Comment 48 for bug 12154

there are many possible ways to fix this, some obviously easier than others. I'm going to target this for a paper cut milestone for the time being so we can keep track of it, and forward it to the upstream Nautilus devs later and see what they think.

I think a simple solution would be to add an option to the context menu that says "<Action to perform> as administrator", or some variation on a theme. This would perform the action in the relevant application with root privileges without having to elevate those of Nautilus.