Maybe it's because the internet make people think?
I mean, most people believe that you shouldn't believe everything you find on the internet. So, I suspect this results in a lot more source checking, who wrote the article/point of view, and why.... you know, lots of analytical and critical thinking and reason... looking for evidence, formulating hypotheses, testing hypotheses and coming to fact/evidence based conclusions.
These are all things that are poisonous to faith. There's an irony in this; from what I understand, a significant number of the clergy lose their faith in the process of becoming ordained or shortly after. Religious qualifications aren't the best for finding decently paid work outside of religious organisations so they're pretty much stuck with a decision that they made when they had stronger faith. Is this the old stereotype of the "priest who's lost his faith"?
Oligarchs, Fascists and the People's Protest in Ukraine
Derek Monroe says the Ukrainian far-right, with the backing of local oligarchs, the US and the EU, hijacked popular protests against corruption
"Western press reports are saying Russian troops are amassing on the Ukraine border. Russia says these are normal troop movements. There's a war of words between Congress and the Kremlin. But it seems fairly clear now, as the dust more or less settles, the Russian annexation of Crimea will have to be de facto recognized by Ukraine and the West. And the strategy now of President Obama and Europe is to quickly try to integrate Ukraine into the E.U. orbit and the American orbit--$18 billion IMF loan is being promised to the Ukraine and more."
Wow, OKStupid's PR and marketing agency have just hit the jackpot! Got everyone all riled up and ready to argue into the small hours of the morning about who's right https://xkcd.com/386/
Don't do internet dating but if I did it'd be with OKStupid's immediate competitor.
The minimum wage increase movement is gaining significant traction and we can expect to see some pushback of the traditional right-wing conservative type trying to scare workers telling them that they'll lose their jobs if their wages go any higher. I expect to see much more of this as the movement gains more momentum.
There'll more likely be no net chnage in jobs if the minimum wage goes up to $15 p/h and the economy may even benefit if it went back up to it's 1970s value of $20 p/h in today's money.
As many here have commented, the Renaissance generated unprecedented amounts of culture, art, science, economic activity, etc. improving life for everyone for the centuries that followed.
Silicon Valley, on the other hand, has consolidated unprecendented amounts of culture, art, science, economic activity, etc. impoverishing thousands, if not millions, of people who used to work at making things and providing services.
The SAT is a pointless test. School grades are more than sufficient for evaluating candidates for further study and jobs. According to world renowned linguist and professor emeritus at USC:
Yes, let's drop the SAT essay. While we're at it, let's drop the SAT.
Sent to the NY Times, March 11
Re: "Can writing be assessed?" March 10.
There is no point in testing writing form, i.e. the use of conventional writing style, grammatical accuracy. Research consistently tells us that writing form comes from reading, not from writing and not from study. Writing itself is a powerful tool for solving problems and making yourself smarter. This requires mastery of the composing process (e.g. knowing that as you revise you come up with better ideas). This cannot be tested. Research also tells us that high school grades are a good predictor of college success. Adding a standardized test does not improve the prediction. So there is no point in having the SAT.
Stephen Krashen
NY Times article: NY Times article:
Sources:
Reading and Writing: Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading (Heinemann and Libraries Unlimited); Lee, S.Y. (2005). Facilitating and inhibiting factors on EFL writing: A model testing with SEM. Language Learning, 55(2), 335-374.
Composing process: Elbow, P. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP. 1973. Perl, S. (1979). The composing process of unskilled college writers. Research in the Teaching of English, 13, 317-339. Boice, R. (1994). How writers journey to comfort and fluency. Westport: Praeger.
Grades and the SAT: Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009.Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley.
"or is this an invitation built to enhance informed oppression?" - The FBI are pretty good at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Perhaps that's where the Chinese get some of their ideas... or how about the DEA, CIA, NSA, etc.?
It's just one empire running propaganda campaigns to criticise another. Just make effective surveillance circumvention tools freely available to everyone. Then we'll have to address the hysterical jumping around and shouting of the security agencies about terrorism, child pornography, organised crime, etc. even though we don't see any evidence of blanket surveillance putting any of those people in jail - the ones that get caught get caught through targeted criminal investigations within the law.
