It makes the point that some cars are safer at 120MPH+ than others are at 50.
Completely true. I sold my own car 15 years ago and have been driving rental cars whenever I really need on (living in the center of the city, it's not that often), I've droven a lot of different cars in my life. Some of them I wouldn't want to drive far about 100 km/h no matter what their theoretical max speed is, while in some 150 km/h feels like calmly coasting about. The car makes all the difference when driving at speed.
You seem bothered by the technical incompetence without being bother by the lying about who the enemy is, even creating a fake enemy that in reality is a friend (USA), in order to hide what they themselves were doing.
The fact that I didn't write about something shouldn't lead you to conclusions about my opinion on the matter.
But frankly speaking, I'd rather have competent liars than incompetent idiots in charge of my country. For the former, you only need to be sure their interests align sufficiently with yours. For the later, you can never feel safe.
Unfortunately, our government (I'm german) is full of irresponsible, power-greedy fools. Local television has highlighted some of these problems repeatedly (like ministers who, not in 1970 but in the 200s need to decide about Internet regulations but don't even know what a browser is). Unfortunately, one of the things that changed compared to, say, 30-40 years ago is that they've replaced the state-paid experts in the ministries with lobbyists ^H^H^H "external advisors", who are not only experts in their fields (good), but also paid for by private corporations. That's right, the people advising our government get their salary not from the government, but from corporations.
I don't know if stupidity is a sufficient explanation, but our ministers including Merkel actually had encrypted mobiled phones offered to them by a special branch of the government responsible for securing the state IT infrastructure. They turned them down because it was more convenient to use market smartphones.
Personally, I think that act alone should be suffient to bring them all up for trial on aiding and abetting treason.
I say that as someone who's running two games somewhat similar to the one advertised in your.sig and having similar rules in place, but also as someone having real-life experience with the law.
In a game, the environment is very different. Everyone has at least one shared goal (playing the game), and a benevolent dictator has the meta-goal of keeping the game running for everyone. These assumptions are not valid in real life. A catch-all law would be exploitable and lead to tyranny.
I'm a German living in Germany, so let me add a few things about the Autobahn that law makers seem to ignore. They think changing the law is all there is to it. But they forget that the reason the Autobahn works is that it is designed and built for this exact purpose.
The german Autobahn is like the US highways in LA or other big cities, but it is like this everywhere, even in the slowest, darkest corner of the most remote countryside. The Autobahn has mid dividers everywhere, at least 2 lanes everywhere, never, ever any traffic lights or crossings, all the roads are kept in good condition permanently and all curves are smooth and wide enough to be used at high speed. These and other details create an environment where you can simply assume a larger number of things. I've driven 290 km/h (180 mph) on the Autobahn and felt perfectly safe. I would never, ever, ever drive that speed on any of the US highways I've seen.
It's not so difficult to understand that both of the players in this game are fuckers. You don't need to pick one or the other. "much bigger deal" doesn't make much sense unless you are distributing limited resources. When you're the police dispatcher and you have exactly one car available and one person phones in a murder and the other his neighbours being loud, the question makes sense to decide where to send it (first). But "not being ok with something" is not a limited resource. You don't have to focus on the legal system issues and drop the Kim is a fucker part.
yet those who brought the world to its knees got billions and never even saw the insde of a court room much less a jail.
True, but one wrong doesn't make another one right. And I personally wouldn't want to live in a world with a "we don't prosecute robbery as long as there are murders" policy.
[...] over a German living in New Zealand whose company was registered in Hong Kong?
Who is not living in both Germany and Hong Kong anymore because of previous conflicts with the law, including being convicted of crimes?
Why is it so difficult for most/. readers to understand that there can be two assholes in a fight, and rooting for one of them just because you personally dislike the other isn't the answer?
It sucks, but certifications are a way of demonstrating that you have enough commitment to the field to get them.
It's really sad, but it's true.
I exited a large multinational corporation with a senior title, but no certifications simply because in my career path they were never needed (I moved up inside the company, with people knowing who I am and what I can do). Now it bites me. Especially because most of them are basically scams: They're crazy expensive, but they don't test any actual expertise, just your ability to memorize the correct answers from the study documents, and convince your boss to put his signature under the "yes, he's doing this thing for the past X years" paper.
But sadly, while they don't open any doors to places you want to work in, their absence can close doors that you want to stay open.
