As in if someone anonymously puts up a poster on private land that defames you, you actually get to challenge it in court and if it's found to be libel it's taken down.

Uh, no. Not even close to how it works in reality.

If I put up a poster in my front yard (in the United States) defaming a Japanese doctor, a Japanese court has zero ability to make me take it down.

Look at this from a less "I personally approve of this ruling" angle - If a Saudi court rules that the New York Times needs to recall an issue for an offensive cartoon, would you expect the NYT to actually round up every printed copy in the US, or just to stop the delivery of that day's issue to Saudi addresses?

Are you somehow incapable of understanding how export control laws work? If they're banned from certain US technology and for purpose, then any route around that through any 3rd party would be illegal.

Aaand... China cares about that why?

"Yes, we'd like to order 33,000 ThinkStation P700s, please? Yes, two E5-2697's, please. No, no OS. No memory either. Also no storage. Video card... hold on, let me ask our chief res... er... office manager... Okay, yes, how many Tesla K80's can you fit in one of those? Let's go with that, then. Do you take UnionPay? No? Hmm, gold bullion? Wow, rough checkout process here! Paypal? Great! Oh, can I get a tracking number when you ship it? Thanks."

Are you somehow incapable of understanding that you can't magically stop someone from getting milk while continuing to sell them live cows?

"US: No more supercomputer simulations for you!"
"China: Okay, we'll just go back to actual above-ground nuclear testing"
"US: But you signed a test ban!"
"China: Come and stop us."

This seriously cannot end well. China already has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, this goes so far beyond the scale of our pissing contest with Iran as to make it almost laughable (if it didn't potentially involve the world ending in a nuclear holocaust).

we live in the Surveillance Age now and will probably be for the rest of our lives.

Probably true - But I'll still use encryption for my private files and communications. I'll still refrain from screaming what I had for breakfast into the ether. I'll still make up random information when registering for any service that doesn't need real info to perform its core function. I'll still "fuzz" personal details when relevant to discussions on sites such as Slashdot. I'll still bait telemarketers even though they probably know more about me than I do. And, I'll still make Officer Twitchy get a warrant to search my phone, even if it means I get shot in the back trying to peacefully walk away.

Accepting the reality of something doesn't mean you should just give up - We all unavoidably die, why don't we all just commit suicide now and save ourselves the hassle of wasting all that time working and sleeping and exercising-so-we-can-live-longer and such? Sometimes, "accepting" something means "fight harder anyway".

And with this, we learn the real solution to the Fermi paradox - Not warlike tendencies among apex predators capable of becoming sentient, not resource starvation before getting off-planet (though close to that), not Reapers or something similar, not the actual absence of habitable planets - But simply the ease of developing ecosystem-destroying technology vs the complexity of understanding the chaotic interdependence of planet-sized ecosystems.

We had a nice run, humanity. Maybe the Blattarian race that succeeds us in a few million years will do better.

The first-gen Rift headsets are bulky, heavy, and have a low enough resolution and flicker to make most people ill after a short period of use.

Even the second-gen ones aren't really good enough.

I'd say, two, three more solid generations before this is "ready for everyone", mostly meaning early adopter wannabes who can't handle the current paradigm.

"Feinstein has always been a closet Republican"

Come again?

Yeah, although keep in mind that the GNex was an unusual case. There are binary components that Google doesn't have source to and the SoC maker is out of business, and the code seems to have gone with them. After learning a lesson from the GNex, Google has worked to ensure contractually that no Nexus device will be left in the same situation.

The same convergence happened in the phone industry for exactly the same reason... regulations give only one provider in an area the right to run wires to your house. There's huge incentive for such local monopolies to consolidate to form regional monopolies. But the basis is the government-mandated local monopolies. Now, granted that there are some good reasons for the local monopolies; it would be a pain to have a dozen companies all tearing up your street to install their own wires... but there are lots of ways that could be addressed.

AFAIK, all candidates get paired with a recruiter, regardless of who contacts whom, at least they do if the process goes to the interview stage, because it's the recruiter who sets all of that up.

