If the government has lots and lots of power - either through regulation or spending - what happens next? What do you do if you are running a company and you have competition and there is a big, powerful government with guns and stuff just sitting right there? What do the wealthy and powerful do when the government has lots of money and power? Just sit there and take it?
No, they didn't get to be the rich and powerful by being stupid. They proceed to use their wealth and power to bend the government toward doing their work for them. Whether through sweetheart no-bid contracts (e.g. Halliburton) , or arcane tax rules (Insurance Industry), or oddly specific regulations (casket sales, hair braiding, taxi cabs, etc., etc.), they are going to do what they can to get a bigger piece of the pie.
When faced with this, most people clamor for the government to have more power - to clamp down on these abuses by industry. But ask yourself - why are there so many more lobbyists in Washington than there used to be? Government hasn't lost any power. They've grown exponentially. And so have the high-priced lobbyists.
Why? Because that's where the money is. FedX and UPS use government regulators to fight each other because they can. The mortuary industry uses government to prevent competition.
We see this all the time in the tech industry. Ever hear of net neutrality? How many big companies have their lobbyists working overtime on various sides of that argument? How many of them are trying to use government to gain an advantage? How many are trying to stop someone else from using government to put them at a disadvantage?
The more power the government has over an area, the more likely it is to be corrupted - because the incentives are greater.
I don't think anyone fails to recognize the problems with Taxi regulations in places like New York, where a taxi medallion is worth a fortune. The gap in services caused by an artificial monopoly leaves an opening for companies like Uber, Lyft and tons of gypsies cab operators. So is the solution to have more regulations? Or would it be better to have smaller government just set simple rules for operating a livery service and enforce those fairly - other than that, stay out of it. Instead of tightly controlling the number of cabs, let the private sector work that part out.
Smaller government doesn't mean no government. It means smaller. Smaller, less powerful and less money to spend means less attractive to those who would use the power of government for their own plunder.
The FCC was created by the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This law was updated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Signed into law by William J. Clinton.
The commission is designed to have a 3-2 party split - although there have been "independents" from time to time to get around this. For the first 2 decades it was controlled by Democrats. Since then it has switched back and forth, with a roughly even split of control.
There is no shortage of nannies in either party. The last great moral panic about the entertainment industry was spearheaded by Democrat Tipper Gore. Unless you count Thompson's video game thing. I don't know if he had a party affiliation, other than the nutball party.
To truly attain the high ground you have to align with one of the fringe parties. Like the Green Party. They have nice, consistent(ish) ideology-based positions. Or the Libertarians. Whatever. The point being, you get to be holier than thou with everybody.
Hastert got 15 months. For withdrawing less than $10k from his bank account several times. Literally. That is the crime he was convicted of. It is illegal to move less than the reportable amount of money ($10k) in order to avoid having it reported. It is called structuring. Could be the most ridiculous, made-up crime of all time. And for this made-up crime the prosecutor said he should get 0-6 months.
But because he was also a dirty molester and they couldn't convict him on that, they said they should make an example of him to deter other molesters so they would know that they couldn't get away with it. Literally. This is what both the prosecutor and the judge said.
So not that he doesn't deserve worse - but there is something fundamentally wrong with the notion of punishing people for crimes they have not been convicted of or even charged with. "Everybody" knows this cop is a dirty child-porn watching creep. So let him rot in jail. Hastert admitted that he did something wrong with some high school boys, but we can't get him because of the statute of limitations. So find something else and push his punishment beyond the guidelines. (they also tacked on a $250k payment to a victim reimbursement fund and mandatory sex-abuse counseling - things he was not charged with)
In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." Either we are a nation of laws, or we aren't. And letting the gross and creepy edge cases define our law is not the way to be a nation of laws.
There are lots of things covered in the new regs. But the argument is over the "right to be forgotten" and particularly it's application to search engines.
From the EU themselves:
The respective legal grounds of original publishers and search engines are different. The search engine should carry out the assessment of the different elements (public interest, public relevance, nature of the data, actual relevance) on the basis of its own legal ground, which derives from its own economic interest and that of the users to have access to the information via the search engines and using a name as terms of search. Even when (continued) publication by the original publishers is lawful, the universal diffusion and accessibility of that information by a search engine, together with other data related to the same individual, can be unlawful due to the disproportionate impact on privacy.
There's lots of things in the regulations that are not controversial. Others that are controversial, but on matters of policy and contract law. "Right to be forgotten" as described above says that you can write an article about Commander Taco's hot tub, but if he doesn't like folks knowing about it he can prohibit me from pointing folks to that article (should I have a search engine). This bit is a fundamental free speech issue. "No it isn't" isn't an argument. It's simple contradiction.
