Personally, I preferred the saccharin taste to aspertame. I'd drink saccharin products today if they were available on the market.

> I don't want some device I have to build in a kit every couple of months. I'm beyond the point where I want to endlessly fiddle with technology. It's a waste of my time, and not something I do for fun.

But you realize that Google is pretty incompetent as a consumer support vendor? They're putting out changes to their "stock" android OS at least twice a year. For lollipop, they upgraded the phones months ago; but didn't even bother to upgrade the N7 (2013, razor/razorg) until a week or two ago. And almost every time, someone gets boned by a software glitch caused by the new release. Google does not give a tinker's damn when the device goes sideways on consumers.

I'm still running kitkat, figuring that I'm not going to even update my tablet until (lollipop) v5.1.1 is released as an automatic update. I'm pretty much terrified, at this point, every time Google puts out an upgrade, because their QA really sucks. As far as I'm concerned, fiddling with it is a guaranteed event, like a slackware/gentoo release from a decade ago, every time Google puts out an upgrade.

The sad truth is that its highly likely I will go iPad mini when my N7 dies on me. And I hate Apple. It strangles developers. Its as soulless as Google. Their products will never be the vanguard of technology. But Apple gives a damn about ensuring a flawless user experience. If the tablet goes sideways, they'll replace it. Their upgrades will fix things without introducing new problems. The question is whether that's worth the excessive margin they'll be extracting from your wallet.

No one cares what an anonymous coward thinks.

I'm thinking the the US takes its commercial computer security so casually, the Chinese get a head start by hacking the repository with all the details involved with the fab plant. At this point, China has the engineers and materials scientists capable of reverse manufacturing critical equipment, and can buy previous generation tools from European companies.

Lenovo still has to follow US export laws, and Lenovo can simply be embargoed. I don't think Lenovo even produces computers with Xeon CPUs (unless they come from the outdated China fab plant).

Chinese workers are still cheaper than to develop & implement a packaging robot? I find it hard to believe, but that's probably the case.

IIRC Apple constructs its MacPro's in the US.

You're also under the mistaken impression that the Chinese can't just steal the technological details from US fab plants, and then make an acceptable copy purely for their military research division.

Lenovo still has to abide by US commerce regulations if it wants to sell its products in the US. (Which is currently its most lucrative way to stay in existence.) Frankly, I doubt Lenovo even has a license to buy Xeon chips. What I don't get is what is stopping a European export company from buying the computers in small numbers, and shipping it over to an Eastern European company that does no business in the US, and have them send the chips to China?

And why is this even an irritant to China. There is no time savings from a computation unique to a Xeon chip, that cannot be replicated by a supercomputer cluster with software higher precision emulation. Its just more work and higher energy consumption costs.

The soonest way China gets SOTA computing chips is to provide the chips from US factories. (And then the Chinese build the tools to nuke said factories.) Let them develop their own competing technology. That at least gives a 10-20 year window where the US is "safe" from higher tech nukes. Handing it over to them for a profit gives zero time window.

Not disagreeing with you, but I was looking more towards situations in meatspace. Such as areas that are not accessible by roads. Which would be rural villages not in the US, or "wild" areas like Alaska or Northern Canada.

Frankly, I see this having more use for people "needing" to hike for long distances (10-20mi) under weight.

But lets hypothesize that you had a need to walk 10 miles in one direction and 10 miles back. Your calf muscles aren't weakening because they're being worked, but you expend about 7% less (metabolic) energy completing the 20 mile walk.

Good for you.

1) You do realize that the end of WW2 and the end of the Korean War was less than 10 years?
2) "PVA troops in Korea continued to suffer severe logistical problems throughout the war. In late April Peng Dehuai sent his deputy, Hong Xuezhi, to brief Zhou Enlai in Beijing. What Chinese soldiers feared, Hong said, was not the enemy, but that they had nothing to eat, no bullets to shoot, and no trucks to transport them to the rear when they were wounded."

That is not the definition of a "professional" army.

And even if they were better organized by 1979 (each soldier had a rifle, and the soldiers were all carried by truck), they really were's much more than an antiquated mass of farmers that hadn't fought an external war since Korea.

It was also a Vietnamese military victorious over a world superpower less than ten years ago. Vietnam was basically the equivalent of the US military in that region. Vietnam didn't have a lot of air power, but it had the best trained, veteran soldiers in the region. China, on the other hand, was still an antiquated mass of farmers that hadn't fought an external war since WW2. And they were trying to thrust a million men through a pass in a mountain range (which separates China from Vietnam).

The irony is that even though Vietnam thoroughly kicked the Chinese invader's ass, they still had to negotiate a peace with China, because China's loss was like losing a zit on its hide.