And in many jurisdictions that would be a crime unless you are a licensed electrician.

You are assuming it is a more accurate record of mistakes. This history is being kept by private companies and government agencies. The rich and powerful are still able to cover up their mistakes. The rest not so much.

If I copy a file from your share to my share, there is no reason to download the file, decrypt it, encrypt it with my key, and reupload it. Instead, I just need to reencrypt the file's key with my own and upload that, pointing to the same big encrypted blob.

Here we go. Should really search first :-) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/cryptnum.htm has some details of Blind Signatures and Double-spending Identification.

Of course, for this you need a government to allow banks to issue secure yet untracable digital cash. I can't imagine it would survive the first round of 'funding terrorism' charges.

No, you just need sufficiently advanced maths. You need a system where you can create a signature one time anonymously, the signature providing enough information for a merchant to prove it is valid. However, if you create a signature two or more times with the same key enough information is revealed to destroy your anonymity making the fraud traceable.

My understanding is that at least one system like this had been written up well over a decade ago, but I have no idea if the crypto has survived peer review and cannot cite anything. Anyone know details of a system such as I described?

Considering the gnome-do like application launcher and the newer keyboard driven replacement for menus landing in the new version, I certainly wouldn't consider Unity 'intended for tablets and phones'. Unity is indented to be a common GUI across all form factors. I'm not sure who else it seriously attempting this. Maybe Google trying from the other end with Android? Or are they focusing on ChromeOS for the laptop and desktop form factors?

The fundamental problem is that the user needs a trusted channel between themselves and the authentication provider. The only common & cross platform communication channel is a web browser. Native apps work around this by embedding a web browser, which is insecure in that they might be stealing your password. But the user experience is sucky, and most opinions seem to be that the existing systems have sacrificed too much usability for security.

Now it is supported by Google & Facebook, XMPP might be an alternative way of communicating with the end user that would work better for native applications, at least on the desktop. I suspect mobile devices would suck a bit here.

They have shipped in a number of European countries and are selling well... too well, causing supply issues.

No, their business model depends of displaying adverts to their users. Want to display ads to Google users? You have to give money to Google. If Google sold that information, they would be cutting their own throats for short term gains because people would only pay for the information once.

If you have a draft decent enough that it could be picked up by a traditional publisher, you have a draft decent enough to get an editor for a share of the profits. No need for cash up front. I think this will become a common model. And the end result will be a well edited book, unlike stuff that goes through the big publishing houses which certainly is not - if it is midlist they don't want to spend the money for more than basic copy editing (and its obvious they often don't even bother with paying a starving student to do even that!).

Anonymity also inspires people to act in ethical ways. Remember this the next time you are following a revolution on Twitter, where your anonymity means your life. Or will you be too busy engaging in heated kernel architecture debates and looking at lolcats?