Feeding any data anywhere is a concern.

German hacker association Chaos Computer Club found out that VW had collected location data on their cars on a badly secured system. That data was exfiltrated and it was shown that it could be used e.g. to determine where politicians lived, which schools they dropped their kids off at and which brothels they frequented.

Leaving data in the hands of a company subject to foreign jurisdiction is concerning but even within your local jurisdiction simple carelessness can lead to data leaks with potentially massive consequences. The best way to prevent misuse of collected data is to make sure the data isn’t collected in the first place.

Or double down on AI. Then double down even harder.

• Make the use of Copilot mandatory; simultaneously heavily monetize it to instantly turn the AI division into a profit center.
• To that end release the successor to Windows 11, a cloud-only offering that replaces the taskbar with a Copilot instance which launches programs for the user. Downplay any accusations that the new Windows Live 365 With Copilot is just a rental Windows 11 with the taskbar hastily hacked out.
• Don’t forget that Windows Live 365 With Copilot does not include a subscription for Copilot, which must be booked separately.
• Get all of your customers to switch by immediately dropping support for all previous Windows versions, “migrating” their support windows over to Windows Live 365 With Copilot. Corporate customers, which have gone all-in on Azure, will need years to migrate off the Windows ecosystem, which means excellent short-term revenue.
• Make sure that Windows Live 365 With Copilot can only save to OneDrive to make it maximally hard for those customers to get their data out.
• Hope that the current world order disintegrates before the massive exodus of customers ruins the company.
• Whether or not it does, turn off your business phone and spend the next five years doing massive amounts of cocaine on a private island in the South Pacific.

It has Kinect Star Wars. And… that’s basically it.

Trump dictates that other countries comply & submit to his bullying, ELSE US’s tarriffs will bludgeon their economies until they obey.

Which is why the EU is currently making trade agreements with just about everyone on the planet. The USA handing out tariffs like candy is a lot less relevant when you can pivot your trade elsewhere on fairly short order.

Such an agreement with Canada has been in the works for the last ten years. All that’s currently missing is for it to be ratified by all involved countries, which might go a bit quicker now given how the States are behaving.

I’m pretty sure that several members would say no if they tried to join. Accession requires (among other things) all member states to ratify the treaty of accession.

Agreed. Oddly enough, my Meshtastic contacts are much farther away than my farthest MeshCore contacts but MeshCore seems to be much livelier.

Note that what Gore said was that he “took the initiative to create the Internet”. That’s actually true; his lobby work for a civilian network were one of the most significant factors in commercializing ARPANET. He never claimed that he invented the thing.

“You heard that right, Gafgarion. I want you to show up to this next fight naked and unarmed for no particular reason.”

Mind you, doing things you could do in real life might actually be a major part of the appeal.

Sure, in real life I could grow quality potatoes or power wash a house or drive a truck to a city that’s 400 kilometers away. And I’d get a little bit of dopamine from a job well done – after hours, days, or even months of work. Plus what’s needed to acquire the tools/land/licence necessary to do it in the first place.

Or I play Euro Wash Farm Valley Simulator 2026 and finish the job within half an hour of gameplay that’s just challenging enough for me to feel that I actually did something. While possibly interacting with a cast of charming and/or interesting people along the way.

There’s a reason why job simulators are such a popular genre. They take the interesting bits from a job, drop the tedious parts, and greatly accelerate the whole affair. They’re like working in real life but better.

Except Desert Bus, of course. That one very deliberately isn’t.

Neither do the lower ones. The wheels of an office chair typically don’t move when the seat spins around.

Probably that they’ll do fuck all when China invades Taiwan.

It’s a German laundry detergent brand.

Besides, even though people love to riff on it, Kinect Star Wars was actually great if you ignored everything but the Galactic Dance-Off mode. A very competent rhythm game where half of the songs are Star Wars filk? Sign me up!

How about a trade? I mean, Trump really wants Greenland. That’s about 2.2 million square kilometers.

Texas is about 0.7 million square kilometers. California is 0.4. New Mexico 0.3. Arizona is 0.3. That makes 1.7 million square kilometers.

So how about they swap? The USA get Greenland, Denmark gets all of the states adjoining Mexico. That swap is super favorable to the Americans (2.2 > 1.7, after all) and the USA even get a nice buffer state between themselves and those Mexican drug cartels they’re so afraid of. There’s literally no downside. Trump would be the greatest landswapper in all of history, if not more. I’m sure Denmark would even give him a Nobel Prize in Economy or two.

I’m pretty sure that whether it can is irrelevant. Unter Trump it won’t because China playing strongman appeals to him more than petty things like allies and an independent semiconductor market. Also, he can very clearly be bought and Xi can just send him a couple yachts with tacky decor or something.

He has pretty much torched all of the USA’s soft power and standing as a trade partner.

GWB had already done some damage to both, which Obama tried to repair (more so on the trade front). Then Trump I happened and made it very clear that the USA were no longer a reliable partner and probably not even politically stable in the medium term. Biden tried to salvage something but then Trump II happened and conclusively buried what little goodwill the States had left.

I don’t think the pax americana is going to survive the decade and neither is the petrodollar. It remains to be seen whether the States will become a local hegemonial power, a failed empire with lasting ambitions á la Russia, or will even fade from relevancy entirely. I don’t expect them to remain a superpower.

Also note that the EU has just signed a free-trade agreement with Mercosur, meaning that the EU and pretty much all of South America are pivoting trade away from the USA towards each other. Conveniently, that should also make both of them less reliant on China.

If you want to download once and then never have to deal with updates unless you want to, there’s always GOG.

(Also, yes, Steam is a lot more comfortable with a faster connection. I generally spend more time waiting for Vulkan shaders to be precompiled than for downloads to finish.)

We just signed an FTA with Mercosur. That’s a major trade bloc. I think we’re doing good on that front and it demonstrates that we have the capacity to just pivot trade home away from the States.

Still, I do agree that counter-tariffs don’t feel too great as a response, even with the new FTaa in place. It might really be time to bring out the anti-coercion instrument.

Mind you, that’s for the same reason all American phone numbers in shows have a 555 prefix – showing a real address could lead to liability if e.g. someone tries to launch an attack on that address they saw on TV.

Unlike phone numbering schemes, the IPv4 address space has no well-known area reserved for fictitious addresses. Sure, you could use something like 192.0.2.0/24, 198.51.100.0/24, or 203.0.113.0/24 (test networks for use in documentation), but those aren’t well-known outside of certain circles.

So they just go with completely invalid addresses because that’s easy.