You have an odd definition of low resolution. A quick Google image search shows as one of the first results a 2000x1345 resolution image at time.com where you'd have to actually be officially blind to not be able to see the shrapnel damage.
Yes you only have to look at where the aircraft was hit by shrapnel (lower-mid front right of cockpit), the aircraft's location and speed in the sky when it was hit, and the type of damage (shrapnel not cannon fire):
1) The original Ukrainian jet claim spoke of a jet following MH17 from behind, but the jet was hit from the front, so this is clearly false.
2) The new claim talks of Ukrainian jet cannon fire from the front, but there is only missile shrapnel damage not cannon damage (nor any other evidence of cannon damage), so this is also clearly false.
3) MH17 was shot down at a location in the sky such that for a missile to be fired from the air at the front of the aircraft the attacking jet and missile would've had to have come from Russian airspace.
So whilst the possibility remains that this was shot down by a jet however unlikely Russia still needs to explain why given the fact it had been shooting down Ukrainian jets in Ukrainian airspace from Russian territory for weeks it managed to acquire any radar data, video of images of this one particular jet. Ukraine has no stealth aircraft.
There seems to be argument that there were no images of a BUK missile trail, but there are also no images of an air to air missile trail either yet this aircraft was definitely hit by a missile launched either from Russian rebel (aka regular) forces on the ground, or from Russian airspace.
If the Ukrainians did this we still need to know how the hell they got deep into Russian held territory, or Russian territory proper undetected and leaving no evidence. That hasn't been provided yet, this evidence is either false (talks of cannon fire, zero evidence of) or makes propositions that require the preposterous (a Ukrainian jet launching a missile from Russian airspace undetected).
I'm half expecting the next bit of Russian propaganda to state this was done by an America F-22 launched from Turkey hence why the Russians failed to detect it as they weren't looking in that direction and don't have any radar data because the F-22 is too stealthy...
I don't know why we're even having this debate in the first place. The Evidence of a Russian rebel/Russian regular manned BUK is pretty solid now, it's far and away the most plausible and most well evidenced explanation (especially given the one missile short BUK scurrying back across the Russian border in the immediate aftermath). The news headline might as well be "Russia still trying to avert blame for it's massive fuck-up" to which we could all reply "no shit!" but I guess that doesn't get page hits.
Since when have weather reports been 100% accurate for the next 24 hours, let alone the next 7 days, month or year?
Have you ever followed weather reports? Wait, you don't need to answer that, I know the answer is "no" or you wouldn't say something as incredibly stupid as you have. Predicting the weather is far from a solved problem.
Plant life is one area where CITES can often be counter-productive.
The problem is that many rare plants that are found smuggled and seized by customs just end up getting burnt under the principle that they want to avoid anyone using customs itself as a back door route for bringing stuff into the country - i.e. bring it in, let customs seize it, then buy it back through a third party.
Ideally these specimens would instead be sent to botanical institutes and nurseries to cultivate for commercial sales which would remove pressure on in-habitat populations.
A friend who is a botanist in South America and has several newly discovered species to his name actually has to go through the process of distributing seeds for such species to such people he knows worldwide before he's named and described the plant, because stupidly it's legal to do so due to the fact it has not yet been described and hence cannot by definition be given a CITES rating that is used to prohibit movement in the first place. By distributing them legally as he does it ensures that nurserymen can start providing these new species commercially after he has formally described the species and after it has received a CITES certification meaning that there is little to no pressure on illegal collection of the species in the wild because people can just obtain them legally from the nurseries.
It's all very backwards, but the focus should be on better enabling ex-situ conservation such that those with the facilities to breed a new and/or endangered species can do so hence greatly reducing and often even removing the threat of habitat extinction.
For what it's worth though, for this particular photographer in question looking at her pictures I believe pretty much all the specimens on her site are widely known and well policed - I've seen some myself and for others I've known people who have visited. The locations of I think all these things are I believe neither secret nor hard to find so I don't think she's putting much at risk here. Whether there are more in her book whose locations are secret I've no idea though.
I don't think you have basic economic literacy as you seem to think these costs occur in a vacuum which isn't even close to reality.
You're paying one way or the other regardless, either you pay 50 euros for 1 MWh + 100 extra euros for your healthcare (through insurance, or taxes depending on the healthcare system of your country) or you pay 100 euros for 1 MWh of electricity and no extra for associated healthcare costs. This means you're 150 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with coal but only 100 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with renewables like wind, unless of course you abandon healthcare costs altogether and leave large swathes of your population too ill to work effectively (or at all) which in itself has it's own costs and risk of economic collapse.
Couple this with the fact that your population is healthier (i.e. less cases of coal burning induced debilitating cancer) and hence more productive and the fact that you have more money left over (because total costs of wind vs. coal + effects of coal) are cheaper and your economy will actually be able to grow more as there is more scope for investment and consumer purchases.
There's no sensible metric by which total costs of coal being more expensive are a benefit. The only reason it remains that way is because of politicians fear of upsetting vested interests and corporate lobbying by the fossil fuel industries.
I disagree, look at counter-examples such as Battlefield 4. It wasn't even beta quality on release, it was alpha quality with glaring bugs such as saves regularly failing forcing you to start from scratch, regular crashes - some even braindead and unmissable like pressing "A" to toggle between autospawn and manual spawn after dying resulting in a crash back to the dashboard after one of the patches designed to "fix" the initial release.
Yet it went on to win "multiplayer game of the year" award even though to this day it still has launch day bugs and for about 6 months of it's life multiplayer didn't even really work for most people. It's still made excellent sales, and with a followup in the franchise now being extremely hyped with seemingly already high preorders looking at preorder ranking charts on various retailer sites.
I also think some of your examples are just down to franchise burnout too, regardless of game quality CoD hit it's plateau a good few years ago with Black Ops 1 and it's been stuck at that plateau and trending towards downward sales for a while.
The gamers are as much to blame - go try and criticise people for preordering on a gaming site and watch the barrage of insults you get for daring to point out that they're silly for paying more money than ever for games that are less finished than ever.
When they know they can get away with this crap why would they change? Ubisoft has done this because it saw EA got away with it.
I think if they all start doing it we will see a crash in the market but right now? there's no way gamers are punishing for bad releases even remotely enough to discourage it.
Microsoft got a lot of praise from developers for dropping their charge for patches this generation (after they realised it was good to allow continuous updates to games like Minecraft and Diablo 3 receive) but I think it's part the problem. Now there's no financial cost to fixing their games Ubisoft, EA etc. have realised they can release paid-for alpha tests and fix them later under a flurry of half-arsed regular patches with no financial penalty. Microsoft needs to start charging these guys $50k per patch again, and only make exemptions on a case by case basis like they did Minecraft on the 360. If they're left with a choice of releasing a game that will be perpetually alpha quality, or paying hundreds of thousands to fix it, then they'll be more inclined to get it right for release in the first place, just like they used to in the PS3/360 era.
It's not me that hasn't looked at actual facts, it's you that doesn't grasp what the real costs of coal are.
