That hasn't been true since the 19th Century, regardless of what the CCP claims to whip up nationalist furor. No Mainland Chinese Government has exercised sovereignty over Taiwan in living memory and the CCP only cares because a successful non-despotic Taiwan serves as a constant reminder to their own people that there's an alternative to their governance model.

Too bad for them Winnie-the-Pooh abandoned the pretense of "One Country, Two Systems" by cracking down on Hong Kong. Whatever (slim) chance there was at a peaceful reunification evaporated when the people of Taiwan saw what happened there.

I might suggest starting by lessening our reliance on Chinese supply chains for critical goods like semiconductors. If the national security argument isn't sufficient for that, consider what happened during COVID supply chain disruptions. Both provide ample reason, IMHO, not to be wholly dependent on the PRC for any non-luxury good, particularly when they would never allow themselves to be likewise solely reliant on an American product.

We can talk about less sexy goods too. Recall the PPE shortages early in the pandemic and ask yourself why a First World County couldn't accommodate its own needs for something as simple to manufacture as an N95 mask. You can't even make the MBA/late-stage capitalist argument for that off-shoring, not when the majority of the manufacturing process is automated and labor costs are minimal. Boo hoo, 3M makes $0.75 profit on each mask instead of $0.76.

The brain starts with the semantics. Some are innate, others are learned, but the semantics is always first. The syntax is then layered on top of this. This is why the high-intelligence end of the autistic spectrum is linked to delayed speech followed by a very rapid process to complex speech. The semantics is being built to a far higher degree, the syntax is postponed until the last possible moment.

AI, as it currently exists, needs a very very large number of examples, far more than the brain by tens of orders of magnitude, and hallucinates far more, because ALL it knows is the syntax. There is no handling of the semantics at all.

This approach can NEVER lead to actual intelligence of any sort, let alone superintelligence. They are solving the wrong problem. And that is why they fail, and why they will only ever fail.

If you want actual intelligence, the syntax must come LAST. And the modern breed of AI researcher is simply far too stubborn and arrogant to fathom that.

Substances most people do not regard as addictive (weed) or inherently dangerous (alcohol) are viewed as both by the Federal and most State criminal justice systems.

They knew that a broken BRCA2 increased the risk of cancer. The missing link was that high glucose leads to high MGO which inactivates BRCA2.

They started with cells where one copy of the gene is bad in order to more easily see any effect. It is quite possible that given a bad enough type II diabetes, the same effect can happen even with 2 good copies of the gene.

Since communism is, by definition, classless, you cannot both be classist and communist.

Racism is, again by definition, incompatible with abstraction.

My conclusion is that you're pretty shaky on definitions.

Gnome might not be the best example. At least TWO distros were inspired by the desire to avoid Gnome shell. At least one to avoid SyetemD. Linus had to yell at the SyetemD people to stop them from crapping up the kernel.

The recent debacle with the xz based security hole explains well why Debian likes to think twice about updating package versions.

We need to anounce the coming of the salt shaker to get those slugs moving.

Jello Biafra for president!

The whole thing violates a reasonable expectation of privacy. They don't need to know your name to make sure you don't have any weapons on you.

I wish I had mod points for you today. This reminds me of what Slashdot used to be like 20 years ago.

If you need trained technical support to troubleshoot an issue with a switch you aren't much of an IT Professional, IMHO.

In 20+ years in this profession I've never needed technical support on a switch for anything other than a hardware failure requiring RMA/warranty service. Cisco would certainly be less frustrating in this regard, because I wouldn't have to jump through the Tier 1 nonsense to convince them it actually is a hardware failure, as opposed to an ID10T error, but I haven't dealt with enough switch failures to justify the Cisco Premium for this scenario.

I could be a real snob and make the same statement about routers and firewalls. Admittedly a higher bar there, more that can go wrong configuration wise, still, unless we're talking super small business here, you should have enough in-house expertise to manage them with whatever configuration you need.