I'm beginning to think the "eventualy move into management" when you get to your mid to late 30's is just the normal development path in IT.
Not just IT. But its based on business in general being completely braindead. In this particular case, the vast majority of companies simply don't have interesting non-management career paths. If you want to earn more, get more responsibility, rise in the hierarchy, you've gotta go into management, because the clueless morons who design the company career pyramid are all managers themselves and can't grasp the concept of valuable people who are not managers.
My suggestion would be to look for a company that is more in touch with the real world, but sadly they're rather rare. If you're lucky enough to get into one, my congratulations.
This, 100%. I've seen a lot of brilliant, experienced mature IT people. I've seen a few stupid, boneheaded mature IT people. For young people, the ratio is reversed.
Of course, I say that now that I'm in that 2nd category myself. When I was much younger, of course I thought I had the answer to everything and the people writing boring standards were boring and old, and my brilliant reinvention is so much better. Fortunately, my field was always security and cryptography and there you learn very fast and very painful how stupid reinventing the wheel is, especially if you insist that triangles are the new circles.
I am willing to accept being the victim of such a bad luck thing
I don't wish you to ever be. It's easy to say it on on online forum. It's much more difficult to live it. There are plenty of articles out there about people who either wrongly or for totally ridiculous reasons (exchanging nude pictures with their girlfriend while three weeks under the legal age) ended up on the witchcraft ^H^H^H^H sex offenders list and who can't get a job, can't live in lots of places because of proximity to schools or whatever other bullshit restrictions there are. It doesn't sound like its "bad luck". It's more like "you're totally fucked".
Honestly, I think it says a lot about people if they are willing to ruin someone's life as easily as performing a Google search and judging without even reading any of the articles and trying to understand what they are seeing.
True, it does. However, from the perspective of someone who has done hiring, I can also tell you that at least on the first round you simply don't have the time to check anyone in depth. I've once had more than 200 applications for one position to fill. Make a guess how much time each of them got before I put it on either the "look more closely" or the "reject" pile. Yeah, it's not fair, but unless I wanted to do nothing else but checking these applications for three weeks, what to do?
In the ideal world, we would always get the full picture and make an informed decision. In the real world, we make snap judgements based on partial information.
Tainted search results are tainted search results. I do not want them.
You really think your current search results are "untainted"? You think Google or Bink or Yahoo or whoever do not massage them a little based on their own judgements? Just because their manipulations are part of the algorithm doesn't mean they're not manipulations.
The simplest ones are most often the correct ones.
I can't remember who said it, but it's so very true: "To every difficult, complex problem, there is always a solution that is simple, straightforward, easy to understand, and wrong."
Anyway, are you advocating the death penalty there?
Maybe before you discuss things you should get at least a basic overview of what you're talking about? The Tyrannicide question has nothing to do with the death penalty aside from the fact that maybe someone ends up dead. But the legal, ethical and philosophical implications are very different.
Well I don't know about him, but I can finish my 'philosophizing' in less than 30 seconds. In other words (snicker) he's full of shit.
Silly to admit to not know one of the most famous current experts in a field when you're trying to score points in it, really. I'm sorry, but you're just one of those braindead people who think that nobody else in the world ever had a thought worth contemplating and that their own opinions are the pinnacle of every discipline. People like you are a detriment to the whole human race, whose primary feature over animals is our ability to time-shift, as Korzybski (another think you probably don't know) names it - to expand upon the knowledge of others instead of re-inventing the wheel all the time.
I'm wasting my time here. You're throwing up pseudo-dilemmas that have been solved a thousand times already, you're just ignorant of the answers.
I disagree, the page rank algorithm is content-agnostic.
It doesn't even matter how it works. I don't understand what's so difficult about this. If you write an algorithm to do something, you are indirectly responsible for its results. You can't claim it was force majeure or gods will or something.
The difference between me telling you X and me writing an program that tells you X is the difference between me killing you with bare hands or shooting you with a gun - the results, and my responsibility for it, are the same.
And here it is, the simple answer to a 2500 year old philosophical debate, in a/. posting...
Words are completely, utterly inert, more inert than helium.
Dennett (an actual philosopher) calls this kind of statement a "Deepity". A hollow phrase sounding profound, but it's actually either false or trivial, depending on how you read it.
Words are the primary tool of people in power, and have been for 10,000 years. Only those who neither understand nor wield power disregard them.
and had an additional team of employees to deal with copyright complaints.