Yes, the amount you pay directly for coal appears cheaper than wind, but unlike wind the amount you pay directly isn't anything close to the real actual costs of coal. This article explains some of the increased costs of coal that are buried into your taxes, medical insurance and so forth such that you don't realise what the real cost of coal you're paying actually is:
There are countless studies that research the real costs of coal and the estimates vary, but all show coal as consistently more expensive than pretty much any other power source.
Nuclear would be far cheaper than coal if you could just dump the waste in someone's back garden and let them pick up the bill for their cancer, but for some reason coal is one of the few power sources allowed to get away with doing basically exactly this.
So when I say actual costs, I mean actual costs, not the up front direct costs on paper you've quoted- those have no relevance to the actual in practice cost of using coal as an energy source.
Why would electricity bills be higher? Wind is cheaper than coal when you account for full costs. No coal burning means healthier people which means less healthcare cost which means lower taxes.
The total cost of coal is incredibly expensive so moving away from it offers a decent net cost saving.
Even then do we even have to waste output? I'm sure we as humans have processes that are not time critical and could happen during periods of excess capacity.
For example, if we have a day where there's a load of spare capacity being wasted could we not instead use that energy for something like recycling? So you have a recycling centre adjacent to the plant that is kept topped up with glass or plastic that needs melting for re-use and during times of excess capacity the excess is simply used for melting this stuff down or processing it or whatever. It doesn't mean we wont still have permanent recycling centres and stuff as well, but if there's spare power we might as well use it effectively and if there isn't so what? It's not time critical, it can sit there and wait a month until the spare capacity comes up to churn through a bit more.
"The problem is that you cannot predict how much will be produced with renewable. Only conventional power allows power generation predictions."
Not true at all, there are plenty of renewable options that are predictable, just that wind and solar aren't either of them.
Hydro and tidal are good examples, a hydro dam can be built with enough of a buffer against drought that there's still always enough to run and the tide isn't going anywhere in many places. Geothermal is another good example.
Okay yes there are extreme circumstances where these things could fail, but then there are plenty of circumstances in which nuclear, coal or gas can fail as the UK recently found out with at least one nuclear reactor offline due to cracks, and a few other stations having suffered fires shutting them down or cutting capacity.
You can't blanket state that renewable is unreliable- plenty of renewable options are as reliable as any other energy source we have.
"But they are different skills, and more powerful tools necessarily imply that what used to be highly skilled jobs are now not so skilled."
No it doesn't necessarily imply that, in fact, it doesn't imply that at all and it isn't true.
Systems have gotten more complex with more technologies and more moving parts than ever before. The complexity has simply moved from the underlying technologies being complex to the overall problem being complex.
Even the most basic non-trivial web applications now will often require knowledge of HTTP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, web services, XML, SOAP, SQL, Apache/IIS, some server-side technology (e.g. Java with Spring or C# with ASP.NET and their respective toolchains) and probably some patterns like MVC and any frameworks relevant to that and their technicalities. So sure, a component of the solution like C# is way more easy than say x86 assembler, but the overall solution the developer is working is incredibly more complex than anything people were ever writing in assembler.
Highly skilled jobs are still highly skilled, they just require a different set of skills- rather than having in depth knowledge of the nuances of the x86 instruction set and the CPU implementations of it you instead need to know many different technologies in decent detail and how they tie together and the nuances of them instead. There's still as much to know and the overall solutions still need just as much understanding and thought, it's just different knowledge, that's all.
FWIW I was brought up on C and assembly but now do a fairly diverse range of development but mostly large scale distributed back end systems- this is why I can say with certainty that it's complete nonsense to suggest things are any less complex now than they've ever been. I still have to engage my brain as much as I always have because shit doesn't get easier no matter how many tools you have- the tools just eliminate one complexity whilst allowing you to focus on further complexities. Simply put, that's precisely the mechanism that allows software to get more advanced in the first place and if it didn't happen like that then software would be the same now as it was 20 years ago.
I already do this because I live in the UK and that's exactly how much it costs with tax here FWIW and ours isn't even the most expensive Western nation on this front.
I had a quick search to fact check your post, and it doesn't really seem accurate. It seems 12.9% of oil comes from Persian Gulf countries (i.e. the Middle Eastern nations where war is a problem), whilst 14% of European oil comes from the same place, so there's little in it:
The gulf is bigger for Africa (US 5%, EU 21%) but apart from a temporary foray into Libya for a few months the nations in question aren't nations where there has been any Western intervention for a long time.
Which isn't to say EU's energy purchases aren't a problem, as the whole Ukraine crisis has shown the EU needs to cut dependence on Russian gas and oil.
But ultimately your claim that the EU should be stabilising the middle east because it uses more oil is basically false, given there's a mere 1.1% gap in purchases between the EU and US from the major problem areas in middle east where American blood keeps getting spilled.
Your argument is irrelevant however, it's a distraction, an attempted play on technicalities to avoid the real reason it's always the Americas that end up the middle east- it's not about oil consumption, it's about oil control. America doesn't keep meddling in the middle east because it consumes their oil, it meddles in the middle east because it wants it's companies to profit from production of that oil, and to control who gets to consume that oil.
The EU isn't engaging in the middle east as much as the US is because EU foreign policy hasn't been so focussed on controlling the flow of oil and building it's economy on the basis of taking control as much of the global oil and gas market as possible.
You mention China also, which is a similar case, you talk of lack of power projection, but that's not true- China's power projection just isn't military, it's economic. But whilst the US spent the last decade bombing Iraq and Afghanistan China spent the same decade courting under-developed African nations to build up their infrastructure and to exploit their resources- whilst America went to war to control the oil already being pumped, China invested in just pumping new oil in as yet untapped markets by funding production of wells, road, telecomms infrastructure and so on and so forth. It's been pretty busy:
It's also interesting if you look at some of the widely available pre-2010 maps- you'll see there's barely a section of Africa that hasn't been touched to the tune of billions of dollars by the Chinese in the last 10 - 15 years.
So your misdirection was a nice try at excusing America from the problem, but it misses the very reason America isn't excused from the problem - America isn't there because it's the good guy doing the EU, China and Japan a favour. It's there out of choice because it has created and intertwined itself in the problem because it views that as a key part of it's global power projection priorities. It realises that messy military agreements and dealings with the Saudis may not net it much oil because it doesn't need it from them, but it does mean that US companies can rake in billions from helping exploit those resources whilst also providing it's military companies with lucrative defence contracts to defend those investments.
It's the very nature of the fact that America's power projection is military that's the reason it's always engaged in wars unlike China with it's economic power.
This is also in part why Saudi Arabia is more than happy to help keep oil prices low at a time when fellow OPEC members like Venezuela could be pushed to the brink of collapse by low oil prices- partly because Saudi gains in seeing a competing major oil producer crippled for a
Yes and this is largely because taxonomy is a mostly broken pseudo-science.
To this day most taxonomic classification is done based on "what it looks like" and whilst DNA classification is growing it's still not done well.
For example, if plant A looks like plant B and shares many similar traits it will still often be classified in the same genus even if DNA evidence shows it's more distinct than plant C which looks completely different but has a much closer evolutionary relationship based on DNA analysis.
