RandomThoughts3

Google has always been a pain when it comes to internationalisation.

The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling. I don’t even know if it’s still possible.

> in contrast to the US, there is absolutely nothing that limits the illegitimate power grab of the EU.

I am happy to inform you that the EU actually works according to treaties which basically cover every point of a constitution and has a full set of courts of law ensuring the parliament and the European executive respect said treaties and allowing European citizens to defend their interests in case of overreach.

> European aristocrats just decided

I am happy to inform you that the European Union has a democratically elected parliament voting its laws and that the head of commission is appointed by democratically elected heads of states and commissioners are confirmed by said parliament.

If you still need help with any other basic fact about the European Union don’t hesitate to ask.

> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be

As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.

It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.

> The only thing I see is that manufacturers prefer an ip stack because it's "easier" to develop for.

It is easier to develop on an ip stack.

You have great tooling and great libraries out of the box because pretty much everything uses ip nowadays.

Plus, at least part of the controllers people use for their smart home will use ip anyway. A non ip network will need a bridge.

> How is that possible when thread use an ipv6 stack over 802.15.4 while zigbee use a simpler stack also over 802.15.4?

Easy, zigbee doesn't use a simpler stack. Using the same physical layer protocol doesn't tell you anything about the rest of the stack.

It's actually pretty simple. 6LoWPAN which is what Thread uses is more efficient than the Zigbee network protocol. Packets are smaller and the routing is better. It's not particularly surprising to be honest because Thread was designed by people who knew Zigbee really well and were aiming for an improvement.

> Britain wanted to leave EU, not quit trade.

This sentence doesn’t make sense. The trade agreements are part of being in the EU. Wanting to leave the EU is literally wanting to stop being part of the single market. Obviously they have worse trade. They decided to leave the trading union.

This is not punishment. This is literally what Britain asked for.

That only going to a less integrated union. That doesn’t solve the issue of inner members wanting to go faster towards union and being hampered by countries which shouldn’t even be members like Hungary.

It’s a very clever idea.

I could see it becoming very useful if on device LLM becomes a thing. That might allow storing a lot of original sources for not much additional data. We might be able to get an on device chat bot sending you to a copy of Wikipedia/reference material all stored on device and working fully offline.

It’s clear at that point that you are just going to refuse any sources. I haven’t provided zero evidence you are discarding my evidence (which includes a report from the EU by the way).

If you fail to see how knowing if the US is engaging in IP theft is relevant to a discussion about US-lead effort to isolate China motivated by IP theft from them, I don’t think I can do anything for you. It is not whataboutism. It’s the heart of the issue.

The core issue is that the US is becoming protectionist to try to protect its threatened position and trying to drag other countries in its madness. IP theft is merely an excuse.

Discussion is over as far as I’m concerned.

> And a society that separates its politicians from its people is as bad as that quote about separating its scholars from its warriors.

So you hate all modern democracies actually and it has nothing to do with the EU. Thank you that makes things a lot more clear.

> I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable

It can be exactly the same for MEP. Countries are free to use a per region vote if they want. Turn out the UK chose to have national lists but France had 8 regional zones until 2018. It was entirely a UK decision.

Plus all MEP’s votes are public and easy to consult and they all have an address you can write to. The fact that people don’t even bother remembering how they are called is not per se a deficit of democracy in the EU.

The UK complained at length about the EU for decades including educated people so much so that they decided to leave and are now out.

Both the far right and far left opposes the EU openly in France. Even amongst EU supporters there is a fair deal of criticisms levelled at the organisation.

I think your alleged taboo is very much self imposed.

How exactly did the EU punish Britain?

Britain was by far the most annoying of the two during the whole negotiation and didn’t even play fair. The Home Office is currently being sued by the EU for not respecting its engagements related to foreign nationals.

The current situation is not punishment. The UK wanted to leave the single market and is now out of the single market. Turns out that leaving a common market including your main import and export partners is somehow disastrous for your economy. Who could have guessed? Certainly not the experts who spent months explaining at length to the UK population before the referendum.

NSA 'engaged in industrial espionage' - Snowden [1]

European Parliament report on Echelon [2] This states that the USA did intercept communications of European companies, officially to, I quote, “monitors for corruption”.

And that’s what I found in 5 minutes. So much for whataboutism.

I’m always shocked by the average American level of ignorance about what the US does…

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/25907502.amp

[2] https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/news/2001/sep/ech...

> Well, no, they're proposed by the government of their country.

Yes, that’s how democracy works. Countries have elected governments.

> Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to)

Huh? It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists. The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country is not magically a loss of democratic accountability.

> CIA meddling with another state's economics is completely separate from them stealing IP and you know it.

I was talking about them stealing IP and spying on foreign companies contractual negotiations. It happens all the time and has been pointed numerous time in report of the European Union, European countries and multiple publications in the US. The US has been using its intelligence services to help its companies for decades.

