Do you remember how the press endless banged on about how Google+ was small and that it was 'beaten' by Facebook? People are still doing it here. Well, I used it a lot. It was awesome. However Google killed it off before this actual shutdown.
Before G+ was a thing, it was Buzz. Buzz was a locally centred discussion platform and it ended up being an interesting way to establish a social graph. I met some really interesting people in my city and we had many deep conversations. Buzz moved to G+, and everything continued there. Then one day they decided that photos were where it was at and destroyed the platform as a discussion board. Design changes just meant that images were kept and text was shortened to two lines in a feed. It quickly became just another image based platform of narcissists. I don't know how it did numbers wise after that, but it totally killed the platform for most of the people who were there from the start. My archive of G+ shows that I crafted a load of posts that took a lot of time. I was using it in place of a blog, and I benefited from people actually reading and interacting with my posts. Not any more.
It seems to me that it was this theme which shaped the way Google approached all of their products and G+ itself is just the latest. They hated the negative press. If they were seen to be second to someone doing billions, then better not to do it at all. That shift right is what made me, and anecdotally a lot of my friends, change out our view of Google. I don't suppose there was ever a time Google cared what we thought, it's just that now it was clear.
They are charging the cell at a little over 1C. This is really pretty trivial for modern lithium cells. The problem for mobile devices stems from two things --- power cables that were ostensibly designed for data, and the necessity to put the power circuitry in an already compact box, right next to the battery, and a computer.
A solution to the first problem is to up the voltage on the cable, which is what most of these fast charge standards do. However you *then* require a buck regulator to get that voltage back to what you need, 3V to 4.2V DC. Which physically isn't very big with a high switching frequency, but it's still going to dissipate some heat and realistically that is your practical limit. It can be (probably is in the product demoed by TFA) helped by using exotic semi conductors for the switch like GaAs. Not normally worth the $1 or so the part would cost, but for a high end phone where thermal issues are key... that $1 buys you a feature the other guys don't have. A feature you didn't need but never mind that.
So does it shorten your battery? Not the charge rate, really. It's nothing to write home about, but the whole package is gonna get hot. I have a OnePlus which has some proprietary fast charging and it gets pretty toasty here in the tropics. So much so, I just use a regular charger. Lithium cells do degrade with elevated temperatures.
Frankly with USB-C, I think wireless charging and super fast charging etc are all daft. It's super easy to plug in, and a couple of amps is already catered for in the spec. What is the goddamn hurry? This is basically like wireless charging, a solution in search of a problem.
Everything you said is stuff that international corporations have been dealing with since long before the cloud existed.
The prevailing model has always been to hold local corps accountable, regardless of who they are owned by. They often have to modify their offering to comply with local laws. What, exactly, is so special about cloud computing services that makes this less true?
The dominant cloud model is already built on local points of presence. Much of the rest of what you're talking about is a random spray of complaints that some people don't want to comply with local environment. Well sure, they don't, but at the end of the day there's billions of dollars at stake, so they will.
Clearly the greatest advantage for cloud providers is the technical capability to spin up infrastructure, not the physical hosting of it in the United States. For most of the planet, the US is unacceptably distant from a latency perspective anyway.
There's something cool about a physical keyboard in a portable computer. I used a Psion to write a book during a train commute over a period of a year. So I feel nostalgic about this but...
When I think about it. What is the reason we need a pocketable device with a full keyboard. It seems to me that a touch-screen keyboard is a perfectly adequate compromise for typing in a pocketable device, but if you're actually going to want to type a lot... you can't really go past a mini laptop like an XPS 13 or whatever.
When you talk about running apps on something like this. It has a screen that is more mobile-like in size, but an input mechanism from desktop devices. Are you going to run a mobile browser, or a desktop browser? Probably mobile. Which means you're touching the screen, and then you realise that mobile web sites are usually configured for portrait vews...
So, it's kind of cool, and I'm sure there's niche use cases and hell, it's not breaking the bank. I don't really see much of a use though. Well, actually, I quite like the idea of a linux device where you're interacting with the shell rather than a desktop... but really useful? Hmm.
