"Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame."
From your response:
"The only way you can arrive at a reasonable per hour estimate of your energy usage is by at least averaging out a day's usage"
Perhaps you should learn to read a post before replying to it.
I used monthly averages. This was evident from the material I posted, and while I could guess at how you missed that fact it wouldn't be a very charitable assessment.
"Weren't the usage numbers from when it is running the whole point of this discussion?"
No, the relative environmental impact of LHC vs. consumer power use was the point of this discussion. Those homes don't stop existing for half the year just because the LHC powers down. If you want to average home power consumption for peak and non-peak time, then you need to do the same for LHC to arrive at a meaningful, apples-to-apples number.
In other words, take your "monthly averages are better than weekly averages which are better than daily averages" argument to its logical conclusion, and you'll realize we should be using annual averages (since that is the longest-period peak cycle in consideration).
The LHC has regular cycles of some months on, others off. Neither of those alone represnts a "regular" usage figure. Times when it's at full power are peak.
So, you figure as long as I either avoid owning assets or hide them well, I should be allowed to do whatever I want to your assets without fear of consequence?
That's nice. I stand by the idea that taking any specific, significant problem and delegating it to unspecified "Technology of the Future" to take care of, amounts to technology worship. If you don't like that assertion, you're free to disagree.
Since your only objection is to my wording, I gather you agree to the various points that discredit the validitty of waiting for the Singularity to solve this problem? If not, perhaps you should address them.
Wrong. Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame.
"141304 average US residences able to be powered off the energy consumed by the LHC"
Very similar to the result I posted, which should have tipped you off that your numbers are no better than mine. You used different estimates given in different units, but otherwise you're merely repeating the calcualtion that a number of us already did.
The reason the numbers are slightly different (you actually estimated slightly less homes than I did, btw) is that I used different starting estimaets and rounded a bit more. Why did I do this? Because it was sufficient to disprove the original claim of 'millions of homes and businesses' and was a lot less work.
In other words, you spent more effort to reach the same conclusion. In a discussion on efficiency. And then had the balls to claim the rest of us were doing it wrong.
"during a regular usage month"
And here you are factually wrong. Those estimates were for a peak utilization month.
TFA doesn't give us enough information to determine if these cells would be suitable in applications that currently use primary cells.
It does claim that they could displace lithium batteries, which is not a primary cell application.
I suppose you could try to make swapping batteries in electric cars quick and easy, and then maybe you could work out a model for using primary cells in cars. I'm not holding my breath on consumer acceptance, but I could be wrong about that.
Even then, we'd need to see actual numbers. The reason there isn't just one battery chemistry today is that battery characteristics vary widely - there's a lot more to it than just nominal voltage and weight - and different batteries are suited to different applications. The only battery I consider suitable for backpacking with a 10W radio station in my pack is a AGM lead acid - and that's in spite of its weight. I would never hike with a large ilthium battery, yet I would never use lead acid to power a cell phone.
So until we get past the media hype and see some real data on these batteries, I'd say it's premature to claim that they could save us from an impending lithium shortage (which, in case you missed it, is what TFA is trying to say).
Your third bullet conflates energy with power. You could put it in terms of the calorific value of 1 cornflake (that would be energy, which is also what eV measure), but time has nothing to do with it.
Anyway, 2.36 TeV = 3.78 * 10^-7 J
So if my math is right, that's about enough to heat a shot glass of water by 1/10,000,000 of a degree C.
That's right, Citizen, don't worry about your problems. Just go be a good consumer and enjoy life; everything will be taken care of for you by the Great Tin God. As if by magic Technology will sweep in and save the day, with no need for you to change or contribute in any way.
Oh, and don't worry; mere mortals cannot dig a hole so deep that Technology can't solve it. You can't do so much damage in the next 20 or 30 years, give or take, to face catastrophy before the coming of the Great Tin God. Your folly certainly can't interfere with His coming - and have faith, He is coming!
Give. Me. A. Break.
If not for humans striving to solve significant problems, there would be no technological advancement, and any Singularity that we might imagine coming would never be. That's if the whole Singularity idea isn't crap to start with (of which I am not convinced).
Perhaps an aphorism will help: Have faith, but row toward shore.
The LHC uses 120MW, but if you really want to slant the numbers in your favor we can go with the 180MW consumed by the entire CERN complex.
