Nokia got the memo. Rest of us saw what happened to nokia after believing the memo and used our common sense.

They're not suffering yet if the persistent rumors about what is about to get released are anywhere near the reality. Apparently the next batch will tell the story of industrial espionage as conducted by NSA and then provided as a service to US companies. If that gets confirmed, you can start seeing actual government sanctions from large trading partners like EU, China, Russia and so on. And it's then when the meaning of "suffering" for US companies will start to really be realized in this particular case.

Right now it's just cloud companies that start getting squeezed. That's nothing major when you look at US-dominated IT industry as a whole.

Basically they need something, anything to compensate for disaster that is windows 8, until MS comes back to reality. MS can carry over the dry period with it's MS tax and other parts of its business, OEMs not so much.

It's not so much lack of learning as desperation to keep the revenue flow going in the current market.

Mozilla's idea of "developing" has been "steal ideas from add-ons, implement them in a half-assed way, and strip some UI elements while you're at it to prepare people for being helpless in face of blatant monetization" ever since 4.0.

This is very much in line with this development roadmap. It adds useless crap that they can monetize and it strips control over browser from the user (removal of javascript disable box etc).

The scariest part is that most of "insane conspiracy nutjobs" thought the reality was better than it actually was.

Many new and most older USB drives are still USB2 because that's all that they need to be - storage mediums for backups, media and so on. You don't need fast hard drive for that, so they usually use cheap 5200rpm 3.5" drives in enclosures that contain the drive and an SATAUSB (in case of older drives, IDEUSB) adapter.

I own one of those, and use it mainly to back up things like windows installs on my desktop/laptop. Sure, I could buy a USB 3 drive that is quite a bit faster, but why would I do that? It's more costly and at no real life advantage since back ups go during the night meaning as long as backup is fast enough to finish during the night, I don't care if it takes two hours or eight. It's also fast enough to do things like media playback and other similar uses.

Storage drives are not meant to be impressive in terms of speed. That's what you have SSD for.

Your comment is about as smart as raging that a delivery truck isn't as fast as a racing car.

If I'm recalling correctly, SMS standard doesn't even allow for this. You have to send message as MMS, which is much more expensive. Doing this silently while making user believe that he's sending a SMS is a big problem with some phones (iphone, I'm looking at you).

Suspect? They know it. No need to suspect. When you're a small country stuck in the middle of many evil empires who want to rob you as efficiently as possible, you know that every deal you sign comes with poison in the envelope.

This moaning is about getting Western populace prepared for the propaganda of the next Cold War. You won't see too much crying about Chinese spying outside those territories. If anything, it's generally viewed as a good counterbalance to rampant one-sided Western action over last two decades.

Remember: our system was built to be good for us, and bad for others to be enforced at gun point. That's why we're fabulously wealthy by the world average standards.

I like how you choose to completely disregard human history in favor of super-optimistic drivel.

I think you're misunderstanding the concept of government bond debt and private debt. One does not come to collect government bond debt in a traditional sense. It's paid out against bonds at time specified in the bond. The term "collection" generally refers to ability to pressure the debtor into payment. As described above, such scenario does not exist with US bonds - the pressure comes from economic needs that are irrelevant to any individual bond or bond holder.

As a result, as long as China holds the bonds, and as long as the time of payment is one stated in the bond, when China "comes to collect" as you put it, US will in fact be forced to pay. There is very little doubt about that due to factors stated in previous post.

It's worth noting that one of the reasons for severe decline of lions has been slowness evolutional response to human hunting factor (they seek mainly alpha males). Essentially every time one dies, the entire pride suffers a bout of infanticide, which is the key reason for decline of lions in the areas where they are hunted. If it was just alpha male deaths caused directly by humans, lions as species would have far less problems.

It's a pretty good microcosm of small tribal community and is somewhat relevant to humans as well.

I'm surprised that you are an accountant who can make such sweeping and incorrect claims. Government bonds have very strict terms on repayment and that is for a reason - they need to be exceptionally predictable and reliable to function in their primary role of being reliable bonds.

Trying to postpone or alter terms of debt would be viewed as limited default, as has happened in Greek case. I.e. perhaps the insurance events would not be triggered, but markets would most certainly dump the bond en masse demolishing its value both in terms of cost and trustworthiness.

Finally there is an issue of financing. US needs to finance its government and it needs to finance its private sector. As of writing this a large portion of this financing comes from China for a very simple reason - China gets a lot of money from exports. That money has to go somewhere. As a result, it's investing everywhere, including US debt, both public and private. Sudden cessation of this investment would be a massive shock to the system, and while it would likely not be as fatal as default event on bonds, it would be a severe shock to the system for two reasons: one is the direct need to finance the portion that used to be financed by Chinese, and other in the fact that bonds would have to have increased yields to sell both due to less investors as well as the fact that one of the biggest if not the biggest current investor in the world suddenly ceasing its investments and shifting them elsewhere would have many analysts consider actual downgrading and possible limited dumping of the bond.

All of above events would cause severe harm to US, and by extension world economy, which is why they are unlikely to occur. We are effectively in a state of financial MAD in credit system.

I'll make this one easy on you. Currently one of the main cornerstones of US economy is that its dollar is world's main reserve currency and that its debt obligations are considered very stable and reliable bonds.

Defaulting on even a small amount of debt to China would collapse this system and US and world economy would not survive the fallout. Even if you completely eliminated the Chinese problem by some hypothetical means that will not have economic impact, US economy would collapse on itself within months due to lack of ability to borrow and massive international sales of US bonds and obligations which would make importing necessary equipment for basic functionality of the country essentially impossible. You would be looking at a total societal collapse, which considering the influence of the US bonds and US dollar would likely be felt worldwide.

As Somalia shows very well, when central government becomes too weak to maintain control, warfare simply moves down to tribal/criminal/corporate level.