And I'm sure Holland's coastline is the same length as the USA's.
That's irrelevant.
What matters is the ratio of coastal area to be protected (which isn't the same as all coastline) to the economic resources available to protect it. The US has 44 times as much coastline as the Netherlands, but it's GDP is also 20 times larger. Considering that much of the US coastline is relatively sparsely settled, and can simply be allowed to move inland, displacing a few people, and that some other portions of the coast are steep and can take the rising water, we can handle the 2X difference in ratios.
The region of US coastline that will be hardest to deal with is the southeastern US, where we have large low-lying coastal regions that regularly get pounded with hurricanes. Building dikes that can withstand hurricanes is much harder than just building dikes. Those are the areas where we will probably have the biggest populations that have to move to higher ground. Or maybe we'll figure out how to build dikes around Miami that will stand up to anything mother nature can dish out. Actually, there's no question that we can build such dikes; the only question is whether it's cheaper to build the dikes or to abandon the region.
If the consequence to not complying is having all of their European assets seized and not being able to do any business with advertisers in Europe... choosing not to comply could be a really, really tough decision. Though I suspect they could bring enough pressure to bear through the US government to fight it off.
Were all of the asymmetric cryptosystems invalidated, smart cards would probably become dramatically more important. Everything we do with asymmetric crypto can be done with symmetric crypto (and in many cases with liberal use of trusted third parties), but key distribution becomes a much harder problem. Smart cards provide a cost-effective and reasonably-secure mechanism for key distribution.
As long as we have one secure, general-purpose asymmetric algorithm, though, I don't see much of an impact. Well, except that if everything else were to fall, I think everyone would look askance at the remaining algorithm, wondering if its time is just about to come as well.
Dlog is the base, however, to almost any other public key algorithm out there which isn't elliptic curve.
EC algorithms (ECDH, ECDSA, ECIES) are also based ultimately on the discrete log problem. So, this news is a potential threat to essentially all of the major asymmetric crypto algorithms, excepting only RSA.
But mod'ing them down? I like that. It means I don't have to wade through hundreds of trash messages to find anything worth reading.
On slashdot, I think negative feedback does result in more trollish activity, but it also pushes the activity below the threshold at which most people read, so the community doesn't see it and isn't damaged by it. Trolls also don't get mod points so they can't visit their wrath on others.
All in all, I think it works pretty well. I'll leave it to others to discuss if the mechanism to suppress trolls has negative side effects.
Said this the other day when I heard about the ruling. I happen to live in France and if I start noticing this happening, i'm going to pay for a decent US based VPN. I shouldn't have to do that just to fucking Google something without censorship.
Another reply to my comment says that the ruling would require Google to remove links from all of their services, not just European ones. I don't know if that's true, but if so it means that (a) this European ruling could result in censorship of non-European traffic and (b) the US-based VPN wouldn't help you.
I don't know if that's true. If so, it's even worse than I thought.
I'd rather take my chances and live in a free society with some "risk" than in an oppressive nanny state that feels the need to increasingly monitor every aspect of my life.
That's what he's missing, the 'risk' he's talking of is the price to pay for living in a free society.
This.
One of my favorite revolutionary war-era quotes is Jefferson's "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure."
Normally, we think -- as did Jefferson, I'm sure -- that the "blood of patriots" mentioned is that of citizens fighting to throw off an oppressive government. Sometimes we also think of it as the blood of soldiers defending against tyrannical forces threatening to invade. But it's equally valid to think of it as the blood of innocent citizens which is shed simply because freedom and safety are sometimes at odds with one another. Sometimes, the only way to be safer is to give up some freedom...and it's often not worth it.
I say "often" because this isn't a black and white issue. There is a balance that has to be found, a balance that takes into account the relative harms and the numbers of people. In this case, I think the right of 300 million US citizens[*] to live free of spying by their own government is really, really big. Moreover, it's also really important to our continued freedom in all areas that we be comfortable speaking our minds, and government spying directly damages that freedom. For example studies have shown that the NSA's actions have had a chilling effect on what reporters are willing to talk about. That's very, very dangerous.
