Posts by doublelayer 9408 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
You have your acronyms mixed up. The people who said this was acceptable are the FEC, not the FCC. The FCC doesn't get to regulate what people write in emails, blocked or not. The FEC doesn't really either, but they have to decide if Google's action is in aid of a specific candidate. If they disagreed, Google could do it anyway but might get fined if they cared enough. If you want to forward on the spam, it's the FEC you want. The FCC would just be confused.
There are more people in the search engine's market research who don't want to have to correct their spelling than people like you who want the search to fail under those conditions. Yes, that's obvious by their actions. I'm not sure why you asked for an explanation if you knew this already.
Your only options are to find a different search engine that does it less or learn the advanced search syntax that they support, which in your case will primarily be the quotation marks but there are others. If you're searching using a general search engine frequently, this is worth learning instead of insisting that the search engines change what they'll do with general terms, an insistence they will ignore. You may also want to use more tools to perform your search. The more searches you perform, the more necessary it is to refine the tools you use.
"Why do search engines have to cope with misspellings?"
Because their users misspell things. Sometimes, it's deliberate (I know people who use a search engine if they don't know the spelling of a word so they can check in a dictionary that the corrected one is accurate). Sometimes, it's just typos. Often, it's because users don't always spell correctly and would prefer getting search results for what they probably want instead of useless ones until they correct themselves or a note telling them to fix their spelling. The people writing the engine software see that as a feature, and whether you like it or not, that's what they've chosen to do.
So your SEO isn't very good, if that's your goal. Sorry to hear that. Search engines have to deal with misspellings all the time, so if the people with names like but not identical to yours are more often searched for, they'll show up. You can try quotation marks if this is annoying you. My anecdotal experience has been that DDG's search results have been good enough for my use cases for years, but I wouldn't expect them to be perfect about it.
By the way, if you type in prawn, you get a definition, a wikipedia page, a bunch of pages about prawns, shrimp, and their uses in cookery, and a system called PRAWN.
That's not what they said. They said it wasn't good enough for their needs yet and acknowledge that it's developing, implying that it might in the future meet their needs. How many others near you* have Starlink service? Can it stand a few thousand of them getting their own connections? Can it stand most local businesses also having one? If the answers are "no" or "not yet, but", that's why it's not yet suitable for the scale they want.
* You may not be that close to other people, but the satellite uses a different concept of closeness. People who are using the same satellite as you or one that interferes with yours by using the same downlink facility as it comes into an orbit better positioned for your use count as close.
Absolutely, that's an issue. I don't think many developers will fork every dependency, because updating them if they're still using the canonical version is annoying, but they probably do keep copies. I know I do that with the important dependencies even though I'm not expecting their code to be taken away. This is an unfortunate requirement. Storing code that you use is important, and if you're going to use a project that nobody else is archiving, you might have to do the archiving yourself. Having Gitlab keep a useful, public, and free archive up would be excellent, but if it costs them too much for their investors to continue supporting, they might stop.
No, I give a challenge and state up front that the predicted way for you to move the goal posts isn't acceptable. I could see that coming a mile off. They need to store a lot of information? Come up with some reason why it's actually a tiny amount of information. They're storing a ton of data over there. I'm sure they've already looked at compression and deduplication. They still end up having to store a lot of data, and you claim they can somehow manage it for a laughably tiny bill. If you actually think that's possible, prove that. Don't tell me "Well it is actually only a hundred gigabytes, so two hard drives does it", because we both know it's orders of magnitude more even if we don't know exactly how efficient their compression is. You can't get anywhere close to their data requirements for your stated bill.
To some extent, Microsoft is already doing it. They connected Github to a massive amount of cash so they're unlikely to start deleting anyone's repositories and they also made an offline archive in the arctic in case we have a world-ending catastrophe and want JavaScript libraries in the aftermath. That's not everything, but someone could clone all the old Gitlab repositories onto Github if they want an archive that Microsoft pays for.
The Internet Archive is also in a position to be useful on this and they discussed archiving the Gitlab data already. They don't have the money that Microsoft does, but they do have the interest.
A million may be small change to a big tech company, but it's not their million. It's Gitlab's million, and they aren't a massive tech company. We could try to find someone to give them a million so they wouldn't have to incur that cost, but that's not happening now, and so we get the situation where they're considering whether it's worth their million to keep it up. That's not automatically our problem because they chose to get themselves into this situation, but they could choose to make the preservation of this data not their problem if they end up deciding they want to use their resources differently.
