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There is a tool at http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg... for estimating the lost efficiency of solar panels due to clouds etc. For Denmark it gives about 27%. From wikipedia efficiency of commercial cells is typically 21.5%, so about 200 W/m^2. So after losses lets say 140 W/m^2 times half the time (the sun is up on average) so 70 W/m^2 average over the year. There are about 7000 hours in the year, so we get about 500 KWh/m^2/yr.

The total energy consumption of Denmark (wikipedia, and probably not including vehicle fuel) is about 200 TWh/yr (and dropping steadily), so that's about 400 million m^2, or a 20 km square.

Now no one is suggesting using purely PV solar for a whole country, but it does suggest that replacing all roofs with solar roofs, or covering a few large redundanct industrial parks would get you quite a lot of the way.

Actually Denmark is open and windy, so wind is a much better call there.

There's a finite list of categories, they are not something you make up on the spot. The search results for "software" (they also offer WIPO and USPTO as sources) leads me to believe that there are only two categories for software, namely 9 and 42. 16 would be manuals for software, 38 something with transmitting software, and 41 is training. I'd also assume that the GNOME Desktop environment fits both 9 and 42.

Under the European Data Protection Directive (EU LAW) personal data is protected from unauthorised disclosure.

"I didn't say that it should. I said that it should have exactly the same restrictions as the source that it's indexing - but not stricter ones. It is just an index to something else; it doesn't make sense to regulate it differently from what it indexes."

I don't buy the argument that it's just an index, it prioritises, it throws in ads, it does malware scans, I think Google's well past the point at which it can be merely called an index.

But regardless of the semantics, I think a more fundamental question is what benefit is there to Google providing this data if it has the means to cut it out? The only people that benefit are Google (increased profits by not having to care) and people using the data illegally. As such I'm really not seeing what the positive benefit of keeping this data there actually is.

"It would seem to me that this particular kind of data would be better off non-indexable in the first place, yes (and perhaps the law should rather require the original publishers to embed some markers indicating that it is not legal to index, and then require search engines to respect those markers; these would then also be useful as a convenient enforced opt-out mechanism for other stuff). And generally speaking, public record systems have their own search capability. So there's no public interest to have Google double that."

I think this is a fair point, though as you say there's a danger you'll get someone creating a crawler to harvest explicitly personal information so it may backfire. Regardless, I tend to think that given that the debate has been had in Europe and that Europe wants strong data protection and europe wants the option of rehabilitation Google's time would be better spent working on exactly this kind or other kinds of solution than setting up rigged panels where it controls the location, the panel, the audience, and the questions - that's the kind of shit that's given Microsoft the worst of it's reputation in the pass, particularly over the whole OpenXML debacle. I think Google is wasting time and money whilst being incredibly evil in trying to swing things against the will of the population and that really has to stop- if it wants to put it's point across fine, but creating rigged panel roadshows and such to try and lobby for changes to the 2012 refresh that go against what people actually want is not acceptable and it needs to stop.

"But originally we were talking about things such as newspaper articles. I just can't imagine a scenario where it would be reasonable to have an article published about something, but not have it indexed by a search engine. Surely if it's deemed in public interest to the extent that justifies making it seen by several hundred thousand random people, it should be available for anyone who cares for a cursory search."

I don't think it is seen by that many people though after a time, when you're talking about a local bankruptcy story from 7 years ago then few people are going to randomly stumble across that on the newspaper's site, you have to pretty much be explicitly looking for it.

So yes, I absolutely agree the status quo is far from technologically (or necessarily legally) perfect, but the 2012 refresh seeks to address that legal aspect, in fact, the summary of the right to be forgotten aspect in the refresh is pretty much spot on, I'm sure most people would agree:

"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

This is why I fi

Of course artificially inflating the costs of energy makes companies and employees more efficient. That is because they have to compete with outside sources who are not burdened with the artificial costs or risk going under.

If everyone in the word was subject to the exact same costs increases, it would only become inflation and the world would move on just the same. Instead when only part of the world has to deal with increased costs, they have options to consider, either becoming more efficient, paying less for labor, materials, or whatever else is a cost, or escaping the costs increases altogether by moving to an area without the increased costs (offshoring). Presumably, the last option is a last resort because leadership of these companies will not want to move.

Is it any wonder that EU countries have more than tripled their imports from China within the last 10 years? In the last 20 years, trade with China and the EU countries went from almost nothing to over 428 billion a year in 2013. Of that 428 billion, only 148 billion is exported from EU countries while 279 billion was imported into them.

But keep on increasing costs, China and India and all the other countries like the concept.

http://trade.ec.europa.eu/docl...

See other posts about links to many groklaw.net posts which are about why they think you are wrong. There are many posts dealing with you... E.g. http://www.groklaw.net/article... [groklaw.net]

While Groklaw mentioned me many times, I'd need to see a list of cases in which Groklaw made a prediction that turned out true and I made one on the same issue that didn't. The one you linked to is from the spring of 2010 and it's about the IBM mainframe antitrust matter. Stuff like that is obviously not decided by an online community (or the open source community). The way to look at complaints about allegedly anticompetitive behavior is not binary. It's a question of whether someone had a reasonable basis for being concerned. In this case, the basis was clearly reasonable given that the European Commission opened formal investigations (a few months later) and IBM ultimately made commitments (the following year).

Also maybe Oracle can win that API copyrightability dispute, but that is because the Judges have no clue (except Alsup) (Cooperations are people and such, yeah right).