The problem is that most taxonomists still let very human emotions get in the way of classification, they decide to overrule objective DNA evidence where it offends them for some reason.
But even where DNA evidence is used it's not used in a consistent way. If you have two specimens of living creatures whose DNA is 0.001% different then they may be classed as the same species if they're animals, but different species if they're plants, all to satisfy the human trait of the fact that if that 0.001% difference is visually obvious in one species but not in another then the person classifying will make a different arbitrary decision to someone else.
So when the levels of difference that define where a specimen is a different species, different genus and so forth are still arbitrary then most taxonomic classifications are still completely meaningless from a scientific standpoint.
It all comes down to the fact that taxonomy just doesn't know what it is - most proper scientists would argue they need it to be a tool that allows them to refer to different types of living thing or the same living thing in an objective manner, yet most taxonomists just treat it as a non-science (but still like to call it a science) that's used to provide convenient names for things in garden centres, zoos, museums and so forth even if those names are completely arbitrary, contradictory, and of no consistent scientific merit. So it becomes a fundamental question of who taxonomy is meant to serve? scientists by providing objective ways to refer to living things, or your average joe to give sloppy, often scientifically inaccurate but convenient names for things. Effectively taxonomy needs a formal split into two practices- strict taxonomy and casual taxonomy with each providing different taxonomic definitions, one formal, objective and useful to science, the other arbitrary, but simple and convenient.
Becareful what you wish for, the BBC has basically gone down the path of doing shows you can learn something from and apart from a few good Attenbroughs and a few good Brian Cox's every few years you basically have 3 choices:
1) Generic medical drama #125423523 2) Generic cooking show #35263463 3) Generic 1800 - 1930 show #43634633
I swear the BBC lost their costume cupboard in their move to Salford and all they could find afterwards were the 1800s clothes because if you turn the BBC on nowadays you'll either get some incredibly repetitive and dull artsy shit that caters to old people or one of the above, which mostly caters to old people. Long gone are the days where we got things like Spooks.
But then that's probably also why over half of the BBC's audience in the UK is now over 60.
So sure with the BBC everything they produce is something you can learn something from, but for christs sakes I'd only want to make so many puddings, watch so many heart attack surgeries or watch so many people doddering about boringly and aimlessly in the 1800s. Unfortunately it seems, if you wish for it, TV can end up just a little bit too much like the school you hated as a kid because most of the shit you were taught was boring crap that didn't interest you.
Okay sure there's Doctor Who and Top Gear which are popular but how often are they actually on? What if you don't like those only two shows that don't seem wholly focussed on the over 60s as their primary audience target?
I've never had a problem paying the license fee in principal because I think it's a good idea, and I think historically it's actually been great but nowadays I don't feel like I get my moneys worth given that the only thing I really get out of it is the news website and the rare documentary. I shouldn't be paying £120 a year for news and the excitement of one good hour long documentary every once in a while. There's something wrong when you can literally go weeks without there being anything in the TV schedule of interest. It's not like there hasn't been a wealth of subject matter they could've made good shows on but failed miserably in the last couple of years - 25th anniversary of the Falklands war, 100th anniversary of World War I yet on those topics it's either been repeats of documentaries we've all seen before or simply just crap. Even the World War I dramas have been more focussed on people in their 1910s clothes wardrobe pratting around in coal mines, fields, or mills back home than the actual fucking war itself.
I love education too, god only knows I've studied enough post-graduate, but I would like the TV I pay for to be at least a little bit entertaining.
Agreed, it's actual application by authorities has been pathetic. There's somewhat of an irony I guess in the fact that numerous execs were jailed for financial scandals before the law existed (i.e. some Enron and Worldcom folks were jailed) but none after despite the law creating an ever more powerful tool to do exactly that.
I'd suggest though that it's worth considering that the problem isn't the law per-se, but whoever is taking charge of enforcing it. It seems there were a lot of financial misconduct prosecutions in Clintons era and at the very very start of Bush's era possibly as a spillover from Clinton era doctrine but fuck all after that.
Of course I'm not being partisan here and pretending it's all Bush, it's pretty clear Obama has equally let plenty get away with it on his watch too. But certainly both of them seem to have overseen governments with a startling lack of prosecutions for this sort of thing compared to their predecessors.
So it's hard to judge Sarbanes-Oxley, on one hand you could argue that it put a stop to financial scandals, on the other you could say that's blatantly not true because we've seen plenty and it's not being used, on another we could say it's because of SO that we're not seeing prosecutions anymore. Personally though I suspect it's more to do with government will to prioritise and enforce that aspect of the law- i.e. since Bush and continued by Obama there is no will to enforce against financial crimes- I don't think this is purely a US phenomenom though for what it's worth, I think it's been the same here in the UK and really the West in general.
"Seems like the prosecutors could have gone with a good old "destruction of evidence" and not had to delve into Sarbanes-Oxley (which while having many good intentions is in so many ways a totally fucked up law that has made billions for a few financial and auditing consulting companies and cost tens of billions for the rest.)"
To be fair, whilst I'm not defending the way the law is written, let's not forget that the whole reason it was written- because without it a series of financial scandals meant it cost tens of billion for the rest too.
"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."
"In practice, it severely restricts the ability of people to find said article, given just how popular search engines are in general, and Google in particular. Effectively, it slashes down the readership of the article by several orders of magnitude."
But that's exactly the point, the goal is neither to erase history altogether, nor to make someone's mistakes from a long time ago available within a split second.
"And I don't understand why it's a good thing, in your opinion. I understand your general point, but insofar as it pertains to Google - I fail to see what socially useful thing is served by prohibiting them from caching such article. They are as much a part of the "news pipe" as everyone else, and play an important role. I would rather have that role protected."
Because it's not relevant. Credit reference agencies in Europe are expected to ditch bankruptcy data on people after 6 - 7 years to allow people a second chance. Why should Google be allowed to act as a back door credit reference agency that has no legal restrictions on it like the actual credit reference agencies do? It makes a mockery of the whole situation, we have a whole legal framework for making sure people cannot be discriminated against indefinitely and can have a second chance financially, that someone doing a genuinely good thing like trying to start a business using their own money but then fails because the economy turns bad isn't prevented from ever owning a house again, or finding a job, or getting a girlfriend or whatever else.
If it takes a second to find this information people are likely to do so, hell they may not even be looking- what if someone or a family members Google's their friend to find out about his new business attempt only to see he went bankrupt once before, something the person didn't want his family to know about? By simply removing the quick and easy search barrier for such personal information whilst allowing it to be retained in public record we achieve balance, we ensure that it can't be used casually in places where it's not supposed to such as in a discriminatory manner in recruitment, mortgage lending and so forth but we make sure that if such a person becomes a prominent figure such that it becomes worth digging up a bit more about them that there is at least some public record available on it, that history hasn't been completely erased about them. I do not think this is an unreasonable balance, it largely solves concerns on both sides of the argument to a pretty reasonable degree- history isn't erased, but people aren't being unfairly treated because of Google holding and rapidly providing access to data that can be used in a discriminatory manner.
