Steam makes a lot of effort to stop people from buying outside the EU. But within the EU it is pretty much "change your current location in the settings, PROFIT".
A couple of years ago I bought all my steam stuff from russian, ukrain, brasilian and indian resellers for like 10-30% of the EU/US prices. This ist pretty much impossible now because those "poor country editions" have been blocked from starting for a couple of years in the EU. Though all my old stuff still works if I would buy a current game it would be geo blocked.
Nowadays I buy the british and rumanian editions. These are always working fine and without geo blocking. Although these are lot more expensive than russian/etc edition they are still less expensive than DE editions. And come uncut.
In 1989 I bought the A2024 display. 15", 1024x800, 63hz with an extreme phosphor afterglow. It was simply the best CRT I ever had my hands on. I used this one on my Amiga 2000 which had 1MB of Chip-Memory, 2MB of Fast-Memory and a 40MB SCSI hard drive and did a lot of professional work on this system. Later I upgraded to an Amiga 3000 with 2MB Chip, 16MB Fast, a true color VGA card and ethernet. This machine does pretty much anything a modern computer can do without showing its age.
The things I did on my Amiga in 1986 were pretty much impossible to do on any other machine until 1996. Only a €1000 Windows 95 system could barelly do what a $500 Amiga could do ten years earlier. And it took a €2000 Windows XP system to do what an €1000 could do 15 years earlier. Did I mention that I could run Amiga OS, Atari TOS, MacOS, CP/M 68k and ixemul (a unix subset) all at once and often faster than on "real" hardware? And emulate a C64, a PC and MAME Arcade too, all at once? Also in 1989 I did connect regularly to Internet, Fidonet and BBSs through official Amiga Software. While listening to my music collection running DeliTracker in the Background.
It was a scaringly advanced machine totally ignored by all the non-nerds and ruined by a company which had no clue what they had build.
The only real critic for the amiga: Big-Head-Companies didn't offer their software for the amiga. But honestly, noone needed them because there was so much from smaller companies and a lot of that stuff was extremely well done.
Nope, it doesn't. There is not even one single account of false flag propaganda by the executive branch of the US.
Maybe some US citizens do in their spare time but most likely they are not paid by the goverment.
I know that because I have been watching troll propaganda on the internet since the 1980ths. And I have never ever found even the slightest evidence for false flag propaganda by western goverments. On the other hand there where MILLIONS of such events by Iran, Russia and - a lot less but still - some thousand events by china, north korea, syria and some more. Especially the iranian propaganda was at times incredibly easy to spot by using word-for-word translation of persian language and using totally strange metaphores. They have gotten better over the years but still drop a clanger from time to time (those guy think "canine devotion" sounds bad to westerners but the opposite is usually true). The russian trolls where usually a lot more competent. Still, a clanger from time to time, mostly when they mix up their russian daily life with western daily life. My personal favorite: I was backtrolling a russian troll about Woolworths in the US. He totally fell for it and postet about how horrible Woolworth is towards its customers and workers and so on.... thing is, there is no Woolworth in the US for like 20 years... there are lots of Woolworths everywhere else but not in the US. But still Woolworth is very well known in Russia as the typical "western super market". I also backdroll them a lot about western sports (which i know absolutely shit about but these guys know even less) and they always fall for it.
On some forums there are like 50% of all posts by bots and foreign drolls. Just get along and live with it.
I seriously doubt that any reasonable cloud provider is using tape for backups.
You know how expensive tape storage is?
The drives cost like ten times of a comparable hard drive and the media like twice.
In other words, a 2TB tape drive with 10 tape media costs as much like 30 hard drives with 2TB each.
And those beasts die like flies. most drives are only meant to run a few hundred tapes before breaking and the media is even much less reliable.
Utter Madness. I guess Google will be better of to backup its data to the other side of the world using a bunch of cheap consumer hard drives which power down after backup.
All tests about those ARM-Books were crushingly horrible. Their compability is lacking, their speed slacking... do they really expect to get that piece of mediocrity at the price of a mid range gaming notebook?
Are they aware there are Lenovo solutions based on Goldmont which beat this weirdo at everything at a price of 300 Euro?
Why buy a $1000 smartphone when you can get a half as good phone for $200? Which still beats every smartphone from two years ago?