Judge Alsup's non-copyrightability ruling was flawed even from a purely technical point of view (for example, the way he conflated the Java language and the APIs). I know that a lot of people here (and on Groklaw, for that matter) liked the outcome (sort of like 'the end justifies the means') but I doubt that they even cared to read the decision from a critical perspective. There was an unjustified apotheosis on the Internet after his decision (an apotheosis that the judge himself presumably didn't even want to happen). Then the Federal Circuit, which enjoys a great reputation around the world for its IP expertise, determined that he had confused even basic principles of copyright law (for example, by importing fair use considerations into the copyrightability analysis). Those who hated that outcome concluded, like the post I just quoted, that the Fed. Cir. must have gotten it all wrong. Again, they substituted their belief as to the proper outcome for an analysis of the actual reasoning. Just like I thing people missed the weak aspects (even in purely technical regards) of Judge Alsup's ruling, the same crowd missed the strong ones of the Fed. Cir. opinion. I recommend to those who disagree with the Fed. Cir. to read the actual opinion, including the footnotes (some of the best stuff is found in them). The Fed. Cir.'s description of the Java language-API relationship makes a whole lot more sense than what the district judge wrote.

That still does not change that you talked about billion dollars, and come on, even if they lose you don't really believe it will be in this order of magnitude finally, are you?

To answer your question (before explaining why the first part is based on a misunderstanding), my refresher Q&A on this case says in its headline that while there was a billion-dollar damages claim, this case is about something more strategic. The commercial value of what's at stake far exceeds a billion dollars, and the key to the kingdom for Oracle is to prevail on the merits and obtain an injunction, not for the sake of harming Android but for the purpose of bringing Android back into the Java fold (as Oracle's lawyers described it in a court filing).

The fact that Oracle brought a billion-dollar damages claim came to light in mid-June 2011. I merelyquoted from a court filing and explained that this was the (financial) risk (of course, as always provided that the plaintiff p

See other posts about links to many groklaw.net posts which are about why they think you are wrong. There are many posts dealing with you... E.g. http://www.groklaw.net/article... [groklaw.net]

While Groklaw mentioned me many times, I'd need to see a list of cases in which Groklaw made a prediction that turned out true and I made one on the same issue that didn't. The one you linked to is from the spring of 2010 and it's about the IBM mainframe antitrust matter. Stuff like that is obviously not decided by an online community (or the open source community). The way to look at complaints about allegedly anticompetitive behavior is not binary. It's a question of whether someone had a reasonable basis for being concerned. In this case, the basis was clearly reasonable given that the European Commission opened formal investigations (a few months later) and IBM ultimately made commitments (the following year).

Also maybe Oracle can win that API copyrightability dispute, but that is because the Judges have no clue (except Alsup) (Cooperations are people and such, yeah right).

Judge Alsup's non-copyrightability ruling was flawed even from a purely technical point of view (for example, the way he conflated the Java language and the APIs). I know that a lot of people here (and on Groklaw, for that matter) liked the outcome (sort of like 'the end justifies the means') but I doubt that they even cared to read the decision from a critical perspective. There was an unjustified apotheosis on the Internet after his decision (an apotheosis that the judge himself presumably didn't even want to happen). Then the Federal Circuit, which enjoys a great reputation around the world for its IP expertise, determined that he had confused even basic principles of copyright law (for example, by importing fair use considerations into the copyrightability analysis). Those who hated that outcome concluded, like the post I just quoted, that the Fed. Cir. must have gotten it all wrong. Again, they substituted their belief as to the proper outcome for an analysis of the actual reasoning. Just like I thing people missed the weak aspects (even in purely technical regards) of Judge Alsup's ruling, the same crowd missed the strong ones of the Fed. Cir. opinion. I recommend to those who disagree with the Fed. Cir. to read the actual opinion, including the footnotes (some of the best stuff is found in them). The Fed. Cir.'s description of the Java language-API relationship makes a whole lot more sense than what the district judge wrote.

That still does not change that you talked about billion dollars, and come on, even if they lose you don't really believe it will be in this order of magnitude finally, are you?

To answer your question (before explaining why the first part is based on a misunderstanding), my refresher Q&A on this case says in its headline that while there was a billion-dollar damages claim, this case is about something more strategic. The commercial value of what's at stake far exceeds a billion dollars, and the key to the kingdom for Oracle is to prevail on the merits and obtain an injunction, not for the sake of harming Android but for the purpose of bringing Android back into the Java fold (as Oracle's lawyers described it in a court filing).

The fact that Oracle brought a billion-dollar damages claim came to light in mid-June 2011. I merelyquoted from a court filing and explained that this was the (financial) risk (of course, as always provided that the plaintiff p

The study was performed by Ecofys, a renewable energy consultancy, and the cover sheet comes with disclaimers about its accuracy.

The actual report is more interesting than the articles that hype its findings. The core results are seen on page 36 (PDF Sheet 53).

You will find that there are a lot of assumptions. In particular, they place a great cost factor on "depletion of energy resources". That single adder more than doubles their cost for nuclear. The explanation is that this is the cost of using up our uranium supplies. This is on top of the cost of uranium, already included elsewhere. If you read enough youll find that they just made a big assumption and don't yet really have a basis for it. Its quite convenient for them to make an assumption that magically brings nuclear up to their derived cost for solar. Of course, even as assumed, that cost could be mostly eliminated by reprocessing. They also place a cost on "heat production".