If they were serious about climate change and environmental sustainability, they'd do something more along the lines of enforcing existing regulations and laws, instead of pretending Republican President Nixon had never signed them into law. That's right, Obama is to the right of Nixon and less concerned with environmental protection, and economic resilience and sustainability.
Education doesn't work like retail; retail has a blindingly fast turnaround (in months and quarters). Changes in education policy and/or learning and teaching approaches don't normally show up until 10-15 years later. Educational organisations and institutions base their reputations on records of excellence and achievement going back generations. I don't think today's venture capitalists (Gates' Foundation, Walmart, Google Venture, et al) are that patient and so they're unlikely to invest in any meaningful, effective educational endeavours.
Not concerned about privacy and blanket, warrant-less surveillance? Better hope that the algorithms the security agencies use to identify the "bad guys" are infallible.
I also read a lot of research papers. I sometimes discuss them in academic groups and need to highlight parts for quick and easy reference.
I've tried a variety of eReaders (glowy ones with touch screens) and tried converting PDFs to eBooks and HTML, I've used a smartphone, I've taken my laptop with me. I've looked at what others are doing to see if they've got any good ideas.
What do I do now? I get my local print-shop to print them out for me. They can even turn them into neat little books with enough space around to write notes. It's not very tree friendly so I do it judiciously but good ol' fashioned paper is unbeatable in my opinion.
It'd be nice for people who value their privacy not to have their location/IP address sent to advertisers before they've had a chance to deny permission. Should privacy conscious people now disconnect their computers from the internet while installing Firefox? I wonder what the folks at TOR Project will make of this?
It looks like US education is moving towards a more efficient and profitable business model. Too bad learning outcomes aren't profitable.
Next, the corporations will lobby to de-couple learning outcomes from awarding funding to privatised schools. It might work well for the school-to-prison pipeline; lots of profit to be had from funnelling children into correctional facilities.
Presumably you mean develop syllabi and curricula under liberal, permissive Creative Commons licences and/or in the public domain. This is a good step towards releasing educational organisations from the dominance and control of the big publishers, e.g. Pearson and McGraw Hill, and yes they have captured a lot of K-12 education and manipulated it to their own benefit regardless of learners' needs, but it doesn't address education policy itself.
Publishers are only part of a bigger system with vested interests pulling in multiple directions simultaneously and with the people that really understand how learning and education actually work being marginalised by political considerations. A lot of this is coming from the private sector, especially the IT sector, which wants a slice of the lucrative pie, and their attempts to privatise parts of the system to give them a stronger foothold, free from regulation and from annoying details like learning gains and effect sizes, dropout rates, etc.
MOOCs are a case in point. The IT sector is driving this, with the help of a few universities that welcome the corporate money, but AFAIK, nobody researching MOOCs' with pre-, post-, and delayed-post tests or, more importantly, doing long term studies. All they're doing is gathering web metrics which may be fine for selling advertising to corporate sponsors but are utterly useless at measuring learning (whatever they may tell you on flashy TED Talks presentations).
Bottom line: computers and computer mediated assessment are stupid, teachers are smart. Invest in teachers if you want smart learners.
I reckon it's pointless and symbolic, like congress trying to impose more sanctions on Iran AFTER they'd agreed to come to negotiations.
All the countries on that list have internet censorship regimes and so people there are more likely to be familiar with censorship circumvention techniques. Wanna study a US MOOC? Use TOR or whatever tools suit your purpose.
Yeah, I agree with many of the sentiments about the Nobel prize having little or no legitimacy. Anyway, Snowden's got plenty of recognition from groups that have better reputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As long as the US remains "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" (MLK), it would be morally reprehensible to give "peace" awards to anyone in US govt. who doesn't take effective steps to dismantle the "American military industrial complex" (Dwight Eisenhower).
