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.

I've been parsing this kind of press release for a long, long time now. I can pretty much tell what we're dealing with by how hard it is to state the advantage of a new approach in narrow and precise language.

That this blurb doesn't even disclose the error model class (error correction is undefined without doing so) suggests that the main advantage of this codec lies more in the targeting of a particular loss model than a general advance in mathematical power.

Any error correction method looks good when fed data that exactly corresponds to the loss model over which it directly optimises.

The innovators of this might have something valuable, but they are clearly trying to construe it as more than it is. This suggests that there are other, equally viable ways to skin this particular cat.

Snowden is going to be the first person in human history to have a suspicious death at the age of one-hundred and five.

There's a big difference between what these agencies do under cover of darkness, and what they do under the glare of a public spotlight. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after two decades in exile, whereupon he continued to criticise his homeland for another fourteen years, before dying of heart failure under suspicious circumstances at age eighty-nine.

There's a good reason they get mighty twisted about having their darkness aired: no more summary judgement, no more page 13 obituaries of A-list adversaries.

Hurricane Lolita:

I once read of an interview given by Roman Polanski in which he described listening to a lurid radio account of his offense even as he was fleeing to the airport. He suddenly realized the trouble he was in, he said, when he came to appreciate that he had done something for which a lot of people would furiously envy him.

No, Snowden's exile is something different: a life not envied, not one little bit. That much his button-down steampunk adversaries can manage under the broad light of day.

I must respectfully disagree with you on every point you raise.

A randomised stack would cause certain types of bugs to manifest themselves much earlier in the development process. Nothing decreases the cost of a bug hunt more than proximity to the actual coding event.

Such an environment rewards programmers who invest more to validate their loops and bounds more rigorously in the first place. Nothing reduces the cost of a bug more than not coding it in the first place.

There's nothing that stops the debugging team from debugging against a canonical build, if they wish to do so. If they have a bug that the canonical build won't manifest, they wouldn't even have known about the bug without this technique added to the repertoire. If many such bugs become known early in the development process—bugs that manifest on some randomised builds, but not on the canonical debug build—you're got an excellent warning klaxon telling you what you need to know—your coding or management standards suck. Debugging suck, if instigated soon enough to matter, returns 100x ROI as compared to debugging code.

Certainly the number of critical vulnerabilities that exist against some compiled binary can only increase in number. So what? The attacker most likely doesn't know in advance which version any particular target will run. The attacker must now develop ten or one hundred exploits where previously one sufficed (or one exploit twice as large and ten times more clever).

If the program code mutated on every execution, you would have some valid points. That would be stupid beyond all comprehension. An attacker could just keep running your program until it comes up cherries.

The developer controls the determinism model. It's an asset in the war. There can be more when it helps our own cause, and less when it assists our adversaries.

Determinism should be not reduced to a crutch for failing to code correctly in the first place. Get over it. Learn how. Live in an environment that punishes mistakes early and often.

I notice re-reading my own post that I have an "out" missed and an "out" added. Must be how it passed through casting nines.

The Amazon share price demonstrates that investors anticipate profit from the Amazon business model at some point, which they will point very loudly when it begins to appear that growth has reached a plateau. (It's only mildly conceivable that this whole thing is a Ponzi scheme held afloat by successive ranks of the greater fool.)

By some weird co-incidence I breezed through The Everything Store by Brad Stone yesterday afternoon (and following up, just an hour ago, MacKenzie Bezos's misguided one-star review).

I wanted to get a better sense of the author, so I also watched Discussion: Author Brad Stone on The Everything Store, hosted by Daniel Siciliano, professor at the Stanford Law school, who turns out to be sharp, engaged, articulate, and charismatic. Brad largely stays on script with his own book.

Brad did take certain liberties with his book (small ones) of the kind an author is pretty much forced to take if he wishes to have a readership. Mr Bezos would not be so principled as to fact check his profit into oblivion. MacKenzie needs to get a grip on her entitlement double standard.

Brad regards his critical chapter as the one entitled Expedient Convictions. His recap was the best bit in the entire Q/A: "Amazon [aka Jeff] rationalise their customer focus to excuse a lot of things. This paper-thin rationalization is actually naked self-interest."

No shit Sherlock. He then goes on talk about how Amazon engineered their operation to pay no sales tax at the state level by claiming not to operate in any of those states, which is only true in the narrowest legal sense. Amazon runs huge operations in those states structured as legally independent subsidiaries (which are nevertheless totally under Amazon's thumb).