There are no cost considerations included for reliability, intermittancy and variablility. Nor direct infrastructure costs associated by technology, such as the need to add new transmission lines to accommodate wind. In fact, that is probably the biggest cost factor left out of the wind result. Section 3.4 talks about trasmission infrastructure. I'll paraphrase.. "we ignored it because it was too hard to figure out". Another nice convenience for them.

Taken at face value, if I'm a renewables guy looking at this report, I'd have to question why more money goes in to solar than wind.

The first link in the summary is to a news report with the headline "First online murder to happen by the end of 2014, warns Europol". When you read the story, what it actually claims is

The study, which was published last week, analysed the possible physical dangers linked to cyber criminality and found that a rise in ‘injury and possible deaths’ could be expected as computer hackers launch attacks on critical connected equipment.

The assessment particularly referred to a report by IID, a US security firm, which forecast that the world’s first murder via a ‘hacked internet-connected device’ would happen by the end of 2014.

And the reference that it mentions is right here and says

With more objects being connected to the Internet and the creation of new types of critical infrastructure, we can expect to see (more) targeted attacks on existing and emerging infrastructures, including new forms of blackmailing and extortion schemes (e.g. ransomware for smart cars or smart homes), data theft, physical injury and possible death [188], and new types of botnets.

No mention of 2014. No assertion that it will happen: just that it might.

TL;DR: Europol isn't predicting an online murder in 2014. That's just a subeditor who either didn't understand the plain English of the reporter or who chose to outright lie when writing the headline in order to sensationalise it.

It's worth noting that some if not most people who are infected with a normal flu are asymptomatic. The H1N1 flu apparently had an unusually high rate of asymptomatic infections. For example, this report implies infections were at least a factor of three higher than symptomatic infections due to the increased presence of antibodies.

The narrative may not be "agreed upon", which is understandable considering how many Greens politicians put their careers on the line with implementing the failed policy, but it's factual. German Environmental Agency numbers are simply not up for discussion.

Here is the trend until the implementation of the policy in 2008:
http://www.theglobaleconomy.co...

German Environmental Agency had to obfuscate the follow-up numbers for political reasons, so you'll find that many sources cut off at 2009. However it had to continue reporting, and as a result, the numbers are there, both on its own page and on Eurostat's.

Here for example is the report on EU-wide 2012-2013 comparison which shows very well just how badly Germany's goal was damaged by Energiewende:
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....
Here is the same report for 2011-2012
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....

The narrative may not be "agreed upon", which is understandable considering how many Greens politicians put their careers on the line with implementing the failed policy, but it's factual. German Environmental Agency numbers are simply not up for discussion.

Here is the trend until the implementation of the policy in 2008:
http://www.theglobaleconomy.co...

German Environmental Agency had to obfuscate the follow-up numbers for political reasons, so you'll find that many sources cut off at 2009. However it had to continue reporting, and as a result, the numbers are there, both on its own page and on Eurostat's.

Here for example is the report on EU-wide 2012-2013 comparison which shows very well just how badly Germany's goal was damaged by Energiewende:
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....
Here is the same report for 2011-2012
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa....

The EU has a bunch of sad laws that discriminate against non-EU countries for trade.

Oh really? Care to back that assertion with facts and links?

Oh right, you can't, because the EU is one of the most open market in the world.

This has hurt the UK quite badly when it came to trade with other common wealth countries that weren't part of the EU.

The UK has been nothing but a pain in the arse since day one of its membership. Screw them. Read this if you dare.

The way Australia got screwed was pretty bad and I think people that remember still hold it against the UK to this day.

Oh, you mean Australia? The country that is one of the biggest trade partner of the EU? Gosh darn, those poor Aussies sure got screwed in those deals. Which deals, by the way? Again, lots of innuendo, but not too many facts and figures, if I dare say so myself.

The one who is lying is you.

Germany roughly 7tons per capita, USA roughly 18tons, that is close to a factor of 3, not 2.

Per the European Edgar DB, Figure 2.4, American per capita in 2012, was 16.4. In Germany, it was just under 10. That is a factor of 1.5, and no where NEAR 3x.

Chinas rate is still on the lower edge of European countries like Denmark or Germany.

in 2012, China's per capita was at ~7.2, while Europe's was at ~7.3. That was two years ago.
Since that time, Chinas CO2 emissions have risen more than 20%. China now accounts for more than 1/3 of the global emissions, with less than 1/6 of the world population.
And all of that is based on numbers that Chinese gov. has given up. OCO2 is about to shock the world and liars like yourself.

Secondly, over the last 20 years, Europe's rate has not changed much That is complete nonsense. Europes footprint dropped by 30%.

In POF, america is the only major nation to have made major cuts That is nonsense, too. Since 1997 you dropped perhaps in 5% ... if at all.

And while China continues to grow their emissions by 3-5% a year, and Europe is actually growing as well, only Americas continues to fall. wow three lies in one sentence, you are good at that.

Per edgar, EU27 was at 4.12 in 1992. In 2012, you were at 3.74. That is a 10% drop.
Now, in the same time span, we increased heavily due to W (from 5->5.91), and then due to our cheap nat gas, we dropped BELOW 5, though, edgar shows America at 5.19 in 2012. However, other groups show that 2013 was a major drop for America, pretty much a fixed level for Europe (esp. due to Germany's killing of their nukes and their massive build-out of coal plants), and a REAL MASSIVE increase for China's emissions.

Well since you asked so nicely.

The government of the autonomous region of Valencia (Spain) earlier this month made available the next version of Lliurex, a customisation of the Edubuntu Linux distribution. The distro is used on over 110,000 PCs in schools in the Valencia region, saving some 36 million euro over the past nine years, the government says.

