So the proposed solution is: (1) more government supervision, (2) more gun control, and (3) more encryption? This guy was being observed by the government every day because he was working for the government, the shooting took place in one of the most strictly gun controlled states in the nation, and there is no evidence he needed encryption. In addition, the shooter wasn't a "homegrown, self-radicalized individual", he was radicalized abroad by a belief system many people share and spread.
What this reflects is the utter impotence of the current administration to do anything meaningful. Obama promised a restoration of privacy, constitutionality, and a radically different foreign policy, and he has turned out as bad as Bush, if not worse.
Addressing the terror threat will require massive changes in US foreign policy, plus many years of patience for things to calm down. Getting in bed with Middle Eastern despots for oil and cleaning up the messes that European colonialism left across the globe have always been questionable to begin with, but at least there was some economic justification for it. In the 21st century, these policies are just imbecilic.
The whole point of academia is (or should be) to create a place where the pressure of capitalism does not bias the pressure of easy results. Instead, academia has just become something equivalent to communism (probably due to the national origins of many of the people that inhabit academia) mixed with dirty big business capitalism.
I have no idea how "the pressures of capitalism" entered your arguments. Capitalists are probably the most interested in accurate scientific results because inaccurate results cost them money. Capitalists may exaggerate scientific results in marketing, but that is self limiting because customers quickly figure out when something doesn't work.
Misuse of science happens almost entirely in government, because in order to gain benefits from misrepresenting scientific results in government, you only need to fool politicians or administrators; they don't understand the science, and when they lose money, it's the tax payers' money and it doesn't hurt them much and doesn't keep them from doing it again.
Now, I will be the first person to admit, none of this is ever going to happen. We are way past the point of no return. We needed to catch this problem like 30 years ago. So, what is our best option now? I do not know. I am open to options, but I think we are pretty much screwed at this point
The best option is the same that it has always been: let people decide for themselves as much as possible which scientific results to believe and which ones not to believe. That is, government should get out of the business of making nutritional recommendations, should greatly scale back prescription drug regulations, should get out of the business of apply scientific results to education, should stop trying to meddle with the economy or financial markets based on scientific results, etc.
Yes, but the only real practical way to do this is tie the key to biometric information such that when that private key or the signing authority get's compromised, you can get a new key by a) being alive and b) matching the biometric data.
You don't need online biometric information. A simple off-line photograph and fingerprint are enough. Sworn affidavits may also be used to replace some of those identifiers. That is, if you lose your identification card, you go to an office and re-establish your identity, and that process may be more cumbersome than merely some automated online process.
If I'm mostly going to run Android apps, why would I want to do that inside a Windows phone? All I get is extra overhead from emulation and incompatibilities. Before worrying about phones and Android, Microsoft really needs to worry about Windows store, because it looks to me like few of the traditional Windows software vendors are making their software available through the Windows store. I don't know whether that is because Microsoft charges too much money or because the store requirements are too strict, but the end effect for the user is that on Windows, I still have to deal with manual software installation and upgrades, while also having that useless Windows store thing sitting around.
People should stop using birth dates and social security numbers for security or identification purposes. We should use smart cards and public keys for identification, both for government services and financial transactions.
Look, my point was that low-lying atolls are resource starved and not very productive places to live; people there are always going to be comparatively poor.
My comment about the late settlement was merely meant to illustrate that point, not to prove it: people undertake these risky and arduous voyages only when they faced strong population pressures. There is ample literature on that. Technologies for longer sea voyages were likely also developed in response to population and resource constraints, and the need to venture further out for fishing, trade, and colonization. As for the settlement of Polynesia, it started in about 1000BC and mostly ended around 1300AD; that's a long time span compared to the time for any individual atoll to become overpopulated.
We simply don't know how important Jupiter was for life on Earth. People argue that it shielded Earth from collisions, but for that to be effective, Jupiter had to be outside of Earth's orbit. Most of these planets/brown dwarfs would be inside the orbit of any planet in the habitable zone. Gravitationally, they are likely pretty much indistinguishable from just a central sun. If they have an effect, it may be in causing or shielding solar flares.