Okay I'll bite. Because we have it already, it's the goddamn web. Which you can build desktop and mobile apps out of, which just needs some support from Apple for the fancier bits of the standards behind PWAs but which Apple wont support... because it doesn't force you to buy their goddamn desktop computers just to make things for their mobile phones.
... put "User-agent: googlebot-news Disallow:/" into robots.txt.
But no. What publishers want is the same amount of traffic and some extra monies... Well, they tried that in Spain, so Google just shut it down in Spain.
A quick recap. Australia isn't asking for anything special. The USA is a "lot further along. 'Every' device manager? Out of the world's top ten phone makers, one is American, the majority are Chinese. And you think Australia will ask them to do something China isn't? Finally, the 'small' market of Australia is loosely equivalent to Canada, or all of Scandinavian countries combined. A market of tens of millions of relatively high end devices. Not a lot of scope for a principled stand by a mobe maker.
Yeah look, you might be right in the end. We've seen it before as you say.
That said, what we *know* so far is only a speech and that wasn't a speech full of stupid. Sure it was full of dog whistling on crime, because that's what the Coalition does, it is a fear machine. It specifically acknowledges the views of the tech sector, and specifically said they don't intended to backdoor encryption.
Of course we shall soon see when the bill arrives.
That's true, but intelligence agencies and law enforcement are entirely different silos. The secret methods of the former aren't available to the latter. Well, until it means there's an exploitable back door which happens to get commercialised and then sold to regular law enforcement. Intelligence services aren't usually staffed by idiots, so they generally keep a lid on things. As Snowden showed, they can be pretty damn effective...
For me, I'm not worried about what spooks do*. They're not interested in me, and I naively hope that their capabilities aren't distributed widely. I am worried, I think we all should be worried, about whatever gets gifted to regular law enforcement - because that just ends up being something anyone can buy off the shelf, and over time it becomes ever more widely deployed routinely in areas of government. And, of course, they'll store all the shit they steal, and then it'll be stolen by criminals and you find there's some dude that's got a home loan with your credentials.
* Except for Chinese spooks. Not theoretical, as in I've already been a target.
This story says 'Australia to pass bill'. No, the bill is scheduled for debate and the government will hope to pass a bill, but they have a weak majority. It's likely to be contentious, I would not bet on it passing at all.
Secondly, there's the implication of a encryption backdoor. This is lifted from the TFA which is an opinion piece. So far the only real source is a political speech made by Angus Taylor (minister for law enforcement and cyber security) in June. The Register (TFA) implies encryption backdoor, despite the minister's own words ("This Government is committed to no 'backdoors'... We simply don’t need to weaken encryption in order to get what we need.").
That said, the TFA is right to be concerned because elsewhere Taylor says "We need access to digital networks and devices, and to the data on them", which does imply an attack on encryption. Now, I'm no fan of our current government, or regressive right-wing government in general, but I have to say, the speech demonstrates a fair bit more understanding than previous efforts in Australia, the UK and recently the US, aimed squarely at encryption. There's only one group arguing for golden keys, and that's the spooks. If a government listens to spooks *and* industry, they usually come to understand why it's not practical. Angus comes out and says industry has moved towards encryption, and that's good, that tech giants oppose weakening encryption, and that's not what they government wants to do. He spends more time talking about that, than the clumsily worded line that implies he's lying in all the other bits.
I find myself in the unlikely position of defending the government in this narrow sense because miscategorising their position makes it harder to present a reasoned opposition when it is needed.
The Register has, I think, the right of the real goal here. To ensure that end devices are breakable. Of course they dog whistle about phones shipping with 'root kits', but before we all get hysterical... this is what law enforcement already does. When they nab crooks, they break into their phones. I suppose if I was an American I'd be worried because it's pretty clear the US gov will want to systematically break into everyone's phone when they enter the country... but most of the industrialised world isn't there yet. We all worry about law enforcement overreach, we all know breaking or weakening encryption is impractical, regardless of what any one nation state desires (barring nuclear options available to systems like China's GFW).
There are, however, probably some reasonable cases when you want law enforcement to be able to break into stuff. I don't know where the line is, I guess we'll be worrying about this for decades but it'd be nice if it wasn't categorised as a binary proposition. We get enough of that in politics.
