Posts by sev.monster

Tech companies ready public stances on Roe v. Wade

Re: Google hypocrisy

Johnny breathed on me, now I have cooties, pregnants and the clap!

Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Re: Still better than others

Great Aunt in Duluth is my band name.

The end of the iPod – last model available 'while supplies last'

Re: Sad but inevitable RIP

From zero, an afternoon with the very straightforward MPD docs is just about all you need for a functional setup. It's less of a case of not knowing how to do it and more not wanting to spend the time on it, not knowing the option is available in the first place, or already having another solution that works for them (e.g. the Apple ecosystem).

...Of course, then there are people like this. Even beginning to use a project like MPD assumes baseline familiarity with a computer and its methodology. Some people don't even have that, for which I concede to your point.

Re: Sad but inevitable RIP

Do your own streaming then. I am a big fan of myMPD; when I am at home I stream directly to my DAC via PulseAudio (via Pipewire compatibility layer) for lossless playback and when I am on the go I stream using the extremely data-efficient Opus. What needed 320kbps CBR MP3 to sound good now only needs ~100kbps VBR with Opus, so it's usable with poorer connections. You can even knock it down to half and it still sounds better than most other equivalent bitrate lossy formats.

Of course, you aren't forced to use myMPD, any MPD-compatible client will work. There are apps for most devices (like M.A.L.P for Android).

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: powershell command missing

I use the unaliased form of ? so little I actually forgot what it was aliasing.

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

Gotta admit it lives up to its name :)

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

At work I use it to set desktop background color by embedding C# directly in the script.

Add-Type @'

using System;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace BGInfo {

public class DesktopColor {

[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError=true)]

private static extern bool SetSysColors(int cElements, int[] lpaElements, int[] lpaRgbValues);

private static readonly int[] elements = {1}; //COLOR_DESKTOP

private static readonly int[] colors = {3873552}; //[System.Drawing.ColorTranslator]::ToWin32([System.Drawing.Color]::FromArgb(0, 16, 27, 59))

public static void Update() {

SetSysColors(elements.Length, elements, colors);

}

}

}

'@

[BGInfo.DesktopColor]::Update()

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

And if you want to be pedantic, shebangs are implemented entirely in the kernel and are syntactically unrelated to the resultant shell :)

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

I am very aware test has a string equality operator. I used numbers and numeric comparison operators here because I was illustrating the similarities between Bourne shell syntax and PowerShell, as well as the "ugliness" they both share. What emfiliane said is correct.

And what I was illustrating here was not specifically targeted at Bash—hence why I specified "Bourne shell" as I did. Following UNIX/POSIX nomenclature, Bourne shell does not include any built-in comparison operators (other than not operator !) and relies fully on the return value of programs, such as test. Unless you want to compile your own program to do what test already does or forego all of its functionality, there is simply no other way.

If you really want to be pedantic, it's POSIX syntax, and not explicitly Bourne shell syntax. Doesn't change the point.

Re: powershell command missing

For-EachObject is % and Which is ?

You can do job control, but it's nowhere near as clean as with *nix shells, i.e. just put & at the end. Here is an older but still relevant high level discussion, and here is the official documentation. Once you get used to it it's fine, but it's still a bit more to type and manage.

At least it's better than cmd, which has no such functionality.

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

There is STILL no admin interface for Microsoft Bookings. It has been years, and STILL the only way to get access to someone's Bookings account is to manually add yourself with Exchange cmdlets. It's absolutely infuriating.

That aside, you should try PS Core. It cleans up a lot of the nonsense since it is essentially a separate product to mainline Windows-bundled PowerShell based on the .NET Framework. Later versions of Windows will likely include it by default once they get feature parity.

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

One of my biggest gripes in PS is trying to write code that can handle single objects or arrays being passed to it. It's the cmdlet/module authors' faults for not always sending one or the other, and there are cmdlets in the standard library that do it. Thankfully it is easy to resolve, but if you don't know what might be sending what before writing something, it can be very painful to debug later.

