The EU ruling does not require the information on a website to be deleted. Quite the opposite, it upheld the ruling against that by previous courts.

The EU ruling does not require Google to de-index the information. No, seriously, it doesn't.

What the EU ruling states, and this is made painfully clear by the court and also in the summary document, is that the link to the information not be coupled with the personal name. How Google chooses to implement that is Google's affair.

The Statute of Anne is ultimately at the heart of this, because this is where ownership of information is first taken out of the hands of corporations and guilds, and placed squarely in the hands of individuals. The Data Protection Act, which stemmed from (again) corporations claiming ownership of information belonging to others - but this time often getting it wrong with life-threatening consequences, was in many ways a repeat of that battle.

In the case of the DPA, the stakes were higher. Computer glitches and operator errors declaring living people to be dead spread from computer to computer like an incurable cancer. With no redress, even if it meant your bank account was closed, insurance got cancelled and house repossessed. Even if you got a company to fix the data, it would merely get reinfected. Politically aligned "vetting" companies were making a fortune selling bogus information to prospective employers, ensuring only ideologically approved candidates would get hired.

I don't think people remember those days.

European privacy rules are intended to transfer rights to individuals, as per Statute of Anne, and attempt to prevent malign, inaccurate data from harming said individual. So far, so good. I'm amazed at the number of libertarians who are opposed to individuals having rights. The more they oppose such a notion, the more I'm inclined to believe the philosophy suspect. If core elements can be ignored when convenient, they're not especially core.

The EU laws and ruling might not be perfect, in fact I don't believe for a moment they are. But I reject the idea that a corporation has more rights than a person.

Some time back, when I argued that freedom of the collective could not be neglected in pursuit of freedom of the individual, there was much opposition. Mostly along the lives that collectives have no physical reality. I fully expect these to be the people most opposed to the EU ruling, on the grounds that collectives (because that's what a corporation is) have freedoms.

In other words, I believe people prefer cognitive dissonance to having self-consistent beliefs or to admitting error. Much better to split the mind than debug an ideology. Microsoft would be proud.

I'd love to see a sane, rational discussion on the issue. Particularly with experts in IT security as part of it, as they're the experts in handling the conflict between access needs and access controls, and between risks vs benefits, especially on historical data which may include flawed data.

As an IT professional, you will have access to data that regular employees don't. You keep your mouth shut and you don't snoop. Period. You only look at as much as you have to diagnose and fix problems; the details are irrelevant.

It's called "being professional."

Think of it as the equivalent of lawyer-client or doctor-patient relationships.

As the originator of the term, he had the right to define it. But the definition that he created was based not only on his words, but also on his actions.

Under the control of Mussolini the government tried to use minimal force to get its way (i.e., to satisfy the business interests), but if minimal force wouldn't work, he was quite willing to use more.

N.B.: He also created the term "egghead" to describe intellectuals, because his thugs found it so easy to break their heads.

Sorry, but you are confusing existing systems which are called Socialist with Socialism. It's not an unreasonable argument, but Socialism isn't necessarily a government. Local laws permitting individual factories can be Socialist. And there is no guarantee that such a facotry would provide those benefits.

OTOH, both countries and factories can fail whether they are Socialist or Capitalist. There's no inherent guarantee that one is more likely to fail than the other. The fact that there are few successful Socialist factories reflects their low rate of formation, and their high infant mortality (because they often come into existence only when the original, run on a Capitalist basis, is going bankrupt...so it is sold to the workers).

I don't find much validity in the GP's argument, but neither do I in yours. Public health measures are not an inherently socialist feature, even though they are more common and extensive in governments called Socialist. They should sensibly be considered as "investment to maintain the health of the social body upon which the government subsists". That they are considered socialist is due largely to the work of the American Medical Association, which had a vested interest in not having the government control their wages and prices. Now that those things are instead controlled by the insurance industry that vested interest has evaporated, but the prejudices instilled have not...and the insurance companies are quite happy to keep those prejudices going.

You clearly don't understand the meaning of EITHER socialism or communism. Communism predates Karl Marx. And Stalinism isn't even Marx-Lenninism. (Note the hyphenated designation, as that which Lenin preached and practiced wasn't what Marx preached.) Also neither is Maoism, which also is only one variety of communism. (Stalinism isn't ANY kind of communism. It's just standard totalitarian dictatorship with an unusually brutal and despotic dictator. Only Idi Amin could claim to practice the same kind of government, though Pot Pol had certain similarities.)