For example, if a corporation commits negligent homicide, there is a high barrier to having that liability fall upon anyone personally.
The "high barrier" doesn't result from any kind of special corporate treatment, but the simple fact that it is hard to determine in a complex organization who is responsible for any particular act. The only people that creation of a corporation protects is its investors, for the simple reason that the act of investing in a legally established company cannot be by itself criminal.
Corporations have no natural rights, they are not human beings.
All "corporate personhood" means is that people don't lose their constitutional rights just because they act as a group. And the only rights that SCOTUS recognizes for corporations are those that are available to groups of people. For example, a corporation can't marry and it can't get a Miranda warning, because those are not rights available to groups of people. But a corporation can engage in free speech, own property, and file lawsuits because those are rights available to groups of people. Corporations should also enjoy the right to free association, meaning they should be able to hire and fire at will; that's still something we need to fight for.
OTOH, if you mean that the people collectively cannot justly pass laws imposing those conditions on corporations, you are quite incorrect. It can and to some degree probably should.
In the US, the only valid laws are those that are consistent with the US Constitution, and the US Constitution provides strong limits on what the federal government can do. That is, "the people" are legally quite constrained in the kinds of laws they can pass.
Of course, with large enough majorities, the constitution can be amended or ignored. That just happens to be a bad idea. The notion of reining in evil corporations and capitalist speculators for the benefit of society was the essence of fascist ideology at the beginning of the 20th century. Germany quite democratically elected a guy that was going to do just that, and the rest is history. So while technically, it is possible to do this, it is a really bad idea.
Your understanding of what happened is entirely wrong. Indeed, many of these places used to be blue collar towns. The people who lived there saved for retirement and raised kids, kids that went on to college and to better jobs. Neither they nor their kids want to live in aging company housing anymore. The parents retired somewhere nice, and the kids moved to bigger houses in the suburbs. That left a lot of cheap, old housing stock around in these places, housing that nobody who has a choice would want to live in. Meanwhile, big cities have been busy passing all sorts of ordinances and rules that dramatically increase the cost of housing and pushing out the poorest city dwellers. Where do they go? The cheapest housing they can find, which happens to be the old housing stock left behind by the blue collar workers.
You erroneously take the decline of these old blue collar neighborhoods as an indication of a descent of blue collar workers into poverty, when it is exactly the opposite: that kind of housing used to be acceptable for lower middle class workers, but expectations and income of even the lower middle class have risen so much that that housing is now only acceptable for the poor. And when the poor were pushed out of inner cities by city revitalization and government policy, they ended up settling in these houses that nobody else wanted.
They are "false positives" in the sense that the stellar companion may be a small star or a brown dwarf instead of a "planet". But the distinction between a "big hot gas giant" and a "brown dwarf" is fairly academic, in particular if you're concerned with things like habitability.
However, if you wish to sever personal liability from the organization formed, that is a PRIVILEGE that the public may (or may not) choose to grant you.
It's not really a "privilege", it's just a formalization of one form of structuring a private business transaction. As a business owner, I could also write liability limits into each contract. It's just easier to have a bunch of standardized legal forms for doing so. If you do business with a corporation, you know how its liability is limited, and if you don't like that, don't do business with them.
In any case, even if you call it a "privilege", the conditions under which liability is limited are already well-defined: corporations need to abide by laws and they need to comply with their corporate charter. If they fail to do that, courts effectively can already impose a "corporate death penalty".
What you can't do is impose a corporate death penalty just because you believe that a company isn't charging the prices you want it to charge, or is paying its CEOs too, or doesn't comply with some political demand you like.
Except during that timeframe Australia grew from 18 millions to 24 millions. So that's 35% reduction. Meanwhile US grew only slightly from 274 millions to 319 millions.
True. That's why it's a good idea to look at rates. And the simple fact is that if you look at a graph of homicide rates over time, Australia's gun control laws had no effect at all. Surprisingly, they didn't even have an effect on suicide rates.
