Obviously not... see if you can spot NK on the map

How? The internet cables go through China - so you either cut China off from the Internet too, or you accept that all NK traffic goes via China's routers.

I doubt China will see nipping into their territory and cutting any of their internet cabling as perfectly reasonable.

why would China DDoS NK's routers? Surely they'd just unplug the cables that stretch over the border. they could even say "for maintenance" if they needed an excuse, feeble though it is.

A "collapsible shipping container like palette" would be harder to load and unload than a palette.

not really - a pallet with sides is still a pallet. Only now its easier to put stuff in that won't fall off the edge. You only need to put bars at the corners with thin material stretched between them. The only issue is cost, pallets are simple and cheap.
TBH a pallet with sides is no different to a pallet with a box of stuff stuck on top of it, so I don't really see the need, but I understand where they're coming from.

And how do you accommodate over-high items? Or stuff that is over-wide?

charge extra for custom handling. Isn't that what the shipping industry would love :-)

but isn't the pallet a standardised container - albeit without walls and a top?

Its standard width, and length means it fits into standardised holes in warehouses and can be moved with standardised vehicles. The shipping container is no different except it has walls to keep stuff together.

the point I take is that its the standardisation that matters. True in so many areas.

I'll tell you one more ting to look at in C/C++ : web development.

I had to replace a PHP webserver that did a small bit of functionality recently, and we had a C++ service that did all the heavy lifting anyway, so I added a webserver lib to it (civitweb, a fork of mongoose) and found to my surprise that it was trivially easy. sure I had to write out my own headers but that requires all of 3 lines of cut and paste code, the rest - pure ease.

All the bloated web frameworks I'd used previously are gone now, for all their advanced functionality, I find they just get in the way. I might still use them for big systems that have a lot of pre-built functionality, but if you want web serving that provides most of the functionality in client-side javascript anyway, I'd be doing it in C from now on!

Of late, .NET Native is an interesting piece of tech that precompiles .NET apps using VC++ compiler backend. So you get all optimizations in your .NET code that C++ normally gets.

this is why I prefer C++ - my time is worth a lot less than the time all my users spend using my programs, so although my boss complains about my productivity, he does that when I'm writing .NET code anyway :-)

I would pick PHP over .NET everytime... and I'm not a PHP dev!

the main reason is the bloat in .NET - its good at many things, but web serving is always been a "look at the cool kids and try to replicate what they do". So you either have to support IIS-based webservers which I have always found rather clunky (and if you ever go back to one that was written a while ago, getting it working again is always been trouble).

For webservices, I found that WCF is crud. Its nice to code up a webservice that doesn't require IIS, and it all seems nice. But then I saw how PHP could do a web service in 6 lines of code compared to the 6 files of code WCF required I knew I was using the wrong tool for the job (especially when you factor in WCF's dreadful performance).

The last aspect is security - having worked in very high secure systems, one additional thing you can do to help add a layer of security is not to use a monoculture - so a web server written in PHP that talks to a Windows server running .NET is more secure than both running the same OS (ie a zero-day exploit will be used on both servers, but if one is Linux and the other Windows one server is going to be immune).

I'm all for .NET, its a good tool and I use it daily. But experience has taught me to advocate the right tool, regardless of what it is. I hate and loath the "it is Microsoft therefore we use it" attitude as I've seen so many useless systems written with the wrong, but Microsoft, tool. (I guess the same applies to Oracle, IBM and every other vendor or language - the same hate goes for "100% pure java" that was just a way of saying "only buy my shit")

PS. Apache has supported threads since 2.0 came out, it only spawns processes where some 'cgi-style' processor requires them. Also, on Unixy systems spawning processes is as cheap as spawning threads on Windows.(if you want a truly lightweight thread on Windows, google for Windows Fibres to see what I mean). But again, my point is - you don't know enough about what you're criticising and so are making poor choices based on hype and bullshit.

it could be part of the revenue - how many of those rear end crashes were because the tailing driver wasn't paying attention and trying to keep going, and how many because the driver in front fancied a slow crash that was someone else's fault to sue for "whiplash injury" compensation?

right... ok, we'll just have go for plan B - slavery for all workers while the landed elite get rich.

Or.. we'll just find different jobs for everyone to do

there's always new jobs.. even if its working in "customer support" or marketing.

There's a reason the West has migrated jobs from manufacturing to the service sector, the manufacturing is done in China or similar, leaving western workers to either design, advertise or sell the products to each other.

Its pretty old news, what happens depends on the area automated - when Gutenberg created the press, the old clerks stopped copying by hand and started becoming more like authors (similar to have the newspapers have been replaced by bloggers and opinion), though when the Spinning Jenny was introduced there was a lot of public disturbance, but in the end it worked out.

Yeah. But which government?

Estonia!

quite true, and part of the problem is the pyramid scheme of them all, designed to make pots of cash for the people who create the currency in the first place as they have a stash of coins before it starts.

What we really need is the government to create a virtual currency, with all the regulation and control that entails. Then you can have all the benefits of a cryptocurrency but with the benefits of it actually becoming mainstream for the majority of users, without the problems a truly anonymous one has with regard to criminal activity.

"The real thing for your .NET platform" will be "the Open Source .NET platform produced by the .NET Foundation."

or will it be "the real thing for the .NET version platform"?

Or the .NET platform that is open source, but you still need to buy a load of stuff to get the juicy stuff that powers most applications nowadays, like WCF and WPF.

Now, if someone forked it and produced a GUI that worked well, rendered fonts without fuzziness or needing a caching service, and performed well... then I'd be much more positive about this open sourcing of .NET core.

I don't know - Google seems to do very well indeed on advertising revenue, I can't think why the sites that display their adverts aren't doing nearly as well....