The thing is, since decisions made in the EU are typically completely undemocratic anyway, I have no problem with being stuck with only 70–80% of them if the alternative is 100%. Frankly, we have a lot of money and skilled labour, which puts us in a strong position to make bilateral or collective deals for mutual benefit anyway.
I'm sick of being told that my own government, which presently has a dubious enough mandate itself for multiple reasons, can't do things that are clearly wanted by the population of my own country, because they claim they have to comply with such-and-such a European rule. It's remarkable how often unelected busybodies pushed out to Europe by our own government (Mandy, anyone?) manage to get such rules made, yet how powerless they always seem to be when it comes to changing them in ways the Powers That Be do not like. It's also remarkable how long it takes our government to comply with European Court rulings that it doesn't like.
Moreover, to the other poster who commented on the cheap supply of Eastern European labour, it's only cheap when much of it is illegal. Otherwise, unskilled manual labour pays the same minimum wage it pays to people from our own country, and skilled workers manage to charge just as much whether they are from here or elsewhere. Meanwhile, we have huge problems because of the sheer number of immigrants from those same countries: basic services like health and education can't cope in several areas; there aren't enough houses; our transport infrastructure is insufficient; and even people who come over to do honest, legal work often bring their whole family with them, which drains our resources even further. And of course, we're also screwing the native countries of these people, because those who are able to come and work in the UK are typically among the more skilled and qualified, or at least those with dedication and a good work ethic, and those are precisely the people that those countries need themselves in order to improve their own economic prosperity and catch up with the more developed nations in the Union.
We managed just fine before the EU, when Europe simply had useful trade agreements for mutual benefit. One of the few other good things to come out of Europe is the European Convention on Human Rights, but as someone usually points out in these discussions, that also did not come from the European Union, but from the much older Council of Europe (not to be mistaken for any EU bodies with a similar name).
What the EU adds on top is trying to tie our nations' economies and workforces together, which is never going to work as long as member nations have such dramatically different economic power at home. And then there is the whole undemocratic cash sink that is the EU administration, which is an abomination no-one would tolerate, if only they could actually vote out the people responsible.
In short, I (and many more people) am not Euro-sceptic in general, but I am hostile to the European Union.
European courts have had UK laws overturned in the past, and no doubt will again.
Which is why all those innocent people whose DNA was being held on the national database have had their records deleted, in line with the recent court ruling.
Oh, wait, they haven't. The government is still planning to hold those DNA records for several years, and longer if the (not even charged, never mind prosecuted) offence involved was in certain categories.
If the government really wants to push the law through, it can withdraw from the Treaty of European Union, but I suspect a lot of companies would object to... not getting any more EU subsidy money.
You do realise that those of us on this side of the channel are some of the biggest net contributors to EU coffers, right?
So....do all these cameras keep the police in line, too?
No. Strangely, whenever there are incidents where the authorities are accused of inappropriate behaviour, the CCTV footage always seems to be "missing".
London Underground is full of cameras. How many captured anything on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed?
At the recent G20 protests in London where the police "kettling" tactic was widely criticised and hundreds of complaints about police behaviour resulted, how much evidence from CCTV has been produced to show the police acting reasonably? Compared with how much amateur footage shot with mobile phones and the like?
At similarly infamous May Day protests a few years ago, when again the police were widely criticised for their handling of the situation, journalists and victims questioned why all of the CCTV in the area also seemed to be switched off.
It's as if the magic "Kill all the CCTV!" button from The Bourne Ultimatum actually existed and was sat in the control room at Scotland Yard.
CPU usage is not the only constraint you have to think about. Rack space, power, and cooling should be considered as well.
Sure, when you get to the point of scaling up the hardware that's going to make a difference. But again, I have to ask how many projects today will ever need to scale beyond trivial levels of space, power and cooling? After all, with modern computing power, you can run some pretty serious systems out of a small cupboard in the corner of your office, off a standard power supply, without so much as installing air-con.
Exactly. The need for databases has not gone away, but the upper bound for what you can do with cheap, commodity hardware and the likes of Postgres or MySQL is now higher than most projects will ever need. Numerous popular web sites run on a handful of well-specified but basically off-the-shelf PCs. Almost any in-house business admin application can be run this way, too.
