Or you could stop being an incompetent and ignorant twit.
Seriously, self-signed certificates can only be verified by comparing them against a stored public key for being exactly equal. Nothing else allows their verification, at all (as anyone can make one with freely available tools, and can tell any old lie they want in the identity part). Getting a public CA to sign your certificate provides their assertion that the identity information is correct (within the scope that they state; the very cheapest CAs don't verify very much, and the expensive ones are typically much more careful) and that adds a layer of security.
It also means that Google doesn't have to provide a mechanism for storing certificates, and it allows you to update your server certificate as and when you see fit; with a stored self-signed solution, you'll have to coordinate any change on your server with the gmail fetcher, which is considerably more complex. It's also more complex in other ways: the fetcher will probably be fetching from multiple servers at once, yet if each has its own self-signed certificate then you've got to switch around all the security configuration between each fetch. That's all cost and complexity. Far easier for them to just do what they've done and require you to stop being a cheap dumb-ass. (They can always block a CA if that CA demonstrates that they're issuing in bad faith; they'll want to do that anyway...)
Just looking at the site should make anyone on the internet ask themselves, "who the hell all these CAs are and do we really trust them with our most personal data"?
You are very confused. Alas, you are spreading your confusion around.
The whole design of SSL and public key infrastructures means that you don't trust the CAs with your personal data. Indeed, you hardly ever need to communicate with the CA directly at all. You just trust them to make accurate statements about hosts of websites. You then have to decide whether to trust that site with your personal data. Thus, no matter who signs the SSL certificate for Facebook, I'm not trusting them with my personal data...
There's no technical reason you couldn't run your own CA, in which case it could be as trustworthy from your perspective as you like. This is very close to what you do with a self-signed certificate. The only tricky part is persuading other people to trust that CA; they don't know it from a hole in the ground. The value of the big CAs is that they've coordinated with manufacturers of browsers (and a few other pieces of software) to ensure that their public certificates are already in place: browsers can already do the technical parts of identity and trust management for you. Still doesn't tell you if the company is shady or not; just that they are who they say they are.
This looks like it's primarily interested with homonyms - words with different meanings, but the same arrangement of letters. Like, say, "Prince". Prince could refer either to the title, a particular holder of that title, a brandname, or a bunch of other things. Think wikipedia's disambiguation page. This technology is basically giving google the ability to determine which particular meaning a given instance of the word is talking about, given context.
That's not a bad explanation, but the real magic is that it's ascribing a set of meanings to a word or phrase according to the nature of the clustering of web pages that mention it. Then, they can split up things like search results according to the potential significant meaning sets as one of the first things, without particular regard for just how popular the particular uses of the term are with respect to each other. In effect, it's automatically ascribing the meaning according to the potential context graphs, which is one of these fascinating Hard AI things. (I'm at least partially convinced that something similar drives human cognition and memory; you understand things by understanding how they relate to everything else.)
Isn't that the point of trying to make more money..?
Yes and no. Unless you're going to legally force everyone to make the same amount of money (which would be pure foolishness) you're going to end up with some people making more and some making less. As a society, we've decided that we don't want slavery and indentured servitude, and that various necessities (e.g., food and shelter) have to be acquired via market-based mechanisms, so the minimum effective income (post tax) that people receive has to be sufficient to live on. That greatly constrains the proportion of the income of the poor that you can levy taxes on.
The other problem with flat taxes is that it's very easy for the cost of levying them on the poorest to exceed the amount received from them. In effect, the net tax received after the costs of collection is negative; by collecting nothing from the poorest, the amount of money coming in that can be used for paying for things other than taxing people goes up.
Well, you aren't forced to use Google's Plat store
But if you want to reach 90%+ of all devices you'll have it on the play store.
"Of course we'll bundle our MorganNet software with the new network nodes! Our customers expect no less of us. We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us."
Software patents have got to go. And with them, inventions that "can be implemented in software" also need to go. I saw nothing in either link talking about software patents.