The very first case brought under "right to be forgotten" was about a forced sale of a house - i.e. a foreclosure auction announcement. Since the guy had never done anything else of note, it was the first thing that popped up on Google. He argued that it was no longer relevant and shouldn't be available on the internet. This is what "right to be forgotten" means.
False accusations fall under the category of libel and are handled completely differently. As far as I know there is no "this ain't true" category for "right to be forgotten" takedown notices. Just relevance and time. Strangely, a false accusation that falls outside of libel might manage to skirt the "forgotten" criteria as well. If, for example, you had been falsely but credibly accused of something and had successfully fought that accusation in court, the results might never become "irrelevant" through the passage of time.
Such is the fate of Mario Costeja González, the guy who filed the first ever lawsuit on the topic. He won the right to be forgotten, but his forced sale will never be forgotten now.
If this was about stuff that ain't true, they'd have a whole different set of criteria and arguments on their hands. Sure, you could have erroneous stuff flushed down the google memory hole as well, but the truth of the information really doesn't figure prominently in the decision tree.
Google doesn't hold your data. Well, they do, but not in a way that is relevant to this topic. They are being told that they cannot return results for "AmiMoJo" about the big lawsuit settlement against British Petroleum if you've applied to have it forgotten, even if the article is still online at the NY Times or the London Times. That just makes no sense to me at all.
There's nothing "private" about public records. Nor is there anything "privacy" related about saying "hey, they published an article about AmiMoJo" in the Times!". These are very public things. And sure, there are thousands of scenarios where it would be desirable to have embarrassing facts hidden. But this law isn't about private facts remaining private. It is about public facts becoming private, but only in a bizarre, half-measure way. It seems to be entirely designed to facilitate lawsuits against big corporations. The Times of London doesn't have to take down their article, but Bing is not allowed to index it for your name. But they are allowed to index it for British Petroleum and lawsuit and Slashdot User. The courts will still have all of the public records about the case, and they'll still be available to anyone. But Yahoo will have to pretend they don't exist. But only for your name. Not for the other relevant parties. Super-bizarre.
And claiming that there is a difference if I tell you that the Times published an article because you asked and I just felt like telling you --- and telling you the same thing because you asked and Whole Foods promised to pay me a dime if I mentioned that they have avocados on sale while I tell you is just..... well, weird. By my way of thinking you either have the right to speak freely or you don't. Prying into the motivations of the speaker before determining his right to speak sounds dangerous. Motivations might be useful for determining trustworthiness, but they really shouldn't have even the slightest impact on your rights.
None of the "Right to be forgotten" movement is about false accusations. It is about true statements that are reported somewhere on the web, and about blocking search engines from being able to report the results.
It is odd that we live in a time where people are perfectly happy to prohibit a private citizen from accurately reporting the location of a news article while simultaneously ratcheting up government lists of shame like sex offender registries and "john lists". It is truly a bizarre juxtaposition to have people simultaneously clamoring for ever more restrictions on "sex offenders" (which includes a lot of things that most folks wouldn't agree are dangerous or sex-offender-ish) and lifetime public registries at the same time that we have governments coming after people for pointing to a newspaper article from 10 years back that talks about some would-be politician's divorce.
The harms that you discuss are much more related to government action than they are to search engine technology. But it is the search engines that must be restricted. Meanwhile, if you happen to live in Miami-Dade county and were caught having sex with your high school girlfriend the government can place you on the offender registry for life and literally force you to live in a tent under an interstate overpass. Even if the young lady is now your wife. (they have rules about how close offenders can live to parks, schools, malls, etc. the only place in the entire county registered offenders can live is under a couple of overpasses. So if you happen to be on probation for your offence and can't leave the county, you have to live the life of a homeless guy.)
So while I agree with your sentiment - both about the falsely accused and the guilty - I'd say the government "scarlet letter" is much more problematic than having some newspaper articles hanging out there. Besides, any prospective employer is going to do a professional background check, rather than just a simple google search. In which case all that old stuff is going to show up anyway.
Which doesn't mean it wouldn't suck times ten to be falsely accused of something, particularly something prurient and involving kids. No amount of "right to forget" is going to remove that stain.
This notion that you have a right to be forgotten is beyond parody. The idea that I have to scrub my notes of all mention of your foibles defies logic. If you were convicted of arson in 2015, what on earth makes anyone think that other people are obligated to hide that fact? And how exactly does the passage of time magically imbue facts with liability? In 2020 it will still be relevant and OK to have in the newspaper, but in 2030 it is magically verboten?
