No the point of deliberately diluting value is to promote lending. All the "real businesses" you talk about generally require a liquid short and medium term loan market in order to survive since they can't hold enough capital to cover shortfalls in sales or conversely to expand to meet demand they can see but not service quickly.

And you know, meanwhile against all of this more people are lost more money to BitCoin then they have holding actual US dollars invested in real business enterprises.

You can commit genocide rapidly with artillery and airstrikes too - that's not really the issue.

At it's core this is really a debate over liability and perception. If you setup a perimeter gun, who's liable when it kills someone? If it's supposed to have IFF and it fails then who's liable? The guy who set it up? The manufacturer? etc.

But more important then that is very much perception: the law of armed conflict exist because war is not eternal, it has to end someday and we'd like that to be sooner. Where robots fit into this is an interesting question: indiscriminate machines that you know group X unleashed on you probably is somewhat worse then group X's soldiers showing up, since the perception of who was responsible isn't clear - if it's not just the soldiers, it might as well be all of them so let's go kill all their civilians when we get the chance.

But conversely robots offer some weird modifiers to that possibility - after all, it's conceivable you could build an armored soldier which would only ever fire back at muzzle flashes with pinpoint fire (maybe lasers?) meaning it would be staggeringly unlikely to ever hit a civilian. This sure would help a lot in asymmetric warfare, but then, if the robot can't "die" should it kill at all or should we only use tazer and dispersal weapons?

This seems entirely at odds with the reality of US treasuries in certain categories experiencing negative yields for the past few months and China continnuing to hoover them up like its going out of style. Meanwhile, EU countries are actually experiencing debt refinancing issues, hence all the bail outs.

Where exact;y do you imagine all this capital can actually flee to?

Oh woe is you, considering Mt Gox has been taken down as well on similar charges. You put your money in unregulated, opaque non-physical assets - you got what you deserved.

Because how do you think petrol gets from point A to point B?

Except the Ubuntu phone is on to a fairly good concept here: smartphones are getting powerful enough to become desktop PCs. This is an obvious area where you'd actually want a desktop OS running - or at least very compatible - with the phone.

Where they may get tripped up is the trend towards augmented reality type systems, but that's a ways off and there's plenty of low-level work to be done (since AR falls more into the desktop OS design scale then the phone one).

Yeah I love this concept. With the dock for my S4, I can plug in all the peripherals just fine - what I need is the OS support to run full desktop apps on it in this mode. An Ubuntu-like OS would be ideal (though I'd probably try to run Cinnamon or something instead for a DE).

With the point being, that it's not a problem with either approach since it depends on an app developer thinking "I should monitor my configuration for changes".

It does it when something is a "remove" and not an upgrade operation I've found. apt treats a remove and install for two packages that provide the same dependency as two separate operations - it tries to remove and normalize the system, before it installs the new one. So when it's something like xscreensaver it tries to remove the entire DE.

Isn't there a D-Bus interface specifically for doing "root-less" installations of new packages - i.e. you say "install this!" and it can check if you're allowed to, then do it?

Also isn't this an app-problem? There's no specific reason any Windows app will actually re-read a changed registry key. It's easy enough to stick an inotify on your config files (and tons of daemons do exactly this).

apt still has a tendency to create circular rings of dependencies ("remove one package, watch as it tries to remove your entire desktop environment"). Although within that context, this still feels like the wrong answer since the real issue is apt can be very silly about inspecting the operation you ask it to perform and concluding that everything will be fine (and there's no decent user tools to say "I'm breaking this, it's ok, let it stay broken").

Online dedup is the wrong solution to the problem since you have to keep the hash tables in memory. All you need is some install-time intelligence to reference count the files.

Pulse drives aren't exactly that efficient anyway. For the effort and manpower to build one (probably already in space) we could also develop suitable reactors for an nuclear thermal-lightbulb type engine (Project Pluto). That's also old technology, by and large - the engine was tested and functioned, and the principles of operating it with monopropellant in space are hardly an insurmountable challenge and essentially related to other technology (the Skylon engine or any of the other types of scramjets the US military is building)

HTTP submission is pretty common, since it's structurally easier to manage then SSL. You just use RSA encrypted payloads instead.