I'd go further than the parent post, though, because I suspect it's just as bad at the other end of the spectrum now. Unless you're working for something like a bank, a government social security department, or a massive commercial outfit like Amazon, you probably don't need the high-end capabilities of software like Oracle any more. However, if you really are playing in that league, it's probably cheaper to buy lots of commodity PC parts and build your own cloud than to use expensive, high-end server kit from the likes of Sun. Likewise, if you're Google or Amazon, you have the resources to develop bespoke software tools to match your needs anyway (and if you're not quite Google or Amazon yet, you can lease resources from those who are).
It's hard to see how either Oracle or Sun has much of a top-end target market left for its traditional products. It would be interesting if they went for an aggressive mid-range offering though, aiming at providing a complete hardware and software platform for mid-large businesses that are fed up with Microsoft but don't want to outsource everything to the cloud either. Post-merger, they'll have a credible office suite, more database expertise than anyone else, lots of supporting back-end/middleware tools, and a programming language and client-side software platform that were tailor-made for remote deployment.
If it turns out that the market likes the benefits of centralised admin and remote deployment, but wants to keep control in-house rather than trusting (and paying ongoing fees for) third party services, then an Oracle/Sun combo that invested its resources smartly over the next couple of years should be able to compete very strongly. They might even be able to build a credible long-term business model based on support, consulting and customisation, rather than relying on relatively few sales of expensive hardware and DB licences.
Thought for the day: if this goes through, I'll be glad I don't have shares in SAP.
It's high enough resolution to identify people, car registrations, and the like.
In any case, are you claiming that the rules should be that it's OK now, but if the resolution went up a bit it would suddenly become unacceptable? When does that happen? 50% better resolution? 200%? 1000%? When I can see what's on TV in someone's home? When I can read the bank statement on the desk in someone's home?
Please make at least some effort to read the other comments before posting yourself.
If you look back to what I was challenging in my comments above, and indeed elsewhere in this thread, you'll find that the argument that anything observable from a public place is automatically up for grabs is pretty much exactly what several people are claiming in support of Street View.
Of course that is silly and the issue of privacy can't just be black and white, for reasons such as you suggest. That's exactly what I, and some other posters around here, have been arguing. You're attacking the wrong target.
Of course Street View doesn't go as far as I described, but as you could see if you'd read the other comments before posting yours, my point is that if you're going to argue that anything in public is fair game, there is no difference in principle between what Street View does and what I described. So, where do you draw the line? Why is Street View OK, but what I described not OK?
It is a simple reductio ad absurdum argument: if you don't like the logical conclusion of the premise that anything in public is open to anyone regardless of how they use it, then you don't get to rely on that premise to defend Street View.
An individual following another individual around and taking pictures clearly intends something entirely different from Street View.
Sure, and I'd agree completely that stalker-like behaviour is even creepier than mass surveillance.
However, those I am challenging, whose fundamental argument is that if you can observe something from a public place then anything goes, are not entitled to make such distinctions. I assume all their photographs are also in black and white...
But from a public policy and rights perspective, it would have been better for the American people long-term if Google actually started fighting and winning these suits in order to shut the nutjobs up. If you don't want people to see you -- stay inside.
So where do you draw the line? Can I follow you around? Can I record everywhere you go? Can I watch over your shoulder while you type your PIN, and photograph your credit card number when you take it out of your wallet and it is momentarily visible? Can I systematically record who you spend your time with, when you and your family are out of your home, how your kids go to school, what routes you drive and the details of your car? What about using high-res video equipment and listening devices to monitor what's happening inside your home from outside? How about I publish your entire life, and those of your family and friends, everything I can observe from public places, using any modern technology I can lay my hands on, on-line for all to see?
I wish someone had tried to do that to fools like Scott "Privacy is dead, deal with it" McNealy. It would made a nice demonstration of the hypocrisy when his expensive security people and/or the police had intervened, particularly if any sort of privacy or harassment laws were used to justify the intervention.
Unless you're a lawyer or a judge who disagrees with all the briefings I've had with some of the nation's top attorneys on just this kind of matter, don't bother to respond.
Yes, I definitely believe that someone who wrote a post like that on a forum like Slashdot is a high-flying legal eagle, and furthermore that my own ethics should be completely dictated by the legal system in your jurisdiction, and I'm sure everyone else here agrees that we should just take your word for it.