In the book Jeff is quoted as saying they don't use any services provided by those states, so why should they pay a sales tax? Their subsidiaries are using plenty of government provided infrastructure in those states to make those products and services possible. The whole story is just an accounting shell game. Their products come from somewhere, somehow. I don't think you find out at the center of the nested Russian dolls that the Amazon fulfillment center is a Xen machine instance on EC2. In mathematics, Mr Bezos, this analysis is known as the pigeonhole principle, which in layman's terms says you can't ethically pay tax nofuckingwhere on $74b dollars in revenue. But you know that already, don't you? And MacKenzie knows that you know that, doesn't she? Right, I though as much. Pity Brad got the influence of Remains of the Day on your regret minimization framework misplaced in time by about a year in his origin story. How will we ever trust another word this man says?

Which of those two errors concerns a million dollars or more? Bzzzt. Looks like Jeff wins the milliravi award for speaking with forked cheek.

Anyway, this story today is nothing new, and hardly the worst. Anyone interested can check out how Amazon sat on Lovefilm in the UK/EU. It was brutal.

Stone makes Amazon's internal culture sound like The Passion of the Christ which I think was dramatised by Stone somewhat, but hardly given the full Oliver (the answer to my fey verbal riddle is Natural Born Killers if anyone cares).

As I recall it from an early chapter, among the fringe whingers MacKenzie complains are insignificant and overrepresented was one Shel Kaphan whom Bezos himself described as "the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com" as part of his great and commendable summing up of a valued resource so totally no longer needed.

Quick, someone hand me a gold pen, I want to stick it down my throat.

Jules Verne envisioned the submarine. Does that make a submarine impossible? Does the concept sink on the basis of its sci-fi roots? Oh, lordy, what a fucked up standard of evidence on which to accuse any theory of being faith based.

* [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/pictures/110208-jules-verne-google-doodle-183rd-birthday-anniversary/ 8 Jules Verne Inventions That Came True]

The guy predicted pretty much everything but the click trap.

So it sits there. Unpublished by anyone. I'll never know if nobody likes it until I hit the go button. But I'm also scared to learn that I suck at something I enjoy doing.

I went through a similar process to yours, with agents liking (but not taking) my novel. My wife has won literary awards for works agents wouldn't take because they couldn't see her stories becoming best sellers. Not just doing well (which they admitted they would do), but becoming best sellers! The entire publisher/agent thing is a bad joke on creative talent. These self appointed gatekeepers of our culture often miss the next big thing and are rarely looking for a new, different voice despite what they claim, but rather the next celebrity ghostwritten tripe where they can make a quick buck.

I can relate to your fear of rejection...I share it...but I'd encourage you to go for it. Make sure your book is professionally edited and proofread (this is absolutely critical, and far too many self-published authors don't do this). While you're doing that, figure out a promotional strategy. For example, line up bookstores in your area for signings, create a presence on goodreads, participate in book fairs, lit fests, and conventions applicable to your genre, etc.

Don't be too disappointed if you don't sell a ton of copies (it is very hard to get noticed), and don't measure yourself on that...measure yourself on how well people enjoy your work. That is the real metric on how well you write, and how good your work is. My novel Autonomy received all kinds of good reviews (from people I've never met!), but it's still not a "best seller." Just put your edited, polished work out there and if those who read it love it, then you don't "suck at something" you enjoy. Quite the opposite.

I also have the landscape/portrait combination. It would take far more than this to tempt me to switch. My gutter has a slight fold, so my visual perpendiculars are about six inches apart, and I'm not viewing the wings at some weird oblique angle (or buttock balancing, which can only end badly if like many software developers one is treadmilling the 50/50/50, where 50 is the new 40).

My landscape screen hails from the era where 1680x1050 was king, and a godly stout and square king at that. It's not quite wide enough to triple tile, so I had to solve the console problem differently.

I configured Tilda terminal to pop up (always on top) in the bottom 1/3 of the vertical display, where the pixels begin just two inches above the top of my desk. The vertical display always has my primary browser, maximized. When Tilda pops up, I still have as much vertical height for my browser than on the landscape screen, so I just have to scroll the web content to the top portion of the browser window while I'm using the console (like hell I'm going to manually demax my browser window every time I pop up Tilda with my Windows menu key).

