It sounds very much like "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"

This sort of thing seems to be fairly routine, if you start to dig into it. There was an example recently where the police raided someone's business and took a load of lithium batteries, which they warned them were volatile. You can guess what happened. Caught fire, destroyed a load of other evidence along with them, police now trying to blame the business owners (who were not charged or doing anything wrong).

Another very common one is losing CCTV evidence, often because the police don't request it before it gets deleted. If you think you might need it, make a request for it yourself, don't rely on the cops to get their act together.

Sure, but most of them used the 6502 at 1MHz due to the shared RAM and bus.

The Z80 was popular as well. Lots of early consoles and computers used that.

I know, I was talking only about high speed rail. There are many, many grade crossings on non high speed lines.

I think it's pretty unarguable that China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and into a fairly Western/modern lifestyle.

Most Western systems suffered from a severe lack of memory bandwidth. Japanese systems tended to have two separate buses, one for the CPU and one for the video. It was necessary early on in order to display the more complex Japanese characters.

By having two buses, the graphics could be a lot better than on systems that shared a single bus between the CPU and graphics. The Famicom managed to have a decent number of colours and sprites on screen at a good resolution, while others had to compromise at least one of those things. It did mean that the cartridge needed two ROM chips, but it was well worth it.

It also meant that the CPU was faster. A 6502 derivative which most Western systems would only operate at a maximum of 1MHz, so that 2MHz RAM and ROM chips could alternate between servicing the CPU and graphics chip. The 6502 was very efficient anyway, so it was actually quite a powerful little system. The later Super Famicom only doubled the speed, but retained the 8 bit CPU with a few minor 16 bit extensions.

I'm talking specifically about the Chuo Shinkansen, the new maglev one. Most of the conventional lines are not tunnel, although they are all grade separated. No crossings anywhere.

The Japanese and Chinese tracks are all grade separated. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire Chinese network had CCTV with AI to detect objects entering the track. Japan might have some solution for that too, given the speeds involved.

90% of the Japanese system is tunnels through mountains, so very difficult for people to access, and easy to monitor the few entrances.

The human body isn't much of a threat to trains, and the tracks are designed so that vehicles won't be able to get onto them.

There was a bit of a bump, but the price per watt lower than 2021 now. I think it was mostly tariffs that were responsible.

We shouldn't be worrying about "dumping" and the like, we should just be buying as many of the damn things as we can get, and making as many of our own as possible. This is about climate change, not protecting our domestic manufacturing.

This is about automation. The factories are moving to robots and "lights out" manufacturing. Deployment of the panels is being done by drones and tracked robots too now.

Even places that are normally inaccessible or very expensive to get materials to, are becoming solar farms now. The sides of mountains and remote areas.

A lot of young people are disillusioned with capitalism, and quite understandably so. It hasn't delivered the benefits for them, and the advice they were giving about making it work (get educated, get a house, work hard and rewards will come) turned out to be bad.

They look at China, which provides for citizens. When they see that people are going to migrate to cities, they build big new cities with affordable housing and excellent public transport. Meanwhile in the West it's all landlords, who are also NIMBYs in case you had any ideas about easing the supply issues.

Climate change is another example. There is no reasonable metric by which China is not doing far, far more than Western countries are.

I'm not saying that the Chinese model is better necessarily. Aspects of it are, mostly the ones shared with social democracies like some European countries have. The big issue is that the model many Western countries use is failing badly, and politicians are mostly only offering more pain in response to it.

It must be more than just the gun silencer concept, because the Japanese tried that with limited success for their conventional high speed trains.

The Chinese seem to have applied some new materials to absorb the sound.

The Japanese must be quite worried about developments in China. Theirs was going to be the only long distance maglev system, and a lot of the financing was based on being able to export the technology. China is going to beat them to deployment and will doubtless export the technology too. Now it sounds like they have solved the only big outstanding issue.

The two systems have some interesting differences. The Japanese trains need wheels below 90 kph, but are simpler and passively safe in the event of total power loss or violent earthquakes. The Chinese trains require active management of the magnetic fields constantly, but float even when not moving.

The restrictions on who could make games for the NES were in response to the North American video game crash. Some companies got around it in part by having subsidiaries that allowed them to exceed the limit on the number of games published per year, but they still had to buy cartridges from Nintendo rather than making them themselves.

In terms of power the Master System was arguably better than the Famicom, but I don't think it ever out-sold it. In Japan Sega muddied the waters a bit by having too many systems. They started with the SG-1000, then the SG-1000 II, and then the Mark III. All were backwards compatible but added new features. The Mark III also got an FM sound add-on, and that combo eventually became the Master System which integrated the FM. The Mark III couldn't mix the FM and PCM audio though, so there only only one game ever made that used both.

All that lead to division and confusion in the marketplace. By the time Sega got to the Master System, the Famicom/NES was already entrenched.

IIRC he asked Zelenskyy why he hadn't thanked the American people.

I hope you are right, but with this SCOTUS and all the other trump loyalist judges...