Oh, sorry, wait: your listed homepage is for a company that makes money from photographing buildings. I'm sure you're not biased at all, then.
But because it's on the internet, it's somehow special now.
Someone in the street randomly walking past your house is a momentary, transient thing. Any observations are made incidentally by a single person, if they happen to be looking at all, which most people won't anyway because they'd feel a bit embarassed if they were caught peering in through someone else's window.
Google is a commercial organisation, systematically collecting high resolution images of an entire area while the people doing it are safely hidden away inside a car and then storing those images in a permanent, searchable database that is accessible to anyone.
Can you really not see the difference between these two scenarios?
Google have always pushed the boundaries of what is reasonable behaviour in terms of data mining, but I think this time they have clearly gone too far and they're about to start feeling the resistance that has been brewing for a while now. Countries are trying to prohibit their actions by law. Perhaps more telling, whole villages of normal people are turning out to physically block the car because they don't want it spying on them. Google are even failing the obvious reasonable behaviour test of "Would people think it was acceptable if those Google staff went up to every home in person and took a high res camera shot through the front window?" Are you seriously claiming that if someone walked up to the front of your home in person and started snapping away through all your windows, maybe a shot down the side to where your kids are playing, noting down your car registration, and so on, you would have no problem with that? I suppose that's possible, but I think you're in a very small minority if that's true.
As usual, the law is not keeping pace with technology, but in an era of mass communication and enormous databases, we really do need to make sure we get serious privacy/personal data protections enshrined in law in the very near future. Very bad stuff is already happened to far too many people, and it's only going to get worse if governments and megacorps are allowed to continue on their quest to turn every citizen's life into rows in a database.
Virtually all teachers do exactly that - it's mandated by the law.
Not where I live, it's not. Please open your eyes and realise that there are more people in the world (and on the Internet) than those where you live.
You on the other hand refuse to do that (because you're stubborn) and thus can't get a decent job.
Why do you post things like that? Do you somehow think that insulting me will make your point any more valid, convince me that you're right, or convince anyone else who might be reading this that my point of view has less merit?
You're wrong, by the way, as a cursory glance at my posting history would make obvious.
Can you not read? I answered this question in depth, and thus there was no need to repeat it twice.
Well, no. You might think you did, but whatever you're thinking, you didn't write it.
In any case, now you're changing the rules, and suddenly our teacher is apparently standing up in class and saying that drinking is dangerous and causes liver damage. Leaving aside the fact that (assuming responsible drinking in moderation) there is no evidence to support your claim and plenty to suggest that a glass of good wine now and then actually has health benefits, where did this idea of the teacher being hypocritical come from? No-one's mentioned it before.
This is no different than my own boss *requesting* I not travel internationally, unless I inform them, due to concerns about exportation of state secrets. Yes it's legal to travel, but it's still something they like to monitor. It's part of being a professional.
No, it's part of being a slave. That's what they call it when others get to control and monitor you full-time. Go ahead and play along if you like, but personally, no employer of mine gets the right to tell me where I go on my time off, nor to be told where I actually went.
The timing of this article is ironic for me. My other half is visiting NY (we live in the UK) and just called to tell me her mobile got trashed in an accident but wouldn't have worked anyway as it doesn't support the US frequency bands.
Of course, that call was pretty short, since landline calls from the hotel to the UK are $5.50 for the first minute and $3.50 per minute after that. It's hard to imagine why people would eschew a service offering such clear value for money in favour of flat rate services like writing an e-mail!:-)
The key word, which you ignored, is the boss would ASK her to remove the photos.
Why should she even be asked to remove the photo, though? She is doing nothing wrong.
Posting photos where adults happen to be enjoying a glass of wine in good company is not against the law. On the contrary, countries where children are exposed to responsible drinking behaviour from an early age have much, much lower incidence of alcohol-related criminal activity.
She doesn't deserve to be fired, but I see no harm in a boss simply asking her to use better judgment.
I don't see anything wrong with her judgement just the way it is.
I would, however, have a problem with anyone whose judgement said that people should not be free to share photographs of themselves participating in perfectly normal and legal activities, just because they happen to be teachers and the children they taught were not yet allowed to take part in the same activities. That's just political correctness gone mad, and a terrible example of allowing an employer to interfere with an employee's private life outside work.