"Under the EU's state aid rules, national authorities cannot take measures allowing certain companies to pay less tax than they should if the tax rules of the Member State were applied in a fair and non-discriminatory way,"

It is not possible to specifically write one company into the law as exempt. Now it has been done by making laws such that they only apply to one company, but these practices are being sued now.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

So no, it is not common place outside the US, and certainly not as easy.

But the voting in the US is dominated by companies anyways, it is a very different climate and understanding of democracy than anywhere else.

Reading lightly the judgement at http://curia.europa.eu/juris/d... - a number of issues are raised.

It is several times noted that it's a 1:1 based on physical books.
One of the most important reasons for digitisation would be to protect physical books from being lost.
Digital books, of course, can be backed up.

The judgement does not quite help with that - if a paper book is disposed of, destroyed, or catches fire - you lose the right to at the least display it - it is not clear to me that you have any right to retain the digital copy.

"use by communication or making available, for the purpose of research or private study, to individual members of the public by dedicated terminals on the premises of establishments referred to in paragraph 2(c) of works and other subject-matter not subject to purchase or licensing terms which are contained in their collections; "

This has some problems.
If you digitise your collection, can you only provide access at the site you digitised it at?
At any building in the same complex?
At any building managed by the same entity as the original digiser?
At any library with inter-library loan arrangements with the first library?

The judgement diddn't address this, they just said the fundamental right existed.

Another major hole in the judgement is 'by communication' - unless this is separately defined - one could imagine it being OK to connect (with DRM) to some dedicated terminal which provided copies of books via your phone or tablet.

The judgement also notes that it's free for national lawmakers to permit libraries to print or give digital copies - if the original publisher is properly compensated - even if the original publisher declines this.
This could vastly free up access to some books where the publisher is unidentifiable.

Define 'in'.

"In" means at an "dedicated electronic reading point" in a publicly accessable library. Not necessarily the library that contains the paper copy. The main restriction is that libraries may not use this to reduce the need to buy multiple copies to satisfy demand.

This is great for scholars who really need to see some obscure published paper from 1982, and are not near a huge academic library. It's great for people who like to read out of print novels. It won't do anything for people who want to read the latest best-seller when all the library copies are checked out.

Yes, yes the EU only picks on large foreign corporations: http://ec.europa.eu/competitio....

Exactly. I know for a fact that this is the case in Europe (if you're interested, it's in the E-Commerce Directive, article 12: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal...). Cases are known in the Netherlands where acting as a moderator on a forum made someone liable for stuff that got posted there, whereas if you don't do anything with the content you're pretty much safe...

http://www.energystar.gov/ia/p... says
"[Assuming efficiency improvements of 16% to 33%...] Estimated per-unit annual savings for residential vacuums are on the order of 10-19 kWh/year... Considering there are approximately 28 million vacuums sold in the U.S. each year, the national energy savings opportunity would be on the order of 67,000-135,000 MWh per year if 25% of products sold were replaced with energy efficient models"

Contrast that the the document linked in TFA:
http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regu... says
"[Vaccuum cleaners sold per year in 2005 and 2020: 54 million and 92 million]... [Energy consumed by vacuum cleaners under business-as-usual by 2020: 29.7 TWH/year]... by 2020, the annual electricity consumption ... of vacuum cleaners will be reduced by 19 TWh"

So, 67 TWh annual savings in US vs. 19 TWh annual savings in EU in spite of twice as many vacuum cleaners sold per year in the EU. Is there just more dirt in the US? Or was the Energy Star scoping report just overoptimistic?

A Google search shows many versions of this news with some actually saying that the decision to switch has already been made. Not so, according to another report at TechRepublic: "Ditching Linux for Windows? The truth isn't that simple, says Munich" http://www.techrepublic.com/ar... What is certain for the moment is that a study will be made internally by the Munich city council, the new mayor and deputy mayor are in favour of Windows (and even MS fans) and reportedly instrumental in bringing the Microsoft German head office to Munich. The final decision will be made by the elected members of the council. From the many comments on this piece of news at different sites, we can gather that Munich likely mishandled the process e.g. Limux (their version) is still at 10.04 which is really old and should have already been upgraded to 12.04 (used, for example, by Google and the French Police). Munich migrated some 14,000 workstations to Linux while in complete contrast the French police have 37,000 workstations running their version called Gendbuntu (Gendarmerie + Ubuntu) and their plans are that by the end of this summer to have it running on 72,000 workstations. http://ostatic.com/blog/french... The French police also claim they have saved 40% on the total cost of operation using Linux. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/co...

When the european commission does a public consultation, it get aound 300 comments (even when the policy could have worldwide implications). Most of them are from companies trying to keep some kinf of status quo, then from NGO saying it doesn't do enough and very few people answer under their own name (eg: DG CLIMA consultations. In this case, 500 comments is a very good return rate...

As an Australian, I am bitterly disappointed in my Government. Whilst the rest of the world is ramping up their climate protection measures

And yet each year we set a new record on total emissions because there's a bigger population who wants a higher standard of living. Looking at Trends in global CO2 emissions 2013 report (pdf) on page 50 you can see that the emissions in industrialized nations are down around 20-25% per capita from 1990-2012 through greener technology but a lot of that is lost in population growth and the low hanging fruit is gone. For developing countries all the arrows point upwards, even if we assume China will level out at EU levels (almost there) and not US levels (about double) there's still India and another few billion people who'll also want the standard of modern living.