They probably omitted it because it's a load of crap.
There is no pro-unification party in Taiwan. The DPP, the guys in power, are pro-independence albeit in a practical sense, they're not going to declare independence. The other party are the KMT, the guys who historically considered themselves the rightful rulers of mainland China. They fought a civil war with the communist party so how exactly would they view unification do you think? *
> try to rally up political forces in Taiwan, Hongkong, and Tibet,
That's PRC propaganda. The people that rally up forces in those territories are the people that live there. The same group of people that the PRC habitually ignores in it's aggressive/invasive one china policy.
> By the same logic / ideal of the West, Catalona and Haiwaii should be sovereign nations by now.
Again, no, because that adopts the PRC's thinking. Catalonia, you can argue, since it's arguable there's a democratic mandate to be an independent state. And they (and Spain) are in charge of that, no one else. Hawai'i, the people of Hawai'i want to be American. Just like the people of Taiwan, want to be Taiwanese, and not Chinese. A fact that the PRC and the millions of brainwashed nationalist Chinese trolls somehow find of no consequence.
It is, in fact, all that actually matters.
* actually it is true that the KMT advocates closer ties to China, largely based on commercial interests.
You don't seem to understand Taiwan and have misstated the situation.
The current government of Taiwan is a pro-independence government. It's a democracy, and these people were voted in. There's no chance of China appointing anyone, that's just not going to happen. It's easy to make the mistake. China has been so successful at telling everyone that Taiwan == China that people start to believe it, but it simply isn't true.
There is no plan for China to take over, there is no timetable. It is fundamentally not possible nor would the electorate accept any appointments by China. They're also pragmatists and have no interest in provoking China. This is why the status quo continues.
However the PRC has essentially bribed or strong armed almost every nation on earth to avoid formal recognition of Taiwan as an independent country. This is shameful really, but money talks. This has real effects on Taiwan, like not being able to participate in international forums. However in other respects business carries on regardless of the word games. Countries can't have embassies in Taiwan, for example, but they have 'offices' that do exactly the same thing.
It would be nice to see some leadership, from the US maybe, in resolving this absurd situation. It could start by addressing the current issue (economic threats on airlines that describe Taiwan as a country), and ideally... by formally recognising Taiwan. Trump even alluded to that, but... it was just a bit of anti-China rhetoric it seems.
After all, the government has been so competent at negotiating Brexit with the EU that a nationwide fibre broadband network will be a simple walk in the park.
I've never heard of blocking tethering in Australia, certainly none of my providers ever had (about half a dozen different ones). I don't even know how they'd do it... I mean it's a standard feature in Android at least.
I use this bank. The first I knew of this, I was in the supermarket buying groceries. When I went to pay, the machine said it needed a signature too. This is weird, I've never seen it before. So, I just did it and I got to walk out with my groceries.
Earlier I had bought a few more expensive things in a department store. It's entirely possible I wouldn't have been able to buy them then.
Apparently it was caused by a power outage to the mainframe. Maybe they should move this stuff off mainframes like everyone else has. Shrug.
> The federal government has no business doing commercial product R&D that's actually being done in the private sector.
This is so wrong it's hard to know where to start. Let's just confine ourselves to renewable energy. It's fair to say that renewable is a growth market worldwide. If your country doesn't do fundamental research on renewables, how do you expect to capture this market? Well, it wont by slapping a 30% tariff on importing PV panels because the world's largest *market* for PV will retaliate in kind and you'll sell precisely 0.
Bottom line, if you're not in this race, you lose market share, and that means losing exports, jobs, tax revenue and all that jazz.
The second aspect of your rant is the whole small-government idea. Well, most of world considers that one of the things a government ought to do is ensure there is a healthy safe environment for their citizens. Any move to renewables is basically a strategy for avoiding chuffing out fine particles from chimney stacks and tail pipes. I mean, you wouldn't want to have everyone spewing out catalytic-free diesel clouds from their cars would you? Eventually, everyone is going to be driving (or being driven by) electric vehicles. That's just the way it's going to be. Most nations realise the value of investing in research so they can reap economic benefits from participating in the emergent industry.