By encouraging it and actively looking to get high-profile illegal content uploaded, yes. Did you miss all the news about what the prosecution discovered in their internal e-mails and stuff?
I find it very unlikely that he's actually guilty of criminal copyright infringement.
Given his history, even without knowing anything about this case at all, my bet would've been on his guilt. He's a career criminal, he's been convicted before, changed countries at least twice to avoid the legal consequences of his actions - yeah, I would be more surprised if he were innocent.
Sure, there were blunders and probably a few laws were broken during his prosecution, but to all the fools rooting for Kimble here I say: About time justice finally caught up with this guy who's been a career criminal for most of his life, sold out his friends to the law before to get a better deal for himself, and has dodged prison by changing country too often already.
I hope they put him away for good.
And I hope his fanclub here will learn the difference between downloading movies for free and rooting for freedom. It really is such a shit that "free" in english means two completely different things.
No, no they couldn't, because you'd click on the links and you'd see the actual result. Search engines can only report what is there; they might report on it incorrectly, but you can always check up on them.
Google once posted statistics about how many people go to even just the 2nd page of search results. I'm too lazy to search for the exact number, but it was quite low.
For all practical purposes, something that's not on the first few pages of search results on Google doesn't exist. Some unusually dedicated or technical persons with refined search terms might find it, but for the vast majority of the Internet, the difference between "on page 43 of Google search" and "deleted" is purely academic.
I'm always hoping we can achieve P2P internet that will be impossible to censor. Something to make the authorities squirm.
I hope we will have that for one year. I'm confident the vast majority of "free information" extremists will finally understand that every extreme position is dangerous bullshit.
Censorship is always evil, without exception.
In the real world, there are always exceptions to every rule. Philosophers have been debating this topic for at least 2500 years, the Tyrannicide question is the most popular way of phrasing it.
How does one filter the good information from the bad?
Academically? Untracktable problem.
Pragmatically? If you can't find it on Google, then for 99% of the Internet users, it doesn't exist.
it fails because it ignores the technical constraints to implementing such an idea.
I say it succeeds, because it takes a pragmatic, real-world approach to the issue and accepts that its solution is not 100% pure mathematical perfection. But in the real world, 99% or 95% or 80% or sometimes just 51% is sufficient.
For example, if a politician is caught for embezzling money,
This point is much stronger and better thought-out.
Yes, in an ideal world, we could guarantee that the search results return a balanced view of the subject, with both pro and contra, bad deeds and good deeds, accusations and convictions as well as acquitals.
Until we live in that world, is it better to throw up your hands, accept Google's profits as more important than the life of innocent people ruined by "oh shrug, that's just how our search algorithm works" or is it better to protect real breathing humans and force Google to spend one millionth or so of its profits on it?
But at the same time, your problem is also the answer to why this law doesn't apply only to those innocently accused. Because there's no objective truth that would help us decide what to keep and what to forget.
without bringing child pornography into it.
I chose that specifically, because for other crimes people might decide to simply ask you if it was true. For child porn, that's very unlikely. You'll just be dropped from the list of candidates without ever learning why.
10 years later they would more be more likely remember the arrest, not the charges being dropped.
The probability of someone remembering a news headline from 10 years ago that - at that time - was not personally meaningful to them is next to nothing. The probability of someone putting your name into Google just to check what comes up is much higher than zero.
It's actually very pragmatic, reasonable and smart to address the likely issue that is reasonably easy to address and ignore the highly unlikely one that's very hard to fix. The EU is much smarter here than you are, because they're dealing with actual problems in the actual world, not with philosophical abstractions in an ideological exchange.
By targeting major international search engines, they can enforce it (IE, they are being lazy).
No, they're doing what they should be doing. Instead of putting their head into the sand and singing "nothing we can do about it, la la la la la", they are doing what they can do about it.
It's not perfect, but outside of the ivory towers of the computer departments of universities, that's how the real world works. We have a law against murder as well, even though it doesn't actually prevent murder. But it's better than nothing, it's what we can do about the issue, and it works reasonably well.
Most of the real world happens between the largely philosophical positions at the extreme ends.
Slashdot Mirror
Just out of curiosity, what were you driving?
BMW M3
It makes the point that some cars are safer at 120MPH+ than others are at 50.
