"Every Chinese Keyboard App Allows Chinese Government Spying"

That's the real headline. It's not a "security flaw". It's an intentional backdoor to allow the government to monitor what people are typing.

Because once they post it, it's too late - even if you get the platform to take it down, someone's probably seen it, and if it contains "sensitive information" then the ideas might spread.

But if someone starts typing some keywords, then it could be pre-emptively shut down ahead of time. Posting something pro-democracy? Better to lock your phone than let you post it. Hey, we can cause your phone to reboot so it looks like a phone bug!

And if you're a known torublemaker, well, then everything you type is being monitored.

No, the grid is severely undermaintained.

If it was maintained, PG&E wouldn't be near bankrupt because of all the fines from the wildfires it starts from failing equipment. We're not even talking equipment like transformers and other grid things, we're talking things like insulators and bushings that are falling to pieces and causing wires to short out.

Those are things that are generally supposedly to be replaced on a regular basis, and honest, are very cheap items individually, though are very expensive to install because you need to send a crew out to do it.

Also, deregulation is a huge cause of supply issues - if you cause a chortage, the price goes up. So you generally want to keep being in "shortage" mode so you're constantly paid high prices. This is a strong disincentive to build new supply since new supply means prices go down, and you're likely to not make back that money you spent on a new power plant as quickly.

The grid is the same shape as it was when Enron collapsed. And Enron was just a symptom to show how screwed up a deregulated market can get.

The other issue is you need LP memory or the power consumption is so high you're looking at a computer with a UPS more than a laptop.

There's a reason why desktop memory comes with heat spreaders nowadays, and often the faster ones have really big heatsinks on them, versus laptops which don't. The "low power" part of LP memory really saves a ton of power.

There were laptops that were trying to be cutting edge and used desktop memory, and the battery life was worse than pathetic. Non-LP memory just consumes a heck of a lot more power.

It's made even more confusing because ECC is build into the RAM chip itself - DDR5 requires ECC internally in the device.

This has made it basically impossible to search for ECC RAM modules (modules that support ECC - i.e., the 9th chip) because everyone is saying "on chip ECC data protection". Kind of important if the server you're provisioning memory for requires ECC memory, so you have to search really closely to determine if they're talking about on-chip ECC (which is required by DDR5) or on-mondule ECC support (which adds another chip for ECC support).

So on-chip ECC is to protect against things like rowhammer and cosmic rays bitflipping, which is at least something, and likely probably OK for short memory buses. (The main problem is the denser RAM gets, the greater chances of bitflipping).

Or even abuse it seems.

That's the exact opposite of how it actually works. Fertility rates tend to be highest among socioeconomically challenged groups, and lowest among high earning groups.

I've never had a problem reading Chinese or Japanese books or watching movies. Yes, translation of idioms is always problematic, particularly from languages that are not related to our own, but a good translator can usually deal with that. For me, the problem with The Three Body Problem was the loopy plot, shallow characters and the author's abrupt genre jumping. I'm reasonably familiar with the Cultural Revolution and its profound effect on Chinese society, so ironically, reading the first chapter was the best part of the book. There was an interesting story there that wasn't a science fiction story.

Forklifts prove otherwise, the technology for using compressed hydrogen is ready ... it's just not well suited to passenger cars.

Forklifts are either fully electric, or they're using propane or LNG.

Hydrogen is just very inconvenient to use as keeping it as a gas takes a lot of space, and keeping it as a liquid requires a lot of equipment to keep it cold. And either way, it leaks out so your vehicle can't sit around unused or you run out of fuel. Hydrogen cars right now can keep their hydrogen around for a week before it's all gone. That's right, if you park your car a week with a full tank, you'll come back to a car with an empty tank.This limits the usefulness if you're having to drive so much you're vising the gas station daily.

That being said, EVs with flow batteries might actually be the future. You can use the battery and charge it up normally, or you can drain the used electrolyte and refill it with new electrolyte, thus giving you the "pump" convenience since you can "fill it up" in a few minutes. Of course, the current problem is current flow batteries have 10% the energy density of Li-Ion. In addition the used electrolyte can be regenerated since you can recharge.

I agree. Some of it, I suspect, is that I've just read so many books now that I'm in 50s that when I read a trope-driven genre novel (SF, Fantasy, Mystery, Thriller, whatever), I rapidly feel like I've read this story before. I've gotten to the same place with TV and movies. Both mediums really suffer from a lack of any kind of originality, or even attempts at quirkiness. It all just feels like Thomas Kinked-esque cookie cutter.

I've started reading a lot more non-fiction, mainly history. Ironically, there's a lot more originality there than in most of the modern fiction I read.

I read the first Three Body Problem novel, and I thought it was crap. Some of that might have been the translation, although I've read other translations from Chinese without that much of an issue. The plotting was terrible, the characters flat. I finished it more because I kept expecting it to eventually turn around, breaking my rule that if I don't like a book in the first three chapters, I won't finish it. In the end, I couldn't imagine why I would want to read any more of it.

