If it's possible to distribute a corrupt video file that has "MPAA 0WN5 J00" in it, then it's also possible to distribute a linux distro that has a rootkit in it, and BT can legally defend against things like that.
... to generate public domain content with metadata such that it appears to be content that Macrovision is looking to disrupt. Then, when they do disrupt that content, sue them.
Alternatively, have computers on the network keep hashed lists of failed downloads (filename, IP address) and the precise reason they failed (corrupt data, etc.). Transfer these lists whenever a file transfer is started.
It's up to the client what to do with this information if it matches their own ("182.165.3.43 keeps terminating downloads at 95%!"), but there are all sorts of nasty possibilities that take advantage of the fact that the legit part of the network has more bandwidth (data flood) and more CPU power than the poison nodes.
The number of trademarkable things is increasing daily, as more people go into business making more products.
The number of words in the English language, however, remains the same.
Just a namespace collision isn't evidence of trademark infringement. That requires (or should require -- I gave up on learning the details of IP law once I realized that it made no sense) one company to choose their name specifically to leech off another successful name.
Tigerdirect has been around since before Apple picked the name Tiger.
Apple wouldn't want anything to be named after such a shitty company.
You expect science to have an answer for everything?
Let's take your points one by one.
1) Science is not concerned with absolute proof; however, if a creationist could create a theory of the origin of life that could make predictions beyond the material contained in the theory, and do so to the same degree that evolutionary biology's predictions hold... then it might be considered.
2) Microevolution is observed in the lab every day, including by myself personally. Macroevolution is not observed in the same way since the timescales are too long, but there are many examples of correct predictions. I don't have time to go into detail here because I have to be at work soon, but you can find many on Wikipedia et al.
3) It is indeed a theory. So is gravity. "Theory" is used by scientists to mean "any mechanism or idea that lots of people have tried to disprove and failed, and seems to work pretty well." The difference between a theory and a law isn't so much the level of proof but the content of the claim: theories tend to be longer, more abstract ideas, while laws tend to be short (especially mathematical) descriptions.
e.g. "the theory of gravity", "the inverse-square law"
4) Evolution does indeed have holes, but those holes are just things that are *not yet known*. We don't yet know where the first one-celled animal came from; there are several guesses, but no data one way or the other. However, few scientific theories are absolutely 100% complete, but that doesn't mean that they're invalid. We don't know exactly *why* gravity does the things it does, but there's a good description of *what*. Evolution isn't completely worked out yet, but the "holes" you mention aren't "things that grossly contradict data"; they're just areas where more work is needed.
5a) This is why scientists usually don't mess around in social policy.
5b) Scientists, unlike religious leaders, don't need to be perfect. Yeah, some people thought eugenics was a good idea once -- they don't any more, in the face of *data* saying that it wasn't.
There is no shame in a scientist, presented with contrary data, changing her mind. That's the point!
Incidentally, the jury is still out on the infinite-universe claim. Get back to the cosmo crowd in twenty years or so -- they should have new data.
Just because something doesn't work in the ideal way doesn't mean that that ideal is necessarily wrong. I do, indeed, wish science worked in that way more often, especially in the biological sciences where (as you point out) profiteering takes the driver's seat and science is relegated to something you handwave at to get grants.
I'm a physicist (grad student), so I have a more idealistic view of things, I suppose: nobody wants to make millions off of gamma-ray bursts, so it's a little more civil out here.
In physics history, there are plenty of examples when challenges to the "current prevailing theory" have been welcomed. Einstein's ideas about space and time were radical and invalidated a lot of prior theory, but they were widely accepted (after experimental verification, of course!) because people realized that 1) this is elegant, and 2) this solves a bunch of our problems.
Sure, there are lots of wrong turns, dead ends, dumb ideas, good ideas that are called dumb, and the like in science. But, just like natural selection, the process -- on a large scale -- works. Eventually, in the commons of ideas, the good ones win out.
Natural explanations are, as you point out, susceptible to reason.
If you can say "It's ghosts!" and then come up with a theory of ghosts that fits the data, then those "ghosts" aren't unscientific. In fact, that happens -- ever heard of a guy named Marconi?
Science works by positing an explanation (an hypothesis), then doing all sorts of tests to try to prove that explanation wrong.
For instance, I could say "All objects fall." I drop rocks, a computer, my girlfriend, and a 1982 Dodge Dart off of a cliff: they all fall.
