Since the thread is about the XZ issue, this is an odd statement to make. They weren't careful, they got caught before it hit widespread deployment. It had barely been in a tagged xz release and only barely made it into the bleeding edge rolling test releases of select distributions. We have no information on what they would have done if it had lived long enough to be in widely deployed Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, SuSE, embedded implementations.

Funnily enough, they might have been foiled anyway, because at the same time, systemd was looking to stop linking to various external libraries including XZ, to reduce bloat. So even a systemd-patched OpenSSH still wouldn't have linked to XZ or load XZ ever if that change got folded in before XZ had a chance to inflict the attack.

Except that's not why it doesn't exist, and has even been proposed as a wayland protocol. Wayland doesn't claim "not a Wayland thing", but instead argues that, somehow, this is now simply impossible. Because it only handles rectangular 2D monitors aligned well with x and y axes. They bemoan that by it's nature, it can't be "optional" because if it is possible, then applications will bank on it, and thus "break" when an environment opts out of it. Because it's not perfect, they don't want it at all. All the while neglecting to make an acceptable counter proposal, just closing proposals as either being "inadequate" by failing to address the "what if it's an alien interface" concern, or "over complicated" if it strives to actually cover those hypothetical interfaces.

I'll confess they have something of a point, I was a developer on a project where this was desired, and it was a PITA under X desktop environments. When we requested coordinates, would they be honored, or shifted? Did the WM count including or excluding it's own decoration? What about panels with forced non-overlapping rules that would adjust our geometry? How much of the shift was due to decoration versus panels and what can we expect lower down the screen? What about if there's some scaling being applied and what does that do to our geometry? I'd love for a better solution to exist and would be happy for their "better idea" to be offered, but as it stands it's a matter of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Rejecting the imperfect but familiar solution in favor of the perfect solution no one can seem to come up with.

Again, that's not why it's not in Wayland, but let's entertain your line of thinking. It's not that there's a "speedlimit" authority, so it's more like:
-Some group says the speed limit should be 65 mph and puts up a sign
-Another group thinks the speed limit should be 160kph, and puts up their sign too
-Another group thinks there should be no upper speed limit, but a lower speed limit of 80 mph
-Another group thinks that it should be 200 kph, but measured relative to the relative movement of the air instead of ground speed.
So now you have to drive down this road, faced with a dizzying array of rules that are hard to follow and impossible to concurrently comply with, while driving alongside other folks trying to also decide which policies to follow.

Well, they got stuck with a few things that were awkward.
-Can't really "lock" the screen if a context menu is open. Due to limitations in how keyboard/pointer grab work and that being the only mechanism for screen locking to work
-Scaling is a bit limited, technically you don't have fractional scaling or per-monitor scaling in Xorg.
-X11 implementations struggle with strategies to avoid tearing.
-X11 model allows easy surreptitious screen scraping and keylogging.
-The X11 model for compositing basically made window managers responsible for rendering *anyway*, so the X11 server imposes some formality and still makes the compositor do the real work.

Now they likely could have fixed some of this (and patches exist for some of it), however given that as of the COMPOSITE extension, they basically made the window managers have to do more of the work anyway, it is understandable why they would pitch a scheme where the "mostly does nothing" X server is no longer a key part of the stack. Not merely new for the sake of being new, but being new in the face of an 'almost good enough' existing graphics stack has really caused it to fail to get the development that it sorely needed to be good on a reasonable time scale.

It's certainly categorically new and will have some applications, but there have been some rather persistent "oddities" that seem to limit the potential. Meanwhile some impossibly large amounts of money are being thrown as if the age of the artificial super intelligence is now a few months away.

Fully expect one of a few ways the scenario ends poorly for the big spenders:
-Turns out that our current approaches with any vaguely possible amount of resources will not provide qualitative experience significantly better than Copilot/ChatGPT today. It suddenly became an amazing demo from humble hilarious beginnings, but has kind of plateaued despite the massive spend, so this scenario wouldn't surprise me.
-A breakthrough will happen that gets to "magic" but with a totally different sort of compute resource than folks have been pouring money into, making all the spending to date pointless.
-The "ASI" breakthrough happens and completely upends the way the economy works and renders all the big spending moot.

As an employee, or as a believer in their cause? If they are a believer in their cause, given the circumstances, this seems exactly what they SHOULD do as a human being. Their employer is, in their view, being immoral in a way they cannot abide. This sort of protest is exactly a reasonable course.

Losing their jobs should be considered a likely outcome, but given what Google is doing then they should be willing to pay that price for the sake of their cause. They might have preferred an outcome where Google mends its ways, but at least everyone knows about the situation in the media and the protester is no longer a party to something their conscious doesn't like.

I mean, if they were *vaguely* protesting Israel's actions with respect to the Palestinians, maybe you have a point, though it's a good way to have your protests be utterly ignored and just be a "make yourself feel better" behavior rather than trying to encourage change.

But in this case, they were specifically protesting Google's direct involvement. So being deliberately disruptive at work would be pretty on point for such a protest. Now is Google within their reasonable rights to dismiss them? Sure, and if the cause means anything to the protesters, then the dismissal is a price that is worth it. It was disruptive in the short term, and google's chosen reaction brings the protest national coverage and makes clear what Google was doing and how they plan to continue doing things.