Effectively to do away with the data protection act we then have to do away with credit reference agencies because they become pointless as they're unrestricted (and those restrictions on CRAs exist for excellent reason) and Google can basically become an open source of everyone's financial history ever. That's really not a good thing, though I'm sure the NSA et. al. would love it.
Even outside of finance there are sensible reasons for data protection though- if a domestic abuse victim changes their name and moves but someone posts a bit of information linking their old and new lives such that their abusive partner may come and attack them then if the website wont remove it because it's outside UK jurisdiction or whatever then I really don't see why Google needs to hold a link to that. I don't see what possible benefit it serves to anyone other than a violent criminal.
I'd be more swayed by the "poor Google" argument if Google's profit margins were slim and it was a choice between no Google at all and none of this, but they make billions, worse, they don't pay half the taxes they're supposed to so the argument that they can't be bothered, that they want higher profits, that they can't afford it is nonsense, if nothing else they can pay to manage this out of all the tax money they don't pay so there's ample opportunity and r
That's not how personal data is defined in the context of the European Data Protection Directive, for starters the review was of a commercial performance and the very nature of going commercial with the performance takes it outside the realm of personal.
If the WP had instead listened in to his bedroom using listening equipment and had reviewed him performing to himself in his own home then it'd be a different story, though even here the WP would likely be guilty of infringing other laws first and foremost involving invasion of privacy, potentially intercept/wiretapping laws depending on what happened and jurisdiction etc.
When a link is removed from Google that doesn't magically remove people's ability to read the article. Newspapers have their own archiving and search systems, they're not dependent on Google for that. If you believe removing a link from a Google search erases the original article or somehow otherwise makes it unreadable as you claim then I suggest you learn a bit more about how the technology works.
It's not about being able to rewrite or erase history, it's about keeping information that is no longer relevant out of casual searches.
This achieves a balance, it means that companies wishing to use this data illegally (because we believe in second chances in Europe and so apply limitations to data such as bankruptcy information) have to go out of their way to find it, and so have no basis to defend themselves in court such that it's not worth them doing it, whilst allowing for the possibility that, say on the off chance someone who went bankrupt later becomes in charge of a national economy as a politician that history hasn't been completely erased so now that that data becomes public interest again it can be found in public record.
Who are you talking to? You seem to be making a comment that has no relevance to anything I said.
I pointed out that the summary doesn't understand the law anyway, what has that got to do with whether it's applicable in the US or whatever?
You're telling me that a law that I pointed out doesn't exist in Europe (because the law discussed in the summary isn't a real thing) doesn't apply in the US? No shit, of course it doesn't because it's not even a real law but a figment of the imagination of the idiot who wrote the summary/article.
"lease do enlighten us how it could easily apply algorithms to categorize data to distinguish between personal, protected data, and data of public records that belong to someone else. Just for shits and grins, please create an algorithm that would distinguish between the Washington Post article and the original bankruptcy article."
There's a few points to make here, firstly is the fundamental point that Google is not above the law, the applies to Google, it is not a unique or special entity. Thus, the fact is that Google has to find a way of not holding and providing data illegally in Europe in breach of the Data Protection Directive. That is a given.
So given that, Google has a choice, it can either keep hiring staff to handle request reactively manually, or it can use it's technological skills to reduce that burden. How far it trusts it's technology depends on how many false positives it's willing to have, the less false positives it wants the more it needs to depend on human determination.
But pretending Google can't improve the process with technology is laughable, I don't know if you're technically illiterate, haven't been following the news or what, but in your example, a news website, there are key terms that provide context for Google's knowledge graph - it's clear it's a news site either by the company name or key terms like "news", the date is available on the article so relevance can be ranked easily, names are nearly always easily detected and terms like bankruptcy give context. It is not a particularly hard problem in computing to fairly reliably categorise this as a story about a bankruptcy and judge it's recency. Whether you then trust the computer or categorise it for human checks is the sort of thing Google would need to trial, but no one, certainly not me is pretending there's a magic algorithm that can solve the problem 100% of the time but it is pretty clear that Google could reduce the staffing cost burden using technology to make this less of an issue for them.
"Wow. So that means that now laws that cannot be followed every time are a good idea? In the case of Google, it means a perpetual fine that cannot be escaped, is completely arbitrary, and applies only to Google."
So anyone arrested for murder is always guilty? What? Where do you live? That's not how the law works, even if Google doesn't pro-actively remove such content it still has scope to do so when alerted to it, it only faces penalties if it outright refuses to do so and has no legal basis for the refusal. Even if it believes it has a basis but is found not to in a court of law the courts will not penalise just for losing the argument if it's argument was fair and in good faith unless it seems clear Google was intentionally taking the piss. The chance of Google getting penalised is basically zero unless it tries very hard to take things all the way to trial and loses.
"Everything you posted so far is a damning indictment of exactly why this law is terrible: it's not possible to fully comply, it's arbitrary, it's open to abuse from all sides, and its target is also completely arbitrary."
I don't think you know what the word arbitrary means, because it's obviously not arbitrary given the fact the bounds are well publicised and established. Any fringe cases can be dealt with in court and Google will know which way to turn if it wants to there, but the vast majority of cases are very clear cut and few of those that aren't will actually end up in court.
As for whether this law should exist? Well it's quite simple. For over a decade just about every company that exists in or operates in Europe has managed to comply with this law. It's been successful in reducing spam and reducing the number of victims of unnecessary discrimination. It's stopped companies carrying out invasive acts in people's lives and it enjoys broad support across the continent where it exists. You only have to look at various discussions where Americans bitch about marketing and robocalling here, or bitch about refusal for m
So "abstract" is a get out of jail free card in the US? You could use the abstract defence to serve stolen credit card numbers?
Could Snowden have leaked national security secrets via snippets as abstracts and been immune from prosecution?
I don't think that's right, I'd be surprised if an abstract under fair use laws gives you an inherent legal right to disseminate illegal information in the US. I suspect there are still limits on what information can be published publicly.
"For starters Google (in the context of the search engine, not plus or ads) is not collecting data about you but about the websites. This includes the indexed content of the website."
That's nonsense, you can't merely separate the two with a throwaway statement. If the website it's collecting data from contains data about you then Google is collecting data about you, it's a logical fallacy to suggest otherwise.
"This is the only way a search engine can work."
This is another fallacy. Google already has plenty of algorithms to categorise data, it could easily apply the same to personal data to be flagged to review but it opts not to because it doesn't want to cut into it's bottom line, but companies don't get to increase profits by ignoring the law, that's just not the way the world works. This isn't a situation where Google would have to go bankrupt to adhere to the law and we're left with a choice of no Google or no data protection. It's perfectly possible to have both- no one is expecting perfection, but ultimately just because Google may never get it perfectly right doesn't mean they should be freed from the law altogether.
As for the rest of your post, I have no idea what the relevance of your analogy was, it seems to veer off so far from the subject at hand I can't even begin to associate it with any rational on-topic point. You then follow that up with some declaration that Google isn't breaking the law even though it was and that you're not American and are German. I really don't know where you were going towards the end but you seemed to fly off on some completely random tangents there.
