Hi! Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I don't personally know the X protocol well enough to comment either way; I can only report on the opinion professed by the X developers themselves.

Here is what I understand are the answers to the points you raise. You'll probably want to check out the talks by Daniel Stone (core Xorg developer) that have been linked elsewhere in the thread, in case I missed something.

Essentially, their opinion is that the X protocol is unsuited to what computers do nowadays. From what I understand, the only task that X11 still performs in current graphic stacks is IPC for the actual rendering extensions, and sadly, IPC is something it's very poor at.

Core X11 is network-transparent by design, but rendering is done through non-core, non-network transparent extensions nowadays. This appears to be a common misunderstanding about the meaning of network-transparent; remote display of application does in fact not require network-transparency because transparency means a lot more than just "remote capable". And Wayland as a protocol is already as remote capable as Xorg because Xorg was already filling buffers remotely and feeding that into SSH connections.

So if you want network-transparency, you'll have to disable all those rendering extensions in your Xorg configuration. But, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe what you really want, is to fire up apps remotely and have them display locally, right? And this has already been implemented in the reference Wayland compositor.

Until then, you will probably not miss the loss of network-transparency because you already lost it in current Xorg servers. I think that this, there, is the number one misunderstanding about both Xorg and Wayland.

You are correct about a window system being more than just about sharing buffers. All the things you mention are being redesigned as part of Wayland with the purpose of fixing issues that the X developers claim were unsolvable with X. (Don't take my word for it, though. Check out those talks.)

So in essence, the X developers think that Wayland stacks will be better than Xorg stacks at everything that Xorg does. Including remoting.

I do actually have one reservation about that general claim, and interestingly, it's one that I haven't seen come up from the aforementioned peanut gallery. But time will tell.

But until then, the X developers think that designing a new API from scratch is more straightforward than monkeypatching the old one into doing the same things. If you sincerely think they are wrong, maybe you'll want to step forward and take over the maintenance of Xorg? I'm sure some people out there would be grateful.

I, for one, am going to trust that they know what they are doing, but you may feel otherwise about that, and that's fine. There's just a "put up or shut up" line there that people who share your opinion seem unwilling to cross, and I think that's worth pointing out.

The story so far in a nutshell:

The Xorg developers got tired of spending their time working around the way X was designed in 1980 (which made sense at the time) to try and make it fit 2010 workloads and hardware.

They started to think about how to do the stuff that actually needs doing in an efficient manner, while removing the roadblocks they currently have to contend with.

Turns out that when you take what Xorg actually does nowadays, streamline the fuck out of it, and take away all the needless obstacles, you end up with a pretty straightforward buffer sharing protocol. They called it Wayland and started to work on an implementation.

And then the countless people in the peanut gallery who obviously know X much better than the X developers beheld the notion and started giving... loud feedback, shall we say. Without ever stepping forward to take over the maintenance of Xorg, mind you.

TL;DR: Xorg developers make what they concluded is the soundest technical choice. People on the Internet lose their shit. Business as usual.

Not if you're out of prison.

I think you might have an inaccurate picture of the furnishing in a solitary confinement cell.

Have you considered lodging a complaint against this guy? The use of psychological torture in a situation like this might well qualify him for professional sanctions.

That is an assumption you are making, and it's a bad one. Not only do criminals continue to do the obvious in-prison crimes like assault on other prisoners and guards, they actually participate in out-of-prison crimes through the development of gang networks, which is greatly facilitated by prisons, particularly dangerous ones where an individual needs protection.

If that's the only option short of solitary confinement as practiced in US prison, I suspect you haven't put much thought into the problem.

That's not engineering, it's wishful thinking. Which is not to say it is *wrong*, just unjustified.

The system is designed to be in static equilibrium, so it is by no means guaranteed that the kind of results you are envisioning are the only possible alternatives.

That makes me felafel.

The issue isn't where peoples' eyes are pointed. The issue is what people will actually see.

It's one thing to move the clock, gas tank gauge and speedometer up so it appears to float over the road. It's another to do the same thing with a book, a work document or a sports game.

Stuff that only requires brief attention and is relevant to the operation of the car is perfectly safe, which is why it's OK when it is set down in the dashboard, away from your view of the road. The audio system is less relevant to the operation of the car and can take more attention for longer as you look for what you want. People *do* get into accidents because they take too much time fiddling with their radio instead of looking at the road. But that's behavior you can guard against.

Something that takes the driver's focus off driving is bound to be bad, even if it is optimally placed in his field of vision.

Your example raises an interesting point in that the justification to refuse to serve the KKK is arguably *less* than refusing to serve a gay couple. A cake is not an instrument of violence and oppression, unless the Klan starts leaving sinister cakes instead of burning crosses on people's lawns. A gay wedding cake is actually about redefining what has been the recent cultural norm for marriages.

I actually think that if this law were only confined to fancy cakes and photographers, it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunate, perhaps, but people can bake their own cakes and take their own pictures if need be. What I'm concerned about is the cumulative effect of *any* kind of business being denied to people on the basis of their private behavior and beliefs.

For example imagine a gay couple living in a small Arizona town. The local grocery store won't sell to them, so they have to drive fifty miles to shop at Walmart. Then their car breaks down and the local mechanic won't fix it. If you like for "gay" substitute "atheist", "Mormon", or "black" if you like. It's one thing not to associate with people you disapprove of, it's another to drive them out of town. To live in a place you need to be able to purchase goods and services.

The law can't make us like each other, nor should it try, but it should enable us at a minimum to live together in peace and order.

One of the things I don't see discussed much is the potential failure modes for such a system.

My wife is a physical oceanographer, and one of the failure modes for instruments deployed on cables from a ship is a 'wuzzle' -- a large tangle of steel cable. Given the nature of the stuff, a length of cable that fits nicely in a spool on deck can twist itself into a knot larger than the ship.

So one thing I'd like to know is what are the potential hazards a couple thousand miles of elevator cable falling to the Earth's surface? Could we end up with tangles miles in diameter?

I think a space elevator is a great idea if it's feasible, provided that in the criteria for "feasible" we include being prepared for the conceivable ways the project could fail.

Subjectively, the bike becomes comfortable when it feels like an extension of your body. It's natural to shift around and be loose rather than stiff. If you were running you'd naturally move around obstacles or change your gait.

From TFA:

"Because all the partners want to gain experience from building ITER for what could be a lucrative future industry, the ITER agreement carves up the construction of reactor components among partners, each of which has created a “domestic agency” to handle the contracts. The result is far from efficient: Superconducting cable for the reactor’s magnets is manufactured in six different nations and the 5000-tonne vacuum vessel is being built partly in Korea and partly in Europe."

Remind you of any super-costly projects in the US?

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is way over budget and behind schedule. This is no doubt partly due to the ambitious goals of the project, but the fact that it employees 35000 people carefully spread over the majority of congressional districts in the country might also contribute. It's hard enough to do the nearly impossible without having to budget proof the project by doing it in an extravagantly complicated way.

Depends on the number of hours you put in the saddle. If you just ride an hour or two on the weekend, then a cushy seat and upright posture feels comfortable. If you ride many more hours per week it's a prescription for saddle sores and cut off circulation near the tops of your femurs.

If you ride a lot, you get used to the drop handlebars, which afford a number of small but significant changes in posture over a long ride, and allow you to use more of your body muscles (along with cleated shoes). Also with drop handlebars you support more of your weight on your hands and legs, so no manhood problems. When I was riding over a hundred miles per week, I found the most comfortable saddle was hard plastic with no padding at all.