It is sadly not (my current draw is closer to 300-400 mA at 4.8v). Even if it was though, the current chromecast doesn't have the hardware to support it.
I've had no such issues with speed. My chromecast is generally on by the time I've figured out what I want to watch and buffering is less than 15 seconds to start the video. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
This seems like such a minor thing to people who live in houses/rural areas, but I took home a Chromecast that is completely unusable for video because I live in a densely packed apartment building. My TV is RIGHT next to my router, but there's so many 2.4GHz networks and so much interference that Netflix buffers like crazy.
There is nothing stopping any nation with ICBMs from launching them at Washington DC, and with enough warheads one would hit, possibly all would hit. But it would be suicide for the country that launched them.
Yes, anti-ship missiles and rail-gun rounds would likely devastate a carrier group. Part of any strategy against a country with that capability would be to take out those targets first (NRO keeping watch on those locations, CIA and NSA helping out). Trillions of dollars are spent specifically to keep track of missiles, foreign troops, to improve defenses, and to improve first-strike capabilities. Even a rail-gun and anti-ship missile can possible be countered, there are a lot of people working on making it happen.
Part of the deterrent is that we have battle-tested long-range radar systems that can detect where missiles are launched from. The US has dozens of nuclear and non-nuclear VERY VERY large bombs in every corner of Earth that would be used to absolutely destroy whatever launched that missile at a super-carrier.
The reason to have war-games is to find weaknesses in strategy and defenses.
If nothing else, I feel safer with a dozen super-carriers on constant patrol.
Having aircraft available in a warzone in a way that carriers provide is invaluable. It's the reason the Marines have invested in their own smaller carriers (and the sole reason the F35 needs a VTOL version).
Well it's a good thing you feel safer. I was particularly concerned by this:
"The leader of the red team employed brilliant asymmetric tactics resulting in 16 U.S. ships, including two supercarriers, going to the bottom in a very short span of time. The Navy stopped the war game, prohibited the red team from using these tactics and then reran the exercise declaring victory on the second day."
If true, that's not 'finding weaknesses in strategy and defenses,' that's 'sticking your head in the sand.'
This is absolutely par for the course in training exercises. Several reasons occur immediately. The persons involved may want to cover their butts, and report a more positive outcome. OR, the value of training for failure is very limited in value; scenarios that allow everyone to practice their skills may fit the mission goals better.
My son, while in the Army in Korea, led a 6-person team as 'insurgents' in an exercise against a company. After the scripted exercises they were allowed to do anything they wanted. Result: rear gate breached after a feint; company HQ tent blown up by 'suicide bomber' (only casualty on his side); and three quarters of the company killed by his roaming snipers. They only stopped the exercise when his 'insurgents' ran out of ammo. This exercise was of course never part of the after-action report :)
If we already know a vulnerability exists, why allow it to be repeated if the goal is to find unknown vulnerabilities? It's not about winning the game, it's about finding weaknesses in defenses.
You can't just "launch all nukes" every time in a war-game, everybody already knows that works.
There is also the good chance that we do have the capability to defend against the specific scenario, but employing it is either too expensive, temporarily unavailable, or too secretive.
Maybe the US Navy just wanted other nations to think that we can't detect submarines at those depths. Then in a war-time situation we can say, "oh, yeah, we were just bluffing, we can easily spot you at those depths".
If the highly-public and multinational war-game involves testing the exact ranges of submarine detection, maybe they had good cause to stop the war-game, and it wasn't necessarily because of losing.
It's also possible the red team was deviating from the rules of the scenario. These things are never free-for-alls, where you make up your tactics as you go. When you're moving that many ships and people unless it's somewhat coordinated you risk injuries and deaths. In a training exercise you're just trying to make sure everyone is doing what they're supposed to do.
If the Navy wants to explore tactics and vulnerabilities computer simulations are a much better fit.
They got trillions worth of defense for free by hacking the US also.
You can't blame them at all for doing that though, if someone or another country has some technology or information that the US wants and can't access then I'm sure we would employ similar (or much more devastating) techniques to acquire it.
That does seem insanely expensive. Maybe the price was quoted in $/m^2 and the unit was mistakenly switched to square feet at some point?
An alternative explanation is that the owners of these houses don't really want to sell them at all for some reason. Maybe keeping the money tied in unsold real estate is somehow preferable to having cash or other assets, due to e.g. government housing subsidies or something?
Nobody wants to take a loss on real estate in China, so they'll just wait until the market is better or they get compensated by the government when they eventually "redevelop" the land (those apartments only have an effective 10-20 year lifespan given quality of current construction methods). They don't take out big loans to buy these places, so there is no liquidity pressure. This is good and bad, no housing market crash but a huge zombie market of low turn over of second hand housing even in much more active first tier cities.
"those apartments only have an effective 10-20 year lifespan"
Economical or political crisis hits, and they'll have to live in those apartments for 50+ years. We've been there already.
How do you build an apartment block these days anyway so it just lasts 20 years? With modern materials it's a bit unexpected.
It's a royally crappy idea anyway. Imagine selling one of those apartments to a person aged 40, who then promptly retires and have to live 20 years in a crumbling home or lose one and go homeless.
