I won't get many things Google doesn't like me to see in the auto-completion. Google is already customizing and filtering completions heavily and many things people search for are not listed there.
I would agree that if this were purely mechanical (list the most common searches that start with what you type) things might look different (and you would get porn-related completions for just about everything). But by redacting the completions Google becomes the publisher and not just a search engine. If Google sees the need of filtering out things it doesn't like to see connected to its name as an auto-completion it has to do this for names of others too if they request it with good reasons.
I find it interesting that there are people who rally for Google assuming rights Google is denying others. This is "Google über alles".
I'm curious how German law determines what is an "offensive" search. If there's a legal definition, then maybe you can work something, but if "offensive" is determined by the "offended", then Google might as well disable the entire feature as anyone who doesn't like the autocomplete result for their name or term begin banning just about every potentially offensive combination out there.
Google avoids lots of completions already. You won't get completions about many things that Google deems to be offensive, like sexual terms (even porn actors) or negative things about Google. Google does this fairly arbitrarily with no documented rules or anything. It's not that adding something to a blacklist if someone requests this in connection with his name would be anything major to this. In fact it would just give you some rights that Google assumes for itself as a matter of course.
Note that in Germany Google also was required to blank out houses in street view in Google Maps if the owner requested this.
What's the API for the "notify Google of offensive autocomplete words"?
You don't get this. It's not about "offensive words" but about connecting YOU to things you have nothing to do with just by suggesting completions others have searched for.
So the API is: Type your name into the Google search field and if you get completions that would be libel if published as a headline with your name in it in a newspaper, notify Google as you would notify the newspaper. It's not about search hits or things said on other sites Google just indexed. It's about what Google publishes about YOUR name in the completions and your rights.
This is not about search terms or search hits but just about autocomplete. It's not about hiding what you did, but about not slapping people looking for you or your company into the face with terms that come solely from other people searching for something (and maybe even not finding anything).
I mean, if I start to type your name into Google and Google suggests completions of "sells drugs to minors" just because people search for this in connection with your name (or someone else with the same name) you wouldn't be happy either.
Besides: Google already IS redacting autocompletion heavily. It weeds out completions reeking of sex, of anything negative about Google itself... By doing this the completions become an edited publication and Google is responsible for what it "publishes" here.
It's much more about rights (of affected individuals) than about anything else. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. There's nobody else beside Google you can turn to to get this "publication" corrected or to sue (in case of libel), because it's Google who's publishing rumours here.
Good to see that the religious nuts (that is you) are out in force again. Sorry, but what you say simply doesn't match observed realities. In the past, when CO2 levels have been substantially higher than they are today, and higher than the predictions for AGW too, life thrived on this planet. In fact, in volume and diversity, it did a lot better than it currently is.
Yes, there is no doubt that the predicted warming will cause many issues for human kind, and it will even be traumatic for a good number of species tied to current habitats (but they will adapt quickly), there is no reason to think that the warming will be generally negative to life as such. Quite the opposite. When the earth warms it is far more likely that the earth, as was the case before, becomes a better place for life as such.
Not for our species necessarily, though. Or for our economies even.
Also: The changes that are happening right now are happening incredibly quick. Quick changes ARE negative to life as such. Environments and ecosystems that change over thousands or tens of thousands of years are much easier to adapt to than changes that happen within decades.
Look at the Holocene Extinction -- we're right in the middle of a major extinction event and everything points at one species being the driver of it -- us. It's not looking very much as if many species are adapting at all to the changes we're causing. Most species are straight going extinct before they even get a chance to adapt. We're rapidly transforming the world into a farm to feed the pest that is called humanity and this farm is severely mismanaged.
Life will adapt, yes. The question is if we and our economies can adapt too.
Yeah, it does. Life will survive this as it survived worse things than that.
But our societies and economies as they are will not. That's the point. You can have "life" adapt perfectly well in the long run and still have global mayhem happening while it is adapting.
Also, "life will adapt" just ignores the fact that changes that happen over thousands of years are easier to adapt to than changes that happen within decades. There's no time for slow migration, ecosystems and economies gradually changing and adapting. Fast changes are incredibly hard to adapt to and the changes we're looking at are happening really quick.
It's the typical jump from "nothing is happening" to "life will adapt" while totally ignoring all the major shit happening to real people and real economies that makes me wonder about the will to face reality in many people. First they close their eyes while pretending "it's a lie, nothing is really happening", then they jump to "life will adapt". Yeah, but life may adapt by you and your children starving.