If a teacher posts a bunch of wedding photos and in some of those she's drinking wine, DON'T fire the teacher for actions performed off-the-clock. Simply ask her to remove the photo.
Why should she even do that? There is nothing illegal or inappropriate about either getting married or drinking wine.
If someone has a problem with photos such as you describe, then the problem is with the person, not the photo.
If that someone is the teacher's boss, then they need to find a new line of work, because they're lousy at supporting their staff.
Which is lovely, until all the organisations you necessarily deal with — government departments, financial institutions, employers/clients, and so on — start putting personal data about you on their own systems that you don't control.
Well, it's quite a large step really, isn't it? For one thing, no-one from the BSA has the legal right to just arbitrarily visit your premises and demand to audit your stuff: if you're (for example) an all-FOSS shop and they want to check your Microsoft licensing, you can just tell them to go bother someone else.
The problem with the threat to sue idea, in the US at least, is that for an individual to defend themselves from such a lawsuit, even if they are innocent, the cost may be high, perhaps more so than the amount of money they would have to pay to settle. This demonstrates that the US "justice" system is fundamentally broken, of course, but that's how things are today, and that's how the RIAA get away with it.
On the other hand, businesses threatened in a similar way are likely to have legal resources they can drawn upon and have budgeted for; certainly anyone big enough to have a significant bank balance to hit for damages will have. That makes them far less appealing targets, so it wouldn't really be worth the BSA going after businesses with speculative threats of legal action anyway.
And when the going got tough, as I recall, Twitter fell over, as did most of the other darlings of the current social networking hypewave.
It's kind of amusing that people have started to think of simple web front ends to simple CRUD applications as if they're demanding. Indexing the entire WWW is demanding. Running the financial systems behind a bank is demanding. Modelling weather systems is demanding. The CAD models for a 60' yacht are demanding.
Running a web site that provides a trivial front-end to a database with one three-column table is not demanding, even if you're getting lots of hits. And it still fell over.
Because the BSA attacks businesses, not disabled single mothers, children, and the dead, fewer people even know about them.
Also, while their behaviour has not been perfect, as far as I know the BSA has never systematically and deliberately gone after parties who are probably innocent. While they have been known to try to pull audits and such under somewhat dubious circumstances, it's usually at least responding to a tip-off.
Big Music and Big Movies, on the other hand, have frequently and systematically attacked legitimate consumers, and run campaigns of intimidation based on at best dubious legal claims and misleading advertising.
Sure you do, except for all the little get-outs they keep trying to introduce, like making it only two points for slight speeding, or letting you take a "speed awareness" course to get out of some of the penalty.
These measures conveniently mean that they can fine incidental speeders more often before taking them off the road.
Now, either slightly speeding is inherently dangerous, or it is not. If it is, then those dangerous drivers should be taken off the road quickly, to keep everyone else safe. If it is not, then there is no excuse for penalising people who accidentally exceed the limit at the wrong moment and get caught. But saying that it's serious enough to merit significant financial penalties, yet safe enough to leave the offenders on the road (and paying all the associated taxes, of course) is just hypocrisy.
The real solution, of course, is to do away with the artificial limits, look at each case on its merits, and if someone was actually driving dangerously or inconsiderately, punish them accordingly. But that requires actual police officers, court time, and due process. It's much easier to create a technical offence and automate enforcement without troubling over those other little details.
Oh, sorry, we were talking about copyright law not speeding, weren't we? I wonder how I mixed up the two areas, they're not at all alike.
The Reg covered it yesterday and noted that Mandelson denied this report -- given they're due for an election in less than a year I can't believe they'd go out of their way to alienate voters.
New Labour are effectively a lame duck government at this point: they have no realistic chance of retaining power after the next election. Indeed, IIRC there have been low points in their popularity recently where according to the polls and given how our electoral system works, they might even have been pushed into third place if the election had been held at that time.
Unfortunately, this puts them rather in the position of a trapped animal that has no choice but to fight: they have nothing left to lose, so they can institute as many poor policies as they like in the next year and no-one can do anything to stop them or punish them. Thus we see the continued madness with things like ID cards and databases (which pretty much all of the other big parties oppose), and we also see lobbyist-friendly measures in fields like copyright that aren't important enough to swing lots of votes but do gather favour for when electoral funding time comes around.