> How do you build an apartment block these days anyway so it just lasts 20 years? With modern materials it's a bit unexpected.
My rented apartment in central Beijing is about 10 years old, considered fairly high end (we pay 7500 RMB/month for a one bedroom), and is already showing signs of deterioration (and our complex is considered "good" and well managed compared to the other ones in our fairly middle class Sanyuan Qiao area). It is a combination of poor construction techniques + poor maintenance + poor planning. The government and development companies "built to build" with little focus on the long term.
They are already tearing down developments made 15, 10, or 5 years ago, or even before they are finished* for "re-development."
"Modern materials" doesn't necessarily mean the most durable or well-suited to the task. It typically means cheap to produce (therefore readily available) and visually... acceptable.
The concrete China uses is pretty cheap actually, and the labor used to put it together is fairly unskilled. They have to build much thicker as a result, which leads to higher maintenance costs (which isn't done) and much quicker degradation.
Prices skyrocketed due to housing as an investment. It's a very peculiar thing but basically it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Houses go from $100k to $120k in two years? Alright well let's buy a house as an investment on a shitty salary, it's free money.
Until everyone said that, and the rate of prices going up kept increasing, and kept reinforcing the investment opportunity myth.
Basic bubble, basically. And it was of course fueled by insane growth in wages.
It's insane. You basically had 20-30 years of 15% growth annually. 20 years of that is 16x. 30 years is 66x. It wasn't quite 15%, but probably 10-11% on average the past 30 years. That means housing prices will naturally rise, and when they naturally rise for decades and there's seemingly free money if you invest in a home, it's easy for an investment bubble to arise that even outpaces wage growth.
Then add to that two more elements: gigantic internal migration (China has internal passports, it's very interesting. But it doesn't stop huge urbanisation).
How big? Well 25 years ago urbanisation was about 25%. Today it's about 55%.
Then add to that population growth of 200 million extra people. What do you get? No joke, half a billion extra people living in cities compared to just 25 years ago, in China. That's insane. That's literally the entirety of North America (more than 20 countries), or all of South America times 1.5, or all of Europe and then some, living in cities, many of them existing ones.
And that's how you get homes worth $200 - 400k, for Chinese who have a $7k GDP per capita, and middle class wages deviating from that only slightly higher.
Partially it's alright. China will still urbanise, it will have to demolish and rebuild many buildings, and its population will add another 100m people. But on the other hand, it's an extremely worrying asset bubble we don't talk about enough. People forget that China was, though far from alone, in some ways quite instrumental in dampening the effects of the economic crisis. One can worry what happens if an economic crisis arises from China itself, as asset prices in some areas are just absolutely batshit insane and will have to be written off at some point, which collapses the house of cards. (selling overpriced property for nothing, which already happens but is inevitable on a larger scale, reduces all property values, who are overpriced too, escalating a major selloff that'll leave tons of debt in its wake. Familiar story of course.)
Sure, assuming housing prices don't continue to grow. But lending rates in China are about 6% or so, just the interest alone on a $200k mortgage is absolutely insane for an ordinary Chinese person. It's almost twice the annual gdp per capita.
Meanwhile here in the Netherlands a typical house will set you back $250k but the per capita gdp is $50k. Of course the Netherlands is wealthier, but you'd think its housing prices would reflect that and show a similar income/housing ratio, roughly speaking, but it's just completely different.
Housing is in a huge bubble and there's a crazy gap between wages and housing in China. If wages continue to grow while houses don't, sure... but that'd also mean people will sell their homes because they're no good as an investment anymore, which pops the bubble, and that'll create a ton of debt as people are stuck with $200k mortgages on a home worth $100k or less, that's structurally so unsound it'll be demolished within 20-30 years.
My outlook is pretty pessimistic tbh. Although it does seem to be a problem confined to particular areas, that must be said.
I'm mildly optimistic. I'm recently back from Saigon which went through a similar thing - new builds were stupid expensive against GDP per capita and peaked around 2008 or so. Then:
"house prices can drop as quickly as they rise. Vietnam's did with a vengeance in late 2010 as the economy slipped. Prices are down by 50 per cent in some parts of the country, and no one is predicting a rebound. Banks are weighed down with bad debt, much of it secured against property..."
Economic growth dropped from about 7% nationally to about 5% and maybe 0% in Saigon but is now back to growing 7%. Property in the overpriced new builds is still down 50% or so but showing signs of recovery - life goes on indeed it's kind of booming just now after being pretty quite a couple of years back. I imagine China will be similar.
They just have a blacklist of sites that they block, it's not much more sophisticated than that from what I read. All of the localstorage, cookies, and other tracking across domains goes away if you filter requests like that. I'm sure they are doing more things, but they have to make sure it doesn't break a large number of sites, and if a site is broken it seems like an "all or nothing" allow/deny system, which is not ideal.
I use uMatrix and it defaults to blocking all 3rd party scripts unless they're globally trusted or have been trusted in the past. This creates lots of problems for many websites. Most new websites I visit I have to enable some 3rd party scripts, refresh, make sure there are not any critical javascript errors in the console, then I can properly use the site. Normal users cannot be expected to do this, they must have it work the first time or they will freak out.