This only makes sense if you are [b]NOT[/b] using a smartphone as a tool [b]BUT[/b] as a status symbol. But then, there are some people who are in desperate need of cheap status symbols. Though an apple smartphone is mostly a status symbol for being in the lower class.
Apple is still selling computers which are based on eight years old technology being outmatched by current Goldmont Atoms but still selling at insane prices.
Who ever thinks there is something coming up soon is a religious zealot.
I am not making fun of apple. They are another greed company. I make fun of their customers.
If support for old systems is dropped I will drop LXDE.
My smallest LXDE system is a PentiumMMX 233Mhz, 192MB RAM and S3 Virge. I use it mostly for its rather rare Audio-Hardware which requires at least two fully ISA compliant Slots which later systems simply do not offer. While is overall quite sluggish it gets the job done with very little suffering.
Another one is a Pentium III 733Mhz with 384MB of Memory and a Geforce 256. This one works pretty well with LXDE. While Applications take some extra seconds to start they work very well.
I really like the lean approach of LXDE.
If support for old systems is dropped I will drop LXDE.
In my whole Life I have never ever bought anything without knowing exactly what I would get. And let me add that while I have invested several 10.000 € over the last 40 years into my personal computer hard and software I have not spend 100 € into ingame purchases.
Because honestly I think everyone who invests big into a small chance of getting "the one fancy hat" which is just bits and bytes is an obvious idiot who should be checked for his mental health and maybe put under tutelage.
Around 1970 munich created pretty much of its underground network, several hundred km of underground and upper ground networks. Pretty much all work was done within five years for a couple of ten millions.
As early as 1975 there was demand for a second backbone underground line.
And finally after nearly 40 years last month real work began. Thousands of lawsuits later, thousands of archealogical expertises, analysis of rare critters living in the soil, after skyrocking costs of billions and billions... it started....
WTF. An eleven kilometer tunnel took 40 years to realize, costing 300times more than the whole earlier network...
China build a maglev train line of 970km in less than one year after the first discussions for half the price....
A nasty overlooked fact about foreign trolls: Pretending to be a different nationality is a sign of shame.
Or in other words, every russian troll is ashamed of being russian, of stepping out and telling "look i am a russian and I have this oppinion".
It is rather easy to point out even deeply conspiratorially russian trolls: Just ask them to tell a nasty joke about putin. THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO THAT. And if they ague "I know no jokes about putin" just ask them to quote a putin joke you posted. THEY ARE ALSO NOT ALLOWED TO DO THAT EITHER.
Conclusion: no putin joke = payedtroll
So all russian trolls, please quote this:
"Putin said that when Americans claim to be exceptional it offends other countries. This from a man who arrests his political opponents, persecutes people based on sexual orientation, and put a girl band in a labor camp for singing songs he didn't like. We don't think we are better than everyone else. We just think we are better than him, specifically." –Jimmy Kimmel
The whole point of TTIP and TPP was to unite the major trade nations under a common set of rules and use this huge market power to force china to open its market and comply to a long list of standards.
The US is simply to small to force anything on anyone all alone.
Lovely. Next he is requesting to join the EU partnership program next to tunesia, turkey and south africa. Why work out a mutual trade agreement when you can also join an established one?
The TCO (total cost of ownership) is already part of the whole argument. Trust me, photovoltaic energy IS dirty. There are better renewable energies.
Something else, storage of energy does not require chemical batteries. Some examples: Pumped-storage hydroelectricity, concrete lift storage (there is a concrete lift in germany weighting around five million tons, build underground and perfectly invisible), submerged bubble energy storage and many more. The required Resources and Technology is so simple it was already available to the ancient roman empire: Water and concrete. Lost of it.
> Could you explain how, exactly, a 100% solar/renewable > approach would do more damage to the environment than the > non-renewables that it could otherwise replace?
Production of photovoltaic cells relies on semiconductor technology which is inherently dirty. Per Square meter of semiconductors we are talking about THOUSANDS of tons of chemicals, horrible acids, polutted water, poisoned soil. Or BILLIONS of tons per total year production. In fact the TCO of photovoltaics is BY FAR the worst of all. Only good thing about it, by using expensive recycling technologies one can catch like 99% of the waste. Read and think: Expensive Recycling. Who is gonna do this?
Please seperate this from other renewable energies, Thermical solar power for example is pretty clean but only useful for heating, not for electricity.