Re: powershell command missing

The brevity of *nix is because all the commands were abbreviated out of necessity. The real star here is du/POSIX and not really Bash—just imagine what you'd have to do if du didn't exist!

Looking at the example, it's actually not correct. Fixing it you get the below output. (Unfortunately pre and code tags are being horribly butchered by our vulture overlords, sorry.)

PS C:\> Get-ChildItem C:\Users\me | ForEach-Object { Echo $_.Name ; $_ | Get-ChildItem -Recurse | measure-object -property Length -sum }

...

Desktop

Count : 63

Average :

Sum : 10194386

Maximum :

Minimum :

Property : Length

...

Downloads

Count : 26

Average :

Sum : 429328707

Maximum :

Minimum :

Property : Length

...

You're wondering what the syntax is about. We can break it down.

Get-ChildItem C:\Users\me |

Pipe in all children of your user folder. In PowerShell, all pieces of data are .NET objects, and every item returned by Get-ChildItem is fully formed. This is unlike other scripting languages that might return a string for the filename (e.g. Bash). This gives you a lot of flexibility.

ForEach-Object {

Here we iterate over the objects sent thru the pipe. This is similar to piping to read in *nix shell, but over objects instead of strings.

Echo $_.Name ;

This writes the item name to output; echo is an alias for Write-Output. (And its use tells me that the OP may not be very well versed in PS...)

$_ | Get-ChildItem -Recurse |

This is my change. Here we are sending the current object in the loop (in PS it's $_ for ForEach-Object) into Get-ChildItem. OP's example used . which used the current directory. We are using a pipe here instead of -InputObject or using -Path $_.FullName because it's shorter and should be faster.

Aside about loops: You can specify the variable if you use the foreach statement, but you can't use statements (easily) in pipes. ForEach-Object is a "cmdlet" and is able to process pipe input and send output, so that's why it's used here. You can also use -PipelineVariable xyz if the thing you are piping from is a cmdlet, and this will provide the variable xyz to the next scope in the pipe.

measure-object -property Length -sum

This consumes every object sent down the pipe, reads each Length value, which is in this case the file's size and provides a sum.

...But this example also isn't very good. It looks nothing like du output. We can make some changes to better emulate du and make it more "PowerShell"-y.

PS C:\>gci C:\Users\me -pv x|%{$_|gci -r -ea 4|measure Length -s -ea 4|select Sum,@{l='Filename';e={$x.Name}}}|sort Sum -d

Sum Filename

--- --------

429328707 Downloads

10194386 Desktop

2265 Searches

I tried to make it as compact as possible, and the output looks good; here is what it would look like if el Reg didn't murder it. Funny enough, this result from SO that I looked up afterwards does essentially the same thing, though I am making use of some newer language constructs (like -PipelineVariable via the -pv alias). If you are curious I can explain this one too, but it will take more time. It also is not truly faithful to the du experience, as it only shows the toplevel children including files, and does not give a grand total for the toplevel directory. Modified to do that, you would get something like this:

$x='C:\Users\me\Downloads';(gci $x -ad -r -fo -ea 4)+(gi $x)|%{$d=$_;$_|gci -r -fo -ea 4|measure Length -s|select Sum,@{l='Filename';e={$d.Name}}}|sort Sum -d

Sum Filename

--- --------

429329118 Downloads

288174446 folder 2

7952775 folder1

4964601 test

I know it looks esoteric as hell, but keep in mind I am trying to keep it short, which means using all the alises and shortcuts I can. I also must stress, we are essentially re-implementing du here, and that's why it looks so much more verbose. If du or an equivalent existed in PowerShell, it would be as easy as:

du | sort

which is no more verbose than in *nix. But as far as I can see there is no equivalent.

If you wanted to have an experience like that, you could take the snippet I wrote above and put it in a function/cmdlet in your PS profile, which is the PS equivalent to Bash profiles. Though, I would honestly recommend to not use it, since it's not optimized at all, and you are relying on whatever PS implementation you're using to properly handle all the duplicate objects :)

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

Meanwhile in Bourne shell...

if test "$x" -gt 9 -a "$y" -eq 10; then

And yes, this works in Bash.