But the problem isn't whether an invention is in hardware or software; that's a very artificial distinction when you have things like reconfigurable hardware and firmware about. The problem is exactly what you get when obvious patents are permitted. If a patent isn't advancing the state of the art substantively when it is published, it's ipso facto hindering innovation.
There's also a potential for problems with people trying to get patents on things where critical functional components are kept as commercial secrets. That's not a problem with patents themselves though. Secrets cannot and should not be protected from independent discovery.
Rather than let the sea have that land, can't we build a 1m tall levee?
You can, but you've got a lot of those levees to build. Better get on with it. Oh, and you've got to also figure out what to do about awkward cases like salt marshes (which aren't exactly sea or land, but rather somewhere in between) and you need to build bigger levees behind the first ones to deal with the fact that the sea doesn't stay at one level, but rather moves up and down with tides and storms; a 1m levee is unlikely to be enough given the consequences of catastrophic failure.
Levees can protect some of the coast, but definitely not everywhere. It's too hard to do and not cost effective when you expand to protecting thousands of miles...
a) when AGW alarmists see record heat waves, it's because of global warming. when they see record cold snaps, it's because of global warming. then they move to "climate change" (which, always does, so that's like saying "I'm right as long as something that always happens keeps happening"), and then the record does something silly like exhibit a zero trend for 16 years.
It appears that the major consequence of global warming is that the increased energy in the atmosphere triggers more extreme events. One of the key changes seems to be that it is changing — slowing — the rate that the jet stream moves back and forth (probably due to the nature of the coupling between the troposphere and the stratosphere). That allows for more extreme events — heatwaves have more time to develop, cold snaps can get further south and become colder, stormy periods last longer — and we see this in weather records. One extreme event doesn't mean all that much, but when the rate of extreme events is greatly increased, and for year on year too, we know that the probabilities driving our weather have been changed somewhat. Given that where we live and how we use the land depends hugely on the local climate (not on the global climate; you don't live and work everywhere at once!) this matters hugely in economic terms.
We can see and measure the changing climate. (We don't know how much it is going to change by overall; that's truly a bunch of educated guesswork.) We can see that this is likely primarily caused by CO2 concentration changes, and those we can also measure. (Non-greenhouse gas contributions seem to be minimal.) Where is the change coming from? Well, it's not volcanoes (which are producing the gas at about a constant rate) so it's probably either from CH4 releases (itself a super-powered greenhouse gas, but it gets oxidized to CO2 relatively quickly) from melting tundra or something like that, or it is from CO2 released directly from principally human activity. It is certainly true that we have, as a species, burnt an awful lot of fossil carbon; there are a lot of power stations, factories and cars out there.
So GW is real. Is it AGW? It's not 100% certain, but it is difficult to find anything else it could plausibly be. It certainly doesn't make sense from a public policy perspective to assume that it must be false.
b) AGW isn't falsifiable because any observation of global average CO2 and global average temperature can be explained away with an ad hoc special pleading. If the melting glaciers *prove* AGW, but advancing glaciers don't *refute* it, then you've simply done a "heads I win, tails you lose".
A single net-melting glacier doesn't prove all that much. It only samples local conditions (and whether a glacier grows or shrinks depends on the balance of melt rate and rate of accumulation due to snow). Moreover, conditions are naturally variable. But what about when 95% of all glaciers (outside of East Antarctica) are shrinking? Would that be evidence of GW? What's more, that's not the only observed phenomenon that's highly consistent with GW. The probability (as any good Bayesian statistician would tell you) of all these unrelated evidence lines being consistent with a no-GW hypothesis is really small indeed. There's really a crapton of evidence out there.
Whether the GW is anthropogenic is harder to work out. What it is is a damn good hypothesis that's consistent with a lot of facts; other explanations that are run past the same gauntlet don't hold up nearly so well. (Solar output changes, Milankovic cycles; these have demonstrably driven GW in the fossil record, but they don't predict a warming phase now.)
I suspect that the real reason you object to the AGW hypothesis is that, if it is true, it has public policy implications that you don't like. Tough. Scientists have been pushing for years for economic changes to reduce the impact of AGW precisely because they think that it is the cheapest
Why not use this as an opportunity to replace the creaking DNS system with something more suitable?