Oh, and Mandelson is the textbook example of why our political system is broken: he couldn't hold on to legitimate, elected office, and for years he's been doing the rounds in unelected but powerful positions thanks to friends in high places. Then again, I suppose it's no less damning that he should head the government in Brown's absence than that Brown himself should head the government when his party were elected after giving explicit guarantees that people weren't voting for this scenario. The sooner we get move to genuinely representative democracy in this country, the better.
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The thing is, since decisions made in the EU are typically completely undemocratic anyway, I have no problem with being stuck with only 70–80% of them if the alternative is 100%. Frankly, we have a lot of money and skilled labour, which puts us in a strong position to make bilateral or collective deals for mutual benefit anyway.
I'm sick of being told that my own government, which presently has a dubious enough mandate itself for multiple reasons, can't do things that are clearly wanted by the population of my own country, because they claim they have to comply with such-and-such a European rule. It's remarkable how often unelected busybodies pushed out to Europe by our own government (Mandy, anyone?) manage to get such rules made, yet how powerless they always seem to be when it comes to changing them in ways the Powers That Be do not like. It's also remarkable how long it takes our government to comply with European Court rulings that it doesn't like.
Moreover, to the other poster who commented on the cheap supply of Eastern European labour, it's only cheap when much of it is illegal. Otherwise, unskilled manual labour pays the same minimum wage it pays to people from our own country, and skilled workers manage to charge just as much whether they are from here or elsewhere. Meanwhile, we have huge problems because of the sheer number of immigrants from those same countries: basic services like health and education can't cope in several areas; there aren't enough houses; our transport infrastructure is insufficient; and even people who come over to do honest, legal work often bring their whole family with them, which drains our resources even further. And of course, we're also screwing the native countries of these people, because those who are able to come and work in the UK are typically among the more skilled and qualified, or at least those with dedication and a good work ethic, and those are precisely the people that those countries need themselves in order to improve their own economic prosperity and catch up with the more developed nations in the Union.
We managed just fine before the EU, when Europe simply had useful trade agreements for mutual benefit. One of the few other good things to come out of Europe is the European Convention on Human Rights, but as someone usually points out in these discussions, that also did not come from the European Union, but from the much older Council of Europe (not to be mistaken for any EU bodies with a similar name).
What the EU adds on top is trying to tie our nations' economies and workforces together, which is never going to work as long as member nations have such dramatically different economic power at home. And then there is the whole undemocratic cash sink that is the EU administration, which is an abomination no-one would tolerate, if only they could actually vote out the people responsible.
In short, I (and many more people) am not Euro-sceptic in general, but I am hostile to the European Union.
European courts have had UK laws overturned in the past, and no doubt will again.
Which is why all those innocent people whose DNA was being held on the national database have had their records deleted, in line with the recent court ruling.
Oh, wait, they haven't. The government is still planning to hold those DNA records for several years, and longer if the (not even charged, never mind prosecuted) offence involved was in certain categories.
If the government really wants to push the law through, it can withdraw from the Treaty of European Union, but I suspect a lot of companies would object to ... not getting any more EU subsidy money.
You do realise that those of us on this side of the channel are some of the biggest net contributors to EU coffers, right?
So....do all these cameras keep the police in line, too?
No. Strangely, whenever there are incidents where the authorities are accused of inappropriate behaviour, the CCTV footage always seems to be "missing".
London Underground is full of cameras. How many captured anything on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed?
At the recent G20 protests in London where the police "kettling" tactic was widely criticised and hundreds of complaints about police behaviour resulted, how much evidence from CCTV has been produced to show the police acting reasonably? Compared with how much amateur footage shot with mobile phones and the like?
At similarly infamous May Day protests a few years ago, when again the police were widely criticised for their handling of the situation, journalists and victims questioned why all of the CCTV in the area also seemed to be switched off.
It's as if the magic "Kill all the CCTV!" button from The Bourne Ultimatum actually existed and was sat in the control room at Scotland Yard.
CPU usage is not the only constraint you have to think about. Rack space, power, and cooling should be considered as well.
Sure, when you get to the point of scaling up the hardware that's going to make a difference. But again, I have to ask how many projects today will ever need to scale beyond trivial levels of space, power and cooling? After all, with modern computing power, you can run some pretty serious systems out of a small cupboard in the corner of your office, off a standard power supply, without so much as installing air-con.