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

When it first came out, I would have agreed with you. In truth I avoided it for years because "cmd just worked" and "the syntax sucks" and "it makes no sense why they're doing this" and "it's slow as hell".

But then the versions continued to roll out, more modules got developed, the infrastructure got better, and speeds improved greatly. And now we have the largely open-source and multi-platform .NET Core and PowerShell Core, with perfectly acceptable performance and a bevy of useful features. Being able to easily script against .NET Framework/Core objects (or just straight up write in CLR languages and load them at runtime) is such a huge boon, especially when Windows is so tightly integrated with it. There essentially isn't anything you can't do with PowerShell on modern Windows, and it far outshines the capabilities and cruddy syntax of cmd.

Anyway, if you want to talk about bad syntax, let's honestly and objectively take a look at Bash, or really Bourne/POSIX shell in general, and all their ilk. You mean to tell me x="hello world"; echo "${var%world}" is self-evident without already knowing what it means? Or the fact that you can't put spaces around the = when assigning a variable, which has tripped up every newbie? Or the other hundred non-trivial hurdles you have to work around to make a good script? The grass is not always greener on the other side. Even in Windows-land, ask any veteran sysadmin and they will tell you every which way cmd syntax sucks, and how inflexible and error-prone it is; it even shares some of the problems that Bourne shell does, like assigning variables.

Fact of the matter is PowerShell is a hell of a lot more expressive than its competitors, even if the syntax is still a little wonky after all its revisions. I'd take it over cmd any day, and if I didn't know anything about *nix shell and weren't already used to it, I would probably take it on Linux too.

Crooks steal NFTs worth '$3m' in Bored Ape Yacht Club heist

Re: Said this before, I'll say it again.

An important aspect to the idea of "scarcity" and resultant value of virtual items in general can be explained by comparing to the ship of Theseus. For example, when an NFT is minted, what is gained is a specific, original, and non-reproducible token—its not the contents or target of the NFT or anything related to it that is one-of-a-kind, it's the transaction it makes up on the blockchain. Sure, you can copy the shitty monkey PNG the NFT points to, you can even fork the blockchain and potentially duplicate it, but your copy will never be that specific piece of data at that specific time in that specific place. That uniqueness is confirmed and held sacrosant by others in the crypto community, regardless of the actual artistic value of the shitty monkey.

Sadly there is no shitty monkey icon, so take an alien instead. If you squint hard enough...

Re: Said this before, I'll say it again.

It doesn't take much research in the space to see that the majority of people interested in these art/digital item NFTs are any selection of the following:

• Very young and impressionable
• Without a social group and desire somewhere to fit in
• Too unintelligent to actually understand the technology but think they do and that makes them feel self-important
• Trained by Big Videogaming and pop culture to think microtransactions, lootboxes and in-game item economies are a great way to spend a lot of money and have lots of value
• Want to make money and don't actually care about improving the technology, underlying economy, or other humans

Any practical use of NFTs has been completely eschewed by the cryptobros shilling their latest disgusting art project (implemented using URLs to images rather than on-blockchain image data because that's expensive as hell), or trying to replace some perfectly functional existing technology for largely no real benefit (see NFT-based game items, DAOs, many bullshit cryptocurrencies).

Crypto could have been revolutionary. But instead it's turned into one giant Ponzi scheme.

When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue

You can still embed the data directly instead of using a URI, but the costs for doing so are incredibly high. Even the shitty pixel images that people were minting—which used little storage space thanks to their small size—have mostly switched to centralized servers due to how cost-prohibitive it is.

Unless by "a small NFT setup" you are implying a new from-zero blockchain, you're wrong. As the complexity of the blockchain increases, so do the computational and storage costs, and those costs are spread throughout the entire ecosystem—they don't magically lessen by keeping the number of transactions you are adding low.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Sorry, most web analytics platforms already track the movement of your mouse to generate heatmaps and increment the strength of interests, and if you take a moment to do some self-observation, you may find that your mouse often trails your vision on things you consider clicking or that interest you. It's a hard habit to break if you do it, hence why I block all analytics platforms...

