In September, Federal Law No. 242-FZ came into force in Russia. In a nutshell, the law requires all foreign businesses that handle the personal data of Russian citizens to keep this data on servers located within the country.
This is so that Putin can protect Russian citizens from invasions of privacy by evil American corporations like Facebook! Putin cares about his subjects!
They state that companies are only allowed to hold and provide personal information if they have a need to do so. What is allowed is defined. Reporting things like spent convictions or that someone was raped long ago has been ruled by the court to be outside that definition.
The right to be forgotten is distinct from the right to privacy, due to the distinction that the right to privacy constitutes information that is not publicly known, whereas the right to be forgotten involves removing information that was publicly known at a certain time and not allowing third parties to access the information
Second, your analysis is wrong. Google only indexes and serves information that is available on the web, and when pages disappear from the web, Google stops serving them up in search results pretty much immediately. Forcing Google to remove search results makes sense only if you allow the original sources of the data to continue providing the information.
You're basically saying that data protection rules about "storing information about individual" should be consistent for both search engines and other content providers. I agree. My point is: under "the right to be forgotten", the rules are not consistent.
If the rules were consistent, people whose privacy was violated would simply go to the original publisher who put that information online to get it removed; Google wouldn't have to get involved. But under current rules, the original publisher can continue providing that information, it's just that search engines can't show it.
Do newspapers also need to censor their old microfiche and archived paper copies
No. They don't even generally have to remove their online content.
If not, then why just pick on google, and not all other forms of media?
Because Google is a big American company that is hurting European publishers and media companies. So, European publishers and media companies lobbied their legislators, riled up voters with editorials and "reporting", and the rest is history.
There are actually long established laws governing this stuff. The ruling was based on data protection rules going back to the mid 90s, it's just that until then search engines had argued they were exempt but the court disagreed.
Nice theory, but unfortunately wrong. The "right to be forgotten" applies to search engines indexing public data sources; the original sources frequently continue to be online, and quite legally so.
But he didn't. [...] Counterfactuals are nice and all, but we only have one history, and that says you're wrong.
My argument doesn't rely on "counterfactuals". deGrasse-Tyson's argument is that private investors are unwilling to take the risk of exploration. When more than half of his funding came from sources that were unquestionably private, his argument is obviously wrong: that is, private investors clearly are willing to take that risk, both because more than half of the voyage was financed by private investors, and because the risk was entirely insured by private insurance companies. To make that point, it doesn't matter whether 50% or 100% of Columbus's voyage was privately financed, any large percentage of private financing illustrates the point. With that observation, it isn't necessary to even argue the point that Queen Isabelle was acting like a private investor (which she did) and not like a modern government.
Even if we were going to take Columbus' voyage as an exact model for space exploration, then NASA should not start any project until such a project is at least 50% financed through private investors and 100% privately insured again failure. What Columbus's voyage clearly does not support is anything like the current NASA funding model, or any model in which US tax payers act as an insurer for space launches, which is what deGrasse-Tyson is arguing for. That is, 0% private financing and 0% private insurance is clearly "counterfactual".
who continue to insist that without DARPA and the NSF, private parties might have built the Internet. The point is, when the time came, they didn't.
What are you talking about? Almost the entire Internet as it exists today is privately built and owned. The original ARPANET and NSFNET were also privately invented and built (albeit with government financing). The primary effect the US government had on the Internet was to delay its widespread adoption by several decades because of the communications monopolies it had granted to companies like AT&T.
This reminds me of libertards like roman_mir
It should. I'm a libertarian and I make no excuses about it. I understand your confusion: I used to be a progressive and a believer in government programs myself until I actually bothered to get the facts and read up on the history. Keep at it, you hopefully will figure it out sooner or later.
No, it isn't. They could do some other commercial work and potentially get higher profits, but with higher risks.
Companies like Lockheed Martin are specialized in areas that are of interest only to governments. They have neither the management, nor the patent portfolio, nor the facilities, nor the employees to successfully compete in other areas. That is, their resources are substantially misallocated, and that misallocation requires substantial amounts of money and time to fix.
They do government contracting because it's low risk, not because there's a lot of profit in it.