Whether you need to do this depends on what you want to track--if you just track the dependencies for stuff you write, then you're fine. If you're using someone else's package that includes it, then they'll need to do that tracking to make a working package anyway, so unless you're planning to compile your own, in which case yes you do need copies of the source for it, you can ignore it. If you do want to also track the dependencies of everything you run, and some people do, then you follow the same procedure. For example:
$ apt depends clang-format-10
clang-format-10
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14)
Depends: libclang-cpp10
Depends: libgcc-s1 (>= 3.0)
Depends: libllvm10 (= 1:10.0.0-4ubuntu1)
Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 5.2)
Depends: python3
You probably don't need to do this, but if you want to, the tools are available to you. You can also outsource it. Let your IDE writer check on clang-format. If they drop it, then replace it as you would do with a library you were pulling in. That could mean finding an archive and building it. It could mean switching to an alternative. It could mean no longer using it. You're in charge of your dev environment and your code's dependencies, so take the approach you think best and collect information you'll need to take that action.
You pointed this out in your comment: the people who contributed to the source would, whatever happens to Gitlab, still be able to self-host the system. That's what the contributors and everyone else gain by contributing, and it isn't being taken away. Making something open source doesn't guarantee the authors will also run a free service running the code, but it should mean that the code remains available to those people for their use.
I definitely see the complaints of the open source community about this, but not because they contributed to the code. If Gitlab had not promised a free tier, I wouldn't at all object to their service being commercial. I don't have a solution to this problem, but just because someone contributed doesn't entitle them to a service.
The problem is that, when people who didn't update or maintain anything and who might have forgotten the thing exists don't pay $1, Gitlab would still have to do something about their repos. If they delete those, people will still complain. I suppose the only thing they could do is freeze them so you can only clone or fork and not offer any more free services to cut their losses. I'm not sure if this would earn a favorable review.
You must install some software on your computer which allows Gitlab to store some files there and upload them. How this works for people who have limited bandwidth, turn their computer off with some frequency, or simply don't continue to have the software running isn't explained. Could it work theoretically? Yes, it would fix a number of problems. Would it work in practice? Probably not so well unless you had a really large set of users who kept it consistently operational.
You can know all your dependencies if you put in a little effort. If you use a package management system, it can print out a list of all the packages you have. If you're building everything from source, you know what code you've had to compile. Only if you're using a combination where the user has to install some libraries but you compile in others is it even a little tricky, and you can start from nothing and simply count which packages you have to install to get it working, then identify any dependencies those packages list. Not everyone does this, and it's not an automatic process, but nor does it require an unreasonable effort on their part.
I challenge you to prove that. Use the article's number of 145 PB of theoretical project storage. I'll even let you assume that the average user is only using a tenth of that (balancing out the people with tiny chunks of code and those who store larger assets there). 14.5 PB, with redundancy and availability, for $500 a month. Go.
Before you try, you can't assume that everyone isn't using the storage, that the data can be compressed, or that the data can be usefully deduplicated. Someone storing as much data as Gitlab is has already investigated compression and is likely using it. You have to find sufficient raw storage.
Yes, I think a lot of countries' general police would look at this scammer, say "A couple kids robbed of medium-to-small amounts that have now been returned by the credit cards, not simple to identify right now, not of major concern". I'd like it if they took a more active approach, but wouldn't count on that happening.
With this scale of fraud, the fraudster is probably not that advanced. However, China's law enforcement system is not as advanced on regular crime as it is for those things the government doesn't like. If someone wanted to get this scammer, they are likely to have the tools needed to do it, but there's a chance they won't put that much effort into it. Scammers doing more than finding individual children also have ways to evade consequences, just as they do in other countries. You'd think that a dictatorship with a virtually unlimited budget for surveillance and general 1984-ishness should be able to prevent or at least immediately catch criminals, but China hasn't had that history so far.
"Except it wasn't a child. Possibly the car was smart enough to know that."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it still kind of dangerous to drive around consistently hitting child-sized objects that aren't children? Even if it's a lightweight large object, you can knock it into a more dangerous position. If it's denser, that will likely damage your car and the object. When they finally get working self-driving cars, I'd prefer one that avoids collisions with all objects, animate or not.
"When you say something is in BETA, there are certain expectations set by precedent."
Yes. They are as follows:
1. The developers have designed and implemented everything.
2. They did the customary unit testing, and it passed.
3. They tested on their defined inputs, and it worked.
4. They tested in practice on their own (alpha testing), and it at least mostly worked.
5. Now you can try it, but you're likely to find bugs and there are known ones you'll experience that won't be fully documented.