Are you talking about the technical part that is used to announce to computer systems what the mapping of names to IP addresses is for each system, or the legal part that is used to decide what names can be owned and who actually owns them? There's very little contact between the two, really, and the troubles associated with one really have nothing to do with the other. Technically, you're talking about how to do things like DNSSEC, and legally you're talking about ICANN and their quest for ever greater monetization of short alphanumeric strings.
Functions either succeed or fail, period. That statement is fact.
Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel might not entirely agree with that statement. (Functions can also not terminate, and it can even be impossible to work out if they are going to terminate or not.)
So haskell magically manages a temporary DNS error or malformed input from a file? I call bullshit.
Let's see, those are both problems with the external world and so would probably become thrown errors in the IO monad, at least to start with. (OTOH, a DNS lookup would probably have to return a Maybe anyway, as there's no guarantee that a failure will be transient; the address could have been retired from service and there's nothing at the level of code to distinguish "temporary" from "permanent"; the name resolution library itself doesn't know.) You thought you were calling the GP out, but instead just demonstrated your ignorance.
Of course, the programmer will still have to work out what to do with the failing case. I suspect that that's the part that most people writing code actually suck at, and that's a language-independent suck.
C# has IDisposable/using. It's not equivalent - a far cry from it - but it covers some common cases. And Java is getting Closable/try-block in Java 8, which is more or less the same thing.
That's a language feature of Java 7, and is already in production.
When taking the decision to keep the emergency backup fuel pumps in the basement, did no one think of what would happen in the event of flooding.
Probably someone thought about it, but decided that other potential hazards (e.g., a leak in the tank causing fuel to be soaked all through several floors of the building) were more important to deal with. There are many different sorts of risks, and optimal mitigation strategies for one can be very poor for others. You can guess what the likelihood of each particular risk is, but that's definitely guesswork; the whole of New York really wasn't set up with this sort of storm surge in mind.
better yet concentrate and figuring out how to build the Fastest damn spaceship possible, something that can reach.5 the speed of light or faster,
Were you planning on fueling that with magic pixie dust? Seriously, accelerating large masses to those sorts of speeds, even in space where there's greatly reduced friction, is significantly beyond what we can do now. Going to the moon, or Mars, or even anywhere else in solar system, is simple by comparison.
Of course, if we ever figure it out then we can and should go to the stars, but it really isn't what you'd call a sane short-term or even medium-term plan. It requires the existence of things that we've got no idea how to try to do.
You know what you call the party who hires a "lower-cost" lawyer? The LOSER.
Not in all jurisdictions. Maybe you are inhabiting somewhere where price-gouging by legal representatives is encouraged, but most places regard that as an abhorrent incentive for lawyers to serve only themselves and not their clients. (In the UK, the handling of who pays legal fees is a grant of the judge in equity, and if the judge feels that one side has not taken reasonable steps to limit the cost of proceedings, they can grant the costs against that side even if they win. Usually, the two sides are best off bringing broadly matching levels of legal power.)
What, all approximately 3 EUR of it? (That is, 1.5 billion euros / 500 million people. Ballpark correct figure anyway.) Not worth mailing individual sums out to people for that little; that would be just acting as a subsidy for postal services. If you want money back personally, sue the manufacturer of the products you bought yourself (assuming they're one of the fined corporations or a local subsidiary); you should find it easy enough to prove your case now that they've been penalized...
For comparison, the password to an account I use fairly often is 128 characters.
That must be annoying to type in every time.
More seriously, if that's a password but the system in question is only storing a relatively short hash of it, all the attacker has to do is find something that hashes to the same thing. That's pretty simple to do if you've got the grunt compute power, as there's usually no other checks on the sense of a password at the point of use (which isn't the same as the point of definition). In effect, you're not hindering attackers at all but you are making things worse for yourself. Congratulations on your addition to Security Theater! With thinking like that, you're almost qualified to work for the TSA...
