And what if we actually like using non-x86 architectures? ARM is becoming increasingly popular - I already have 2 different ARM devices, both running Linux. It's only a matter of time until ARM makes it's way into the desktop/server market. Even now, there's a lot of interest in running Linux (proper GNU/Linux with an X server) on tablets.

You joke, but there's already a lightweight Qt-based desktop environment called Razor-QT that runs quite nicely on the RasPi, though it is still a bit rough around the edges since it's still in development.
If all else fails, the KDE project could probably assimilate it.

http://goatse.ch/

What do you mean American problem? The patent situation is a problem affecting multinational technology companies around the world. One of the key points about the whole Samsung vs Apple case was that there were different outcomes in different countries.
Also, I'm fairly certain Slashdot doesn't count as a blog, and the Americanness of it is rather questionable as well.

Pretty much any (GPL-compliant) Android phone with an unlocked bootloader can run any Linux-based OS you want. And while this company has just started, the KDE project is nearing version 2.0 of Plasma Active, which runs on top of Mer (a fork of Maemo/Meego that Jolla will almost certainly also be basing their OS on).

We already install Linux on desktops that come pre-installed with Windows - I'm surprised there aren't more people installing Mer on their Android phones.

No one expects wearable computing to replace desktops. No one expects tablets or smartphones to replace them either, but that hasn't stopped them from becoming popular.

Wearable computing, like smartphones/tablets, is about providing seamless access to technology when you're away from the computer. It seeks to supplant the smartphone, not the desktop.

Flash still seems to use ALSA directly instead of PulseAudio. It was a lot easier to simply replace it with Gnash than to change the config.

This is a pretty major issue of your working with non-trivial amounts of data (e.g. image processing). One of the main reasons for this is that the current version of Octave is only single-threaded; it can't take advantage of the extra cores that even modern phones have. Apparently multi-threading can be enabled by recompiling it, but that's a fairly large demand for the average user...

I still have some simple apps I wrote back then, and timing one just now it took a full 2 seconds to start, and that was constant no matter how many times I ran it.
That said, they did target .NET 3.0, so it's likely that they fixed that in one of the later versions with some kind of caching.

We also have its legacy: Meego, Mer, etc. Mer has been used as the basis for some KDE-based mobile phone OSs (still in alpha), so I think it's only a matter of time before we see this going somewhere.

Wow, I actually understood some of that. And they said I'd never have a use for anything we learnt in linear algebra...

I tried using WPF in my late teens, and I gave up after writing 2 or 3 applications. The reason was performance: where a WinForms app starts (virtually) instantaneously, a blank WPF form took about half a second, which is *not* a trivial delay in terms of responsiveness. I later found Qt when doing some C++ development, which achieves the same separation of code and (XML-based) GUI, with none of the performance issues. Frankly, Microsoft would have done better to fork it (it is open source, after all) and implement exceptions properly. (Important function calls like connecting signals to slots (events and event handlers in .NET) should not fail silently and only output messages to the console).

From memory, there are plenty of GPIO pins for use by extensions - those could easily be used for whatever interface you wanted, and since they're literally direct lines to the CPU you're not getting better speed than that.

Is the perception context-dependant though? I never visualise numbers (trying to visualise an abstract concept just limits you to 3 or fewer dimensions), but trying to do so just now I used number lines for addition/subtraction, and perpendicular lines for multiplication/division. Once I reach complex numbers, everything just becomes a vector.

I agree entirely. Having spent a few years studying law, one of my earliest observations was that 'reasonable' was code for 'let the courts figure it out'.