The fact that you seem unaware of that is slightly worrying to me. Were you also part of the people arguing that mass spying by the NSA and Echelon were an hoax?

> The discussion is whether other countries have to guard against China stealing their IP.

Other countries have to guard against everyone stealing their IP. It’s not whataboutism to point that the US is charging China with something it has been doing itself for a long time.

It shows that the core discussion has actually nothing to do with IP. It’s all about the US feeling its allegedly hegemonic position being threatened.

I’m sorry that you have been lapping US propaganda so much that you are now convinced that US=good, China=bad. From my European point of view, they both are awful with China having slightly less blood on its hands, thankfully no nuke in the backyard of the country neighbouring mine and at least the Chinese didn’t elect the autocrat leading them.

Germany is lobbying all the time for stupid rules to please minority members of their home coalitions (see them trying to torpedo nuclear as a carbon free source on energy in all the European law related to clean energy to appease Die Grünen for exemple) and have realigned themselves strongly with the US since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Since Von Der Leyden appointment, the commission has been favouring them a lot.

The main issue is that the EPP is basically in service of Germany and France lost a lot of influence when most of their deputies joined Renew, a party which is less well integrated in the European Parliament apparatus. That and France failures to even start tackling the structural reforms it needs obviously.

[delayed]

> The commissioners are appointed by their party

Commissioners are proposed by their country and discussed with the head of the commission (which was selected by the whole European council) before being validated by the parliamentary committee in charge of its portfolio (composed of MEPs which are elected using direct universal suffrage and proportional representation (you can hardly be more democratic than that).

I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.

> This is completely irrelevant, as there's no evidence that the US uses its state intelligence apparatus to engage in industrial espionage

What? I’m rolling on the floor right now.

It’s being going on for decades. There are dozens of articles about the CIA intervening in economic matters, contracts somehow leaking and trade secrets being stolen. Do you live under a rock?

Also how is it irrelevant to a discussion about China being unreliable because they practice corporate spying? It’s not whataboutism.

I think Americans don’t understand what their country does and how they are perceived by other countries. We are not going to follow you along in your dumb crusade which is only motivated by your own interests.

The council, composed of representatives of governments elected in their own state, nominates the commission and proposes laws which are then voted by the parliament where deputies who have been directly elected by European sit. The parliament also confirms the commission.

Care to explain how any of that is undemocratic?

Wasn’t that mostly a UK thing? I don’t think I have heard fishing rights mentioned since Brexit.

Greenland isn’t a Danish protectorate. It’s an autonomous territory which is to say an autonomous administrative region of Danemark. Greenland very much is part of Danemark and its inhabitants are Danish citizen. Nothing to do with a protectorate.

> It’s very different than Japan. Japan is more like the US, capitalist where some companies are cozy with the government.

It’s like Japan at the end of the 80s in term of economic development and the US reaction to it (but you might not have been born when people talked about the Japanese ogre) not in terms of political structure. But even then if you take a realistic look at the free market in Japan and Korea, it might not look that free actually.

> Chinese intelligence entities have embedded engineers in a variety of sectors…

Yada, yada, again same shit than with Japan at the time.

The US routinely spies on all its commercial partners to. Multiple scandals involving European companies in the last decade and let’s not talk about how it uses its stupid embargo laws to punish foreign companies it does not like.

Should we also ban the US from international commerce too or does this logic only apply to country that threaten American interests?

> No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient

There is significantly more politics involved in how the CPP is run than you think and people complain more than you seem to believe. It’s far from an open democracy but it’s not North Korea either.

They use Swift BIC and an account number at the branch because that’s already there and there is one thing American banks hate even more than communism it’s change and having to spend any kind of money to modernise.

> You need to trust the knowledge workers that make up your economy to not send your research to a hostile nation so they can take advantage of your R&D investments.

You know nationalistic non sense has come to a new high when you reach this level of comments on a generalist web site.

So industrial spying has been a common issue since basically forever and it’s an inter-companies things. This is not a national security thing with two states on each ends. What said about China in the US is really sad if unsurprising. It mirrors exactly the craze about Japan by the end of the 80s. This is just an economy transitioning from cheap production center to being a modern research based economy. There is no need to end the global free market because you have a new competitor.

The upper class has been wearing expensive jeans for a very long time.

The upper class doesn’t need dress code. They know they are the upper class. Dress codes are for petit bourgeois and the upper middle class who try to pretend but everyone knows they are actually middle class.

The upper class has been wearing expensive jeans for a very long time.

Magnus left the competitive scene on his own terms years ago when he forfeited the world championship.

He is shareholders of chess.com since they bought out Play Magnus. He is not losing it. He has competing economic interests to FIDE and very little interest into being cooperative with them more than is strictly necessary.

> He's not a regular participant, Magnus is almost an institution of his own.

He is also very much no in agreement with FIDE (a tradition for chess champions - see Fischer, Kasparov). And to be honest FIDE is on FIFA level when it comes to being dodgy as an organisation so it’s hardly surprising.