Comment Re: China is a totalitarian hell (Score 1) 142
lol. Every time someone points out that the USA is just as much of a repressive propagandist as China, some guy gets butthurt and jumps in with some highly specific thing that apparently makes it totally different.
Comment Re: China is a totalitarian hell (Score 1) 142
In the USA, the state runs arguably an even bigger propaganda machine. The fact that it's privatised on paper doesn't mean it's not a tool used by the elites and less than is the case in China.
Comment Re: China is a totalitarian hell (Score 1) 142
To be fair, given the state of things in the west today, it's hard to argue that end state capitalism is any better for the citizenry than end state communism. It just has better PR.
Comment Good work on the easy part! (Score 5, Interesting) 31
If you actually have a set of rules that detect your bot being wicked it will presumably save you some CPU time to run them on the NIC rather than having the host CPU watching the traffic; but the hard part is the set of rules that detect your bot being wicked.
This is basically the equivalent of adding a firewall and claiming that you've solved network security. Yeah, the firewall is pretty well placed to block malicious traffic; defining 'malicious traffic' is left as an exercise for the reader.
Comment Timing? (Score 2) 65
It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.
It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.
Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 74
That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.
Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 74
Comment Re:Why not X1? (Score 1) 74
Comment Re:Flock is building 1984 (Score 4, Insightful) 254
Being in public does leave you with no particular defensible expectations of not being observed, and possibly even remembered for a time, by assorted passers by; and typically also permits more direct tailing of people for observation purposes(subject to some, often slightly vague, threshold at which having PIs or paparazzi hunting someone remains a problem even in public; as we saw here where the police took the notion seriously enough to show up but not to do anything in particular).
What it has historically never meant, for technical reasons, was pervasive coverage and longterm retention. Which is certainly increasingly feasible with only moderate levels of investment; but is absolutely a novel development for what 'public' and 'no expectation of privacy' meant.
It's like defending the installation of a massive network of sprinklers because "you have no expectation of staying dry when you go outside; haven't you heard of rain?" Sure, nobody the weather to be sunny all the time, any more than they expect everyone to avert their eyes in public; but they would correctly consider the installation of irrigation equipment on every lamppost to be an intrusion on their ability to stay dry despite the fact that the sky has never extended them a constitutionally protected right to no rain.
Comment 'Degrade'... (Score 2) 93
Comment Re: Minority Report (Score 1) 148
Did you guys ever actually believe that land of the free stuff? Wow.
Comment Re:Missing some context (Score 1) 90
There is probably a part of the graph that is mostly linear, nondrinkers to very light drinkers to light-ish drinkers; but anyone who is really hitting the sauce and succumbing to DUIs, cirrhosis, or other non-cancer alcohol mortality is making themselves ineligible for alcohol related cancer death.
Comment Re: Different worlds (Score 1) 504
And fair play too. The West doesn't subsidize it's companies to give them an advantage in foreign markets, it invades and bombs the shit out of the entire economy and then sells them "reconstruction services" on interest bearing loans.
So yea. Fuck anyone that whines about Chinese subsidies.
Comment Re: HAHAHAHAHA!!! (Score 1) 189
Agreed. I should have said "one system". I accept your correction.