Slashdot Mirror
You have an odd definition of low resolution. A quick Google image search shows as one of the first results a 2000x1345 resolution image at time.com where you'd have to actually be officially blind to not be able to see the shrapnel damage.
Yes you only have to look at where the aircraft was hit by shrapnel (lower-mid front right of cockpit), the aircraft's location and speed in the sky when it was hit, and the type of damage (shrapnel not cannon fire):
1) The original Ukrainian jet claim spoke of a jet following MH17 from behind, but the jet was hit from the front, so this is clearly false.
2) The new claim talks of Ukrainian jet cannon fire from the front, but there is only missile shrapnel damage not cannon damage (nor any other evidence of cannon damage), so this is also clearly false.
3) MH17 was shot down at a location in the sky such that for a missile to be fired from the air at the front of the aircraft the attacking jet and missile would've had to have come from Russian airspace.
So whilst the possibility remains that this was shot down by a jet however unlikely Russia still needs to explain why given the fact it had been shooting down Ukrainian jets in Ukrainian airspace from Russian territory for weeks it managed to acquire any radar data, video of images of this one particular jet. Ukraine has no stealth aircraft.
There seems to be argument that there were no images of a BUK missile trail, but there are also no images of an air to air missile trail either yet this aircraft was definitely hit by a missile launched either from Russian rebel (aka regular) forces on the ground, or from Russian airspace.
If the Ukrainians did this we still need to know how the hell they got deep into Russian held territory, or Russian territory proper undetected and leaving no evidence. That hasn't been provided yet, this evidence is either false (talks of cannon fire, zero evidence of) or makes propositions that require the preposterous (a Ukrainian jet launching a missile from Russian airspace undetected).
I'm half expecting the next bit of Russian propaganda to state this was done by an America F-22 launched from Turkey hence why the Russians failed to detect it as they weren't looking in that direction and don't have any radar data because the F-22 is too stealthy...
I don't know why we're even having this debate in the first place. The Evidence of a Russian rebel/Russian regular manned BUK is pretty solid now, it's far and away the most plausible and most well evidenced explanation (especially given the one missile short BUK scurrying back across the Russian border in the immediate aftermath). The news headline might as well be "Russia still trying to avert blame for it's massive fuck-up" to which we could all reply "no shit!" but I guess that doesn't get page hits.
Since when have weather reports been 100% accurate for the next 24 hours, let alone the next 7 days, month or year?
Have you ever followed weather reports? Wait, you don't need to answer that, I know the answer is "no" or you wouldn't say something as incredibly stupid as you have. Predicting the weather is far from a solved problem.
Plant life is one area where CITES can often be counter-productive.
The problem is that many rare plants that are found smuggled and seized by customs just end up getting burnt under the principle that they want to avoid anyone using customs itself as a back door route for bringing stuff into the country - i.e. bring it in, let customs seize it, then buy it back through a third party.
Ideally these specimens would instead be sent to botanical institutes and nurseries to cultivate for commercial sales which would remove pressure on in-habitat populations.
A friend who is a botanist in South America and has several newly discovered species to his name actually has to go through the process of distributing seeds for such species to such people he knows worldwide before he's named and described the plant, because stupidly it's legal to do so due to the fact it has not yet been described and hence cannot by definition be given a CITES rating that is used to prohibit movement in the first place. By distributing them legally as he does it ensures that nurserymen can start providing these new species commercially after he has formally described the species and after it has received a CITES certification meaning that there is little to no pressure on illegal collection of the species in the wild because people can just obtain them legally from the nurseries.
It's all very backwards, but the focus should be on better enabling ex-situ conservation such that those with the facilities to breed a new and/or endangered species can do so hence greatly reducing and often even removing the threat of habitat extinction.
For what it's worth though, for this particular photographer in question looking at her pictures I believe pretty much all the specimens on her site are widely known and well policed - I've seen some myself and for others I've known people who have visited. The locations of I think all these things are I believe neither secret nor hard to find so I don't think she's putting much at risk here. Whether there are more in her book whose locations are secret I've no idea though.
I don't think you have basic economic literacy as you seem to think these costs occur in a vacuum which isn't even close to reality.
You're paying one way or the other regardless, either you pay 50 euros for 1 MWh + 100 extra euros for your healthcare (through insurance, or taxes depending on the healthcare system of your country) or you pay 100 euros for 1 MWh of electricity and no extra for associated healthcare costs. This means you're 150 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with coal but only 100 euros out of pocket for 1 MWh of electricity with renewables like wind, unless of course you abandon healthcare costs altogether and leave large swathes of your population too ill to work effectively (or at all) which in itself has it's own costs and risk of economic collapse.
Couple this with the fact that your population is healthier (i.e. less cases of coal burning induced debilitating cancer) and hence more productive and the fact that you have more money left over (because total costs of wind vs. coal + effects of coal) are cheaper and your economy will actually be able to grow more as there is more scope for investment and consumer purchases.
There's no sensible metric by which total costs of coal being more expensive are a benefit. The only reason it remains that way is because of politicians fear of upsetting vested interests and corporate lobbying by the fossil fuel industries.
I disagree, look at counter-examples such as Battlefield 4. It wasn't even beta quality on release, it was alpha quality with glaring bugs such as saves regularly failing forcing you to start from scratch, regular crashes - some even braindead and unmissable like pressing "A" to toggle between autospawn and manual spawn after dying resulting in a crash back to the dashboard after one of the patches designed to "fix" the initial release.
Yet it went on to win "multiplayer game of the year" award even though to this day it still has launch day bugs and for about 6 months of it's life multiplayer didn't even really work for most people. It's still made excellent sales, and with a followup in the franchise now being extremely hyped with seemingly already high preorders looking at preorder ranking charts on various retailer sites.
I also think some of your examples are just down to franchise burnout too, regardless of game quality CoD hit it's plateau a good few years ago with Black Ops 1 and it's been stuck at that plateau and trending towards downward sales for a while.
The gamers are as much to blame - go try and criticise people for preordering on a gaming site and watch the barrage of insults you get for daring to point out that they're silly for paying more money than ever for games that are less finished than ever.
When they know they can get away with this crap why would they change? Ubisoft has done this because it saw EA got away with it.
I think if they all start doing it we will see a crash in the market but right now? there's no way gamers are punishing for bad releases even remotely enough to discourage it.
Microsoft got a lot of praise from developers for dropping their charge for patches this generation (after they realised it was good to allow continuous updates to games like Minecraft and Diablo 3 receive) but I think it's part the problem. Now there's no financial cost to fixing their games Ubisoft, EA etc. have realised they can release paid-for alpha tests and fix them later under a flurry of half-arsed regular patches with no financial penalty. Microsoft needs to start charging these guys $50k per patch again, and only make exemptions on a case by case basis like they did Minecraft on the 360. If they're left with a choice of releasing a game that will be perpetually alpha quality, or paying hundreds of thousands to fix it, then they'll be more inclined to get it right for release in the first place, just like they used to in the PS3/360 era.
It's not me that hasn't looked at actual facts, it's you that doesn't grasp what the real costs of coal are.
