Thank you. That was the first realistic assessment I've noticed so far in this discussion.

There is no programming language that is ideal for all contexts, nor any VM that supports all use cases well. There can't be, because there are some fundamentally contradictory goals that simply can't be fully reconciled. For example, you can't have a language that efficiently manipulates hardware for systems programming yet which also lets you run general applications downloaded from untrusted sources in a safe sandbox. The trick is to pick out the common elements and principles that are shared by some of the cases, and pool that work as much as possible so the maximum resources can go into making each tool better in its particular niche.

It's good that people who have grown up with "web apps" are starting to notice these issues that are old friends in the wider programming world, and that the Web world is starting to run into hard problems and realise that there aren't always easy solutions to them. This will inevitably lead to greater maturity in the technologies we use on the Web. But that doesn't mean the Web world somehow magically has answers that no-one else who's been working on this for the last 30/40/50 years has found.

Ironically, possibly the biggest lost opportunity in recent years is that Microsoft could have shifted the whole industry for the better just by having a decent, standardised install/upgrade process for native applications on Windows desktops. If they had produced something with the ease of use we now expect from mobile app stores, but the range of grown up applications we expect from a serious operating system and the freedom and support for developers that Microsoft used to champion for many years, then they might have disrupted the killer feature of Web apps -- which IMHO is the near zero friction ease of getting hold of them -- almost overnight. Throw in a decent set of tools for supporting client/server communications, and what advantages do Web apps really have left over native-but-distributed development?

Sadly, MS never really solved that problem, and so instead of today's new programmers growing up with a wide variety of native languages and run-time environments that built on decades of successful language and VM evolution, we get stuck with the joke that is Javascript, a bunch of server-side languages that all look much the same when you strip away trivial syntactic differences, and worst of all, insane amounts of development effort going into building several variations of ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of what a cutting edge VM should have been by now, all locked up in different browsers where nothing but Web apps can even use it. The rise of Web apps has probably regressed the software industry by at least a decade and counting. :-(

This is why allowing vague terms like "national security" or "terrorism" as a justification for any penalty in law is dangerous. There is a certain irony in this news arriving on the same day that there are moves to hold a terrorism trial completely in secret. It's not so long after the Gary McKinnon fiasco, either.

The strange thing is that this isn't even a very good strategy, at least not in the UK. Blair's administration only just retained power at the general election after going to war in Iraq, and even that was because of a combination of quirks in our electoral system. At the following election, it was closer to "Labour? Who are they?".

Remember that the law in question does not give anyone some arbitrary and complete power of censorship.

For example, in the UK a conviction that leads to a prison sentence longer than four years never becomes spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, while convictions with shorter sentences eventually become spent after a period of time that depends on how serious the sentence was. Other things being equal, it seems likely that the "right to be forgotten" would not extend to allowing someone to remove references to an unspent conviction but might allow references to spent convictions to be suppressed.

Where offences involve taking advantage of vulnerable people or are of a sexual nature, as in the scenario you described, there may be other considerations as well as the general principle of spent convictions, which might also override any generic "right to be forgotten".

So while, predictably, the first batch of deletion requests reported in the media are mostly people with genuinely dubious histories trying to do a bit of selective rewriting, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will succeed, nor that even if they succeed for now, in the sense that Google decide to err on the side of caution and delete by default for the immediate future, they will continue to succeed in the long run.

This could all change in light of other recent moves at EU level that could render the current ECJ judgement academic anyway, and if the general plan is to move forward with explicit statute law in this area but it turns out that the previous ECJ judgement was being abused, the issues of proportionality and balancing individual privacy with public interest will surely be reviewed.

The trouble with libel and slander laws is that they are overwhelmingly used by those who are high profile public figures, where the potential damages they will win and the media coverage that will probably result might actually justify the insane costs of bringing a formal legal action under those laws.

For the other 99.99% of the population, the reality is that even if someone says something blatantly untrue that severely damages the victim's career, it still may not be worth bringing a case in a lot of jurisdictions. The process is simply too heavy to function effectively when scaled down to normal people with normal lives and normal jobs.

I do agree with you about the need to limit the use of obviously inflammatory and biased language by professional prosecutors and police officers in court, though it doesn't help when we have crazy loose wording in the laws themselves. For example, if mere possession of any item that might be useful in preparing for an act of terrorism constitutes an offence, all you need is a library card or a city map or a phone or a car.