9/11 was tragic, yes. We should try to avert future large-scale terror attacks, certainly. But against the scale of the nation as a whole, 9/11 -- the largest, most successful terror attack ever -- was a flea bite. It killed fewer people than die on our roads every three weeks, and did less property damage than a major hurricane. We could survive a 9/11 every year and not really feel the pain (as a nation -- obviously the people directly impacted would suffer greatly). And I reiterate that 9/11 was the largest, most successful terror attack ever. That's not the kind of thing that's easy to repeat, or, therefore, very likely to happen again.
Another serious consideration is that if we allow our government to obtain too much power over us then we might arrive at a point where we need to refresh the tree of liberty via Jefferson's method. That would be far deadlier than a few terror attacks, even big ones.
We need to accept that we can't have perfect safety. Hell, we can't have it even if we're willing to give up all freedom. So we should accept that part of the cost of freedom is a few lives, and we should honor those people as heroes who unwittingly sacrificed for the freedom of the rest of us. That's a far more effective way to preserve freedom than spending the lives of soldiers in foreign wars while voluntarily giving up the freedoms they're supposedly dying to defend.
[*]Yes, I realize that non-US citizens also want to live without being spied upon. That's a valid issue, but separate from the point I'm making.
Exactly what I came here to say. Insurance is usually the best defense against unlikely monetary losses. Lost data often cannot be replaced, so you need offsite backups to ensure your data won't be lost of destroyed.
As a bonus, this plan not only addresses theft but also vandalism, fire and any other sort of damage covered by your insurance policy.
They won't pull out, there is far too much money to be made. From their point of view this is just a cost of doing business.
No, they won't pull out. However, if it becomes impractical to really review every removal request, they'll just remove everything that gets requested. All other search engines and indexes will have to do the same.
The result will be that any information that anyone wants quashed will disappear from all indexes. Unless something happens to limit the obvious logical progression here, Europeans are going to find that they need to use proxies based elsewhere to make the web useful.
I hope he has 50 kaypros or whatever stored in nitrogen somewhere... that can't go on forever.
I don't see why not. DOS runs fine on modern machines. At some point he may have to switch to emulation, but IA32 emulators should be around for a very very long time.
You're absolutely right. I have no idea what I was thinking when I posted that. Seriously, I can't figure out why I thought that was a reasonable response. I can't even claim that I wasn't fully awake.
One ploy they can use that doesn't require super genius insight is to try to promote complexity in new standards. Complexity makes implementation harder and increases the probability of exploitable mistakes, in both design and implementation.
And yet despite this, SELinux remains installed by default on many distros. How long more is the NSA going to be allowed to live in our Kernels?
SELinux is good stuff, regardless of where it came from. I think we should extend its use, not remove it.
That or just subscribe to Spotify. Being able to pick just about any song wherever you are is far superior to a music hoard.
This.
I always thought I'd hate subscription music, but I got Google All Access and it's clearly the best way to listen to music. There are problems with both Spotify and All Access, though; there are some limitations in their library. In particular some of the bigger artists from the last few decades have not licensed their music for streaming playback, so they aren't available. My solution to that has been to identify the music I have purchased on CD and which isn't available on All Access (e.g. Metallica and the Beatles) and rip and upload just those, since Google allows you to upload up to 20K songs to add to your library. Then they appear right alongside all of the library-provided songs, for device download ("pinning") or streaming.
Eventually I expect the library issues to get sorted out, which will make subscription music the most convenient way to listen to music, hands-down. It should also provide a very nice model for artists when the structure gets rejiggered so the labels don't get basically 100% of streaming playback revenue.
A third way is to control positions responsible for communicating with other groups, which gives them more opportunities to influence the discussion or misrepresent consensus.
I don't think that really works, and the request you quote is evidence to support my belief.
But there is definitely an allure to private schools, where the vast majority of the students are there to learn, most of the parents care enough to spend inordinate amounts of money on education, and the entire system is geared towards keeping your business and keeping those Ivy League acceptance rates up instead of ass-covering.