And comparing the US and Australia, the US homicide rates fell from a peak of 9.8 in 1991 to 7.4 in 1996 to 4.7 in 2011. Australia fell from a peak of around 2.0 in 1992 to 1.8 in 1996 to about 1.2 in 2011. So, really, there is no significant difference there either (if anything, the US had a greater reduction).
Repealing the Second Amendment is not enough. The Second Amendment doesn't grant you the right to bear arms, it simply reiterates that the federal government already lacks the power to restrict the right to keep and bear arms under the Constitution. That's also why all the bickering over the details of the Second Amendment (e.g., what the term "militia" refers to) is meaningless.
If the federal government wants to restrict the right to keep and bear arms, not only does the Second Amendment need to get repealed, the Constitution needs to be amended to grant the federal government that power explicitly.
Australia used to have the same problem, but a conservative government managed to introduce gun restricts at the cost of the next election, and gun violence and accidents dropped sharply.
That's a deceptive statement. In fact, the only demonstrable effect of Australian gun control was a reduction in the number of gun-related suicides, which isn't surprising. Homicide and suicide rates overall also dropped, but that wasn't attributable to gun control; they simply followed long-running trends in Australia and abroad. Based on the available data, the Australian gun control efforts of the 1990's produced no demonstrable benefits.
And note that this is for a best-case scenario of an isolated continent with well controlled borders, plus a government that was willing to implement a draconian mandatory buy-back program.
There are way too many guns out there to have any effective method of restriction work.
Even if there weren't, guns are really easy to make even with simple metal working tools. With 3D printers and CNC machines cheap and widely available, gun control simply cannot work at all.
Note also that the Europeans haven't been much more successful. Sure, they have fewer gun suicides, but criminals get guns as easily and cheaply in Europe as they do in the US.
But I am yet to see anyone change their pre-existing opinion as a result of these discussions.
I did. I used to be solidly pro-gun-control. After looking at the data and thinking about the implications of gun control, I have changed into a strong support of second amendment rights, and I oppose most forms of gun control.
Notice the presence of Compton, CA, Newark, NJ, and East Chicago, IN, among others?
Wealthy city governments love to push their problem areas into administratively separate entities; even across state lines if they can.
I don't know why those cities are considered dangerous when there are cities with worse rates.
The Chicago homicide rate is 15.1, ridiculously high. Even LA as a whole is 6.3, still very high, but that's even worse when you consider that that is concentrated in a few hot spots.
Lots of small-to-mid-size cities have homicide rates below 2.
So basically small cities that once relied on manufacturing/warehousing jobs.
You're seriously wanting to claim that Compton, CA, or East Chicago, IN, are "small cities" in any meaningful sense? Get real. Many of those so-called "small cities" are merely parts of larger metropolitan areas, kept administratively separate because the city that they are effectively part of doesn't want to incorporate them.
One bank executive confirmed the hack to Farooqui, adding that, "This is blackmail."
Yes, it is. But it is also something else, something much more important: lousy security, utter disregard for their customers, and negligence on the part of the United Arab Emirates Bank.
When a bank loses customer data on this scale, the bank is the crook and the victim is the customer. Trying to portray the bank as the victim (of blackmail) adds insult to injury.
What I mean is that if you are looking for a specific outcome (let's say curing lung cancer), then I'm not really against trying-until-succeeding:) even if it's not 100% reproducible:)
You haven't thought this through. Assume people think that some method cures some disease. Over time, there are 500 studies testing for efficacy of that method in curing the disease. Even if the method is completely ineffective, at the 5% significance level, they will get 25 studies showing statistically significant effects; at the 1% level, they'll still find five studies. Few if any of the negative results will get published, and the ones that are will likely be discounted under the assumption that the people doing the experiments weren't applying the method correctly. Overall, it will appear as if there is strong evidence for the efficacy of the method, even though it is no better than chance.
