China is already the world's largest economy by PPP. It is also #1 trade partner for many nations. On top of that it has its own processors, and is building fabs as well to compete with Taiwan and SK. It is also leading in solar panels, electric cars, trains etc. At this stage, there is little it needs from the rest of the world in terms of tech that it can't acquire.
So thinking that Chinese economy will stall similar to Japan is wishfull thinking and denial at this stage. And China's large population and huge effective territory allows it to handle both low-value and high value manufacturing. Which means that there is no pivot that someone can stop.
129MWh is a laughable amount of storage when you need at minimum 10000MWh per day for 1mln people. So you would need at least $12.5bln to build enough plants for just one day per 1mln people. And that's not counting maintenance. For that price 2-3 nuclear plants can be built which can last 30-50 years unlike the 10-20 years of lithium storage.
Instead of hideously expensive (and potentially explosive) lithium storage, solution should be synthesizing and storing some form of gas. This gas can then be produced and stored in underground locations during summer, and then spent during winter.
Gas turbines can be started within minutes. And majority of grids do not currently use "stabilization" within seconds. This sort of requirement is caused by the unreliable and unpredictive solar/wind generation.
With local apps there are issues of updates, security and platform lock-in. No such issues with web apps. And thanks to modern JS engines, web apps are now fast enough for most tasks.
>>but it's slow and unable to keep up with edits > 500 nodes
It is perfectly possible to build a fast JS app. The one in your example is not well optimized.
It is also perfectly possible to build a clean PHP app. Yet, the overwhelming majority of PHP apps are piles of hacks and the overwhelming majority of JS apps are bloated behemoths, because those are languages that are sloppy or hungry (respectively) by default, these are the paths of their least resistance. With the current "ship it first, fix it maybe later, never pause to think it through" mentality, all you'll ever get is the default.
(And don't get me started on Web security, or rather lack thereof: security is not inherent to web apps"; DROP TABLES; --
The best place to put spyware into is closed source unauditable software.
On Windows the entire system and most well known applications are closed source, therefore not trustworthy, but on Android things are not that different: Android makes heavy use of closed source device drivers and so far any attempt to get a completely open system while keeping all the underlying iron useable has failed because most device manufacturers keep their hardware undocumented, save for Google and a few big players under NDA.
The point is that security is an OR: a chain whose strength depend on the weakest link; if one closed blob can contain a keylogger, having just one in an otherwise 100% open phone still makes the phone 100% potentially not secure.
By your definition, Linux is also insecure since it depends on closed source BIOS and closed source device firmwares, as well as closed source hardware.
Security is a process not a if/else choice, and Android is more secure than Windows because it is open source and you can replace Google parts. Good luck doing that on Windows.
The key is "potentially" and from whom the risk of exploitation comes from. Having one closed driver instead of 20 makes the system statistically a lot less prone to exploitation by the usual malware writers, but if a government or any entity with enough power wants to take advantage of that weak point to install say a keylogger, their chance of success is 100% like it would be on a system that depends on 20 closed blobs.
And yes, Linux (and BSD) is also potentially insecure (or less secure if you prefer), which is the reason why the same effort who brought us a lot of quality Open Source verifiable software now should be directed towards obtaining also Open Hardware. We need to build a culture as we did with Open Source software so that people will understand the importance and associated risks.
I heard a delightful retort recently to this kind of comment:
"And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle"
Who's to say that the architecture can support 4GB, or that adding the components in would only bump up the price by $20, or that ASUS wanted to make something different to the device they made but just didn't know how, or that the goal is to have a device targeted at the 'limited use desktop PC' market, or that users of a limited use desktop PC would find memory the biggest constraint on this device for their particular choice of OS ... and so on.
It's easy to identify ways that you could improve the specifications, and increase the cost, of pretty much any device. It's hubris to believe designers / vendors of hardware are ignorant of this.
I mean, PCs from thirty years ago (when RAM was measured in kilobytes) were good enough to develop on. Quad cores and gigabytes of RAM sure are nice to have, though.
Of course, for a barebones PC, you don't really need "Nice".
They can still do it. If they don't have resources for further development, then just ship it out of kernel as a separate patch/driver for now. That way it will still be open source and will be included in Ubuntu, Archlinux, etc.
Energy generation is not a problem, there is nuclear, sun, wind. Energy storage is. Currently, hydrogen should be a better option for energy storage as it is cheaper than the expensive and explosive lithium-ion batteries. Never mind that lithium-ion loses its capacity on every cycle and requires rare minerals.
I don't think this is a trick - especially as it states "Pay What You Want". They need money to develop the OS and apps. And asking later will result in more hate.
They should include more videos and screenshots so people have a better idea of what they are buying.
So thinking that Chinese economy will stall similar to Japan is wishfull thinking and denial at this stage. And China's large population and huge effective territory allows it to handle both low-value and high value manufacturing. Which means that there is no pivot that someone can stop.