Currently the best guess is that world population will peak at a little over 9 billion people (this is mostly a fill-up of elderly, the number of children is not growing anymore) and if we assume the world average CO2 per capita will approach the EU average then we're still looking at a 25% increase from population growth and 50% from higher standard of living for a total of 1.25*1.5-1 = 87.5% above today's level. Unless there's a huge breakthrough in green energy it's almost inevitable that CO2 emissions will continue to increase massively, considering what's politically realistic. I don't suppose saying "stay poor, so you don't pollute like we do" will fly very far and genocide even less so.

Not sure what you're talking about. In Europe it's been possible to do fast, free, cross-border transfers for a while now. Domestic transfers between current ("checking") accounts are already legislated to take no more than 2 hours, but in practice take a few minutes before the amount is visible in the destination account. There is also legislation to prevent most cross-border transactions within the EU from costing more than domestic transactions. Charge-backs not possible.

And if you think Bitcoin transfers are free, you're conveniently ignoring the non-negligible CPU time involved in verification vs simply changing two numbers in a database.

Basically you're complaining about how behind the times US banks are.

A few months ago I was trying to look up the latest figures on the Ebola outbreak. All I could find through most news cites were BS articles that wasted 3/4 of their space on the background of what Ebola is and where Sierra Leone is. In my searching I stumbled across a Daily Map Archive from the EU commission.

Each day they bring a new map with news from around the world. Succinct news, showing where it is geographically, with actual figures and no other bullshit. Granted, it's nearly all bad news...but I've learned so much about events around the world that the major news outlets don't cover (too much time covering important things like Brazil Exploitation Theatre or the latest breaking news out of Hollywood).

Thine linken: http://ercportal.jrc.ec.europa...

Coincidentally, their map today is of that very same Ebola outbreak. Things are not looking good.

The original case was a newspaper notice of a personal bankruptcy of a pretty obscure person, while this is a story about a very public CEO resignation. The decision is a bit of a mess, I agree, but this case pretty clearly falls outside its scope, which explicitly says that stories involving public roles are excluded (which resigning as CEO of Merill Lynch certainly counts as).

From the explanatory summary (pdf) that accompanied the decision, explaining when search-engine operators may turn down removal requests:

The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results.

So, you'd say a businessman who has had a personal bankrupsy should be able to remove any evidence publicly available even though those doing business with him are financially invested in him but a man removing himself from position of CEO should not, even if none of his following positions are as CEO?

"A new law that has a fairly vague scope"? It's a law which dates back to 1995, and its scope is fairly clear. See the ECJ's Factsheet.

The whole idea of treating a news report as "personal data" seems completely flawed to me.

But in any case, there seems to be a "public interest" judgement to be made, with respect to this law. In general I think "public interest" judgements need to be made by judges and other public organisations within an established framework, rather than as ad-hoc judgements by private businesses.

The original case was a newspaper notice of a personal bankruptcy of a pretty obscure person, while this is a story about a very public CEO resignation. The decision is a bit of a mess, I agree, but this case pretty clearly falls outside its scope, which explicitly says that stories involving public roles are excluded (which resigning as CEO of Merill Lynch certainly counts as).

From the explanatory summary (pdf) that accompanied the decision, explaining when search-engine operators may turn down removal requests:

The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results.

I don't believe you understand why google's pissed.

They're a for-profit American corporation. They make money selling information to people. They keep costs low but refusing to use actual humans to do any of the work, when computer algorithm will work fine.

But this ruling specifically assumes they have an actual person sitting around, with nothing to do but read these requests, and then spend an hour trying to figure out if Jose Juerez in this story is a nobody who can use his right to be forgotten, or he's a Jose Juarez who is a figure of public interest. Moreover the guy has to know every EU language, every EU minority language (so Sorbian with an 'o' counts, because German citizen Sorbians are also EU Citizens), prominent local non-EU languages (such as Serbian, with an e), and probably also at least a smattering or major world languages like Russian and Chinese.

Since that person does not actually exist, they either have to hire a staff of several dozen, or they have to hire a couple really good lawyers who know the more prominent EU languages (ie: a Frenchmen, an Englishman, a German, maybe a Scandinavian because most of them can at least BS their way through all four of those languages, etc.), and then pull poor Nicolo Popescu from his team in analytics when a Romanian has a request. Then you have to hope Nicolo (hired for his ability to see patterns in data, not his communications skills), and the EU-fluent-lawyer he's talking to can communicate some very sophisticated legal concepts to each-other.

So even if they only have 50k requests, as the BBC reported, this is not a cheap program for them to administer. They're paying something on the order of $150-400 an hour per person they hire because you need multi-lingual lawyers, they need to bring in the random dude who happens to know Gaelic once a month, they need to do some pretty strong googling of their own to confirm the complaints aren't BS generated by Yahoo bots specifically to fuck over their bottom line, etc. 50,000 complaints times $150 is $7,500,000 so even if each one only takes an hour (and it'll be more like five, especially for EU languages that aren't world languages like Italian or Portuguese), 250k complaints (as in this summary) is nearly $40 million assuming that they only take an hour. It's probably gonna be closer to the $250 million range by the time they actually get done investigating. And that's in seven weeks. Over a full year this is is is almost certainly gonna cost them $1-$2 Billion.

So in other words google has two option. Agree to hire it's own Eurocrats for roughly $1 Billion a year, or make an algorithm that automatically accepts any request. As an American corporation they are loathe to spend that money on regulatory compliance until the actual regulators actually rule they actually have to have staff costing an actual $1 Billion. Note that, in general, each use of 'actual' in that last sentence requires at least one court ruling. American corporations really, really, really hate spending

"A new law that has a fairly vague scope"? It's a law which dates back to 1995, and its scope is fairly clear. See the ECJ's Factsheet.