Here is a small comparison: Lets say we would grind all nuclear power stations into small dust and put em into the ocean then the natural radiation of all oceans would rise three times. Most likely nothing wouild change. Lets put all waste from semiconductor production into the ocean and it would become a deadly acid cocktail where one little sip would send you into hospital.
Your opponent was successfully switching its topic every time he wanted, every time he ran out of arguments, every time his POV looked bleak. And you let him. You followed him.
Instead you should press your point. Never argue too many points at once but never give up a single point. Choose your points wisely. Something like "select your one or two most valid argument out of the thousands of possible arguments". Press them. Never let go of a good point.
You opponent tries to change topic? Ignore it. Bring back your Topic. Tell him you do not fall for his lousy Whataboutism. Bring back your topic. He tries to avoid it? Ask him why he tries to avoid it. You will drive your opponent either into submission ("I can see your point now"), resignation ("You are a meany, I will never ever talk to you") oder madness ("but the illuminate and the pink invisible CIA agents!!!"). And finally, have the last word, no matter what, make clear your hard facts won the day while his failures to deliver hard facts are obvious. Be a gentle dick.
Facts are a wonderful thing because the longer and deeper you discuss them the harder they get.
Lies on the other side are brittle. Discuss them for long and they crumble to dust.
Once upon a time... it took my Amiga 3000 (68030@25Mhz) around 30 seconds to decode a 1024x768 JPEG at 15 Bits color depth. Resizing to screen size (usually 800x600), smoothing out artifacts, put in some dithering took another 30 seconds... I dare not to imagine how long it would have taken on a much slower Amiga 500 (68000@7Mhz), not to speak of the infamous JPEG decoder for the CPC6128 which a friend used to convert single pictures OVER NIGHT.
This was no fun at all. I always hated JPEG for being horribly slow. Even my first 486 usually took ten seconds to decode the same picture and only after aquiring the "quick picture viewer 386" from Oliver Fromme. It took Irfanview on early P3 and Athlons to display JPEG without feeling bored...
I hope the new AV1 format will not be a slow poke.
My rusty EEE 901 ran for nearly a decade, expanded to 2GB RAM, 36GB Flash and a 10 hour extra large battery, running XP, LUbuntu 10,04 to 16.04 and Windows 10 all fine. Pretty much every daily work worked flawless EXPECT browsing the web.
I ended up with tihs: https://skinflint.co.uk/odys-s... - very cheap, very small and light and high resolution on a small screen gives a very crisp picture. Also using it as a tablet by flipping the screen 360 degree around is pretty nice. 32GB is a lot of space for Windows 10 32Bit which usually needs less than 10GB for itself. I also installed a 64GB SD-card to store some Movies, Musik, Steam-Games.
And no, I do not think it is a good product. The keyboard is mediocre, wireless LAN substandard, no user serviceable parts, the layout is not well thought either. But the overall idea works very well. You might want to invest a bit more money into some Lenovo Yoga to avoid the show stoppers.
While diplomats do not get prosecuted a nation also is not required to give diplomatic immunity to every foreign politicion. And even if a nation can not prosecute a diplomat it still can investigate a crime done by him. And you can always show him the door.
Slashdot Mirror
Steam makes a lot of effort to stop people from buying outside the EU. But within the EU it is pretty much "change your current location in the settings, PROFIT".
A couple of years ago I bought all my steam stuff from russian, ukrain, brasilian and indian resellers for like 10-30% of the EU/US prices. This ist pretty much impossible now because those "poor country editions" have been blocked from starting for a couple of years in the EU. Though all my old stuff still works if I would buy a current game it would be geo blocked.
Nowadays I buy the british and rumanian editions. These are always working fine and without geo blocking. Although these are lot more expensive than russian/etc edition they are still less expensive than DE editions. And come uncut.
In 1989 I bought the A2024 display. 15", 1024x800, 63hz with an extreme phosphor afterglow. It was simply the best CRT I ever had my hands on. I used this one on my Amiga 2000 which had 1MB of Chip-Memory, 2MB of Fast-Memory and a 40MB SCSI hard drive and did a lot of professional work on this system. Later I upgraded to an Amiga 3000 with 2MB Chip, 16MB Fast, a true color VGA card and ethernet. This machine does pretty much anything a modern computer can do without showing its age.