Then I drop a duck, and it flies off. So I revise my guess: "All inert objects fall."
I drop pencils, a bow-tie, and a plate of lasagna off the cliff; they all fall. Then I try a bag full of helium; it doesn't fall. Oops, need a new theory...
This is how science progresses: make assumptions, assume that they're right until something shows otherwise, and then methodically try to prove them wrong. Some of our assumptions last a very long time, and we call those "laws": conservation of energy is a good example.
However, there's another unspoken law of science that's emerged: "All things have natural explanations." Whenever scientists encounter a new phenomenon, they assume that it has a natural explanation (i.e. one susceptible to analysis) and then go about finding it.
It turns out that every phenomenon we've looked at has a natural explanation. There are of course some things that don't have explanations yet, but those things that we do have explanations for are *all* natural.
People have said "It's ghosts!" about many things in nature, and the scientists have said "Huh. We don't know what causes this."
Then fifty years later we say "Oh, look, someone showed that it's an electrical discharge in the ionosphere!"... and the it's-ghosts crowd slinks off.
This has been repeated time and time again, and it's never been ghosts.
Do you really think China is willing to ban all websites that aren't in plaintext?
In Gandhi's treatise on civil disobedience, he states that the goal of civil disobedience is not to force the government to end oppression, since by definition there is no force involved. However, civil disobedience can make the cost of continued oppression (defined however) outweigh its benefits to the regime.
In this case, China's government is caught between a desire to maintain authoritarian control and a desire for economic success.
If China were forced to filter all non-plaintext websites to retain authoritarian control, this would jeapordize their economic growth, giving the regime a difficult choice to make. Political dissent is all about making the
Determining whether something is politically acceptable can be made difficult, and the point of cryptographic and steganographic schemes like the one I mentioned is to make that determination impossible with a reasonable amount of effort on the part of the censor.
Encryption works because the amount of computer time required to 1) encrypt the information and 2) decrypt the information with the key is vanishingly small compared to 3) the amount of computer time required to decrypt it without the key.
It is possible to design data in such a way that a computer has no chance of "reading" the content; think of those images with odd letters in them that websites use to prevent bot account registrations. This of course isn't the answer for the very reason you mention: a human censor is looking at the same stuff you're looking at, and can understand anything you can.
If China is using human censors, however, then a new possibility emerges. Any method to defeat the Red Firewall should be usable with no tools other than a web browser and a human brain, so complicated machine-aided steganographic tools are out. However, it should be possible to send data in such a way that:
1) no amount of computer time can identify the data as contraband
2) the amount of human time required to identify the data as contraband is sufficiently large
3) the amount of human time required to determine the meaning of the data, given the knowledge that it is contraband, is reasonable.
This works because a Chinese searching for banned information has plenty of time; he can spend quite a while (in human time) "decrypting" the website he has just read. However, the Chinese web censor can't do this; he has to make a decision very quickly, since he has tens of thousands of other Chinese he's supposed to be spying on.
As a very simple example (that is no doubt flawed), suppose a large selection of websites started misspelling random words. (It could be argued that this is already done.) Now, a viewer who knows that the page he's loaded is contraband can collect all the misspellings and extract the message, but a censor simply does not have time to examine every misspelled webpage to determine whether there is a hidden message.
Ultimately the problem is the same as in cryptography and steganography: make the amount of effort required to understand the message without the key sufficiently large while keeping the amount of effort required to understand the message *with* the key sufficiently small.
The only difference is that the "effort" is human effort rather than CPU time.
My desktop (dual 7200 rpm hard drives) is slower than my laptop (single 4200 rpm drive) in every way other than the drive. The slight delay as things are swapped never really bothers me there, but the swap latency on a slow laptop drive is nasty.
It seems like Windows' treatment of virtual memory is inefficient. Why use a file for swap -- incurring ntfs overhead and fragmentation -- when you could use a swap partition (like Linux) without exposing the user to any additional complexity (which is the usual tradeoff for efficiency gains).
I had to upgrade my laptop from the stock 512 to 1.25GB just because WinXP thrashed the paging file so much. Granted, I multitask like a demon, but it shouldn't take 30 seconds to swap Firefox back in.
Definitely agree with you on the new benchmark suite. It'd be a lot of numbers to wade through for the average Joe, but it would sure be useful.
As a sidenote, on the Athlon 64 the internal memory controller doesn't scale with the processor -- all the scaling is done by fiddling with the multiplier.