6. You shouldn't rely on it in production, where important things like your un-backed-up data or humans may be damaged if it goes wrong.
It's called "full self driving". This is an oddly specific name if it means "limited automatic actions". I'm not asking it to be perfect, but it should be tested a lot before people start activating and possibly relying on it; the license may tell them not to, but that's not sufficient if critical safety systems are still missing. In addition, when it's completed, it should offer full self driving. If it doesn't, they'll get a lot of people thinking it does and using it as such.
"It would be much easier and more secure to create a new anonymous wallet, and transfer the funds from there. the use of a Tumbler Service on the funds being sent would probably act as a red flag in the first place. So you know it would be a dumb idea anyway."
You may be unfamiliar with how wallets work. You can create any number of them, but how do you intend to get value into them? The only way to transfer value into a wallet is by sending it from another one. If you fund a new anonymous wallet from a known one, people can track that. So if you send your funds from a known wallet, where they currently are, through a chain of new ones you've just created, any analysis of the transfer activity can identify what you've done with a lot of clarity. You could make it a little better by using old anonymous wallets you stockpiled a while ago, but if they were inactive, it will still be obvious, and if they were active, it becomes easier to make other guesses as to who has them and what they're used for. I don't think you're going to fund spies with a Bitcoin-style cryptocurrency any time soon, but if you do, your suggested approach will be unlikely to work.
This assumes that you can find the people you want to charge and that you can charge them legally. Finding people whose entire business model is accepting pseudonymous tokens and making them more anonymous isn't supposed to be easy if they're doing their jobs right. They're not going to tell you where they are, they take their profits in the currency they're laundering, and they may change ownership frequently as operators cash out.
If you do identify them, a given country may be unable to charge them. Usually, the rules of extradition allow a country to charge someone if a) they were inside that country when they committed a crime or b) their victim was inside that country (and people sometimes even argue against this one). If the criminals were in a third country and they didn't steal the money, only launder it, they might not be legally chargeable in the country where the victim of theft was. Finally, the criminals might be located in a country that won't agree to extradite them under any circumstances or charge them there, in which case you can hope they leave for one that will but if they don't or you don't notice when they do, your charges don't affect them at all.
Now I'm wondering what your function does and how often you trigger it. The big cloud's pricing for storage and bandwidth is rather high, so it can't be using very much of those. I'm also pretty sure you're not running this as a public service. Still, if you're comparing like for like, Digital Ocean has serverless now as well.
Sure, but on what basis would you sue? In almost all cases, the real terms of the offer are in a longer contract which specifies more explicitly what you'll get, so you have the ability to understand what was included and for how long before you started. The closest thing I can see is false advertising, which could sometimes work, but is prone to lots of loopholes because advertising requires a shortened form of presentation so it's easier to misread and for Google to allege that you misread it. For example, they could claim that they meant "offer the service" as "offer it to someone for free", I.E. it's not a limited-time free trial, but not that it would exist in perpetuity. Whether they meant that or not, if they can convince a judge that they could have meant that and you can't prove that they didn't at the time, they'll likely get away with it. Even if you could introduce new laws to add restrictions on this sort of thing, what could you do that would remove sneaky uses of language without having a bunch of unintended consequences enriching lawyers?
I've not read the contract that implemented this service, but I can virtually guarantee it doesn't say "It's free forever and it means everything". Lawyers are smart enough not to give that kind of guarantee. Whether or not they knew back in 2006 that it would go commercial only, and it's been long enough that they might have thought it could stay free forever, they also knew they might have to change what people were getting for free and would have written the contract accordingly. If it really does say "free forever", then you've found the lawyers with the least foresight and have fun with that.
I assume they meant "offer the service" as "offer the free service", which they're no longer doing. That's the kind of sneaky language places like using. I can't feel too annoyed at Google though because they gave people a free service for sixteen years; if they made it a short time before taking it away, I would also think it's a bait and switch, but I never expect free or unlimited things to stay available, and sixteen years is plenty of time for a service to last before something changes in it.
"Have you tried transferring gold over the internet?"
I didn't say "over the internet" now did I? That's why I budgeted $50k for the payment logistics. That's enough to transfer it in person to a place the criminals can take it more safely, with security for the pickup, and some padding for occasional bribes. Maybe it's not, but even if they made it $250k for that and $2.75M in profit, there are people willing to do it. Criminals used to work in the offline world, and they still do.