Completely true. I sold my own car 15 years ago and have been driving rental cars whenever I really need on (living in the center of the city, it's not that often), I've droven a lot of different cars in my life. Some of them I wouldn't want to drive far about 100 km/h no matter what their theoretical max speed is, while in some 150 km/h feels like calmly coasting about. The car makes all the difference when driving at speed.
You seem bothered by the technical incompetence without being bother by the lying about who the enemy is, even creating a fake enemy that in reality is a friend (USA), in order to hide what they themselves were doing.
The fact that I didn't write about something shouldn't lead you to conclusions about my opinion on the matter.
But frankly speaking, I'd rather have competent liars than incompetent idiots in charge of my country. For the former, you only need to be sure their interests align sufficiently with yours. For the later, you can never feel safe.
Ah, so your argument is that the resources used to prosecute Kimble could be used elsewhere?
So what you're saying is that we should let known criminals go free because children in Africa are starving?
Unfortunately, our government (I'm german) is full of irresponsible, power-greedy fools. Local television has highlighted some of these problems repeatedly (like ministers who, not in 1970 but in the 200s need to decide about Internet regulations but don't even know what a browser is). Unfortunately, one of the things that changed compared to, say, 30-40 years ago is that they've replaced the state-paid experts in the ministries with lobbyists ^H^H^H "external advisors", who are not only experts in their fields (good), but also paid for by private corporations. That's right, the people advising our government get their salary not from the government, but from corporations.
I don't know if stupidity is a sufficient explanation, but our ministers including Merkel actually had encrypted mobiled phones offered to them by a special branch of the government responsible for securing the state IT infrastructure. They turned them down because it was more convenient to use market smartphones.
Personally, I think that act alone should be suffient to bring them all up for trial on aiding and abetting treason.
Legislatures could learn a lesson from this.
omg, please no!
I say that as someone who's running two games somewhat similar to the one advertised in your .sig and having similar rules in place, but also as someone having real-life experience with the law.
In a game, the environment is very different. Everyone has at least one shared goal (playing the game), and a benevolent dictator has the meta-goal of keeping the game running for everyone. These assumptions are not valid in real life. A catch-all law would be exploitable and lead to tyranny.
I'm a German living in Germany, so let me add a few things about the Autobahn that law makers seem to ignore. They think changing the law is all there is to it. But they forget that the reason the Autobahn works is that it is designed and built for this exact purpose.
The german Autobahn is like the US highways in LA or other big cities, but it is like this everywhere, even in the slowest, darkest corner of the most remote countryside. The Autobahn has mid dividers everywhere, at least 2 lanes everywhere, never, ever any traffic lights or crossings, all the roads are kept in good condition permanently and all curves are smooth and wide enough to be used at high speed. These and other details create an environment where you can simply assume a larger number of things. I've driven 290 km/h (180 mph) on the Autobahn and felt perfectly safe. I would never, ever, ever drive that speed on any of the US highways I've seen.
It's not so difficult to understand that both of the players in this game are fuckers. You don't need to pick one or the other. "much bigger deal" doesn't make much sense unless you are distributing limited resources. When you're the police dispatcher and you have exactly one car available and one person phones in a murder and the other his neighbours being loud, the question makes sense to decide where to send it (first). But "not being ok with something" is not a limited resource. You don't have to focus on the legal system issues and drop the Kim is a fucker part.
yet those who brought the world to its knees got billions and never even saw the insde of a court room much less a jail.
True, but one wrong doesn't make another one right. And I personally wouldn't want to live in a world with a "we don't prosecute robbery as long as there are murders" policy.
[...] over a German living in New Zealand whose company was registered in Hong Kong?
Who is not living in both Germany and Hong Kong anymore because of previous conflicts with the law, including being convicted of crimes?
Why is it so difficult for most /. readers to understand that there can be two assholes in a fight, and rooting for one of them just because you personally dislike the other isn't the answer?
It sucks, but certifications are a way of demonstrating that you have enough commitment to the field to get them.
It's really sad, but it's true.
I exited a large multinational corporation with a senior title, but no certifications simply because in my career path they were never needed (I moved up inside the company, with people knowing who I am and what I can do). Now it bites me. Especially because most of them are basically scams: They're crazy expensive, but they don't test any actual expertise, just your ability to memorize the correct answers from the study documents, and convince your boss to put his signature under the "yes, he's doing this thing for the past X years" paper.
But sadly, while they don't open any doors to places you want to work in, their absence can close doors that you want to stay open.
I'm beginning to think the "eventualy move into management" when you get to your mid to late 30's is just the normal development path in IT.
