Sure you can withhold your password and they cannot keep a US citizen from entering. But they will take the phone and send it off to Israeli hackers to get your data. Theoretically after they don't find anything they will return your property to you, perhaps in several years. But I doubt they do that anymore.

And boy do they work hard at trying to make #3 stick when they decide they want to get rid of a person.

What he means is ARM boards and the SoCs that power them are in their own individual and incompatible worlds, intended for being embedded into a product. They were never intended to become PCs and run generic operating systems. Apple might use what is technically a SoC, but they have defined a complete platform for themselves from the boot loader on up to the peripheral hardware to support their OS. If Pine64 were to design a chip, a boot loader, a chipset, and an operating system to match with full hardware support and firmware from top to bottom, then they too would more like a complete, general-purpose computing platform rather than a vendor of various embedded (and largely incompatible) ARM SoCs. Because Pine64 cannot do this, their products remain interesting but not fully use-able, and that will never change.

Had Microsoft required UEFI and allowed the same user control over the secure boot process that they do on Intel, then you'd have something there.

Apple, well they are their own proprietary world, so no different from any proprietary ARM system as far as Linux is concerned. Asahi Linux notwithstanding. I had hoped at one time that Asahi Linux would actually fully support the hardware and make Apple products viable for Linux, but I've long since given up on that idea.

Intel and AMD battery life is pretty good now and I feel like ARM will soon have no advantage over them in terms of power and performance.

Apparently some cars come with always listening AI assistants now. I wish that was a bad joke but it's not.

The RAM crisis is but just one sign of the cracks in the system.

That's hilarious that the country was established in 1776 to counter communism.

Linux support for all ARM devices from any vendor (maybe except for Raspberry Pi) really sucks, honestly. Out-of-date kernel forks, distro forks, u-boot, device tree, etc. Unless you need an embedded system, there's no reason to by ARM. At least not until they all support one of the system standards like SystemReady, has UEFI, generic boot, etc.

Like a few others above you're falling back on the old, "but other systems are worse so you should be happy with what we have" fallacy. And even worse implying that criticizing the current system and calling for change is the equivalent of lobbying for some other system like a command economy or whatever you think communism is.

You're making a number of assumptions, some of which may not be valid. First you are assuming that the system you have is the system you think it is. Second you are assuming that it cannot be made better or changed any way, to serve the people of the United States better and with greater freedom and opportunity. Third, you are assuming that the system you have today is the same system you had 10, 20, 100, or 200 years ago.

For an increasing percentage of Americans, life is getting worse and worse financially, and also physically. Such people are vulnerable to ideologies that lead to poor alternatives, including (currently) fascism. The whole point of the United States, its economic system, its political system, laws, justice, etc, is to make possible and provide a means for its citizens (people!) to build lives, families, work to provide for themselves, etc. Full stop. Yet the system we have today is failing a significant percentage of the population and has changed significantly over the last decades. Cracks are showing and getting wider. How should it be fixed?

Are you serious? So fascinating. I always thought America was about freedom of expression, citizen involvement in government, encouraging individuals to campaign (or talking and debating others in a public forum such as this) for reform and change when someone sees something that's unjust or need fixing. But all you can say is if you don't like it leave? That's really what America is now?

Even if I hold different views and values than rsilvergun, kudos to him for having the courage to say things and call for needed change.

Nope that's not it either. Companies have found out that if they collude and control the entire supply of something, they can make more money by not meeting demand, indefinitely. The free market basically no longer exists and definitely no longer discovers prices by matching supply and demand. Covid fundamentally broke it all. Even without collusion in markets with high barriers to entry, reducing supply, or at least not meeting demand maximizes shareholder profits.

Don't mistake heavy criticism of our present failing system for endorsement of any other system such as CCP China. Saying all other systems are even more horrible is not a valid reason for blindly accepting the many problems we now face.

Oh wow. Are you okay? That's a lot of text and a worrisome amount of effort put into trying to make one insignificant person look bad just because he offended you. Instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks, maybe you could debate his claims (which he does often back up with actual fact, by the way).

And he's not at all wrong. You really are in denial about what is happening. He does not joy in that, nor do I. In fact I am quite sad about how quickly things have come apart. How quickly the constitution has been cast aside by the ruling class, and how the institutions of democracy that made the US so powerful have been gutted. I know exactly how this is going to end, but I do not welcome it.

I'm also angry about our present situation because when you can no longer determine of China, Russia, and the United States which is your friend and ally and which is your biggest enemy, we are indeed in a bad way.

I don't see any indication that anyone other than CXMT is scaling up production of the chips destined for consumer DDR5 modules. They obviously would switch back to DRAM if the HBM market drops, but that would take significant time. And maybe even after the bubble pops, HBM would still be much more profitable, so there might not be a huge incentive to get back into the consumer RAM. It's entirely possible the other three will concede the consumer DRAM market to chinese companies willing to make slightly less money on lower-margin products.

The number of DRAM makers is definitely relevant. The fewer the companies the more broken the system is. Free market price discovery starts failing when a small number of producers hold the market and realize that supply need not ever meet demand.

A sea of consumer memory providers? You do realize that only three companies make the RAM chips that go into DDR4 and 5 memory modules, right? Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. And they have scaled back production in favor of HBM for AI servers. Prices are up because the supply is very low now. Hopefully CXMT will get in the game and by 2028 produce enough chips to supply the market demand.

Once more a western company hands everything over to China. Just read reports today that Chinese company CXMT is preparing to ramp up to make desktop RAM at large scales. Now they won't have anything to sell until 2028. But since the incumbent cartel companies have all but abandoned this segment of the market, by then I suspect CXMT will probably be producing most consumer RAM. And when the AI bubble pops and AI demand goes to normal levels, Micron and SK Hynix are going to be in deep trouble. And we'll have handed one more thing we depend on to China. Tariffs will no doubt fix that.

I'm confused. Which system are you saying produces the borg drones? It's not at all clear.

Besides that was a bad analogy. The UFP (and Starfleet) always was a socialist utopia.