Does it have the intro "Imagine Bash, but object oriented and with function call names so long they would drive a Java developer to madness. Brought to you by the author of Microsoft Bob and Clippy, psychopaths that infect your computer with their dead-eyed smiles comes Powershell."

As an owner of the complete History of Middle Earth series, these books are not for the casual fan, or probably even the average fan. They really are more designed for Tolkien scholars, and anyone picking up The Nature of Middle Earth expecting ripping yarns filled with Hobbits and wizards is going to be very disappointed.

So the assignments on the top of the stack, which were the last to be turned in, received the lowest grades.

That doesn't seem totally unfair.

That presumes there's a correlation between when it was handed in and the student deserving scrutiny.

Any paper could end up on top for any reason - perhaps the teacher tells students to put them in a pile as they leave class - so the one on top is the one that left class last. Which may be a student who was asking a question after class. Or maybe they had an accident packing up stuff and thus ended up being the last to leave.

Or maybe the teacher asks students to pass their papers forward and collects them from the front, so the top one depends on which aisle the student sat in and which end the teacher started collecting first.

Of course, then comes the question of why someone hasn't invented a paper shuffler that re-orders papers to prevent such bias.

The problem with leather is it's an animal product, and something that vegans and the ilk are strongly opposed against.

That's the main reason Apple moved away from leather. It's also why Tesla offers an alternative to using leather in their steering wheels (this was back when Elon Musk actually cared about such things). (Start to see an overlap in customer base?)

Plus, I'm sure, leather is out of the question in India for obvious reasons, and Apple is looking into moving manufacturing there.

It's not that you can't get leather accessories for Apple products, it's that Apple themselves don't want to offer it. They will offer it in their stores, but as a 3rd party manufacturer to make it.

I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind offering leather phone cases, because well, those change every few years so you'd be forced to buy a new one anyways. But I'm sure a large proportion of their customer base, being vegan, would strongly oppose such a move.

I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

That did happen. There was Concurrent DOS in the mid 80s, which was multitasking DOS. GEM was used in several other computers, but also was a competitor to Windows in the early days - because it was extremely lightweight and you didn't need to upgrade your 8088 PCs to run it.

But low cost licensing they didn't have.

In the famous "IBM visits Digital Research", the narrative often heard is that IBM came to Digital Research (Kildall's house) and his wife said he was out flying. That was all true. However, IBM did not leave nor demand Kildall return - the reason is that Kildall's wife handled the business side of Digital Research while Kildall did the technical side. Thus, he wasn't needed for the meeting at all.

The main sticking points were that IBM wanted an NDA signed, and Kildall's wife refused. The second demand was that IBM wanted an all-in price to license CP/M. They didn't want to have a per-PC license, they wanted an all-in price.That was the biggest stumbling block because DR did not offer an unlimited seat license.

So after that they went back to Microsoft to get an OS from them (Microsoft was tasked with producing and porting their suite of languages to the new computer). Microsoft did cheat Seattle Computer Products when it bought QDOS from them - because they wanted to pay per-customer. And they sold it to well, one customer - IBM. So that's why PC-DOS and MS-DOS existed and why IBM kept shipping PC-DOS. They bought it from Microsoft and had Microsoft maintain it for a while.

In the end, Digital Research did sue IBM and Microsoft because MS-DOS/PC-DOS looked too similar to CP/M (one of the first "look and feel" lawsuits - DR was known to sue companies for making something look like CP/M). IBM settled out of court by offering to ship their PCs with CP/M in the end. (The PC never shipped with an OS - that was something the IBM reseller added as a package deal). Of course, CP/M couldn't compete in the 16-bit world because MS-DOS was $99, while CP/M was $250 and never really caught on, because by that time, people have ported their CP/M applications to MS-DOS/PC-DOS. (Of course, Microsoft had a hand here - they made some source translator tools - thanks to the similar architectures of the 808x (8080, 8085, 8086), 6800, 650x and Z80 CPUs, it was possible to do a mechanical source translation to aid porting. MS-DOS/PC-DOS/QDOS was structured after CP/M's design which helped greatly because system calls ended up being similar.

I don't know how much CP/M cost on 8-bit computers - it could be cheap, it could be expensive. Just on the PC side, MS-DOS was far cheaper than CP/M ever was.

CP/M produced MP/M which was a multi-user version of CP/M, which begat 16-bit versions CP/M-86 and MP/M-86, which then became Concurrent CP/M-86, which evolved into Concurrent DOS. That eventually transformed into Multiuser DOS in the 90s (after Novell acquired Digital Research).

Incidentally, MS-DOS 1.x/PC-DOS 1.x was very CP/M like. MS-DOS 2.x started adding more traditional operating system conventions that Microsoft adopted from their Xenix. In that in CP/M, and DOS 1.x, files specified on the command line were opened for you by the operating system and you basically manipulated pointers and asked the OS to bring it into memory. DOS 2.x later acquired the more traditional open/read/write/seek/close style semantics and system calls.