I think they probably stick to text comms when they can because this allows them to use people without having those voices recognized and tracked. That also helps if the language they're using to converse isn't their native one. If they did use a voice system, there are a few programs for distorting a voice that don't make it obvious that's happened, especially through a bad laptop mic.
"Also, non destructive hacking of suspected malware teams infrastructure be de criminalised."
That won't happen because, if you suspect something to be malware that's not, the people who owned it are not going to take "I thought you were a malware gang" as an excuse for why it was acceptable. If you're correct and end up hacking the real operators, it will already be effectively allowed because the criminals are unlikely to report your activities to the police, knowing that they too can be convicted based on the data you have and they'll face larger penalties than you would. Not to mention that, in a democracy, I think most juries would cheerfully nullify the charges if you somehow got them for successfully targeting a malware organization without causing external damage.
I can see some companies finding a subcontractor whose contract says they'll negotiate with the ransomware people but whose real purpose is to pay them in whatever illegal way is needed without requiring anyone at the company to know what happened to the cash that was sent over. It certainly wouldn't be as many companies as do so now when the stuff requested is legal, but I wouldn't expect it to be zero.
It's also worth considering that, without cryptocurrency, there will still be people who have successfully ransomed data for millions, and those people can pivot to a different payment method. Those who ask for tiny ransoms may well change focus if cryptocurrency becomes unavailable, but if you can successfully get $3M in cryptocurrency, you can also get $2.95M and budget $50k for the company to get that value to you in something else, such as gold. Sadly, they've already decided ransomware is a business model that works, so not all of them will just move on if part of the old structure becomes undesirable.
-> The biggest reason is because most ransomware groups specifically and explicitly say: 'We don't want to work with a negotiator...
Says ransomware negotiator. A slight case of conflict of interest in that statement. You need new tyres, says car tyre salesman.
No, you've got it wrong. It would be that if he said that employing a ransom negotiator always gave better results. As it stands, he just said that the criminals themselves don't want you to use one. This is at least sometimes true, and probably because they know a negotiator who has experience with ransomware will do things like checking whether their encryption has been cracked already or whether they're the type who asks for money and then vanishes. Whether you have a negotiator or not, which he didn't recommend in this statement, don't admit you have one.
The criminals who stole it. You can report additional income, source criminal activity to your country's tax authorities. If you don't, you can be charged with tax evasion as well as theft.
If you're willing to break more laws than just the theft ones, but not tax evasion, you can also set up a system to launder it. On successful laundering of it, you'll likely have paid tax at least once and probably twice as a business and in your personal capacity.
"What will be the basis of the legal action?"
Manipulating a system to gain possession of property you aren't entitled to. Courts deal with this all the time, and they're not going to take "The code had a bug so it's all cool" as a defense. Even if you see this as ridiculously bad security, it's still illegal to walk into a building whose door is standing open and take things, and while the owner probably won't be getting sympathy or an insurance payout, the taker can still go to prison for it. Some early cryptocurrency people might have enjoyed saying "the code is law", but the real law doesn't tend to think so.
"You do write a log, don't you ? Not just ping up unmemorable messages and expect the user to do your work for you ?"
And you now need to get the user to send you their log, or have an automatic collection system so you can find it. When does it become the user's job to use the software as it was designed? Why, when something happens during the user's use of the software, on the user's machine, while the user is controlling it, on the user's data, is it the developer's fault when someone won't read a message?
Unless that error message says "We should never get here. Start panicking now." or "Segmentation fault", it's likely a message that's been written by a developer so the user can read it. Yes, sometimes the developer is available for a user who is confused, but it's still the user's responsibility to provide information so they can get answers. It is not my job to read every log so the users never have to do something easy while doing their job.
Which works if you can get a user to send you the right file when they have an issue. You could have the program send it automatically, but this can lead to privacy problems (I argue for privacy all the time and I won't give up on that, but having worked with user support requests there's a reason people like automatic telemetry). I've had users automatically delete the log file on completion, users who got annoyed if the log file was anywhere but the temp folder, users who couldn't find the temp folder, and users who couldn't find the file even when it was set to a path they selected. Logging helps, but a user can still find a way to weaken it.
