The material immediately below the leaf is going to be a steel rail, which takes some work to get burning; but this would seem to be a concern if the tracks have some leaves on them; but also leaves/brush/grass/trash/etc. gathered around the tracks themselves. Ablating a thin layer of leaf from a big chunk of steel isn't so bad; but you only have to get unlucky occasionally for bits of burning leaf to fall from the clearance site and land in something suitably tindery and start a decent little fire.
Maybe I'm just a terrible person whose sense of childlike wonder and love of lasers has shriveled; but isn't 'clearing leaves' the sort of job where a simple nozzle blowing compressed air(turned on and off based on sensor input if it turns out that you can implement a sensor system at lower cost than just running the compressor a bit more often) at the track immediately in front of the wheels would be more than adequate for the purpose?
My understanding is that some trains even have a compressed air supply already(for pneumatic braking and sundry other duties), and all trains, since they have to move, are going to have a fairly burly supply of either mechanical or electrical energy to run a compressor. Much simpler and likely more durable than a laser and optics high-powered enough for debris clearing, and less likely to cause amusing track fires.
Am I missing something here, or did somebody just fail to KISS?
I'm not sure how this is related to HTTPS. Are you saying that Verizon was previously running a transparent proxy that automatically munged the sites you browsed and made them smaller? Have you excluded the likelihood that they've just gotten even fatter over time?
Much of the daily-headlines stuff isn't encrypted anyway; but, even if it is, it is entirely possible to proxy, modify, and otherwise manipulate in-transit HTTPS traffic as long as your client(s) trust your proxy as a CA. It's not pretty; but it's entirely doable(and more than a few corporate firewall boxes do exactly that, with devices on the LAN side configured to trust them). If you want a box-in-the-middle to strip your morning headlines into lyxnvision, HTTPS isn't stopping you.
Some of them are even worse than advertising; but, yeah, "value-added services" is weasel speak for all the ghastly things that your telco would like to do to your perfectly good dumb pipe in order to charge you more for it. (In the same way that the recently revealed custom of injecting tracking IDs into the HTTP headers of traffic passing over some providers', like Verizon's, mobile data networks is called "HTTP Header Enrichment".)
Breaking that shit isn't a cost of HTTPS, it's one of the major reasons to use it.
There are certainly costs associated with ruggedizing things; but those ruggedization costs apply to any laptop(so if it's more expensive than a chromebook now the ruggedized version is going to be more expensive than the ruggedized chromebook); and there have been a variety of education-focused semi-rugged designs in cost-sensitive areas before.
Back when 'netbooks' were a thing, for instance, Dell had the Latitude 2100, 2110 and 2120, which were utterly standard netbooks in basically all respects; but more expensive and with thicker, rubberized outer shells and compatibility with the standard Dell AC adapter. They cost substantially more than consumer netbooks, as much as some cheap 'n nasty 15 inch units; but pretty much the only way to kill them was to tear off their keys often enough that replacements became uneconomic.
The journal "Nature" is indeed very likely. The various Nature Publishing Group journals, though, are a much longer list and a much more expensive one; and some of those are also pretty prominent and likely to contain things of interest that Nature the journal doesn't.
I don't see why his statements would even be seen as contradictory: He said that humanity needs to spread into space if it wants to up its survival chances. It's pretty hard to argue with that(though you don't have to see that as important), keeping all your eggs in one gravity well isn't a good diversification strategy.
Now he says that a strong AI could threaten humanity's continued existence. This hardly seems implausible: something that is smarter than us and needs resources does seem likely to be a potentially bad neighbor. Opinions vary widely on how purely theoretical this concern is, given AI research's stellar record; but it's not exactly a terribly radical position.
Unless this hypothetical AI is singularly focused on some inscrutable but unobtrusive goal, or so vastly intelligent that various inconvenient physical laws are cleverly bent, I'm not sure why 'ignored' would even be on the table.
I'm not saying that an AI would have to immediately either glom on to us and try to understand what it means to love, or build an army of hunter/killer murderbots; computers require space, supplies of construction materials, and energy; and so do we. Again, barring some post-scarcity breakthrough that our teeny hominid minds can barely imagine, where the AI goes merrily off and builds a dyson hypersphere of sentient computronium powered by the emissions of the galactic core, there isn't too much room for expansion before either the AI faces brownouts and a lack of hardware upgrades or we start getting squeezed to make room.
