Those "stupid journalists" appear to be in good company, starting with official press releases from both the European Commission and indeed the European Court of Justice itself about the 2010 Spanish newspaper case.

I would be the first to agree that moves towards a more powerful right to be forgotten such as you describe would be a good idea, but as of today, these are mostly just proposals. For example, while there is already a right under some limited circumstances to request deletion of personal data, the UK's data protection regulator has written guidance for data controllers that makes clear that the right is quite tightly constrained for the time being.

In this case, "filter" means select only those items that match the criteria, i.e., where the given predicate is true.

This usage is about as consistent as anything you'll find in the programming world: languages using it this way include Python, PHP, JavaScript, Java, D, and many well-known functional programming languages including Haskell, several of the ML family, Erlang, Scala and Clojure. Some other well-known languages have related algorithms under other name, but I know of no counter-examples that use "filter" in the opposite sense.

I can't have a serious discussion with you if you believe racist things. No one intellectually honest and capable can have a serious discussion with a racist, because it is only possible to believe in racist things if you are of low intellect. Objectively true. To correlate skin color and intellect is gross prejudice composed of logical fallacies. It is ironic too (you need to be low iq to commit to the fallacies and believe this arbitrary link between skin color and intellect).

I can't have a serious discussion with a creationist or an antivaxxer or a ufo cultist either. Because to firmly believe these things is only possible if you are a person with a serious defect in intellect. I'm being 100% serious and sincere. You are a stupid person. Objectively true based on you having a racist belief. You are not worth the time of anyone serious, and you will never find the "fair" airing of your thoughts that you seek because everyone intelligent has discarded your entire domain. No one intellectually honest is interested in indulging and entertaining an idiot's idea. And that is exactly what racism is: the "thoughts" of the dumb people.

And if you want to improve the gene pool: don't have children. Again, I am completely sincere. You are a dumb person. To have a racist belief is only possible if you are.

You disrespect people based on the color of their skin. Therefore you deserve no respect. You withhold respect for ignorant reasons. You see a skin color, and make a baseless judgment on intellect and character from that. Which, ironically, is proof you are unintelligent and of low character. Because to believe racist thoughts is only possible if you lack cognitive capacity in certain areas of reasoning and social intelligence, and if you have bad intent on society and individuals in general.

You're a disrespectful asshole, so you get nothing but insults and disrespect in return. You get what you give you ignorant douchebag.

Want to improve the gene pool? Don't have children. I mean that sincerely. The quality of your words here belies low intellect and low character on your part, objectively speaking.

The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:

That means there will be no asteroids left in the Solar System, because they all will have struck Earth, in another few hundred million years. Think someone’s overestimated something there? Yeah, me too. Let’s take a look with the flaws in our fear-based reasoning.

Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.

A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.

And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.

And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.

Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?

Just a lot of really bad arguments.

I think you're confusing two different things here. The "right to be forgotten", as much discussed recently with regard to Google and the like, is primarily about search engines digging up old information that would otherwise naturally fade into obscurity, and in particular the danger of finding old information that looks plausible but may in fact be misleading without context or now incorrect/outdated.

Sadly, most of us even in Europe still have rather limited rights to compel businesses not to store personal data about us or to delete that data on demand, if the data is correct, they register the fact that they are doing it with the appropriate national privacy regulator, and they can come up with some vaguely plausible argument for why they want to have the data.

I guess a few million people are about to find out the hard way why some of us have been arguing for a long time that we should have stronger privacy safeguards in the Internet/big data/data mining age. I wish they didn't have to find out this way, though.

let us say, just for the sake of argument (i don't really believe your ignorance), that skin color and race are correlated somehow

it's a bell curve. you understand that, right?

so, for example, we have on one end one of the most cerebral presidents we've maybe ever had, at least since wilson: barack obama. obviously more intelligent than the vast majority of white people, as well as black people. more intelligent than people of all races, period

what is the value, exactly, of saying that because his skin is brown, that we have to ascribe some sort of negative modifier on how we perceive his intelligence, just because a bunch of other people who are brown are supposedly less intelligent on average?

