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.

As mentioned, I've racked up $10k in various gas engine vehicle repairs by about the same time where an EV battery might likely need repair. Colleague recently had to replace his Volt battery after 300k miles for about $6k, and that was a battery that would be a full charge cycle in just 30 miles. So if the battery repairs are going to screw me, so too would owning a gas car.

No, it gets boring after years of the range being roughly the same, more to do with driving characteristics and weather and if there's been a decline, it's unnoticable.

You didn't read my comment did you? Yes in some places the commercial charging is *almost* (but not quite as much as gas). This is largely academic for me.

"Never" is the wrong word, but either:
      - The 2 or 3 times a year of having to 'suffer' a commercial charging provider is not enough to outweigh the *massively* more common daily driving activity where residential/work charging is sufficient, cheap, and massively more convenient.

If I have a strict timeline, I'm travelling commercial, and company is paying for rental or taxi/rideshares to close the gap. Adding 20 minutes to a 6 hour road trip is no big deal for any personal road trip. Chances are I can tuck it in with eating some food and not even have a delta. If it's longer than 6 hours, I'm probably stopping at a hotel anyway, I don't trust myself to drive safely longer than that in a single stretch.

I don't see the connection here. Public transit generally covers a metropolitan area, relatively low radius of transit. Range anxiety shouldn't be a factor even in theory within public transit.

I have family in rural america, and EV charging is better than city. Because no one gives a damn if your car parks right next to your house, right next to your breaker box. Adding a hardwired L2 charger to any house with 200A service is a few hundred dollars, because all you need is the EVSE, one breaker, and a trivial amount of wire. Go more city and *maybe* you can have a car nearby, but only streetside, and maybe you are allowed to install electrical gear, at some significant expense, but maybe not. The things that make home EV charging challenging for some urban people just don't apply in the country.

On the power outage scenario, you car's battery doesn't suddenly empty, no more than your gas tanks drain. In fact, if you felt fed up with power outages, then a solar array would mean you could replenish your cars range. With plenty of land to do the panels however you feel like (much cheaper and more effective to pole mount in the country, suburban has to settle for roof mounted solar only). Of course you likely have a generator or two, that's likely a PITA because you don't run it enough and infrequently used engines have some pain points.

In terms of replacing perfectly working vehicles, that's a bad idea to replace them if they are fine. Whether ICE or EV, best thing is to "drive it into the ground", because the difference in emissions is far less than the impact of frequently manufacturing cars. *However* when the time does come for an ICE vehicle to be put out to pasture because it's just not worth fixing anymore, an EV is actually a decent choice for rural living as a selection for the replacement.