And would that be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Because "Three years ago, Fred was charged with child sex offences" might be a true statement, but it's a very different statement to "Three years ago, Fred was charged with child sex offences, but was unanimously found not guilty by a jury after the person pressing the charges turned out to be his ex-wife's best friend, who was subsequently convicted of perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice after evidence emerged that she had paid all three of the prosecution's other witnesses to make co-ordinated false accusations against Fred."

I'm not sure anyone deserves to have long-past transgressions haunt them forever, even if they are reported factually. There are enough unwarranted prejudices in society, without someone struggling to get a job at 40 because the Internet never forgets that they were once cautioned for stealing a chocolate bar at the age of 14.

Either way, merely "This is the truth, so I may speak it without taking any responsibility for the consequences" has always been a horribly dangerous principle to support. Context is everything when it comes to reputations, and never more so than in the Internet age where reputations can last forever and reach all around the world.

That's all very well, but you're talking about someone whose life is being destroyed right now. Starting a slow process so no-one else will suffer a similar fate in a decade or two is great, but woefully inadequate for the problem at hand (to which some degree of solution should already be available in most western democracies, via some version of wrongful arrest law and some version of defamation law, both of which should be designed for exactly these kinds of circumstances).

Perhaps the single most important argument for why defamation laws should exist at all is that once someone's reputation has been tainted, often no apology or correction can ever truly undo all the damage. This is also, IMHO, a strong argument for not allowing anyone to be named as a suspect or defendant in a criminal case prior to at least having them charged with something, or preferably having them properly convicted by a competent court.

If the situation with the GP's friend really was as described, then neither the police nor the media were behaving in a neutral, acceptable way, and both should be dealt with accordingly. And then the individual's public record should quite rightly be cleansed and the unproven allegations "forgotten", which is the whole point of the European legal position we're talking about.

Some of what you say is certainly fair, but I don't think the useful/not useful cases for OpenStack are quite as black and white as you seem to be implying.

For a single physical box that's going to pretend to be a handful of not-often-changing virtual boxes, sure, something like OpenStack is way overspecified (and overcomplicated).

However, scaling up a bit, you moved into the territory where you have a few powerful machines and multiple large-scale storage devices, and you probably want them to run lots of services and get more frequent requests to provision a new facility. Most of all, you really, really don't want a single point of failure, because if any of your big boxes goes down it takes out half a department until everything is fixed. At that point, there is a lot of potential upside to building all your IT facilities on logical/virtual infrastructure that is in turn built on top of physical hardware but without your users ever seeing it.

Right now, with these technologies for private clouds or whatever buzzword we're using this week still in their infancy, there are a lot of growing pains. Virtualisation for processors and storage is complicated enough on its own, before you add SDN on top, and then the more specialised services and all the infrastructure to tie it all together like identity and image management. User interfaces for sysadmins tend to be pretty bad even in fields that are already well established with relatively obvious requirements, which this isn't.

So for today, I don't know who would find a good cost/benefit for moving to OpenStack. But of course, not so many years ago, people used to say that about obscure new technologies like Linux and web applications, too.

OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services. As with many "open" technologies, the realities aren't quite as simple as the article here suggests, though.

It's certainly true that proprietary high-end networking gear and virtualisation software can be expensive. In that respect, alternatives like OpenStack are potentially disruptive.

On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.

Also, just because big name brands are keen to be associated with the shiny new buzzword, don't mistake that for sincere support. OpenStack poses a direct threat to the established business model of some of those networking giants, and just like everyone else, the executives at those businesses are wondering where the industry is going next and how to look like you're playing nicely while really still trying to optimise your own financial position.

I tend towards the view that if someone was tried and not convicted, it should be possible for them to have unproven allegations against them hidden. If a court with actual evidence in front of it did not decide to convict, should the accused really then face a second trial by public opinion? Whose interests are really served by such a policy?

Then again, I tend toward the view that no-one should be publicly named as a suspect in most crimes anyway unless and until they have been properly convicted. None of these situations allows some perfect disclosure policy that never gives undesirable outcomes, and I do understand that there are reasonable arguments in favour of disclosure. However, my bias is toward innocent-until-proven-guilty, simply because some damage can't be undone, and once rumours start they will tend to spread whether or not they are founded on anything remotely resembling the truth. Which brings us back to where we came in...