You don't have to feel strongly about somebody to exterminate them, if you both need the same resources.
Thanks for the clarification: do you know if the type certification can be handled as part of the process you'd go through for a Part 15 'incidental radiator' (or local equivalent) or does having an active radio, even a pre-approved module just tacked on to an internal USB or serial header or similar, always mean greater scrutiny than a mere electronic device?
There certainly is some terrifying dodgy stuff on the market(you don't even have to fleabay it yourself, plenty of the slightly downmarket stuff in your average big box store or mall may or may not have been properly looked over, 900MHz analog baby monitors used to be great fun, along with analog video blasters).
I'd also be curious to know if South Korea's location makes them more nervous than usual. I've been told that the Israelis' FCC-alike can be pretty sensitive because the country is hours from people who hate their guts on essentially all sides, so if a device might interfere with radar systems that is considered to be A Problem. Korea at least only has a major problem in one direction; but there may well be some RF gear that is taken pretty seriously because of that.
I was mostly quibbling; because there really isn't much you can do when in the presence of such staggering hubris. "Yeah, our business is basically selling scientists' work to themselves and getting paid coming and going while people beg for access. Anyone who opposes this is probably a commie who hates all knowledge."
They aren't as big, thankfully; but they do a pretty good job of making the financial services sector look downright humble, hardworking, honest, and useful.
Massachusetts(and possibly some others; but I'm familiar with here) makes things a bit easier because they have the 'Minuteman Network' of interlibrary loans, and that includes both local public libraries(easy to get to; but no specialist journals) and state university libraries(less convenient; better selection); but the local universities can be a bit cold.
MIT is quite relaxed, I don't know the exact limits of their openness; but I've never been given any trouble as long as I'm quiet and nondisruptive. Harvard? Not. So. Much. I had a buddy who worked for their library system once. Her badge couldn't even get her into library buildings other than the one her job was in. If something was misrouted in interoffice mail, she needed someone a few levels up the food chain to go collect it or escort her while doing so. Wound a bit tight.
"The article originally quoted Peter Suber as saying that the new programme eliminated the six-month embargo NPG places on authors self-archiving manuscripts in online repositories. The six-month self-archiving embargo remains, so this sentence has been removed."
Even if that had been accurate, it's disappointing to see Harvard adopt such a toadying attitude. They've got one hell of a brand, a massive endowment, a great deal of prestige, some excellent faculty and (at least when it comes to dealings in real estate around their campus) a...forceful...approach to negotiation. You'd think that they could put that toward a worthy cause by helping to bring the publishers to heel, rather than making conciliatory statements about pitiful little PR stunts like this.
Perhaps more fundamentally, you cannot 'manage rights' without managing restrictions (since if a user lacks a right, they are to be restricted from doing it) and you cannot 'manage restrictions' without managing rights(since, if a restriction is not imposed, the user possesses a right).
It sounds nicer to talk about 'rights management' rather than 'restriction enforcement'; but the moment you make permission something that is technically enforced, 'rights' and 'restrictions' are inextricably linked.
What surprises me, given their popularity in education(and the fact that turning any old laptop design into a 'chromebook' involves little more than a firmware change), is that nobody seems to make a modestly ruggedized Chromebook.
Among normal wintel laptops, the bottom of the range is dangerously cheap plastic crap that breaks if you look at it; but it's quite easy to buy various levels of ruggedness from 'adequate build quality' to 'actually designed with road warriors in mind' to 'yes, actually rated to an alphabet soup of drop, vibration, and other tests' to 'Toughbook' to 'Please Consult a General Dynamics Representative, and have your checkbook open'.
Given what you pay for the really high end, the cost/benefit for student use tends to land somewhere on the toughish side of boring business laptop; but you can buy those easily enough. For some reason, nearly all Chromebooks are delicate little things, cheap and lightweight; but just not that tough.
