They’ll pay a very heavy price. How far is the Taiwan strait? If you think D-day is bad you haven’t seen anything yet. Many wouldn’t even make it to the beach.

Having said that they do have excess males, they’ll probably be better off to lose those. Because only the numpty bellends join the armed forces, the ones with more than 2 brain cells have some self preservation. Noone joins the armed forces if you have other prospects in China.

Many people will lose their only child. This cannot be good as many people will protest. However the government has one advantage over other countries.

China isn’t as unified as propaganda leave you to believe. Noone gives a shit about anyone other than their immediate family members. You can see this when people get run over and noone helps. Or how they push and do everything to be first in line with no regard for anyone else.

Money is king in China thesedays. They will probably have no issue shaking down or worse their countrymen if they get a bonus or two, all they have to do is import people from the next province or two to do the dirty work.

Not saying it’s a smart idea but just saying they could probably contain the blowback of the body bags coming home and lose the most unproductive of society in the process.

We’ll see if Xi goes fuck it I wouldn’t be around for the consequences when he gets older. He’s 70 now, in a decade he will be 80. The average age in China is 78. He probably will beat that as he would have the best health care but beyond that it’s not guaranteed. So not much to lose for him.

Guess which of your competitors offer remote working and has a product that smokes you?

Haven’t touched VMware for years Hyper-V does everything I need.

Now with Azure I don’t even need to manage the virtualisation just use an arm template to spin something up in 2 secs. I know Azure compute uses something based off Hyper-V, haven’t really used AWS, does Amazon use technology from VMware for their virtualisation?

China and Taiwan can be one country tomorrow. I’ve said it a hundred times.

All China has to do is cede full control to Taiwan. It will be governed by Taiwan but it will be one country.

Yes I know it’s too hard politically and unrealistic. Because they don’t really want unification they want control.

I think if they passed the legislation first as a trial and then if it went well put it through a referendum there would be more support.

I'm not saying he would but he could just force it through legislation now, with the greens support and independents support, Pocock is in ACT who was the only place to vote yes, I think they have enough to pass.

Sure it will go against the results of the referendum, or "the will of the people" but it will be a legal way to do it. I think if it went through legislation it would become like GST, deeply unpopular at the time but it just becomes fait accompli and noone would dare reverse it. Because once in noone wants the optics of being "the racist in the parliament" besides maybe ONP.

I hope you have that machine on a separate VLAN that's completely firewalled, segregated from the rest of your network, with access to the internet but not the rest of your LAN.

Because if it does then other devices on your network would be potentially vulnerable.

I've worked with PC's that are out of support and the company too tightarse to pay for windows updates. The LAN cable was unplugged and you could only access it by physically being on the PC, but it won't work in your instance as you need the internet to play games.

It sure does. But if businesses haven't panicked then a home user doesn't need to.

Reviewing and redoing intune policies, deployments, software compatibility testing, driver deployment ,reconfiguring autopilot and testing through the rings is an absolute pain in the arse.

For personal deployments you can deploy within one day. No need to worry about any of the above. So if businesses aren't worried yet neither should regular consumers.

Wow I hope you're not doing your banking on that PC.

Looking at the CVE for windows 7 after January 2020 (end of support)

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/17153/Microsoft-Windows-7.html?vendor_id=26

Doesn't look pretty. Many exploits to give attackers elevation of privileges (administrator to your PC), remote code execution etc.

These don't require you to download "dodgy" software. It happens because parts of the windows source code isn't coded to perfection (as with all software) and then the attackers exploit the code in a way not originally intended by Microsoft.

This risk is elevated when the operating system is out of support because different windows systems share the same code base, so when Microsoft releases security updates and CVE reports to the internet, attackers can read these and find out how to attack unpatched systems even if they did not know about the exploit beforehand.

So it's imperative to apply the patches in a timely manner usually within 24-48 hours after release.

On a side note windows 7 isn't out of support, Microsoft is still releasing patches for it along with XP. Many enterprises have to use these operating systems for compatibility with their software, they are getting the updates because they're paying Microsoft millions of dollars for them. So are you saying that other users of windows 7 are wasting their millions of dollars for "overrated" security updates?

Windows 7? How are you getting your security updates?

If it ain't broke don't fix it. Windows 10 isn't even close to end of support.

If enterprise users haven't moved over then individual users don't need to.