If you don't have that problem though, then by all means continue waving.

Re: Ta for the heads-up :-)

Add another to the list, Textadept: https://orbitalquark.github.io/textadept/

It's a breeze to configure and works in GUI and CUI with mostly the same settings shared between. I have my own almost-vi bindings mixed with CUA stuff I'm used to.

Are they raving?

What about a rabbit test? But I imagine the symptoms would make you feel fuzzy on the outside?

There's no furry icon so I settled with this.

Re: vim? Backslider!

Pff, I flip bits in the registers with bare wires. Get on my level kiddo.

Should we expect to keep communication private in the digital age?

I'm so sorry.

Not sure about the use of "vulturistic" there

Sorry, I was being unintentionally speciesist to our vulture overlords. Such a horrible mistake will not happen again. I willingly flog myself 1000 times in repentance.

We get the privacy we deserve from our behavior

Re: confused

I see security questions as as a type of alternate, secondary password, or account recovery tokens. All of mine are procedurally generated unreadable streams of text. I can't wait for the day when a phone technician is forced to sit there while I read out my question's answers.

I am pretty sure anyone that installs uBlock Origin has that garbage blocked by default anyway, so sorry that I and millions of other people am depriving websites of such incredibly useful data... Not.

Quite simply, I don't want my data ingested by Google/Alphabet if I can help it, and part of the reason why I don't is because it is the "industry standard [for] website tracking". I don't give a hoot about their privacy policies or terms of service because we both know they will be worming and weaseling their way around with their horde of lawyers to extract as much data from you as possible while still having their legalese read good.

Also, I very much doubt a GP, who probably gets more referrals from other doctors and hospitals as well as insurance network searches than it does Google search results, is particularly worried about vigorously uplifting their SEO and ensuring users click through. If they don't get a new patient I don't think they would care, I shre wouldn't.

Also they agreed to remove it, that shows to me at least that the analytics data wasn't very useful to them anyway.

I am appalled by the number of people that voted for on this topic, especially here.

Do I expect, as in the sense of our current reality and what companies and governments are actually doing, privacy on the Internet? It is unfortunately unlikely, and I personally do not expect it, which is why I take extra steps to ensure I am safe.

But SHOULD we? Not in what currently is, but in what there is potential for? Thinking in terms of "oh, it's already happening, so we should just accept it", is not only terrifyingly pessimistic, but sets a dangerous precedent that others will follow. The only way we will get our privacy back from vulturistic corporations and overreaching government organizations is by declaring unchallenged that we have a right to our privacy for the information we do not openly disclose, and if we provide that data to a third party in confidence, do not wish to be disclosed by any potential data holders. We SHOULD expect and demand it, and if our reality does not match those expectations, then something needs to change.

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

Sorry, apparently I used the wrong icon.

Re: Transcendental question

What is the deliciousness factor of a spherical pi? Is it more delicious than a normal pi?

Re: The State changed its tune

Get off your high horse.

Name me a religion that is not based on unsound and unproven belief in an entity or action that cannot be observed or even proven to exist by scientific methods. It would be more difficult to find one that doesn't than it would be to name all of the religions that follow that generalization.

While not every religious person may fully believe in the truth of their religious belief system's deity or deistic ability, you cannot deny that the central purpose of not only every religion I can think of, but I assume all known religions is to circulate and support that belief (if it isn't to con people out of money ala Scientology).

The use of "man" here clearly represents all people. For centuries the word has been used in nearly every language to represent the human race. You know that and yet you still nitpick. The use of words is to represent our ideas and thoughts, which means the words themselves may not have the same power that you personally assign them in the eyes of the speaker you lambast. The intent was clearly and obviously not to damage women or in some way make them inferior, so why is it important to complain about? For example, I call women "dudes" because I call everyone "dude", that does not mean I hate women or see them as inferior, because that is not my intent. And because the average, not Twitter brainwashed person (yes that was a personal attack) understands my intent, they understand I mean no harm in the use of my words, and to this day no woman has ever complained that I call then "dude". Hell my girl calls everyone "dude" too including other girls.