Not just IT. But its based on business in general being completely braindead. In this particular case, the vast majority of companies simply don't have interesting non-management career paths. If you want to earn more, get more responsibility, rise in the hierarchy, you've gotta go into management, because the clueless morons who design the company career pyramid are all managers themselves and can't grasp the concept of valuable people who are not managers.
My suggestion would be to look for a company that is more in touch with the real world, but sadly they're rather rare. If you're lucky enough to get into one, my congratulations.
This, 100%. I've seen a lot of brilliant, experienced mature IT people. I've seen a few stupid, boneheaded mature IT people. For young people, the ratio is reversed.
Of course, I say that now that I'm in that 2nd category myself. When I was much younger, of course I thought I had the answer to everything and the people writing boring standards were boring and old, and my brilliant reinvention is so much better. Fortunately, my field was always security and cryptography and there you learn very fast and very painful how stupid reinventing the wheel is, especially if you insist that triangles are the new circles.
I am willing to accept being the victim of such a bad luck thing
I don't wish you to ever be. It's easy to say it on on online forum. It's much more difficult to live it. There are plenty of articles out there about people who either wrongly or for totally ridiculous reasons (exchanging nude pictures with their girlfriend while three weeks under the legal age) ended up on the witchcraft ^H^H^H^H sex offenders list and who can't get a job, can't live in lots of places because of proximity to schools or whatever other bullshit restrictions there are. It doesn't sound like its "bad luck". It's more like "you're totally fucked".
Honestly, I think it says a lot about people if they are willing to ruin someone's life as easily as performing a Google search and judging without even reading any of the articles and trying to understand what they are seeing.
True, it does. However, from the perspective of someone who has done hiring, I can also tell you that at least on the first round you simply don't have the time to check anyone in depth. I've once had more than 200 applications for one position to fill. Make a guess how much time each of them got before I put it on either the "look more closely" or the "reject" pile. Yeah, it's not fair, but unless I wanted to do nothing else but checking these applications for three weeks, what to do?
In the ideal world, we would always get the full picture and make an informed decision. In the real world, we make snap judgements based on partial information.
Tainted search results are tainted search results. I do not want them.
You really think your current search results are "untainted"? You think Google or Bink or Yahoo or whoever do not massage them a little based on their own judgements? Just because their manipulations are part of the algorithm doesn't mean they're not manipulations.
The simplest ones are most often the correct ones.
I can't remember who said it, but it's so very true: "To every difficult, complex problem, there is always a solution that is simple, straightforward, easy to understand, and wrong."
Anyway, are you advocating the death penalty there?
Maybe before you discuss things you should get at least a basic overview of what you're talking about? The Tyrannicide question has nothing to do with the death penalty aside from the fact that maybe someone ends up dead. But the legal, ethical and philosophical implications are very different.
Well I don't know about him, but I can finish my 'philosophizing' in less than 30 seconds. In other words (snicker) he's full of shit.
Silly to admit to not know one of the most famous current experts in a field when you're trying to score points in it, really. I'm sorry, but you're just one of those braindead people who think that nobody else in the world ever had a thought worth contemplating and that their own opinions are the pinnacle of every discipline. People like you are a detriment to the whole human race, whose primary feature over animals is our ability to time-shift, as Korzybski (another think you probably don't know) names it - to expand upon the knowledge of others instead of re-inventing the wheel all the time.
I'm wasting my time here. You're throwing up pseudo-dilemmas that have been solved a thousand times already, you're just ignorant of the answers.
I disagree, the page rank algorithm is content-agnostic.
It doesn't even matter how it works. I don't understand what's so difficult about this. If you write an algorithm to do something, you are indirectly responsible for its results. You can't claim it was force majeure or gods will or something.
The difference between me telling you X and me writing an program that tells you X is the difference between me killing you with bare hands or shooting you with a gun - the results, and my responsibility for it, are the same.
Google certainly doesn't have heuristics that try to pick out negative stories and highlight them.
Of coursen not, and I never said it has. However, it is the page rank algorithm that results in this selection, so Google is not entirely uninvolved.
There is no need to kill the tyrant.
And here it is, the simple answer to a 2500 year old philosophical debate, in a /. posting...
Words are completely, utterly inert, more inert than helium.
Dennett (an actual philosopher) calls this kind of statement a "Deepity". A hollow phrase sounding profound, but it's actually either false or trivial, depending on how you read it.