Exactly. The need for databases has not gone away, but the upper bound for what you can do with cheap, commodity hardware and the likes of Postgres or MySQL is now higher than most projects will ever need. Numerous popular web sites run on a handful of well-specified but basically off-the-shelf PCs. Almost any in-house business admin application can be run this way, too.
I'd go further than the parent post, though, because I suspect it's just as bad at the other end of the spectrum now. Unless you're working for something like a bank, a government social security department, or a massive commercial outfit like Amazon, you probably don't need the high-end capabilities of software like Oracle any more. However, if you really are playing in that league, it's probably cheaper to buy lots of commodity PC parts and build your own cloud than to use expensive, high-end server kit from the likes of Sun. Likewise, if you're Google or Amazon, you have the resources to develop bespoke software tools to match your needs anyway (and if you're not quite Google or Amazon yet, you can lease resources from those who are).
It's hard to see how either Oracle or Sun has much of a top-end target market left for its traditional products. It would be interesting if they went for an aggressive mid-range offering though, aiming at providing a complete hardware and software platform for mid-large businesses that are fed up with Microsoft but don't want to outsource everything to the cloud either. Post-merger, they'll have a credible office suite, more database expertise than anyone else, lots of supporting back-end/middleware tools, and a programming language and client-side software platform that were tailor-made for remote deployment.
If it turns out that the market likes the benefits of centralised admin and remote deployment, but wants to keep control in-house rather than trusting (and paying ongoing fees for) third party services, then an Oracle/Sun combo that invested its resources smartly over the next couple of years should be able to compete very strongly. They might even be able to build a credible long-term business model based on support, consulting and customisation, rather than relying on relatively few sales of expensive hardware and DB licences.
Thought for the day: if this goes through, I'll be glad I don't have shares in SAP.
It's high enough resolution to identify people, car registrations, and the like.
In any case, are you claiming that the rules should be that it's OK now, but if the resolution went up a bit it would suddenly become unacceptable? When does that happen? 50% better resolution? 200%? 1000%? When I can see what's on TV in someone's home? When I can read the bank statement on the desk in someone's home?
Please make at least some effort to read the other comments before posting yourself.
If you look back to what I was challenging in my comments above, and indeed elsewhere in this thread, you'll find that the argument that anything observable from a public place is automatically up for grabs is pretty much exactly what several people are claiming in support of Street View.
Of course that is silly and the issue of privacy can't just be black and white, for reasons such as you suggest. That's exactly what I, and some other posters around here, have been arguing. You're attacking the wrong target.
Of course Street View doesn't go as far as I described, but as you could see if you'd read the other comments before posting yours, my point is that if you're going to argue that anything in public is fair game, there is no difference in principle between what Street View does and what I described. So, where do you draw the line? Why is Street View OK, but what I described not OK?
It is a simple reductio ad absurdum argument: if you don't like the logical conclusion of the premise that anything in public is open to anyone regardless of how they use it, then you don't get to rely on that premise to defend Street View.
An individual following another individual around and taking pictures clearly intends something entirely different from Street View.
Sure, and I'd agree completely that stalker-like behaviour is even creepier than mass surveillance.
However, those I am challenging, whose fundamental argument is that if you can observe something from a public place then anything goes, are not entitled to make such distinctions. I assume all their photographs are also in black and white...
In what jurisdiction?
But from a public policy and rights perspective, it would have been better for the American people long-term if Google actually started fighting and winning these suits in order to shut the nutjobs up. If you don't want people to see you -- stay inside.
So where do you draw the line? Can I follow you around? Can I record everywhere you go? Can I watch over your shoulder while you type your PIN, and photograph your credit card number when you take it out of your wallet and it is momentarily visible? Can I systematically record who you spend your time with, when you and your family are out of your home, how your kids go to school, what routes you drive and the details of your car? What about using high-res video equipment and listening devices to monitor what's happening inside your home from outside? How about I publish your entire life, and those of your family and friends, everything I can observe from public places, using any modern technology I can lay my hands on, on-line for all to see?
I wish someone had tried to do that to fools like Scott "Privacy is dead, deal with it" McNealy. It would made a nice demonstration of the hypocrisy when his expensive security people and/or the police had intervened, particularly if any sort of privacy or harassment laws were used to justify the intervention.