Those wattage specifications are usually "thermal dissipation power", the maximum power that the processor can use under full load at full speed (which is the amount of heat that a design must be prepared to deal with, hence the name).
Processors hardly ever actually eat this much power, especially mobile processors that have C-states, underclocking, and undervolting to save power. My laptop has a 62W Athlon 64 in it, but under light load I can run the whole system on 22W or so.
Then there is the whole problem that the AMD chips have onboard memory controllers while the Intels don't, the question of how much performance gets lost when the processor underclocks, etc., etc.
Centrino is a no-brainer in only two segments of the mobile market: the thin-and-light long-battery-life market and the lots-of-cash market. The top-end Pent M's may equal the top-end mobile Ath64's at some tasks, but not for anything near the same price.
However, the mobile Ath64 has its own niche carved out: relatively inexpensive mainstream/DTR notebooks. The extra battery life provided by the Pentium-M isn't that big of a deal on machines with big screens and beefy video cards, where the processor isn't the primary power consumer.
I'm typing this on an eMachines M6811, an A64 3400+ machine with plenty of goodies, a big screen, and a video card beefy enough to play anything I throw at it. I got this machine for $1200; you'd be hard pressed to find a comparable Pentium-M machine for the same price, even a year later. It gets 2.5-3 hours on battery.
If you're looking for all-around laptops that aren't that expensive, have decent battery life, and offer beefy performance, the A64 beats the Pent-M hands down.
That makes sense, and I was thinking myself about some of the interesting tidbits one can glean from seeing a "newborn" galaxy.
Still, the article pitches the discovery as interesting solely as "OMG INFR4R3D SOURCE WTF BBQ!", which (as you've confirmed) isn't why this is significant.
An astrophysics student, rusty on his astro because he's been focusing on quantum recently, responds:
If they're just distant galaxies that have been redshifted (/reddened by dust absorption), why do we care?
Isn't this what's *supposed* to happen? "Apple observed falling, film at 11."
'Course, they mention that these galaxies are "100 times more powerful" than the Milky Way. Is that 100 times more luminous in the infrared than the Milky Way (which would make sense) or 100 times more luminous in the infrared than the Milky Way is in the optical (which would require the starburst theory that they mention, or a weird form of an AGN, or something).
Hopefully access to more high-quality literature for free will encourage more students to take up the study of the written word and put down their chainsaws-with-vibrato.
(FYI: I'm a classical choral singer. We get real, real edgy when we have to perform with jazz bands and have to trust a sound engineer to sort out balance. Hell, even microphones and amplifiers make us nervous.)
I live in Huntsville, AL, whose main industry is military R&D contracting. This city makes its living off of American militarism.
I have never seen anyone as hawkish as some of these contractors. Most actual members of the military I know are either opposed or ambivalent to the war, or support it only insofar as they support their comrades-in-arms (and don't really stop and consider whether the conflict is just).
The contractors, however, scare me sometimes. Not all of them, of course... but the "nuke the sonsofbitches and let God sort them out" attitude seems much more common among the people who get paid to make the bits that do the nuking yet don't have to be directly involved in the process.
While having a "unipolar" worldview is certainly a bad thing, this reaction seems silly. Google's indexing is, admittedly, of more benefit to Anglophones than Francophones, but it's detrimental to nobody. If the French government (or a French company) wants a similar index of French literature, they should make it themselves -- and I hope they do, since free access to information is never a bad thing. But to criticise Google for focusing on works in their native language located in libraries in their home country for a new project, however, is silly.
However, it looks like he's mostly not criticising Google but calling for a parallel effort from non-English sources. This, of course, is laudable.
(Side note: I'm generally on the side of the French in these little Franco-American spats. I saw a SUV that had a "Boycott France" bumper sticker today, and considered sticking a note under his wiper that said something to the effect of "Y'know, you have the French to thank for the philosophy of free speech that allows you to show that sticker without danger of your tires getting slashed...")
Slashdot Mirror
There you go, then.
If it's possible to distribute a corrupt video file that has "MPAA 0WN5 J00" in it, then it's also possible to distribute a linux distro that has a rootkit in it, and BT can legally defend against things like that.
... to generate public domain content with metadata such that it appears to be content that Macrovision is looking to disrupt. Then, when they do disrupt that content, sue them.
Alternatively, have computers on the network keep hashed lists of failed downloads (filename, IP address) and the precise reason they failed (corrupt data, etc.). Transfer these lists whenever a file transfer is started.