Having been to a private school, I can tell you that most of the focus is not education, but on looking good to the parents. I don't think teachers are any better (though probably not worse), and the main reason students are better come down to pre-selection (entrance exam, no poor children). The only fundamental plus is that they're allowed to expel troublemakers.
That's one form of private school. The school I sent my son to took any an all applicants and was largely populated with students (like my son) who were failing in the public school system, including kids with behavioral issues. The school's students also scored in the 95th percentile on the same standardized tests given to public school students -- and without "teaching the test". The curriculum was innovative and engaging, classes were small, and the teachers were uniformly excellent (even though they all made less money than when they taught in public schools). The administration's approach to dealing with problems was outstanding, almost always striking a very insightful balance between compassion and firmness.
The annual tuition was $3000, about 2/3 of what my state spent (this was in the late 90s), and that tuition was the total cost: it included field trips, meals (hot breakfast and lunch), books, paper, pencils, etc., everything. The only thing they didn't provide was transportation, though they did allow kids to arrive at school two hours before the start time, and stay three hours after (latch-key time, they called it), so working parents could drop kids off and pick them up before and after work. During those extra hours the kids were supervised, given homework help if they needed it, or entertained with games or -- rarely -- videos if not.
Money is not the difference. The private school my son went to was outstanding in virtually every way. What I think ultimately made it so great was the administration, primarily the principal, who was not only great at working with kids but also did a really good job with hiring teachers and other staff.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm sure Holland's coastline is the same length as the USA's.
That's irrelevant.
What matters is the ratio of coastal area to be protected (which isn't the same as all coastline) to the economic resources available to protect it. The US has 44 times as much coastline as the Netherlands, but it's GDP is also 20 times larger. Considering that much of the US coastline is relatively sparsely settled, and can simply be allowed to move inland, displacing a few people, and that some other portions of the coast are steep and can take the rising water, we can handle the 2X difference in ratios.
The region of US coastline that will be hardest to deal with is the southeastern US, where we have large low-lying coastal regions that regularly get pounded with hurricanes. Building dikes that can withstand hurricanes is much harder than just building dikes. Those are the areas where we will probably have the biggest populations that have to move to higher ground. Or maybe we'll figure out how to build dikes around Miami that will stand up to anything mother nature can dish out. Actually, there's no question that we can build such dikes; the only question is whether it's cheaper to build the dikes or to abandon the region.
Extinguish.
Why would Google extinguish it?
So... donating to the campaigns of congressmen that'll vote for things you want is now bribery?
In most other civilized countries, it IS.
So it's illegal to donate to political campaigns in most other civilized countries?
A US law can't stop an EU court from confiscating the EU-based assets of a US company.
Assuming they think there's any significance to the color at all.
If the consequence to not complying is having all of their European assets seized and not being able to do any business with advertisers in Europe... choosing not to comply could be a really, really tough decision. Though I suspect they could bring enough pressure to bear through the US government to fight it off.
Unless they have an Apple device. Yeah, they still *can* send you SMS from an iPhone, but only if they know the difference, and why they should care.
Were all of the asymmetric cryptosystems invalidated, smart cards would probably become dramatically more important. Everything we do with asymmetric crypto can be done with symmetric crypto (and in many cases with liberal use of trusted third parties), but key distribution becomes a much harder problem. Smart cards provide a cost-effective and reasonably-secure mechanism for key distribution.
As long as we have one secure, general-purpose asymmetric algorithm, though, I don't see much of an impact. Well, except that if everything else were to fall, I think everyone would look askance at the remaining algorithm, wondering if its time is just about to come as well.
Dlog is the base, however, to almost any other public key algorithm out there which isn't elliptic curve.
EC algorithms (ECDH, ECDSA, ECIES) are also based ultimately on the discrete log problem. So, this news is a potential threat to essentially all of the major asymmetric crypto algorithms, excepting only RSA.