(Myself? I disable logins with passwords wherever I can. Turn up with a cryptographic key — the verification of which is not a hashing operation at all — or don't turn up at all.)
[Sales tax is] regressive, so it hurts poor people disproportionally
The way to deal with that is to exclude some categories of goods and services from the tax (or equivalently to set its rate at zero for those goods) where those goods and services are things which virtually everyone needs to purchase. An example of a reasonable candidate for being untaxed is food not intended for immediate consumption (i.e., groceries). With such a tax regime, you lessen the regressiveness (but don't eliminate it entirely) to the point where it does not act to prevent people from being able to survive.
Of course, things are more complicated in the real world. Purely functional approaches would obviously be pretty inefficient in a lot of cases, since things would be needlessly copied. Lisp, as an example, has both a non-destructive append as well as a destructive nconc, the latter being intended for use in situations where the original lists will not be used again (and can therefore be modified).
The other complication in the real world is that memory management becomes a real drag because memory is inevitably a shared modifiable resource, and determining what threads are using a particular piece of memory is messy. The best approach I'm aware of involves sharing objects between threads only for the duration of a message transfer and processing in response to it; if the receiver wishes to retain a value, it has to copy it (which can be done in a usually-lock-free way, fortunately). This model fits with pure functional programming languages fairly well (and a few others) but it really sits badly with the POSIX threading model and its derivatives (including both Java and C#).
If your program is both lock-free and hazard-free, it can scale up and out very well. However, it's not trivial to get there, and it is an arrangement that is actually non-optimal in some special cases, such as applying a color transform to an image. Parallelization is harder than it looks, and it definitely should look hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Or Google could just fix their broken approach.
Or you could stop being an incompetent and ignorant twit.
Seriously, self-signed certificates can only be verified by comparing them against a stored public key for being exactly equal. Nothing else allows their verification, at all (as anyone can make one with freely available tools, and can tell any old lie they want in the identity part). Getting a public CA to sign your certificate provides their assertion that the identity information is correct (within the scope that they state; the very cheapest CAs don't verify very much, and the expensive ones are typically much more careful) and that adds a layer of security.
It also means that Google doesn't have to provide a mechanism for storing certificates, and it allows you to update your server certificate as and when you see fit; with a stored self-signed solution, you'll have to coordinate any change on your server with the gmail fetcher, which is considerably more complex. It's also more complex in other ways: the fetcher will probably be fetching from multiple servers at once, yet if each has its own self-signed certificate then you've got to switch around all the security configuration between each fetch. That's all cost and complexity. Far easier for them to just do what they've done and require you to stop being a cheap dumb-ass. (They can always block a CA if that CA demonstrates that they're issuing in bad faith; they'll want to do that anyway...)
Just looking at the site should make anyone on the internet ask themselves, "who the hell all these CAs are and do we really trust them with our most personal data"?
You are very confused. Alas, you are spreading your confusion around.
The whole design of SSL and public key infrastructures means that you don't trust the CAs with your personal data. Indeed, you hardly ever need to communicate with the CA directly at all. You just trust them to make accurate statements about hosts of websites. You then have to decide whether to trust that site with your personal data. Thus, no matter who signs the SSL certificate for Facebook, I'm not trusting them with my personal data...
There's no technical reason you couldn't run your own CA, in which case it could be as trustworthy from your perspective as you like. This is very close to what you do with a self-signed certificate. The only tricky part is persuading other people to trust that CA; they don't know it from a hole in the ground. The value of the big CAs is that they've coordinated with manufacturers of browsers (and a few other pieces of software) to ensure that their public certificates are already in place: browsers can already do the technical parts of identity and trust management for you. Still doesn't tell you if the company is shady or not; just that they are who they say they are.
Battery life? Compared to what?
Compared to a desktop corporate lawyer, of course, which requires a constant supply of money and regular recharging with leather upholstery.
This looks like it's primarily interested with homonyms - words with different meanings, but the same arrangement of letters. Like, say, "Prince". Prince could refer either to the title, a particular holder of that title, a brandname, or a bunch of other things. Think wikipedia's disambiguation page. This technology is basically giving google the ability to determine which particular meaning a given instance of the word is talking about, given context.