I realize that this is motivated by politicians who don't want accounts of their youthful indiscretions publicly available, but the fact that there seems to be broad support for this law is kinda scary. Freedom of speech is a pretty basic and important right. Any law requiring censorship should be well beyond the boundary of public discourse, let alone actually being implemented as law.
I recognize that Europe has a different history with speech and censorship and citizens rights, but c'mon folks, can't we stand up for the right to speak the truth in public?
Yeah, I did that setting up my first ever hosts security in Linux back in the old slackware days. I was on a remote terminal session and being careful - making one change at a time.
So the first thing I did was put DENY ALL in an empty hosts file. A millisecond before I hit save I had a thought.... ooops. And the walk of shame to the console ensued. Didn't make that mistake again.
Making repeated small deposits under the 10k threshold is called structuring, and is a serious crime in and of itself. You can be convicted of structuring even if there is no underlying crime. People have lost their businesses to asset forfeiture because they made regular deposits under $10k - even though they had fully documented every penny. It seems that earning 7-9k per week is enough to have your business seized. Next time you should be smart and earn more than 10k per week, I guess.
Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert reported an extortion plot against him and is being prosecuted for withdrawing payoffs for the extortionist in sub-$10k increments. (in his case they are likely going after him because the extortion plot involved allegations that he molested teenage boys..... and/or being an icky Republican.)
Not the ones that tried and failed, like the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, or Uzbekistan. Not Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, or Yemen. Not the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc countries like Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany (East), Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia. Not Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Rep. of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, or Slovenia. Not Angola, Benin, Dem Rep. of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, or Mozambique.
Christopher Soghoian said, "FBI Director Comey has created a "warrant-proof webcam" that will thwart lawful surveillance should he ever be investigated.
That is some high-quality satire right there. Too bad it will be lost on pretty much everyone outside our community. It is rare to see something so concise and on-point - thanks for including that quote!
There are no good guys in this story. He's a dick for blocking other people's services. The government are being ridiculous in charging him with felonies and holding hundreds of thousands in fines over his head, and people having loud animated conversations on their cell phones in crowded public spaces are rude.
If he did what he is accused of then he is guilty of disturbing the peace. He should be punished accordingly. He's not guilty of intercepting people's cell calls and recording their conversations with a sting-ray device. He didn't bring down the local power sub-station. He did the equivalent of loudly disrupting a public meeting. Proportionality is an important concept, and we've lost track of it.
AFAICS, most people who think they understand statistics don't. What they understand is how to apply some rote rules to data that all too often shouldn't have those particular rules used on it.
This is undoubtedly true. I can completely get behind the author's notion that more people need to understand statistics. When I was in basic bio-medical research it was appalling how often statistics were not properly applied. Mostly it was "run a student T test and look for P values of.05 or less" with no further analysis. It was not at all uncommon to do a paper at journal club that had serious problems with their data, but had nice looking numbers supporting statistical significance.
I include myself, of course. I had enough statistics to know how to apply the formulas and to spot some basic issues, but until I collaborated with a real PhD statistician I had no idea just how bad it was. She basically showed me that I had no idea what I was doing, even though I was following the industry standard protocols. And she showed me just how awful the statistics were in most of the work I was reading. At least I think she did. I don't know. Most of what she was talking about I had to take on faith..... because, you know.... my knowledge of statistics isn't that advanced.
They also say that they had the "avoid dangerous areas" feature switched off.
The title and lede of the article are in complete conflict with the content of the article. So much so that I'd say that the lede and headline were not from the same author. This event had pretty much nothing whatever to do with Waze.
As others have pointed out, the real take home from the article is that there is a refugee camp in Israel that is so dangerous that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinian Authority patrols there. The mere appearance of two non-combat soldiers in a car is enough to set off a violent attack in this location where shootings are a daily occurrence.
No one should have to live like that. The two governments should get together and remedy the situation - disbanding the camp for starters. But they won't. People suck sometimes.
Nobody believes that Saudi Arabia is selling below cost. They can make money on their oil at 1/4 the current market price. The reason OPEC exists is to control production and increase prices - thereby increasing profits. This is a cartel and would be illegal if these were companies and not nations.
I don't know what you think is "biting us in the ass" - unless you were investing in shale oil in the Dakotas. Lots of people are losing their shirts because they need to make more than $65 per barrel to make back their investment.
