I think what is being missed here, is that the block is on the sharing of "news" links. ie, fb is no different to slashdot in being a user-supplied content/links platform. Fb is publishing user-supplied content.

I suppose that means it is OK to share flat earth conspiracies, but not links to the "official news" that may debunk those theories.

Also, it is effectively a tax on a small number of companies, to subsidise of another small set of companies that used to be able to decide who wins the next election.

FB is a user supplied content platform, consisting of user supplied drivel and external links, much as is /.

There is no re-publishing, it is user supplied content or public links that are being shared/blocked. The sites being shared that are complaining are not paupers slaving for the community being abused by big tech.

There is no blocking of "news", everyone can still go direct to whatever "news" source they prefer to consume, it is the sharing of third party content that is currently being prevented in some cases. WTF is the definition of news anyway?

To carry it further, what would be a reasonable line between what FB does vs places like /., ISPs, government media pages, a sole trader website, an email provider etc etc - does this mean anyone who provides a vehicle to share an official news article needs to pay Murdoch et al? What is the difference between "news" and other paid for content?

To limit what people can share due to legislative enforced costs changes things. If I share some loony conspiracy story, no one can share an official news link that may de-bunk that story on FB. Or if there is some agreement made between FB and the "News" consortium, then there is a costing difference between sharing stories from some sources compared to other sources that will also change what content is displayed.

Effectively an indirect tax on some organisations to support other organisations based on some very rubbery concepts, which I imagine will be the source of some messy legal processes for years to come.

Time to open the popcorn..

If you cannot automate tasks as part of your job, someone else who can will be more cost effective, or someone else will fully automate your job. Either way, I imagine being able to script some automation together will be an essential part of being able to gain work in the future, especially as so much of general work consists of repetitive tasks.

Sites like iftt and other introductions to scripting solutions, make this type of automation easy for the general population to get the building blocks of automation without the overheads of making a request to an IT specialist.

How many programmers work on mail merge or the many other office functions that have been solved many times over already? Yes, just as today, there will be some spreadsheets from hell and some vb messes, but the same productivity pressures will retain more of the capable ones than the mess generators.

Middle managers creating their own crap scripts can still have a huge impact on their productivity, and this is an area that some traditional IT departments have not supported very well other than to try to lock it down, albeit with some good reasons.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

(Laws | Contracts) are just a set of rules that may have been codified in a sloppy fashion which allows a number of implicit logic errors to slip through as there is no formal testing.

I have worked in areas related to encoding acts of legislation and regulation into chunks of DSL for processing by a rule engine. It was easier than I expected, but was not without challenges.

When compared to normal business process automation, at least laws have a specific definition(s) for every term already defined as well as specific outcomes; whereas the agony of throwing BAs at interpreting a business function that is poorly defined and without any specific outcomes can be a nightmare.

Imagine the first inroads are as supplementary tools to identify legal loopholes and gaps(the implicit logic errors when the rules are combined).

In terms of writing contracts, this has already been heavily automated; remember EDI, umm, trading systems, electronic purchasing?

Judiciary bodies already use software that highlight variations in sentencing whilst guiding judges and magistrates on a range of factors that determined previous sentence ranges(precedents).

You are being disingenuous, the "merely advise" is in fact a two year time limit for member states to put the change into legislation.

Sounds alot like vinyl to me, and I only just chucked out the old turntables!

But apart from sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health what services have google ever provided?

If I owned a hardware store and advertised hammers by displaying the use of the hammer in breaking into a house/safe whatever, then maybe there would be some not unexpected bad blood from people who experienced some damage from hammer wielding thieves, or were even just worried about the possibility.

Whether the recipient seemed like they deserved such treatment because they did bad things to kittens is moot, being seen to promote illegal activities as a positive use of your product is just a bit silly, even if you vehemently disagree with said law.

Arguing about the pros and cons of banning hammers in a particular store because in some cases the use is wrong but seems justified seems even sillier to me.

Piracy is much better than the alternative, using the alternative happily. Making a feel-good story out of giving to people what they have already taken that they cannot pay for must be such a cool result for a middlemanaging doublespeak specialist!

The B-Ark now has a destination!

Wikileaks have succeeded where all others have failed, simply by burying everyone in 91,000 documents looking for easter eggs!

Really, the amount of time spent trying to get a name out those docs before they died of old age, even with such helpful categorisation would surely be enough to completely disable any real activity.

It seems to be spin however tenuously tied to the truth to destroy the validity of Wikileaks and any info they receive that they then release which is in some way embarrassing.

Queensland is NOT part of Australia, and any sort of intelligence fled during the Joh Bjelke-Petersen years when he kept telling everyone "d d d dont you worry bout that now!" in response to any questions from the media. Intelligent design is just the usual Queensland double speak dialect for being told to do and believe what you are told or face the consequences of just what happens with that there banjo.