It just doesn't matter.

No, but if they talk shit when they're there you'd hope people would vote them out again. I'm being too idealistic, aren't I?

And they're there because they were voted in by people who sympathise with these views. We get the government we deserve because, as a nation, the bulk of the US is scientifically illiterate. There will continue to be illiterates in power as long as the people are illiterate. Somehow we need to find a way to promote science as a way of thinking and do so without hurting the feelings of the religious right.

They failed in Greenland because they were fuckwits and reared cattle in conditions that couldn't support this. It's amazing they lasted as long as they did. Had they made an effort to live in a more similar manner to the indigenous people, who'd lived there for many centuries, they'd have been ok. The early European settlers didn't have a technology problem, they had a common sense problem.

Oh, fuck, you're right. Yes, tell them that in this manner and you get 5 gigs extra space. As a pleasing side-effect, so do I.

The Wii is a console. I wouldn't call it a fad.

Try Copy. It's cheap and you get a lot of free storage for referring people.

It's April 1st. You're not fooling anyone.

Nobody is saying the former is bad and the latter is OK. It's not an either/or situation: both are bad and people are trying to do something about both. In theory, however, it should be easier to do something about the whales than something about the rainforests.

Yes, of course, it's always been an obvious sham.

Yep, I'm being optimistic--I admit it. I don't think they'd be dumb enough to cripple the product by requiring FB integration. By my reading they haven't even done this with Instagram, so why would they do it with a gaming headset? That would be daft. Of course I could well be wrong, but given the absence of any real information as to what's going on it seems premature to write off the whole thing and just assume FB will fuck it all up. Let's see the product first.

Look, I don't like FB either but you're looking at this in a very one-sided way. As the article points out, Instagram and WhatsApp haven't been subsumed into FB in any obvious way following their acquisition. Go to the websites for those services and you won't see evidence of FB. With Instagram, for instance, it appears from the site that FB sharing is optional (I haven't used the App, but the website indicates this). So from past behaviour, FB haven't done an all-out assimilation of everything they've purchased. In addition, FB have contributed plenty to the opensource community. So there are good things there in addition to the crap they've pulled. Finally, they haven't done hardware before and so this very new territory. We know very little about what FB want to do with OR and, frankly, it doesn't look like they know either. It's quite plausible that they will be hands off. No 180 turns needed to envisage such a scenario.

What FB crap? There is no final product: you don't know what it'll be like yet. Probably it'll just have a FB logo and FB will have some pointless (to you or me) services that utilise VR. If you don't have a FB account and aren't interested in that stuff then likely you just skip it, plug the OR into your PC and game away. We don't know that OR will be used to "push" FB. We don't know anything yet.

FB are now so established and enmeshed into other services that they are unlikely to suffer the fate of previous social networks. Nonetheless, it's hard to shake off the thought that users are fickle and FB's popularity may suddenly wane. Perhaps FB see it that way and they want to branch out into something more "solid", like hardware, or perhaps they've just decided that they have the cash and want to do something cool with it. Either way, it seems likely that this will mean a better Oculus arriving sooner. It might have a FB logo on it, and FB might have services for it. But so what? I don't have a FB account and if I bought an Occulus to play games then why would I worry about FB? I get why there's backlash but in reality, when you strip the emotion from it, it's likely a good thing for VR.

However, it will remain illegal to circumvent DRM. So whilst this law is progress, it's not progressing very far.