When available, I tend to make a bot to read the reports and send me a summary, usually a one-line summary, when things are fine. A single message at a predictable time confirming that the expected reports have been received, are available for me to read, and contain no issues means I have a good amount of information. If I don't get one when I expected it, the monitoring bot or my email is broken. If one of the things it's reading doesn't show up as expected, this gets recorded as an anomaly and a different message is sent. On a normal day, I read a message with a subject line indicating that I don't have to read other things. It's not always feasible to do it that way, but when it is, it's nice.
At least that's an option that has to be manually enabled and can be disabled easily. The one I hate is when they put up a notification inviting me to install Mac OS 12. The only good thing about this is that it doesn't have a notification sound. Unfortunately, it does sometimes steal keyboard focus and cause me an urge to go down to Apple headquarters and start swinging my laptop as a club shouting "You obsoleted this thing so I can't install Mac OS 12. Either bring back the long OS support lifetimes or shut up, and both would be fine.".
Having optional features is how product manufacturing works, even when some of those features are desired by nearly everyone. This is no different, even if it would likely put many people off their cheapest one.
Consider saws. For a long time, they were rather basic moving blades for cutting stuff and that's it. There are now saws that have sensors to check whether what they're cutting is likely to be flesh, so if your finger is there, they'll stop. Objectively, this is the better saw. Still, for years, people dealt with this problem by not having their finger near a saw blade and you can still buy plenty of saws that won't have that sensor. The ones that do will be more expensive. You could easily say "The fact you have to pay extra not to cut your finger off is still a pretty big mark against [saw manufacturer] in my book", but it wouldn't change how saws are manufactured or used.
When we consider a product, we may all have features that, in our opinion, are necessary for the product to be useful. This doesn't mean that the product is useless without them; someone who is careful can use a saw without the finger sensor and someone without pets can probably use the no-detection vacuum, but they aren't desirable to us. The cheapest vacuum is undesirable to you. All of these vacuums are at least somewhat undesirable to me, which is why I've stuck with the manual vacuum for now. Yet that doesn't mean that the product is fatally flawed.
If you weren't looking while using a manual vacuum, you'd have the same problem. If you choose to use a robot to do something, you should expect there to be some cases where you need a more advanced robot to do everything a human would do. For complex things, it's why there are no robots available to do them. If you expect an environment free of those hazards, you may be able to use the simpler version. For each situation, there are tools that can be used for it.
Amazon already has products with cameras that are expected to have consistent unobstructed views. If you don't trust them to use that data in a way you would accept, which you probably shouldn't, don't put one there. I would inspect any data collection statement from any robot vacuum that is going to send data elsewhere, and when possible, use one that can function without an internet connection. If they put a flash chip in it, it should be able to store the maps it creates locally, so unless you have multiple ones that are working together, and I don't even know if that's a feature they have, they shouldn't need to communicate. Whether you can get one from this company I don't know.
"To be fair to Google ti sounds like they identified a problem and were dealing with it (arguably ineffectively) but whilst getting the filters, systems or whatever sorted they put up a warning."
No, there was no warning. That's in the claims as why it's Google's fault. The only warning came from a third party on a different communication system. There are also no filters or the like; they get a request to take something down, investigate to whatever extent they want, then take it down. They already have all the systems to do it. The problems taking down this particular fake app were not technical.
At the beginning, I don't support the argument. The internet has dangerous things on it, and it's not automatically someone's responsibility to prevent you from getting one of them. Had this been about Google search results, I would be firmly on Google's side. However, I also have to support the original argument of this thread that, since Google likes to claim it charges a massive fee and has a dominant position on Android app distribution for the safety and security of its users, it would be nice to have this as proof that their claims are overblown.
Because they improve. Everyone improves to some degree, and Intel has produced better products recently than they had before. The question isn't "has Intel exceeded its processors from last year"? If the answer is no, they have really big problems. The questions are "Has Intel's improvement over last year's designs exceeded AMD's [or a similar competitor] improvement in the same time" and "Is Intel's product better or worse than a comparable AMD one".
The way you define "better" changes the answer to this question, and many have their opinions on the subject. You can consider performance, power usage, and cost to decide what variables you value and how you weight them. In addition, the example you show is from processors that are five years old. This was a nice improvement, but were the subsequent generations similarly improved? Was the power usage really the same between these (one thing that both Intel and AMD have been doing to annoy me is using power consumption numbers and then dynamically consuming so that the actual consumption is something very different than the reported number).
In many ways, Intel's CPUs are fine. They're still reasonably fast and work in a lot of things. I have no problem using one. I similarly have no problem using someone else's, and when it comes time to get a CPU for something, I'll let the performance, power usage, and price govern my decision. Intel needs to continue keeping those values up if they want to stay in the running.