I think your recruiter violated policy in saying what he said. In addition, I suspect it may not actually have been true, because from what I know of the hiring process the recruiter doesn't get detailed feedback from the hiring committee on the rationale for the no-hire decision. I suspect the recruiter just told you something he thought would let you down gently, without knowing the real rationale. The same may have been true for the AC. Or maybe I'm wrong.

As for the bullet-dodging... I doubt it :-). There's a reason Google has been rated the #1 place to work six years running. Not that you don't enjoy what you do, I'm sure you do, and perhaps even more than you'd have enjoyed Google. But I strongly suspect you'd have enjoyed working at Google very much. I do, and I've worked for small startups, too. The rewards are different. Google is cool mostly because you work with a lot of really amazing people and work on things that have tremendous real-world impact. A billion people use my software on a daily basis. That's hard to get elsewhere. You also generally have a great deal of say in what you work on, and how it gets done, which is similar to a startup. The downside of Google is that it is a big corporation, which means there's a certain amount of bureaucratic overhead which you generally don't have to put up with at a small company. And you obviously also don't get the same sense of helping to set the company's direction as a whole. And, of course, while Google compensation is probably better than most startups, it doesn't come with the stock options that promise to maybe someday make you an instant millionaire.

There's no doubt that the process is imperfect. In fact, the bar is quite deliberately set so that there are a large number of false negatives (bad no-hire decisions), to keep the number of false positives extremely low.

As for your particular complaint... I think that people who don't think well on their feet actually won't perform well at Google. Rather than one person plugging away for a month to come up with that ingenious solution you mention, the approach at Google is to get a half-dozen people together and collaboratively work through the same solution space in a few hours. Will they come up with your ingenious solution? I can't guarantee it... but the odds are actually pretty high. I work with some seriously bright people (I can't figure out why they keep me around; but I'm not complaining).

I don't want to imply that slower, more methodical thinking styles are bad. In fact, I think you can make a good argument that Google needs more methodical thinkers. But for better or worse, the culture is one of rapid-fire thinking and speaking, heavy on collaboration, light on process.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think Google's interview process does select for the kind of people Google wants to hire, and you may simply not be that kind of person. That's not to say that your'e not highly intelligent and deeply competent... just that you don't fit the culture.

(Obviously I'm assuming a lot based on a few words from your post. Please excuse me if I'm off base.)

Wow, just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

/ Dating myself
// Hurry up, Rosie, or we'll miss the movie!

It's worth pointing out that libertarians *do* have a solution to the lack of competition in the ISP space: remove the regulations that prop up the regional monopolies. However, since we're apparently not going to do that, additional regulations are necessary to prevent the government-mandated monopolies from screwing us too badly.

Actually, for the system image we do want to enable installation of custom signing keys, so you don't have to unlock/relock. The current situation encourages modders to leave their bootloaders unlocked, which is bad because if someone finds your device they can flash a custom/malicious system and gain unlimited access to your data (well, disk encryption is another barrier, but we prefer defense in depth). So custom signing keys will make it easier for modders to secure their devices. I won't say when, but I will say that's something we want to enable on Nexus devices.

For the trusted OS, it's different. The problem is that the trusted OS has access to device secrets that don't change when the device is re-flashed. Worse, the trusted apps make use of those secrets as the root from which they bootstrap all of their cryptographic keys. This means that if someone can flash a custom trusted OS they can extract those keys, and then subvert all of the security provided by the real trusted OS. Worse yet, sometimes those secrets aren't device-unique, but may be the same across a whole batch of devices. In those cases the TEE apps derive device-unique keys using the per-batch keys and the device serial number. But that means an attacker who can flash a malicious trusted OS to one device can compromise the entire batch.

So... the only way to have any security from this TEE stuff is to very tightly control what code is allowed to run in it. Which means no customization. That's sad, but it's what we have to do.

Quit playing obtuse. The Hawaiian Department of Land and Natural Resources gave the University of Hawaii an exclusive lease to use that land. Whether that department consists of "Natives" or haole, you racist, your elected government made a deal on your behalf.

You don't get to go back on that deal just because some BS "native rights" movement has grown in popularity over the past few years.