I will move over before support finishes but make no mistake that'll be because I'm forced to due to security reasons and not because I want to.

My windows 10 enterprise has been running flawlessly.

China can unite with Taiwan tomorrow if they want to peacefully.

It's been done before. Look how East and West Germany did it. Overnight.

All China has to do is be East Germany and let Taiwan be West Germany and it will be sorted. But obviously they don't want that because being one country isn't their main goal.

It's the system that is the issue. Without checks and balances if it wasn't Xi it would just be another guy with a different name.

I believe Deng Xiaoping had two successors lined up last being Hi Jintao, so a dictator was always going to seize power when xi came on.

So you can replace until Xi showed up with until anyone showed up that term.

So if small businesses aren't what you call producing anything of value then what would you consider would be something that does produce something of value? Out of curiosity.

Because those small businesses are providing services to the community/other businesses which wouldn't be able to function without them. That's not the case with the censorship pencil pushers the businesses there would be able to function better without the extra layer of bureaucracy.

And big 4 accounting and investment banking is required, they fill a market in outsourcing by providing expertise where it doesn't make sense for every company to have a full time employee on it. Good for short term projects the places I worked in all use them. Investment banking well you have to spend money to make money so yes they're providing value by providing the investment for other businesses to grow.

Well let's see, I don't know because I don't live there. Not everyone/everything lives in/revolves around America.

In any case I'll bite then. Everyone I know who's in business degrees are of minimum big 4 or in an investment bank at a minimum, the smarter ones have their own small business.

Are you seriously saying those are less productive than someone who censors information and makes it harder for people to conduct business?

And to your second point the overproduction of housing is two fold, firstly it's one of the very few investable resources there and second the local government needed to sell the housing to raise taxes and needed to build despite demand or lack of due to keeping people in a job.

They are own goaling their economy with these counter productive pencil pusher jobs that provide zero or negative input to the economy.

Real estate crisis, reduction of jobs especially in the younger population, lack of investment from overseas because of zero covid for too long forcing companies to move supply chains and that's before picking a fight with everyone causing uncertainty which makes it less investable.

Cutting down the "private" sector which provided the majority of the jobs because that would threaten pooh bear.

It'll make China weaker in the long run, but the people in charge won't care, they'll be long dead before then. All the people in the top powers are all multi billionaires, even if they lost 95 percent of their wealth they would still live extremely comfortably.

As for the general populace, I like to use the Kim Jong Un anology - a fat man within a nation of skinny men. Not really of importance to the ruling elite.

Funny they're all very patriotic when it comes to these things. However when asked if they personally want to go to war…well, not so patriotic when you have to put your life on the line.

If it’s any consolation it’s pretty bad to say but it might be good for humanity in the end. Half the issues they have is the lack of men caused by a previous war with a figure that Putin is trying to emulate now.

Putin is sending more of his men to their deaths unnecessarily. Could have been avoided by not starting the war. But what’s done is done, now that it is started the men that has been liquidated will help restrict Russia in the future. They still haven’t recovered from WW2.

Her mistake was to do it in a Muslim country. I have a Muslim friend you wouldn’t even know if they didn’t tell you.

Outdrinks everyone, sometimes eats pork but rarely. But that’s because they only get pub food, according to him food just takes up space that can otherwise be occupied by beer/vodka/gin/burbon. Noone else I know Muslim or not goes to this extreme, it can’t possibly be good for their liver.

He’s at least smart enough not to do this in a Muslim country.

Actually for me it’s quite good. Get like 1/3 back from dental. Then a bit back from gym fees. Optical is another one I use regularly and I get a massage a year. And most importantly ambulance cover just in case.

Granted one or two of them I would have skipped if I wasn’t paying private health (optical and massage).

At the higher salaries if people didn’t want to pay the Medicare surcharge and having to buy junk policies they can funnel their discretionary income into investments, the costs of the investments can be negatively geared so you can earn for example a million dollars and only pay 90000 taxable income worth of tax (an extreme example I know). ASX, property, into the business etc. where you reduce your taxable income in exchange for gaining (investable) assets.

I mean Joe Lycett was briefly known as Hugo Boss, name didn’t stick after he changed it back.

There’s actually a famous instance of it happening. K-19. They had to go into the reactor room to fix up the cooling because of botched manufacturing process.

What happened to them after can only be described as gruesome. I’d rather a bullet to the brain after.