They have gone at it far more aggressively than makes sense from a pure cost point of view. There are two possible explanations. 1) they really really care 2) they see this as a strategic technical area where they can get a lead on America and, in the long term either use it for leverage or as a way to give Chinese companies and the Chinese economy in general an advantage over the US economy.

With the US getting more and more trapped into expensive nuclear and coal, it looks more like China is going to get a straregic energy cost benefit.

Unfortunately not entirely true. Ineviably most of us are using a bunch of communication apps like gmail/slack/discord etc. For the ones you use regularly you might want to install the native app, though often these are very close to malware/spyware. For ones you use occasionally or don't trust enough, you want to use the web app and you want to control it's behavior. E.g. you don't want your corporate identity to see your private cookies. In that case Arc does a bunch of useful things whilst dia likely does almost the exact opposite.

Browser plugins don't get access to all the user's data so really don't give you the complete overview this does. It's not close to a substitute.

Oh wait, you were thinking from the user's point of view?? Sorry, nobody cares.

If you committed your workflow to Arc, you are probably wondering how to escape as quick as possible. Unfortunately Arc did a bunch of valuable advances which it isn't totally trivial to replace, but think of it as a lesson in why you should never commit to a product controlled by a company without clear substitutes. Here are some ideas to look into (wiith either open source or at least alternative suppliers) .

* Zen browswer
* sideberry exension for Firefox

What else?

There is no significant amount of made-out-of-China batteries on the market. So if something goes wrong with batteries, they most likely are Chinese batteries.

I just bought a pixel device exactly because the custom ROM communities were recommending it. This has always been one of Linux's and Linus's main justifictions for why they were right to stay away from free software puratinism and allow proprietary drivers. Hopefully this leads to a final effort to merge linux mobile back into Linux, to get stock kernels onto mobile devices and to remove Google from the ecosystem. We need a new bitkeeper moment.

It means that the article's author has no evidence, but strong convictions about who's to be considered the evil enemy. Thousands of articles whispering unproven innuendos populate the media, and this article is no exception.

You do realize that above cited link to his kernel email list contribution was a pretty short response in a thread that already consisted of a multitude of emails discussing "pandemic" related things before he added his 0.02$ ? But you choice of words already reveals that you are not interested in any rational exchange of arguments.

Consoles are more than just hardware DRM, they are also a hardware fixture, a mass-produced line of identical computers that allow video game developers to optimize for a certain set of features and hardware capabilities. "XBox" no longer provides that with the advent of the "everything is an XBox" strategy. And it will not take long before we will hear of games that run properly on only some of those supposed "XBoxes".

That "shitload of IP" does not really give Microsoft significant leverage over the competitors that are still in the console market. They have to sell their games for those consoles anyway, through the very channels of their former competitors where those make a nice profit out of every item sold.

Plus Microsoft produces such shit operating systems that even games written for Windows run slower under Windows than on the SteamOS Linux distribution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

... in an attempt to pretend they did not unconditionally surrender the "console war" and left the console business to the winners.
The laughter and popping of Champagne bottles in the Sony and Nintendo headquarters must have been epic.

None of the many countries that got rid of locally transmitted Malaria required a vaccine to do so. Without lots of untreated Malaria patients, there is no real risk of this disease spreading again, even if for a while some of the other forms in the lifecycle remained in existence.

Indeed with Mosquitos it should be feasible to keep a frozen reserve around for the unlikely case that the drawbacks of their eradication outweighs the benefits. Way easier to freeze them then a Passenger Pigeon or a Dodo.

If it was only about Malaria, then indeed there are way simpler and better ways to get rid of this, like not just letting the infected remain without treatment. Even poor countries like Sri Lanka managed to get rid of Malaria by doing so.

But (certain) Mosquitos are vectors for a whole lot of other diseases that are not as easy to get rid off as Malaria.

Adding to this, the people who now say they are concerned about other species depending on those pathogens for their livelihood apparently are not concerned about the bacteriophage species that live off Yersinia Pestis.