What they need all those guns, bombs, and soldiers for is no great secret. Nothing to do with defence or maintaining peace and stability in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Think about it. Bullying is learned behaviour. It's something that some children learn and some don't (for a variety of complex reasons). Who do they learn it from? Possibly parents and siblings... but then bullying is a systemic issue, not just a few isolated incidences. Where is systematic bullying by adults in front of children most prevalent? In schools, of course. Children get bullied... sorry, "disciplined"... by teachers and caregivers and some children (not all, because there are other complex factors/influences at play) in turn see this as acceptable productive behaviour to be emulated, in order to get what they want. If there are fewer adults providing "models" of bullying... ahem, "discipline"... in their school lives and displaying it as normal, acceptable behaviour, they're less likely to emulate that behaviour. See Albert Bandura's "Bobo doll" experiments for a more detailed and nuanced view.
See: Bandura, A.; Ross, D.; Ross, S. A. (1961). "Transmission of aggression through the imitation of aggressive models". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63 (3): 575–582. doi:10.1037/h0045925
"Leak" seems to be the new term for "press release." Samsung are just drumming up their marketing machine to promote their next product. Must have learned it from Apple Inc. Perhaps they'll "lose" a prototype somewhere (Starbucks?) so that PR marketers... ahem, "journalists" have an excuse to generate more advertising revenue for their publication(s).
We have no idea of what you want to do with your phone. What does a "power user" use their phone for? Are all "power users" the same? If you post something more meaningful, perhaps you can get more meaningful answers.
I have my phone. It does everything I want very well. I have no idea if it'd be useful to you.
Yeah, not really Godwin's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... I understand the "bring up Nazis when you're losing" bit, but that's after you've realised you're losing, rather than it being the opening argument.
Comparisons to Nazis just come across as hysterical and immediately undermine the writer's arguments. This article is utter nonsense and doesn't merit any further discussion.
From what I understand of the issue it appears that the SF residents are upset because Google are using their tax payer funded public infrastructure (bus stops) as their own private property and in doing so marginalising SF citizens. It has little to do with the workers themselves who are just trying to get to work as best they can but their presence is becoming a sore point for SF citizens.
The bottom line is probably something more like if Google (and the other IT giants) want to import thousands of workers which put a strain on SF's infrastructure and services, and push up the cost of living for everyone else, then they should contribute to that infrastructure to help ameliorate the problems, not exacerbate them by creating private 2nd tier services and infrastructure. The whole point of setting up in and around SF is because it's a really cool place to live. It has great arts, communities, and a history. It's the citizens of SF that make it what it is. Google et al are exploiting SF and pissing off the reason that people want to come and live there.
With all due respect, I don't think Souskill is interested in the answer to his question. If you really want to know what's in demand, look at job descriptions on job boards. I think he's more interested in/. readers' reactions to the question and opinions of the different client and server scripts/languages. Makes for an interesting discussion, does it not?
Google are breaking the law. Pure and simple. Whatever you think of the law is a different matter.
I don't think fines will work for a variety of reasons, e.g. long trials and appeals processes while they negotiate the size of the settlement while the legal infringements continue unabated, and the eventual amount paid usually gets written off as a cost of doing business.
If the EU countries (and other regions, e.g. South America, and Africa) and their ISPs blocked or at least filtred Google (China and Saudi Arabia already do) and whoever else breaks the law (Our politicians seem to be happy with anti-piracy blocking), that'd get their undivided attention very quickly. Even if users circumvent the blocking using proxies or TOR, Google and other law breakers would still lose much of the surveillance data or it'd be rendered worthless. All the time that Google's infringing services are offline or unusable would provide opportunities for more ethical and legally compliant services to gain market share, e.g. for search there's IX Quick. It'd be nice to see more diversity and competition on the web instead of this massive, centralised domination by a small number of US companies. That would be even better for local economies.
On the espionage front, why should the USA be able to snoop on everyone else's web activities but nobody allowed to snoop on theirs? They have an unfair, unethical (and illegal) advantage in negotiating political, trade, aid, and business agreements. That's what the rest of the world are really up in arms about.
Slashdot Mirror
- Hey look, I got a new set top box!
- Where?
- There, on top of the pile of slightly older set top boxes.
- Why do you need another one?
- Coz it's got 2 channels that I can't get on any of the others.
One day, we might get coherent, reasonable media service providers. For now, you'll have to make do with the "free market."
Maybe it's because the internet make people think?
