Funny thing about this - I still use Firefox b'cos I like the idea of being able to stage RSS feeds on the bookmarks toolbar of the browser. Internet Explorer finally had it in versions 8 & 9, but dropped it in Firefox. Chrome/Chromium never had it, and somehow, never thought about it. But that's my favorite, must-have feature on a browser

Actually, why does anyone need to 'maintain' it? It's a fully functional browser, working perfectly on your computer, so just use it as long as your computer lasts

Good point. I use Firefox, as it's one of the 2 available browsers on TrueOS - the other being Chromium. Thankfully, since Firefox is not the one maintaining that version, my browser is right now at ver 58.0.2. On the downside, some websites act up when I try to use them (like the IRS site) but in general, I have no issues

Windows 10 has a Linux kernel? Since when? I thought that the main selling point of Windows 8 was their kernel, and in Windows 10, they cleaned up the Metro UX and split it b/w desktop and tablet

There is already an American company called Triller, of which TikTok is a knock-off. They could try applying there

The Tiktok ban - and the ban on other apps - makes complete sense once one recognizes that the data of these apps that people store are inputs to Chinese AI systems that can be used to refine their cyberwarfare capabilities. Any AI system is only as good as the amount of data put into it, and having maxed them out for their own citizens, China's now trying to get the data on as many other people in the world. India dealt them a major blow in this department, since they have a population as big as China's, and cutting them out is a major deal. If the US and then the next big countries of the world - Brazil, Indonesia, et al start shutting out China, that's what it'll take to set back their cyber warfare capabilities

You can throw off that 'I am rather conservative' charade, if you have nothing to say about the race based hatred initiated by both BLM and Antifa in cities that are all (but one - Ft Worth) run by Democrats. When people are forced to kneel in solidarity w/ BLM by people totally unknown to them, when stores are looted in the name of reparations, In these cities, while police are being defunded, Individual citizens who are forced to take up guns b'cos the police won't come are then prosecuted by DAs. You have a Democrat party that wants to jail people for not wearing masks, while doing squat about rioters. This version of the Democrat party is worse than Communist parties in places like Cuba and North Korea: at least there, everybody knows who they are.

That's the problem w/ these 'Never-Trump' lowlives. They won't judge Trump on his record, be it on employment, the economy (talking about before the pandemic, of course), the military, the judiciary... Instead, b'cos he's dumped some very unpopular GOP policies, he's hated by a lot of them - Max Boot, Bill Krystal, John Bolton... On the Democrat side, people who'd have loved the policies of Trump in terms of pulling troops out of Syria and Afghanistan and trying to pull more out of Germany - they're now against those things... why exactly?

If you are a conservative, you can take to the bank that had President Bush been running things, he'd have fiddled - there would have been a shutdown, but no payouts of the CARES and PPEs b'cos the only panacea he had for anything was lower taxes. Something that's hard to do if none is being collected. It would have been that much worse. As for that great CDC you're talking about, yeah, given how they botched the first batch of tests so that the task force had to bring in the pharmaceutical industry, they sure deserved all their money. No, Trump has made the conservative response to this pandemic look really good - whether it was tapping car companies for ventillators, Kodak for pharmaceutical ingradients, other companies to make PPEs and so on. I can't imagine either Obama nor Bush coming up w/ anything like it

Except that the same people who lionized Hugo Chavez happen to loathe Trump for ostensibly doing the 'same thing'. Go figure

...all caused by the same country that these moves against TikTok is aimed at. While the rest of the world struggles w/ the China virus, Beijing itself is busy doing land grabs of all its neighbors and then some. In the meantime, TikTok and other apps are rich sources of data of people all over the world, and any AI system is that much more powerful the more data it has fed into it.

The pandemic is important, but we shouldn't overlook Beijing looking to swallow the rest of the world, largely thru its belt/road initiative. They want to do to the world what they've done to Hong Kong

Or the sound made by one of those timebombs one hears in movies

I hardly have any. The only one I have is Steam, and that too only if I log into my main account. As the above posters suggest, it's all the background tasks that Microsoft has decided to add that has slowed everything down. At this rate, a 72-core CPU w/ 1TB of DDR4 RAM is what will be required: each core will perform a background task, leaving 1 CPU completely to the user

Precisely, and now, Windows 10 is excruciatingly slow no matter how much memory or storage or #cores one has. So there's no good reason to upgrade.

Not just that, shrinking used to make sense in the 90s when we had only single core processors (actually, the 'core' concept didn't quite exist except for the Pentium Pro in a way) and there actually was a cost savings by doing a die shrink. That hasn't been true for a while now, w/ wafers becoming more expensive and processes more complicated. I think 25 nm is a sweet spot: beyond that, the ROI is really low, and just not worth it!

The US has troops in about 150 countries worldwide. I partly agree w/ you that we should prioritize, and leave a whole bunch of them. Given that our #1 threat is China, we should pick 2 regions - the Americas and the Indo-Pacific region (all Asian countries from India to Japan, and potentially Russia as well)

While we shouldn't have troops all over the world, we can't let China conquer countries nilly willy: sooner or later, they'll be trying to conquer the US as well. One major aspect of the Chicoms: unlike the Soviets, but like the Nazis, they have imperial aspirations. President Xi not only follows Maoism, he also considers his government as the head of Tien Hsia, or all under heaven. His long term plans is for China to be the only real government there in the world

So the US should leave NATO, which hasn't been relevant for 30 years now, and focus on the Indo-Pacific region. Have an alliance w/ the Quad (US, Japan, Australia and India) at its core, and extend it to embrace other countries under threat from China - Taiwan, Vietnam, Burma, Mongolia and possibly even Russia. Despite what things look like diplomatically, all's not well b/w Beijing and Moscow, w/ Beijing claiming that Vladivostok belongs to China, despite being legally sold to Russia in 1894.

So yeah, don't police the world, but there are parts of the world important for US interests. Let the Chinese do what they want in the Middle East and Africa, since we can't spread ourselves too thin, but prevent them from having an Asian empire

And India is backing it up the right way. Actually, ever since the China virus hit, India has been quietly driving a 'self reliance' program to get as much manufacturing into India and not have to import anything from China. The Galwan Valley skirmish only brought this to the forefront: now Indians are actively boycotting China, and Chinese companies are afraid to operate in India.

As Gordon Chang advocates, we need to do that as well: not just ban their apps, but also cut off all economic ties, b'cos maintaining them only strengthens Beijing. Yes, it will be painful, but after 30 years of enriching China, going cold-turkey on them is not gonna be painless. Ideally, we should bring back whatever production and operations we can back to the US, but failing that, we should move them to other countries, be it Vietnam, Thailand, India, Philippines and so on

The US needs to do a lot more than just banning Chinese apps. We need to ban all transportation from China - just look at the stories about mystery seeds being sent at random to people in both the US and other countries - and reimagine manufacturing and production of everything we currently just buy from China.

Right now, China is acting exactly like Nazi Germany did in the run up to WWII - and they have territorial claims on all their neighbors. No, we don't have to go to war against them, but we can do the next best thing - economically isolate them. Ban everything they make from coming to the US, not b'cos of Trump or Biden or anyone else, but simply to stop Beijing from growing even more powerful and rich than they already are. Otherwise, it won't be too long before they conquer all of Asia