Other than the collusion by some of the producing nations, this is how markets work. The price of the commodity got high enough that additional investment was drawn in and new technologies increased the supply. Nothing is being reframed. The Saudis happened to have a huge supply of easily obtained oil that allows them to turn on the spigot at will. At the same time they happened to have political interests in harming Russian producers and driving US Shale Oil production out of business. The long term impact of this new strategy remains to be seen.
While i agree with your point, I really don't think the car analogy is apt this time. The mode of failure for cars not starting is: "something doesn't work, so it won't start." Not so much a safety precaution as a "it don't work" sort of thing. Nobody performs a pre-drive safety check and calls a halt because of a fault in a subsystem. You put the key in and if it starts, you go. You can run the thing without oil and it will complain, but it won't stop you.... until it breaks. The airline analogy is much more applicable because they do face pressure for on-time departures and they do issue holds for safety reasons.
The landing attempt on the barge is also significant because of the GEO transfer profile of this flight. The booster will be going much faster than previous landing attempts, so it is much riskier.
I was impressed with the landing site - the landing is supposed to be about 10 minutes after launch and it takes place 400 miles down range. Wow... rockets are... uh,... really fast.
I've been to the site. Other than the buildings for the astronomy, there is nothing there other than a bunch of large rocks. Truly nothing. There is no cultural heritage. There is no natural values. It is a huge pile of rocks. There is almost no life there.
I did get to see one of the rarest plants in the world in bloom while I was there. The Mauna Kea Silversword was the only plant I saw anywhere above 10k feet on the mountain. And there were only a couple of them in the wild, due not to astronomers but due to sheep farmers.
The entire area of the astronomy complex is tiny. Much, much smaller than a suburban shopping mall. Of all the things to be getting your panties in a twist about on the islands of Hawaii, a few buildings way away from everyone on top of the mountain is at the bottom of the list. In fact, I wouldn't even bring up the big island. It is mostly empty and fairly rural - for a touristy island.
That's kinda myopic, isn't it? Has there ever been a culture or tribe that didn't expand and conquer desirable lands when they were able? Manifest Destiny is just a populist slogan to label the same drive that all cultures exhibit. There's a reason we know who Genghis Khan is, and there's a reason that the english language is a melange of so many different language families - it isn't like all those other cultures just left the British islands to govern themselves over the last couple thousand years.
It isn't like the Polynesian people have never conquered lands held by others. I mean, why do you think they showed up on Hawaii in the first place? It certainly wasn't because a supreme being decreed it so. They were looking for a better place to find their fortune and raise their family.... and they found it in an uninhabited island. But they had no way of knowing what they would find. The Maori don't have a traditional war dance because they want to scare off would-be colonialists from the west.
People are people. For good and for ill. The basic drives are the same.
Don't click on that link. It is the very real embodiment of the Billy Madison quote:
"Mr. Madison, what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Think I am being hyperbolic? OK,
Personally, I am against the construction of telescopes anywhere and I have lots of problems with western science. I am careful to emphasize the adjective “western” in western science because Kanaka Maolis often remind me that they’ve always known many of the things western science claims to have discovered. Remember, as Mauna Kea protector Hualalai Keohula has reminded me, that Kanaka Maoli navigated the world’s largest and greatest ocean in canoes built with wood and stone, aided with nothing more powerful than the naked human eye, centuries before the West realized the world was round. This, it should be said, is the right way, the least destructive way, the non-violent way to practice astronomy.
And honestly, that is where he's at his most cogent. He goes on to argue that science is fundamentally evil because:
The culture we live in is based on domination. How else do we account for the fact that one in five women will be raped in her lifetime? One in four girls and one in six boys sexually abused before they turn 18? How else do we account for the fact that 2.6 people are killed by American police every day?
Why, then, would we expect western science – a product of this culture – to be any different?
The measure of the crime isn't "did he disclose this information". There are legitimate defenses to the charges, including the illegality of the activities he was exposing. There is also the possibility of jury nullification, which is one of the reasons that we have trial by jury in the first place.
Not that it isn't a steep road. He disclosed way more than just the illegal stuff, so he'd have a hard time making that stick as a blanket protection. But there is an argument to be made.
The AG is pretty incoherent here. He's saying that it is illegal gambling, but he's also claiming that it is a problem because the top 1% of players win the lion's share of the money. Well, that'd be the case if there was a great deal of skill involved, rather than relying mostly on luck. Which was the entire point of the "it isn't gambling" position.