Or you can basically kill all your environment protections, kill your research funding and initiate a trade war with everyone else by slapping on tariffs. It's a policy so perfectly honed to be almost completely the wrong-thing-to-do that it's breathtaking. Still, I'm sure your ideologues will convince you that it's good some how, the market will sort it all out right? Good luck with that.
This should be understood on the background of how speed cameras operate here (Victoria, otherwise referred to in Australia as Police State). The damn things are everywhere. There's no responsibility to tell people where they are, so they're not used as a deterrent like other states, they're used to raise money and they're GREAT at that. More than a billion dollars in the last three years.For a place that has the population of Wisconsin. There's a classic one in Chadstone, which is the champion for raising $$$, located just as 70kph turns into 40kph. They must be cackling with glee over that one.
Also, there's no leeway on these things. 77% of speeding fines are for exceeding a posted limit by less than 10kph (6mph). I've had one for being 3kph over, while being the only guy on a double lane straight highway for miles and miles... (cops hide in the vegetation in the median strip). Good one guys, beats catching rapists eh?
Fundamentally, other \.ers have called it right. The fundamental problem is that a commercial operator will basically install as many of them as you let them since they get nice revenue from it. The state government sees this as $$$, and can pull up all sorts of charts telling you that they are 'safety cameras'. All the while, this is a state where cops do nothing about rampant tailgating, driving around with fogs + high beams, hoons spinning wheels at every traffic light, failure to indicate and so on... because that would need police work rather than just ticking a box on a form and waiting for the money to roll in.
Occasionally, just occasionally, one sees a burnt out speed camera with still-smouldering tyres at the base of it. Digitally burn the things? Bring it oooon.
>... would Facebook know about "real solutions for real people"?
In fact, more than virtually any other company in the world, excepting perhaps Microsoft.
> What exactly do they produce? What particular problems do they address? How is mankind's lot significantly improved by the presence of Facebook?
They produce a social network. There are many problems that these address. Sure, from your point of view, people post cat baby photos. Around the world Facebook is virtually the Internet, because it provides the means to connect with a social graph of people in similar circumstances. The breadth of communities, NGOs and government agencies worldwide that use Facebook groups to communicate with small communities, where there exists no infrastructure to build and publicise traditional web sites, is beyond large. Today I fly out to the rural mountains of Taiwan where I will be working with the Taiwanese indiginous people to document their own language. They face a great many difficulties but the various tribes have been able to pull together to share information, organise events, publicise their political struggles, all via Facebook and mobile networks (another great engineering achievement, which presumably you actually rate?)
Signed,
Also an engineer (one who develops solutions for people outside of the rich white-anglosphere).
There's heaps of them on eBay. Just get a NodeMCU 'dev kit'. There's a couple of vendors, nothing between them really. They cost about $5-8 from China. Then use NodeMCU and not this silly BASIC thing:)
Since it hasn't been mentioned here. The ESP8266 is no stranger to interpreted languages. The NodeMCU firmware offers a Lua interpreter. It's been around for longer than this BASIC project and is now fairly robust. I have created a couple of projects with it and been pleasantly surprised, particularly with support for the u8glib library. This is just outstanding.
There's lots of reasons to like an interpreted language on a device like this. That said, the hardware/libraries integration and maturity is way more important than exactly what interpreted language. I feel a tag nostalgic for BASIC but I don't really see the utility over the excellent NodeMCU firmware. There's even an online firmware builder that allows you to select which features, ostensibly hardware protocols and the like, to bake in so you can maximize how much free heap there is. http://nodemcu-build.com/
Interesting. Are you using the software USB serial library (CDC or something?). Uses up half of the flash and most of the RAM but it does work. It's just really really tight. Presumably you're using the arduino library for PS2 controllers? Looks like it's bit-banging, might well expect the AVR to run at a particular speed. Might want to look at that?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you remember how the press endless banged on about how Google+ was small and that it was 'beaten' by Facebook? People are still doing it here. Well, I used it a lot. It was awesome. However Google killed it off before this actual shutdown.
