I'm not claiming that this shows SCION can replace the respective parts of the network stack right now, and you're right that at a global scale this is still an unproven technology. But I would argue that a technology needs a certain level of matureness / is not "snake oil" if it is deployed in a heavily regulated and comparatively conservative sector such as banking.
Hmm, I'd disagree. The fact that Anapaya Systems (the for profit company mentioned) has the only commercial implementation/adjacent software is a problem, yes. But "snake oil" doesn't quite match up with the fact that SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day [1], so at least some level of workable technology has to be there. And for no one to be taking it seriously, there's a decently long list of multinational ISPs at the very least taking steps towards offering SCION to customers [2] (e.g. British Telecom has expressed enough interest that they have various recent marketing videos on Anapaya's YouTube channel). Finally, I'm not sure what you mean regarding the "scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto" - as someone who has worked on SCION-based projects I never heard anything about this. Apparently a blockchain company invested in Anapaya, but that doesn't really change anything about the protocol itself, does it?
Indeed, he talks about BGP and SCION in the lectures. Sadly I think the lectures aren't available to non-students. What is available though are explanatory videos by him (Adrian Perrig) on the SCION website, where he talks about the issues BGP has: https://scion-architecture.net/pages/videos/
The tl;dw is that today's internet has comparatively poor availability, packet paths can be hijacked and there's little transparency in routing. SCION sets out to solve these problems, and has a few nice things in store, such as guaranteed bandwith between two hosts making DDoS attacks much less effective (COLIBRI QoS), or an incredibly high throughput packet filter (LightningFilter).
It seems like you are confusing two pieces of software: There is Baloo, which is the KDE file indexer. And then there is Akonadi, which is the storage service for all PIM related things (so emails, contacts, calendars etc.). If you disabled Baloo in the settings it should not show up as a process anymore and certainly shouldn't be using any system resources.
Akonadi is required for the usage of KMail, KOrganizer and such (because they use it to store their data, so that is rather essential). If you don't use those applications, you can simply remove it with your package manager. Otherwise we'd appreciate a bug report with regards to the high CPU / memory usage on bugs.kde.org. Thank you for using KDE software :)
As a current student of Ueli Maurer and a Swiss citizen, I completely agree with you (the exam part is hard for me to judge... that's coming up in January for me). He claims that he did review algorithms for them, but only once did he look into one which actually got used in production.
I strongly hope that such cases where our NDB is passively allowing foreign nations to interfere with security equipment that is even used by Swiss companies will not become more frequent. It cannot be allowed that the secret service of a neutral country like Switzerland continues to act like this.
I fully understand that opinion - it is a big pain point for many users. Inside KDE, our VDG (Visual Design Group) is working on ironing out those inconsistencies and visual problems. It's a gigantic task, but I do believe we are making progress - especially System Settings has been getting a lot better lately. They are also working on a evolutionary update to our default 'Breeze' design theme. Check it out at https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891.
(And if you do find specific problems e.g. regarding margins or fonts, please report them on bugs.kde.org, and we'll take a look.)