Words are the primary tool of people in power, and have been for 10,000 years. Only those who neither understand nor wield power disregard them.
and had an additional team of employees to deal with copyright complaints.
By encouraging it and actively looking to get high-profile illegal content uploaded, yes. Did you miss all the news about what the prosecution discovered in their internal e-mails and stuff?
I find it very unlikely that he's actually guilty of criminal copyright infringement.
Given his history, even without knowing anything about this case at all, my bet would've been on his guilt. He's a career criminal, he's been convicted before, changed countries at least twice to avoid the legal consequences of his actions - yeah, I would be more surprised if he were innocent.
Sure, there were blunders and probably a few laws were broken during his prosecution, but to all the fools rooting for Kimble here I say: About time justice finally caught up with this guy who's been a career criminal for most of his life, sold out his friends to the law before to get a better deal for himself, and has dodged prison by changing country too often already.
I hope they put him away for good.
And I hope his fanclub here will learn the difference between downloading movies for free and rooting for freedom. It really is such a shit that "free" in english means two completely different things.
Firstly, what the AC said, and secondly yes, it might be big news, but it may or - more likely - may not turn up on searches for your name.
No, no they couldn't, because you'd click on the links and you'd see the actual result. Search engines can only report what is there; they might report on it incorrectly, but you can always check up on them.
Google once posted statistics about how many people go to even just the 2nd page of search results. I'm too lazy to search for the exact number, but it was quite low.
For all practical purposes, something that's not on the first few pages of search results on Google doesn't exist. Some unusually dedicated or technical persons with refined search terms might find it, but for the vast majority of the Internet, the difference between "on page 43 of Google search" and "deleted" is purely academic.
I'm always hoping we can achieve P2P internet that will be impossible to censor. Something to make the authorities squirm.
I hope we will have that for one year. I'm confident the vast majority of "free information" extremists will finally understand that every extreme position is dangerous bullshit.
Censorship is always evil, without exception.
In the real world, there are always exceptions to every rule. Philosophers have been debating this topic for at least 2500 years, the Tyrannicide question is the most popular way of phrasing it.
How does one filter the good information from the bad?
Academically? Untracktable problem.
Pragmatically? If you can't find it on Google, then for 99% of the Internet users, it doesn't exist.
it fails because it ignores the technical constraints to implementing such an idea.
I say it succeeds, because it takes a pragmatic, real-world approach to the issue and accepts that its solution is not 100% pure mathematical perfection. But in the real world, 99% or 95% or 80% or sometimes just 51% is sufficient.
For example, if a politician is caught for embezzling money,
This point is much stronger and better thought-out.
Yes, in an ideal world, we could guarantee that the search results return a balanced view of the subject, with both pro and contra, bad deeds and good deeds, accusations and convictions as well as acquitals.
Until we live in that world, is it better to throw up your hands, accept Google's profits as more important than the life of innocent people ruined by "oh shrug, that's just how our search algorithm works" or is it better to protect real breathing humans and force Google to spend one millionth or so of its profits on it?
But at the same time, your problem is also the answer to why this law doesn't apply only to those innocently accused. Because there's no objective truth that would help us decide what to keep and what to forget.
without bringing child pornography into it.
I chose that specifically, because for other crimes people might decide to simply ask you if it was true. For child porn, that's very unlikely. You'll just be dropped from the list of candidates without ever learning why.
10 years later they would more be more likely remember the arrest, not the charges being dropped.
The probability of someone remembering a news headline from 10 years ago that - at that time - was not personally meaningful to them is next to nothing. The probability of someone putting your name into Google just to check what comes up is much higher than zero.
It's actually very pragmatic, reasonable and smart to address the likely issue that is reasonably easy to address and ignore the highly unlikely one that's very hard to fix. The EU is much smarter here than you are, because they're dealing with actual problems in the actual world, not with philosophical abstractions in an ideological exchange.
By targeting major international search engines, they can enforce it (IE, they are being lazy).
No, they're doing what they should be doing. Instead of putting their head into the sand and singing "nothing we can do about it, la la la la la", they are doing what they can do about it.
It's not perfect, but outside of the ivory towers of the computer departments of universities, that's how the real world works. We have a law against murder as well, even though it doesn't actually prevent murder. But it's better than nothing, it's what we can do about the issue, and it works reasonably well.
Most of the real world happens between the largely philosophical positions at the extreme ends.