A nominally average return at low risk is actually a high return. Furthermore, I'm not sure why you think that their profits are low. Perhaps you are looking at profit margins, but that's not really a useful number for defense contractors, since they are probably inflating their costs; you need to look at other numbers. Lockheed-Martin's return on equity, for example, is an obscene 125%.
The Cold War was not primarily a military conflict, but a socio/economic/political one.
As I was saying: you also can't make a credible business or scientific case. You are making a socio/economic/political case. Yes, my qualifier was there for a reason.
However, when it comes to the socio/economic/political argument, I think you are on thin ice, because creating gigantic federal programs to demonstrate the superiority of free markets and free societies over communism is idiotic. What the Apollo program really demonstrated was that the rest of our economy was so strong and resilient that it could tolerate such utterly useless programs as the Apollo program. Building a bunch of gigantic pyramids would have accomplished the same purpose.
The reason government contractors do it is because it's low risk and decent return, not high return.
The return is high relative to the return they would be getting without government funding, which is close to zero.
By contrast, a company like Apple can make huge profits by selling overpriced Chinese-made stuff to gullible consumers
The value of Apple's products is in what people are willing to pay for it, which apparently is a lot of money. The fact that you (or I) may think that their products are "overpriced" in some sense does not change that.
What makes a LOT more sense is near-earth asteroid mining.
It does. But, as you pointed out yourself, private companies are getting into the act, and teleoperated and autonomous robotic probes are the drivers there.
Those are not consequences of us putting a man on the moon; they are consequences of the US investing in rockets. We didn't need to put a man on the moon in order to do that.
Furthermore, those insane technologies nearly caused global nuclear war; that kind of madness is only the result of government action. If anything, it's another argument why government should not be allowed to engage in this kind of spending.
My point was that without the Apollo program we never would have gotten to the moon in the first place. Which wrong technologies are you referring to?
All the boring nitty-gritty engineering that was necessary to make it happen. The Apollo space program sucked up the engineering resources of nearly half a million engineers, scientists, and technicians for a decade. Think of all the useful stuff those people could have done, instead of working out how to build life support systems and flight control systems out of clunky 1960's technologies.
And that is precisely why government needs to take the lead on it. Otherwise it won't get done.
Like any large, long term project, a manned mission to Mars would need to be planned largely using today's technology. What that means is that probably 1-2 million scientists, engineers, and technicians would be spending the next 10-20 years on tinkering with 2015-level technology in order to launch something in the 2030's. Furthermore, the companies involved are robbed of any incentive to innovate: they originally specify the project using 2015-level technology, and they make the most profit and face the least risk by sticking with it to the bitter end.
I think it would be a much better if those 1-2 million scientists, engineers, and technicians can spend their time and effort on developing new technologies. I suspect that in another decade, what would be a trillion dollar project now can be done for a few billion dollars with 2025 technology.
Queen Isabella was the government of Spain. You think she earned that money?
Who cares what you call it? The question is what she did and why she did it. And the fact is that she didn't act anything like NASA or Congress, she didn't take any extraordinary risks, and she wasn't even essential to the voyage. So, deGrasse-Tyson's analogy is simply wrong.
Sure I can. It's actually pretty easy to make that argument.
You're welcome to try.
We went to the moon to beat the Russians during the Cold War - an existential threat
Really? How did putting people on the Moon help us defend against the USSR?
Some exploration can be done efficiently with probes. Some cannot be done at all with probes. [...] They're useful tools but they aren't a replacement for going yourself.
Nowhere did I argue that manned exploration should never happen. But given the technology we currently have, robot probes are arguably the best bang for the buck. In fact, focusing development on robot probes and autonomous systems is probably the fastest way of getting a manned space program up and running. The problem with government financing of manned space programs is that it misallocates resources, ultimately hurting what it is trying to achieve.
Not the big voyages. Those required the resources and backing of governments.
Columbus' voyage was already predominantly privately financed. Furthermore, Queen Isabella contributed nothing like a modern government to the exploration effort, she merely acted as another investor with money that she pretty much had sole control over. If Queen Isabelle she hadn't paid for it, Columbus could well have found the balance of the funding from other private investors, or simply scaled back the voyage a little (after all, one or two ships might have sufficed). Furthermore, the risk of those voyages was privately insured, not born by Queen Isabelle or any government.