The 'Chromebook' is certainly spawned from one of the various strains of 'network computer' fantasy(though not one of the X11/ICA/RDP/VNC school of fully 'thin' client ones); but (whether Google actually likes this, or is just running into the constraints of 'network computer' and enduring it) it has mutated into a bit of a hybrid:
Everything feels a bit ass-backwards if you are trying to do things locally (since local programs are all basically treated as a special case of webapps with particularly aggressive caching); but between the various local storage capabilities that have been tacked on(either HTML5 features or ChromeOS specific hacks for 'apps' to create icons and the like) and NaCL/PNaCL please-don't-call-them-plugins, you do effectively have a more or less full set of local OS capabilities, a bunch of APIs, and so on, they just all look like they were designed by web developers.
Again, I don't know if this is acceptance or pragmatic endurance on Google's part; but either way the trajectory of ChromeOS started by veering far into 'network computer' (Hey, let's rip out basically all parts of a linux distribution except the browser!); but has then tacked back, albeit by re-implementing everything inside the browser, rather than re-exposing the underlying OS.
They definitely still prefer to be networked; but, then again, what OS doesn't these days?
Don't you worry. Once Macmillan is finished assembling a crack team of enterprise licensing experts from IBM and Oracle they'll be able to offer a special 'programmatic access' subscription tier with an API developed by someone who should have stuck with printed paper and a pricing structure as inscrutable as it is usurious!
Of course, because we all still have IDs that will get us into a reasonably well funded college library, or local public library systems with the acquisitions budget to keep their journal subscriptions current...
I suspect that they aren't so arrogant as to assume that others don't already have preferred workflows; just so arrogant as to assume that whatever best suits their revenue model is the only workflow that matters.
I always just use 'photon capture technician' and put up with the weird looks. 'Photon capture specialist' if the person can't put the damn camera down.
Does South Korea's regulatory framework not allow for the (wildly common in devices where low cost is more important than seriously tight integration) situation where a vendor produces a wireless module, gets that certified and approved, and then someone who doesn't want to deal with the hassle just embeds the unmodified module in their product? Or do they have that; but also have a market composed of 96.83% totally unlicensed chinese mystery modules that may be emitting just about anything and probably are?
I imagine that, in principle, a solar system could form happily enough in the inertial frame of a star moving like a bat out of hell, so long as all the necessary ingredients and resulting planets were as well.
I would be a bit curious about how livable such planets would be. Space is pretty empty; but not entirely so; and if you are travelling at those sorts of speeds relative to the almost-nothing, you'll be running into hydrogen atoms and dust specks and things fast enough that the experience will be somewhat akin to standing downrange of a particle accelerator. That's the sort of thing that might not leave a planet without seriously heroic gravity or quite a magnetic field without much atmosphere.
Intel chips have actually gotten surprisingly common in the cheap 'n dubious Android stuff segment. I didn't know that you could even get an American salesman to quote you a price for the amount of money that RockChip or their ilk will sell you a mostly-functional device for; but it is a matter of fact. Maybe the 'promotional support' is particularly generous these days.
I picked up a couple of $45 specials over the weekend (not for use as actual tablets, obviously; but if you need a small monitor to serve as a UI/display for some DIY job it's gotten to the slightly weird place where an entire Android tablet costs substantially less than a screen of equivalent size), in all their plasticky, poorly translated, glory, and "Intel Inside".
It'll be a cold day in hell when this particular, um, fashion statement, takes off; but my understanding is that building a helmet to mitigate golf ball strikes should be markedly less difficult than one to protect you from football-type collisions.
It is arguably trolling; but your "it's a feature of tech" points to what is actually a very important difference between spying in conventionally-democratic-and-wealthy countries and spying in conventionally-authoritarian-and-dubiously-well-developed countries. And it is a difference that has made Team Democracy look less fuzzy of late.
Electronic surveillance provides a massive advantage to countries that are wealthy and wired (obviously, on the 'everyone's embassy has suspicious antennas' scale, everyone does electronic surveillance; but mass electronic surveillance is only possible if there are actually enough targets, which means that you need a well wired citizenry doing a lot of things worth looking at while online). They have the targets, because their citizens are dicking around on the internet. They have the means, because lots of the important backbone runs through them and they can afford to subvert telcos and infrastructure contractors and then build datacenters and hire analysis geeks to poke at the giant pile of data.