If you wanted to power millions (we'll say 2M, since that's the lowest number that can be called "millions") of homes and businesses, you could only give each one 90W. My modest-sized, well-insulated, gas-heated, largely-flourescent-lighted house consumes roughly 1kW (1000W).
So now that we have the hyperbole out of the way, certainly LHC consumes a lot of power. If you hadn't been greedy, you could've said "could power thousands of homes and businesses" (and left off the assertion that there was some time multiplier involved), and that's true.
However, willingness to spend energy on physics is only in conflict with wanting to conserve energy if either (1) the value of the physics fails to outweigh the value of the power consumed, or (2) there is a more energy-efficient way to do the physics.
Perhaps you think the physics isn't worth doing; those funding it disagree. That does not make them hypocrits.
If you have a more efficient design for the LHC, I'm sure many people would love to see it.
Oh, and there's only one LHC whereas there are millions of homes, millions of vehicles, millions of offices in the world. In other words, millions of opportunities to make incremental energy improvemnts that would cumulatively offset far more power than all of the particle accelerators in the world consume, without the need to sacrifice scientific progress (or much of anything, really).
"The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP"
Oh, really?
According to the very links kdawson uses to back this idea up, the botnet was off line for what, maybe 2 weeks... out of a 52 week year. So if they accoutned for all of the US spam, that outage would result in a drop of 4%.
But looking at the other numbers in TFS, it looks like there was in fact a drop of something like 25%.
So yes, it may have had something to do with it. In the same sense that the increase in temperature in my house may have had something to do with letting the dog back in (but probably had more to do with having the furnace repaired).
That's nice, but the point you must think you were making has nothing to do with TFA.
You appear to think 'how will you change the password' is a valid objection to any use of biometric data. You are wrong if you think that. It is a valid objection to use of biometrics for authentication. TFA does not say anything about using biometrics for authentication.
So my mistake - I thought you were wrong and deserved a reply, but actually you were off topic and deserved a -1 moderation.
That makes exactly as much sense as asking how you invalidate and reissue a name and photograph - i.e. your question makes no sense at all.
You don't. You don't have to. As I said before, you don't invalidate the data on the ID; you invalidate the ID. That is how it works with every card in your wallet today.
My point exactly. The concept of "change your password" doesn't apply. It's a knee-jerk reaction to any use of biometric data and, in this case, ignores how the data is being used.
Yes, you can revoke and re-issue a passport. That doesn't change your name or appearance; it doesn't make the data on the passport any less valid than it always was. It just means nobody will accept the lost passport as an official document any more.
What makes you think you can't do exactly the same thing with this ID? Sure, it may carry more detailed information; how does that relate to the ability to invalidate the document?
I say it "may carry" more detailed information because that isn't really what TFA says. It says that (1) every citizen will have an electronic ID, and (2) the database that contains the ID's will also contain biometric data. That's a bit of a distance from biometric data being on the card, and it's a world different from your biometrics being used as a "password" that you cannot change.
Not sure what the face scan is; I'd guess it's somehow meant to be more computer-readable than a typical photo, but who knows.
I don't think capturing the data and putting it on the card is so much the problem, as keeping it in a central database.
Also, having a mandatory national ID is a bit much.
You've asserted that identify is one thing that needs a central database. Maybe that's true or maybe it's not, but if you accept it as a premise then you are not a "privacy freak".
Depends how the information is to be used. I don't have, and never had, any input into the information on my passport, so how do I "change my password" when it comes to my passport?
Someone could misuse the ubiquity of this information by trying to make it a "password"; and if so, that's a technical flaw in their security. As for the ID database program in general, the obvious flaws are based in privacy, not technology.
'qualified them as "very large", only to note later that "One of the newly discovered RNAs, called GOLLD, is the third largest and most complex RNA discovered to date"'
I guess you were assuming that "very large" meant "larger than any similar thing we'd seen before"; but to me "significantly larger than typical thigns of the same type" is very large.
If you want to see the legal definitions, you probably have to refer to the law. Even then you may be out of luck, but I wouldn't assume that just because TFA is vague...
From TFA, it is indeed incredibly unclear what would constitute an offense. It quotes the Canadian Supreme Court stating that a certain set of criteria are not the intended boundaries set by the law (and that since those were the criteria used in a particular criminal case, the case needs to be re-tried)... (Incidentally, am I mistaken in thinking that American double-jeopardy principles wouldn't allow for this kind of thign here? Guilty verdicts and civil judgements can be set aside, but would even the supreme court be able to order retrial of someone after acquittal? Does Canada not have that concept?) But if the court said what the criteria are, TFA didn't show us that.