Unless you're a lawyer or a judge who disagrees with all the briefings I've had with some of the nation's top attorneys on just this kind of matter, don't bother to respond.
Yes, I definitely believe that someone who wrote a post like that on a forum like Slashdot is a high-flying legal eagle, and furthermore that my own ethics should be completely dictated by the legal system in your jurisdiction, and I'm sure everyone else here agrees that we should just take your word for it.
Oh, sorry, wait: your listed homepage is for a company that makes money from photographing buildings. I'm sure you're not biased at all, then.
But because it's on the internet, it's somehow special now.
Someone in the street randomly walking past your house is a momentary, transient thing. Any observations are made incidentally by a single person, if they happen to be looking at all, which most people won't anyway because they'd feel a bit embarassed if they were caught peering in through someone else's window.
Google is a commercial organisation, systematically collecting high resolution images of an entire area while the people doing it are safely hidden away inside a car and then storing those images in a permanent, searchable database that is accessible to anyone.
Can you really not see the difference between these two scenarios?
Google have always pushed the boundaries of what is reasonable behaviour in terms of data mining, but I think this time they have clearly gone too far and they're about to start feeling the resistance that has been brewing for a while now. Countries are trying to prohibit their actions by law. Perhaps more telling, whole villages of normal people are turning out to physically block the car because they don't want it spying on them. Google are even failing the obvious reasonable behaviour test of "Would people think it was acceptable if those Google staff went up to every home in person and took a high res camera shot through the front window?" Are you seriously claiming that if someone walked up to the front of your home in person and started snapping away through all your windows, maybe a shot down the side to where your kids are playing, noting down your car registration, and so on, you would have no problem with that? I suppose that's possible, but I think you're in a very small minority if that's true.
As usual, the law is not keeping pace with technology, but in an era of mass communication and enormous databases, we really do need to make sure we get serious privacy/personal data protections enshrined in law in the very near future. Very bad stuff is already happened to far too many people, and it's only going to get worse if governments and megacorps are allowed to continue on their quest to turn every citizen's life into rows in a database.
Virtually all teachers do exactly that - it's mandated by the law.
Not where I live, it's not. Please open your eyes and realise that there are more people in the world (and on the Internet) than those where you live.
You on the other hand refuse to do that (because you're stubborn) and thus can't get a decent job.
Why do you post things like that? Do you somehow think that insulting me will make your point any more valid, convince me that you're right, or convince anyone else who might be reading this that my point of view has less merit?
You're wrong, by the way, as a cursory glance at my posting history would make obvious.
Can you not read? I answered this question in depth, and thus there was no need to repeat it twice.
Well, no. You might think you did, but whatever you're thinking, you didn't write it.
In any case, now you're changing the rules, and suddenly our teacher is apparently standing up in class and saying that drinking is dangerous and causes liver damage. Leaving aside the fact that (assuming responsible drinking in moderation) there is no evidence to support your claim and plenty to suggest that a glass of good wine now and then actually has health benefits, where did this idea of the teacher being hypocritical come from? No-one's mentioned it before.
This is no different than my own boss *requesting* I not travel internationally, unless I inform them, due to concerns about exportation of state secrets. Yes it's legal to travel, but it's still something they like to monitor. It's part of being a professional.
No, it's part of being a slave. That's what they call it when others get to control and monitor you full-time. Go ahead and play along if you like, but personally, no employer of mine gets the right to tell me where I go on my time off, nor to be told where I actually went.
The timing of this article is ironic for me. My other half is visiting NY (we live in the UK) and just called to tell me her mobile got trashed in an accident but wouldn't have worked anyway as it doesn't support the US frequency bands.
Of course, that call was pretty short, since landline calls from the hotel to the UK are $5.50 for the first minute and $3.50 per minute after that. It's hard to imagine why people would eschew a service offering such clear value for money in favour of flat rate services like writing an e-mail! :-)
The key word, which you ignored, is the boss would ASK her to remove the photos.
Why should she even be asked to remove the photo, though? She is doing nothing wrong.
Posting photos where adults happen to be enjoying a glass of wine in good company is not against the law. On the contrary, countries where children are exposed to responsible drinking behaviour from an early age have much, much lower incidence of alcohol-related criminal activity.