The problem that drove me nuts is that the content at the bottom of a web page won't scroll up to the top of the window. FF just doesn't think the user ought to be able to scroll past the point where the bottom pixel of the content is any higher than the bottom pixel of the display window. No empty bottom margin allowed! The right side of your screen can taper into nothingness, but not the bottom. That makes it pretty clear already that there's an industry-wide potato famine for vertical real estate: they didn't even consider that it might be ergonomically more acceptable to scroll the portion of the content you're actually reading up to eye level, because to a first dipshit–designer approximation nearly every screen is a horizontal slit (I chose the ndash rather than a hyphen in that compound modifier, by a nose).

One loses pretty much nothing running a browser in portrait mode if combined with NoSquint. On 80% of web sites (denominated by the sites I willingly chose to visit) I just magnify the fonts until all the loopy cruft blows off the sides of the screen, leaving that portion which I wish to attend gloriously enlarged on my jumbo page. It is certainly true that some sites are coded in relative units where it's impossible to achieve a horizontal enlargement of the main content column by fiddling with NoSquint. For these, there's always Stylish. If even Stylish fails (mainly because the selectors are too cluttered and generic) I either (A) actively seek an alternative resource better behaved, or (B) switch that specific page into Chrome. Yes, I treat the web like a kindergarten full of unruly children (and graphic designers) forever requiring a heavy thumb. It's worth the effort. One font to rule them all!

I've long lived by the adage that for primary reading, fonts should be large enough that the user can lean back and operate the Page Dn key with your big toe. Your own spine will thank you on the home stretch of the 50/50/50.

That mainly leaves the annoying scrolling problem. Fixed with Stylish.

body:after {
content: 'Tail';
color: #505050;
display: block;
text-align: center;
font-size: 1vmax;
padding-bottom: 40vh !important;
}

Yes, this breaks a few web layouts and the word 'Tail' shows up sometimes in the strangest places (this is how I know when it's my own diddle—and which of many—breaking the layout). Easy enough to switch off if the need arises.

The 40vh is empirically just big enough to cause web pages to scroll above the top of my Tilda terminal.

I love this desktop configuration. It rocks. Even my black gutter, slightly crooked like the spine of a book, is more of a feature than a bug.

One sees those big flat screens in a different light after one multiplies by the love-slave vector 50/50/50. The applicable units are hours, weeks, years. Not seconds, minutes, and dazzle.

The entire premise of this post is built on stupidity escalation.

Corporations often pass off short-term financial hardship (mainly of the cash flow variety) as a legitimate reason to prune staff—generally fooling no-one, yet successfully biding time in the PR war saying nothing much at all until some new outrage of the moment shifts the spotlight to a different circus ring. Among the best-paid professionals in our society are the engineers of running issues aground against the acidic shoals of going nowhere fast with the greatest expense (first, we kill the injunctions). Business as usual, on both fronts.

This is irritating, so we pretend to become stupid as bricks in turning the table, as if the converse contains the least shred of cognitive viability: that any company not under present fiscal duress could not possibly benefit under best management from another round of lay-offs.

If anything, the converse is even dumber than the original stonewall, and about 100x more bloody minded. God forbid that by such asinine manoeuvres we return Karl Marx to the rank of essential reading, who at least spat upon the pathos from a viable view of systems.

Ruminant self-castigation concerning my previous post.

Fingers and foghorn were clearly operating at different stages of rubbing the sand out of their eyes. Waking up is hard to do. Harrumph. Nothing burnishes one's wit like mucking up one's determiners twice in two sentences.

I blame it all on eliding the apostrophe from the all-caps. That small joke went against the soul of my being. It was like The Scream welling up inside me.

It just struck me that we should change the name of the apostrophe as used in contractions to "the zipper mark". Do up your zippers boys and girls. First lesson on the first day of middle school every year through grade seven, eight, nine, and ten.

Then this brief public service announcement concludes with the disclaimer that surfaces sometimes deceive: the zipper mark and the dangling participle have nothing in common, but if you'd like a good example of the DP to think about until we get there, consider this:

Flitting gaily from flower to flower, the football player watched the bee.

We shouldn't lose sight of the small victory here. Regardless of how it's handled, it's important that the end user can go on record as having requested more a tiny millibob of actual respect.

We also need a companion flags: YESISETITMYSELF and IFYOUBLOWMEOFFYOUREANASSHOLE.