For EU people who want to take action: call or email your Member European Parliament (MEP) and let them know that don't supper the policy (or support it?!?). You can call them via:
Please write in your own words, and preferably from your own e-mail address! I can't see getting a bazillion of copies of the same message being anything but annoying and I wouldn't be surprised if they block the sender of such tools.
I wrote to them last time this was voted on and expected zero replies (partly due to the late hour), but actually got 2 out of 13, one of which indicated they had actually taken a few seconds to read some of my words. I later read they had received "thousands" of messages on the subject. I can't imagine most of them getting anything close to even this small amount of attention.
Having called a few of them and spoken to them on the phone about this they are mostly pissed off about the cookie-cutter emails spamming them about this but quite happy to talk about it on the phone.
On the other hand, some of us are much better at typing than talking. And some might have a fit of social phobia at the mere thought of a phone call.
The templates might be tedious, but they are there for people who would otherwise post some random flame or rant. Pages encouraging phone calls have scripted templates on them too.
Yeah and that's fine, personal emails were quite well received. Template emails were universally ignored, regardless of which side of the issue the representative stood.
Oh yeah, last campaign of the kind worked great. Members of Parliament really appreciated to have their mailbox (and their voicemail) mail-bombed by hundreds or thousands of such spam and reacted super well.
</sarcasm>
No, in fact, no matter which side and party they belonged to, it really pissed them off and turned them against what the spam advocated for. Many thought it was orchestrated by some GAFAM.
You're not wrong. I remember seeing a couple of MPs lamenting the barrage of messages they received.
On the other hand, if you're an elected representative you better listen to your constituents. They are there to represent the people, not to decide in their place. Or, at least, that's the idea.
If being a public servant is so agonizing, there is a simple solution for them, most European countries offer livable welfare, you don't need to be a MEP if the job isn't for you. We literally have lists of people willing to do their job, it's called an election and it's coming next year. So this can and will be fixed very soon, so don't fret about spam, just stay home.
DNA computing might be an interesting new domain [1]. The idea is to use DNA as a memory, while using proteins/RNA as logic operators. This can provide massive speed and efficiency gains, especially for optimisation problems that need parallelization. Just consider that 4bits of information on DNA take only about 1nm^3 of volume, where solid state memory has about 3Tb/in^2 which is roughly equivalent to 10^7 nm^3.
To me it is still not clear how scalable the DNA computing is, but there are nice proofs of concept already [2].
I am willing to bet that both DNA computing and DNA manufacturing (organically 3D print things, but like how organisms grow) will be yuuuuuuge.
Not sure when it will have its internet moment, but the universe has been doing this for a long time and once we unlock its secrets, we become a wee-bit closer to Gods.
I have been using Dropbox Paper for about two years now. I highly recommend it for cloud note taking app, because:
(1) Can easily collaborate and share
(2) Markdown syntax with LaTeX support
(3) Embed images, youtube, PDF and lots of other stuff straight into the note.
(4) Visually clean and elegant
The downsides are:
(a) No offline editing (only limited support on mobile)
(b) Dependent on Dropbox Inc
+1 for Paper, but how are you embedding PDF? I can only add it if it's already in my Dropbox, and it is not editable (notes, highlighting, etc..) Only thing missing for me to make it go from good to great.
PDF has to in the dropbox folder somewhere before you can add it. Then it appears as a single page preview. Clicking on it allows to view the full doc within Paper, but there is no annotation feature as of now. Example:
https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/tools/table/61322