Where this gets complicated to me is, the court is trying to identify behaviors as far in advance of actual harm to the child as possible. Certainly if we can catch a child predator without a child being harmed, that's better than catching the predator only after a child has been harmed. But, the further in advance of the offense you move, the less certain you're really looking at activity that would lead to an offense.
On one hand, I understand the reason to remove intent to commit an offense from the criteria: How do you prove intent to a future action; should avoiding prosecution be as simple as saying "yeah, but I'd never have followed through?" However, to say that no intent to commit an offense is required - that merely doing something that would make it easier to commit an offense if you later decied to, is itself a crime - seems like an unjust standard.
It seems to me like a non-harmful conversation should only become a crime when it's later put in context of something more sinister. TFA specifically mentions discussion topics that would be expected between, say, a student and school counselor. Do you cut off the use of modern technology in those types of job; do you start an arms race of enumerating when a given conversation is or is not ok?
The unfortunate thing about it is, the higher you set the bar for when you can infer that something inappropriate is really going on, the shorter the window to act if actual harm is to be prevented. This seems similar to the dynamic with the right to bear arms. Gun control laws try to anticipate why you have a gun and to construct limits that allow for legitimate uses while limiting circumstances that lead to tragedies (crimes or, sometimes, just serious accidents). Here I tend to prefer we err on the side of individual liberty - up to a point. But then again, I'm American; my understanding is that Canadian gun control laws are a bit tighter than ours.
This seems like the same thing playing out, but with freedom of speech and association rather than right to bear arms.
Not every MLM scheme is a ponzi scheme. They do lend themselves to shadiness, but there are some distinctions (which is why Amway, or whatever they call themselves these days, doesn't get prosecuted into oblivion).
The major distinction is, the flow of money is linked to production of something that serves a goal outside the system. In Amway's case, that would be a sale; in this case, it would be knowledge of the location of a balloon.
First, the CSR lied to you. (No point splitting hairs about whether she might have believed she was right; she represents the company and is responsible for knowing better; what the company told you was not true.) Still, that's not uncommon.
Now, I'd question why you didn't escalate since their demand (as you've presented it) appears clearly unreasonable, but that's a judgement call.
Now, you start making payments and get back in good standing, and never did they give you a statement showing this? Nor did they restore your service until you asked? Nor even when you were paying the account well into the black did they mention it until you were there in person?
In other words they coerced you into giving them a 0% loan... and your response to this bit of fraud was to upgrade your service with them???
"a max realistic bandwidth of 38 mbps... a small customer count, 100 customers... cable companies usually offer 10-20mbps of dowload speed on docsis 2.0 plant"
In other words, you're selling something you don't have and then blaming the customers for wanting to use what they bought.
What's the most recent shareholder lawsuit you can think of?
Yes, there is a financial responsibility to shareholders. However, people love to trot this out to "prove" how a business has acted or will act, and it just doesn't fly.
The DNS data may be valuable, but customer goodwill may be more valuable (especially when loss of goodwill would decrease access to the data). The decision to retain and mine the data, or to avoid doign so, will be a business decision, and it's unlikely to result in a lawsuit either way. (I'd say the most likely way to end up in court, actually, would be to mine the data but mislead the public about doing so.)
I'm no expert on DNS DDoS amplification attacks, but reading up on them (including what Google has to say about them) I don't know what makes you say they only apply to consumer lines.
First of all, even if it were impossible to overwhelm Google's bandwidth, that wouldn't stop an attacker from using Google's open resolver in an amplification attack against some other target; in that regard, it woudl be better if Google were running it from an employee's basement.
Besides, it appears this type of attack has been used to create orders of mangitude more traffic than would be needed to just flood a consumer line.
According to Google's site, they recognize this as a problem and have mitigation strategies in place; the most relevant one seems to be throttles on sending of response packets to any given target.
Slashdot Mirror
...and it was seen all over Norway? I don't think so.
From your quote of my previous post:
"Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame."
From your response:
"The only way you can arrive at a reasonable per hour estimate of your energy usage is by at least averaging out a day's usage"
Perhaps you should learn to read a post before replying to it.
I used monthly averages. This was evident from the material I posted, and while I could guess at how you missed that fact it wouldn't be a very charitable assessment.
"Weren't the usage numbers from when it is running the whole point of this discussion?"
