[slightly off-topic]
talking about "per capita" with China hides the massive imbalance between the rich Eastern coastal provinces (with wages and standard of living comparable to "the West") and the much poorer inland provinces. The rich Chinese don't particularly like the uneducated peasants/factory workers...

"... managed to recently waste a mind-boggling $100 million in pointless digital advertising campaigns through a host of blatantly shady ad networks. One such instance involved launching "'battery saver' style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone." Upon typing "Uber" into Google Play, the service "auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves."

1) This makes it sound like Uber was making the fake "battery saver-style apps", not a dodgy ad network that got paid commission for impressions/app installs.

2) the twitter thread linked to says the "waste" was 15% of their $100m advertising budget, not that the entire $100m was wasted.

this is how the Singapore app works too. When you register the app (or the standalone bluetooth token), you give the Ministry of Health your contact details, but the phone apps and tokens only swap your random ID with each other, and those exchanges stay on the device.

If you are diagnosed with Covid-19, the MOH gives you a code you put into the phone app that will let it upload all the recent exchange data to their website, where it can be associated with your contact details. (Or you give them the bluetooth token, if you are using that instead of the phone app.)

If the police have access to the MOH registry, then they can only access people's contact details (which the Singapore government already knows for everyone in the country), and presumbly the uploaded random identifiers for anyone unlikely enough to get a Covid-19 diagnosis.

There is currently a separate system called SafeEntry which is based on scanning a QR code when you enter any shop or shopping mall, and presumably that uploads identifiable location data to a government website. However if the police are really interested then they can already access cell phone tower data to know where your phone has been. (even pre-pay SIM cards in Singapore require ID to purchase, so the government knows who has every number.)

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.

when I moved countries (but took my wireless router with me), google used to think I was still at my old location for the first several months (when I was connected my to wifi). I guess until the next time a google car drove past and got the new location of the AP mac address...

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.

99.8% between humans and chimpanzees refers to the entire genome (~3 billion base pairs).

23 And Me and related companies only look at about 3 million positions - the positions that are often different between different human populations/races (these are known as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).

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.