That's not a bad explanation, but the real magic is that it's ascribing a set of meanings to a word or phrase according to the nature of the clustering of web pages that mention it. Then, they can split up things like search results according to the potential significant meaning sets as one of the first things, without particular regard for just how popular the particular uses of the term are with respect to each other. In effect, it's automatically ascribing the meaning according to the potential context graphs, which is one of these fascinating Hard AI things. (I'm at least partially convinced that something similar drives human cognition and memory; you understand things by understanding how they relate to everything else.)
Isn't that the point of trying to make more money..?
Yes and no. Unless you're going to legally force everyone to make the same amount of money (which would be pure foolishness) you're going to end up with some people making more and some making less. As a society, we've decided that we don't want slavery and indentured servitude, and that various necessities (e.g., food and shelter) have to be acquired via market-based mechanisms, so the minimum effective income (post tax) that people receive has to be sufficient to live on. That greatly constrains the proportion of the income of the poor that you can levy taxes on.
The other problem with flat taxes is that it's very easy for the cost of levying them on the poorest to exceed the amount received from them. In effect, the net tax received after the costs of collection is negative; by collecting nothing from the poorest, the amount of money coming in that can be used for paying for things other than taxing people goes up.
Well, you aren't forced to use Google's Plat store
But if you want to reach 90%+ of all devices you'll have it on the play store.
"Of course we'll bundle our MorganNet software with the new network nodes! Our customers expect no less of us. We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us."
Software patents have got to go. And with them, inventions that "can be implemented in software" also need to go. I saw nothing in either link talking about software patents.
But the problem isn't whether an invention is in hardware or software; that's a very artificial distinction when you have things like reconfigurable hardware and firmware about. The problem is exactly what you get when obvious patents are permitted. If a patent isn't advancing the state of the art substantively when it is published, it's ipso facto hindering innovation.
There's also a potential for problems with people trying to get patents on things where critical functional components are kept as commercial secrets. That's not a problem with patents themselves though. Secrets cannot and should not be protected from independent discovery.
Don't confuse bad interface design with some grand plan.
Why not? That's what Blizzard seem to be doing...
Rather than let the sea have that land, can't we build a 1m tall levee?
You can, but you've got a lot of those levees to build. Better get on with it. Oh, and you've got to also figure out what to do about awkward cases like salt marshes (which aren't exactly sea or land, but rather somewhere in between) and you need to build bigger levees behind the first ones to deal with the fact that the sea doesn't stay at one level, but rather moves up and down with tides and storms; a 1m levee is unlikely to be enough given the consequences of catastrophic failure.
Levees can protect some of the coast, but definitely not everywhere. It's too hard to do and not cost effective when you expand to protecting thousands of miles...
a) when AGW alarmists see record heat waves, it's because of global warming. when they see record cold snaps, it's because of global warming. then they move to "climate change" (which, always does, so that's like saying "I'm right as long as something that always happens keeps happening"), and then the record does something silly like exhibit a zero trend for 16 years.
It appears that the major consequence of global warming is that the increased energy in the atmosphere triggers more extreme events. One of the key changes seems to be that it is changing — slowing — the rate that the jet stream moves back and forth (probably due to the nature of the coupling between the troposphere and the stratosphere). That allows for more extreme events — heatwaves have more time to develop, cold snaps can get further south and become colder, stormy periods last longer — and we see this in weather records. One extreme event doesn't mean all that much, but when the rate of extreme events is greatly increased, and for year on year too, we know that the probabilities driving our weather have been changed somewhat. Given that where we live and how we use the land depends hugely on the local climate (not on the global climate; you don't live and work everywhere at once!) this matters hugely in economic terms.