The things I did on my Amiga in 1986 were pretty much impossible to do on any other machine until 1996. Only a €1000 Windows 95 system could barelly do what a $500 Amiga could do ten years earlier. And it took a €2000 Windows XP system to do what an €1000 could do 15 years earlier. Did I mention that I could run Amiga OS, Atari TOS, MacOS, CP/M 68k and ixemul (a unix subset) all at once and often faster than on "real" hardware? And emulate a C64, a PC and MAME Arcade too, all at once? Also in 1989 I did connect regularly to Internet, Fidonet and BBSs through official Amiga Software. While listening to my music collection running DeliTracker in the Background.
It was a scaringly advanced machine totally ignored by all the non-nerds and ruined by a company which had no clue what they had build.
The only real critic for the amiga: Big-Head-Companies didn't offer their software for the amiga. But honestly, noone needed them because there was so much from smaller companies and a lot of that stuff was extremely well done.
There aren't many bright crackers left today. I guess the really smart and active guys can be counted on one hand.
I think it would be cheaper and more efficient to pay every Top10-Cracker some $1000 per day as long as the game stays uncracked.
> The US surely runs it's own too.
Nope, it doesn't. There is not even one single account of false flag propaganda by the executive branch of the US.
Maybe some US citizens do in their spare time but most likely they are not paid by the goverment.
I know that because I have been watching troll propaganda on the internet since the 1980ths. And I have never ever found even the slightest evidence for false flag propaganda by western goverments. On the other hand there where MILLIONS of such events by Iran, Russia and - a lot less but still - some thousand events by china, north korea, syria and some more. Especially the iranian propaganda was at times incredibly easy to spot by using word-for-word translation of persian language and using totally strange metaphores. They have gotten better over the years but still drop a clanger from time to time (those guy think "canine devotion" sounds bad to westerners but the opposite is usually true). The russian trolls where usually a lot more competent. Still, a clanger from time to time, mostly when they mix up their russian daily life with western daily life. My personal favorite: I was backtrolling a russian troll about Woolworths in the US. He totally fell for it and postet about how horrible Woolworth is towards its customers and workers and so on.... thing is, there is no Woolworth in the US for like 20 years... there are lots of Woolworths everywhere else but not in the US. But still Woolworth is very well known in Russia as the typical "western super market". I also backdroll them a lot about western sports (which i know absolutely shit about but these guys know even less) and they always fall for it.
On some forums there are like 50% of all posts by bots and foreign drolls. Just get along and live with it.
I seriously doubt that any reasonable cloud provider is using tape for backups.
You know how expensive tape storage is?
The drives cost like ten times of a comparable hard drive and the media like twice.
In other words, a 2TB tape drive with 10 tape media costs as much like 30 hard drives with 2TB each.
And those beasts die like flies. most drives are only meant to run a few hundred tapes before breaking and the media is even much less reliable.
Utter Madness. I guess Google will be better of to backup its data to the other side of the world using a bunch of cheap consumer hard drives which power down after backup.
$1000 for THAT?
Has Samsung gone completely insane?
All tests about those ARM-Books were crushingly horrible. Their compability is lacking, their speed slacking... do they really expect to get that piece of mediocrity at the price of a mid range gaming notebook?
Are they aware there are Lenovo solutions based on Goldmont which beat this weirdo at everything at a price of 300 Euro?
LOL
Idiots.
I really can come up with only one description for all this childish behaviour: Idiots.
An Investor who thinks he can enter a complex market in less than ten years is simply an Idiot.
An Entrepeneur who promises to enter a complex market in less than ten years is simply an Idiot.
Lets check the market:
Google Mail needed seven years to conquer the market.
Android needed six years to conquer the smart phone.
Linux needed 12 years to vanquish the commecial unices.
Whatsapp took six years to rise.
Facebook even needed nine years to get where it is now.
Twitter needed seven years too.
AMD needed five years to create the Ryzen Architecture. And will need another five years to gain greater market share.
Sooo... what is the moral of the story? If someone promises you he can conquer the world in a year take your money and put it somewhere else.
I really think ARM might in the long run be able to catch a part of the market share from Intel. But it will take many years and many little steps.
Where is the cheap Mini-ITX board with a Snapdron 850 and up to 32BG memory?
Where can I get a cheap Add-In-Board with 128 ARM cores for my PC, something like an Xeon Phi for cheap?
Whats the driver situation for ARM multi media solutions?
Is there any standard how ARM Desktops, Workstations and Servers are working, booting, initializing?