I mean, most people believe that you shouldn't believe everything you find on the internet. So, I suspect this results in a lot more source checking, who wrote the article/point of view, and why.... you know, lots of analytical and critical thinking and reason... looking for evidence, formulating hypotheses, testing hypotheses and coming to fact/evidence based conclusions.
These are all things that are poisonous to faith. There's an irony in this; from what I understand, a significant number of the clergy lose their faith in the process of becoming ordained or shortly after. Religious qualifications aren't the best for finding decently paid work outside of religious organisations so they're pretty much stuck with a decision that they made when they had stronger faith. Is this the old stereotype of the "priest who's lost his faith"?
Oligarchs, Fascists and the People's Protest in Ukraine
Derek Monroe says the Ukrainian far-right, with the backing of local oligarchs, the US and the EU, hijacked popular protests against corruption
"Western press reports are saying Russian troops are amassing on the Ukraine border. Russia says these are normal troop movements. There's a war of words between Congress and the Kremlin. But it seems fairly clear now, as the dust more or less settles, the Russian annexation of Crimea will have to be de facto recognized by Ukraine and the West. And the strategy now of President Obama and Europe is to quickly try to integrate Ukraine into the E.U. orbit and the American orbit--$18 billion IMF loan is being promised to the Ukraine and more."
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11661/
Beware of any statements like, "don't need antivirus" and "gets a laptop that can't get viruses"
Wow, OKStupid's PR and marketing agency have just hit the jackpot! Got everyone all riled up and ready to argue into the small hours of the morning about who's right https://xkcd.com/386/
Don't do internet dating but if I did it'd be with OKStupid's immediate competitor.
The minimum wage increase movement is gaining significant traction and we can expect to see some pushback of the traditional right-wing conservative type trying to scare workers telling them that they'll lose their jobs if their wages go any higher. I expect to see much more of this as the movement gains more momentum.
There'll more likely be no net chnage in jobs if the minimum wage goes up to $15 p/h and the economy may even benefit if it went back up to it's 1970s value of $20 p/h in today's money.
As many here have commented, the Renaissance generated unprecedented amounts of culture, art, science, economic activity, etc. improving life for everyone for the centuries that followed.
Silicon Valley, on the other hand, has consolidated unprecendented amounts of culture, art, science, economic activity, etc. impoverishing thousands, if not millions, of people who used to work at making things and providing services.
The SAT is a pointless test. School grades are more than sufficient for evaluating candidates for further study and jobs. According to world renowned linguist and professor emeritus at USC:
Yes, let's drop the SAT essay. While we're at it, let's drop the SAT.
Sent to the NY Times, March 11
Re: "Can writing be assessed?" March 10.
There is no point in testing writing form, i.e. the use of conventional writing style, grammatical accuracy. Research consistently tells us that writing form comes from reading, not from writing and not from study. Writing itself is a powerful tool for solving problems and making yourself smarter. This requires mastery of the composing process (e.g. knowing that as you revise you come up with better ideas). This cannot be tested. Research also tells us that high school grades are a good predictor of college success. Adding a standardized test does not improve the prediction. So there is no point in having the SAT.
Stephen Krashen
NY Times article: NY Times article:
Sources:
Reading and Writing: Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading (Heinemann and Libraries Unlimited); Lee, S.Y. (2005). Facilitating and inhibiting factors on EFL writing: A model testing with SEM. Language Learning, 55(2), 335-374.
Composing process: Elbow, P. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford UP. 1973. Perl, S. (1979). The composing process of unskilled college writers. Research in the Teaching of English, 13, 317-339. Boice, R. (1994). How writers journey to comfort and fluency. Westport: Praeger.
Grades and the SAT: Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009.Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley.
Source:
"or is this an invitation built to enhance informed oppression?" - The FBI are pretty good at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Perhaps that's where the Chinese get some of their ideas... or how about the DEA, CIA, NSA, etc.?
It's just one empire running propaganda campaigns to criticise another. Just make effective surveillance circumvention tools freely available to everyone. Then we'll have to address the hysterical jumping around and shouting of the security agencies about terrorism, child pornography, organised crime, etc. even though we don't see any evidence of blanket surveillance putting any of those people in jail - the ones that get caught get caught through targeted criminal investigations within the law.