Thankfully there are academics and then there are academics
Unfortunately, good intentions and honesty aren't enough to fix this. Nor, frankly, is it really a problem with the science or the scientists, it's a problem with using scientific results prematurely to make economic or medical decisions. Sooner or later, people will have done enough experiments in order to show that a particular scientific result is actually real. But that point is usually much later than people assume.
You could also see that if you broke the TLS encryption.
If Google wanted to smuggle data about kids back to their servers, they could do that steganographically, in DNS queries or images or battery usage reports. Since Google seems to be using a lot of deep learning for data mining, the data you are looking for would also be just a bunch of floating point numbers, data that may not even be decodeable using any information on the device.
My point is that you can demonstrate the presence of data leakage, but you can't conclusively prove its absence to people who start with the assumption that Google is dishonest and adversarial. There is nothing Google can do to satisfy the EFF, and if the EFF doesn't believe Google's pledges or audits, then the EFF should simply recommend that schools don't use Google at all, instead of filing complaints. Of course, the same is true for Apple and Microsoft, who have similar ecosystems of OS control, diagnostic data, online backup, app stores, and online services.
So far, medical science has done essentially nothing whatsoever to stop ageing from killing us. Instead, current medicine stops us dying prematurely of other causes. I see no reason at all to think we're just going 'solve' ageing overnight, as the professor seems to think.
More specifically, medicine has been able to extend life on average by reducing death from causes other than aging, but it hasn't been able to increase maximum life span.
These things tend to improve incrementally, and if we're lucky, medical science may soon take the first step in combating ageing.
But, see, the fascinating thing about aging is that life span has not improved incrementally, despite numerous medical advances. That suggests that human life span is not simply determined by the accumulation of a lot of other causes of death, but actually primarily genetically determined through a small number of mechanisms (and there are some good ideas of what those are are). That's why there is at least some reason for optimism that life span can be increased through gene editing.
When people say that they may be able to "stop aging" through gene editing, that doesn't mean that everybody instantly becomes immortal, it means that we can then address aging in the way you imagine: as a large number of incremental medical improvements, addressing all the other things that can go wrong besides the genetically determined life span. But until we address aging, other medical advances will become ineffective in terms of extending human life.
People like Church and Lander are excellent scientists in their specific areas. But they sound incredibly naive when talking about issues outside their area. My recommendation: don't believe the promises that these people are making (like "curing aging" in five years). On the other hand, don't give in to their fears either ("'we' need to go slowly").
I hope people will work aggressively on gene therapy for aging, human cloning, genetic manipulation of human and animal embryos, and xenotransplantation. I also hope people will do so responsibly and not create disabled human beings or cause animal suffering. And the best way of doing that is for people to talk about ideas freely and take individual responsibility for their actions, and to spread funding widely. The worst thing we can do is to create blanket bans on certain techniques out of irrational fears, or to invest billions of dollars into a few showcase projects over empty promises.
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So the proposed solution is: (1) more government supervision, (2) more gun control, and (3) more encryption? This guy was being observed by the government every day because he was working for the government, the shooting took place in one of the most strictly gun controlled states in the nation, and there is no evidence he needed encryption. In addition, the shooter wasn't a "homegrown, self-radicalized individual", he was radicalized abroad by a belief system many people share and spread.
What this reflects is the utter impotence of the current administration to do anything meaningful. Obama promised a restoration of privacy, constitutionality, and a radically different foreign policy, and he has turned out as bad as Bush, if not worse.
Addressing the terror threat will require massive changes in US foreign policy, plus many years of patience for things to calm down. Getting in bed with Middle Eastern despots for oil and cleaning up the messes that European colonialism left across the globe have always been questionable to begin with, but at least there was some economic justification for it. In the 21st century, these policies are just imbecilic.
I have no idea how "the pressures of capitalism" entered your arguments. Capitalists are probably the most interested in accurate scientific results because inaccurate results cost them money. Capitalists may exaggerate scientific results in marketing, but that is self limiting because customers quickly figure out when something doesn't work.
