Your example is biaised: the media *did*, and still *do*, give Chirac and Sarkozy the same leeway as they gave Mitterrand. Think fictive employments (concerning Chirac) and more than dubious election campaign fundings (Sarkozy), both of which were and are still duly underexposed except in a minority of the press -- and that's only two examples among several.

I've lived in France for fifty year, I /am/ French, and here people 'left of Che Guevarra' are a tiny minority, in the general population as well as among journalists. So either you are mistaken in believing you live in France, or you are deluded about the France you are living in, or you are deliberately misrepresenting the truth to pass your opinion as fact.

Ok, parent comment was quite certainly intended as second degree, possibly bait even. Still, it raises a point.

From anyone else's viewpoint, you are [perceived as] all that you do. People perceive you through your code... and through your attitude about your code... and through your attitude about your attitude... and so on.

But that's how they perceive you, not necessarily how they evaluate you.

Now, it is quite understandable to be affected by others' opinion of your code, there's no question about this: that's your work, and people usually do something with the intent that it be well done, so criticism can of course be resented as it points at a failure, and we are taught that failure is bad (which is a mistaken approach IMO, and possibly the reason why many people mistake their own worth with the immediate, first degree, worth of what they do).

You should make the difference between a criticism of the result of one of your actions and a criticism of your own person (or even a criticism of the way you do things). Heck, if there was no difference, no one on Earth would love, or even like, anyone else, since that would require loving, or at least liking, absolutely everything (s)he does [of course, I am assuming here that most people on Earth actually do like, or even love, someone else; that could be a misperception on my part].

The difference is that you cannot undo an action of yours, but you can change the way you do things, thus affecting your future actions, and even your future reaction to things, including, yes, criticisms. In coderspeak, this could be expressed as "agile development of your own self". :)

Long point short: you are not what you code, you are a coder. Keep this difference in mind.

Well, if you RTFP, Linus is abusing the *compiler*'s behavior. At no point does he abuse the compiler authors.

Er... Indeed. But I don't think anyone here said this right was granted by a government. We do have separation of powers here too. :)

You mean everywhere in the U.S., right? Because otherwise, it would be a case of trying to apply the US law beyond the borders of the US, which, I think, is the exact mirror of a (rightful) criticism in another comment about the EU supposedly trying to reach beyon the EU borders [actually, the question was misunderstood by the commenter, but that's another point].

Or even what these rights are exactly. However, concerning your fear about restricting rights to those expressed: this is pretty much handled in article 4 of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (the highest French law in terms of precedence), which (roughly translated) states that one's rights should only be limited when their exercise deprives someone else from their own rights, and that these limitations should be expressed in the law. IOW, our rights start unlimited, and law only limits them -- what is not prohibited is allowed.

Nor do these arrogants "USA and other countries" (merrily forgetting there is something else in the world than Europe and the USA plus its satellites) who think there is no second chance ever, and no right to ensure one's personal data are correct, and no rigth to privacy either -- to mention only some of the personal-data-related rights that are given to me by my own European country (note that, as some have said, other European countries may have these rights in a less formal way, as a result of case law) and that I can successfully use to deter French spammers while I still have to suffer US ones. :/

(amusingly, if you take one step back on this "those arrogant whatevers" ping-pong game, you'll get a pretty good case of some one (one region of the world)'s freedom (to define the Right Way) stopping where it harms someone else (nother region of the world)'s freedom (to do exactly likewise). Now, let's go read article 4 of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen. See the irony? No? Too bad.)

I think you should read the European Directive. At no point does it ever consider whether service providers should investigate or not; therefore service providers cannot be held "liable", whatever exact meaning you give this, for "not investigating". Besides, being a European Diective, it applies to european service providers only, and to complaints from european persons only -- in TFA, the complaint was by a German entity of Universal and against a German SP.

Because there is a *law* (in the form of a European Directive from 2000, which should have been transposed into state laws across all of Europe now, which says that if a communication service provider receives an infringement claim, they can either make pull the infringing content offline, in which case the 'plaintiff' cannot drag them to court, or they can ignore the complaint and leave the conent online, in which case, the plaintiff can try and drag them to court -- which, BTW, does not mean the plaintiff *will* prevail; that depends on the content of the complaint. There were cases (in France, that's the only country where I'm following law and tech issues) where a service provider was dragged to court but won because the complaint was badly written one way or another; courts are very strict here on how such omplaints must be made).

IIRC, since European Directive 2000/31/CE, more than 13 years ago.

They can, too.

Not sure what point of TFA you're discussing here, but AFAIU, no one said that a registrar *had* to shut down a domain upon complaint; only that *if* a registrar does not shut it down, then it *might* be held responsible.

Was the European Directive 2000/31/CE not transcribed into German Law?

This is not about "enforcing [or not] copyright for slimy, parasitic companies" (a statement which I find quite one-sided), this is about the registrar being notified of a possible copyright violation and having to decide whether i) to just ignore an invalid (or, at least in France but possible in all Europe, non-obvious) complaint, or ii) to consider the complaint valid and well-founded and remove access to avoid any liability, or iii) to consider the complaint valid and well-founded but maintain access and accept potential liability. All three cases have happened (again, in French courts).

... which the Slashdot title does not exactly convey. From TFA, what happened is the domain was registered and used to distribute material without consent of the right owner(s), the infringement was obvious, the registrar was notified, and did not take action beyond passing the notice to the website owner. *This* lack of action is what made them liable; TFA even explicitly states that generally, registrars are not liable if they do act promptly upon serious requests.

"On second thought: you're fired."

Hmm, no, he has every right to access your professional data for sure, but this does not necessarily require him to know your passwords. Back when I was doing IT for a 25-odd people company, I'd briefed people that their password was like their signature: personal, and if some manager asked them their password, they should redirect the manager to me (happened a few times, each time the request was baseless and rejected, and when there was an actual problem, it was solved without anyone having to let anyone else know their password). Heck, I'd briefed everybody never to tell me their password.