Calling yourself something doesn't mean that the label rightfully applies to you. The North Korean government calls itself a "People's Republic", but it doesn't match the conventional meaning of Republic. (Do note, however, that Republics are normally controlled by an Oligarchy of some sort. It's not the "feel good" term that USians are generally taught it is. Not if you really understand what it means and how it operates. And the constitution guarantees that the states will have a Republican [Things of the Public] form of government, not a Demmocratic [i.e., power derives from the people] kind of government. And in both these cases I grossly simplified the meanings of the terms. In fact I'd need to research a bit to determine precisely what each meant, though basically in a Republic power derives from ownership of things, and in a Democracy power derives from being a "person", for some meaning of person. [E.g., slaves were originally considered to be only 2/3 of a person in the US.] Please note that this doesn't mean that the power belongs to the people, but rather that the government allocates power on the basis of people.)

This is a good example of why when there are no consequences, civil behavior deteriorates.

Do you also "root" your car? I mean it has lots of computer controllers that you should have access to since you won the thing, right?

Were it "Netflix for games" you'd pay a flat monthly fee and be able to play whatever game(s) you want.

It's not the ripping software, it's the digital recording function, i.e. the ability to write to disk.

Here's what the court said in the RIAA v Diamond Multimedia case: (internal citations removed)

Unlike digital audio tape machines, for example, whose primary purpose is to make digital audio copied recordings, the primary purpose of a computer is to run various programs and to record the data necessary to run those programs and perform various tasks. The legislative history is consistent with this interpretation of the Act's provisions, stating that "the typical personal computer would not fall within the definition of 'digital audio recording device,'" because a personal computer's "recording function is designed and marketed primarily for the recording of data and computer programs." Another portion of the Senate Report states that "[i]f the 'primary purpose' of the recording function is to make objects other than digital audio copied recordings, then the machine or device is not a 'digital audio recording device,' even if the machine or device is technically capable of making such recordings."

So it really depends on what else the car's ability to write to disk is both primarily used for, and what it is primarily marketed for. The latter is probably worse for them; even if the car happens to be writing map or diagnostic information to disk, probably ripping CDs is what is mainly being advertised.

Very true. A wholly free market is actually quite toxic, as a certain Adam Smith noted. Especially when it's dishonest.

In-app purchases are the return of micropayments, but for virtual goods less valuable than Second Life real estate. It is, of course, entirely fair for companies to sell such products and for customers to buy them, but the control system is poor, virtual goods have an amazingly high failure rate for delivery, and prices are often in the small print.

Have you seen Linus' opinion of recent GCCs? My web browser melted from the heat.

Sigh. Emacs is an operating system with text editing facilities.

Functionality comes at a price. Complexity introduces bugs by necessity, reduces performance and increases memory footprint.

Below some given threshold, adding complexity is fine. The reduction in wasted time/money exceeds the increase in overheads. Above that threshold, the reverse is true.

As with all systems, for any given variable, the plot of efficiency vs complexity follows the standard S curve. Memorize this curve, it will save you much grief. The aggregate will be more complex because the variables have inter-dependencies and unique characteristics. You need to resolve to orthogonal components if you want to do anything useful.

Since nobody can be bothered to do that much maths, it becomes a simple question - do you get anything out of using them?

For me, the answer is usually no. There are no editors out there that handle more than a small fraction of the languages I use. Several critical languages use specialized formatting rules and it is a syntax error to not follow them. It would be nice to actually have an editor remember the rules for me, but formatting editors prettify code. The notion of languages having rules is beyond them.

Most code editors I've used also insist on adding truly ugly dummy code. And by "ugly", I mean I would demote a first year student by a year for writing such crap.

Maintainer convenience is not a factor I allow in mitigation. NetBeans and Eclipse score poorly. Eclipse doubly so, as I've seen it suffer seizures when updating purportedly compatible extensions. If I can write code faster by chiselling it into rock than typing it into an editor, the editor's coding isn't being written for the benefit of users. If portability and compatibility are claimed, I expect that claim to be true or rescinded. Transactions, including updates, should be bulletproof - which may include rollbacks for the irretrievably mangled.

Good code isn't the problem. Good code is never a problem. Finding good coders IS a problem, finding good coders who can work together is almost impossible. (Ergo, Linux is the byproduct of alien experiments on the brains of Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, coinciding with a freak quantum entanglement with Dread Cthulhu in a parallel universe.)

If it did, the quality of the pictures would be better.

We need to stop finding different mechanisms to all vote on one day and instead allow in-person voting over a longer period, such as a calendar week.