Misuse of science happens almost entirely in government, because in order to gain benefits from misrepresenting scientific results in government, you only need to fool politicians or administrators; they don't understand the science, and when they lose money, it's the tax payers' money and it doesn't hurt them much and doesn't keep them from doing it again.
The best option is the same that it has always been: let people decide for themselves as much as possible which scientific results to believe and which ones not to believe. That is, government should get out of the business of making nutritional recommendations, should greatly scale back prescription drug regulations, should get out of the business of apply scientific results to education, should stop trying to meddle with the economy or financial markets based on scientific results, etc.
You don't need online biometric information. A simple off-line photograph and fingerprint are enough. Sworn affidavits may also be used to replace some of those identifiers. That is, if you lose your identification card, you go to an office and re-establish your identity, and that process may be more cumbersome than merely some automated online process.
If I'm mostly going to run Android apps, why would I want to do that inside a Windows phone? All I get is extra overhead from emulation and incompatibilities. Before worrying about phones and Android, Microsoft really needs to worry about Windows store, because it looks to me like few of the traditional Windows software vendors are making their software available through the Windows store. I don't know whether that is because Microsoft charges too much money or because the store requirements are too strict, but the end effect for the user is that on Windows, I still have to deal with manual software installation and upgrades, while also having that useless Windows store thing sitting around.
People should stop using birth dates and social security numbers for security or identification purposes. We should use smart cards and public keys for identification, both for government services and financial transactions.
Look, my point was that low-lying atolls are resource starved and not very productive places to live; people there are always going to be comparatively poor.
My comment about the late settlement was merely meant to illustrate that point, not to prove it: people undertake these risky and arduous voyages only when they faced strong population pressures. There is ample literature on that. Technologies for longer sea voyages were likely also developed in response to population and resource constraints, and the need to venture further out for fishing, trade, and colonization. As for the settlement of Polynesia, it started in about 1000BC and mostly ended around 1300AD; that's a long time span compared to the time for any individual atoll to become overpopulated.
We simply don't know how important Jupiter was for life on Earth. People argue that it shielded Earth from collisions, but for that to be effective, Jupiter had to be outside of Earth's orbit. Most of these planets/brown dwarfs would be inside the orbit of any planet in the habitable zone. Gravitationally, they are likely pretty much indistinguishable from just a central sun. If they have an effect, it may be in causing or shielding solar flares.
The "high barrier" doesn't result from any kind of special corporate treatment, but the simple fact that it is hard to determine in a complex organization who is responsible for any particular act. The only people that creation of a corporation protects is its investors, for the simple reason that the act of investing in a legally established company cannot be by itself criminal.
All "corporate personhood" means is that people don't lose their constitutional rights just because they act as a group. And the only rights that SCOTUS recognizes for corporations are those that are available to groups of people. For example, a corporation can't marry and it can't get a Miranda warning, because those are not rights available to groups of people. But a corporation can engage in free speech, own property, and file lawsuits because those are rights available to groups of people. Corporations should also enjoy the right to free association, meaning they should be able to hire and fire at will; that's still something we need to fight for.
In the US, the only valid laws are those that are consistent with the US Constitution, and the US Constitution provides strong limits on what the federal government can do. That is, "the people" are legally quite constrained in the kinds of laws they can pass.
Of course, with large enough majorities, the constitution can be amended or ignored. That just happens to be a bad idea. The notion of reining in evil corporations and capitalist speculators for the benefit of society was the essence of fascist ideology at the beginning of the 20th century. Germany quite democratically elected a guy that was going to do just that, and the rest is history. So while technically, it is possible to do this, it is a really bad idea.
Your understanding of what happened is entirely wrong. Indeed, many of these places used to be blue collar towns. The people who lived there saved for retirement and raised kids, kids that went on to college and to better jobs. Neither they nor their kids want to live in aging company housing anymore. The parents retired somewhere nice, and the kids moved to bigger houses in the suburbs. That left a lot of cheap, old housing stock around in these places, housing that nobody who has a choice would want to live in. Meanwhile, big cities have been busy passing all sorts of ordinances and rules that dramatically increase the cost of housing and pushing out the poorest city dwellers. Where do they go? The cheapest housing they can find, which happens to be the old housing stock left behind by the blue collar workers.