In addition, I find it hilarious that you decry the, as you seem to be implying, classical use of the word "man" to define the human race, while trying to attack someone's stance against religions, many of which have deeply-rooted misogyny within them and are responsible for horrible atrocities and inequality against women etc. Remember in Christianity where women were used as tokens of reward to men in the bible and treated as essentially disposable? When, after allowing Satan to murder Job's wife, God simply gave him another and called it good? Or how about the treatment of women in Islam? Getting stoned for not wearing your full-body coverings seems really cool, let's defend those poor religions from being generalized.

I am apalled by and cannot sympathize with people that posit themselves like you.

Haha hey guys check this out:

sptth://illegalporn.moc!

What? That's not a website. Why are you saying something so illogical? Why are you looking at me like that? Look at it, does that look like a valid URL?

Re: Email

Oh no, my WhatsApp message was encrypted and decrypted to get to my intended recipient, guess I should arrest myself.

Oh no, now I visited a HTTPS website, whatever shall I do. Guess I'm going to jail again.

Re: Wondering if some monetary damages would make sense. The "american way"

You said everything I would have. Good shout.

Re: Wondering if some monetary damages would make sense. The "american way"

Why does everything have to be about race? Can't he just be a plain idiot?

Sorry, those images must also be decoded to be displayed on your screen, unless it's RAW or some formats of BMP. 10 years in the slammer, punk.

Massive cyberattack takes Ukraine military, big bank websites offline

Re: Defacement

Wealthy Aristocratic Federation, they got tired of the banks having more money than them.

Re: Parting Shot?

I definitely think this is more of Russia's/the USSR's classic "burn them from the inside" strategy they have been employing over the decades. Make the Ukranian people fear the direction the government is taking them and give them the idea (warranted or not) that their infrastructure is insecure and fallible. I'm sure Russia's goal is to increase the number of legitimate pro-unification/pro-Russia citizens until it reaches a point like what happened in Donbass. From then they can continue to shuffle in arms through Luhansk an Donetsk to provide to the separatists and sit back with their feet up to watch the chaos unfold, maybe poke it with a stick every now and again.

Re: Preparedness vs Lassitude

Nice fanfiction. Do you self-insert the US every time you schizopost?

RAID expansion comes to OpenZFS at last

Re: Yes yes yes!

I would personally recommend you do. Yes, back when ZFS outside of Solaris barely had any functionality out of the gate (no manual scrubs, oh my) and there were multiple forks for different distros, I would have certainly not recommended it unless there was no other solution, it wasn't ready for primetime by any stretch of the imagination. But by this point, since the OpenZFS merger, there is a command for basically anything you want to do with the system and you are generally no longer restricted on what you want to do. I would not hesitate to use it for production, though I would probably hesitate to update it very frequently, as I ran into this issue myself after an update.

I would also say OpenZFS is probably more stable on FreeBSD, though I have not used a BSD in long enough to say that for sure, and they have been making strides to get feature parity with FreeBSD and Linux. (Solaris/Oracle compatibility is another story.) Here on Alpine Linux, that bug I linked is the only issue I've run into using ZFS on root, encrypted volumes, the System Attributes feature, and more, so my own empirical evidence says it's "stable enough" at least for my uses. Performance has also improved on Linux to the point that only the most heavy of FS I/O will show a clear winner to simpler filesystems like ext or XFS.

If you don't need the features ZFS provides, or if you need redline performance, by all means don't use it. But the tools are easy enough to use by now and the features so plentiful that it can probably suit many different use-cases. I for one use bookmarks and snapshots to do incremental backups to an off-site pool, which is not something you can easily do with a more traditional FS setup.

Also, on the topic of bugs, as far as I can see the GitHub tracker is in decent enough shape for such a large project. You should also pay attention to just how much is fixed on the reg, and not just the open issues. I definitely get where you're coming from though, but I myself have learned to expect a little jank in any project that isn't part of some corporate monolith... and even then, that doesn't guarantee quality (coughWindowscough)

Disclaimer: I am probably biased toward ZFS since I use it extensively.