Now they won't sue each other, just everyone else.
Google doesn't file patent lawsuits, except in self-defense.
But mod'ing them down? I like that. It means I don't have to wade through hundreds of trash messages to find anything worth reading.
On slashdot, I think negative feedback does result in more trollish activity, but it also pushes the activity below the threshold at which most people read, so the community doesn't see it and isn't damaged by it. Trolls also don't get mod points so they can't visit their wrath on others.
All in all, I think it works pretty well. I'll leave it to others to discuss if the mechanism to suppress trolls has negative side effects.
Said this the other day when I heard about the ruling. I happen to live in France and if I start noticing this happening, i'm going to pay for a decent US based VPN. I shouldn't have to do that just to fucking Google something without censorship.
Another reply to my comment says that the ruling would require Google to remove links from all of their services, not just European ones. I don't know if that's true, but if so it means that (a) this European ruling could result in censorship of non-European traffic and (b) the US-based VPN wouldn't help you.
I don't know if that's true. If so, it's even worse than I thought.
Really? Wow. I hadn't realized this could affect non-European search results. That's even worse than I thought.
I'd rather take my chances and live in a free society with some "risk" than in an oppressive nanny state that feels the need to increasingly monitor every aspect of my life.
That's what he's missing, the 'risk' he's talking of is the price to pay for living in a free society.
This.
One of my favorite revolutionary war-era quotes is Jefferson's "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure."
Normally, we think -- as did Jefferson, I'm sure -- that the "blood of patriots" mentioned is that of citizens fighting to throw off an oppressive government. Sometimes we also think of it as the blood of soldiers defending against tyrannical forces threatening to invade. But it's equally valid to think of it as the blood of innocent citizens which is shed simply because freedom and safety are sometimes at odds with one another. Sometimes, the only way to be safer is to give up some freedom...and it's often not worth it.
I say "often" because this isn't a black and white issue. There is a balance that has to be found, a balance that takes into account the relative harms and the numbers of people. In this case, I think the right of 300 million US citizens[*] to live free of spying by their own government is really, really big. Moreover, it's also really important to our continued freedom in all areas that we be comfortable speaking our minds, and government spying directly damages that freedom. For example studies have shown that the NSA's actions have had a chilling effect on what reporters are willing to talk about. That's very, very dangerous.
9/11 was tragic, yes. We should try to avert future large-scale terror attacks, certainly. But against the scale of the nation as a whole, 9/11 -- the largest, most successful terror attack ever -- was a flea bite. It killed fewer people than die on our roads every three weeks, and did less property damage than a major hurricane. We could survive a 9/11 every year and not really feel the pain (as a nation -- obviously the people directly impacted would suffer greatly). And I reiterate that 9/11 was the largest, most successful terror attack ever. That's not the kind of thing that's easy to repeat, or, therefore, very likely to happen again.
Another serious consideration is that if we allow our government to obtain too much power over us then we might arrive at a point where we need to refresh the tree of liberty via Jefferson's method. That would be far deadlier than a few terror attacks, even big ones.
We need to accept that we can't have perfect safety. Hell, we can't have it even if we're willing to give up all freedom. So we should accept that part of the cost of freedom is a few lives, and we should honor those people as heroes who unwittingly sacrificed for the freedom of the rest of us. That's a far more effective way to preserve freedom than spending the lives of soldiers in foreign wars while voluntarily giving up the freedoms they're supposedly dying to defend.
[*]Yes, I realize that non-US citizens also want to live without being spied upon. That's a valid issue, but separate from the point I'm making.
Exactly what I came here to say. Insurance is usually the best defense against unlikely monetary losses. Lost data often cannot be replaced, so you need offsite backups to ensure your data won't be lost of destroyed.
As a bonus, this plan not only addresses theft but also vandalism, fire and any other sort of damage covered by your insurance policy.
They won't pull out, there is far too much money to be made. From their point of view this is just a cost of doing business.
No, they won't pull out. However, if it becomes impractical to really review every removal request, they'll just remove everything that gets requested. All other search engines and indexes will have to do the same.