Before G+ was a thing, it was Buzz. Buzz was a locally centred discussion platform and it ended up being an interesting way to establish a social graph. I met some really interesting people in my city and we had many deep conversations. Buzz moved to G+, and everything continued there. Then one day they decided that photos were where it was at and destroyed the platform as a discussion board. Design changes just meant that images were kept and text was shortened to two lines in a feed. It quickly became just another image based platform of narcissists. I don't know how it did numbers wise after that, but it totally killed the platform for most of the people who were there from the start. My archive of G+ shows that I crafted a load of posts that took a lot of time. I was using it in place of a blog, and I benefited from people actually reading and interacting with my posts. Not any more.
It seems to me that it was this theme which shaped the way Google approached all of their products and G+ itself is just the latest. They hated the negative press. If they were seen to be second to someone doing billions, then better not to do it at all. That shift right is what made me, and anecdotally a lot of my friends, change out our view of Google. I don't suppose there was ever a time Google cared what we thought, it's just that now it was clear.
Fuck you Google.
They are charging the cell at a little over 1C. This is really pretty trivial for modern lithium cells. The problem for mobile devices stems from two things --- power cables that were ostensibly designed for data, and the necessity to put the power circuitry in an already compact box, right next to the battery, and a computer.
A solution to the first problem is to up the voltage on the cable, which is what most of these fast charge standards do. However you *then* require a buck regulator to get that voltage back to what you need, 3V to 4.2V DC. Which physically isn't very big with a high switching frequency, but it's still going to dissipate some heat and realistically that is your practical limit. It can be (probably is in the product demoed by TFA) helped by using exotic semi conductors for the switch like GaAs. Not normally worth the $1 or so the part would cost, but for a high end phone where thermal issues are key... that $1 buys you a feature the other guys don't have. A feature you didn't need but never mind that.
So does it shorten your battery? Not the charge rate, really. It's nothing to write home about, but the whole package is gonna get hot. I have a OnePlus which has some proprietary fast charging and it gets pretty toasty here in the tropics. So much so, I just use a regular charger. Lithium cells do degrade with elevated temperatures.
Frankly with USB-C, I think wireless charging and super fast charging etc are all daft. It's super easy to plug in, and a couple of amps is already catered for in the spec. What is the goddamn hurry? This is basically like wireless charging, a solution in search of a problem.
Everything you said is stuff that international corporations have been dealing with since long before the cloud existed.
The prevailing model has always been to hold local corps accountable, regardless of who they are owned by. They often have to modify their offering to comply with local laws. What, exactly, is so special about cloud computing services that makes this less true?
The dominant cloud model is already built on local points of presence. Much of the rest of what you're talking about is a random spray of complaints that some people don't want to comply with local environment. Well sure, they don't, but at the end of the day there's billions of dollars at stake, so they will.
Clearly the greatest advantage for cloud providers is the technical capability to spin up infrastructure, not the physical hosting of it in the United States. For most of the planet, the US is unacceptably distant from a latency perspective anyway.
Indeed. Comments here reflect a lack of understanding about what modern web apps are like and how pervasive they are.
There's something cool about a physical keyboard in a portable computer. I used a Psion to write a book during a train commute over a period of a year. So I feel nostalgic about this but...
When I think about it. What is the reason we need a pocketable device with a full keyboard. It seems to me that a touch-screen keyboard is a perfectly adequate compromise for typing in a pocketable device, but if you're actually going to want to type a lot... you can't really go past a mini laptop like an XPS 13 or whatever.
When you talk about running apps on something like this. It has a screen that is more mobile-like in size, but an input mechanism from desktop devices. Are you going to run a mobile browser, or a desktop browser? Probably mobile. Which means you're touching the screen, and then you realise that mobile web sites are usually configured for portrait vews...
So, it's kind of cool, and I'm sure there's niche use cases and hell, it's not breaking the bank. I don't really see much of a use though. Well, actually, I quite like the idea of a linux device where you're interacting with the shell rather than a desktop... but really useful? Hmm.
