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.

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.

I'm talking about the Treasury models that predicted a recession that would destroy 500,000 jobs in the best case and 800,000 in the worst case. Those models have never been released.

The Remain campaigners lied repeatedly, aggressively and in a coordinated way, far more so than the Leave campaign did. It was partly the sight of the relentless lying that caused me to study the arguments for Leave more closely and eventually conclude Leave was right. They are still right.

Here are a few lies told by the government alone in the course of the Remain campaign, let alone other campaigners:

If you vote Leave we (Osbourne and Cameron) will punish you by passing a massive 'emergency tax'. Literally, vote wrong and we'll take all your money. A big deal for pensioners and poorer people who were more inclined to vote out. But no emergency tax happened.

This lie wouldn't have been credible without another lie - that Cameron would stay on if he lost the vote. Cameron insisted he wouldn't resign and therefore that Osbourne and his emergency tax were guaranteed. He was lying the whole time - he resigned hours after losing.

The tax lie was itself justified by another lie - the supposedly guaranteed recession that voting leave would trigger, due to the "uncertainty" created by the two year negotiation period. The Treasury knew they were lying, that's why they refused to show its models or how it measured "uncertainty". We know this was a lie because two years after the vote the economy is booming. There was no "uncertainty hit" at all.

The recession lie was supported by yet another lie - the supposed cast iron consensus amongst economists that Brexit = Insta-Recession. No such consensus existed: before the vote economists like Patrick Minford were highlighting how absurd the claims where and immediately after the vote, the Bank of England's chief economist stated that the reputation of economics was in tatters. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman stated the idea of an uncertainty triggered employment bloodbath was "motivated reasoning" and Mervyn King (former head of the BoE) said the government had been talking nonsense.

Notice a pattern here - the Remain campaign built a tower of lies that all supported each other and which have all been disproven in the years since. I'm not even getting into all the other stupid claims they made and are still making today. Just the basics were enough to seriously tilt things in their favour.

Finally, your own post is itself a lie. The Leave campaigners haven't "admitted they'd been lying all along".

We should distrust it completely, as the paper gives no examples of any of the tweets or accounts they classified as being "bots". None whatsoever. Lots and lots of stats about their model and many implausible claims of it being perfect, but nothing that could be used to actually verify their claims.

Indeed their claims are completely implausible. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and they provide none.

Look at Churchill's speeches or FDR's fireside chats. Now look at Donald Trump's twitter stream

Please. Any historian will tell you that Churchill and Trump had quite some things in common. Your perception is merely coloured by the emphasis of historical retellings, which focus you on very specific parts of Churchill's life and views and ignore all the rest. Trump is in the here and now so you see it all.

Churchill was an incorrigible racist who lost the very first election after the Allied victory, largely because he was seen as an incapable peacetime leader who was obsessed by Empire. He wasn't a popular pick even when he became Prime Minister, due to the perception of incompetence.

If Churchill had a Twitter stream today it'd whip up the mob of the always-offended far faster than anything Trump has done. Here are some Churchill quotes. Imagine them in the Twitter stream of a 21st century politician using contemporary English, who never won a war, and see if it changes anything:

"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

"It is, thank heaven, difficult if not impossible for the modern European to fully appreciate the force which fanaticism exercises among an ignorant, warlike and Oriental population"

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril."

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." (sounds a lot like "WINNING" doesn't it)

"In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed."

"It may be said, therefore, that the military opinion of the world is opposed to those people who cry 'Democratize the army!' and it must be remembered that an army is not a field upon which persons with Utopian ideas may exercise their political theories, but a weapon for the defence of the State." (don't think he'd like women in the army)

"I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can't help it — I enjoy every second of it."

"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum."

Churchill is rightly remembered as a great man - in war, you need someone who enjoys war and is good at it to defend a nation and only a great man could have beaten Hitler. But let's not pretend he was some sort of ultra-intellectual anti Trump. Put Churchill quotes on Twitter under a pseudonym and he'd be banned within hours.