If they were serious about climate change and environmental sustainability, they'd do something more along the lines of enforcing existing regulations and laws, instead of pretending Republican President Nixon had never signed them into law. That's right, Obama is to the right of Nixon and less concerned with environmental protection, and economic resilience and sustainability.
Hi Papaspud,
Education doesn't work like retail; retail has a blindingly fast turnaround (in months and quarters). Changes in education policy and/or learning and teaching approaches don't normally show up until 10-15 years later. Educational organisations and institutions base their reputations on records of excellence and achievement going back generations. I don't think today's venture capitalists (Gates' Foundation, Walmart, Google Venture, et al) are that patient and so they're unlikely to invest in any meaningful, effective educational endeavours.
That, and learning isn't a business transaction.
Not concerned about privacy and blanket, warrant-less surveillance? Better hope that the algorithms the security agencies use to identify the "bad guys" are infallible.
I also read a lot of research papers. I sometimes discuss them in academic groups and need to highlight parts for quick and easy reference.
I've tried a variety of eReaders (glowy ones with touch screens) and tried converting PDFs to eBooks and HTML, I've used a smartphone, I've taken my laptop with me. I've looked at what others are doing to see if they've got any good ideas.
I hate printers and agree with The Oatmeal that they were sent from hell: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/p...
What do I do now? I get my local print-shop to print them out for me. They can even turn them into neat little books with enough space around to write notes. It's not very tree friendly so I do it judiciously but good ol' fashioned paper is unbeatable in my opinion.
It'd be nice for people who value their privacy not to have their location/IP address sent to advertisers before they've had a chance to deny permission. Should privacy conscious people now disconnect their computers from the internet while installing Firefox? I wonder what the folks at TOR Project will make of this?
It looks like US education is moving towards a more efficient and profitable business model. Too bad learning outcomes aren't profitable.
Next, the corporations will lobby to de-couple learning outcomes from awarding funding to privatised schools. It might work well for the school-to-prison pipeline; lots of profit to be had from funnelling children into correctional facilities.
Presumably you mean develop syllabi and curricula under liberal, permissive Creative Commons licences and/or in the public domain. This is a good step towards releasing educational organisations from the dominance and control of the big publishers, e.g. Pearson and McGraw Hill, and yes they have captured a lot of K-12 education and manipulated it to their own benefit regardless of learners' needs, but it doesn't address education policy itself.
Publishers are only part of a bigger system with vested interests pulling in multiple directions simultaneously and with the people that really understand how learning and education actually work being marginalised by political considerations. A lot of this is coming from the private sector, especially the IT sector, which wants a slice of the lucrative pie, and their attempts to privatise parts of the system to give them a stronger foothold, free from regulation and from annoying details like learning gains and effect sizes, dropout rates, etc.
MOOCs are a case in point. The IT sector is driving this, with the help of a few universities that welcome the corporate money, but AFAIK, nobody researching MOOCs' with pre-, post-, and delayed-post tests or, more importantly, doing long term studies. All they're doing is gathering web metrics which may be fine for selling advertising to corporate sponsors but are utterly useless at measuring learning (whatever they may tell you on flashy TED Talks presentations).
Bottom line: computers and computer mediated assessment are stupid, teachers are smart. Invest in teachers if you want smart learners.
I reckon it's pointless and symbolic, like congress trying to impose more sanctions on Iran AFTER they'd agreed to come to negotiations.
All the countries on that list have internet censorship regimes and so people there are more likely to be familiar with censorship circumvention techniques. Wanna study a US MOOC? Use TOR or whatever tools suit your purpose.
Yeah, I agree with many of the sentiments about the Nobel prize having little or no legitimacy. Anyway, Snowden's got plenty of recognition from groups that have better reputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As long as the US remains "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" (MLK), it would be morally reprehensible to give "peace" awards to anyone in US govt. who doesn't take effective steps to dismantle the "American military industrial complex" (Dwight Eisenhower).