What good did all the control and data for the USSR and East-Germany? The latter really had perfected the art of its citizens spying on its citizens and still: It just collapsed. You can't really control a population. There are just too many people and when they decide to do something all your control is moot.
That's actually the point Schneier tries to make: From a certain point on collecting more and more data the ROI (and eroding civil liberties is one of those "investments") just isn't there anymore. You're sitting in a nice deep hole and busy yourself with digging it deeper.
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
"Impossible to determine", exactly. The US is so poor and the government spends so much without getting anything useful done because the wars it sprays over the world and the cold war on the people.
It would be wiser to accept some risks. You can't (and don't want to!) have a state in which two young people can't get at some black powder and pressure cookers and learn how to make a bomb. This is madness.
Google should invest in such things. Data is worthless if can't do something useful with it. Then Google in the best case could become something like a Mind or at least an embryo of one. In the worst case... Facebook... no! We're doomed!
The spooky thing about that is: There is a limited amount of Bitcoins that will ever exist and new ones are getting more and more expensive to mine. This means that if Bitcoin ever will take off every single one of them would get more and more expensive. Bitcoin will top out at 21 million bitcoins. If you have one million bitcoins you will own about 5 percent of everything that can be bought with it. As in: If Bitcoin would become THE world currency at some point you would own 5 percent of the world. Of course even owning one bitcoin would make you stinking rich then.
Email today is totally fine for texting. The problem is not the protocol, the problem are the clients that still fully stick to an emulation of writing something like a letter. Better email clients that support some ways of quickly composing and reading short blurbs of text could solve this easily.
(Of course this doesn't change the fact that many people want to have things like chatting or texting and email nicely separated.)
Not any more than other ways to burn fossil fuels. And you can use hydrogen (or synthesized hydrocarbons) if you want. There's no reason rockets can't be carbon neutral.
You wrote: "Unless you want to kill off 90% of the worlds population..."
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Any good ideas in this direction? It would solve so many problems, unemployment, high real-estate prices, traffic, hunger, poverty, ease of netfame/tv appearances, distribution of resources, global warming, and hopefully, get rid of all the stupid people.
A good economic collapse, maybe with some ecologic collapse giving a helping hand will easily do the trick. People will just starve and/or kill each other.
Unfortunately it won't necessarily be the not stupid ones who survive.
I mean, maybe. But then a few centuries ago people were free to make a living off the land. Now they have to beg for jobs and no amount of work is going to help them without that when they have nothing to work with and there's no unclaimed land to farm.
It may well be that the only truly free people were those who came into lands that belonged to nobody and it also may well be that those in fitting climates weren't really bad off. The golden times of mankind are over. Maybe there are new golden times far in the future, but this would require some really hard work to get us off this rock. And with "us" I don't mean just a handful of stinking rich tourists in LEO.
The problem is that a lack of bees can do much more harm to agriculture than a ban of a pesticide. Not doing anything until it's too late to recover isn't an option here.
I think some people totally miss how important for agriculture bees are.
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
I think if you have nothing but stone to work with getting sand in your gruel is pretty much unavoidable.
I'm pulling my money out of foolish things like municipal bonds and buying stock in companies which make rotator cuff treatments and therapies because that is apparently going to be a huge growth area soon.
Yeah, because doing things with your arms and hands that require more motion than moving a mouse around on a desk just isn't natural... or what?
Yeah, but let me tell you that users who used Google Reader are those who read and write a lot. Each of them is easily worth 10 plain users. I was burned by that and right now I'm busy moving quite a few users and one business away from Google. Google kicking out ActiveSync and in six months CalDAV isn't exactly helping them here. Google is starting to feel somewhat uncomfortable all of a sudden. There has been a widely felt uncomfortable feeling about Google's potential to abuse their power for quite a while but all of this is the first time Google makes this potential into something you have to deal with. And this is not a good feeling.
Google is changing right now. Even those working there notice that. Google is dropping right now all the attributes that made nerds comfortable with it. It is turning into something else.
Why is there this rush to put everything in the cloud? Are you telling me that my device can't store a few bytes to kilobytes of textual data on it...