Given the falling cost of technology, and the sheer efficiency of just tapping all electronic communications vs. breaking people in the basement of the secret police HQ one by one, I expect that even traditional hellholes will jump on the bandwagon eventually; but for the moment, the (relatively new) development that 'electronic surveillance' is now mass surveillance, and domestic surveillance, rather than military SIGINT stuff exclusively, is the biggest change in the relative surveillance level in quite some time.
The 'feature' is that this is treated as a nasty surprise, and somehow hypocritical or in poor taste. It's otherwise expected, or even exaggerated.
That said, the one huge change that has likely given generally-wealthy-and-developed-western-democracies a (probably temporary) massive boost in relative spying scariness is the move to electronic surveillance, and the move of the citizenry to electronic media and devices on which to spy.
When most intelligence gathering is human intelligence, or fairly low sophistication manual bugging/document theft/break-ins/etc. a visibly authoritarian system where secret police intimidation and coercion are routine, assorted invasive practices are fully legal or impunity is so strong that they might as well be, and so on, is most helpful for surveillance purposes.
When the intelligence gathering is electronic, you can get away with a much softer touch; but you need an extensively 'wired' citizenry in order to have something to spy on, and you need considerable amounts of technical expertise, money, and infrastructure.
While tech is just getting cheaper, and even absurdly squalid hellholes will probably have enough of it for a data-driven surveillance dystopia sooner or later, this did give a fairly massive relative bump in the spy power of 'nice' governments. Their attempts to replicate old-school Stasi stuff have been on smaller scales, and generally less effective(eg. NYPD vs. basically all the muslims in the eastern US, never mind that they are a municipal police force. The lawsuits they were many, the intelligence gains they were minimal, the whole thing was sort of an embarassment, and that was under the full power of the 9/11!!!! constitutional exception).
They've had much better luck taking advantage of the fact that a huge amount of the world's electronic activity flows through areas they have access to and, thanks to cheap consumer electronics, now a huge amount of the world's communication foreign and domestic, does as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The material immediately below the leaf is going to be a steel rail, which takes some work to get burning; but this would seem to be a concern if the tracks have some leaves on them; but also leaves/brush/grass/trash/etc. gathered around the tracks themselves. Ablating a thin layer of leaf from a big chunk of steel isn't so bad; but you only have to get unlucky occasionally for bits of burning leaf to fall from the clearance site and land in something suitably tindery and start a decent little fire.
Maybe I'm just a terrible person whose sense of childlike wonder and love of lasers has shriveled; but isn't 'clearing leaves' the sort of job where a simple nozzle blowing compressed air(turned on and off based on sensor input if it turns out that you can implement a sensor system at lower cost than just running the compressor a bit more often) at the track immediately in front of the wheels would be more than adequate for the purpose?
My understanding is that some trains even have a compressed air supply already(for pneumatic braking and sundry other duties), and all trains, since they have to move, are going to have a fairly burly supply of either mechanical or electrical energy to run a compressor. Much simpler and likely more durable than a laser and optics high-powered enough for debris clearing, and less likely to cause amusing track fires.
Am I missing something here, or did somebody just fail to KISS?
I'm not sure how this is related to HTTPS. Are you saying that Verizon was previously running a transparent proxy that automatically munged the sites you browsed and made them smaller? Have you excluded the likelihood that they've just gotten even fatter over time?
Much of the daily-headlines stuff isn't encrypted anyway; but, even if it is, it is entirely possible to proxy, modify, and otherwise manipulate in-transit HTTPS traffic as long as your client(s) trust your proxy as a CA. It's not pretty; but it's entirely doable(and more than a few corporate firewall boxes do exactly that, with devices on the LAN side configured to trust them). If you want a box-in-the-middle to strip your morning headlines into lyxnvision, HTTPS isn't stopping you.
Some of them are even worse than advertising; but, yeah, "value-added services" is weasel speak for all the ghastly things that your telco would like to do to your perfectly good dumb pipe in order to charge you more for it. (In the same way that the recently revealed custom of injecting tracking IDs into the HTTP headers of traffic passing over some providers', like Verizon's, mobile data networks is called "HTTP Header Enrichment".)