No, the relative environmental impact of LHC vs. consumer power use was the point of this discussion. Those homes don't stop existing for half the year just because the LHC powers down. If you want to average home power consumption for peak and non-peak time, then you need to do the same for LHC to arrive at a meaningful, apples-to-apples number.
In other words, take your "monthly averages are better than weekly averages which are better than daily averages" argument to its logical conclusion, and you'll realize we should be using annual averages (since that is the longest-period peak cycle in consideration).
The LHC has regular cycles of some months on, others off. Neither of those alone represnts a "regular" usage figure. Times when it's at full power are peak.
So, you figure as long as I either avoid owning assets or hide them well, I should be allowed to do whatever I want to your assets without fear of consequence?
Interesting.
Yeah, I'm not passing judgement on the energy levels; just answering the question.
Honestly if a single hadron collision carried enough energy to seem significant in everyday terms, I'd be a little worried.
That's nice. I stand by the idea that taking any specific, significant problem and delegating it to unspecified "Technology of the Future" to take care of, amounts to technology worship. If you don't like that assertion, you're free to disagree.
Since your only objection is to my wording, I gather you agree to the various points that discredit the validitty of waiting for the Singularity to solve this problem? If not, perhaps you should address them.
"You guys aren't comparing apples to apples "
Wrong. Comparing average power consumption is just as valid is comparing energy over a fixed time frame.
"141304 average US residences able to be powered off the energy consumed by the LHC"
Very similar to the result I posted, which should have tipped you off that your numbers are no better than mine. You used different estimates given in different units, but otherwise you're merely repeating the calcualtion that a number of us already did.
The reason the numbers are slightly different (you actually estimated slightly less homes than I did, btw) is that I used different starting estimaets and rounded a bit more. Why did I do this? Because it was sufficient to disprove the original claim of 'millions of homes and businesses' and was a lot less work.
In other words, you spent more effort to reach the same conclusion. In a discussion on efficiency. And then had the balls to claim the rest of us were doing it wrong.
"during a regular usage month"
And here you are factually wrong. Those estimates were for a peak utilization month.
TFA doesn't give us enough information to determine if these cells would be suitable in applications that currently use primary cells.
It does claim that they could displace lithium batteries, which is not a primary cell application.
I suppose you could try to make swapping batteries in electric cars quick and easy, and then maybe you could work out a model for using primary cells in cars. I'm not holding my breath on consumer acceptance, but I could be wrong about that.
Even then, we'd need to see actual numbers. The reason there isn't just one battery chemistry today is that battery characteristics vary widely - there's a lot more to it than just nominal voltage and weight - and different batteries are suited to different applications. The only battery I consider suitable for backpacking with a 10W radio station in my pack is a AGM lead acid - and that's in spite of its weight. I would never hike with a large ilthium battery, yet I would never use lead acid to power a cell phone.
So until we get past the media hype and see some real data on these batteries, I'd say it's premature to claim that they could save us from an impending lithium shortage (which, in case you missed it, is what TFA is trying to say).
Your third bullet conflates energy with power. You could put it in terms of the calorific value of 1 cornflake (that would be energy, which is also what eV measure), but time has nothing to do with it.
Anyway, 2.36 TeV = 3.78 * 10^-7 J
So if my math is right, that's about enough to heat a shot glass of water by 1/10,000,000 of a degree C.
Yeah... if only a volt (unit of electrical potential, symbol V) and an electron-volt (unit of energy, symbol eV) were the same thing...
That's right, Citizen, don't worry about your problems. Just go be a good consumer and enjoy life; everything will be taken care of for you by the Great Tin God. As if by magic Technology will sweep in and save the day, with no need for you to change or contribute in any way.
Oh, and don't worry; mere mortals cannot dig a hole so deep that Technology can't solve it. You can't do so much damage in the next 20 or 30 years, give or take, to face catastrophy before the coming of the Great Tin God. Your folly certainly can't interfere with His coming - and have faith, He is coming!
Give. Me. A. Break.
If not for humans striving to solve significant problems, there would be no technological advancement, and any Singularity that we might imagine coming would never be. That's if the whole Singularity idea isn't crap to start with (of which I am not convinced).
Perhaps an aphorism will help: Have faith, but row toward shore.
The LHC uses 120MW, but if you really want to slant the numbers in your favor we can go with the 180MW consumed by the entire CERN complex.