We can see and measure the changing climate. (We don't know how much it is going to change by overall; that's truly a bunch of educated guesswork.) We can see that this is likely primarily caused by CO2 concentration changes, and those we can also measure. (Non-greenhouse gas contributions seem to be minimal.) Where is the change coming from? Well, it's not volcanoes (which are producing the gas at about a constant rate) so it's probably either from CH4 releases (itself a super-powered greenhouse gas, but it gets oxidized to CO2 relatively quickly) from melting tundra or something like that, or it is from CO2 released directly from principally human activity. It is certainly true that we have, as a species, burnt an awful lot of fossil carbon; there are a lot of power stations, factories and cars out there.
So GW is real. Is it AGW? It's not 100% certain, but it is difficult to find anything else it could plausibly be. It certainly doesn't make sense from a public policy perspective to assume that it must be false.
b) AGW isn't falsifiable because any observation of global average CO2 and global average temperature can be explained away with an ad hoc special pleading. If the melting glaciers *prove* AGW, but advancing glaciers don't *refute* it, then you've simply done a "heads I win, tails you lose".
A single net-melting glacier doesn't prove all that much. It only samples local conditions (and whether a glacier grows or shrinks depends on the balance of melt rate and rate of accumulation due to snow). Moreover, conditions are naturally variable. But what about when 95% of all glaciers (outside of East Antarctica) are shrinking? Would that be evidence of GW? What's more, that's not the only observed phenomenon that's highly consistent with GW. The probability (as any good Bayesian statistician would tell you) of all these unrelated evidence lines being consistent with a no-GW hypothesis is really small indeed. There's really a crapton of evidence out there.
Whether the GW is anthropogenic is harder to work out. What it is is a damn good hypothesis that's consistent with a lot of facts; other explanations that are run past the same gauntlet don't hold up nearly so well. (Solar output changes, Milankovic cycles; these have demonstrably driven GW in the fossil record, but they don't predict a warming phase now.)
I suspect that the real reason you object to the AGW hypothesis is that, if it is true, it has public policy implications that you don't like. Tough. Scientists have been pushing for years for economic changes to reduce the impact of AGW precisely because they think that it is the cheapest
Why not use this as an opportunity to replace the creaking DNS system with something more suitable?
Are you talking about the technical part that is used to announce to computer systems what the mapping of names to IP addresses is for each system, or the legal part that is used to decide what names can be owned and who actually owns them? There's very little contact between the two, really, and the troubles associated with one really have nothing to do with the other. Technically, you're talking about how to do things like DNSSEC, and legally you're talking about ICANN and their quest for ever greater monetization of short alphanumeric strings.
I know where I think the main problems are...
Functions either succeed or fail, period. That statement is fact.
Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel might not entirely agree with that statement. (Functions can also not terminate, and it can even be impossible to work out if they are going to terminate or not.)
So haskell magically manages a temporary DNS error or malformed input from a file? I call bullshit.
Let's see, those are both problems with the external world and so would probably become thrown errors in the IO monad, at least to start with. (OTOH, a DNS lookup would probably have to return a Maybe anyway, as there's no guarantee that a failure will be transient; the address could have been retired from service and there's nothing at the level of code to distinguish "temporary" from "permanent"; the name resolution library itself doesn't know.) You thought you were calling the GP out, but instead just demonstrated your ignorance.
Of course, the programmer will still have to work out what to do with the failing case. I suspect that that's the part that most people writing code actually suck at, and that's a language-independent suck.
C# has IDisposable/using. It's not equivalent - a far cry from it - but it covers some common cases. And Java is getting Closable/try-block in Java 8, which is more or less the same thing.
That's a language feature of Java 7, and is already in production.
Also: What's a "PHP" or a "VB"?
A security exploit.
Going public may give you a big money boost, but it's like selling your soul to the devil.
Technically, it's selling your soul to Wall St.
No, I take that back. You're absolutely correct.
When taking the decision to keep the emergency backup fuel pumps in the basement, did no one think of what would happen in the event of flooding.