Schneiderman probably should have edited his remarks better so he wasn't making the argument for the other side. I suppose prosecutorial immunity extends to mouthing off to the press so he isn't liable for slander and libel.
Probably not the pols.... but probably directly targeting the bureaucracy and all of the NGO's and lobbyists sucking at the government teat in Washington. A little good will might go a long way. And if that good will happens to work at the department of commerce or the state department, well, so much the better.
There's a reason the USA came up with Voice of America after all. And it wasn't to change the hearts and minds of politicians and dictators around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You have it backwards.
If the government has lots and lots of power - either through regulation or spending - what happens next? What do you do if you are running a company and you have competition and there is a big, powerful government with guns and stuff just sitting right there? What do the wealthy and powerful do when the government has lots of money and power? Just sit there and take it?
No, they didn't get to be the rich and powerful by being stupid. They proceed to use their wealth and power to bend the government toward doing their work for them. Whether through sweetheart no-bid contracts (e.g. Halliburton) , or arcane tax rules (Insurance Industry), or oddly specific regulations (casket sales, hair braiding, taxi cabs, etc., etc.), they are going to do what they can to get a bigger piece of the pie.
When faced with this, most people clamor for the government to have more power - to clamp down on these abuses by industry. But ask yourself - why are there so many more lobbyists in Washington than there used to be? Government hasn't lost any power. They've grown exponentially. And so have the high-priced lobbyists.
Why? Because that's where the money is. FedX and UPS use government regulators to fight each other because they can. The mortuary industry uses government to prevent competition.
We see this all the time in the tech industry. Ever hear of net neutrality? How many big companies have their lobbyists working overtime on various sides of that argument? How many of them are trying to use government to gain an advantage? How many are trying to stop someone else from using government to put them at a disadvantage?
The more power the government has over an area, the more likely it is to be corrupted - because the incentives are greater.
I don't think anyone fails to recognize the problems with Taxi regulations in places like New York, where a taxi medallion is worth a fortune. The gap in services caused by an artificial monopoly leaves an opening for companies like Uber, Lyft and tons of gypsies cab operators. So is the solution to have more regulations? Or would it be better to have smaller government just set simple rules for operating a livery service and enforce those fairly - other than that, stay out of it. Instead of tightly controlling the number of cabs, let the private sector work that part out.
Smaller government doesn't mean no government. It means smaller. Smaller, less powerful and less money to spend means less attractive to those who would use the power of government for their own plunder.
outside of the FCC's rules from the 1940's -1960's that were put in place by republicans wanting to save the children from talk about nipples.
Hold up, everybody. Someone is wrong on the internet!
The FCC was created by the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This law was updated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Signed into law by William J. Clinton.
The commission is designed to have a 3-2 party split - although there have been "independents" from time to time to get around this. For the first 2 decades it was controlled by Democrats. Since then it has switched back and forth, with a roughly even split of control.
There is no shortage of nannies in either party. The last great moral panic about the entertainment industry was spearheaded by Democrat Tipper Gore. Unless you count Thompson's video game thing. I don't know if he had a party affiliation, other than the nutball party.
To truly attain the high ground you have to align with one of the fringe parties. Like the Green Party. They have nice, consistent(ish) ideology-based positions. Or the Libertarians. Whatever. The point being, you get to be holier than thou with everybody.
...and yet Hastert only gets 15 months.
This is actually very relevant to this case.
Hastert got 15 months. For withdrawing less than $10k from his bank account several times. Literally. That is the crime he was convicted of. It is illegal to move less than the reportable amount of money ($10k) in order to avoid having it reported. It is called structuring. Could be the most ridiculous, made-up crime of all time. And for this made-up crime the prosecutor said he should get 0-6 months.
But because he was also a dirty molester and they couldn't convict him on that, they said they should make an example of him to deter other molesters so they would know that they couldn't get away with it. Literally. This is what both the prosecutor and the judge said.
So not that he doesn't deserve worse - but there is something fundamentally wrong with the notion of punishing people for crimes they have not been convicted of or even charged with. "Everybody" knows this cop is a dirty child-porn watching creep. So let him rot in jail. Hastert admitted that he did something wrong with some high school boys, but we can't get him because of the statute of limitations. So find something else and push his punishment beyond the guidelines. (they also tacked on a $250k payment to a victim reimbursement fund and mandatory sex-abuse counseling - things he was not charged with)
In the immortal words of Clint Eastwood, "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." Either we are a nation of laws, or we aren't. And letting the gross and creepy edge cases define our law is not the way to be a nation of laws.