In addition, Columbus worked out the business plan and the voyage independently before seeking funding, and he decided on the spending like a private business man. That is nothing like the space programs that deGrasse-Tyson favors, which involve decades-long government programs, subject to Congressional spending choices and political meddling.
Your story is the same argument deGrasse-Tyson keeps making, and it falls apart when you look at historical facts.
Private companies only get involved when there is something they can see a way to profit from. It's a good thing but pure exploration of the frontier is simply something they cannot do because the risk/reward ratio is off the charts bad.
Private companies make high risk/return gambles all the time; high risk per se isn't a deterrent. The problem with manned space travel to Mars is that it is high risk/low return. That is, even in the best case scenario, if you succeed traveling to Mars, there is going to be little return from that because there is nothing on Mars that we want or need right now.
However, government funding is low risk/high return for the companies that actually receive the funding. NASA's manned programs have been nothing but huge subsidies to US aerospace and defense contractors, plus some politically expedient handouts to politicians in important states.
We tried that with the moon. What happened? Next to nothing for half a century. The Apollo program didn't advance space travel, it held it back, by focusing on the wrong technologies.
These kinds of exploration programs are not economically viable for commercial enterprises.
Manned space exploration isn't economically viable for anybody at this point. It's not a question of whether private investors have sufficient resources (they most certainly do), it's whether there is sufficient return on investment.
The fastest way to space is not for NASA to waste money on politically favored programs, it is to let space exploration develop naturally. That means focusing on robotics, biotech, and propulsion right now; once those have advanced sufficiently, manned space travel will happen by itself.
You simply cannot make a credible business case for a private company to do it.
Correct. And you also can't make a credible business or scientific case for government to finance manned space travel to the Moon or Mars at this point. And that is why government shouldn't waste any money on it either.
get NASA out into the solar system doing the cutting edge research and exploration we so desperately need
We do need research and exploration, but that can be done most efficiently using robot probes. NASA is good at that. When NASA wants to send people to Mars, however, they are just wasting money and engaging in crony capitalism.
Columbus was sponsored by a wealthy and powerful sovereign government. 15th century schmucks were not involved.
More than half of Columbus' voyage was financed by private investors. And it is misleading to refer to the rest of the funding as coming from a "wealthy and powerful sovereign government"; technically, the Spanish crown may have been that, but in the end, it was simply Queen Isabella deciding how to spend her money; she could have just as well spent that money on a new palace or pet dalmatians. It was also not that much money.
On top of that, the frustration of seeing what could be dome as opposed to how little is actually done must frustrate the heck out of engineers.
Why don't you read the original article? It basically makes that point.
Engineers spend a lot of time learning math and the sciences and do not get enough liberal arts exposure at all in their educational process. Therefore, you are training a sort of human calculator, who is not well connected with the feelings and hopes of others.
All engineering programs I have ever seen have incorporated extensive liberal arts exposure. I think the problem is more that non-engineering degrees lack rigorous training in math and science, which means that the people graduating from those are very well "connected with the feelings and hopes of others", and are well equipped to manipulate their fellow human beings, but have no idea about how to actually change things for the better.
It's saying that being religious and politically conservative makes you more likely to be a terrorist. I'm sure this will cause no controversy whatsoever.
Well, it's not what the original scientific article says. It's the WP article that misrepresented an article about Islamic extremism as being about violent extremism in general.
In fact, if you read the original article, that's the kind of argument it makes. The WP article simply distorts what the original article was all about:
These signs point to a classic explanation of the onset of rebel movements – frustrated rising expectations and relative deprivation – dating back to Aristotle and Tocqueville
There are numerous other problems with the analysis. For example, the "nine-fold" claim comes from dividing the percentage of engineering graduates in the sample by the percentage of engineers in the general population of those countries. But since university degrees are greatly overrepresented among their sample, that greatly overstates the ratio. The first statistic that should strike people is not that engineers are overrepresented among terrorists, but that education is overrepresented among terrorists.