It's up to the client what to do with this information if it matches their own ("182.165.3.43 keeps terminating downloads at 95%!"), but there are all sorts of nasty possibilities that take advantage of the fact that the legit part of the network has more bandwidth (data flood) and more CPU power than the poison nodes.
The number of trademarkable things is increasing daily, as more people go into business making more products.
The number of words in the English language, however, remains the same.
Just a namespace collision isn't evidence of trademark infringement. That requires (or should require -- I gave up on learning the details of IP law once I realized that it made no sense) one company to choose their name specifically to leech off another successful name.
Tigerdirect has been around since before Apple picked the name Tiger.
Apple wouldn't want anything to be named after such a shitty company.
So what's the deal?
Wow.
... then it might be considered.
You expect science to have an answer for everything?
Let's take your points one by one.
1) Science is not concerned with absolute proof; however, if a creationist could create a theory of the origin of life that could make predictions beyond the material contained in the theory, and do so to the same degree that evolutionary biology's predictions hold
2) Microevolution is observed in the lab every day, including by myself personally. Macroevolution is not observed in the same way since the timescales are too long, but there are many examples of correct predictions. I don't have time to go into detail here because I have to be at work soon, but you can find many on Wikipedia et al.
3) It is indeed a theory. So is gravity. "Theory" is used by scientists to mean "any mechanism or idea that lots of people have tried to disprove and failed, and seems to work pretty well." The difference between a theory and a law isn't so much the level of proof but the content of the claim: theories tend to be longer, more abstract ideas, while laws tend to be short (especially mathematical) descriptions.
e.g. "the theory of gravity", "the inverse-square law"
4) Evolution does indeed have holes, but those holes are just things that are *not yet known*. We don't yet know where the first one-celled animal came from; there are several guesses, but no data one way or the other. However, few scientific theories are absolutely 100% complete, but that doesn't mean that they're invalid. We don't know exactly *why* gravity does the things it does, but there's a good description of *what*. Evolution isn't completely worked out yet, but the "holes" you mention aren't "things that grossly contradict data"; they're just areas where more work is needed.
5a) This is why scientists usually don't mess around in social policy.
5b) Scientists, unlike religious leaders, don't need to be perfect. Yeah, some people thought eugenics was a good idea once -- they don't any more, in the face of *data* saying that it wasn't.
There is no shame in a scientist, presented with contrary data, changing her mind. That's the point!
Incidentally, the jury is still out on the infinite-universe claim. Get back to the cosmo crowd in twenty years or so -- they should have new data.
Nowhere in this entire article has anyone said anything about morals.
Science has nothing to say about moral issues.
Bzzt, red herring.
I have a meta-theory.
All statements about scientific philosophy can be made more efficiently by a one-liner Feynman quote than by a ten-page paper.
Just because something doesn't work in the ideal way doesn't mean that that ideal is necessarily wrong. I do, indeed, wish science worked in that way more often, especially in the biological sciences where (as you point out) profiteering takes the driver's seat and science is relegated to something you handwave at to get grants.
I'm a physicist (grad student), so I have a more idealistic view of things, I suppose: nobody wants to make millions off of gamma-ray bursts, so it's a little more civil out here.
In physics history, there are plenty of examples when challenges to the "current prevailing theory" have been welcomed. Einstein's ideas about space and time were radical and invalidated a lot of prior theory, but they were widely accepted (after experimental verification, of course!) because people realized that 1) this is elegant, and 2) this solves a bunch of our problems.
Sure, there are lots of wrong turns, dead ends, dumb ideas, good ideas that are called dumb, and the like in science. But, just like natural selection, the process -- on a large scale -- works. Eventually, in the commons of ideas, the good ones win out.
Natural explanations are, as you point out, susceptible to reason.
If you can say "It's ghosts!" and then come up with a theory of ghosts that fits the data, then those "ghosts" aren't unscientific. In fact, that happens -- ever heard of a guy named Marconi?
My internet connection runs on his ghosts.
The fact that all inert objects fall doesn't mean that some non-inert objects don't fall either. :)
Nice, though.
Science works by positing an explanation (an hypothesis), then doing all sorts of tests to try to prove that explanation wrong.
... and the it's-ghosts crowd slinks off.
For instance, I could say "All objects fall." I drop rocks, a computer, my girlfriend, and a 1982 Dodge Dart off of a cliff: they all fall.