Yes, the amount you pay directly for coal appears cheaper than wind, but unlike wind the amount you pay directly isn't anything close to the real actual costs of coal. This article explains some of the increased costs of coal that are buried into your taxes, medical insurance and so forth such that you don't realise what the real cost of coal you're paying actually is:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
There are countless studies that research the real costs of coal and the estimates vary, but all show coal as consistently more expensive than pretty much any other power source.
Nuclear would be far cheaper than coal if you could just dump the waste in someone's back garden and let them pick up the bill for their cancer, but for some reason coal is one of the few power sources allowed to get away with doing basically exactly this.
So when I say actual costs, I mean actual costs, not the up front direct costs on paper you've quoted- those have no relevance to the actual in practice cost of using coal as an energy source.
Why would electricity bills be higher? Wind is cheaper than coal when you account for full costs. No coal burning means healthier people which means less healthcare cost which means lower taxes.
The total cost of coal is incredibly expensive so moving away from it offers a decent net cost saving.
Even then do we even have to waste output? I'm sure we as humans have processes that are not time critical and could happen during periods of excess capacity.
For example, if we have a day where there's a load of spare capacity being wasted could we not instead use that energy for something like recycling? So you have a recycling centre adjacent to the plant that is kept topped up with glass or plastic that needs melting for re-use and during times of excess capacity the excess is simply used for melting this stuff down or processing it or whatever. It doesn't mean we wont still have permanent recycling centres and stuff as well, but if there's spare power we might as well use it effectively and if there isn't so what? It's not time critical, it can sit there and wait a month until the spare capacity comes up to churn through a bit more.
"The problem is that you cannot predict how much will be produced with renewable. Only conventional power allows power generation predictions."
Not true at all, there are plenty of renewable options that are predictable, just that wind and solar aren't either of them.
Hydro and tidal are good examples, a hydro dam can be built with enough of a buffer against drought that there's still always enough to run and the tide isn't going anywhere in many places. Geothermal is another good example.
Okay yes there are extreme circumstances where these things could fail, but then there are plenty of circumstances in which nuclear, coal or gas can fail as the UK recently found out with at least one nuclear reactor offline due to cracks, and a few other stations having suffered fires shutting them down or cutting capacity.
You can't blanket state that renewable is unreliable- plenty of renewable options are as reliable as any other energy source we have.
"But they are different skills, and more powerful tools necessarily imply that what used to be highly skilled jobs are now not so skilled."
No it doesn't necessarily imply that, in fact, it doesn't imply that at all and it isn't true.
Systems have gotten more complex with more technologies and more moving parts than ever before. The complexity has simply moved from the underlying technologies being complex to the overall problem being complex.
Even the most basic non-trivial web applications now will often require knowledge of HTTP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, web services, XML, SOAP, SQL, Apache/IIS, some server-side technology (e.g. Java with Spring or C# with ASP.NET and their respective toolchains) and probably some patterns like MVC and any frameworks relevant to that and their technicalities. So sure, a component of the solution like C# is way more easy than say x86 assembler, but the overall solution the developer is working is incredibly more complex than anything people were ever writing in assembler.
Highly skilled jobs are still highly skilled, they just require a different set of skills- rather than having in depth knowledge of the nuances of the x86 instruction set and the CPU implementations of it you instead need to know many different technologies in decent detail and how they tie together and the nuances of them instead. There's still as much to know and the overall solutions still need just as much understanding and thought, it's just different knowledge, that's all.
FWIW I was brought up on C and assembly but now do a fairly diverse range of development but mostly large scale distributed back end systems- this is why I can say with certainty that it's complete nonsense to suggest things are any less complex now than they've ever been. I still have to engage my brain as much as I always have because shit doesn't get easier no matter how many tools you have- the tools just eliminate one complexity whilst allowing you to focus on further complexities. Simply put, that's precisely the mechanism that allows software to get more advanced in the first place and if it didn't happen like that then software would be the same now as it was 20 years ago.
I already do this because I live in the UK and that's exactly how much it costs with tax here FWIW and ours isn't even the most expensive Western nation on this front.
I had a quick search to fact check your post, and it doesn't really seem accurate. It seems 12.9% of oil comes from Persian Gulf countries (i.e. the Middle Eastern nations where war is a problem), whilst 14% of European oil comes from the same place, so there's little in it:
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/...
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/art...
The gulf is bigger for Africa (US 5%, EU 21%) but apart from a temporary foray into Libya for a few months the nations in question aren't nations where there has been any Western intervention for a long time.
Which isn't to say EU's energy purchases aren't a problem, as the whole Ukraine crisis has shown the EU needs to cut dependence on Russian gas and oil.
But ultimately your claim that the EU should be stabilising the middle east because it uses more oil is basically false, given there's a mere 1.1% gap in purchases between the EU and US from the major problem areas in middle east where American blood keeps getting spilled.
Your argument is irrelevant however, it's a distraction, an attempted play on technicalities to avoid the real reason it's always the Americas that end up the middle east- it's not about oil consumption, it's about oil control. America doesn't keep meddling in the middle east because it consumes their oil, it meddles in the middle east because it wants it's companies to profit from production of that oil, and to control who gets to consume that oil.
The EU isn't engaging in the middle east as much as the US is because EU foreign policy hasn't been so focussed on controlling the flow of oil and building it's economy on the basis of taking control as much of the global oil and gas market as possible.
You mention China also, which is a similar case, you talk of lack of power projection, but that's not true- China's power projection just isn't military, it's economic. But whilst the US spent the last decade bombing Iraq and Afghanistan China spent the same decade courting under-developed African nations to build up their infrastructure and to exploit their resources- whilst America went to war to control the oil already being pumped, China invested in just pumping new oil in as yet untapped markets by funding production of wells, road, telecomms infrastructure and so on and so forth. It's been pretty busy:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
It's also interesting if you look at some of the widely available pre-2010 maps- you'll see there's barely a section of Africa that hasn't been touched to the tune of billions of dollars by the Chinese in the last 10 - 15 years.
So your misdirection was a nice try at excusing America from the problem, but it misses the very reason America isn't excused from the problem - America isn't there because it's the good guy doing the EU, China and Japan a favour. It's there out of choice because it has created and intertwined itself in the problem because it views that as a key part of it's global power projection priorities. It realises that messy military agreements and dealings with the Saudis may not net it much oil because it doesn't need it from them, but it does mean that US companies can rake in billions from helping exploit those resources whilst also providing it's military companies with lucrative defence contracts to defend those investments.
It's the very nature of the fact that America's power projection is military that's the reason it's always engaged in wars unlike China with it's economic power.
This is also in part why Saudi Arabia is more than happy to help keep oil prices low at a time when fellow OPEC members like Venezuela could be pushed to the brink of collapse by low oil prices- partly because Saudi gains in seeing a competing major oil producer crippled for a
Yes and this is largely because taxonomy is a mostly broken pseudo-science.
To this day most taxonomic classification is done based on "what it looks like" and whilst DNA classification is growing it's still not done well.
For example, if plant A looks like plant B and shares many similar traits it will still often be classified in the same genus even if DNA evidence shows it's more distinct than plant C which looks completely different but has a much closer evolutionary relationship based on DNA analysis.