Wait, I thought Disney was a hated enemy of the left. I'm confused. Won't someone please tell me what is acceptable and who I should hate?
There are lots of things covered in the new regs. But the argument is over the "right to be forgotten" and particularly it's application to search engines.
From the EU themselves:
There's lots of things in the regulations that are not controversial. Others that are controversial, but on matters of policy and contract law. "Right to be forgotten" as described above says that you can write an article about Commander Taco's hot tub, but if he doesn't like folks knowing about it he can prohibit me from pointing folks to that article (should I have a search engine). This bit is a fundamental free speech issue. "No it isn't" isn't an argument. It's simple contradiction.
The very first case brought under "right to be forgotten" was about a forced sale of a house - i.e. a foreclosure auction announcement. Since the guy had never done anything else of note, it was the first thing that popped up on Google. He argued that it was no longer relevant and shouldn't be available on the internet. This is what "right to be forgotten" means.
False accusations fall under the category of libel and are handled completely differently. As far as I know there is no "this ain't true" category for "right to be forgotten" takedown notices. Just relevance and time. Strangely, a false accusation that falls outside of libel might manage to skirt the "forgotten" criteria as well. If, for example, you had been falsely but credibly accused of something and had successfully fought that accusation in court, the results might never become "irrelevant" through the passage of time.
Such is the fate of Mario Costeja González, the guy who filed the first ever lawsuit on the topic. He won the right to be forgotten, but his forced sale will never be forgotten now.
If this was about stuff that ain't true, they'd have a whole different set of criteria and arguments on their hands. Sure, you could have erroneous stuff flushed down the google memory hole as well, but the truth of the information really doesn't figure prominently in the decision tree.
Google doesn't hold your data. Well, they do, but not in a way that is relevant to this topic. They are being told that they cannot return results for "AmiMoJo" about the big lawsuit settlement against British Petroleum if you've applied to have it forgotten, even if the article is still online at the NY Times or the London Times. That just makes no sense to me at all.
There's nothing "private" about public records. Nor is there anything "privacy" related about saying "hey, they published an article about AmiMoJo" in the Times!". These are very public things. And sure, there are thousands of scenarios where it would be desirable to have embarrassing facts hidden. But this law isn't about private facts remaining private. It is about public facts becoming private, but only in a bizarre, half-measure way. It seems to be entirely designed to facilitate lawsuits against big corporations. The Times of London doesn't have to take down their article, but Bing is not allowed to index it for your name. But they are allowed to index it for British Petroleum and lawsuit and Slashdot User. The courts will still have all of the public records about the case, and they'll still be available to anyone. But Yahoo will have to pretend they don't exist. But only for your name. Not for the other relevant parties. Super-bizarre.
And claiming that there is a difference if I tell you that the Times published an article because you asked and I just felt like telling you --- and telling you the same thing because you asked and Whole Foods promised to pay me a dime if I mentioned that they have avocados on sale while I tell you is just..... well, weird. By my way of thinking you either have the right to speak freely or you don't. Prying into the motivations of the speaker before determining his right to speak sounds dangerous. Motivations might be useful for determining trustworthiness, but they really shouldn't have even the slightest impact on your rights.
None of the "Right to be forgotten" movement is about false accusations. It is about true statements that are reported somewhere on the web, and about blocking search engines from being able to report the results.
It is odd that we live in a time where people are perfectly happy to prohibit a private citizen from accurately reporting the location of a news article while simultaneously ratcheting up government lists of shame like sex offender registries and "john lists". It is truly a bizarre juxtaposition to have people simultaneously clamoring for ever more restrictions on "sex offenders" (which includes a lot of things that most folks wouldn't agree are dangerous or sex-offender-ish) and lifetime public registries at the same time that we have governments coming after people for pointing to a newspaper article from 10 years back that talks about some would-be politician's divorce.
The harms that you discuss are much more related to government action than they are to search engine technology. But it is the search engines that must be restricted. Meanwhile, if you happen to live in Miami-Dade county and were caught having sex with your high school girlfriend the government can place you on the offender registry for life and literally force you to live in a tent under an interstate overpass. Even if the young lady is now your wife. (they have rules about how close offenders can live to parks, schools, malls, etc. the only place in the entire county registered offenders can live is under a couple of overpasses. So if you happen to be on probation for your offence and can't leave the county, you have to live the life of a homeless guy.)
So while I agree with your sentiment - both about the falsely accused and the guilty - I'd say the government "scarlet letter" is much more problematic than having some newspaper articles hanging out there. Besides, any prospective employer is going to do a professional background check, rather than just a simple google search. In which case all that old stuff is going to show up anyway.