By "at Wall Street", do you mean market capitalization, I.E. how much your entire company is worth when investors apply a multiple of what you actually have? If they value your company at a billion, you have much less than a billion in reserves and profits. Meanwhile, do you know how expensive semiconductor manufacturing plants are? Having a few million to throw at the problem won't get you there. Companies are certainly greedy and ask for and accept money they don't need or deserve, but your scale underestimates the costs of manufacturing at scale and overestimates what a billion in someone else's imagination can buy you.
Both of you are correct. Increasing wages will lead to more workers with more money, which stimulates demand for most goods, some of which are still in limited supply for other things, so the prices of those go up, which causes price inflation. This works great while there's a lot of resources to absorb it, for example a company with tons of profits which go to workers instead of investors. It doesn't work for companies that don't have enough money to do that, who have to increase their prices, requiring higher wages to afford them. Low inflation is best for everyone, but getting there while hurting the fewest people is a challenging task. I won't say what BT should do here, but there's a reason that wages can't be infinite and a reason that people need wage increases right now, and a balance will eventually be needed between these things or we'll have a larger economic problem.
"if retail investors have managed to take a slice of the pie, through coordinating their efforts, then what's not to like?"
If that's what's going on, which hasn't been proven yet for this one, there's lots not to like. One thing is that a lot of people are gambling their money on unreliable information, possibly from scammers. Sure, some people will make money and some people you don't like will lose it. Chalk those up as wins if you want. What about those who buy on this information and end up losing a bunch of money? Is that great too? Don't expect me to be sad when they lose something through their own ignorance, but it's still better if they didn't get lured that way in the first place. If the source is someone running a pump and dump scheme, that's also a negative. There are winners and losers in this, and if you only care about those who win, then everything will look great.
If you're going to give a presentation, you likely trust the armed people in the facility. An armed guard from there is preferable to an armed person you don't know pointing a gun at you. It still doesn't instill confidence, because it's usually less preferable to nobody pointing a gun at you.
If I understand your request correctly, which I admit with the quality of your writing is not guaranteed, you'd like them to increase their sales price so that a scalper can't? Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think I'll be supporting it.
Other SBCs are available at higher prices if you want to use one of those.
"If you have, say, a terabyte of non-volatile RAM, why do you need disks or paging at all?"
Until you need more than a terabyte of stuff stored, you don't. One kind of storage is a lot like another, so a terabyte of optane will function just as well (no, better) than a terabyte of SSD. It will also cost more. The question is whether you need the speed of optane enough to justify its price. Either way, you'll be using it for the same purposes, whether you use a memory byte-mapped model or a filesystem block-model approach to organizing it.
"There was a time when RAMdisks made sense. When it was doable to have a meg of RAM in a computer whose OS used 5% of it, but you only had one floppy drive. That meant you could temporarily stick things in the RAMdrive and not need to switch disks to access it. Why do you want to emulate a 1980s version of a disk in memory?"
Because the filesystem is the way for me to move data from one program to another. I can't take a downloaded audio file from the browser's memory and tell my audio editor to edit this. If it makes the file bigger, the browser will get very confused about why the contiguous block of bits either became noncontiguous or moved. I can't even find that chunk of memory by its address without pulling out a debugger and mapping between the OS's memory regions. We could remove the isolation of processes' memory areas to let this happen, but meanwhile, I can use the filesystem to obtain a set of bits and point something at that set to change it, using a filename I provided for that set. Ramdisks are sometimes useful to keep that useful operation in the fastest memory available to me.
"No current OS organizes its RAM as a filesystem. Right now I am typing in a browser window. That browser has, no doubt, many allocated areas of RAM. They are not files. There is no directory."
They are already mapped objects, but there is an organizational structure. There are objects holding other objects as members in a hierarchical layout. The members have names. The members themselves have members. A member can refer to its parent. That's a lot like a filesystem, but since the type of each thing is known and only the browser's code is operating on them, they don't all have to be bit streams.
Yes, for several reasons. They have always wanted it because it was once conquered by China and they think it should be theirs. They like carving out pieces of land and calling it theirs on a tenuous historical basis, so for that reason alone they'd take it. It also provides them with a useful area for military installations to mess with east and southeast Asian trading and naval traffic and denies the same advantages to anyone else. They wanted it when it wasn't democratic or wealthy, and now that it is, they want it even more.
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