I'd say this is about as quality as a protest gets. They have the exposure (which a "tuck away and privately whine about Israel" would never do), they didn't vilify themselves by being wantonly disrespectful or violent jerks, and they didn't engage in self-harm that may trigger a mental health discussion to take things off point.

This makes for a pretty effective protest, among a sea of protests that are pretty bad.

They didn't actually harm anyone or anything, they put something on the line (their jobs), they raised awareness of the situation *and* Google's role in it.

Contrast with stupid stuff like random looting or tossing food at unrelated art.

Ok, sure, *liquid* water will see a net increase as currently solid water becomes liquid, mostly serving to increase saltwater volume, which is useless. The bigger consequence is how that more cycling through the evaporation/precipitation cycle will manifest, and it would suck if it's mostly moving water through the air to the ocean. Wouldn't be too terrible if it were the other way around, unless it's mostly in unworkably strong hurricanes. The key thing is we aren't sure.

At best, this moves the viable agriculture land. As *maybe* new farmland would open up (hardly a safe bet), existing farm land would be made non viable. When you say "energy" I assumed you meant like hydrocarbon or electricity, which obviously won't be aided. So yes, more thermal energy, but hardly an assurance that would mean a net increase in arable land.

I seriously doubt you have anything suggesting that we've had more successful agricultural thanks to atmospheric CO2 concentration shifts.

Because we know the score for the current climate and how we can house and feed ourselves. We've got very little to go on to confidently know the specifics of change. It would be foolish to assume we know, and since we are currently reasonably "good" with how things are, there's a lot more room for downside than upside. Like say I told you I'm going to rip you out of your nice house and plop you randomly somewhere on Earth to fend for yourself. Would you take that bet that you'll end up somewhere nicer than your house?

It means water from ground will move in different ways. Water in the atmosphere more, moving, well, we aren't sure where. We know how to deal with the hand we are dealt now, we have no idea if the new precipitation pattern will be over the ocean (useless), viable soil or not, etc.

It's not *impossible* that the new conditions will be viable, but if we can keep things as we are used to dealing with them, that would be the safer bet.

Why do you assume financing?

I'm finding this hard to swallow.

So I'm estimating you have a system that outputs about a single megawatt hour in a month. That is likely about an 8kw set of panels. Since you mentioned enough batteries to last a few days, then I am willing to believe $15k all-in, *mostly* in battery and associated management system.

There's no way that you have a solar installer quote you $60k for a 8kw installation without battery. I see about $15k to $22k quoted. Certainly significantly more than the parts, but not $60k.

We don't get additional water, the precipitation will behave somewhat differently, in ways potentially we can't cope with.

The additional energy in terms of useful energy is not feasible to improve our harnessing of energy.

Plants are not so few for lack of CO2 today. We have never felt "oh, our agriculture is limited by CO2", it's limited by other factors, none of which are looking to "get better".

The simple fact is that "oh, 16 million years ago there was more CO2 than today" is not vaguely comforting when that's almost 16 million years before humans were figuring out how to do this whole civilization thing.

While a lot comes from the major vendors, some of the major vendors actually kind of suck and you absolutely have huge gaps in what they provide.

Particularly with firmware, you get chunks to cover bits and pieces but you have to provide certain bits and pieces. I'm frankly shocked how bad the 'ready to go' firmware even from someone like Insyde or AMI is, who you would *think* would have it pretty well down by now. You can have the most milquetoast combination of predictable components and *still* need to do work to behave as well as a Dell or Lenovo even if the components are largely the same, as they have some on staff firmware developers that build on top of the vendors and they don't share their assets with the world. Hell, it's obvious that they don't even share with themselves, some product families are worlds apart from the exact same company with the same chipsets.

Two possibilities:

- Regulatory folks have expressed "concerns", which may have motivated them to try to get some relief

- The had a plan that at least publicly anticipated tolerating 95% attrition and the other 5% were so locked in they'd pay the price needed to more than make up for the 95%. Based on a few situations I have heard about, I get the impression that not even 5% were as locked in as Broadcom presumed, so they may feel the need to buy some time to adjust their strategy to cope with that reality.

That's easy enough to flip around. Obviously your time is worth much less to you because you are happy to take time out to go to the gas station routinely for daily driving, sometimes having to wait for a place to open up, sometimes having to drive to find another gas station, having to babysit the refueling for a few minutes even in uncomfortable weather. That's in a scenario where the gas station is 'on the way' to a daily destination. Around a relatives house, they have to occasionally go about 10 miles the "wrong way" because the area is rural, but no one thinks about it because that inconvenience has been there for as long as anyone can remember.

Now if you make a weekly road trip of 300 miles or so, then sure this disappears into the time taken for that road trip anyway, and pure EV won't be that appealing (hybrid or a PHEV maybe). If you live in an apartment building or city house with streetside parking at *best*, ok, EV sucks because you don't have access to residential charging. However, for those with residential charging as an option and for whom 300+ road trips are a rare occasion, the gas station can easily be the bigger inconvience when comparing head to head.