A couple of years ago when I first read the bitcoin whitepaper and was very impressed and excited (how can you read that and *not* be impressed and excited?) I proposed a slight change to the bitcoin protocol to add support for messages querying for "elided" blocks, i.e. a means for querying a peer for blocks only relevant to a given transaction (the history of all addresses relevant to and leading up to that transaction). The elided blocks would just be the full details necessary to allow a client to validate a transaction, with the Merkel tree being used to elide most of the data.

With a feature like this, a client would not need to download the entire block chain, they'd just need a) enough of the block chain to be able to validate elided blocks which wouldn't be much, and b) a peer willing to answer elided block queries for them. Since answering an elided block query takes real work (you have to have the entire block chain indexed in such a way as to make answering such a query efficient, which means storing alot of data, with proper indexes, and proper software, and connecting to the bitcoin transaction firehose, with the cost associated with that), I included a mechanism that would facilitate allowing the peer to 'charge' you for this service, using the same pseudo-anonymity of regular bitcoin.

The idea being that a client should not have to trust a third party to handle their transactions for them, which is the only feasable way to do bitcoin transactions now unless you want to download 15 GB - not really feasable in most circumstances - and connect to the firehose - also not feasable in most circumstances, and would be much less so were bitcoin to actually become used with any real transaction volume on a global scale. For a small fee (probably cents per transaction I would guess) you could use a system that didn't require you to trust any peers (unlike the current "we'll hold your wallet for you and do your transactions on your behalf" services that seem to have proliferated to make bitcoin actually feasable for clients).

I started to write it, but then gave up on it because I lost interest. All I got out of it was a couple of bitcoins I bought for fun, that made me about 2 grand (on paper of course, I never sold them and I don't really think it's possible to actually liquidate bitcoins into real money without serious work and headache).

How do I know? Well, (a) Google's leadership says so and AFAICT there is no law that allows the government to compel them to lie, publicly or internally and in fact there are laws that make it a crime for executives of publicly-traded companies to lie about issues which could affect the stock price (which this definitely does!); (b) as a Google employee who manages sensitive user data I have some visibility into how requests for that data are handled; and (c) as someone who is familiar with Google culture I find it inconceivable that such a thing could be happening on any kind of significant scale without being outed -- like most of silicon valley, and like geeks in general, Googlers tend to be pretty iconoclastic and anti-authoritarian.

If the speculation has been floating around that long, without a shred of evidence to support it in spite of the large-scale conspiracy that would be required to keep all such evidence suppressed, I think that's pretty compelling evidence that it's not true. You can never completely prove a negative, of course, but you can asymptotically approach certainty.

I think you're overstating what he's saying. He's saying that the government can't get access to the stuff we don't want people to know without getting an appropriate court order. That's not inconsistent with suggesting that if there's stuff you don't want people (the government) to know, then you shouldn't be doing it... because the government still can get it. They just need to be able to convince the appropriate magistrate that they have a good reason. Oh, and they have to be targeting you specifically.

Sure, they could resort to rubber-hose cryptanalysis, targeting key Google employees. If it were to come out, though, it would make the Snowden leaks look very, very mild. As one of said key Google employees (I work on security infrastructure), I've been given to understand that if I am ever approached in any way by the government, I am to immediately consult with Google legal counsel, and that any request that I not talk to counsel would be illegal (I think it would violate the constitutional guarantee of due process).

Certainly, as long as the order or warrant is issued by the appropriate court, is not excessively broad, etc., and then Google will add it to the statistics for the transparency report.

In an information-theoretic sense that is undoubtedly true. In that sense, though, I'd argue that nothing that touches a networked computer is safe.

YMMV, of course, but I actually am pretty comfortable with it. Of course, I have visibility into how Google manages user data, which helps. There is the possibility that a future version of Google may behave differently, but I think that possibility is at least a decade or two away, because I think it would take that long for the company's culture to change enough to make it possible.

Perhaps. I think the general belief about what data Google has overstates the reality by a wide margin, and further even where it's accurate it overstates Google's (current) ability to actually make use of the data.

In any case, if you're concerned with it, Google provides you with the tools to opt out. I encourage you to use them. Personally, I turned on web history, location history, route all of my email through gmail, use Hangouts for SMS, etc., etc. I find the value I get from the services to outweigh the risk I perceive. If you see that balance differently, you should act accordingly.

I do, but as a Google engineer involved in security and privacy infrastructure I'm in a position with much greater than normal visibility into exactly what is done and how.

Governments can ask, and Google will say "No, please come back with an order."

Governments can order, and Google will comply, as long as the order was issued by proper authority, isn't excessively broad, etc. And then Google will add the order, and the number of accounts it affects, to the next transparency report.

That's not perfect, but it's much, much better than the government being able to snarf all the data with no accountability at all.

Well, we do not require transvaginal ultrasounds for women who want to get abortions.

The difference between a progressive state and a conservative state isn't regulation. It's *what* is regulated.

Several annual trips to NYC makes you a tourist, it's not nearly the same as living there.

The subsidy is the "opportunity cost" of selling something at below market rates. If NASA sells a thousand gallons at $5.00 gallon when the market cost is $10.00, that's effectively a $5000 subsidy, even though the cash is flowing *into* NASA rather than out.

The situation is complicated, though, by the fact that the Google execs are allowing NASA to use their planes for research. It may well be that overall the relationship is a win-win, but this kind of complicated and cozy relationship between a government agency is probably not a good idea given that it makes telling good vendor relations from special favors impossible.

Both creative people and cranks have lots of wild ideas. The difference is that a crank reflexively defends his ideas with irrational vehemence. A creative person usually discard his ideas, because he knows there's always more where that comes from.

It reads like it wasn't a subsidy to Google, it's that NASA sold fuel to all it's qualified partners at cost rather than at market rates. So the taxpayers didn't pay anything for a subsidy. NASA recouped what it paid for the fuel, it just didn't make a profit on the transaction. I don't see any compelling reason to require a government agency like NASA to turn a profit on it's deals, as long as it doesn't lose money on them either.

More actively than Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google in charge of machine intelligence? Very few people in the world are more active in AI-related fields than he is.

If you're only worried about economics and ignore all other factors, wouldn't it be cheaper, economically speaking, to just steal gas today rather than pay $3.50/gallon?

If gas were taxed to $1000/gallon, then that would mean that some extraordinary circumstance happened that dramatically cut the global supply of oil (like if someone nuked the entire middle east and Canada found that when they dug deeper into their huge shale reserves, all they had was worthless diamonds instead of oil shale), so that $1000/gallon gasoline (as well as the vehicles that are fueled with it) will be protected by armed men, probably US Military. At that point, killing those that control the oil becomes much more risky, are you sure it's "cheaper"?

There's a big difference between "settled" and "set in stone".

"Settled" science can be challenged, but you just can't waltz into a field and say, "I have this data which proves that decades (or even centuries) of research are entirely wrong." You have to start with narrow claims and then gradually broaden them. You attack scientific consensus by patiently tugging at loose ends until the whole fabric of consensus starts to unravel.

Science is, in fact, open to the possibility of perpetual motion or intelligent deign. It just doesn't make it as quick or easy as some people might like to make such ideas a new scientific consensus. The value of scientific consensus largely lies in that it must be hard-won.

So to answer the summary's question, of course science can be "settled", but settled science can always be overturned. A "settled" hypothesis is merely one so well-supported that the burden of proof lies with its would-be rebutters.

They've even invented protocols for sharing information between themselves.