If you note down something on your computer and then you're on the road and want that note, what do you do? And yes, there are ways to do this, but I'm using Simplenote (much better than this Google thing, free and dozens of clients and scripts and whatnot for all platforms) since a few years and I can tell you that it makes a GREAT difference to have your notes available everywhere and all the time without any effort. Note down a book title, an IP address, some serial number, whatever, and have it available everywhere.
The problem is not the cloud. The cloud is great. The problem are monopolies like Google that offer no standard protocols with an RFC number and accept no third-party implementations of their APIs and protocols and servers. THIS is the problem, not "the cloud".
The web is in the cloud, email is in the cloud. But these have protocols and standards and are not just proprietary products. The fact that you have to explain and preach that over and over and people STILL think that there ist just "have everything saved on your dusty PC or give everything to Google Facebook" is crazy. Are people really that dumb?
Hell, you're not reading that from your PCs HD and you're not writing your comment to it. You read it in the "cloud" and your write it to the "cloud".
Why free? How can such a service that requires servers and bandwidth be "free" anyway?
I would gladly pay for Google Reader. I don't understand why they didn't just limit it to users of payed Google Apps accounts as they did with EAS support.
I'm a bit torn right now between two ways to go on:
a) I set up servers of my own for everything (I still have an SMTP and IMAP server for email, never trusted Gmail) like calendars, contacts, documents, notes, etc. Lots of work to set this up, a bit of money, fear of it being not secure enough if I don't put in more work and time.
b) Just throw myself at Google and accept that every odd year a service I used and love will be gone and I have to find a new home for it after exporting and converting my data (as I have to do right now with Google Reader and the >100000 starred articles in it). Hardly any work at all, Google reads all my data.
Slashdot Mirror
They are supposed to know it by people with the name completing to something that borders on libel telling them about it.
I won't get many things Google doesn't like me to see in the auto-completion. Google is already customizing and filtering completions heavily and many things people search for are not listed there.
I would agree that if this were purely mechanical (list the most common searches that start with what you type) things might look different (and you would get porn-related completions for just about everything). But by redacting the completions Google becomes the publisher and not just a search engine. If Google sees the need of filtering out things it doesn't like to see connected to its name as an auto-completion it has to do this for names of others too if they request it with good reasons.
I find it interesting that there are people who rally for Google assuming rights Google is denying others. This is "Google über alles".
I'm curious how German law determines what is an "offensive" search. If there's a legal definition, then maybe you can work something, but if "offensive" is determined by the "offended", then Google might as well disable the entire feature as anyone who doesn't like the autocomplete result for their name or term begin banning just about every potentially offensive combination out there.
Google avoids lots of completions already. You won't get completions about many things that Google deems to be offensive, like sexual terms (even porn actors) or negative things about Google. Google does this fairly arbitrarily with no documented rules or anything. It's not that adding something to a blacklist if someone requests this in connection with his name would be anything major to this. In fact it would just give you some rights that Google assumes for itself as a matter of course.
Note that in Germany Google also was required to blank out houses in street view in Google Maps if the owner requested this.
I have a dictionary online.
I have perl.
What's the API for the "notify Google of offensive autocomplete words"?
You don't get this. It's not about "offensive words" but about connecting YOU to things you have nothing to do with just by suggesting completions others have searched for.
So the API is: Type your name into the Google search field and if you get completions that would be libel if published as a headline with your name in it in a newspaper, notify Google as you would notify the newspaper. It's not about search hits or things said on other sites Google just indexed. It's about what Google publishes about YOUR name in the completions and your rights.
This is not about search terms or search hits but just about autocomplete. It's not about hiding what you did, but about not slapping people looking for you or your company into the face with terms that come solely from other people searching for something (and maybe even not finding anything).
I mean, if I start to type your name into Google and Google suggests completions of "sells drugs to minors" just because people search for this in connection with your name (or someone else with the same name) you wouldn't be happy either.
Besides: Google already IS redacting autocompletion heavily. It weeds out completions reeking of sex, of anything negative about Google itself... By doing this the completions become an edited publication and Google is responsible for what it "publishes" here.
It's much more about rights (of affected individuals) than about anything else. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. There's nobody else beside Google you can turn to to get this "publication" corrected or to sue (in case of libel), because it's Google who's publishing rumours here.
Good to see that the religious nuts (that is you) are out in force again. Sorry, but what you say simply doesn't match observed realities. In the past, when CO2 levels have been substantially higher than they are today, and higher than the predictions for AGW too, life thrived on this planet. In fact, in volume and diversity, it did a lot better than it currently is.