The problem is that most taxonomists still let very human emotions get in the way of classification, they decide to overrule objective DNA evidence where it offends them for some reason.
But even where DNA evidence is used it's not used in a consistent way. If you have two specimens of living creatures whose DNA is 0.001% different then they may be classed as the same species if they're animals, but different species if they're plants, all to satisfy the human trait of the fact that if that 0.001% difference is visually obvious in one species but not in another then the person classifying will make a different arbitrary decision to someone else.
So when the levels of difference that define where a specimen is a different species, different genus and so forth are still arbitrary then most taxonomic classifications are still completely meaningless from a scientific standpoint.
It all comes down to the fact that taxonomy just doesn't know what it is - most proper scientists would argue they need it to be a tool that allows them to refer to different types of living thing or the same living thing in an objective manner, yet most taxonomists just treat it as a non-science (but still like to call it a science) that's used to provide convenient names for things in garden centres, zoos, museums and so forth even if those names are completely arbitrary, contradictory, and of no consistent scientific merit. So it becomes a fundamental question of who taxonomy is meant to serve? scientists by providing objective ways to refer to living things, or your average joe to give sloppy, often scientifically inaccurate but convenient names for things. Effectively taxonomy needs a formal split into two practices- strict taxonomy and casual taxonomy with each providing different taxonomic definitions, one formal, objective and useful to science, the other arbitrary, but simple and convenient.
Becareful what you wish for, the BBC has basically gone down the path of doing shows you can learn something from and apart from a few good Attenbroughs and a few good Brian Cox's every few years you basically have 3 choices:
1) Generic medical drama #125423523
2) Generic cooking show #35263463
3) Generic 1800 - 1930 show #43634633
I swear the BBC lost their costume cupboard in their move to Salford and all they could find afterwards were the 1800s clothes because if you turn the BBC on nowadays you'll either get some incredibly repetitive and dull artsy shit that caters to old people or one of the above, which mostly caters to old people. Long gone are the days where we got things like Spooks.
But then that's probably also why over half of the BBC's audience in the UK is now over 60.
So sure with the BBC everything they produce is something you can learn something from, but for christs sakes I'd only want to make so many puddings, watch so many heart attack surgeries or watch so many people doddering about boringly and aimlessly in the 1800s. Unfortunately it seems, if you wish for it, TV can end up just a little bit too much like the school you hated as a kid because most of the shit you were taught was boring crap that didn't interest you.
Okay sure there's Doctor Who and Top Gear which are popular but how often are they actually on? What if you don't like those only two shows that don't seem wholly focussed on the over 60s as their primary audience target?
I've never had a problem paying the license fee in principal because I think it's a good idea, and I think historically it's actually been great but nowadays I don't feel like I get my moneys worth given that the only thing I really get out of it is the news website and the rare documentary. I shouldn't be paying £120 a year for news and the excitement of one good hour long documentary every once in a while. There's something wrong when you can literally go weeks without there being anything in the TV schedule of interest. It's not like there hasn't been a wealth of subject matter they could've made good shows on but failed miserably in the last couple of years - 25th anniversary of the Falklands war, 100th anniversary of World War I yet on those topics it's either been repeats of documentaries we've all seen before or simply just crap. Even the World War I dramas have been more focussed on people in their 1910s clothes wardrobe pratting around in coal mines, fields, or mills back home than the actual fucking war itself.
I love education too, god only knows I've studied enough post-graduate, but I would like the TV I pay for to be at least a little bit entertaining.
Agreed, it's actual application by authorities has been pathetic. There's somewhat of an irony I guess in the fact that numerous execs were jailed for financial scandals before the law existed (i.e. some Enron and Worldcom folks were jailed) but none after despite the law creating an ever more powerful tool to do exactly that.
I'd suggest though that it's worth considering that the problem isn't the law per-se, but whoever is taking charge of enforcing it. It seems there were a lot of financial misconduct prosecutions in Clintons era and at the very very start of Bush's era possibly as a spillover from Clinton era doctrine but fuck all after that.
Of course I'm not being partisan here and pretending it's all Bush, it's pretty clear Obama has equally let plenty get away with it on his watch too. But certainly both of them seem to have overseen governments with a startling lack of prosecutions for this sort of thing compared to their predecessors.
So it's hard to judge Sarbanes-Oxley, on one hand you could argue that it put a stop to financial scandals, on the other you could say that's blatantly not true because we've seen plenty and it's not being used, on another we could say it's because of SO that we're not seeing prosecutions anymore. Personally though I suspect it's more to do with government will to prioritise and enforce that aspect of the law- i.e. since Bush and continued by Obama there is no will to enforce against financial crimes- I don't think this is purely a US phenomenom though for what it's worth, I think it's been the same here in the UK and really the West in general.
"Seems like the prosecutors could have gone with a good old "destruction of evidence" and not had to delve into Sarbanes-Oxley (which while having many good intentions is in so many ways a totally fucked up law that has made billions for a few financial and auditing consulting companies and cost tens of billions for the rest.)"
To be fair, whilst I'm not defending the way the law is written, let's not forget that the whole reason it was written- because without it a series of financial scandals meant it cost tens of billion for the rest too.
"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
"In practice, it severely restricts the ability of people to find said article, given just how popular search engines are in general, and Google in particular. Effectively, it slashes down the readership of the article by several orders of magnitude."
But that's exactly the point, the goal is neither to erase history altogether, nor to make someone's mistakes from a long time ago available within a split second.
"And I don't understand why it's a good thing, in your opinion. I understand your general point, but insofar as it pertains to Google - I fail to see what socially useful thing is served by prohibiting them from caching such article. They are as much a part of the "news pipe" as everyone else, and play an important role. I would rather have that role protected."
Because it's not relevant. Credit reference agencies in Europe are expected to ditch bankruptcy data on people after 6 - 7 years to allow people a second chance. Why should Google be allowed to act as a back door credit reference agency that has no legal restrictions on it like the actual credit reference agencies do? It makes a mockery of the whole situation, we have a whole legal framework for making sure people cannot be discriminated against indefinitely and can have a second chance financially, that someone doing a genuinely good thing like trying to start a business using their own money but then fails because the economy turns bad isn't prevented from ever owning a house again, or finding a job, or getting a girlfriend or whatever else.
If it takes a second to find this information people are likely to do so, hell they may not even be looking- what if someone or a family members Google's their friend to find out about his new business attempt only to see he went bankrupt once before, something the person didn't want his family to know about? By simply removing the quick and easy search barrier for such personal information whilst allowing it to be retained in public record we achieve balance, we ensure that it can't be used casually in places where it's not supposed to such as in a discriminatory manner in recruitment, mortgage lending and so forth but we make sure that if such a person becomes a prominent figure such that it becomes worth digging up a bit more about them that there is at least some public record available on it, that history hasn't been completely erased about them. I do not think this is an unreasonable balance, it largely solves concerns on both sides of the argument to a pretty reasonable degree- history isn't erased, but people aren't being unfairly treated because of Google holding and rapidly providing access to data that can be used in a discriminatory manner.