Okay I'll bite. Because we have it already, it's the goddamn web. Which you can build desktop and mobile apps out of, which just needs some support from Apple for the fancier bits of the standards behind PWAs but which Apple wont support ... because it doesn't force you to buy their goddamn desktop computers just to make things for their mobile phones.
... put "User-agent: googlebot-news Disallow: /" into robots.txt.
But no. What publishers want is the same amount of traffic and some extra monies... Well, they tried that in Spain, so Google just shut it down in Spain.
Mangled URL was supposed to be.
Wow, a post that's so off it's not even wrong.
A quick recap. Australia isn't asking for anything special. The USA is a "lot further along. 'Every' device manager? Out of the world's top ten phone makers, one is American, the majority are Chinese. And you think Australia will ask them to do something China isn't? Finally, the 'small' market of Australia is loosely equivalent to Canada, or all of Scandinavian countries combined. A market of tens of millions of relatively high end devices. Not a lot of scope for a principled stand by a mobe maker.
Yeah look, you might be right in the end. We've seen it before as you say.
That said, what we *know* so far is only a speech and that wasn't a speech full of stupid. Sure it was full of dog whistling on crime, because that's what the Coalition does, it is a fear machine. It specifically acknowledges the views of the tech sector, and specifically said they don't intended to backdoor encryption.
Of course we shall soon see when the bill arrives.
That's true, but intelligence agencies and law enforcement are entirely different silos. The secret methods of the former aren't available to the latter. Well, until it means there's an exploitable back door which happens to get commercialised and then sold to regular law enforcement. Intelligence services aren't usually staffed by idiots, so they generally keep a lid on things. As Snowden showed, they can be pretty damn effective...
For me, I'm not worried about what spooks do*. They're not interested in me, and I naively hope that their capabilities aren't distributed widely. I am worried, I think we all should be worried, about whatever gets gifted to regular law enforcement - because that just ends up being something anyone can buy off the shelf, and over time it becomes ever more widely deployed routinely in areas of government. And, of course, they'll store all the shit they steal, and then it'll be stolen by criminals and you find there's some dude that's got a home loan with your credentials.
* Except for Chinese spooks. Not theoretical, as in I've already been a target.
This story says 'Australia to pass bill'. No, the bill is scheduled for debate and the government will hope to pass a bill, but they have a weak majority. It's likely to be contentious, I would not bet on it passing at all.
Secondly, there's the implication of a encryption backdoor. This is lifted from the TFA which is an opinion piece. So far the only real source is a political speech made by Angus Taylor (minister for law enforcement and cyber security) in June. The Register (TFA) implies encryption backdoor, despite the minister's own words ("This Government is committed to no 'backdoors' ... We simply don’t need to weaken encryption in order to get what we need.").
That said, the TFA is right to be concerned because elsewhere Taylor says "We need access to digital networks and devices, and to the data on them", which does imply an attack on encryption. Now, I'm no fan of our current government, or regressive right-wing government in general, but I have to say, the speech demonstrates a fair bit more understanding than previous efforts in Australia, the UK and recently the US, aimed squarely at encryption. There's only one group arguing for golden keys, and that's the spooks. If a government listens to spooks *and* industry, they usually come to understand why it's not practical. Angus comes out and says industry has moved towards encryption, and that's good, that tech giants oppose weakening encryption, and that's not what they government wants to do. He spends more time talking about that, than the clumsily worded line that implies he's lying in all the other bits.
I find myself in the unlikely position of defending the government in this narrow sense because miscategorising their position makes it harder to present a reasoned opposition when it is needed.
The Register has, I think, the right of the real goal here. To ensure that end devices are breakable. Of course they dog whistle about phones shipping with 'root kits', but before we all get hysterical... this is what law enforcement already does. When they nab crooks, they break into their phones. I suppose if I was an American I'd be worried because it's pretty clear the US gov will want to systematically break into everyone's phone when they enter the country... but most of the industrialised world isn't there yet. We all worry about law enforcement overreach, we all know breaking or weakening encryption is impractical, regardless of what any one nation state desires (barring nuclear options available to systems like China's GFW).
There are, however, probably some reasonable cases when you want law enforcement to be able to break into stuff. I don't know where the line is, I guess we'll be worrying about this for decades but it'd be nice if it wasn't categorised as a binary proposition. We get enough of that in politics.