The original case was a newspaper notice of a personal bankruptcy of a pretty obscure person, while this is a story about a very public CEO resignation. The decision is a bit of a mess, I agree, but this case pretty clearly falls outside its scope, which explicitly says that stories involving public roles are excluded (which resigning as CEO of Merill Lynch certainly counts as).

From the explanatory summary (pdf) that accompanied the decision, explaining when search-engine operators may turn down removal requests:

The request may for example be turned down where the search engine operator concludes that for particular reasons, such as for example the public role played by John Smith, the interest of the general public to have access to the information in question justifies showing the links in Google search results.

As I mentioned, you are entitled to your opinions, but you are NOT entitled to your own facts. Coal usage in the EU is decreasing, renewable use (not fossil fuel generation) is increasing:
http://theenergycollective.com...
http://www.renewableenergyworl...
(older data) http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-...
While the price per kWh in Germany is high, it's not even the highest in the EU and certainly not the highest in the world. That statement is just plain WRONG. The price in Germany is not even that far out of line with the rest of the EU where prices are generally at least double the US rates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

1. For the purposes of this Directive, "original work of art" means works of graphic or plastic art such as pictures, collages, paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, lithographs, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, glassware and photographs, provided they are made by the artist himself or are copies considered to be original works of art.

2. Copies of works of art covered by this Directive, which have been made in limited numbers by the artist himself or under his authority, shall be considered to be original works of art for the purposes of this Directive. Such copies will normally have been numbered, signed or otherwise duly authorised by the artist..

Source: here.

This does not even approach applying to books (or software, movies, music, ... -- essentially anything that is sold in mass-produced reproductions). Unless of course you think the author personally types every copy... :)

Here you go: http://ec.europa.eu/programmes...

. . . the rest is up to your writing capability . . . an excellent submission could also be reused for an Ig Nobel . . .

Thanks for the comments. I hope I can clarify some of the things people said here.

Re popularity of OTA vs. cable: Cable is more popular in the US, but that's just the US. Digital Terrestrial is much more common in other places - for example it's the most popular delivery method in Europe by far (page 39) . In the US immigrants use it a lot more than US-born.

To whomever suggested attacks via the remote control's IR port: that sounds a lot of fun to try, but the IR receiver's much less sensitive than the RF jack, it has a much lower data rate, and it needs line of sight.

About the power calculations: 1 Watt (0 dBm) can cover an area of 1.4 square Kilometers, under reasonable assumptions. The math is in the paper.

One last thing: A big shout-out to Martin Herfurt, whose work on HbbTV security was our starting point.

Exactly. For example, every time Krugman gets involved in a debate about the banking sector, it becomes clear why he got the award. The Honorary Nobel Prize he got was handed to him by the head honchos at the Swedish Central Bank, so it shouldn't come as a surprise when his views are heavily leaned towards a more finance sector friendly Keynesian way of thinking.

So trying to boost his credibility with this "Nobel Prize" will only work on people who don't know what kind of a rigged anti-prize it is.

Absolutely false. The Riksbank gets its authority from the Swedish Parliament.

As you can see in this photo, Krugman is being handed his Nobel by King Carl XVI Gustaf who is a strictly ceremonial head of state. The King may be a customer of the bank, but he isn't a honcho at the bank; Parliament controls it.

However, figurehead Carl XVI Gustaf has no say in who gets the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences; that is decided by this group of professors. Not the Sveriges Riksbank at all. Yeah, I know, you've got a conspiracy theory to explain why all these professors are puppets of a bank. Bullshit.

I just don't get why people post lies on the internet that are so easily checked on the internet. Makes no sense dude; for a ten second chuckle, you've branded yourself a liar in the Slashdot community. Where's the win in that?

Because no member of the EU can punish someone by death.

http://europa.eu/legislation_s...

I can only speak for the UK's Data Protection Act, but I'd assume it's the same elsewhere in Europe. Under the UK's implementation of the European Data Protection Directive dead people aren't covered by the act.

I've posted a few times before but it sounds like you're in a situation where this information is useful to you so I'll repeat this again as you may find it helpful.

The right to be forgotten is not actually law yet, the press has been misreporting the whole situation regarding the Gonzalez case. The Gonzalez case was simply a ruling that Google was in breach of the 1995 European Data Protection directive and has nothing to do with the right to be forgotten. It was a straight up case that companies cannot hold personal data without specific cause or reason. For example, in the UK if you have a county court judgement against you because you defaulted on a debt that becomes public record. Credit reference agencies can take this information and use it when doing credit scoring, so if you apply for a credit card, the bank will request from a CRA your credit data and they'll get this back, but, and here's the thing, they can only return that data for 7 years, after that point whilst it remains in public court records it is deemed to be no longer relevant as it's a past judgement from a long time ago. This is where Google fell foul, they were ignoring the laws on personal data that other companies have to and generally do adhere to, they were simply being held to the same standard as everyone else.

The right to be forgotten is a clause in an update to the European Data Protection Directive first initiated in 2012, still in draft form and not yet law. This helps clarify things a bit more for the internet age. If Google wants a search engine exemption then this is where they should've been paying attention and what they should be lobbying for (and no doubt are now). But I will quote the following from the draft law because I think the confusion over the Gonzalez case and the poor media reporting has muddied what the law actually says, and as a result the internet has gone wild about unfounded conspiracy theories about censorship of the media and rewriting history. The actual law tells a very different tale:

"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate and legally justified interest to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media."

