bene_legionary

I couldn't get used to it at all. Every few minutes I kept increasing the volume or decreasing the screen brightness, and at first I never realised why until I looked at how I rested my hands on the keyboard. A few days after I got the laptop I just got rid of it by taking out all of the touchbar buttons in the system preferences. I would have prefered the function keys a lot more.

I really doubt it happening today or in a years' time. There's digital implementations of games but they don't have the same feeling as playing the game by hand. I'd pick up a card or draw something from a drawstring bag 1000 times for every 1 time I'd tap and drag a card or drag a token from a bag on a screen, and I'd think that's a pretty popular opinion.

Compared to Windows, the notifications for trying Safari are nothing, and switching browsers aren't so much of a hassle. Microsoft actively tries to push you to Edge in the settings and a to get a Microsoft Account at start up. A couple of times I've been stopped at start up because of the "You need to finish updating" screen with those prompts, sometimes afterwards I see that my taskbar now has the Mail and Edge app pinned automatically. In comparison my Macbook throws up an ignorable notification in the corner if I open Firefox. For your analogy, your Microsoft Fridge is turning off the power supply for your house unless you go and turn it back on by yourself or buy the Microsoft Oven.

I think Pleco's developers are more focused on improving the dictionary than porting it to computers (they have an Android version too), but it would be very nice to have a computer version that can look up words if you right click them, for example.

Being anonymous is a big part of this. There is very little consequence of being controversial online if you're just another person posting (and not, say, a celebrity where your presence means something offline too). The most might be people noticing that one particular person is stirring up trouble (and block them). Offline conversation has the benefit of being in real time. The other person almost has a social obligation to listen and respond. In addition, you know it's a real person that you're talking to (although, with people spending more time online, their real-life etiquette has changed for the worse; people shout, berate and threaten others like there is no consequence). Online conversation is static; you can ignore it, and nobody will know. Anybody can read it at any time as if you were continously shouting it. Nobody is obligated to respond or pay attention. You have no idea if the person responding or commenting is real, or is just a bot, or is a troll trying to make you irrational and angry. It's terribly confusing.

There is the CCP. They've gone around indoctrinating everyone for 70 years that Mao was the messiah, Xi is Peter the apostle carrying on his vision, and western democracy doesn't work. Removing that would be a huge shock to the Chinese public (Destalinisation is an example of what happens when you remove the cults of personality), not to mention the existing power structures holding up the state would need to be reformed. I believe nothing short of another civil war will bring democracy to the PRC, and believe me, a civil war in China will be bad for the entire world. What I talked about before was before the CCP. Times were different, and the party that at least pretended to be democratic (the KMT, who proved themselves to not be democratic on Taiwan) had a chance to win the civil war. Today, there are a billion more people in China than when the KMT left, and not very many of them believe in democracy. It's not impossible, only mind-numbingly improbable.

Taiwan is a special case because it came after years of KMT oppression and the death of Chiang. His son was more lenient and then his son's successor opened the door for democracy. Taiwan is much smaller and had more exposure to America than the mainland, which definitely helped.

It depends on your definition of Chinese and ethnicity (and I don't mean to offend anybody at all, just for the sake of an answer), but Taiwan is a very real democracy. Perhaps if the KMT won the civil war, there might be democracy in all of China, but the KMT went to Taiwan instead and bloodied their hands before giving the Taiwanese democracy. I don't think Chinese people are incapable of democracy, only that the circumstances didn't allow for it to happen; namely, a few civil wars, a communist revolution and a Japanese invasion.

Now I don't know enough about 'dialects' in the sinosphere but I think that a dominant 'national' language is an expected outcome of globalisation. For example, French threatening to wipe out Occitan, Corsican and Breton, Castillian Spanish with Catalonian and other Iberian languages, Hindi and Urdu in India and Pakistan, etc. That's not to say that it's a good thing, just that it has happened in other places too. French policy on language might just be as strict from what I've read.

I can't answer your question (I left China at a very early age), but I think that it's a shame that the Taiping Civil War isn't widely known as things like the Russian civil war or even the Chinese civil war. People might have a different understanding of China if they knew anything about the Taiping or KMT-CCP wars. Hopefully others can answer your question.

Even Sun Yat-sen, who worked his whole life off trying to bring democracy to China in the chaos of the civil wars before WW2, decided China wasn't ready for democracy. Dr. Sun's successor state of sorts, Taiwan, did manage to carry out his vision in a way (even if they don't agree with the Chinese bit). The first time China had an election was in 1912, and it was largely free by the standards of the time, although the elected president, who was a friend of Sun, was assassinated not long after (the person who ordered the assassination ended up declaring himself emperor of China)

To be fair, the annexation of Tibet happened at a time where China was irrelevant on the world stage having come out of WW2 and a civil war almost completely ruined. Tibet wasn't recognised internationally as a country at the time because of the KMT claims to it. That's not to say that the CCP's invasion, annexation and suppression should have happened or was moral in any way, but Ukraine today has much more political clout and meaning than Tibet had 70 years ago, because attitudes and the capabilities of the countries involved today were different then than they are now.

Although it can be highly disruptive to the local environment. So can most power generation plants, but usually indirectly.