They probably omitted it because it's a load of crap.
There is no pro-unification party in Taiwan. The DPP, the guys in power, are pro-independence albeit in a practical sense, they're not going to declare independence. The other party are the KMT, the guys who historically considered themselves the rightful rulers of mainland China. They fought a civil war with the communist party so how exactly would they view unification do you think? *
> try to rally up political forces in Taiwan, Hongkong, and Tibet,
That's PRC propaganda. The people that rally up forces in those territories are the people that live there. The same group of people that the PRC habitually ignores in it's aggressive/invasive one china policy.
> By the same logic / ideal of the West, Catalona and Haiwaii should be sovereign nations by now.
Again, no, because that adopts the PRC's thinking. Catalonia, you can argue, since it's arguable there's a democratic mandate to be an independent state. And they (and Spain) are in charge of that, no one else. Hawai'i, the people of Hawai'i want to be American. Just like the people of Taiwan, want to be Taiwanese, and not Chinese. A fact that the PRC and the millions of brainwashed nationalist Chinese trolls somehow find of no consequence.
It is, in fact, all that actually matters.
* actually it is true that the KMT advocates closer ties to China, largely based on commercial interests.
You don't seem to understand Taiwan and have misstated the situation.
The current government of Taiwan is a pro-independence government. It's a democracy, and these people were voted in. There's no chance of China appointing anyone, that's just not going to happen. It's easy to make the mistake. China has been so successful at telling everyone that Taiwan == China that people start to believe it, but it simply isn't true.
There is no plan for China to take over, there is no timetable. It is fundamentally not possible nor would the electorate accept any appointments by China.
They're also pragmatists and have no interest in provoking China. This is why the status quo continues.
However the PRC has essentially bribed or strong armed almost every nation on earth to avoid formal recognition of Taiwan as an independent country. This is shameful really, but money talks. This has real effects on Taiwan, like not being able to participate in international forums. However in other respects business carries on regardless of the word games. Countries can't have embassies in Taiwan, for example, but they have 'offices' that do exactly the same thing.
It would be nice to see some leadership, from the US maybe, in resolving this absurd situation. It could start by addressing the current issue (economic threats on airlines that describe Taiwan as a country), and ideally... by formally recognising Taiwan. Trump even alluded to that, but ... it was just a bit of anti-China rhetoric it seems.
After all, the government has been so competent at negotiating Brexit with the EU that a nationwide fibre broadband network will be a simple walk in the park.
I've never heard of blocking tethering in Australia, certainly none of my providers ever had (about half a dozen different ones). I don't even know how they'd do it... I mean it's a standard feature in Android at least.
I use this bank. The first I knew of this, I was in the supermarket buying groceries. When I went to pay, the machine said it needed a signature too. This is weird, I've never seen it before. So, I just did it and I got to walk out with my groceries.
Earlier I had bought a few more expensive things in a department store. It's entirely possible I wouldn't have been able to buy them then.
Apparently it was caused by a power outage to the mainframe. Maybe they should move this stuff off mainframes like everyone else has. Shrug.
No doubt the key problems will remain: the failure to flag pay-walled content and the total inability to blacklist particular news sources.
> The federal government has no business doing commercial product R&D that's actually being done in the private sector.
This is so wrong it's hard to know where to start. Let's just confine ourselves to renewable energy. It's fair to say that renewable is a growth market worldwide. If your country doesn't do fundamental research on renewables, how do you expect to capture this market? Well, it wont by slapping a 30% tariff on importing PV panels because the world's largest *market* for PV will retaliate in kind and you'll sell precisely 0.
Bottom line, if you're not in this race, you lose market share, and that means losing exports, jobs, tax revenue and all that jazz.
The second aspect of your rant is the whole small-government idea. Well, most of world considers that one of the things a government ought to do is ensure there is a healthy safe environment for their citizens. Any move to renewables is basically a strategy for avoiding chuffing out fine particles from chimney stacks and tail pipes. I mean, you wouldn't want to have everyone spewing out catalytic-free diesel clouds from their cars would you? Eventually, everyone is going to be driving (or being driven by) electric vehicles. That's just the way it's going to be. Most nations realise the value of investing in research so they can reap economic benefits from participating in the emergent industry.