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

Ironically, there was a slightly better link than this that provided details of the reasoning and limitations etc. but it seems to have gone missing from Google when I try and dig it out. Conspiracy theory time I think :)

"No but let us say that said newspaper is electronic in form and those archives are electronically searchable, they're screwed by this made up right."

No they're not. You're making things up:

"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

Stop talking shit and making things up.

It's called eCall. It is mandated from October 2015 for new cars and vans. It can transmit GPS data and acceleration and deceleration and airbag deployment to the emergency services. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/... Everybody knows that there will be mission creep for this system, like a justification for the EU GPS competitor and that shortly afterwards there will be laws to retrofit them to current vehicles.

Why can Google be forced to remove reference to a fact, but not the newspaper.

From the Court Opinion
Why Google:

As the data subject may, in the light of his fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, request that the information in question no longer be made available to the general public on account of its inclusion in such a list of results, those rights override, as a rule, not only the economic interest of the operator of the search engine but also the interest of the general public in having access to that information upon a search relating to the data subjectâ(TM)s name.

Why not the newspaper:

16 By decision of 30 July 2010, the AEPD rejected the complaint in so far as it related to La Vanguardia, taking the view that the publication by it of the information in question was legally justified as it took place upon order of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and was intended to give maximum publicity to the auction in order to secure as many bidders as possible.

The AEPD = Spanish Data Protection Agency
Whether this means that a newspaper can be forced to remove content that is not published "upon order of the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs," ... I don't know.
I can't seem to dig up the Audiencia Nacional (Spain's National High Court) decision/referral.

First, why should search engines not enjoy the same free speech rights as newspapers?

You're asking the wrong question.
If we can agree that internet search engines are not newspapers,
then the burden falls upon search engines to explain why they should receive the special status granted to newspapers.

Second, what defines an Internet service as a "search engine" or a "newspaper"? Suppose I run on online newspaper that has a search function, allowing users to search past articles about any topic? Am I now a search engine?

You are not an internet search engine.
The court distinguishes between (1) a newspaper with a searchable index and (2) a website that indexes other websites on the internet.

Suppose my newspaper becomes so popular it becomes the de facto place where people go to search for news stories? Do different rules apply then?

Still not an internet search engine.

Or does this ruling simply apply to sites that link to content on other sites rather than it's own original content?

The decision is dense, but readable.
If you want the highlights, just skip to the conclusion

TLDR: this ruling simply applies to sites that link to content on other sites rather than it's own original content
Still TLDR: With all kinds of legal parsing to determine who is processing the data and whether they are under European jurisdiction.

Now, do online newspapers lose the ability to link to other source material in their articles?

No, they don't. Because they are not internet search engines.

The line between newspapers and search engines may become fuzzy, if it isn't already. Do you see the problem?

The line is not fuzzy and I do not see "the problem."
The only problem I see is that this is horribly inconvenient for Google and every other search engine.
But, according to the court, the inconvenience to Google's business model does not outweigh citizens rights under the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

As the data subject may, in the light of his fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, request that the information in question no longer be made available to the general public on account of its inclusion in such a list of results, those rights override, as a rule, not only the economic interest of the operator of the search engine but also the interest of the general public in having access to that information upon a search relating to the data subject's name.

However, that would not be the case if it appeared, for particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, that the interference with his fundamental rights is justified by the preponderant interest of the general public in having, on account of its inclusion in the list of results, access to the information in question.

Don't try to make this more complicated than it is.

During the course of a worldwide investigation, creators, sellers and users of BlackShades malware were targeted by judicial and law enforcement authorities in 16 different countries.

http://www.eurojust.europa.eu/...

So they didn't go after people that bought it. They went after the people that wrote it, sold it or used it. If you bought it but didn't use it, they aren't going after you... yet. I suspect that what happened here was the authors put a backdoor into their backdoor software... which the users should have expected... lol. When they got raided, either law enforcement found it or they made a deal with the authors.

Yes, they would've ruled in the same way as the law on which this case was based on is relatively old (directive in 1995, implementations from member nations in about 1997 and onwards) and has been used many times. The difference this time was it was applied to Google on the public internet- normally it involves disputes between individuals and companies in a more private setting, such as a company sending someone junk mail because they've held onto their personal details for far too many years after they've had anything to do with them.

One of the misconceptions of the case is that this has something to do with the right to be forgotten law. The right to be forgotten law isn't yet, it's still a proposal. This ruling was based on existing data protection law that places explicit limits on the duration such data can be "processed".

This law is already used by organisations such as credit rating agencies who can only take public information such as county court judgements in the UK against people who have failed to service their debts and hold it for a maximum of 7 years (again in the UK, may vary slightly elsewhere in Europe).

It's worth reading the actual law in question (which again isn't what this ruling is based upon), a recent update is available direct from the horses mouth here:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

It's quite explicit, such as one provision allowing individuals who were children at the time of posting something embarrassing on the internet to request it be deleted once in adulthood. It's not even finished yet, but it's certainly not the document people here think it is.

"You may have a "right" to be forgotten under certain circumstances, but it shouldn't be up to Google to interpret those circumstances."