Then I drop a duck, and it flies off. So I revise my guess: "All inert objects fall."
I drop pencils, a bow-tie, and a plate of lasagna off the cliff; they all fall. Then I try a bag full of helium; it doesn't fall. Oops, need a new theory...
This is how science progresses: make assumptions, assume that they're right until something shows otherwise, and then methodically try to prove them wrong. Some of our assumptions last a very long time, and we call those "laws": conservation of energy is a good example.
However, there's another unspoken law of science that's emerged: "All things have natural explanations." Whenever scientists encounter a new phenomenon, they assume that it has a natural explanation (i.e. one susceptible to analysis) and then go about finding it.
It turns out that every phenomenon we've looked at has a natural explanation. There are of course some things that don't have explanations yet, but those things that we do have explanations for are *all* natural.
People have said "It's ghosts!" about many things in nature, and the scientists have said "Huh. We don't know what causes this."
Then fifty years later we say "Oh, look, someone showed that it's an electrical discharge in the ionosphere!"
This has been repeated time and time again, and it's never been ghosts.
Do you really think China is willing to ban all websites that aren't in plaintext?
In Gandhi's treatise on civil disobedience, he states that the goal of civil disobedience is not to force the government to end oppression, since by definition there is no force involved. However, civil disobedience can make the cost of continued oppression (defined however) outweigh its benefits to the regime.
In this case, China's government is caught between a desire to maintain authoritarian control and a desire for economic success.
If China were forced to filter all non-plaintext websites to retain authoritarian control, this would jeapordize their economic growth, giving the regime a difficult choice to make. Political dissent is all about making the
Determining whether something is politically acceptable can be made difficult, and the point of cryptographic and steganographic schemes like the one I mentioned is to make that determination impossible with a reasonable amount of effort on the part of the censor.
There is a chance; it's just harder.
Encryption works because the amount of computer time required to 1) encrypt the information and 2) decrypt the information with the key is vanishingly small compared to 3) the amount of computer time required to decrypt it without the key.
It is possible to design data in such a way that a computer has no chance of "reading" the content; think of those images with odd letters in them that websites use to prevent bot account registrations. This of course isn't the answer for the very reason you mention: a human censor is looking at the same stuff you're looking at, and can understand anything you can.
If China is using human censors, however, then a new possibility emerges. Any method to defeat the Red Firewall should be usable with no tools other than a web browser and a human brain, so complicated machine-aided steganographic tools are out. However, it should be possible to send data in such a way that:
1) no amount of computer time can identify the data as contraband
2) the amount of human time required to identify the data as contraband is sufficiently large
3) the amount of human time required to determine the meaning of the data, given the knowledge that it is contraband, is reasonable.
This works because a Chinese searching for banned information has plenty of time; he can spend quite a while (in human time) "decrypting" the website he has just read. However, the Chinese web censor can't do this; he has to make a decision very quickly, since he has tens of thousands of other Chinese he's supposed to be spying on.
As a very simple example (that is no doubt flawed), suppose a large selection of websites started misspelling random words. (It could be argued that this is already done.) Now, a viewer who knows that the page he's loaded is contraband can collect all the misspellings and extract the message, but a censor simply does not have time to examine every misspelled webpage to determine whether there is a hidden message.
Ultimately the problem is the same as in cryptography and steganography: make the amount of effort required to understand the message without the key sufficiently large while keeping the amount of effort required to understand the message *with* the key sufficiently small.
The only difference is that the "effort" is human effort rather than CPU time.
And solving that bootstrapping problem is the responsibility of the consumer, not Microsoft.
As an addendum:
My desktop (dual 7200 rpm hard drives) is slower than my laptop (single 4200 rpm drive) in every way other than the drive. The slight delay as things are swapped never really bothers me there, but the swap latency on a slow laptop drive is nasty.
It seems like Windows' treatment of virtual memory is inefficient. Why use a file for swap -- incurring ntfs overhead and fragmentation -- when you could use a swap partition (like Linux) without exposing the user to any additional complexity (which is the usual tradeoff for efficiency gains).
I had to upgrade my laptop from the stock 512 to 1.25GB just because WinXP thrashed the paging file so much. Granted, I multitask like a demon, but it shouldn't take 30 seconds to swap Firefox back in.
Definitely agree with you on the new benchmark suite. It'd be a lot of numbers to wade through for the average Joe, but it would sure be useful.