You erroneously take the decline of these old blue collar neighborhoods as an indication of a descent of blue collar workers into poverty, when it is exactly the opposite: that kind of housing used to be acceptable for lower middle class workers, but expectations and income of even the lower middle class have risen so much that that housing is now only acceptable for the poor. And when the poor were pushed out of inner cities by city revitalization and government policy, they ended up settling in these houses that nobody else wanted.
I don't really care whether it's "corporate controlled" as long as it's open source and not patent encumbered.
That is, I'm happy to let a corporation "control" something as long as people can fork it when the corporation drops the ball for some reason.
Both C# and Swift seem to satisfy those criteria.
They are "false positives" in the sense that the stellar companion may be a small star or a brown dwarf instead of a "planet". But the distinction between a "big hot gas giant" and a "brown dwarf" is fairly academic, in particular if you're concerned with things like habitability.
It's not really a "privilege", it's just a formalization of one form of structuring a private business transaction. As a business owner, I could also write liability limits into each contract. It's just easier to have a bunch of standardized legal forms for doing so. If you do business with a corporation, you know how its liability is limited, and if you don't like that, don't do business with them.
In any case, even if you call it a "privilege", the conditions under which liability is limited are already well-defined: corporations need to abide by laws and they need to comply with their corporate charter. If they fail to do that, courts effectively can already impose a "corporate death penalty".
What you can't do is impose a corporate death penalty just because you believe that a company isn't charging the prices you want it to charge, or is paying its CEOs too, or doesn't comply with some political demand you like.
True. That's why it's a good idea to look at rates. And the simple fact is that if you look at a graph of homicide rates over time, Australia's gun control laws had no effect at all. Surprisingly, they didn't even have an effect on suicide rates.
And comparing the US and Australia, the US homicide rates fell from a peak of 9.8 in 1991 to 7.4 in 1996 to 4.7 in 2011. Australia fell from a peak of around 2.0 in 1992 to 1.8 in 1996 to about 1.2 in 2011. So, really, there is no significant difference there either (if anything, the US had a greater reduction).
Repealing the Second Amendment is not enough. The Second Amendment doesn't grant you the right to bear arms, it simply reiterates that the federal government already lacks the power to restrict the right to keep and bear arms under the Constitution. That's also why all the bickering over the details of the Second Amendment (e.g., what the term "militia" refers to) is meaningless.
If the federal government wants to restrict the right to keep and bear arms, not only does the Second Amendment need to get repealed, the Constitution needs to be amended to grant the federal government that power explicitly.
That's a deceptive statement. In fact, the only demonstrable effect of Australian gun control was a reduction in the number of gun-related suicides, which isn't surprising. Homicide and suicide rates overall also dropped, but that wasn't attributable to gun control; they simply followed long-running trends in Australia and abroad. Based on the available data, the Australian gun control efforts of the 1990's produced no demonstrable benefits.
And note that this is for a best-case scenario of an isolated continent with well controlled borders, plus a government that was willing to implement a draconian mandatory buy-back program.
Even if there weren't, guns are really easy to make even with simple metal working tools. With 3D printers and CNC machines cheap and widely available, gun control simply cannot work at all.
Note also that the Europeans haven't been much more successful. Sure, they have fewer gun suicides, but criminals get guns as easily and cheaply in Europe as they do in the US.
I did. I used to be solidly pro-gun-control. After looking at the data and thinking about the implications of gun control, I have changed into a strong support of second amendment rights, and I oppose most forms of gun control.
Notice the presence of Compton, CA, Newark, NJ, and East Chicago, IN, among others?
Wealthy city governments love to push their problem areas into administratively separate entities; even across state lines if they can.
The Chicago homicide rate is 15.1, ridiculously high. Even LA as a whole is 6.3, still very high, but that's even worse when you consider that that is concentrated in a few hot spots.
