The EU is getting more integrated, but is still nowhere near one economy that moves in unison. So the answer to the headline question is: yes in some places, no in others. Germany's GDP is growing; Spain's is shrinking.

As usual, the paper makes more sense than the press release, but is less grandiose in its claims.

It's a fairly technical result that finds some appeals to the asymptotic equipartition property lead to too-strong claims, compared to a more precise analysis.

If I recall my History Channel correctly, when the Grand Imam of Al Azhar and the Coptic Pope get together and formally agree on something, strange events start taking place.

Yeah, the worry is "one man, one vote, one time", i.e. a party wins free and fair elections and then promptly abolishes democracy and installs themselves permanently in power. Or until someone overthrows them.

In the Muslim Brotherhood's case, that worry looked more than hypothetical, since Morsi attempted several times to rule by decree, and sort of succeeded at least once. It was not hard to guess what his plan was.

The problem here is that the owners of the company are suing their own company for damages, which doesn't really do them any good, since the company they own will have to pay any damages!

Google offers 'unlimited fiber to the home' in the same way that Dreamhost offers 'unlimited web hosting': unlimited with some restrictions on the kind of use you'll make of the service. So Dreamhost won't let you use the unlimited space for hdd backup, since it's only supposed to be for webhosting, and Google won't let you use the unlimited bandwidth for hosting an FTP server, since it's only supposed to be for residential internet access.

I would personally like there to be reasonably priced unrestricted fiber to the home. But I suspect it would cost a lot more. Have you looked up what an unrestricted port at these speeds costs at any kind of colo facility? If you really want a 1 Gbps commit, you're going to pay a lot more than Google Fiber's prices, even at the cheaper facilities.

The files are also pretty readable plain text, vaguely inspired by markdown. So even if org mode somehow disappears, you will still be able to read the damn things, whereas that's less likely to be the case if some day you're stuck with some decades-old janky binary format for a discontinued piece of software.

On the other hand, the learning curve is a bit steep if you've never used Emacs.

As a researcher (patient) studying the social practices of doctors (visiting their offices), my tentative conclusions are that the industry-standard note-taking practices are currently: 1) a web browser; 2) open to WebMD.

But we are getting a bit off topic:

The article was about tracking by third party cookies, and the associated worries about privacy intrusion. In that I agree with Mozilla, and the new default is only what I have had for years.

Yes, I think it's worth remembering that this move is not about ad-blocking, just third-party-cookie blocking. Mozilla is not going to ship AdBlock by default or anything. A site can show whatever ads they want, 1st-party or 3rd-party. They can also store 1st-party cookies. What will no longer work by default is 3rd-party cookies, because they are used to track people around the 'net as they browse between different sites, which lets companies build centralized dossiers of people's browsing habits. Those are used for multiple things, and ad-targeting is only one of them. Some of the companies also act as data brokers and outright sell the collected profiles, without anonymizing the data.

That particular example is specific to the military, though; soldiers have never been considered to have the same freedoms as civilians, even in the early years of the US.

Civilian government employees do have some degree of free-speech protection. The main caveat is that any employer (including a private-sector employer) can fire employees for speech criticizing the employer, in some cases, and that is also true when the government is acting in its role as an employer. However the government is somewhat more limited than a private-sector employer in how it uses this power.

Possibly, but the FISA statute probably supersedes the CFAA.

His defense for that seems to be that the IRA never attacked America. I guess that's true, but they did attack one of our allies. I wonder if King would apply that argument to mean that any other terrorist group is fine as long as they don't launch attacks in the USA (or against American embassies, maybe). For example, the Kurdish PKK has only attacked Turkey, not the USA.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act treats both "unauthorized access" and "exceeding authorized access" as essentially equivalent. The second case is where you had an account but used it in unauthorized ways. This has some obvious vagueness and overreach problems. Did the CFAA drafters really mean to criminalize ToS violations, for example?

Here [pdf] is a proposed amendment to the law from law professor Orin Kerr.

You could look at what the share is among the top N domains, for N=1000 or N=10,000 or whatever, at least as a sanity check.

Are there any solid open standards already in existence for this problem?