And they are like post office boxes that anyone can send more valuables to at any time they wish.

PRISM doesn't do that. We just don't know the codename of the system that does.

I've lost data with btrfs, but I did have a failing drive that I didn't notice was going bad. I didn't have a redundant copy of meta-data and couldn't seem to change that.

All of those things have changed since then. You can set up a cron job to scrub your data instead of being blind to sectors going bad. And you have much better control over the redundancy of your data.

The essential problem is that banks have issued credit against asset based securities that were grossly overvalued. These are debts that we have accumulated over the last 50 years. They will not be repaid, the only question is how we as a society choose not to pay them.

The ideal outcome would drop both the exchange value of these assets, and the credit lent against them. While preserving the equity of the current owners, and imposing a new lower limit on their security value. But while you want to reduce the future income of the lending banks, you don't want them to go broke overnight, since this would also have drastic flow on effects on the economy.

This might be achievable by limiting security value based on the productive output of an asset (instead of the current exchange value). This limit should be the same for everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. That way, if you wish to place the highest bid at an auction, you must put more of your own money on the table. An auction should be won by the person with the deepest pockets, not the person with the highest bank loan. Want to buy a house? Well, you'd better start saving for a deposit.

The introduction of these new limits would have to be staggered. You should be able to calculate the net reduction in debt at a national level. Then to be fair, you could "simply" (cough) hand out the same amount of cash to all individuals. If you have debts, you must pay them down as your credit limit will be going down. If you don't have debts? Spend it, save it, whatever.

Fixing this quickly will be a massive restructuring operation, with a massive impact on the wealth of all individuals and businesses. It is not an action to be taken lightly. Multiple proposals should be submitted, with their outcomes carefully modelled. Of course that assumes that the models used actually reflect reality.

As I expect to see a series of market crashes, followed by longer periods with anaemic growth. On any particular day, things will be looking better. Even when employment falls to Great Depression levels, it will be hard to convince everyone that we need to try something drastic.

There's got to be a point where open tabs are treated like temporary bookmarks. Trying to keep all of those tabs alive and ready to click on is a huge waste of resources.

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.