Bullshit. There is nothing except broken unrealistic promises.
Why buy a $1000 smartphone when you can get a half as good phone for $200? Which still beats every smartphone from two years ago?
This only makes sense if you are [b]NOT[/b] using a smartphone as a tool [b]BUT[/b] as a status symbol. But then, there are some people who are in desperate need of cheap status symbols. Though an apple smartphone is mostly a status symbol for being in the lower class.
Apple is still selling computers which are based on eight years old technology being outmatched by current Goldmont Atoms but still selling at insane prices.
Who ever thinks there is something coming up soon is a religious zealot.
I am not making fun of apple. They are another greed company. I make fun of their customers.
Apple is filthy rich because stupid customers are the best customers.
Don't get me wrong, I am not making jokes about apple. They are cool and simply squeeze every moron for his last cent.
It is theirs customers I am making jokes about.
If support for old systems is dropped I will drop LXDE.
My smallest LXDE system is a PentiumMMX 233Mhz, 192MB RAM and S3 Virge. I use it mostly for its rather rare Audio-Hardware which requires at least two fully ISA compliant Slots which later systems simply do not offer. While is overall quite sluggish it gets the job done with very little suffering.
Another one is a Pentium III 733Mhz with 384MB of Memory and a Geforce 256. This one works pretty well with LXDE. While Applications take some extra seconds to start they work very well.
I really like the lean approach of LXDE.
If support for old systems is dropped I will drop LXDE.
In my whole Life I have never ever bought anything without knowing exactly what I would get. And let me add that while I have invested several 10.000 € over the last 40 years into my personal computer hard and software I have not spend 100 € into ingame purchases.
Because honestly I think everyone who invests big into a small chance of getting "the one fancy hat" which is just bits and bytes is an obvious idiot who should be checked for his mental health and maybe put under tutelage.
comparing 5000 cars with a subway is wrong because the cars and trains aren't the expensive part, the streets and tunnels and railways are.
comparing 500 miles of street with 500 miles of subway is right.
Around 1970 munich created pretty much of its underground network, several hundred km of underground and upper ground networks. Pretty much all work was done within five years for a couple of ten millions.
As early as 1975 there was demand for a second backbone underground line.
And finally after nearly 40 years last month real work began. Thousands of lawsuits later, thousands of archealogical expertises, analysis of rare critters living in the soil, after skyrocking costs of billions and billions... it started....
WTF. An eleven kilometer tunnel took 40 years to realize, costing 300times more than the whole earlier network...
China build a maglev train line of 970km in less than one year after the first discussions for half the price....
A nasty overlooked fact about foreign trolls: Pretending to be a different nationality is a sign of shame.
Or in other words, every russian troll is ashamed of being russian, of stepping out and telling "look i am a russian and I have this oppinion".
It is rather easy to point out even deeply conspiratorially russian trolls: Just ask them to tell a nasty joke about putin. THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO THAT. And if they ague "I know no jokes about putin" just ask them to quote a putin joke you posted. THEY ARE ALSO NOT ALLOWED TO DO THAT EITHER.
Conclusion: no putin joke = payedtroll
So all russian trolls, please quote this:
"Putin said that when Americans claim to be exceptional it offends other countries. This from a man who arrests his political opponents, persecutes people based on sexual orientation, and put a girl band in a labor camp for singing songs he didn't like. We don't think we are better than everyone else. We just think we are better than him, specifically." –Jimmy Kimmel
The whole point of TTIP and TPP was to unite the major trade nations under a common set of rules and use this huge market power to force china to open its market and comply to a long list of standards.
The US is simply to small to force anything on anyone all alone.
Lovely. Next he is requesting to join the EU partnership program next to tunesia, turkey and south africa. Why work out a mutual trade agreement when you can also join an established one?
Contracts never override Law.
Otherwise Canibalism and Slavery would be legal as long as someone is stupid enough to sign a contract.
The TCO (total cost of ownership) is already part of the whole argument. Trust me, photovoltaic energy IS dirty. There are better renewable energies.
Something else, storage of energy does not require chemical batteries. Some examples: Pumped-storage hydroelectricity, concrete lift storage (there is a concrete lift in germany weighting around five million tons, build underground and perfectly invisible), submerged bubble energy storage and many more. The required Resources and Technology is so simple it was already available to the ancient roman empire: Water and concrete. Lost of it.