Lots of small-to-mid-size cities have homicide rates below 2.
You're seriously wanting to claim that Compton, CA, or East Chicago, IN, are "small cities" in any meaningful sense? Get real. Many of those so-called "small cities" are merely parts of larger metropolitan areas, kept administratively separate because the city that they are effectively part of doesn't want to incorporate them.
Yes, it is. But it is also something else, something much more important: lousy security, utter disregard for their customers, and negligence on the part of the United Arab Emirates Bank.
When a bank loses customer data on this scale, the bank is the crook and the victim is the customer. Trying to portray the bank as the victim (of blackmail) adds insult to injury.
[Cut back to Fry, who is relaxing, when his head shakes and we hear a bell ringing. A telephone icon is shown on the eyePhone screen.]
Fry: What's happening to me? Is it puberty?
Bender: It's a phone call, dingus.
Fry: These eyePhones are phones, too?
Bender: Duh!
You haven't thought this through. Assume people think that some method cures some disease. Over time, there are 500 studies testing for efficacy of that method in curing the disease. Even if the method is completely ineffective, at the 5% significance level, they will get 25 studies showing statistically significant effects; at the 1% level, they'll still find five studies. Few if any of the negative results will get published, and the ones that are will likely be discounted under the assumption that the people doing the experiments weren't applying the method correctly. Overall, it will appear as if there is strong evidence for the efficacy of the method, even though it is no better than chance.
Unfortunately, good intentions and honesty aren't enough to fix this. Nor, frankly, is it really a problem with the science or the scientists, it's a problem with using scientific results prematurely to make economic or medical decisions. Sooner or later, people will have done enough experiments in order to show that a particular scientific result is actually real. But that point is usually much later than people assume.
If Google wanted to smuggle data about kids back to their servers, they could do that steganographically, in DNS queries or images or battery usage reports. Since Google seems to be using a lot of deep learning for data mining, the data you are looking for would also be just a bunch of floating point numbers, data that may not even be decodeable using any information on the device.
My point is that you can demonstrate the presence of data leakage, but you can't conclusively prove its absence to people who start with the assumption that Google is dishonest and adversarial. There is nothing Google can do to satisfy the EFF, and if the EFF doesn't believe Google's pledges or audits, then the EFF should simply recommend that schools don't use Google at all, instead of filing complaints. Of course, the same is true for Apple and Microsoft, who have similar ecosystems of OS control, diagnostic data, online backup, app stores, and online services.
More specifically, medicine has been able to extend life on average by reducing death from causes other than aging, but it hasn't been able to increase maximum life span.
But, see, the fascinating thing about aging is that life span has not improved incrementally, despite numerous medical advances. That suggests that human life span is not simply determined by the accumulation of a lot of other causes of death, but actually primarily genetically determined through a small number of mechanisms (and there are some good ideas of what those are are). That's why there is at least some reason for optimism that life span can be increased through gene editing.
When people say that they may be able to "stop aging" through gene editing, that doesn't mean that everybody instantly becomes immortal, it means that we can then address aging in the way you imagine: as a large number of incremental medical improvements, addressing all the other things that can go wrong besides the genetically determined life span. But until we address aging, other medical advances will become ineffective in terms of extending human life.
People like Church and Lander are excellent scientists in their specific areas. But they sound incredibly naive when talking about issues outside their area. My recommendation: don't believe the promises that these people are making (like "curing aging" in five years). On the other hand, don't give in to their fears either ("'we' need to go slowly").
I hope people will work aggressively on gene therapy for aging, human cloning, genetic manipulation of human and animal embryos, and xenotransplantation. I also hope people will do so responsibly and not create disabled human beings or cause animal suffering. And the best way of doing that is for people to talk about ideas freely and take individual responsibility for their actions, and to spread funding widely. The worst thing we can do is to create blanket bans on certain techniques out of irrational fears, or to invest billions of dollars into a few showcase projects over empty promises.