Effectively to do away with the data protection act we then have to do away with credit reference agencies because they become pointless as they're unrestricted (and those restrictions on CRAs exist for excellent reason) and Google can basically become an open source of everyone's financial history ever. That's really not a good thing, though I'm sure the NSA et. al. would love it.
Even outside of finance there are sensible reasons for data protection though- if a domestic abuse victim changes their name and moves but someone posts a bit of information linking their old and new lives such that their abusive partner may come and attack them then if the website wont remove it because it's outside UK jurisdiction or whatever then I really don't see why Google needs to hold a link to that. I don't see what possible benefit it serves to anyone other than a violent criminal.
I'd be more swayed by the "poor Google" argument if Google's profit margins were slim and it was a choice between no Google at all and none of this, but they make billions, worse, they don't pay half the taxes they're supposed to so the argument that they can't be bothered, that they want higher profits, that they can't afford it is nonsense, if nothing else they can pay to manage this out of all the tax money they don't pay so there's ample opportunity and r
That's not how personal data is defined in the context of the European Data Protection Directive, for starters the review was of a commercial performance and the very nature of going commercial with the performance takes it outside the realm of personal.
If the WP had instead listened in to his bedroom using listening equipment and had reviewed him performing to himself in his own home then it'd be a different story, though even here the WP would likely be guilty of infringing other laws first and foremost involving invasion of privacy, potentially intercept/wiretapping laws depending on what happened and jurisdiction etc.
When a link is removed from Google that doesn't magically remove people's ability to read the article. Newspapers have their own archiving and search systems, they're not dependent on Google for that. If you believe removing a link from a Google search erases the original article or somehow otherwise makes it unreadable as you claim then I suggest you learn a bit more about how the technology works.
It's not about being able to rewrite or erase history, it's about keeping information that is no longer relevant out of casual searches.
This achieves a balance, it means that companies wishing to use this data illegally (because we believe in second chances in Europe and so apply limitations to data such as bankruptcy information) have to go out of their way to find it, and so have no basis to defend themselves in court such that it's not worth them doing it, whilst allowing for the possibility that, say on the off chance someone who went bankrupt later becomes in charge of a national economy as a politician that history hasn't been completely erased so now that that data becomes public interest again it can be found in public record.
Who are you talking to? You seem to be making a comment that has no relevance to anything I said.
I pointed out that the summary doesn't understand the law anyway, what has that got to do with whether it's applicable in the US or whatever?
You're telling me that a law that I pointed out doesn't exist in Europe (because the law discussed in the summary isn't a real thing) doesn't apply in the US? No shit, of course it doesn't because it's not even a real law but a figment of the imagination of the idiot who wrote the summary/article.
"lease do enlighten us how it could easily apply algorithms to categorize data to distinguish between personal, protected data, and data of public records that belong to someone else. Just for shits and grins, please create an algorithm that would distinguish between the Washington Post article and the original bankruptcy article."
There's a few points to make here, firstly is the fundamental point that Google is not above the law, the applies to Google, it is not a unique or special entity. Thus, the fact is that Google has to find a way of not holding and providing data illegally in Europe in breach of the Data Protection Directive. That is a given.
So given that, Google has a choice, it can either keep hiring staff to handle request reactively manually, or it can use it's technological skills to reduce that burden. How far it trusts it's technology depends on how many false positives it's willing to have, the less false positives it wants the more it needs to depend on human determination.
But pretending Google can't improve the process with technology is laughable, I don't know if you're technically illiterate, haven't been following the news or what, but in your example, a news website, there are key terms that provide context for Google's knowledge graph - it's clear it's a news site either by the company name or key terms like "news", the date is available on the article so relevance can be ranked easily, names are nearly always easily detected and terms like bankruptcy give context. It is not a particularly hard problem in computing to fairly reliably categorise this as a story about a bankruptcy and judge it's recency. Whether you then trust the computer or categorise it for human checks is the sort of thing Google would need to trial, but no one, certainly not me is pretending there's a magic algorithm that can solve the problem 100% of the time but it is pretty clear that Google could reduce the staffing cost burden using technology to make this less of an issue for them.
"Wow. So that means that now laws that cannot be followed every time are a good idea? In the case of Google, it means a perpetual fine that cannot be escaped, is completely arbitrary, and applies only to Google."
So anyone arrested for murder is always guilty? What? Where do you live? That's not how the law works, even if Google doesn't pro-actively remove such content it still has scope to do so when alerted to it, it only faces penalties if it outright refuses to do so and has no legal basis for the refusal. Even if it believes it has a basis but is found not to in a court of law the courts will not penalise just for losing the argument if it's argument was fair and in good faith unless it seems clear Google was intentionally taking the piss. The chance of Google getting penalised is basically zero unless it tries very hard to take things all the way to trial and loses.
"Everything you posted so far is a damning indictment of exactly why this law is terrible: it's not possible to fully comply, it's arbitrary, it's open to abuse from all sides, and its target is also completely arbitrary."
I don't think you know what the word arbitrary means, because it's obviously not arbitrary given the fact the bounds are well publicised and established. Any fringe cases can be dealt with in court and Google will know which way to turn if it wants to there, but the vast majority of cases are very clear cut and few of those that aren't will actually end up in court.
As for whether this law should exist? Well it's quite simple. For over a decade just about every company that exists in or operates in Europe has managed to comply with this law. It's been successful in reducing spam and reducing the number of victims of unnecessary discrimination. It's stopped companies carrying out invasive acts in people's lives and it enjoys broad support across the continent where it exists. You only have to look at various discussions where Americans bitch about marketing and robocalling here, or bitch about refusal for m
Is that actually true?
So "abstract" is a get out of jail free card in the US? You could use the abstract defence to serve stolen credit card numbers?
Could Snowden have leaked national security secrets via snippets as abstracts and been immune from prosecution?
I don't think that's right, I'd be surprised if an abstract under fair use laws gives you an inherent legal right to disseminate illegal information in the US. I suspect there are still limits on what information can be published publicly.
"For starters Google (in the context of the search engine, not plus or ads) is not collecting data about you but about the websites. This includes the indexed content of the website."
That's nonsense, you can't merely separate the two with a throwaway statement. If the website it's collecting data from contains data about you then Google is collecting data about you, it's a logical fallacy to suggest otherwise.
"This is the only way a search engine can work."
This is another fallacy. Google already has plenty of algorithms to categorise data, it could easily apply the same to personal data to be flagged to review but it opts not to because it doesn't want to cut into it's bottom line, but companies don't get to increase profits by ignoring the law, that's just not the way the world works. This isn't a situation where Google would have to go bankrupt to adhere to the law and we're left with a choice of no Google or no data protection. It's perfectly possible to have both- no one is expecting perfection, but ultimately just because Google may never get it perfectly right doesn't mean they should be freed from the law altogether.
As for the rest of your post, I have no idea what the relevance of your analogy was, it seems to veer off so far from the subject at hand I can't even begin to associate it with any rational on-topic point. You then follow that up with some declaration that Google isn't breaking the law even though it was and that you're not American and are German. I really don't know where you were going towards the end but you seemed to fly off on some completely random tangents there.