... wow, i just edited my profile.. last time i did i was 33... now i'm 50... amazing.

Wow, it has been a lot of years since I have bothered to login to my account here, but I absolutely had to to respond to this article.

Richard Dawkins is a complete fool. Many years ago, I thought he was really smart, and insightful, but as the last 15 years or so have gone on, he is just plainly dumber and dumber... is he getting dumber, or am I getting smarter?

I hope I don't get dumber as I get up to his age.

Maybe I missed something, but it seems weird as fuck for Palmer, the guy who created a suicide device for fucks sake, to be sucking the cocks of the military industry.

They are still functional as USB barcode scanners, with the right software.

... can i store them like on a USB disk attached to the Xbox 360? Or what? like, what's the process for really taking advantage of the fact that they've introduced huge discounts to almost the entire store?

or will the download servers still live on, even after the store closes?

...why are nearly 100% of the people in multiplayer VR environments somewhere around 6 years old?

I was following you on Twitter and then I jumped ship when Trump was allowed back on and moved over to Mastodon.social. I'm still trying to figure out what to do there as "my people" have not moved over there and I've been finding it hard to find like-minded people. My main approach has been looking at the global feed and trying to see if there is anything of interest. It's a SLOW process. Occasionally (once a month or so) there is a single post of interest and someone I can follow.

I've also tried searching hashtags, but most of my interests come up empty, so I haven't gotten much out of that either. The other approach has been to look at who my follows follow. I keep hoping that the Fediverse takes off and some of the bigger names come over. (Thankfully George Takei is someone who did) Still, I have to say, having Twitter off my rotation has been instructive in how it feels to remove the pressure to post from a social media platform. Which brings me to the last point... So far, the things I've posted on my on Mastodon.social have not garnered any responses. I think I just don't have any visibility. I'm a whimper in the sea of toots, so people who would find my toots interesting don't see me.

Anyway... I get you and understand your reasoning. I wish you the best and will continue to look for your toots as time allows. I miss the old days. But every social media platform I've been on since 1988 has always gone the same route: fun --> noisy --> commercial --> spammy --> leadership change to less competent leaders --> implosion --> gone. Maybe the Fediverse will move to the fun stage in the next few years.

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.

I think there's some belief involved here, because we don't really know whatever the hell it was that Tesla was up to at the time. We don't have enough information, I don't think, about what went on in his head, what he was ultimately doing, to know if he had some theory in his brain that we haven't even come close to rediscovering, or not.

It seems clear that if we had a way to do this already, if we could prove out that this was possible, using the knowledge that we have right now, then we would already be doing it, if the technological progress wasn't out of our reach.

I think this kind of hints at an underlying question -- do you believe that Tesla knew what he was doing, and that he may well have had some idea that we haven't even yet thought of, that might've worked?

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.