Currently the search engines must remove the link to the article, but the article stays. This is bullshit. If the article contains something to be forgotten it should be removed or redacted. This is the only correct way to do it. Also, there should be an open procedure, with appeals, to decide if the article must be redacted / deleted.

One of the problems with this law is that it's badly named, which creates a lot of misunderstanding. For example, I do not believe search engines must remove the link to the article completely, just not return it for specific search queries. So it's not the article itself that is at fault, but the connection created by the search engine between the article and the search subject

Basically, when you search Google (or any other search engine) for the name of a person, you are implicitly (or explicitly) asking "What are the most relevant things about this person?" If the answers to this query chosen by the search engine are out of date or irrelevant, then the search engine itself is at fault, as it is the one doing the judgment of "most relevant". When these inaccurate results/connections cause damage to a person, and the search engine won't change its practices, then it is only right that the court stepped in.

Would there be as much of a backlash if this law was called "Requirement for search engines to stop returning inaccurate and harmful results about people?" Maybe not, there might still be people saying "But, the article is correct". But this misses the point that the inaccuracy is in the search-engine-generated and ranked connections between articles and people - not in the article itself.

M.

I'm also a linux user that's ended up on OSX due to management.

Totalfinder is less essential than it used to be, but it's still damn useful for fixing most of the flaws in finder, not least because it adds a shortcut to toggle hidden files/folders, shift-cmd-.

Like you, I've got an acceleration fix to make it work linearly - just what I'm used to, and I use windows + linux at home, so it makes more sense to change OSX.

I've found having a magic trackpad pretty handy for the gesture support. It works fine as your sole pointer, but I find it a bit wearing on my fingertip, so still use a real mouse for that (I hate the apple mice). But the trackpad is next to my other hand, and the gestures for swiping sideways between fullscreen apps (including parallels), swipe up for mission control (all windows and Spaces) and swipe down (current app windows) are quite useful, and I don't have to take my hand off my mouse to do them.

While there are alternative shortcuts for end/start line, I just remap home and end to work that way, using Karabiner (free).
The case insensitive thing you just have to live with. It is possible to format and reinstall OSX on case-sensitive HFS+, but it will break some stuff in subtle ways.

App wise, apart from total finder, you definitely want iterm2, and sublime text. Best terminal and text editor, respectively - and sublime text works on linux and windows too, which is awesome.

I have got used to running OSX most of the time at the office. I haven't had to make that many changes, and it does make a really nice coding setup - much nicer than windows for managing/coding linux hosted webapps etc. Lets not kid ourselves, we always make tweaks and changes to any OS to get it the way we like - I know I don't leave kubuntu in stock settings for long, or windows! Would I pay the price premium for a mac at home? Hell no, I much prefer being able to rebuild my own hardware. But when someone else is paying the bill? I can live with them.

The first time you get a name collision and the spy gets his/her real name assigned randomly, expect sparks to fly

I'm going to try using "007" or, in case they insist on words, "Bond, James Bond" next time I'm in that silly place :p

I should say .. that's not a bad thing to me. I'll be trying it out for sure.

>it's not supposed to be a Minecraft clone

Having just looked at the site I can't really believe this. It has the same visual appearance (like Minecraft to Infiniminer but more so), the same tools in one screenshot, the same placement of the tools. From descriptions it appears to have the same general game mechanics. It doesn't have to be an exact replica to be a "clone" in game terms IMO.

Well FWIW you do in part pay for the BBC - they receive a sizeable stipend from general taxation in addition to the monies raised through the license fee.

It's not the core instruction set that's the problem with booting alternate OSes .. as long as you stick to the base archtecture you'll be fine. It's the lack of standardization when it comes to boot firmware and device configuration that's the problem. The server ARM initiative at least is standardizing on UEFI and ACPI .. hate them or love them, making ARM hardware more similar to Intel Architecture hardware will likely make it easier to support both.

Under Amazon's retail agreement, the publisher's set the book price that amazon paid. Amazon then set the price for customers - amazon had various prices for books, rather than a flat rate. Some were loss leaders - a common enough tactic in the retail world, big book chains do it all the time - but amazon's ebook division was profitable on its own merits - something a DOJ investigation confirmed. That's not dumping, and there were other competitors in the ebook space that were also profitable. If the publishers weren't happy with their margins - which were comparable to other retail models - they were fully entitled to go to amazon and negotiate new retail rates individually, just like they do with other book retailers.

Apple looked at that model, saw they weren't going to make their usual profit margin, and went to the big publishers. Apple said 'we'll let you set the final customer price, we'll take 30%, and an agreement that you won't let any other seller undercut us'. The publishers saw this is as a chance to raise prices and make more profit, and stitch up amazon at the same time. The publishers went to amazon all around the same time, and said, 'these are the new terms. Agree to them, or no more ebooks'. Given Amazon then was facing a choice between no ebooks at all, and the new terms, they rolled over.

Collusion to raise prices is illegal, for very good reason - it defeats the purpose of free markets, that of delivering the best product for the lowest price. And that was what they did. Higher prices across the board, more profit for apple and the big publishers, with no improvement to the product, through collusion. If the publishers wanted higher prices, they could have charged them to amazon individually; or set up their own book store with higher prices. And that would have been competition. But they chose not to compete in the marketplace, but arrange a back-room stitchup deal to raise prices for customers. And all the publishers have now settled with the DoJ for doing so.

Apple could have competed with Amazon; there was nothing stopping them setting their own prices, and making it so easy to use that people would use them instead even if they were more expensive for some books. Or offer other value-added services. Or shock, actually compete on price, it's not like apple was some startup tight on cash! They chose not to do any of that. And now they have to pay for the harm they did - which was artificially higher prices for books. They didn't increase competition; they made a deal with the publishers to lock in a higher profit margin for themselves and nobble their competitors at the same time. That's the exact opposite of competition.

The reality is probably somewhere in between, so if this is indeed the work of government-sponsored hackers, expect an improved Chinese clone the same way the J-31 looks to be a better performing clone of the F-35.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

"all links are backlinks" is what drove me off WordPress. Too many spam links to prune.

Only an injust system would charge a successful defendant costs rather than make an award of [reasonable] costs against the plaintiff. Ridiculous.

Climate change study?