Which doesn't mean it wouldn't suck times ten to be falsely accused of something, particularly something prurient and involving kids. No amount of "right to forget" is going to remove that stain.
This notion that you have a right to be forgotten is beyond parody. The idea that I have to scrub my notes of all mention of your foibles defies logic. If you were convicted of arson in 2015, what on earth makes anyone think that other people are obligated to hide that fact? And how exactly does the passage of time magically imbue facts with liability? In 2020 it will still be relevant and OK to have in the newspaper, but in 2030 it is magically verboten?
I realize that this is motivated by politicians who don't want accounts of their youthful indiscretions publicly available, but the fact that there seems to be broad support for this law is kinda scary. Freedom of speech is a pretty basic and important right. Any law requiring censorship should be well beyond the boundary of public discourse, let alone actually being implemented as law.
I recognize that Europe has a different history with speech and censorship and citizens rights, but c'mon folks, can't we stand up for the right to speak the truth in public?
Yeah, I did that setting up my first ever hosts security in Linux back in the old slackware days. I was on a remote terminal session and being careful - making one change at a time.
So the first thing I did was put DENY ALL in an empty hosts file. A millisecond before I hit save I had a thought.... ooops. And the walk of shame to the console ensued. Didn't make that mistake again.
Making repeated small deposits under the 10k threshold is called structuring, and is a serious crime in and of itself. You can be convicted of structuring even if there is no underlying crime. People have lost their businesses to asset forfeiture because they made regular deposits under $10k - even though they had fully documented every penny. It seems that earning 7-9k per week is enough to have your business seized. Next time you should be smart and earn more than 10k per week, I guess.
Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert reported an extortion plot against him and is being prosecuted for withdrawing payoffs for the extortionist in sub-$10k increments. (in his case they are likely going after him because the extortion plot involved allegations that he molested teenage boys..... and/or being an icky Republican.)
You are right! There is No True Scotsman!
Not China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, or Vietnam.
Not the ones that tried and failed, like the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, or Uzbekistan. Not Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, or Yemen.
Not the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc countries like Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany (East), Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia.
Not Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Rep. of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, or Slovenia.
Not Angola, Benin, Dem Rep. of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, or Mozambique.
But other than those....
That is some high-quality satire right there. Too bad it will be lost on pretty much everyone outside our community. It is rare to see something so concise and on-point - thanks for including that quote!
There are no good guys in this story. He's a dick for blocking other people's services. The government are being ridiculous in charging him with felonies and holding hundreds of thousands in fines over his head, and people having loud animated conversations on their cell phones in crowded public spaces are rude.
If he did what he is accused of then he is guilty of disturbing the peace. He should be punished accordingly. He's not guilty of intercepting people's cell calls and recording their conversations with a sting-ray device. He didn't bring down the local power sub-station. He did the equivalent of loudly disrupting a public meeting. Proportionality is an important concept, and we've lost track of it.
AFAICS, most people who think they understand statistics don't. What they understand is how to apply some rote rules to data that all too often shouldn't have those particular rules used on it.
This is undoubtedly true. I can completely get behind the author's notion that more people need to understand statistics. When I was in basic bio-medical research it was appalling how often statistics were not properly applied. Mostly it was "run a student T test and look for P values of .05 or less" with no further analysis. It was not at all uncommon to do a paper at journal club that had serious problems with their data, but had nice looking numbers supporting statistical significance.
I include myself, of course. I had enough statistics to know how to apply the formulas and to spot some basic issues, but until I collaborated with a real PhD statistician I had no idea just how bad it was. She basically showed me that I had no idea what I was doing, even though I was following the industry standard protocols. And she showed me just how awful the statistics were in most of the work I was reading. At least I think she did. I don't know. Most of what she was talking about I had to take on faith..... because, you know.... my knowledge of statistics isn't that advanced.
They also say that they had the "avoid dangerous areas" feature switched off.
The title and lede of the article are in complete conflict with the content of the article. So much so that I'd say that the lede and headline were not from the same author. This event had pretty much nothing whatever to do with Waze.
As others have pointed out, the real take home from the article is that there is a refugee camp in Israel that is so dangerous that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinian Authority patrols there. The mere appearance of two non-combat soldiers in a car is enough to set off a violent attack in this location where shootings are a daily occurrence.
No one should have to live like that. The two governments should get together and remedy the situation - disbanding the camp for starters. But they won't. People suck sometimes.