Breaking that shit isn't a cost of HTTPS, it's one of the major reasons to use it.
There are certainly costs associated with ruggedizing things; but those ruggedization costs apply to any laptop(so if it's more expensive than a chromebook now the ruggedized version is going to be more expensive than the ruggedized chromebook); and there have been a variety of education-focused semi-rugged designs in cost-sensitive areas before.
Back when 'netbooks' were a thing, for instance, Dell had the Latitude 2100, 2110 and 2120, which were utterly standard netbooks in basically all respects; but more expensive and with thicker, rubberized outer shells and compatibility with the standard Dell AC adapter. They cost substantially more than consumer netbooks, as much as some cheap 'n nasty 15 inch units; but pretty much the only way to kill them was to tear off their keys often enough that replacements became uneconomic.
The journal "Nature" is indeed very likely. The various Nature Publishing Group journals, though, are a much longer list and a much more expensive one; and some of those are also pretty prominent and likely to contain things of interest that Nature the journal doesn't.
I don't see why his statements would even be seen as contradictory: He said that humanity needs to spread into space if it wants to up its survival chances. It's pretty hard to argue with that(though you don't have to see that as important), keeping all your eggs in one gravity well isn't a good diversification strategy.
Now he says that a strong AI could threaten humanity's continued existence. This hardly seems implausible: something that is smarter than us and needs resources does seem likely to be a potentially bad neighbor. Opinions vary widely on how purely theoretical this concern is, given AI research's stellar record; but it's not exactly a terribly radical position.
Unless this hypothetical AI is singularly focused on some inscrutable but unobtrusive goal, or so vastly intelligent that various inconvenient physical laws are cleverly bent, I'm not sure why 'ignored' would even be on the table.
I'm not saying that an AI would have to immediately either glom on to us and try to understand what it means to love, or build an army of hunter/killer murderbots; computers require space, supplies of construction materials, and energy; and so do we. Again, barring some post-scarcity breakthrough that our teeny hominid minds can barely imagine, where the AI goes merrily off and builds a dyson hypersphere of sentient computronium powered by the emissions of the galactic core, there isn't too much room for expansion before either the AI faces brownouts and a lack of hardware upgrades or we start getting squeezed to make room.
You don't have to feel strongly about somebody to exterminate them, if you both need the same resources.
Thanks for the clarification: do you know if the type certification can be handled as part of the process you'd go through for a Part 15 'incidental radiator' (or local equivalent) or does having an active radio, even a pre-approved module just tacked on to an internal USB or serial header or similar, always mean greater scrutiny than a mere electronic device?
There certainly is some terrifying dodgy stuff on the market(you don't even have to fleabay it yourself, plenty of the slightly downmarket stuff in your average big box store or mall may or may not have been properly looked over, 900MHz analog baby monitors used to be great fun, along with analog video blasters).
I'd also be curious to know if South Korea's location makes them more nervous than usual. I've been told that the Israelis' FCC-alike can be pretty sensitive because the country is hours from people who hate their guts on essentially all sides, so if a device might interfere with radar systems that is considered to be A Problem. Korea at least only has a major problem in one direction; but there may well be some RF gear that is taken pretty seriously because of that.
I was mostly quibbling; because there really isn't much you can do when in the presence of such staggering hubris. "Yeah, our business is basically selling scientists' work to themselves and getting paid coming and going while people beg for access. Anyone who opposes this is probably a commie who hates all knowledge."
They aren't as big, thankfully; but they do a pretty good job of making the financial services sector look downright humble, hardworking, honest, and useful.
Massachusetts(and possibly some others; but I'm familiar with here) makes things a bit easier because they have the 'Minuteman Network' of interlibrary loans, and that includes both local public libraries(easy to get to; but no specialist journals) and state university libraries(less convenient; better selection); but the local universities can be a bit cold.
MIT is quite relaxed, I don't know the exact limits of their openness; but I've never been given any trouble as long as I'm quiet and nondisruptive. Harvard? Not. So. Much. I had a buddy who worked for their library system once. Her badge couldn't even get her into library buildings other than the one her job was in. If something was misrouted in interoffice mail, she needed someone a few levels up the food chain to go collect it or escort her while doing so. Wound a bit tight.