If you wanted to power millions (we'll say 2M, since that's the lowest number that can be called "millions") of homes and businesses, you could only give each one 90W. My modest-sized, well-insulated, gas-heated, largely-flourescent-lighted house consumes roughly 1kW (1000W).
So now that we have the hyperbole out of the way, certainly LHC consumes a lot of power. If you hadn't been greedy, you could've said "could power thousands of homes and businesses" (and left off the assertion that there was some time multiplier involved), and that's true.
However, willingness to spend energy on physics is only in conflict with wanting to conserve energy if either (1) the value of the physics fails to outweigh the value of the power consumed, or (2) there is a more energy-efficient way to do the physics.
Perhaps you think the physics isn't worth doing; those funding it disagree. That does not make them hypocrits.
If you have a more efficient design for the LHC, I'm sure many people would love to see it.
Oh, and there's only one LHC whereas there are millions of homes, millions of vehicles, millions of offices in the world. In other words, millions of opportunities to make incremental energy improvemnts that would cumulatively offset far more power than all of the particle accelerators in the world consume, without the need to sacrifice scientific progress (or much of anything, really).
"The drop in US spam might have had something to do with the temporary shutdown of the McColo spam ISP"
Oh, really?
According to the very links kdawson uses to back this idea up, the botnet was off line for what, maybe 2 weeks... out of a 52 week year. So if they accoutned for all of the US spam, that outage would result in a drop of 4%.
But looking at the other numbers in TFS, it looks like there was in fact a drop of something like 25%.
So yes, it may have had something to do with it. In the same sense that the increase in temperature in my house may have had something to do with letting the dog back in (but probably had more to do with having the furnace repaired).
That's nice, but the point you must think you were making has nothing to do with TFA.
You appear to think 'how will you change the password' is a valid objection to any use of biometric data. You are wrong if you think that. It is a valid objection to use of biometrics for authentication. TFA does not say anything about using biometrics for authentication.
So my mistake - I thought you were wrong and deserved a reply, but actually you were off topic and deserved a -1 moderation.
That makes exactly as much sense as asking how you invalidate and reissue a name and photograph - i.e. your question makes no sense at all.
You don't. You don't have to. As I said before, you don't invalidate the data on the ID; you invalidate the ID. That is how it works with every card in your wallet today.
My point exactly. The concept of "change your password" doesn't apply. It's a knee-jerk reaction to any use of biometric data and, in this case, ignores how the data is being used.
Yes, you can revoke and re-issue a passport. That doesn't change your name or appearance; it doesn't make the data on the passport any less valid than it always was. It just means nobody will accept the lost passport as an official document any more.
What makes you think you can't do exactly the same thing with this ID? Sure, it may carry more detailed information; how does that relate to the ability to invalidate the document?
I say it "may carry" more detailed information because that isn't really what TFA says. It says that (1) every citizen will have an electronic ID, and (2) the database that contains the ID's will also contain biometric data. That's a bit of a distance from biometric data being on the card, and it's a world different from your biometrics being used as a "password" that you cannot change.
Not sure what the face scan is; I'd guess it's somehow meant to be more computer-readable than a typical photo, but who knows.
I don't think capturing the data and putting it on the card is so much the problem, as keeping it in a central database.
Also, having a mandatory national ID is a bit much.
You've asserted that identify is one thing that needs a central database. Maybe that's true or maybe it's not, but if you accept it as a premise then you are not a "privacy freak".
Depends how the information is to be used. I don't have, and never had, any input into the information on my passport, so how do I "change my password" when it comes to my passport?
Someone could misuse the ubiquity of this information by trying to make it a "password"; and if so, that's a technical flaw in their security. As for the ID database program in general, the obvious flaws are based in privacy, not technology.
'qualified them as "very large", only to note later that "One of the newly discovered RNAs, called GOLLD, is the third largest and most complex RNA discovered to date"'
I'm not seeing what's wrong with that.
The third tallest building in the world is 101 stories / 1614 feet tall. That's a very large building.
I guess you were assuming that "very large" meant "larger than any similar thing we'd seen before"; but to me "significantly larger than typical thigns of the same type" is very large.
If you want to see the legal definitions, you probably have to refer to the law. Even then you may be out of luck, but I wouldn't assume that just because TFA is vague...