Yes, there is no doubt that the predicted warming will cause many issues for human kind, and it will even be traumatic for a good number of species tied to current habitats (but they will adapt quickly), there is no reason to think that the warming will be generally negative to life as such. Quite the opposite. When the earth warms it is far more likely that the earth, as was the case before, becomes a better place for life as such.
Not for our species necessarily, though. Or for our economies even.
Also: The changes that are happening right now are happening incredibly quick. Quick changes ARE negative to life as such. Environments and ecosystems that change over thousands or tens of thousands of years are much easier to adapt to than changes that happen within decades.
Look at the Holocene Extinction -- we're right in the middle of a major extinction event and everything points at one species being the driver of it -- us. It's not looking very much as if many species are adapting at all to the changes we're causing. Most species are straight going extinct before they even get a chance to adapt. We're rapidly transforming the world into a farm to feed the pest that is called humanity and this farm is severely mismanaged.
Life will adapt, yes. The question is if we and our economies can adapt too.
Yeah, it does. Life will survive this as it survived worse things than that.
But our societies and economies as they are will not. That's the point. You can have "life" adapt perfectly well in the long run and still have global mayhem happening while it is adapting.
Also, "life will adapt" just ignores the fact that changes that happen over thousands of years are easier to adapt to than changes that happen within decades. There's no time for slow migration, ecosystems and economies gradually changing and adapting. Fast changes are incredibly hard to adapt to and the changes we're looking at are happening really quick.
It's the typical jump from "nothing is happening" to "life will adapt" while totally ignoring all the major shit happening to real people and real economies that makes me wonder about the will to face reality in many people. First they close their eyes while pretending "it's a lie, nothing is really happening", then they jump to "life will adapt". Yeah, but life may adapt by you and your children starving.
What good did all the control and data for the USSR and East-Germany? The latter really had perfected the art of its citizens spying on its citizens and still: It just collapsed. You can't really control a population. There are just too many people and when they decide to do something all your control is moot.
That's actually the point Schneier tries to make: From a certain point on collecting more and more data the ROI (and eroding civil liberties is one of those "investments") just isn't there anymore. You're sitting in a nice deep hole and busy yourself with digging it deeper.
The Washington Post:
"Impossible to determine", exactly. The US is so poor and the government spends so much without getting anything useful done because the wars it sprays over the world and the cold war on the people.
It would be wiser to accept some risks. You can't (and don't want to!) have a state in which two young people can't get at some black powder and pressure cookers and learn how to make a bomb. This is madness.
Google should invest in such things. Data is worthless if can't do something useful with it. Then Google in the best case could become something like a Mind or at least an embryo of one. In the worst case... Facebook... no! We're doomed!
The spooky thing about that is: There is a limited amount of Bitcoins that will ever exist and new ones are getting more and more expensive to mine. This means that if Bitcoin ever will take off every single one of them would get more and more expensive. Bitcoin will top out at 21 million bitcoins. If you have one million bitcoins you will own about 5 percent of everything that can be bought with it. As in: If Bitcoin would become THE world currency at some point you would own 5 percent of the world. Of course even owning one bitcoin would make you stinking rich then.
Email today is totally fine for texting. The problem is not the protocol, the problem are the clients that still fully stick to an emulation of writing something like a letter. Better email clients that support some ways of quickly composing and reading short blurbs of text could solve this easily.
(Of course this doesn't change the fact that many people want to have things like chatting or texting and email nicely separated.)
Not any more than other ways to burn fossil fuels. And you can use hydrogen (or synthesized hydrocarbons) if you want. There's no reason rockets can't be carbon neutral.
You wrote:
"Unless you want to kill off 90% of the worlds population..."
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Any good ideas in this direction? It would solve so many problems, unemployment, high real-estate prices, traffic, hunger, poverty, ease of netfame/tv appearances, distribution of resources, global warming, and hopefully, get rid of all the stupid people.
A good economic collapse, maybe with some ecologic collapse giving a helping hand will easily do the trick. People will just starve and/or kill each other.
Unfortunately it won't necessarily be the not stupid ones who survive.
[Citation needed]
I mean, maybe. But then a few centuries ago people were free to make a living off the land. Now they have to beg for jobs and no amount of work is going to help them without that when they have nothing to work with and there's no unclaimed land to farm.