What they need all those guns, bombs, and soldiers for is no great secret. Nothing to do with defence or maintaining peace and stability in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Machines will one day exceed human intelligence." -- Ray Kurzweil
"Only if we meet them half way." -- Dave Snowden (Founder and CSO at Cognitive Edge)
But seriously, have none of these AI "experts" heard of embodied cognition? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Think about it. Bullying is learned behaviour. It's something that some children learn and some don't (for a variety of complex reasons). Who do they learn it from? Possibly parents and siblings... but then bullying is a systemic issue, not just a few isolated incidences. Where is systematic bullying by adults in front of children most prevalent? In schools, of course. Children get bullied... sorry, "disciplined"... by teachers and caregivers and some children (not all, because there are other complex factors/influences at play) in turn see this as acceptable productive behaviour to be emulated, in order to get what they want. If there are fewer adults providing "models" of bullying... ahem, "discipline"... in their school lives and displaying it as normal, acceptable behaviour, they're less likely to emulate that behaviour. See Albert Bandura's "Bobo doll" experiments for a more detailed and nuanced view.
See: Bandura, A.; Ross, D.; Ross, S. A. (1961). "Transmission of aggression through the imitation of aggressive models". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63 (3): 575–582. doi:10.1037/h0045925
"Leak" seems to be the new term for "press release." Samsung are just drumming up their marketing machine to promote their next product. Must have learned it from Apple Inc. Perhaps they'll "lose" a prototype somewhere (Starbucks?) so that PR marketers... ahem, "journalists" have an excuse to generate more advertising revenue for their publication(s).
Really, this stuff is getting stale.
We have no idea of what you want to do with your phone. What does a "power user" use their phone for? Are all "power users" the same? If you post something more meaningful, perhaps you can get more meaningful answers.
I have my phone. It does everything I want very well. I have no idea if it'd be useful to you.
Yeah, not really Godwin's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... I understand the "bring up Nazis when you're losing" bit, but that's after you've realised you're losing, rather than it being the opening argument.
Comparisons to Nazis just come across as hysterical and immediately undermine the writer's arguments. This article is utter nonsense and doesn't merit any further discussion.
From what I understand of the issue it appears that the SF residents are upset because Google are using their tax payer funded public infrastructure (bus stops) as their own private property and in doing so marginalising SF citizens. It has little to do with the workers themselves who are just trying to get to work as best they can but their presence is becoming a sore point for SF citizens.
The bottom line is probably something more like if Google (and the other IT giants) want to import thousands of workers which put a strain on SF's infrastructure and services, and push up the cost of living for everyone else, then they should contribute to that infrastructure to help ameliorate the problems, not exacerbate them by creating private 2nd tier services and infrastructure. The whole point of setting up in and around SF is because it's a really cool place to live. It has great arts, communities, and a history. It's the citizens of SF that make it what it is. Google et al are exploiting SF and pissing off the reason that people want to come and live there.
With all due respect, I don't think Souskill is interested in the answer to his question. If you really want to know what's in demand, look at job descriptions on job boards. I think he's more interested in /. readers' reactions to the question and opinions of the different client and server scripts/languages. Makes for an interesting discussion, does it not?
Google are breaking the law. Pure and simple. Whatever you think of the law is a different matter.
I don't think fines will work for a variety of reasons, e.g. long trials and appeals processes while they negotiate the size of the settlement while the legal infringements continue unabated, and the eventual amount paid usually gets written off as a cost of doing business.
If the EU countries (and other regions, e.g. South America, and Africa) and their ISPs blocked or at least filtred Google (China and Saudi Arabia already do) and whoever else breaks the law (Our politicians seem to be happy with anti-piracy blocking), that'd get their undivided attention very quickly. Even if users circumvent the blocking using proxies or TOR, Google and other law breakers would still lose much of the surveillance data or it'd be rendered worthless. All the time that Google's infringing services are offline or unusable would provide opportunities for more ethical and legally compliant services to gain market share, e.g. for search there's IX Quick. It'd be nice to see more diversity and competition on the web instead of this massive, centralised domination by a small number of US companies. That would be even better for local economies.
On the espionage front, why should the USA be able to snoop on everyone else's web activities but nobody allowed to snoop on theirs? They have an unfair, unethical (and illegal) advantage in negotiating political, trade, aid, and business agreements. That's what the rest of the world are really up in arms about.