From TFA, it is indeed incredibly unclear what would constitute an offense. It quotes the Canadian Supreme Court stating that a certain set of criteria are not the intended boundaries set by the law (and that since those were the criteria used in a particular criminal case, the case needs to be re-tried)... (Incidentally, am I mistaken in thinking that American double-jeopardy principles wouldn't allow for this kind of thign here? Guilty verdicts and civil judgements can be set aside, but would even the supreme court be able to order retrial of someone after acquittal? Does Canada not have that concept?) But if the court said what the criteria are, TFA didn't show us that.
Where this gets complicated to me is, the court is trying to identify behaviors as far in advance of actual harm to the child as possible. Certainly if we can catch a child predator without a child being harmed, that's better than catching the predator only after a child has been harmed. But, the further in advance of the offense you move, the less certain you're really looking at activity that would lead to an offense.
On one hand, I understand the reason to remove intent to commit an offense from the criteria: How do you prove intent to a future action; should avoiding prosecution be as simple as saying "yeah, but I'd never have followed through?" However, to say that no intent to commit an offense is required - that merely doing something that would make it easier to commit an offense if you later decied to, is itself a crime - seems like an unjust standard.
It seems to me like a non-harmful conversation should only become a crime when it's later put in context of something more sinister. TFA specifically mentions discussion topics that would be expected between, say, a student and school counselor. Do you cut off the use of modern technology in those types of job; do you start an arms race of enumerating when a given conversation is or is not ok?
The unfortunate thing about it is, the higher you set the bar for when you can infer that something inappropriate is really going on, the shorter the window to act if actual harm is to be prevented. This seems similar to the dynamic with the right to bear arms. Gun control laws try to anticipate why you have a gun and to construct limits that allow for legitimate uses while limiting circumstances that lead to tragedies (crimes or, sometimes, just serious accidents). Here I tend to prefer we err on the side of individual liberty - up to a point. But then again, I'm American; my understanding is that Canadian gun control laws are a bit tighter than ours.
This seems like the same thing playing out, but with freedom of speech and association rather than right to bear arms.
Not every MLM scheme is a ponzi scheme. They do lend themselves to shadiness, but there are some distinctions (which is why Amway, or whatever they call themselves these days, doesn't get prosecuted into oblivion).
The major distinction is, the flow of money is linked to production of something that serves a goal outside the system. In Amway's case, that would be a sale; in this case, it would be knowledge of the location of a balloon.
Let me see if I got this right...
First, the CSR lied to you. (No point splitting hairs about whether she might have believed she was right; she represents the company and is responsible for knowing better; what the company told you was not true.) Still, that's not uncommon.
Now, I'd question why you didn't escalate since their demand (as you've presented it) appears clearly unreasonable, but that's a judgement call.
Now, you start making payments and get back in good standing, and never did they give you a statement showing this? Nor did they restore your service until you asked? Nor even when you were paying the account well into the black did they mention it until you were there in person?
In other words they coerced you into giving them a 0% loan... and your response to this bit of fraud was to upgrade your service with them???
You're a more forgiving consumer than I am.
"a max realistic bandwidth of 38 mbps ... a small customer count, 100 customers... cable companies usually offer 10-20mbps of dowload speed on docsis 2.0 plant"
In other words, you're selling something you don't have and then blaming the customers for wanting to use what they bought.
What's the most recent shareholder lawsuit you can think of?
Yes, there is a financial responsibility to shareholders. However, people love to trot this out to "prove" how a business has acted or will act, and it just doesn't fly.
The DNS data may be valuable, but customer goodwill may be more valuable (especially when loss of goodwill would decrease access to the data). The decision to retain and mine the data, or to avoid doign so, will be a business decision, and it's unlikely to result in a lawsuit either way. (I'd say the most likely way to end up in court, actually, would be to mine the data but mislead the public about doing so.)
I think the intent is that you buy them as penance for bad code you've already written.
Which makes them pretty much unlike carbon offsets, but I guess someone thinks they're being amusing.
It's a clever fund-raising campaign for certain projects; I wouldn't read much more into it than that.
I'm no expert on DNS DDoS amplification attacks, but reading up on them (including what Google has to say about them) I don't know what makes you say they only apply to consumer lines.
First of all, even if it were impossible to overwhelm Google's bandwidth, that wouldn't stop an attacker from using Google's open resolver in an amplification attack against some other target; in that regard, it woudl be better if Google were running it from an employee's basement.
Besides, it appears this type of attack has been used to create orders of mangitude more traffic than would be needed to just flood a consumer line.
According to Google's site, they recognize this as a problem and have mitigation strategies in place; the most relevant one seems to be throttles on sending of response packets to any given target.