You should write a strongly worded letter to Xi Jinping.

True and they also don't care whether it's a Huawei 'evil communist' phone that runs Chinese 'evil communist' software or an American 'liberty & patriotism' phone that runs American 'liberty & patriotism' software, as long as the damn thing works.

Early operating systems were basically just a bunch of code for starting a main executable, along with runtime libraries that got called synchronously from whatever program was running, which is a far cry from anything that we would call a kernel today. So I wouldn't even say that an OS necessarily contains a kernel, though modern OSes typically do.

Heck, there have even been attempts to do kernel-free OSes more recently.

Not waterproof, less grain than a Nomad. Lame. :-D

*blinks*

In the U.S. (Apple's biggest market at 44% of net sales), only 3% of people are vegan. About 57% of U.S. phone users use iPhones. Even if every single vegan who uses a cell phone at all uses an iPhone, that would still be *barely* over 5% of their customer base. They might be one of the more *vocal* parts of Apple's customer base, but they're certainly not a large percentage of it.

When so many spooks come out against it, that's how you know you're doing the right thing. Let's unpack their statements a bit.

You're not realistically going to magically prevent any of those things with more spying. At best, you might catch the occasional low-hanging fruit, and even then, only if you do incredibly invasive levels of widespread spying on everyone. The right way to prevent those things is by infiltrating the relevant community. People who say otherwise are kidding themselves.

First, their claim isn't even true at a superficial level. Since at least 1961, we have been compelled by law to recognize diplomatic couriers and the contents of their bags as beyond the reach of law enforcement.

Second, our societies have always tolerated spaces that are at least by default beyond the reach of law enforcement, which allow law enforcement to peer into those spaces only after establishing probable cause.

Recent behavior by law enforcement agencies has thrown out the entire notion of probable cause, creating mass spying programs that sniff all the traffic going into and out of various organizations en masse. That, combined with parallel construction and courts being lax at enforcing the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, has resulted in substantial violations of the public's right to privacy.

End-to-end encryption is necessary entirely because law enforcement has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to respect the bounds of privacy that a free society requires. And the fact that law enforcement's irrational "slurp everything up and sort through it later" approach has resulted in everyone encrypting everything is not the fault of the "everyone encrypting everything". It is the fault of law enforcement being utterly egregious and unscrupulous in their behavior.

There are consequences for actions, and when governments show that they are untrustworthy on an ongoing basis, people stop trusting them. Welcome to the real world, kids.

They're "getting into" power generation? That makes it sound like this is something brand new. I remember when Apple put in its first natural gas cogeneration plant to take its build infrastructure off the grid, back around 2002 or 2003, I think. Google has massive generators around a bunch of its buildings, presumably for the same reason. Big tech has been in the energy business quite literally for decades at this point.

That's *with* time-of-use metering. I'm pretty sure the price for EV metering has roughly tripled in the last five years. And only about 11 to 16 cents of that is the actual generation cost. The rest of it is profit for PG&E. The only way to get reasonably priced power in California is to build your own power plant, which will bring your price down to about 17 cents per kWh, and even that isn't much below the price of gasoline.

For a state that's desperate to push electrification, the state's utility regulators sure don't seem to be on board. That's probably why EV sales dropped last quarter for the first time in years.

We really need to break up the PG&E monopoly or let the state buy it and run it. It has never been more clear that regional-scale for-profit utility monopolies just don't work and can never work no matter how regulated they might be.

She'd laugh and ask for a copy herself.