> Bitcoin is alone in this world as the only decentralized system solving The Byzantine Generals Problem.

They didn't solve it, they just acidentally sidestepped it with a solution that costs money (ie to buy enough hashing power for a 51% attack). In reality though this creates a situation where we get an systematic maximum valuation of Bitcoins. (Once the cost of bitcoins costs increases enough that a 51% attack is offset by the cost of computing power to do it then the valuation can't go higher)

None, except the money they didn't want to spend on catching up on features as well as bug-for-bug compatibility with Chrome. As a business descision it makes sense, for the ecosystem less so sadly.

Never forget the software factor, esp w.r.t to performance with modern language runtimes.

Sure C/C++ and Java will run well on Sparc thanks to obvious causes but i doubt things like V8 (and thus node.JS) or the C# JIT compiler will get any love on Sparc, but thanks to the mobiles the companies behind them will make sure they work well on ARM even if it is a tad trickier compared to X86 still. (CPython will work as well or "badly" still due to it being an interpreter).

Sparc was especially horrible for runtime authors since it has register windows that while seeming like a good idea on paper for C like languages makes JIT compiling for both scripting or writing GC's for GC based languages a pain (see the Boehm GC for some documentation on this).

My neighbour has a Wifi-direct enabled printer (Canon i think), no idea if there is working wifi-direct enabled printer driver for Linux but if people want a "year of the linux desktop" missing stuff like this is subpar.

Watching the presentation they talk about what developers can do across Windows and across Linux.

We shouldn't expect it to be Linux and fully Android. Remember that WSL was built to enable Android compat for WinPhones initially but failed to be compatible enough,
but with WSL2 on the horizon they might've solved most hurdles so it could be that they just run Android apps via WSL2 "emulation" and the core OS is actually still windows.

Been using and teaching JavaEE but recently found myself using C# and while i can still miss some aspects of Java there are a bunch of features in C# that just makes code much less cumbersome (partials, elvis operator, structs).

Regarding some other features i'm still on the fence though (f.ex. properties are language-level getter/setters that whilst feeling icky for an old asm/C/C++ programmer do reduce cruft vs your typical Java JPA bindings).

As for a business eco-system i'd say it's a tie or even C# coming out ahead (mostly due to MS entrenchment), Even if Java might be a tad better with open standards it's always been a bit of a hit-and-miss with JavaEE because you always ran into server-specific stuff once you needed to do "nontrivial" things like authentication, sure C#/ASP.net was a single vendor specific implementation but it's documented and actually working (even if the new ASP.net Core stuff is muddying the waters a lot now in terms of finding documentation and examples).

Difference from back then though is that we relied on a LOT of assembly optimized code and in some cases CPU quirks even made it harder to support specialized regular C code (Sparc reg-windows).

Today however most code is written in relatively speaking high level languages and many compilers and interpreters even share codegen frameworks (mainly LLVM). Not too familiar with RISC-V specifics but ARM has been popular enough that people kept away from doing silly things with their C code to make it unportable (PPC and MIPS could've had a better chance today).

If limited government means that private insurance companies would rob me of double the amount in healthcare that the government would take in taxes i'd vote for the government.

Try 3d rendering, the largest scenes in the movie Coco took 120GB and there's plenty of ways to speed up rendering if you have "free" ram, they might not hit 1.5tb today but if they can use it they'll hit it soon enough. https://graphics.pixar.com/lib...

On the contrary, i have some recollection of some nation-states poisioning downloads of "encrypted" communication apps to be able to eavesdrop. (Egypt? Iran?).

While the Berlin Wall itself as just in Berlin it stood as the prime example of the Iron Curtain division of Europe and apart from the Berlin border there was also an division of the German countryside as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_German_border

Considering it's Apple all they'd have to do is reschedule their yearly "new phone reveal" event to coincide with products starting to roll out of a new assembly line to get most of their regular customers to stay with them.
(Add to this they could probably even release a cut-down phone at that event with only software updates and still save themselves if the timetable needed to be accelerated).

Actually the 17 million figure includes commercial vechicles, the number for passenger vechicles seems to be around 6-6.5 million and a competitor approaching 5-10% from being basically at 0% a few years back should scare any company in any market.
See https://countryeconomy.com/bus...

It's not about "whiteness" when it comes to China, it's about a level playing field. Companies in China must be majority owned by Chinese persons or companies so even if car companies,etc has precence in China their local subsidiaries are in some fashion China owned and thus exposed to the possibility of technology theft.

For example read up on how China became the Nr #1 country in high speed trains and the bitter taste it left for companies that tried to invest in subsidiaries there to have their tech stolen and now used agains't them aborad.

http://fortune.com/2013/04/15/did-china-steal-japans-high-speed-train/

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2107096/china-says-its-bullet-train-technology-was-stolen-days-after-us

The engineers were great, at making hardware and embedded software to run on memory constrained system like their cheaper phone models.

I'm sure some people internally said in 2004-2007 that they needed a new OS since they were basically running a macOS8/win3.1 like operating system on phones that had better specs than most win95 machines had used when the internet became a thing, but the thing was that Nokia's culture was not one that could appreciate the need for something like that in the future because the higher rungs were full of salesmen or other risk averse people that usually climbs in big organisations like Nokia was.

(I'm not familiar with Nokia history so maybe they had some teams on that but then they did the whole Copland thing that Apple had done in the 90s)