The result will be that any information that anyone wants quashed will disappear from all indexes. Unless something happens to limit the obvious logical progression here, Europeans are going to find that they need to use proxies based elsewhere to make the web useful.
Defiantly, even :-)
That misspelling made me chuckle.
I hope he has 50 kaypros or whatever stored in nitrogen somewhere... that can't go on forever.
I don't see why not. DOS runs fine on modern machines. At some point he may have to switch to emulation, but IA32 emulators should be around for a very very long time.
You're absolutely right. I have no idea what I was thinking when I posted that. Seriously, I can't figure out why I thought that was a reasonable response. I can't even claim that I wasn't fully awake.
And yet despite this, SELinux remains installed by default on many distros. How long more is the NSA going to be allowed to live in our Kernels?
SELinux is good stuff, regardless of where it came from. I think we should extend its use, not remove it.
That or just subscribe to Spotify. Being able to pick just about any song wherever you are is far superior to a music hoard.
This.
I always thought I'd hate subscription music, but I got Google All Access and it's clearly the best way to listen to music. There are problems with both Spotify and All Access, though; there are some limitations in their library. In particular some of the bigger artists from the last few decades have not licensed their music for streaming playback, so they aren't available. My solution to that has been to identify the music I have purchased on CD and which isn't available on All Access (e.g. Metallica and the Beatles) and rip and upload just those, since Google allows you to upload up to 20K songs to add to your library. Then they appear right alongside all of the library-provided songs, for device download ("pinning") or streaming.
Eventually I expect the library issues to get sorted out, which will make subscription music the most convenient way to listen to music, hands-down. It should also provide a very nice model for artists when the structure gets rejiggered so the labels don't get basically 100% of streaming playback revenue.
Well, not if you ignore the first sale doctrine. Though that doesn't make it self-contradictory, just inconsistent with established law.
A third way is to control positions responsible for communicating with other groups, which gives them more opportunities to influence the discussion or misrepresent consensus.
I don't think that really works, and the request you quote is evidence to support my belief.
But there is definitely an allure to private schools, where the vast majority of the students are there to learn, most of the parents care enough to spend inordinate amounts of money on education, and the entire system is geared towards keeping your business and keeping those Ivy League acceptance rates up instead of ass-covering.
Having been to a private school, I can tell you that most of the focus is not education, but on looking good to the parents. I don't think teachers are any better (though probably not worse), and the main reason students are better come down to pre-selection (entrance exam, no poor children). The only fundamental plus is that they're allowed to expel troublemakers.
That's one form of private school. The school I sent my son to took any an all applicants and was largely populated with students (like my son) who were failing in the public school system, including kids with behavioral issues. The school's students also scored in the 95th percentile on the same standardized tests given to public school students -- and without "teaching the test". The curriculum was innovative and engaging, classes were small, and the teachers were uniformly excellent (even though they all made less money than when they taught in public schools). The administration's approach to dealing with problems was outstanding, almost always striking a very insightful balance between compassion and firmness.
The annual tuition was $3000, about 2/3 of what my state spent (this was in the late 90s), and that tuition was the total cost: it included field trips, meals (hot breakfast and lunch), books, paper, pencils, etc., everything. The only thing they didn't provide was transportation, though they did allow kids to arrive at school two hours before the start time, and stay three hours after (latch-key time, they called it), so working parents could drop kids off and pick them up before and after work. During those extra hours the kids were supervised, given homework help if they needed it, or entertained with games or -- rarely -- videos if not.
Money is not the difference. The private school my son went to was outstanding in virtually every way. What I think ultimately made it so great was the administration, primarily the principal, who was not only great at working with kids but also did a really good job with hiring teachers and other staff.
in 1969, the average spending was $4,221 per student, per year.
In 2010 dollars.
the $27,176.91 in today's dollars. We spend about 40% of that.
You're applying the inflation adjustment twice. If you use correct numbers you find that we're spending about 250% of what we were in 1969.