As a sidenote, on the Athlon 64 the internal memory controller doesn't scale with the processor -- all the scaling is done by fiddling with the multiplier.
Those wattage specifications are usually "thermal dissipation power", the maximum power that the processor can use under full load at full speed (which is the amount of heat that a design must be prepared to deal with, hence the name).
Processors hardly ever actually eat this much power, especially mobile processors that have C-states, underclocking, and undervolting to save power. My laptop has a 62W Athlon 64 in it, but under light load I can run the whole system on 22W or so.
Then there is the whole problem that the AMD chips have onboard memory controllers while the Intels don't, the question of how much performance gets lost when the processor underclocks, etc., etc.
Centrino is a no-brainer in only two segments of the mobile market: the thin-and-light long-battery-life market and the lots-of-cash market. The top-end Pent M's may equal the top-end mobile Ath64's at some tasks, but not for anything near the same price.
However, the mobile Ath64 has its own niche carved out: relatively inexpensive mainstream/DTR notebooks. The extra battery life provided by the Pentium-M isn't that big of a deal on machines with big screens and beefy video cards, where the processor isn't the primary power consumer.
I'm typing this on an eMachines M6811, an A64 3400+ machine with plenty of goodies, a big screen, and a video card beefy enough to play anything I throw at it. I got this machine for $1200; you'd be hard pressed to find a comparable Pentium-M machine for the same price, even a year later. It gets 2.5-3 hours on battery.
If you're looking for all-around laptops that aren't that expensive, have decent battery life, and offer beefy performance, the A64 beats the Pent-M hands down.
Ah, gotcha.
That makes sense, and I was thinking myself about some of the interesting tidbits one can glean from seeing a "newborn" galaxy.
Still, the article pitches the discovery as interesting solely as "OMG INFR4R3D SOURCE WTF BBQ!", which (as you've confirmed) isn't why this is significant.
An astrophysics student, rusty on his astro because he's been focusing on quantum recently, responds:
If they're just distant galaxies that have been redshifted (/reddened by dust absorption), why do we care?
Isn't this what's *supposed* to happen? "Apple observed falling, film at 11."
'Course, they mention that these galaxies are "100 times more powerful" than the Milky Way. Is that 100 times more luminous in the infrared than the Milky Way (which would make sense) or 100 times more luminous in the infrared than the Milky Way is in the optical (which would require the starburst theory that they mention, or a weird form of an AGN, or something).
Hopefully access to more high-quality literature for free will encourage more students to take up the study of the written word and put down their chainsaws-with-vibrato.
(FYI: I'm a classical choral singer. We get real, real edgy when we have to perform with jazz bands and have to trust a sound engineer to sort out balance. Hell, even microphones and amplifiers make us nervous.)
About the American companies:
I live in Huntsville, AL, whose main industry is military R&D contracting. This city makes its living off of American militarism.
I have never seen anyone as hawkish as some of these contractors. Most actual members of the military I know are either opposed or ambivalent to the war, or support it only insofar as they support their comrades-in-arms (and don't really stop and consider whether the conflict is just).
The contractors, however, scare me sometimes. Not all of them, of course... but the "nuke the sonsofbitches and let God sort them out" attitude seems much more common among the people who get paid to make the bits that do the nuking yet don't have to be directly involved in the process.
Seen as fair game by whom?
I certainly don't endorse slashing tires, and I am one of the staunchest Bush opponents you'll find.
Attacking Republicans is indeed fair game -- verbally.
While having a "unipolar" worldview is certainly a bad thing, this reaction seems silly. Google's indexing is, admittedly, of more benefit to Anglophones than Francophones, but it's detrimental to nobody. If the French government (or a French company) wants a similar index of French literature, they should make it themselves -- and I hope they do, since free access to information is never a bad thing. But to criticise Google for focusing on works in their native language located in libraries in their home country for a new project, however, is silly.
However, it looks like he's mostly not criticising Google but calling for a parallel effort from non-English sources. This, of course, is laudable.
(Side note: I'm generally on the side of the French in these little Franco-American spats. I saw a SUV that had a "Boycott France" bumper sticker today, and considered sticking a note under his wiper that said something to the effect of "Y'know, you have the French to thank for the philosophy of free speech that allows you to show that sticker without danger of your tires getting slashed...")
Not for its given bandwidth at its given range, however.
Contact across the skin implies a range of ~1 meter; at that range the required emitted power for a clear wifi signal is on the order of microwatts.