Nobody believes that Saudi Arabia is selling below cost. They can make money on their oil at 1/4 the current market price. The reason OPEC exists is to control production and increase prices - thereby increasing profits. This is a cartel and would be illegal if these were companies and not nations.
I don't know what you think is "biting us in the ass" - unless you were investing in shale oil in the Dakotas. Lots of people are losing their shirts because they need to make more than $65 per barrel to make back their investment.
Other than the collusion by some of the producing nations, this is how markets work. The price of the commodity got high enough that additional investment was drawn in and new technologies increased the supply. Nothing is being reframed. The Saudis happened to have a huge supply of easily obtained oil that allows them to turn on the spigot at will. At the same time they happened to have political interests in harming Russian producers and driving US Shale Oil production out of business. The long term impact of this new strategy remains to be seen.
While i agree with your point, I really don't think the car analogy is apt this time. The mode of failure for cars not starting is: "something doesn't work, so it won't start." Not so much a safety precaution as a "it don't work" sort of thing. Nobody performs a pre-drive safety check and calls a halt because of a fault in a subsystem. You put the key in and if it starts, you go. You can run the thing without oil and it will complain, but it won't stop you.... until it breaks. The airline analogy is much more applicable because they do face pressure for on-time departures and they do issue holds for safety reasons.
The landing attempt on the barge is also significant because of the GEO transfer profile of this flight. The booster will be going much faster than previous landing attempts, so it is much riskier.
I was impressed with the landing site - the landing is supposed to be about 10 minutes after launch and it takes place 400 miles down range. Wow... rockets are... uh,... really fast.
I've been to the site. Other than the buildings for the astronomy, there is nothing there other than a bunch of large rocks. Truly nothing. There is no cultural heritage. There is no natural values. It is a huge pile of rocks. There is almost no life there.
I did get to see one of the rarest plants in the world in bloom while I was there. The Mauna Kea Silversword was the only plant I saw anywhere above 10k feet on the mountain. And there were only a couple of them in the wild, due not to astronomers but due to sheep farmers.
The entire area of the astronomy complex is tiny. Much, much smaller than a suburban shopping mall. Of all the things to be getting your panties in a twist about on the islands of Hawaii, a few buildings way away from everyone on top of the mountain is at the bottom of the list. In fact, I wouldn't even bring up the big island. It is mostly empty and fairly rural - for a touristy island.
That's kinda myopic, isn't it? Has there ever been a culture or tribe that didn't expand and conquer desirable lands when they were able? Manifest Destiny is just a populist slogan to label the same drive that all cultures exhibit. There's a reason we know who Genghis Khan is, and there's a reason that the english language is a melange of so many different language families - it isn't like all those other cultures just left the British islands to govern themselves over the last couple thousand years.
It isn't like the Polynesian people have never conquered lands held by others. I mean, why do you think they showed up on Hawaii in the first place? It certainly wasn't because a supreme being decreed it so. They were looking for a better place to find their fortune and raise their family.... and they found it in an uninhabited island. But they had no way of knowing what they would find. The Maori don't have a traditional war dance because they want to scare off would-be colonialists from the west.
People are people. For good and for ill. The basic drives are the same.
Don't click on that link. It is the very real embodiment of the Billy Madison quote:
"Mr. Madison, what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Think I am being hyperbolic? OK,
And honestly, that is where he's at his most cogent. He goes on to argue that science is fundamentally evil because:
The measure of the crime isn't "did he disclose this information". There are legitimate defenses to the charges, including the illegality of the activities he was exposing. There is also the possibility of jury nullification, which is one of the reasons that we have trial by jury in the first place.
Not that it isn't a steep road. He disclosed way more than just the illegal stuff, so he'd have a hard time making that stick as a blanket protection. But there is an argument to be made.
The AG is pretty incoherent here. He's saying that it is illegal gambling, but he's also claiming that it is a problem because the top 1% of players win the lion's share of the money. Well, that'd be the case if there was a great deal of skill involved, rather than relying mostly on luck. Which was the entire point of the "it isn't gambling" position.
Schneiderman probably should have edited his remarks better so he wasn't making the argument for the other side. I suppose prosecutorial immunity extends to mouthing off to the press so he isn't liable for slander and libel.
Probably not the pols.... but probably directly targeting the bureaucracy and all of the NGO's and lobbyists sucking at the government teat in Washington. A little good will might go a long way. And if that good will happens to work at the department of commerce or the state department, well, so much the better.
There's a reason the USA came up with Voice of America after all. And it wasn't to change the hearts and minds of politicians and dictators around the world.