Why would it be good for the sciences? Men went to the moon a bunch of times already. What is there left to learn from doing it again? Mars, sure.

I wouldn't say it will never catch on. Big tech firms are notorious for their heavy use of data to make decisions, to the extent that they collect so much data it's turned into a PR problem for them. There was the famous "50 shades of blue" rant by an ex-Google designer some years ago where he lamented that visual design was put through measurement rather than managers approving redesigns based on their personal perceptions.

Arguably one reason tech firms dominate is that they use evidence based management more frequently than other kinds of firms.

Sounds great if they can pull it off, but designing a modern OS with these features isn't that hard (by which I mean, it's really hard, but not so hard only Microsoft can do it). But migrating Windows itself to that state - now that's hard. It's also the only thing that really matters. Otherwise ChromeOS got them licked already.

I fully agree that Google seems to have gone downhill in recent years but to say it doesn't use the internet to decentralise its workforce is ridiculous. It has offices all over the world with teams that routinely work across different countries, all on their internal network. Why do you think the killer feature of Google Apps is internet based collaboration? It's much more globally distributed than most firms are.

Why are you so angry? GDPR is clear about exactly nothing, I've read it. If you broadly agree with strong executive power you'll think GDPR is peachy and wonderful and people arguing with it are just stupid or malicious. If you think law should clearly enumerate in exacting detail what it forbids or allows you will think GDPR is incompetent and probably intended for political advantage.

The DPO issue is exactly like every other part of the GDPR - so vague as to be entirely open to interpretation. "Only organisations that do large scale data processing and collecting"? Yeah? What's large scale? What's processing, exactly? What is the precise definition of collecting? What does the term 'responsible manner' mean? None of these things are obvious and all can be argued with without limit.

Do you seriously believe Google hasn't invested huge sums of money in trying to be GDPR compliant? Do you seriously believe CNIL has precise and detailed guidance they followed when reaching this decision? If you do I wonder how much you've really dealt with regulators. Because I have and this is playing out exactly as I predicted - nothing these companies can do, no matter what, will ever be deemed in compliance. GDPR is a fine factory.

Pulling out doesn't mean blocking access to all EU IP addresses. It means shutting down EU subsidiaries, at most. ISPs would then have to decide whether to block google.com or not, but, good luck with that, given how many third party websites load things from Google servers.

The idea that the EU market is so large the EU can pull whatever nonsense it likes is probably going to be tested severely in the coming years. It looks increasingly like a lawless place - GDPR is a classic example of a law that says nothing and everything simultaneously, in which enforcement is entirely political. But there are many other such laws. The idea that the EU is a fair and predictable place to do business is increasingly stressed, and there are plenty of ways to make money from people in it without needing to follow EU law, no more than everyone in Europe has to follow every aspecft of US law to sell products to it successfully.

Well, here's my view. I've played BF1 but that's my only Battlefield game. I'm not a big gamer anymore and never play outside of winter, got other things to do.

I am not an expert in World War 1. But I bought BF1 because I liked the trailer. It seemed pretty darn realistic, certainly about as realistic as it's possible for a video game to get. It starts with you playing soldiers who get killed again and again, relentlessly. The starting sequence of BF1 really impacted me, it makes you realise the scale of the slaughter and hopelessness of the fighting. in ways a po-faced documentary cannot. No matter what you do, you die within seconds ... and then the camera moves to another soldier. You play that soldier, you die within seconds regardless of what tactics you try. There is no way to survive. They made their point very well.

The rest of the story mode was equally well done, the multiplayer was fun. The graphics were great! The locations of real battles were used, the weapons looked convincing, the soldiers looked convincing ... oh, wait. Except for the black men in Germany's army?? Since when did World War 1 Germany have an army filled with black dudes? Since never? This is the country that just 20 years after World War 1 was fighting a war of white supremacy. Also one day the game updated and suddenly the startup picture was of a female soldier.

I admit, it did bother me. I put it to one side and continued to enjoy the game, but it bothered me for all the great reasons explained elsewhere on this thread - because I know the game developers tried hard to be realistic in other areas and deviated in these specific areas because they believe shitting on men like me is virtuous. It's not some holy commitment to realism that caused me to be bothered. It's because I know the aggressive and unpleasant tactics that would have been used to create this unrealism, because I know why DICE did it.

I resent it because I know that they were trying to subtly rewrite history as they genuinely believe that if I see a woman holding a gun when I start my game at night, tomorrow I'll go give a job or a pay rise to the women in my team ... not those awful 'privileged' white men. I resent how delusional this belief is, and how they think they can influence me by lying to me about what WW1 was like. I dislike where this is going because all totalitarian societies in history have been characterised by ideologies of racial hatred, rewriting of history and massive lying in attempts to manipulate the population.

And ultimately, when I saw the adverts for BF5, I thought about whether to buy it or not. Again, I'm not a serious gamer. If I had bought it I'd probably have played it for maybe 10-15 hours tops in the next 12 months. If I'd been in love with BF1 I might have made an impulse buy, Xbox Live certainly makes it easy, but I quickly Googled BF5 and saw people complaining about the even more amped up SJWism and all that it implies. So I decided to pass .... the slight temptation to play a game with nice graphics and music was outweighed by the apathy I felt at financially supporting people who hate me for no reason. I bought Red Dead Redemption instead although so far I don't think I've made it through the tutorial, I'm still stuck on some snowy mountain.

