microcolonel

Sure, but asking politely is hardly the mark of tyranny, and has nothing to do with the sort of scenario I'm replying on.

> To be clear, by hosting a website I'm liable to "authorities" wanting to access everything anyway

In America at least, a search of this nature has to be very narrow in order to be valid, even the secret ones.

Yep, the sanctions have also turned a lot of Chinese R&D money into open source development funds, I love it.

FWIW the GDP decline may have been overblown, and it seems at least plausible that it will be followed by GDP spike, as production fills in unmet demand at higher prices.

Patch it? Keep adding water? There's lots you can do with a (non-catastrophic) leak, and building water vessels that don't leak in your lifetime is honestly not that hard.

When it comes to elected officials, there could be a concern that time gives the successors an opportunity to just make up the evidence.

> Microsoft’s latest diversity report showed the company was mainly white and male, especially at the highest levels.

Well, it is an engineering company based in Washington. This just in: Mitsubishi HQ mostly Japanese and male(!!!).

After working with it for a couple years now, I still really appreciate it.

The supermajority is the core of the problem.

Or at least a country with extreme material inequity; there are people in India who are recognizably wealthy by global standards, and there are also people who can't afford to poop on a toilet.

It's not so much that the "checks and balances" have failed, but that some places are so partisan that they would literally rather support the people who are telling you the police can take your stuff without trial than consider voting for a different politican than they're used to.

The checks and balances work when there are people actually on the other side of the scale.

> ...relegated to third world when it comes to participating in global leadership/trade.

Because when given more civilized tools, they nonetheless alienate the world. They could have annexed Crimea peacefully, at least the part that they actually needed, but chose instead to engage in a semi-hot war while sending mixed signals with the referendum.

Then President Obama completely shut the door on them, which did not have the effect of changing their behaviour; this in Russia after all. What the Obama Administration did in response to the annexation of Crimea was close off most avenues of reconciliation; and the subsequent propaganda about President Trump has kept those avenues closed.

My impression from my conversations with police in Ontario is that predictive policing is a force for good. If it's not the fruit of any poison tree, I'm all for it.

The thing is, it was sold to current owners of single-family dwellings as a sort of “right” not to have too many neighbours to know them all, so if you take that away now, it is going to be unpopular.

I think part of this could be solved by just not living in the Bay Area, and choosing to live somewhere with a better zoning law (like Houston) and take a cycle to genuinely understand how politics produces that good before voting, I know that sounds crazy.

BMI isn't exactly comparable between the sexes, since males and females have different distributions of adipose and visceral fat, and the impacts of these are clearly different.

Despite the apparent intrigue, non-English programming languages fail to build on the canon except through bilinguals, and this alone is a good reason not to bother.

Also, correlation between English test proficiency and academic success in programming school is not a clean metric, and does not necessarily measure a correlation between “English proficiency” and “programming mastery”.

The thing about the Hong Kong annexation is that the same thing that threatens Americans' moral preferences is also bad for business; it doesn't actually matter why you value Hong Kong's legal sovereignty, because the stakes are the same.

FWIW the amount of time I've spent fiddling with my OS in the last year approaches zero, and I don't remember it being this unintrusive when I was using Windows or macOS at work.

Nothing just works quite like something that simply hasn't changed.

In the amount of time I used to spend in a month making sure macOS wasn't on the brink; a couple weeks ago I investigated and implemented a feature in a system component, one that is not present on any commercially available desktop operating system.

Now my input method client displays language-appropriate glyph variants based on the input method's locale, and you just managed to get the App Store to shut up, or fix some of your homebrew after a system upgrade.

It'd be interesting to extend this to handle pipelines, maybe by using some sort of thing where you drag from the output field(s) of a utility to an input field of another, causing them somehow to be fused.

For example, Australia won't even withdraw special trade relations with Hong Kong now that the PRC is compromising the whole point of that status, the U.S. went ahead and did so.

> It’s disgusting that nothing will be done because everyone is addicted to cheap goods from China

I think it's better to shift from that, directly to not letting people (particularly those with means) to make excuses for using PRC goods when it would be almost as convenient to use goods from anywhere else.

It's a start, compared to just letting people say “oh well, guess I'll just give in completely”.

> US greed gave China this power

Maybe from the U.S. perspective, but at this point there are heaps of countries around the world who at least claim to be dependent on China.

This is a matter of global moral cowardice; at least today, the U.S. is more ready to say no to it.

And even those things need to be assessed in the context of a specific design.

> Bad disaster responses can make administrations look pretty bad.

Whether disaster responses are considered good or bad depends largely on which narrative the media select.

Good advice for any voting year: get a checklist and check things off in advance so that voting is extremely convenient when polling time comes.

> My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.

My worry is built on your worry; I worry that people won't even think of using their self control to say no to this, but will wait breathless for some third party to save them from their own bad decisions.

> Much of the 5G progress happens in the core network and network interconnects.

It's a bit silly to wait for a completely different radio transport before thinking of carrier and backhaul improvements, which are almost completely orthogonal.

> Long story short: I think people are working on this

Given the specifics of the sorts of flaws in these network standards, it's hard to come away feeling that they were anything short of intentional. I get the impression that “working on it” more or less amounts to improving plausible deniability by making the backdoors less obvious.

> It gives a great justification for other countries to block American social apps for similar reasons.

That's up to them; when it comes to PRC at least, banning American social media is the norm.

American progress invented the vocabulary you are using to denounce it.

> Essentially, with regular DRAM, you cannot do better than the contemporary low-latency DDRx memory. You might chose to increase latency to increase throughput, though.

My understanding is that, given how memory systems work right now, typically it's the opposite: increasing throughput decreases latency.