Re: monsters...

Yes, the combination of block device/physical volume management, logical volume management, and filesystem into one is absolutely a boon for ZFS. Being able to see the entire landscape from one vantage point (or two with zfs vs zpool on CLI) is incredible. Compare and contrast to the pain of setting up RAID encryption the "traditional way", and I never want to go back. This is ignoring the great features ZFS offers like mentioned.

Re: Yes yes yes!

ZFS offers a userland tool to access the low-level parts of your block devices, vdevs, and pools: zdb. It does not hide anything from you and allows you to see all features, fields, and structures of your pools. ZFS isn't "magic", and is actually very well structured, with its use of feature flags and vendor extensions being clearly deliniated both in source code and in practice, as zdb will show you. Its simplicity might seem untrustworthy, but in reality it is actually that straightforward. Furthermore, the userland tools you are provided with are about as "manual" as you can get without redesigning the wheel—really, you could make the same claim about Btrfs, or any other monolithic, all-encompassing filesystem.

...Of course, no matter how ultimiately trivial ZFS's various systems are once you understand them, there is a good bit of jargon when you dig past the usual basic use-cases, with a lot of additional features, extensions, and configuration tweaks whose purpose and use may not be immediately apparent. There is no shying away from the fact that ZFS, being a well-matured project with lots of different tools under its belt, has a degree of complexity, but you also don't have to use or even enable the features you don't want to use on your pool. It is additionally possible to decypher ZFS internals if you have some lower-level knowledge in other filesystems, and the ZFS official documentation (both for end-users and developers) is very thorough. There are also lots of blog posts where even the practically ancient ones give lots of useful insight. Since a lot of people use it, including large corporations, there is no shortage of experts either, of which you might be able to pick the respective brains of if you ever see the chance arrive.

As an example, while the task seemed daunting at first, I managed to recover data from a completely dusted pool (a problem caused by my own negligence, no fault of ZFS—in fact if I were using it more effectively, I would have had proper redundancy that could have rebuilt the pool) by manually accessing the device with zdb. It is a very useful tool and gives you a curated, structured, parseable view of your data in a way that I have never seen from any other filesystem, and while the ease of something like extundelete would certainly be welcomed if anyone would want to make something like that, I ultimately had everything I needed to play part-time data analyst and recover what I needed without too much hassle.

I used this article at the time to get my bearings with zdb. It should still be relevant. Haven't had the need to look anything up since due to a lack of problems, now that I know what I'm doing.

Huh, my CPU fan just started spinning at max speed... Must be Windows Defender doing another cheeky silent scan.

IT technician jailed for wiping school's and pupils' devices

Microsoft 365 and Intune is tightly integrated with Windows 10 and 11's built-in MDM, and plenty of schools have switched to it. When logging in to desktop apps from home, you must make sure to select "Do not manage my device" or whatever it is during initial setup, or else your device will be enrolled in Intune and covered by corporate policy. Unfortunately most are either too daft or too impatient to read or understand the prompt they are given, and as such will happily enroll their own personal devices, making them surprised for some reason when the dialogue that read "Dude we get full access to all your shit" results in all their shit being deleted.

Frankly it's partially their own fault for not reading, and their devices would not have been able to be reset had they not consented to it in the first place.

Critical 'remote escalation' flaw in Android 12 fixed in Feb security patch batch

Re: Android 12 is a dumpster fire

You decided to join right as Android committers decided to lock down apps even more into an iOS-like walled garden without the interoperability or feature set of said walled garden, unless you're a Google user :)

I once said it was dishonest to say Android was exclusively a Google product since Android is/was an open ecosystem, but damn me to the Google Gulag if they don't have a stranglehold on it now.

This is going well: Meta adds anti-grope buffer zone around metaverse VR avatars

Re: You got to be kidding...

I tried to feel up the market, but I got arrested.

