Because Google should not be in business to make money through harming people. They should just give you free stuff without harming me.

There. FTFY.

MUCH more importantly, though, ads are draining your BANDWIDTH. It's important, because it's also a simple demonstrable harm. If you pay $30 per month for your internet bandwidth, and the ads use up half of it (conservative estimate), then ads are harming you at the rate of $15 per month. Because Google purposely don't allow you to block the ads in android (*), that is a clear, monetary, demonstrable, harm.

(*) Google should be forced to put a big red button on their settings that will block all ads coming into the android device, and all in-app advertising traffic, if the user presses it. It should be force to do so or else be held as an accomplice on bandwidth theft. (**)

(**) Yes, I know, I'm dreaming. But I'd support a class action suit that would aim to accomplish this.

Tupperware. Look it up, before reflexively marking me off topic.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Amazon censors some reviews under various guidelines, google it. The world is already more censored than it looks.

Yes that's my point, positive or negative, if it's a review there must be truth behind it. We expect the same off scientific epxperiments, and that is what allows us to trust the results.

That's a direct translation of "condemning with faint praise".

The problem with criticism in general, both positive and negative, is: how does anyone know if it's truthful?

It's easy to make up a story about going to some restaurant, and maybe you even actually went there, and if you did, who knows if you had a great service or not, maybe you were off your meds, and then for the hell of it, you write a scathing review. Or a great one as a prank for your friends.

On the internet, anybody can be a blogger and there's no quality control, just look at the kind of comments we get on Slashdot at -1. So while blogging is great and all, and saying whatever you like as a blogger is also great, if you're a blogger you should still put your neck on the chopping block like any normal journalist.

If you're going to say something, you'd better have definite proof, not just some random opinion. And if you get sued once in a while, accept it. It happens to professional journalists a lot. The trick is to back up your blogging claims with proper facts that you can actually show to a judge if asked.

So you are saying that Amazon has somehow found a way to actually ship items for free, to both the user and itself?

No, I'm saying that the cost of shipping cannot be accounted for as an integral part of the product price, rather it must be accounted for separately. If it is nevertheless accounted for as part of the price, then Amazon would be doing a bunch of illegal things.

They just wanted to save the hassle of sending in the nukes. Do you know how much paperwork they make you sign for each obliterated virus outbreak these days? It's like initial this pdf to get the plane, sign that fuel requisition, assisinate two pesky reporters, on and on! I kid you not.

Because that is simply false. The cost of shipping is not simply a part of the cost of the product. It's the same product, regardless if you ship it to New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo or anywhere else in the world. Yet the shipping costs are clearly different. So if you tried to account for the shipping costs as an integral part of the product, you'd be guilty of various crimes, like tax evasion due to accounting fraud, and also price discrimination against some of your customers. Besides, you'd also be guilty of dumping, which is a variant of antitrust violation. And that's just in the US, mind you.

But this isn't what this law is about. At least, that's not what I understand it to be about. For this given example, there should be a very specific law designed to handle it properly. This is more about forgetting things that you did (and somebody wrote on the internet), and not cases where you are a victim of a crime. At least, that's what I understand it to be for.

As I understand it, the law has been around for 20 years. It's about letting people, whose data is being collected by a company, demand to see what said company is recording about them, demand to correct data that isn't factual, and demand to be erased from said company's records if the person has (or no longer has) no business relationship with the company.

Except what you're talking about is not so much helping you remember events, but rather helping you discover old events you didn't know about.

Think of it like this: lots of people today weren't born when the Watergate scandal happened, and lots of people don't even know who Richard Nixon was. But they can google him, and in this case Google isn't operating as a memory assistance device, but rather as a teaching device.

The problem is that whereas Watergate is a well known historical fact of some importance, most of the other facts that people discover using Google are hearsay, rumours, and opinion. The quality of information on the internet as a whole is worse than on Wikipedia. At least on Wikipedia the articles can be edited. Google's index should similarly be editable, I think that would raise its value to the level of Wikipedia hopefully.

f you want to call it something else, like the-right-to-prevent-undesirable-information-from-being-copied-and-published, I have no objection. It's a mouthful though. And there are so many different possible reasons someone might have to request a removal, that it wouldn't be reasonable to make special rules for all of them.

Moreover, it may in fact be none of anyone else's business why. Does the battered wife really need to tell some Google employee that she let her husband beat her up for years, just so she can justify the removal of a link to her address? It's kind of nobody's business. And if the husband goes around telling everyone she stole some money from him, how many people are going to assume she's a scumbag who's trying to wipe her slate clean?

Eh? Nobody's stopping you from remembering. That would be very difficult, and I suspect it would possibly involve trepanning.