It's well known that the internet services we use daily limit download/upload bandwidth for clients. Even if you have 1GBs it would take a very large number like a whole office worth of people streaming simultaneously and you would still have bandwidth left over. This is just a way to charge for 2GBs and make a customer feel great when they never use more than 250MBs even for an entire household.

No that's not how this works they would still be committing criminal acts without Facebook. In most cases such genocide is almost always driven by government forces that then look the other way and act like they don't get what's happening. Governments want to blame Facebook a foreign third party simply because the government either supports the genocide and let's it happen or the government has lost control and wants to maintain the appearance that they still run the country.

Government crackdowns on mainland tech companies have created a lot of jobless developers. It's a good employment program they're running but I hope they have a good work/life balance and not burning them out too fast. Better to burnout then take your fancy engineering degree and work on the factory floor.

It's pretty amazing that they have their iOS app ready and shipped before Android. Is it really that much better of a developer experience? It's now a countdown to how long it'll last on the App Store before it's removed, I won't take any bets.

It's a nice "get out of blame free card". Any government doing something either nefarious or irresponsible it can blame a corporation. It's a meme at this point and it's getting old. Facebook is not responsible for the actions of people, groups and whole nations.

This is the most accurate assessment of what's going on and Xi is one of the worst leaders in the ancient and modern history of China. At least in the free world we can limit the damage by voting out our Trumps or their term limits limit the damage. People don't realize how much innovation in technology comes from video games and how network effects affect other industries. GPU development was and still is driven in large part by video games which are useful in other fields such as medicine or computer vision. Machine learning is pushed forward by social media companies. Even if China puts a huge effort in trying to develop their hardware and software industries they're still decades and generations behind. Central state planning cannot produce the innovations that a decentralized market system can this is known already. These clampdowns make catching up even more difficult if not impossible.

What's hilarious about this obsession with fusion reactors is it's just used to heat up water as part of a glorified steam engine. The heat get's turned into steam that powers a mechanically based generator turbine. Even if you do get the reaction to last longer most of the awesome power is wasted converting it to mechanical energy. In most science fiction and video game representations reactors directly convert the nuclear energy output to electricity. Nuclear fusion will never be useful until we can directly convert the energy to electricity in an efficient way. Any nation that attempts to build fusion reactor is just engaging in a nationalistic flag waving and it's all useless. Even worse if there's a massive industrial disaster as a result of these tests which is highly likely in China with their total lack of safety standards and protocols.

It's a fact that American astronauts went to the moon but only a few for brief periods and they knew the risks and signed up for that. But longer exposure has never been studied in any meaningful way. Space is the most dangerous environment humans have ever faced, you can't downplay those risks.

The reason the USA and Russia couldn't build a moon base was it wasn't possible due to technological limitations. You would need major breakthroughs in energy, propulsion, artificial intelligence and other fields to make it possible. To have any sustainable presence we'd need to move past liquid fueled rockets to some sort of electromagnetic propulsion that was more cost effective. Even if the USA, EU, Russia, China and Japan jointly worked on this it would take around 50-60 years of effort and development to achieve this for one of those nations on their own.

First you'd have to have the heavy equipment and energy to drill any meaningful distance down. Closest thing we have are the drills that dig metro and highway tunnels. That equipment has to be transported from Earth to the Moon surface which would be prohibitively expensive. These drills might not even function correctly in the lunar environment due to gravity or atmosphere. Energy would be problematic, if the drills are electric they could only run for a few hours a day. Meaning progress would be slow and if a drill broke down progress could be halted for long periods. Then there's the possibility you can't even drill because the surface rock is too hard and not drillable with any existing drilling equipment we have currently.

In the meantime your crew is exposed to dangerous radiation. If the radiation doesn't get them the risk of fatal accident is almost certain. The risk increases dramatically that the longer you stay the more that can go wrong.

The amount of radiation on the lunar surface is enough to kill a person or make them very sick. There's no magnetosphere like we have on Earth, the radiation at that level will literally begin cooking a person alive. That's if the person decided to stay passed 24 hours for an extended stay trip. Reason that Earth orbit extended stays are okay is they orbit within the Earth's magnetosphere. Even if you build under the ground on the moon the radiation doesn't go away, it's still deadly. There are no easy solutions to this problem and we're at least 100 years away from having the technology to solve it. If it was that easy then the Americans and Russians would have a moon base by now since they've been sending lunar landers for decades already.

Nations that make claims about lunar bases are lying and using the classic trick of putting a deadline far into the future. But they have no intention of actually reaching that goal. Creating propaganda pieces is easy and gullible westerners eat it up because they have a taste for gloom and doom. In the end China's people can't exactly vote out their leaders for lying about not reaching the lunar bases goal, there's no consequences for making such statements. Western leaders make the same kinds of statements that are equally absurd because the goal is set outside of their political term.

China opened the door to the multinational corporate Trojan horse and now have to face the consequences. Multinationals especially western ones are dangerous and treacherous entities to deal with for any government even their own.Apple is very smart to make a deal like this and they know they'll dominate the device market at the luxury segment in China at the detriment of domestic companies like Huawei. Domestic companies in China should feel absolutely betrayed by Beijing. China creates the appearance that it supports it's own companies but then makes a special deal like this with a foreign multinational. China cedes more and more of their economic development to near direct control by multinational partners in the long term with deals like this. Leaders in China are not selected for competence and are selected based on party loyalty and family legacy. These leaders have no idea how to manage a modern economy or companies and at that level of global complexity. Multinationals can run circles around such inexperienced and naive leaders and officials. Most companies in China operate at a loss made up for with subsidies from the government. If they had to operate in a western style open economy they would be considered major failures. China plays the double game of buying loyalty from local companies with subsidies but reserving the truly important deals for foreign multinationals that are in reality the critical corporate partners.