> Could you explain how, exactly, a 100% solar/renewable
> approach would do more damage to the environment than the
> non-renewables that it could otherwise replace?
Production of photovoltaic cells relies on semiconductor technology which is inherently dirty. Per Square meter of semiconductors we are talking about THOUSANDS of tons of chemicals, horrible acids, polutted water, poisoned soil. Or BILLIONS of tons per total year production. In fact the TCO of photovoltaics is BY FAR the worst of all. Only good thing about it, by using expensive recycling technologies one can catch like 99% of the waste. Read and think: Expensive Recycling. Who is gonna do this?
Please seperate this from other renewable energies, Thermical solar power for example is pretty clean but only useful for heating, not for electricity.
Here is a small comparison: Lets say we would grind all nuclear power stations into small dust and put em into the ocean then the natural radiation of all oceans would rise three times. Most likely nothing wouild change. Lets put all waste from semiconductor production into the ocean and it would become a deadly acid cocktail where one little sip would send you into hospital.
Dude, you fell for a pretty simple variation of "whataboutism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Your opponent was successfully switching its topic every time he wanted, every time he ran out of arguments, every time his POV looked bleak. And you let him. You followed him.
Instead you should press your point. Never argue too many points at once but never give up a single point. Choose your points wisely. Something like "select your one or two most valid argument out of the thousands of possible arguments". Press them. Never let go of a good point.
You opponent tries to change topic? Ignore it. Bring back your Topic. Tell him you do not fall for his lousy Whataboutism. Bring back your topic. He tries to avoid it? Ask him why he tries to avoid it. You will drive your opponent either into submission ("I can see your point now"), resignation ("You are a meany, I will never ever talk to you") oder madness ("but the illuminate and the pink invisible CIA agents!!!"). And finally, have the last word, no matter what, make clear your hard facts won the day while his failures to deliver hard facts are obvious. Be a gentle dick.
Facts are a wonderful thing because the longer and deeper you discuss them the harder they get.
Lies on the other side are brittle. Discuss them for long and they crumble to dust.
People hate being called idiots and thats exactly what Facebook just did:
"You are an idiot because you believed into fabricated accounts distributing fabricated stories."
Now smart people could just shut up and swallow their hurt pride. But we are obviously not talking about smart people...
It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Thank you Facebook for being a fool spotlight.
Once upon a time... it took my Amiga 3000 (68030@25Mhz) around 30 seconds to decode a 1024x768 JPEG at 15 Bits color depth. Resizing to screen size (usually 800x600), smoothing out artifacts, put in some dithering took another 30 seconds... I dare not to imagine how long it would have taken on a much slower Amiga 500 (68000@7Mhz), not to speak of the infamous JPEG decoder for the CPC6128 which a friend used to convert single pictures OVER NIGHT.
This was no fun at all. I always hated JPEG for being horribly slow. Even my first 486 usually took ten seconds to decode the same picture and only after aquiring the "quick picture viewer 386" from Oliver Fromme. It took Irfanview on early P3 and Athlons to display JPEG without feeling bored...
I hope the new AV1 format will not be a slow poke.
I feel with you.
My rusty EEE 901 ran for nearly a decade, expanded to 2GB RAM, 36GB Flash and a 10 hour extra large battery, running XP, LUbuntu 10,04 to 16.04 and Windows 10 all fine. Pretty much every daily work worked flawless EXPECT browsing the web.
I ended up with tihs: https://skinflint.co.uk/odys-s... - very cheap, very small and light and high resolution on a small screen gives a very crisp picture. Also using it as a tablet by flipping the screen 360 degree around is pretty nice. 32GB is a lot of space for Windows 10 32Bit which usually needs less than 10GB for itself. I also installed a 64GB SD-card to store some Movies, Musik, Steam-Games.
The Goldmont Atom x5-8350 is pretty fast, a whole different beast than the older Atoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And no, I do not think it is a good product. The keyboard is mediocre, wireless LAN substandard, no user serviceable parts, the layout is not well thought either. But the overall idea works very well. You might want to invest a bit more money into some Lenovo Yoga to avoid the show stoppers.
You are only partially right:
While diplomats do not get prosecuted a nation also is not required to give diplomatic immunity to every foreign politicion. And even if a nation can not prosecute a diplomat it still can investigate a crime done by him. And you can always show him the door.