It's the year 2022 and that's their biggest accomplishment?

"Americans are famous for moving on,"...
Are we talking about the same Americans who still use 9/11 to excuse all kinds of shit?

Wonder if drag&drop across tabs will be just as broken as in the new taskbar (which still requires a tool to even somewhat work again)...

Whatsapp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger are probably the three most widely used messaging apps in the world. It would obviously be interesting to see how much of the /. crowd actually uses them. I personally checked Signal, having been a user and trying to promote its adoption for years.

However I also very grudgingly used Whatsapp until recently as my international contacts all used it exclusively. I have finally been able to erase my account and delete the app this month because people are finally waking up to the threat of Facebook and installing Signal enough to make it a true alternative.

WeChat is of course mostly used in the Sinosphere but I imagine there are plenty of /.ers who live partially in that world.

Obviously, there will be another dozen or so versions of Skyrim on the PS5 too!

Just what the world needed, yet another damn streaming service and one that tries to be even more expensive than the competition.

My dad's F-250 is used for hauling cows to the auction a dozen or so times a year, over 30 miles of nasty mountain roads; the rest of the time it mainly drives around our fairly mountainous ranch, hauling gear for redoing fences, towing a hay trailer and generally getting beat to hell by my dad and my brother's casual attitutde toward driving through brush and backing into things.

The CybrTrck looks to me like it would beat out the soon to be retired f250 on every spec. Better or equal hauling, at least in the higher trims, with plenty of range for runs to town with a trailer load of cows. Awesomely useful as a utility truck (it's got a frickin' air compressor and AC power 'generator' built in!), great off-road specs for going up and down the mountains. And the stainless steel body will probably hold up a heck of a lot better than the body panels on the Ford ever did to my dad's tendency to drive into things.

If this thing looked like a "normal truck", my dad would be buying one already, I guarantee it. But I think the out-there design is going to throw him for a curve. What will the other good ole boys say when he drives to the store?

For most users the difference between American or Chinese backdoors in their hardware means jack shit!

As long as IP lawyers can bill hours they'll happily continue to play whack-a-mole.

Of course we have to oversimplify things here to keep the topic from detailing, but ,,,

You're right on the Japanese and Vietnamese, though the Koreans chose a different route, replacing it with familiar looking characters of their own, that are also syllable-based, but where each character represents a structured combination of the letters/sounds. Basically, if you know the "letters" and the pattern in which to read Korean characters you can already read the words out loud, even without any understanding of the meaning of the words.

Almost forgot about the latter.
It's interesting how the people in Vietnam, Korea, Japan and a few others "imported" Chinese characters and then all chose different paths of modifying/extending/replacing it to suit their own cultural needs.

I'll just leave this here ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

While there is insight in your post, "they are a stabilizing force in the region," is frankly laughable. They are the single most destabilizing force in the region, and perhaps in the world, and they have been for more than a generation. Saudi oil money has financed and promoted jihadi terrorism throughout the Arab world and the broader Muslim world. Regarding the rest of what you said, yes, and then some: from what I've read, Saudi oil can be extracted from the ground "profitably" at anything over about 8 dollars a barrel, but the country's national budget (including a ludicrously high and also ludicrously ineffective military budget) requires something like 100 dollar a barrel oil now. As you note, they are spending down their foreign reserves so fast that they will be gone in five years and the Saudis will be running a deficit. And then they are screwed.

A current fad favors one kind of overpriced status symbol over another. News at eleven!