intelligence is an INDIVIDUAL value. it does no good to class all people according to an arbitrary signifier. if you were interviewing a bunch of people for computer programmer, and disregarded the ones with brown skin because they were "less intelligent," you might have hired a dumb white person and disregarded the black genius. it does no good to you, nevermind black people, to use this shallow useless prejudice, because it doesn't actually help you. an INDIVIDUAL assessment is what matters

for example: most african americans have scottish, irish, english, etc. blood in them, because a lot of their forebearers were raped. therefore, a lot of white people were doing a lot of raping. therefore, according to racist "thinking," we should assume all white people are rapists, because we can prove they rape a lot ( i don't believe this, i'm just demonstrating your ignorance to you)

i'm not really sure this argument is worth having with you though, because i doubt you have enough intellectual capacity to appreciate the argument, since it requires a low iq to believe in racism. by believing in racism, and all of the logical fallacies that come with it, you have objectively proven to me that you are a stupid person. i don't respect you

what i find interesting is that people who ascribe moronic connections: skin color and intelligence, for example, are, by definition of making that ignorant connection and taking it seriously, stupid people. you have to be low iq to be racist. so when they prescribe exclusionary social engineering to "fix" society of the problem of undesireables, they should take their own medicine and not breed, thereby vastly increasing the iq of the population. that's some good eugenics to improvie the "race"

besides, most african americans aren't really african: too many of them were raped. analyze any of their genetics and chances are you find german, irish, english, etc heritage

so, by the "logic" of how racists think, the real race problem is that all europeans are rapists. i don't believe that. i'm just demonstrating how fucking ignorant and low iq racist "thinking" is

Sure there are. The trouble is, every single one you listed has serious drawbacks compared to the current model.

Yes, they did. Plenty still do, though for most of them it's beer money rather than a career.

But before recordings you didn't need a sound engineer in a studio with a mixing desk and a lot of expensive equipment. Who pays the sound engineer in your world? Or the composer of the symphony? Or all those people whose names come after the actors when the film credits roll? Your model might work for the latest production of Hamlet. It isn't going to produce Fast and Furious 8.

That damages the experience for the majority of viewers, who no longer have the option to enjoy the movie in the comfort of their own home.

Because an ad-funded internet is so good that people invented ad-blockers, and blatant product placement doesn't in any way reduce the enjoyment of TV shows.

This is one of the more promising ideas on your list. However, right now, even the most successful projects on Kickstarter and the like are still coming in with an order of magnitude or two less funding than comparable projects generate through a copyright-based system. When GTA VI comes along, do you think it's going to be supported by a successful crowdfunding campaign?

People like stuff for free. I'd agree that some people rip content illegally just because of the convenience factor -- films out in theatres before you can buy physical media or stream a legal download, DRM, and so on. But the idea that the only reason people don't pay for stuff they can download illegally for free is because it's inconvenient is implausible.

Do you know what does work, very reliably, by your arguments about violating property rights? Locking down the Internet and limiting devices you can legally buy/sell/own in the first place to those that play nicely with your closed ecosystem.

The trouble is, the "information wants to be free" crowd think this is a joke and can never happen, and that cute sound-bites like "censorship is damage and the Internet routes around it" will overcome the will of the billion-dollar infrastructure companies that actually produce a lot of popular content and the governments with laws and police and jails. They will not, and all you're doing is pushing those powerful organisations towards systems where -- as, ironically, you suggested -- content providers will keep everything under their control. The only way to enjoy any content will be to rent it and access it via limited mechanisms.

what's crazier than lame algorithms is trolls and racists having so much time and energy to devote to mental vomit generation

when attempting to understand something pathetic and useless, do not think "it has to be a machine," you give humanity too much credit. never underestimate how much of a depraved loser someone can become

Really? What are they, then?

Of course there is, but at no point have I (or anyone else I've seen in this discussion) suggested doing the latter just to make the code shorter. The point is that there are plenty of languages that can say in one clean, readable line of code what takes half an editor window in Java. I gave some typical examples in my reply to another post.

Right. The marginal cost of extra copies of information is very low. Unfortunately the initial cost of putting that information together may be extremely high, and if the information is never collected it won't be distributed either.

So we create an economic incentive to encourage that creation and distribution, effectively amortizing the initial development cost over all those who ultimately obtain a copy. This might not be the perfect economic model, but I'm still waiting for anyone to offer a plausible better alternative.

You can repeat these arguments as often as you like, but the not-a-lost-sale argument still contradicts basic economics, and the just-trying-it-out argument still contradicts overwhelming empirical data the industry has been collecting for years.

No, but I'm saying it appears to have relatively little impact on the bottom line of copyright holders. More importantly, so does vast amounts of empirical data.