Of course this all applies as much to the original source as to any services dealing in second-hand information, but I don't think it's plausible to ignore the huge magnifying effect of a service like Google. Its actions clearly have consequences, possibly serious ones, in cases like this, so it is not obvious that they should be absolved of all associated responsibility just because it's inconvenient to their business model.

It appears we are in strong agreement.

I don't think we should ever become comfortable with state surveillance and censorship, just as for example we should never be comfortable with armed people going around with the power to forcibly detain us or worse. These things may be necessary evils without which the law cannot in practice be upheld, but they are evils all the same.

Such powers should therefore be granted by law only to the minimum necessary level to enforce the law itself, and they should be applied to everyone equally, and they should probably be overseen by ruthless monsters with the ability to punish in some suitably slow and painful fashion any public official who abuses their privileged powers.

It is unfortunate that in reality government officials tend to get away with a lot more than they should, even in our supposedly democratic and civilised societies. We still have a long way to go before serious abuse of office is considered a high crime tantamount to treason and punished accordingly, but I can't help thinking modern society would probably be a fairer place if we could get there.

As far as I'm aware, there is literally no country in the world that actually has 100% free speech protection in law. Certainly the US does not: there are numerous things that you are not free to express without penalty. You can shout about your theoretical First Amendment protections as much as you want, but you can still be sued for infringing copyright, you can still be arrested for threatening to kill someone, etc.

Equating privacy protection with censorship misses the point. There's an old saying that your right to swing your fist ends at the bridge of my nose. It's not strictly true from a modern legal perspective, but the point that you need to balance many rights and freedoms for everyone is just as valid as it ever was. There will always be a tension between freedom of expression and right to privacy, and using inflammatory language like "censorship" to describe anything but an absolutely one-sided position isn't going to achieve anything constructive.

In fact, it's rather ironic that in one paragraph you attack the idea of protecting privacy as a form of censorship, yet in the very next paragraph you argue for government supervision and market regulation so that companies are not free to act as they wish.

There is a certain stunning irony in someone on the US side of this particular debate complaining about nations wanting to enforce their own laws in other nations.

For one thing, that doesn't appear to be what the ruling actually says.

That aside, someone from the United States is arguing against enforcing local laws abroad? Seriously?!

I say let's go with your idea. It sounds great. You can have your free speech on your part of the wild west Internet, and we can have our privacy protection in our part of the grown up, normal laws do actually apply here Internet. Also, maybe we can go back to having reasonable IP laws. And perhaps we might even keep the tax revenues from sales by Internet companies in our countries. With a bit of luck, we might even develop more home grown tech industry that way, too.

Fair enough, bricking the device was a poor example as it's likely to be presumed a software fault. But what about more controversial issues, like the problem with running a speaker too loud and actually damaging the hardware that was doing the rounds a little while back? What if you flash a wireless router and you subsequently get in trouble because it is found to be transmitting other than in accordance with the local regulations? There are issues that could be related to the software change, but it might not be trivial to demonstrate that either way.

Of course in some jurisdictions there are statutory minimum levels of guarantee that vendors are required to provide, and sometimes there is also a presumption that the item was faulty if a problem happens within a certain period after purchasing it. My question is to what extent this will necessarily help you if you've modified some part of the device significantly, in this case by installing new firmware.

(Please note that I'm not claiming the law doesn't support that position in any specific place, I'm just asking for specific citations or other verifiable data to show that it really does. A lot of major manufacturers are on the record as saying that flashing firmware will void your warranty, which suggests they may fight claims in this area, which to me suggests it may not be worth pushing your luck without the law clearly being on your side.)

Exactly. I read this and actually laughed:

Yeah, those crazy employers, sticking with things that work! What were they thinking?!

Perhaps if this guy hired a few more experienced developers, they could have explained the relatively value of the terms "tried and tested" and "unproven and risky". Good older programmers are just as capable of learning useful new technologies as good younger programmers. The real difference is that the experienced ones tend not to waste their time learning five different [JS frameworks]* that they know will all be obsolete long before the project built on them is finished, because they were too busy building something that would actually get the job done using [jQuery]*.

*Please substitute respectively an overhyped but underperforming technology and an established reliable technology in your fields of choice.