"The article originally quoted Peter Suber as saying that the new programme eliminated the six-month embargo NPG places on authors self-archiving manuscripts in online repositories. The six-month self-archiving embargo remains, so this sentence has been removed."
Even if that had been accurate, it's disappointing to see Harvard adopt such a toadying attitude. They've got one hell of a brand, a massive endowment, a great deal of prestige, some excellent faculty and (at least when it comes to dealings in real estate around their campus) a...forceful...approach to negotiation. You'd think that they could put that toward a worthy cause by helping to bring the publishers to heel, rather than making conciliatory statements about pitiful little PR stunts like this.
Perhaps more fundamentally, you cannot 'manage rights' without managing restrictions (since if a user lacks a right, they are to be restricted from doing it) and you cannot 'manage restrictions' without managing rights(since, if a restriction is not imposed, the user possesses a right).
It sounds nicer to talk about 'rights management' rather than 'restriction enforcement'; but the moment you make permission something that is technically enforced, 'rights' and 'restrictions' are inextricably linked.
What surprises me, given their popularity in education(and the fact that turning any old laptop design into a 'chromebook' involves little more than a firmware change), is that nobody seems to make a modestly ruggedized Chromebook.
Among normal wintel laptops, the bottom of the range is dangerously cheap plastic crap that breaks if you look at it; but it's quite easy to buy various levels of ruggedness from 'adequate build quality' to 'actually designed with road warriors in mind' to 'yes, actually rated to an alphabet soup of drop, vibration, and other tests' to 'Toughbook' to 'Please Consult a General Dynamics Representative, and have your checkbook open'.
Given what you pay for the really high end, the cost/benefit for student use tends to land somewhere on the toughish side of boring business laptop; but you can buy those easily enough. For some reason, nearly all Chromebooks are delicate little things, cheap and lightweight; but just not that tough.
The 'Chromebook' is certainly spawned from one of the various strains of 'network computer' fantasy(though not one of the X11/ICA/RDP/VNC school of fully 'thin' client ones); but (whether Google actually likes this, or is just running into the constraints of 'network computer' and enduring it) it has mutated into a bit of a hybrid:
Everything feels a bit ass-backwards if you are trying to do things locally (since local programs are all basically treated as a special case of webapps with particularly aggressive caching); but between the various local storage capabilities that have been tacked on(either HTML5 features or ChromeOS specific hacks for 'apps' to create icons and the like) and NaCL/PNaCL please-don't-call-them-plugins, you do effectively have a more or less full set of local OS capabilities, a bunch of APIs, and so on, they just all look like they were designed by web developers.
Again, I don't know if this is acceptance or pragmatic endurance on Google's part; but either way the trajectory of ChromeOS started by veering far into 'network computer' (Hey, let's rip out basically all parts of a linux distribution except the browser!); but has then tacked back, albeit by re-implementing everything inside the browser, rather than re-exposing the underlying OS.
They definitely still prefer to be networked; but, then again, what OS doesn't these days?
Don't you worry. Once Macmillan is finished assembling a crack team of enterprise licensing experts from IBM and Oracle they'll be able to offer a special 'programmatic access' subscription tier with an API developed by someone who should have stuck with printed paper and a pricing structure as inscrutable as it is usurious!
Of course, because we all still have IDs that will get us into a reasonably well funded college library, or local public library systems with the acquisitions budget to keep their journal subscriptions current...
I suspect that they aren't so arrogant as to assume that others don't already have preferred workflows; just so arrogant as to assume that whatever best suits their revenue model is the only workflow that matters.
I always just use 'photon capture technician' and put up with the weird looks. 'Photon capture specialist' if the person can't put the damn camera down.
Does South Korea's regulatory framework not allow for the (wildly common in devices where low cost is more important than seriously tight integration) situation where a vendor produces a wireless module, gets that certified and approved, and then someone who doesn't want to deal with the hassle just embeds the unmodified module in their product? Or do they have that; but also have a market composed of 96.83% totally unlicensed chinese mystery modules that may be emitting just about anything and probably are?
