This is desired behavior for SSL. Otherwise, a man in the middle could start his own private CA and issue certs for each site that you view. Bug 460374 shows MITM in the wild. If I wanted to verify self-signed certificates through route diversity, I'd install the Perspectives extension. (And I have.)

It hurt native extensions other than NPAPI media handlers, but it led to a more-or-less stable API for writing extensions completely in JavaScript.

You need root to edit hosts on Android. And if you define "lusers" as Android users without root, I suspect they greatly outnumber Android users with root.

It works even when USB sockets are full of epoxy, as is apparently true of a lot of public computers, or on devices such as the iPad that don't really have a general-purpose USB host.

Apparently the SQRL authenticator app gives each site a different user ID number, and the user can revoke an ID number within the app.

Even if Mr. Gibson did seek a patent, Google has prior art.

As I understand it, it's intended in part for the use case where you browse on a computer that's not your own, such as at a relative's home or a public library. This means you haven't stored a client certificate on this computer. The authenticator app on your smartphone would store its own equivalent of a client certificate.

Banks and credit unions already do this sort of two-factor auth: "We don't recognize your computer. Click here and we'll send you an e-mail or text message or call you with a code to access your account on this device. You'll only have to do this once for each device."

Remember how Defrag in Windows 98 used to move the little colored blocks around? One night I got more or less the same thing. When I was about 11, several years before Windows 95 existed, I dreamed I walked into an M/E Root Beer restaurant (apparently a fictional counterpart of A&W restaurants) and in the back room, an anthropomorphic rabbit was sorting a bunch of pieces of paper with pictures on them into various piles. I looked at a few of them, and they appeared to be my memories.

I did link to xubuntu.org, but I admit that might have been a little too subtle.

The editors you're more likely to see preinstalled on these GUI Linux distributions, such as Gedit, Leafpad, Geany, and Kate, all support the well-known keyboard shortcuts out of the box. But I'll grant that that's not much help when you're accessing a remote computer through SSH.

For the most part, Xubuntu is Ubuntu with xubuntu-desktop preinstalled instead of ubuntu-desktop. I tell people I run Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my laptop, even though what I actually installed was the Ubuntu 9.10 CD with a sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop a month after release of 11.10. But the packages that are running are closest to what one gets from a Xubuntu image, and if I had to reinstall, it would be from a Xubuntu image. Sometimes I have to come up with fresh ways to say "If you want Xubuntu, you know where to find it", sacrificing a small amount of rigor for rhetoric.

In other words, your brain processes the desktop and the Start Screen like multiple workspaces on an X11 window manager. I agree with you that that's an improvement. But in my opinion, it'd be even better if the tiles on the Start Screen would "float" over the existing windows on the desktop the way the Dash does in Unity.

(If I'm citing the same source in comments to several Slashdot stories about a topic, that can mean different things to different readers. Occasional readers of Slashdot comments may not have seen the previous citations. And among regulars, I guess the feeling that "tepples is about to link to SciAm again" might encourage people to word their arguments to take into account the citation so that I don't have to repost it.)

That or Windows Mojave, a name Microsoft used to trick people into dropping RTM-tinged preconceptions when evaluating Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

Because it's traditional in at least the UNIX world to treat them as separate components. You can take GNU/Linux and plaster Xfce or KDE or Cinnamon on top of it. Or you can take an X11 based desktop environment on GNU/Linux and switch the underlying OS to FreeBSD.

So where should people learn in the first place that it's even possible to connect a PS3 controller to a PC so that they can Google how?

Tell me about it. All four buttons are X. The easiest way I've seen to fix the tower of Babel that is PC gaming input is to autoconfigure XInput and the most popular DirectInput gamepads and for the rest, ask users something like "Player 2: Press up, down, left, right, jump, fire, and special, in that order."

I wonder how much of that comes from working around other console makers' trademarks.

Now prepare for a mind screw:

1. What letter looks like the CROSS? X.
2. What's made of cardboard and SQUARE? Box.
3. How many degrees in a CIRCLE? 360.

What does that spell?

I agree with you. But when I mention this to other people, a lot have tended to tell me that instead of switching between the menu and the instructions with your eyeballs, it's just as easy to switch between the two with Windows keyboard shortcuts. They tell me that if I get a case of amnesia from rapidly switching among full-screen environments in such an "all maximized all the time" environment, I must have a mental disability that the profitable majority of people don't have.