People like me are sort of like the dark matter of the video gaming universe. We don't make or comment on Youtube videos, we don't play intensely, we suck at multiplayer and on the few times we try it we always come last in the league tables with 15 deaths and 1 kill if we're very lucky. But we pay the same for our copy as everyone else. It doesn't take much to sway us from one title to another. Maybe that's part of why BF5 didn't sell well.

So Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos both repeatedly raped their wives, then? Because both men asked out women who worked for them, repeatedly, before they said yes. Gates I believe even looked up Melinda in the company's HR system.

The idea that persistently asking for sex = rape is idiotic and extremist, even by the standards of 30 years ago. No woman was forced to have sex with Weinstein. They made the hard-headed decision that their career as an actress would benefit from doing so and effectively slept with him for money. They could easily have become actresses without interacting with Weinstein - just maybe not getting to the top as easily as sleeping their way there.

well yes, but it has been too expensive in the past, over the decades one constant when visiting various countries around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, is that every single building would have a solar panel on the roof, they would be solar-thermal water heaters, because they were cheap and it is an obvious cost saving. These days, as the pricing has improved, I imagine there are a lot of solar-PV panels as well.

That's a VERY good desktop - whoever specced it out was very thoughtful :-) Re Surface Book 2: ah, I've only seen one of those so far but it did look well designed. I always thought Windows 7 was OK and I'd say Windows 10 tipped things over to good (I know people hate the telemetry but that's not a personal worry for me). I'm impressed by WSL (I know it's slow for filesystem I/O and there's no official graphical support but again those aren't worries for me) and I know someone who was happy running it. In fact the whole better terminal/OpenSSH available from MS add/investigation into using clang/move to Chromium etc. just proves MS can execute. Busted sleep doesn't sound very Microsofty (I could understand that more with broken third party drivers but yours is essentially a first party laptop) but in these days of "rolling" OSes I guess speed bumps are to be expected. Oh and I also found Hyper-V was good so long as your guest OS had enlightened drivers (Windows/Linux/FreeBSD?)...

I also I admit that Apple will get "tablet money" out of me - I found the iPad to be top notch (again mine is old and dates from 2013 so could do with replacement) but I'm waiting for the "regular" ones to get USB-C. Their phones are less interesting to me 'cos normally I'm a cheapskate and the household seems to be keen on Android (stock only). I'm not so keen that phone physical dimensions keep getting bigger (curious given what happened to laptops) but that's the trend...

I think your "except two things" are nearly impossible for MS to fix though... Are you saying you would be happy with another key combo sending SIGINT in a terminal (for example) or you would only be happy with an Apple-key style situation across the OS? Or are you saying that when the time comes it's going to be a lump situation? :-)

I'm genuinely curious, what are you going switch to TR? Did "work" give you a desktop?

I know people who were MBP owners who went to a Windows Lenovo X1 (which had 16GB RAM, had a 512GB NVMe SSD, i7 of some description and cost less than £2K) in defiance of the new MBP keyboards. They're very happy with their choice and talk plenty about how Mac laptops now aren't what they were in the late 2000s/early 2010s - in the "old days" Apple used to ship things like remote controls in the box, AppleCare was affordable/convenient to use and what you got in your laptop was high-end even in comparison to "regular" laptops (although I've always been an Intel GPU chipset lover when it come to laptops myself).

I'm typing this on a 2012 MBP (with far lower specs than your 2013, still has a heavy DVD drive, came with a small SATA SSD etc) which has had broken keys for the past year and I badly need a new one. I live in hope that somehow Apple produce a physical machine I can't resist (I would like at least 3 USB-C ports AND a decent keyboard with a physical escape key!) but I guess an endgame is coming where they keep their current keyboard (touchbar and shallowness), remove the headphone jack, switch away from Intel CPUs and up the price (I can't afford to spend even £3K on a laptop). If it comes to that I'm unsure what I'll do... call it a day and buy a Chromebook?

No they don't. Copyright is simply private property rights for creative works, and private property rights are the foundation of capitalism.

Which British political parties are talking about kicking out Italians who have been here a decade? Because I'm pretty sure there are none: they've all said anyone already here can stay indefinitely. Your "fear" isn't justified by anything real, which rather proves Cederic's point.

As for the extremist overlords, you realise it's the EU itself that insists on a two year exit period during which partial de-integration is completely disallowed? And that it's the EU that has been responsible for the total lack of progress so far? If you're so scared of de-integration why not go protest in Brussels and get them to be allow a staged process? Maybe you suspect they won't care about what you think.

Why should they take any responsibility for a mess? They didn't cause these problems.

Indeed, the idea that the EU is so unreasonable and hard to deal with that we must leave is exactly what Brexiteers have been arguing for years, and they were repeatedly ignored. Instead ever more power was given to Brussels by pro-EU politicians, powers the EU now isn't hesitating to use to create as many problems as possible for the UK.

As far as I can tell, if the Brexiteers had been more influential, if they had been able to throw the brakes on EU integration or partially reverse it without the EU forcing a full exit as a consequence, things would be a lot more peaceful and a lot more reasonable. They had the option when Cameron tried to renegotiate. However, the EU only recognises one option as being legitimate - total and complete submission ("integration") to the will of Brussels. Any attempt to negotiate a partial integration or partial collaboration simply makes them start shitting about cherries.