The problem arises because the following are true:

1) All companies in Europe are bound by existing data protection law

2) This ruling was based on existing data protection law, NOT the EU's proposed right to be forgotten law

3) The existing data protection law has been around for over a decade, just that until this case no one with an operation as big, complex, and so blatantly public facing as Google has had it applied to them so there's been no fuss made of it

4) The EU's proposed right to be forgotten law is actually a general update to data protection laws intended to clarify things for the mobile/social age. Again, it's a separate thing to that which was applied in this case.

So what we have is everyone getting caught with their pants down, existing law being applied to a major internet player, but just a bit too soon for the provisions of the new law that would be easier on them to be available. The actual directive that contains the right to be forgotten will actually make things better than the existing law because it actually provides clarity and answers to pretty much all of the concerns people have raised here.

It's worth reading the following if you're interested:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...

A choice quote, that will probably shock those who think the EU is out to re-write history because the only information they've had to date is from scaremongering sensationalists:

"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."

Hopefully this clears things up - long story short, the existing law is actually WORSE than the directive containing the right to be forgotten law. The directive also includes explicit provisions to ensure the law does not encroach on freedom of expression and that it's entirely about protecting personal data in the face of fairly legitimate concerns.

It's easy to forget in the face of summaries that cherry pick stuff like paedophiles, and dodgy doctors that this law was as much influenced by the NSA's mass surveillance that we were all upset about what feels like only 5 minutes ago. It's as much to ensure that the US (and UK et. al.) understands that there will be consequences to using corporations to harvest personal data and build a global surveillance network based upon that. It gives companies like Google the ammunition they need to take to the US government and say look, we can't just hand you this data because that then puts us in breach of European data law. It gives them ammunition in their arguments against the US government's excessive over reach and abuse of secret courts and so forth.

Ideally people would read the link above before commenting further, but I wont count on it. Some people are too interested in feigning outrage to give a shit about the facts of the ruling and the law in question.

... So, using your own logic here: why is it that when we see comparisons of "warming" and ice starting from 1937, rather than 1979, we see no warming pattern or ice loss?

The first link I found had observational data from the 1940's.

"To live outside the law you must be honest" The coal industry may not be outside the law, but the same principle applies. You may lie to others about your business, that's business as usual. But when you begin to believe your own lies that's insanity, and leads to bad ends. Even excluding any climate effects, the externalized costs of the coal industry make it more expensive to society than any power source which has NOT been exempted from EPA regs, including all the renewables. These guys who get their income from the coal industry are, pure and simple, on the dole. http://solar.gwu.edu/index_fil... http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/el... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.cleanair.org/Downwi... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com... http://www.aeaweb.org/articles... http://apo.org.au/sites/defaul... http://www.eea.europa.eu/press...

If you're unconvinced perhaps it's because you're the one ignoring the studies. Aspertame has been *extensively* studied after all the hoopla in the '90s.

European Health Commission report as one example:
http://ec.europa.eu/food/fs/sc...

500 studies have been evaluated on aspertame with non showing any clear danger. And you forget that these products have been around for a long while now. So epidemiological studies on the public at large can be done. So far no clear evidence of any increased risk.

Heck - from your own source: "According to the National Cancer Institute, there's no scientific evidence that any of the artificial sweeteners approved for use in the U.S. cause cancer."

But hey, lets just ignore the experts????????????? (is that enough question marks?)

Fear of something is not justification of the fear itself.

To be equivalent we need several additions things. First, an honest admission from you that Exxon might under those circumstances actually be pulling off this fraud not merely an implicit assumption that they can't possibly do so.

Let me be straight - it is impossible for Exxon to be selling water and claiming that it was petrol. When customers attempted to leave the petrol station, their vehicle(s) would not proceed. Nobody could ignore that chain of evidence.

Similarly, it is impossible for Climate Science to be a fraud. The chain of evidence is irrefutable. If CO2 was not a greenhouse gas, then one of the many thousands of times the experiment that demonstrates the radiative properties of CO2 was repeated would have revealed the truth. Unless there is a time travelling zombie Tyndall who, like Santa Claus, appears miraculously to protect the conspiracy, someone, somewhere would have noted that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. Similarly for secondary feedbacks. If the climate record did not indicate the currently calculated levels of secondary feedback then somebody, somewhere would have noted that. The idea that skeptics and climatologists are jointly engaged in a conspiracy that a priori requires a time travelling zombie to pull off is laughable.

Laughable.

Contrast that with climate denial. We KNOW that Anthony Watts receives a salary to post lies on his popular blog wattsupwiththat - a salary provided by the Heritage Foundation. Nobody denies it. We know how much money "Lord" Monkton makes by his travelling circus. We know that Judith Curry was lying when she said she had seen AR5 prior to publication. We know that the claims of these salaried/entrepreneurial PR agents wiht respect to alternative explanations for climate change have been refuted - every single claim.

So who is lying?

My view is that kind of money (such as 34 billion euros per year) buys a lot of climate change research with plenty to spare.

According to the EU Website the 34 billion euros is the entire budget for climate adaptation, technology and mitigation, not the research budget. I guess someone lied to you.

And the EU is dumping 30 billion euros every year through 2020 on explicit climate change related spending. That's a lot of money too.

Nope, sorry:

The EU has agreed that at least 20% of its €960 billion budget for the 2014-2020 period should be spent on climate change-related action. This represents around a threefold increase from the 6-8% share in 2007-2013.

20% of 960GEUR is 192GEUR, not 30GEUR.

But that is spending on "emissions mitigation and climate adaptation actions", not science.

(KeensMustard somewhat overestimates the EU population, it's half a billion, not a billion. Planned spending on climate change relates action is about 384 EUR per capita, ten times his estimate).