Probably someone thought about it, but decided that other potential hazards (e.g., a leak in the tank causing fuel to be soaked all through several floors of the building) were more important to deal with. There are many different sorts of risks, and optimal mitigation strategies for one can be very poor for others. You can guess what the likelihood of each particular risk is, but that's definitely guesswork; the whole of New York really wasn't set up with this sort of storm surge in mind.
better yet concentrate and figuring out how to build the Fastest damn spaceship possible, something that can reach .5 the speed of light or faster,
Were you planning on fueling that with magic pixie dust? Seriously, accelerating large masses to those sorts of speeds, even in space where there's greatly reduced friction, is significantly beyond what we can do now. Going to the moon, or Mars, or even anywhere else in solar system, is simple by comparison.
Of course, if we ever figure it out then we can and should go to the stars, but it really isn't what you'd call a sane short-term or even medium-term plan. It requires the existence of things that we've got no idea how to try to do.
You know what you call the party who hires a "lower-cost" lawyer? The LOSER.
Not in all jurisdictions. Maybe you are inhabiting somewhere where price-gouging by legal representatives is encouraged, but most places regard that as an abhorrent incentive for lawyers to serve only themselves and not their clients. (In the UK, the handling of who pays legal fees is a grant of the judge in equity, and if the judge feels that one side has not taken reasonable steps to limit the cost of proceedings, they can grant the costs against that side even if they win. Usually, the two sides are best off bringing broadly matching levels of legal power.)
We have both "normal" landline phones and IP phones, and yes, the IP phone system going down is actually an issue. It happens regularly...
Sounds to me like the issue is more that they don't stay down. Down with 3-hour telecons!
So where is my money?
What, all approximately 3 EUR of it? (That is, 1.5 billion euros / 500 million people. Ballpark correct figure anyway.) Not worth mailing individual sums out to people for that little; that would be just acting as a subsidy for postal services. If you want money back personally, sue the manufacturer of the products you bought yourself (assuming they're one of the fined corporations or a local subsidiary); you should find it easy enough to prove your case now that they've been penalized...
For comparison, the password to an account I use fairly often is 128 characters.
That must be annoying to type in every time.
More seriously, if that's a password but the system in question is only storing a relatively short hash of it, all the attacker has to do is find something that hashes to the same thing. That's pretty simple to do if you've got the grunt compute power, as there's usually no other checks on the sense of a password at the point of use (which isn't the same as the point of definition). In effect, you're not hindering attackers at all but you are making things worse for yourself. Congratulations on your addition to Security Theater! With thinking like that, you're almost qualified to work for the TSA...
(Myself? I disable logins with passwords wherever I can. Turn up with a cryptographic key — the verification of which is not a hashing operation at all — or don't turn up at all.)
[Sales tax is] regressive, so it hurts poor people disproportionally
The way to deal with that is to exclude some categories of goods and services from the tax (or equivalently to set its rate at zero for those goods) where those goods and services are things which virtually everyone needs to purchase. An example of a reasonable candidate for being untaxed is food not intended for immediate consumption (i.e., groceries). With such a tax regime, you lessen the regressiveness (but don't eliminate it entirely) to the point where it does not act to prevent people from being able to survive.
Of course, things are more complicated in the real world. Purely functional approaches would obviously be pretty inefficient in a lot of cases, since things would be needlessly copied. Lisp, as an example, has both a non-destructive append as well as a destructive nconc, the latter being intended for use in situations where the original lists will not be used again (and can therefore be modified).
The other complication in the real world is that memory management becomes a real drag because memory is inevitably a shared modifiable resource, and determining what threads are using a particular piece of memory is messy. The best approach I'm aware of involves sharing objects between threads only for the duration of a message transfer and processing in response to it; if the receiver wishes to retain a value, it has to copy it (which can be done in a usually-lock-free way, fortunately). This model fits with pure functional programming languages fairly well (and a few others) but it really sits badly with the POSIX threading model and its derivatives (including both Java and C#).
If your program is both lock-free and hazard-free, it can scale up and out very well. However, it's not trivial to get there, and it is an arrangement that is actually non-optimal in some special cases, such as applying a color transform to an image. Parallelization is harder than it looks, and it definitely should look hard.
It's disputable if St. George had ever been to England.
It's not disputable at all. He never went anywhere close.