US grounds investors in Chinese drone maker DJI over 'Xinjiang human rights abuses'

The worst part for me is that there are a huge number of incredible craftsmen that have emerged out of the Chinese intellectual theft and sweatshop economy, but getting to those vendors still requires you to support the regime in some manner. I like a number of the brands on SHENZENAUDIO for example, and have had one on one interaction with some of their staff, and they're all pleasant, smart people, yet stuck in an ecosystem that I would rather not support.

Do I shelve my curiosities and worldly desires to decry a despotic government, or do I enjoy its and its peoples' spoils and fund the machine? This is the position most of the world is in that is in relations with China, I think, including those in the Belt and Road Initiative.

There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Why not put your priorities in the right order and point the fingers at the biggest culprits?

I don't see how that helps when all parties are at fault, but okay.

You fear China's military expenditure while ignoring the actual reality of Western military intervention across the globe.

I fear China's continual expanse and quiet control of nations and states via incurring massive debts and placing strategic outposts around the globe. I despise Western (in your case focused on the US) military intervention and wish they would stop. They act like they are the saviors of the modern world.

Do you raise concerns about the 'israeli' military industrial complex and their activities in Palestine?

Yes. The Middle East in general is a constant hotbed of human rights abuses and potential warcrimes, all in the name of a stretch of dead earth that no one else gives a shit about and long-dead religious figures. None of it is any kind of excuse for the kinds of atrocities committed in the name of their gods and their goals. For your clarification, I am talking about both sides. And when the guillotine falls, the ones that lose the most are the civilians, of course.

Do you raise concerns about the Saudi and UAE military complex and their destruction of Yemen?

See above.

What about your own country's involvement and it's naval parades in the South China Sea?

You are assuming I'm of the United States. While correct, don't assume my position based on that. The US has no reason to be doing about 80% of the military action it is, and is only doing so to at the behest/to further the coffers of the defense contractors and arms dealers that make a killing (ha) off of war.

What about the NATO Cabal and their constant and buffoonish attempts to incite WW3 with Russia?

NATO doesn't have much power in and of itself, but the aggression toward Russia has been somewhat untoward. Nor am I in support of the nonsense that often goes on at the UN. Of course, one cannot ignore China's pandering to both Ukraine and Russia in an attempt to stay on good trading terms with Ukraine and continue to get support from Russia. China is not innocent here, though they may act like it. (Aside: Best case solution would be for Ukraine to chill out and abide by the treatise they signed to avoid an all-out war; this time they will lose more than Crimea and Donbas, as Russia already has its foot in the door and has spread dissent throughout the nation.)

I doubt you do. Instead, you raise 'concerns' about a Country that has rarely engaged in military activities outside its borders in the last 70 years!

You show your true colors. China's consistent and obvious expansion and growth of power outside of its borders, militaristic in nature or not, is a cause for concern. Their massive army and constant development of new tech is a cause for concern. Their grip on a significant portion of the world's production is a cause for concern. If you don't see that, you are either blind or attempting to push your own agenda. Being the lesser of evils does not miraculously make an evil a good, and being the lesser evil only because you lie and deceive and distract and work outside of the limelight (or redirect it) doesn't help.

I am not saying other countries and nations are not guilty of the same things China are doing, because many are. But China is finding and utilizing footholds where no one else even has a chance to step—either that or they are very good at making it seem like they are, and are faking it until they make it.

How ridiculous is that?

I agree, your pandering is pretty ridiculous.

China is the last country on earth one should be concerned about - unless it's being provoked by the Anglo-American Neo-Imperial complex and it's "Five Eyes" old boys club ...

In fact, I haven't read something so ridiculous in a good while.

12-year-old revives Unity desktop, develops software repo client, builds gaming environment for Ubuntu...

Re: Your reporter was very fond of Unity

I'll have you know, my very correct opinions on the disadvantages of everything I don't like are forged in the deep fires of having to deal with dumb bullshit, with a sprinkle of indescribable and indistinguishing rage. Therefor, it is my pleasure to serenade your ears with my copious curses and desk-punching so that you may not suffer the same fate.