Everywhere you look around the western world, where you can see evidence of a property bubble increasing the cost of living. Everyone seems to blame the increase on a lack of supply. But the biggest correlating factor with housing prices is the creation of mortgage debt.

Do you want housing to be more affordable? Cut off the supply of credit.

Doing what you suggest would mean redesigning the network protocol from the ground up right? I mean you're talking about extending X11 so that is has some new features that GTK3 needs. So assume we did that. Now what about all of those Motif features that nobody is using. Do we still maintain them? How do we implement these new extensions and keep the old features in a way that improves the appearance of using the display?

I mean X11 doesn't have an easy way to ensure your application window appears cleanly on the first screen paint. And it's full of network round trips and has quite a few state bugs. How do you improve motif apps so that they don't look like motif apps?

There is so much in the X11 protocol that needs to be deprecated, that at this point you might as well throw it all away and build a better network protocol to replace it. Ok, so the Wayland devs aren't trying to design a new network protocol, but they're also not stopping the community from attempting to build one. Why not get all of the Qt, GTK, wxWidgets etc people into a room and hash out a new standard that they can all agree on.

All the Wayland devs are doing is following the traditional Unix philosophy. Take apart the features of the old monolithic XServer, define the pieces that we need to run a display. Shift features into the kernel that should be in the kernel. Shift the application remoting network protocol up a layer into a client of the compositor.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, there's nothing stopping you from remotely accessing the entire composited desktop via RDP or similar.

Using fingerprint scanners for logging into PC's has demonstrated their uselessness. So you want the operator of a firearm to stuff around getting their thumb to scan correctly in a situation where aiming a gun is literally a matter of life and death (not necessarily the holder of the weapon, but lets assume self defence for the sake of argument).

Printing money that then sits in a bank vault doesn't cause inflation. Bernanke massively increased base money, with practically no effect on any other measure of the money in circulation.

We've been trying to invent those essential AI algorithms for the last 50-ish years. What makes you think we'll magically succeed in the next 15?

Sure processing power and storage have been growing rapidly over that time scale, but we still can't make a computer do anything other than what we tell it to do.

Sure it's easy to model the spread of a virus. It's another thing entirely to write one that can run on every commodity access point, with sufficient CPU power to crack all nearby passwords / keys.

You can't assume that all 5500km of panels will output at full power. You could probably get a better approximation of power output based on the area of panels as seen from the sun, multiplied by the peak output of a panel in direct sunlight.

Banks make money primarily from interest on loans. They have a financial incentive to encourage the rest of society to borrow ever increasing amounts. That extra credit will flow around the economy and convince us that we're doing better than we were last year.

In an asset bubble, where the exact same asset is being exchanged for larger and larger amounts. Where each successive buyer has to borrow more and more money from a bank in order to win the auction. Who is the ultimately responsible for pushing up the price? The buyer? The seller? Or the bank manager greedily thinking of all the extra interest he will get?

Increasing credit so that people can speculate on asset prices is exactly what caused the financial crisis. We as a society had become dependant on that continuous increase in credit to keep our illusion of wealth alive. So when the inevitable finally happened and bank managers ran out or greater fools willing to borrow more, the economy collapsed.

There may be some need for banks to fund entrepreneurs, but they haven't been doing that at all. No, the current banking sector is a parasite, that has gradually convinced us to give them all of our disposable income. They don't make anything, they survive by sucking money from the productive sectors of society. They have taken the place of feudal Lords, gradually convincing the rest of us to pay them rent just so we can have a roof over our heads.

It's not impossible for them to be the same though. You could implement a gift card / store credit system using a crypto transaction model almost identical to bitcoin. Though you might want to eliminate the "mining" of new coins, and only allow your trusted server to produce blocks. You could still use the same publicly verifiable block chain validation process.

Supposedly they are wiping ethanol onto the glass, so you can still smell it. But I'm not certain that would fool everyone.

Sometimes what is being tested is revealed, at least in a vague sense, but how it's being tested is a secret. So they put you through some kind of fake test, but prime you with something else and measure if that changes your behaviour.

And there's the rub. In the US you are used to paying for an ISP connection based on it's peak speed. There's an incentive for an ISP to advertise a high link speed, without pricing in the cost of the back end capacity to deliver it.

Every time some set of US customers attempt to use their stated bandwidth, there has been this outcry from the ISP's that they can afford to provide the service they promised. While on the other hand, there's a massive revolt every time some ISP attempts to impose monthly bandwidth allowances so they know they can afford to provide that level of service.

You can't have it both ways.

Here in Australia we're used to paying for a connection based on monthly bandwidth allowances. Though ISP's have sold plans with no allowance limit, these plans are usually expensive, and only used by customers that will attempt to use it.

If you're talking about Ken Ham, I agree with you. Just be careful not to paint everyone with that stereotype.

It's called "about:memory" and it shows you memory allocation in all kinds of fine or coarse grained ways. And it's been almost continually improved for the past couple of years, while the big issues this page has revealed have been fixed.

Before your deadline of 3 days, did you ever give an estimate of the outstanding effort?

Jumping into a project like that, I'd start by telling them how long it will take to get a feel for the current code base and pull a large number out of the air for the rest. Over time you should be refining that estimate as you learn more and start fleshing out the scope of unfinished / untested work.

If they haven't had a competent process for tracking requirements, deadlines, effort, testing, .... Then all of these jobs fall on your shoulders. Don't just do the work they tell you to do, always try to list the things that haven't been done with a rough guess for how much effort it will take.