It may well be that the only truly free people were those who came into lands that belonged to nobody and it also may well be that those in fitting climates weren't really bad off. The golden times of mankind are over. Maybe there are new golden times far in the future, but this would require some really hard work to get us off this rock. And with "us" I don't mean just a handful of stinking rich tourists in LEO.
The problem is that a lack of bees can do much more harm to agriculture than a ban of a pesticide. Not doing anything until it's too late to recover isn't an option here.
I think some people totally miss how important for agriculture bees are.
That's very interesting, but after reading it up it seems as much like "Made by Sony" as "Made in the UK". Well, it's both of course.
TFA mentions that he ate gruel and grains and that was probably to blame for his poor dental health. They're also blaming mechanical damage from tool holding and chewing sand with his gruel. I find it pretty unlikely that he would eat sandy gruel, they were prehistoric, not stupid. If they were stupid, we wouldn't have gotten the chance to be as stupid as we are as a race.
I think if you have nothing but stone to work with getting sand in your gruel is pretty much unavoidable.
I'm pulling my money out of foolish things like municipal bonds and buying stock in companies which make rotator cuff treatments and therapies because that is apparently going to be a huge growth area soon.
Yeah, because doing things with your arms and hands that require more motion than moving a mouse around on a desk just isn't natural... or what?
Just implement the Google Reader API.
Then, have all apps supporting Google Reader add a field to enter a server.
Then, have several companies offer this service, for free or for money, with or without a web interface.
Then you get a free market for RSS synchronisation on the free Internet, a level playing field for free players.
OK, these days suggesting something like that probably already makes you a communist.
In six months CalDAV support will end.
Yeah, but let me tell you that users who used Google Reader are those who read and write a lot. Each of them is easily worth 10 plain users. I was burned by that and right now I'm busy moving quite a few users and one business away from Google. Google kicking out ActiveSync and in six months CalDAV isn't exactly helping them here. Google is starting to feel somewhat uncomfortable all of a sudden. There has been a widely felt uncomfortable feeling about Google's potential to abuse their power for quite a while but all of this is the first time Google makes this potential into something you have to deal with. And this is not a good feeling.
Google is changing right now. Even those working there notice that. Google is dropping right now all the attributes that made nerds comfortable with it. It is turning into something else.
Why is there this rush to put everything in the cloud? Are you telling me that my device can't store a few bytes to kilobytes of textual data on it...
If you note down something on your computer and then you're on the road and want that note, what do you do? And yes, there are ways to do this, but I'm using Simplenote (much better than this Google thing, free and dozens of clients and scripts and whatnot for all platforms) since a few years and I can tell you that it makes a GREAT difference to have your notes available everywhere and all the time without any effort. Note down a book title, an IP address, some serial number, whatever, and have it available everywhere.
The problem is not the cloud. The cloud is great. The problem are monopolies like Google that offer no standard protocols with an RFC number and accept no third-party implementations of their APIs and protocols and servers. THIS is the problem, not "the cloud".
The web is in the cloud, email is in the cloud. But these have protocols and standards and are not just proprietary products. The fact that you have to explain and preach that over and over and people STILL think that there ist just "have everything saved on your dusty PC or give everything to Google Facebook" is crazy. Are people really that dumb?
Hell, you're not reading that from your PCs HD and you're not writing your comment to it. You read it in the "cloud" and your write it to the "cloud".
Simplenote does the same (very simple notes), it is free and it has real clients for all platforms. Many of them.
Why free? How can such a service that requires servers and bandwidth be "free" anyway?
I would gladly pay for Google Reader. I don't understand why they didn't just limit it to users of payed Google Apps accounts as they did with EAS support.
I'm a bit torn right now between two ways to go on:
a) I set up servers of my own for everything (I still have an SMTP and IMAP server for email, never trusted Gmail) like calendars, contacts, documents, notes, etc. Lots of work to set this up, a bit of money, fear of it being not secure enough if I don't put in more work and time.
b) Just throw myself at Google and accept that every odd year a service I used and love will be gone and I have to find a new home for it after exporting and converting my data (as I have to do right now with Google Reader and the >100000 starred articles in it). Hardly any work at all, Google reads all my data.
My anger says a), my lazy soul says b).
But I surely don't love Google. By the way, nice article here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx
Wait... has this thing any protocol or API to access this with other apps? Or is it again Google/Android/Browser or nothing?