But, despite some weaknesses, the original scientific article is actually much more reasonable than the WP representation of it: its main point is that terrorism is likely a consequence of unfulfilled expectations. Engineers are related to this primarily because if you grow up poor in an Islamic country, an engineering degree is seen as a good ticket out of poverty, and people get radicalized when, after getting their degrees, they can find good employment neither in their original country (due to corruption and political oppression) nor in the West (due to prejudice and tough competition).
The point of the WP article isn't that we shouldn't make generalizations about groups, like "engineers" or "refugees". That's a good point to make, but it is missing one essential point: under existing US law, US engineers and refugees aren't legally equal. That is, it is entirely legitimate to discriminate against refugees in ways that it wouldn't be legitimate for US citizens.
Nevertheless, the means by which the WP article attempts to make that point are wrong. Whether the author understands it or not, the Gambetta and Hertog article does not show that engineers are more "prone to violent extremism". The point of that article is actually that "discontented would-be elites" become radicals, and that engineers are more likely to become right-wing radicals than left-wing radicals. I.e., the "mindset" that causes engineers to become radicalized disproportionately is that engineers tend to think that their work is valuable and essential to society, and they tend to think that socialism and communism don't make much sense. Neither of those is particularly surprising, nor is it something that reflects negatively on engineering or engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
This is so that Putin can protect Russian citizens from invasions of privacy by evil American corporations like Facebook! Putin cares about his subjects!
First, you're confusing privacy legislation and "the right to be forgotten": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The right to be forgotten is distinct from the right to privacy, due to the distinction that the right to privacy constitutes information that is not publicly known, whereas the right to be forgotten involves removing information that was publicly known at a certain time and not allowing third parties to access the information
Second, your analysis is wrong. Google only indexes and serves information that is available on the web, and when pages disappear from the web, Google stops serving them up in search results pretty much immediately. Forcing Google to remove search results makes sense only if you allow the original sources of the data to continue providing the information.
The CHIP has WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4Gbytes of NAND built in, all things you need to add to the Raspberry Pi.
You're basically saying that data protection rules about "storing information about individual" should be consistent for both search engines and other content providers. I agree. My point is: under "the right to be forgotten", the rules are not consistent.
If the rules were consistent, people whose privacy was violated would simply go to the original publisher who put that information online to get it removed; Google wouldn't have to get involved. But under current rules, the original publisher can continue providing that information, it's just that search engines can't show it.
No. They don't even generally have to remove their online content.
Because Google is a big American company that is hurting European publishers and media companies. So, European publishers and media companies lobbied their legislators, riled up voters with editorials and "reporting", and the rest is history.
Nice theory, but unfortunately wrong. The "right to be forgotten" applies to search engines indexing public data sources; the original sources frequently continue to be online, and quite legally so.
My argument doesn't rely on "counterfactuals". deGrasse-Tyson's argument is that private investors are unwilling to take the risk of exploration. When more than half of his funding came from sources that were unquestionably private, his argument is obviously wrong: that is, private investors clearly are willing to take that risk, both because more than half of the voyage was financed by private investors, and because the risk was entirely insured by private insurance companies. To make that point, it doesn't matter whether 50% or 100% of Columbus's voyage was privately financed, any large percentage of private financing illustrates the point. With that observation, it isn't necessary to even argue the point that Queen Isabelle was acting like a private investor (which she did) and not like a modern government.
Even if we were going to take Columbus' voyage as an exact model for space exploration, then NASA should not start any project until such a project is at least 50% financed through private investors and 100% privately insured again failure. What Columbus's voyage clearly does not support is anything like the current NASA funding model, or any model in which US tax payers act as an insurer for space launches, which is what deGrasse-Tyson is arguing for. That is, 0% private financing and 0% private insurance is clearly "counterfactual".
What are you talking about? Almost the entire Internet as it exists today is privately built and owned. The original ARPANET and NSFNET were also privately invented and built (albeit with government financing). The primary effect the US government had on the Internet was to delay its widespread adoption by several decades because of the communications monopolies it had granted to companies like AT&T.