I imagine that, in principle, a solar system could form happily enough in the inertial frame of a star moving like a bat out of hell, so long as all the necessary ingredients and resulting planets were as well.
I would be a bit curious about how livable such planets would be. Space is pretty empty; but not entirely so; and if you are travelling at those sorts of speeds relative to the almost-nothing, you'll be running into hydrogen atoms and dust specks and things fast enough that the experience will be somewhat akin to standing downrange of a particle accelerator. That's the sort of thing that might not leave a planet without seriously heroic gravity or quite a magnetic field without much atmosphere.
Intel chips have actually gotten surprisingly common in the cheap 'n dubious Android stuff segment. I didn't know that you could even get an American salesman to quote you a price for the amount of money that RockChip or their ilk will sell you a mostly-functional device for; but it is a matter of fact. Maybe the 'promotional support' is particularly generous these days.
I picked up a couple of $45 specials over the weekend (not for use as actual tablets, obviously; but if you need a small monitor to serve as a UI/display for some DIY job it's gotten to the slightly weird place where an entire Android tablet costs substantially less than a screen of equivalent size), in all their plasticky, poorly translated, glory, and "Intel Inside".
It'll be a cold day in hell when this particular, um, fashion statement, takes off; but my understanding is that building a helmet to mitigate golf ball strikes should be markedly less difficult than one to protect you from football-type collisions.
It is arguably trolling; but your "it's a feature of tech" points to what is actually a very important difference between spying in conventionally-democratic-and-wealthy countries and spying in conventionally-authoritarian-and-dubiously-well-developed countries. And it is a difference that has made Team Democracy look less fuzzy of late.
Electronic surveillance provides a massive advantage to countries that are wealthy and wired (obviously, on the 'everyone's embassy has suspicious antennas' scale, everyone does electronic surveillance; but mass electronic surveillance is only possible if there are actually enough targets, which means that you need a well wired citizenry doing a lot of things worth looking at while online). They have the targets, because their citizens are dicking around on the internet. They have the means, because lots of the important backbone runs through them and they can afford to subvert telcos and infrastructure contractors and then build datacenters and hire analysis geeks to poke at the giant pile of data.
Given the falling cost of technology, and the sheer efficiency of just tapping all electronic communications vs. breaking people in the basement of the secret police HQ one by one, I expect that even traditional hellholes will jump on the bandwagon eventually; but for the moment, the (relatively new) development that 'electronic surveillance' is now mass surveillance, and domestic surveillance, rather than military SIGINT stuff exclusively, is the biggest change in the relative surveillance level in quite some time.
The 'feature' is that this is treated as a nasty surprise, and somehow hypocritical or in poor taste. It's otherwise expected, or even exaggerated.
That said, the one huge change that has likely given generally-wealthy-and-developed-western-democracies a (probably temporary) massive boost in relative spying scariness is the move to electronic surveillance, and the move of the citizenry to electronic media and devices on which to spy.
When most intelligence gathering is human intelligence, or fairly low sophistication manual bugging/document theft/break-ins/etc. a visibly authoritarian system where secret police intimidation and coercion are routine, assorted invasive practices are fully legal or impunity is so strong that they might as well be, and so on, is most helpful for surveillance purposes.
When the intelligence gathering is electronic, you can get away with a much softer touch; but you need an extensively 'wired' citizenry in order to have something to spy on, and you need considerable amounts of technical expertise, money, and infrastructure.
While tech is just getting cheaper, and even absurdly squalid hellholes will probably have enough of it for a data-driven surveillance dystopia sooner or later, this did give a fairly massive relative bump in the spy power of 'nice' governments. Their attempts to replicate old-school Stasi stuff have been on smaller scales, and generally less effective(eg. NYPD vs. basically all the muslims in the eastern US, never mind that they are a municipal police force. The lawsuits they were many, the intelligence gains they were minimal, the whole thing was sort of an embarassment, and that was under the full power of the 9/11!!!! constitutional exception).
They've had much better luck taking advantage of the fact that a huge amount of the world's electronic activity flows through areas they have access to and, thanks to cheap consumer electronics, now a huge amount of the world's communication foreign and domestic, does as well.