Besides the privacy and safety concerns of these things, I was under the impression that a major flaw is that it's a bit too easy to sneak things through them.

Is it really a smart idea to move these things from a place where security is theatre to a place where the targets actually *are* sneaking weapons through security and using those to actually kill other people?

Anyone at NSA who is participating in this is committing an act of war against a sovereign nation without any declaration of war.

Actually, since it's interception of communications of a foreign country, this may be one of the few recently reported instances of the NSA actually doing their job.

... but that doesn't mean their lives should be ruined simply for some relatively minor past mistakes.

I agree, and that's essentially part of my point, but is this really the fault of the search engines, or is it the "no forgiveness" attitude of employers (and a whole host of others that are in a position to make major decisions that massively affect someone's life) that's the fundamental problem?

It's not just a criminal background problem, either. People are looking at stuff like Facebook photos of someone partying, or political affiliations, etc, and making decisions about employability.

This isn't anything really new, it's just easier to dig up dirt on someone, it's possible to do it on a wider scale, and the results tend to be more authoritative. But there's always been the concept of a "permanent record". That's where expressions like "reference checks", "background checks", "not burning your bridges", "skeletons in the closet", etc came from.

Having Google take down information isn't going to make that information go away; if anything it's creating a business case for a "reputation search engine" to set up shop in a jurisdiction which wouldn't allow this sort of thing.

It's a huge can of worms.

Credit reference agencies have millions of people on their files and a legal obligation to make sure that the information is accurate, and to purge it when it is no longer legally relevant.

Credit reference agencies have meta-data about when they were given the information, who they got it from, and specific dollar amounts, and there's a whole legal framework about how reports are made.

And they *still* routinely screw it up.

Google has an indexing date, a URL, and a blob of content. There's a lot of other stuff they can extract/infer from the content and response headers and they can perform an estimate of relevance (PageRank), but accuracy is obviously inconsistent even without things like SEO's messing with results, and the correctness of any content is governed by stuff like libel and copyright laws in balance with civil rights like freedom of speech.

There's a reason Google's search results have been, in court of law, identified as "opinion" rather than "fact".

Isn't the general principle that once you've done the time, you've paid for your crime?

That's a lovely general principle. That's why we, as a society, are perfectly okay with hiring convicted pedophiles to teach kids, or having convicted armed robbers manage the cash in our ATMs?

I'm generally against using a "one-off" crime to punish someone in perpetuity and deny them a decent quality of life, particularly if it was of the "I was young, stupid and desperate" sort of thing. Shit happens. But a criminal history with high recidivism rates or for particularly heinous crimes can arguably have some predictive aspects.

Why would a pardon be any more relevant of a criteria than the successful completion of a prison sentence?

Because a pardon is, getting back on topic, a formal analysis of whether a criminal conviction is still relevant and/or outdated.

In a magical world where completion of a prison sentence implied rehabilitation, then yes, it would be roughly equivalent to a pardon. In the world where we live, successful completion of a prison sentence just means someone hasn't fucked up so badly that they're still in prison.

Of course, even pardons aren't perfect. Depending on jurisdiction, they may be nothing more than a receipt for a large bribe. But that's still a step up from "got out of prison".

I don't see how a conviction for possessing child porn is irrelevant or outdated.

Well, if he was a minor with pictures of his girlfriend, it's technically child porn, but somewhat excusable. If he'd received a pardon for the crime (dunno if that's available in his jurisdiction) there might be a case.

The problem, fundamentally, isn't the crime that he's trying to have erased, but that the standard of "irrelevant or outdated" is so subjective; it's insane to suggest that Google just take the word of some random person, and it's insane to actually make Google try to evaluate the merit of each claim.

The Spanish case that generated the ruling is a particularly good example. If the information was irrelevant or outdated, then why was is still on the net? If it was an individual trash talking someone, that's one thing (and maybe better actioned under a libel or harassment claim), but if it's a news archive or public documents like auction records then *someone* obviously thinks it's still relevant enough to continue publishing.

Simply put, Google's in the business of indexing stuff that *other* people consider relevant or important enough to publish on the Internet. It's a low bar, admittedly, but asking Google (or Bing, or any other third party) to evaluate the motivations of publishers isn't fair or particularly viable.

The whole concept that a single wrong letter could mean the difference between success and 200 error messages just made them ask, "You do this all day?"

shrug Some people just can't hack jobs where attention to detail matters. A missing semi-colon in software isn't much less messier than an accountant misplacing a decimal, or a millwright putting an extra turn on a depth wheel, or a carpenter cutting an inch short.

Did you not read the part about Canada? I believe they have a winter on occasion.

It's more accurate to say that we have summer on occasion.

...is the only person in the Senate who seems to have not been bought and sold by lobbyists.

I'm a bit surprised the comedy lobby hasn't gone after him. If he goes too far in bringing common sense to politics, people like Jon Stewart will be out of a job. Late Night will only be able to do a "Top 8" count. Writers will be forced to actually *think*.

Let's say out of a $100 monthly cable bill, $25 goes to non-content costs, $50 goes to content, and $25 is profit. That suggests the minimum bill in an a la carte plan might be around $50, which would preserve the current profit level.

Yes, that's what a company who gives a shit about consumers would do.

More likely, the cable company would increase the average bill to $110 (because *something* changed that they can spin as being a customer benefit), decrease the payout to content providers, and make just slightly over triple the profits.

It's also possible they might take a "grocery shrink ray" approach to it, and just give you less content the same price.

The sneaky ones might drop it to $90/month, and call it "passing on the savings".

But cutting a $100 monthly bill in half? When there's an entire customer base conditioned to sending them $100/month? What major corporation is going to give up that if they don't absolutely have to?

I am convinced that the price per channel would go up if everyone was able to purchase channels a la carte.

Of course it would. The cable/satellite providers aren't going to allow the average monthly bill to decrease. In fact, they'd be more apt to use any subscription model change as a means to ratchet up the monthly billing.

They schedule a deskside visit to fix your hardware and you end up covered in monkey shit and banana peels.

You mean they actually show up, eventually? That *is* impressive. Comcast should hire some of those monkeys...

Sure, the most important law of robotics is to protect human life... but if it's going to prioritize, it should probably start with its owner.

Unless the owner is a lawyer and/or politician. In which case, in the interest of protecting human life, it should aim for the nearest solid object as soon as it reaches highway speed.

With a key, you switch it to 1 and can run accessories. You switch it to 2 and the ignition computer is powered. Switch and hold it to 3 and you crank. You decide exactly how to start your engine.

With my wife's hybrid, pressing the button with your foot off the brake turns on accessories. Press the button with your foot on the brake "turns on" the engine. IC engine ignition, obviously, isn't under the manual control of the driver, but otherwise it's not that different from a conventional car.

So: Drive is the file manager, Docs is for word processing documents, and Sheets is for spreadsheets.

It makes even more sense to decouple them when you consider another (now Google) product, Quickoffice.