It should. I'm a libertarian and I make no excuses about it. I understand your confusion: I used to be a progressive and a believer in government programs myself until I actually bothered to get the facts and read up on the history. Keep at it, you hopefully will figure it out sooner or later.
Companies like Lockheed Martin are specialized in areas that are of interest only to governments. They have neither the management, nor the patent portfolio, nor the facilities, nor the employees to successfully compete in other areas. That is, their resources are substantially misallocated, and that misallocation requires substantial amounts of money and time to fix.
A nominally average return at low risk is actually a high return. Furthermore, I'm not sure why you think that their profits are low. Perhaps you are looking at profit margins, but that's not really a useful number for defense contractors, since they are probably inflating their costs; you need to look at other numbers. Lockheed-Martin's return on equity, for example, is an obscene 125%.
As I was saying: you also can't make a credible business or scientific case. You are making a socio/economic/political case. Yes, my qualifier was there for a reason.
However, when it comes to the socio/economic/political argument, I think you are on thin ice, because creating gigantic federal programs to demonstrate the superiority of free markets and free societies over communism is idiotic. What the Apollo program really demonstrated was that the rest of our economy was so strong and resilient that it could tolerate such utterly useless programs as the Apollo program. Building a bunch of gigantic pyramids would have accomplished the same purpose.
The return is high relative to the return they would be getting without government funding, which is close to zero.
The value of Apple's products is in what people are willing to pay for it, which apparently is a lot of money. The fact that you (or I) may think that their products are "overpriced" in some sense does not change that.
It does. But, as you pointed out yourself, private companies are getting into the act, and teleoperated and autonomous robotic probes are the drivers there.
Keep systemd, kick out Poettering.
Those are not consequences of us putting a man on the moon; they are consequences of the US investing in rockets. We didn't need to put a man on the moon in order to do that.
Furthermore, those insane technologies nearly caused global nuclear war; that kind of madness is only the result of government action. If anything, it's another argument why government should not be allowed to engage in this kind of spending.
All the boring nitty-gritty engineering that was necessary to make it happen. The Apollo space program sucked up the engineering resources of nearly half a million engineers, scientists, and technicians for a decade. Think of all the useful stuff those people could have done, instead of working out how to build life support systems and flight control systems out of clunky 1960's technologies.
Like any large, long term project, a manned mission to Mars would need to be planned largely using today's technology. What that means is that probably 1-2 million scientists, engineers, and technicians would be spending the next 10-20 years on tinkering with 2015-level technology in order to launch something in the 2030's. Furthermore, the companies involved are robbed of any incentive to innovate: they originally specify the project using 2015-level technology, and they make the most profit and face the least risk by sticking with it to the bitter end.
I think it would be a much better if those 1-2 million scientists, engineers, and technicians can spend their time and effort on developing new technologies. I suspect that in another decade, what would be a trillion dollar project now can be done for a few billion dollars with 2025 technology.
Who cares what you call it? The question is what she did and why she did it. And the fact is that she didn't act anything like NASA or Congress, she didn't take any extraordinary risks, and she wasn't even essential to the voyage. So, deGrasse-Tyson's analogy is simply wrong.
You're welcome to try.
Really? How did putting people on the Moon help us defend against the USSR?
Nowhere did I argue that manned exploration should never happen. But given the technology we currently have, robot probes are arguably the best bang for the buck. In fact, focusing development on robot probes and autonomous systems is probably the fastest way of getting a manned space program up and running. The problem with government financing of manned space programs is that it misallocates resources, ultimately hurting what it is trying to achieve.
Columbus' voyage was already predominantly privately financed. Furthermore, Queen Isabella contributed nothing like a modern government to the exploration effort, she merely acted as another investor with money that she pretty much had sole control over. If Queen Isabelle she hadn't paid for it, Columbus could well have found the balance of the funding from other private investors, or simply scaled back the voyage a little (after all, one or two ships might have sufficed). Furthermore, the risk of those voyages was privately insured, not born by Queen Isabelle or any government.
In addition, Columbus worked out the business plan and the voyage independently before seeking funding, and he decided on the spending like a private business man. That is nothing like the space programs that deGrasse-Tyson favors, which involve decades-long government programs, subject to Congressional spending choices and political meddling.
