If you took your balance out of MtGOX, sure. But how many people had a cash or bitcoin balance held by them that didn't actually exist? A balance they now cannot recover? MtGOX is certainly negligent, but if they suspected that the cash didn't exist and ignored it while continuing to pay out, that's fraud and practically a Ponzi scheme.

That's exactly what a Ponzi scheme is. Fraud, claiming that you are making money when you aren't, and paying out people from the money contributed by new investors.

The latest mars rover didn't know how to drive when it landed. And now it doesn't know how to land. Sometimes it a matter of reducing the amount of software that can go wrong, or just trying to save memory.

Classifying something as a Ponzi scheme, usually involves outright fraud. ie someone is claiming that there is a huge pile of cash somewhere that doesn't actually exist.

There may be individuals committing fraud using bitcoin. And bitcoin may be a speculative asset bubble with very similar outcomes to a Ponzi scheme. But it isn't *technically* a Ponzi scheme.

I had to stand up and recite times tables in classes, and I could usually do so flawlessly. But I didn't memorise them. Since they were recited in order I had plenty of time to calculate the answers in my head [n * x = (previous value)+x].

Make take on this survey; the kids who are really bright, don't need help at home.

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.