We've got this thing in the rest of the world called George Orwell's 1984. This plainly discusses what happens when government gets broad powers to define which beliefs and statements are acceptable and which are punishable by law.

Some US states have similarly worded laws, but our court system (wisely) recognizes that the "deemed to have never happened" idea is limited to how that state's government (and localities within that state) may treat the person, and that these laws cannot prevent other private parties from making accurate statements about the past.

I agree that the US justice system is too quick to arrest and prosecute people, and that many things are wrongly defined as crimes. If you want to fix that, then fix it -- don't try to make it worse by inventing more legal offenses that relate to pretending that something never happened. A search engine neither builds up nor ruins anyone's reputation.

Who are you to decide when information is outdated? If someone served ten years in prison for embezzlement, and got out ten years ago, that might not be relevant if they are trying to get a job as a software developer -- but if they're working on bank software, that might well become relevant, and if they want to work as a banker, you can be quite sure it is still relevant.

The US recognizes a tort called "false light invasion of privacy" that is very similar to lashon hara. However, it is frivolous to suggest that Google's search engine constitutes either offense.

"Just because you *can* [make an ill-informed comment full of hackneyed phrases], does not mean you *should*."

For example, only a cretin would think that "privacy" means just one thing, and that an argument about one kind of privacy necessarily applies to other kinds of privacy. As a case in point, European data retention laws (pursuant to an EU directive) mean the governments there can snoop on citizens practically as much as they like. The governments regulate what companies can keep and share, but that's not the most important kind of privacy. Mostly Europe thinks society should work according to its government elites, and they want to keep a monopoly on knowledge and political power. People in the US disagree that the government should have a monopoly in those things.

What qualifies as a serious crime? If someone is convicted of stealing client funds, and they go to jail for a decade, are they allowed to walk right back into handling other people's money once they get out? Europeans needs to get over themselves and realize that some parts of the world contain people who are able to make their own judgments about who is trustworthy, for a very good reason.

Also, the facts that the US criminal justice system is rigged against defendants, that it severely punishes a lot of acts that don't have obvious harms to others (e.g. drug dealing and use), and that it makes life unduly hard on many released convicts are all unrelated to the freedom to make factually accurate statements.

G+ is a counterexample only to the extent that individuals posting to G+ are Google employees acting within the scope of that employment. In the same way that Facebook isn't liable when its users upload defamatory or infringing content (because they have a way to handle complaints), Google isn't automatically liable when third parties post information to G+ or Blogger or wherever else.

In the court case that triggered this change in policy, the original publisher was also targeted, and the court found that they had a right to continue publishing the information. The same court found that Google had no legitimate interest in linking to those web pages. You're being either ignorant or deceptive to suggest that the concern here is that Google is continuing to carry stale data.

There should be a balancing test between the public interest in a (true) fact and the privacy interests involved in its disclosure. There is negative public interest in having lists of credit card or Social Security numbers being published like that: the only real purpose is for fraud. On the contrary, there is clear and strong public interest in having someone's past run-ins with the law being available -- so that others can make an informed evaluation whether they want to deal with the person in question. Europe seems to think that its citizenry is too stupid to make that kind of decision, and thus does not consider that there is public interest in making those facts available.

Someone who accuses another of committing "a very serious error of thought" should probably not compare academic misconduct to murder or rape. When was the last time anyone went to jail for academic misconduct?

Does Piketty's book disclose that he altered the numbers he worked from, such that they do not reflect the sources he cited? If not, that would constitute serious academic misconduct under some (relevant) standards.

Of course, he admits to altering his data after someone else noticed it, but some of his changes are apparently plain errors, and the rest are not annotated or explained. They also push the data in a direction that Piketty finds useful (long before the FT article came out, scholars criticized the book for making overblown conclusions that were not well-supported by the data it presents), which is further reason to be skeptical about the nature of the changes. Data manipulation doesn't have to be intentionally biased in order to be consistently biased.

To pick just one flaw in your new link, I cannot reproduce the 6% discrepancy that Reed claims in his The Guardian piece between data sources (b) and (c) -- I calculate it as an average 3.8% difference in the top 10%'s wealth over the eight-year overlap, dropping to 3.3% if you exclude 1974's anomalously large discrepancy, and in either case dropping a bit if you round (b) to whole percentages to match (c). On top of that, the difference goes in the other direction for the top 1% estimates, which makes suspect claims of systematic bias between the two, rather than sampling noise. I think I'll opt out of being "highly inform[ed]" by bad arithmetic, thank you very much.

The Economist essentially says: "We can't be sure he intentionally fudged the numbers, and he says he didn't, so we'll take his word for it." That is an extremely weak defense. The Economist doesn't present anything (beyond Piketty's own authority) to suggest Piketty's adjustments have the right values, or even have the right sign -- just that there are reasons to be skeptical about using the numbers from Piketty's sources as they are.

Those are the most commonly used organic-approved pesticides, not necessarily the most toxic. Either way, the people claiming that organic means "no pesticides" are either ignorant or lying.

Science (or at least Scientific American) disagrees with you: http://blogs.scientificamerica...

Qt has a lot of overhead that can be useful for writing desktop apps but requires extra work for a web browser. Qt wants all apps to be web apps, except you get your "choice" whether to write layout and logic in Qt Quick, C++ or overhead-added HTML; this gives you some degree of interop with the other two, but web browsers don't need that or the overhead it brings. Qt also pointlessly reinvented lots of the C++ standard -- witness QString and all their container classes -- making it hard to integrate with libraries written in non-Qt C++. People who use Qt are mostly allowing themselves to be locked in to a dead vendor's proprietary library.

Look, if someone complains that their time is worth more than they are getting for it, there are three options:
1) They produce enough economic surplus that they can capture (significantly) more for themself, in which case they should try to do that, either by asking for a raise or looking for a new job.
2) They produce significantly more surplus than they get in pay, but somebody else can do the job basically as well, so they can't get a raise; this means their time is in fact not worth more than they are getting paid.
3) They don't produce much more economic surplus than they get, in which case anyone who gave them a raise would start losing money.

When somebody complains about their pay rather than look for a different job, my money is on option 2 or 3 rather than option 1.

Oh, your position is that they are delusional rather than just whiny?