Your story is the same argument deGrasse-Tyson keeps making, and it falls apart when you look at historical facts.
Private companies make high risk/return gambles all the time; high risk per se isn't a deterrent. The problem with manned space travel to Mars is that it is high risk/low return. That is, even in the best case scenario, if you succeed traveling to Mars, there is going to be little return from that because there is nothing on Mars that we want or need right now.
However, government funding is low risk/high return for the companies that actually receive the funding. NASA's manned programs have been nothing but huge subsidies to US aerospace and defense contractors, plus some politically expedient handouts to politicians in important states.
We tried that with the moon. What happened? Next to nothing for half a century. The Apollo program didn't advance space travel, it held it back, by focusing on the wrong technologies.
Manned space exploration isn't economically viable for anybody at this point. It's not a question of whether private investors have sufficient resources (they most certainly do), it's whether there is sufficient return on investment.
The fastest way to space is not for NASA to waste money on politically favored programs, it is to let space exploration develop naturally. That means focusing on robotics, biotech, and propulsion right now; once those have advanced sufficiently, manned space travel will happen by itself.
Correct. And you also can't make a credible business or scientific case for government to finance manned space travel to the Moon or Mars at this point. And that is why government shouldn't waste any money on it either.
We do need research and exploration, but that can be done most efficiently using robot probes. NASA is good at that. When NASA wants to send people to Mars, however, they are just wasting money and engaging in crony capitalism.
More than half of Columbus' voyage was financed by private investors. And it is misleading to refer to the rest of the funding as coming from a "wealthy and powerful sovereign government"; technically, the Spanish crown may have been that, but in the end, it was simply Queen Isabella deciding how to spend her money; she could have just as well spent that money on a new palace or pet dalmatians. It was also not that much money.
Why don't you read the original article? It basically makes that point.
All engineering programs I have ever seen have incorporated extensive liberal arts exposure. I think the problem is more that non-engineering degrees lack rigorous training in math and science, which means that the people graduating from those are very well "connected with the feelings and hopes of others", and are well equipped to manipulate their fellow human beings, but have no idea about how to actually change things for the better.
Well, it's not what the original scientific article says. It's the WP article that misrepresented an article about Islamic extremism as being about violent extremism in general.
In fact, if you read the original article, that's the kind of argument it makes. The WP article simply distorts what the original article was all about:
There are numerous other problems with the analysis. For example, the "nine-fold" claim comes from dividing the percentage of engineering graduates in the sample by the percentage of engineers in the general population of those countries. But since university degrees are greatly overrepresented among their sample, that greatly overstates the ratio. The first statistic that should strike people is not that engineers are overrepresented among terrorists, but that education is overrepresented among terrorists.
But, despite some weaknesses, the original scientific article is actually much more reasonable than the WP representation of it: its main point is that terrorism is likely a consequence of unfulfilled expectations. Engineers are related to this primarily because if you grow up poor in an Islamic country, an engineering degree is seen as a good ticket out of poverty, and people get radicalized when, after getting their degrees, they can find good employment neither in their original country (due to corruption and political oppression) nor in the West (due to prejudice and tough competition).
Incidentally, the original article is here:
http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/...
The point of the WP article isn't that we shouldn't make generalizations about groups, like "engineers" or "refugees". That's a good point to make, but it is missing one essential point: under existing US law, US engineers and refugees aren't legally equal. That is, it is entirely legitimate to discriminate against refugees in ways that it wouldn't be legitimate for US citizens.
Nevertheless, the means by which the WP article attempts to make that point are wrong. Whether the author understands it or not, the Gambetta and Hertog article does not show that engineers are more "prone to violent extremism". The point of that article is actually that "discontented would-be elites" become radicals, and that engineers are more likely to become right-wing radicals than left-wing radicals. I.e., the "mindset" that causes engineers to become radicalized disproportionately is that engineers tend to think that their work is valuable and essential to society, and they tend to think that socialism and communism don't make much sense. Neither of those is particularly surprising, nor is it something that reflects negatively on engineering or engineers.