Read your Machiavelli. Read Sun Tsu. Whatever works. Clown suits work (see Miyazaki).

Explains soulless zombie walking.

Severe cognitive dissonance.

And Jack Vance (languages of pao), for that matter. The theory is bunk, however popular, and however overwrought the leading contender might be, namely, Noam Chomsky's Universal Base Hypothese. SW is to UBH as alchemy is to the periodic table, so the cheerful sight of Stephenson refusing to take his own pompous bunk seriously is kind of fun.

What's wrong with issuing a browser that doesn't track in the first place? Then users could "Opt In" by downloading the pink version instead of the friendly orange version?

"Guidelines" are CYA, not serious concern about user privacy.

It's not the one billion entangled bits so much. Its the terabyte of entangled kittens...

All that inconvenient history could put to far better use broken down and sold as aquarium ballast.

Film noire, please. No "international" version, just start with enough boobs and blood in the first place. No Harrison Ford, though? Really? Let's hope the story (if any) follows the idiotic Deckard-is-a-Skinjob like Rachel and Roy-Priss's boy comes down from Tannhauser Gate to discuss eugenics with Deckard-Rachel's twin girls. Rise of the planet of the grapes of wrath.

Not impressed here. Not even convinced.

Hardware gets cheaper and better by the minute. That means your choices are degrading your chances to recover archived information as soon as it enters storage. It's a paradox. I have no answer to that; I've been bitten by storage on Apple ][+ floppies which can't been read on any current hardware I've got. Hopefully, there's an aftermarket for people who can afford to read the obsolete hardware of the past and transfer it to the nonexistent hardware of the future. Maybe there's a standard that won't be intentionally subverted by market forces (emphasis on force), but I dunno what it is. Pray that all that expensive data remains decryptable, if its encrypted. Your best bet may be to pay for redundancy at every weak point in your system.

IIRC, Admiral Hopper was just as wired as the Professor, too.

I'm blowing 5 moderater points to contribute to this diatribe, but... Evolve? Really?

When I think evolution, I consider the slowly emerging symbiosis between wasps and dicotyledons during the Cretaceous, something that took about 80 million years to get right (and less than 200 to shove to the brink of extinction by apes).

When I think evolution, as well, I consider that "reason" is unreasonable about the forces that push plastic DNA into every available free space in a four dimensional ecosystem that owes far more to Yin than Yang. Malthusian drama? Puh-leez.

When I think of reason, I am most often reminded that most often it is not cogent appreciation, but barratry, that passes for intellect in the brains of apes. When reason finally annihilates the human race, I will suffer, but when I get to address Gaea about her mistakes this time around, I will suggest that next time, no brains for apes might be a good idea.

"Jobs notoriously hates biographies..."

Depends, does it not, on Lisa 1 or Lisa 2. The machine version was notorious.

You're probably too young to remember when cops were pigs? Still are. They never got reeducated because the communes were owned by hippies instead of Commies. Good old Charlie Manson gave cops such a good name by comparison.

If it weren't Penrose, who'd care? Einstein already had a dice and universe dichotomy, and the rest of us approach these subjects in order to shelve them under My Opinion Exactly. Much gas, not so much Hindenberg either way.