Or you can basically kill all your environment protections, kill your research funding and initiate a trade war with everyone else by slapping on tariffs. It's a policy so perfectly honed to be almost completely the wrong-thing-to-do that it's breathtaking. Still, I'm sure your ideologues will convince you that it's good some how, the market will sort it all out right? Good luck with that.
This should be understood on the background of how speed cameras operate here (Victoria, otherwise referred to in Australia as Police State). The damn things are everywhere. There's no responsibility to tell people where they are, so they're not used as a deterrent like other states, they're used to raise money and they're GREAT at that. More than a billion dollars in the last three years .For a place that has the population of Wisconsin.
There's a classic one in Chadstone, which is the champion for raising $$$, located just as 70kph turns into 40kph. They must be cackling with glee over that one.
Also, there's no leeway on these things. 77% of speeding fines are for exceeding a posted limit by less than 10kph (6mph). I've had one for being 3kph over, while being the only guy on a double lane straight highway for miles and miles... (cops hide in the vegetation in the median strip). Good one guys, beats catching rapists eh?
Fundamentally, other \.ers have called it right. The fundamental problem is that a commercial operator will basically install as many of them as you let them since they get nice revenue from it. The state government sees this as $$$, and can pull up all sorts of charts telling you that they are 'safety cameras'. All the while, this is a state where cops do nothing about rampant tailgating, driving around with fogs + high beams, hoons spinning wheels at every traffic light, failure to indicate and so on... because that would need police work rather than just ticking a box on a form and waiting for the money to roll in.
Occasionally, just occasionally, one sees a burnt out speed camera with still-smouldering tyres at the base of it. Digitally burn the things? Bring it oooon.
Noooot really sure Americans ought to be lecturing anyone else about the quality of democracy. :)
> ... would Facebook know about "real solutions for real people"?
In fact, more than virtually any other company in the world, excepting perhaps Microsoft.
> What exactly do they produce? What particular problems do they address? How is mankind's lot significantly improved by the presence of Facebook?
They produce a social network. There are many problems that these address. Sure, from your point of view, people post cat baby photos. Around the world Facebook is virtually the Internet, because it provides the means to connect with a social graph of people in similar circumstances. The breadth of communities, NGOs and government agencies worldwide that use Facebook groups to communicate with small communities, where there exists no infrastructure to build and publicise traditional web sites, is beyond large. Today I fly out to the rural mountains of Taiwan where I will be working with the Taiwanese indiginous people to document their own language. They face a great many difficulties but the various tribes have been able to pull together to share information, organise events, publicise their political struggles, all via Facebook and mobile networks (another great engineering achievement, which presumably you actually rate?)
Signed,
Also an engineer (one who develops solutions for people outside of the rich white-anglosphere).
There's heaps of them on eBay. Just get a NodeMCU 'dev kit'. There's a couple of vendors, nothing between them really. They cost about $5-8 from China. Then use NodeMCU and not this silly BASIC thing :)
Since it hasn't been mentioned here. The ESP8266 is no stranger to interpreted languages. The NodeMCU firmware offers a Lua interpreter. It's been around for longer than this BASIC project and is now fairly robust. I have created a couple of projects with it and been pleasantly surprised, particularly with support for the u8glib library. This is just outstanding.
There's lots of reasons to like an interpreted language on a device like this. That said, the hardware/libraries integration and maturity is way more important than exactly what interpreted language. I feel a tag nostalgic for BASIC but I don't really see the utility over the excellent NodeMCU firmware. There's even an online firmware builder that allows you to select which features, ostensibly hardware protocols and the like, to bake in so you can maximize how much free heap there is. http://nodemcu-build.com/
Interesting. Are you using the software USB serial library (CDC or something?). Uses up half of the flash and most of the RAM but it does work. It's just really really tight. Presumably you're using the arduino library for PS2 controllers? Looks like it's bit-banging, might well expect the AVR to run at a particular speed. Might want to look at that?