She doesn't deserve to be fired, but I see no harm in a boss simply asking her to use better judgment.
I don't see anything wrong with her judgement just the way it is.
I would, however, have a problem with anyone whose judgement said that people should not be free to share photographs of themselves participating in perfectly normal and legal activities, just because they happen to be teachers and the children they taught were not yet allowed to take part in the same activities. That's just political correctness gone mad, and a terrible example of allowing an employer to interfere with an employee's private life outside work.
If a teacher posts a bunch of wedding photos and in some of those she's drinking wine, DON'T fire the teacher for actions performed off-the-clock. Simply ask her to remove the photo.
Why should she even do that? There is nothing illegal or inappropriate about either getting married or drinking wine.
If someone has a problem with photos such as you describe, then the problem is with the person, not the photo.
If that someone is the teacher's boss, then they need to find a new line of work, because they're lousy at supporting their staff.
You can't have a respected office, no matter how good the candidate is, if they're a drunken lout in their off hours.
I believe the point is not what they do in their off hours, but what they might have done in their off hours thirty years ago as a student.
People change. Almost everyone made some sort of "mistake" in their youth. In a sane world, we don't hold that against them long after it matters.
Which is lovely, until all the organisations you necessarily deal with — government departments, financial institutions, employers/clients, and so on — start putting personal data about you on their own systems that you don't control.
Well, it's quite a large step really, isn't it? For one thing, no-one from the BSA has the legal right to just arbitrarily visit your premises and demand to audit your stuff: if you're (for example) an all-FOSS shop and they want to check your Microsoft licensing, you can just tell them to go bother someone else.
The problem with the threat to sue idea, in the US at least, is that for an individual to defend themselves from such a lawsuit, even if they are innocent, the cost may be high, perhaps more so than the amount of money they would have to pay to settle. This demonstrates that the US "justice" system is fundamentally broken, of course, but that's how things are today, and that's how the RIAA get away with it.
On the other hand, businesses threatened in a similar way are likely to have legal resources they can drawn upon and have budgeted for; certainly anyone big enough to have a significant bank balance to hit for damages will have. That makes them far less appealing targets, so it wouldn't really be worth the BSA going after businesses with speculative threats of legal action anyway.
And when the going got tough, as I recall, Twitter fell over, as did most of the other darlings of the current social networking hypewave.
It's kind of amusing that people have started to think of simple web front ends to simple CRUD applications as if they're demanding. Indexing the entire WWW is demanding. Running the financial systems behind a bank is demanding. Modelling weather systems is demanding. The CAD models for a 60' yacht are demanding.
Running a web site that provides a trivial front-end to a database with one three-column table is not demanding, even if you're getting lots of hits. And it still fell over.
Because the BSA attacks businesses, not disabled single mothers, children, and the dead, fewer people even know about them.
Also, while their behaviour has not been perfect, as far as I know the BSA has never systematically and deliberately gone after parties who are probably innocent. While they have been known to try to pull audits and such under somewhat dubious circumstances, it's usually at least responding to a tip-off.
Big Music and Big Movies, on the other hand, have frequently and systematically attacked legitimate consumers, and run campaigns of intimidation based on at best dubious legal claims and misleading advertising.
the Data Protection Act forces organisations to keep data secure
Sadly, it appears that you are mistaken.
Sure you do, except for all the little get-outs they keep trying to introduce, like making it only two points for slight speeding, or letting you take a "speed awareness" course to get out of some of the penalty.
These measures conveniently mean that they can fine incidental speeders more often before taking them off the road.
Now, either slightly speeding is inherently dangerous, or it is not. If it is, then those dangerous drivers should be taken off the road quickly, to keep everyone else safe. If it is not, then there is no excuse for penalising people who accidentally exceed the limit at the wrong moment and get caught. But saying that it's serious enough to merit significant financial penalties, yet safe enough to leave the offenders on the road (and paying all the associated taxes, of course) is just hypocrisy.
The real solution, of course, is to do away with the artificial limits, look at each case on its merits, and if someone was actually driving dangerously or inconsiderately, punish them accordingly. But that requires actual police officers, court time, and due process. It's much easier to create a technical offence and automate enforcement without troubling over those other little details.
Oh, sorry, we were talking about copyright law not speeding, weren't we? I wonder how I mixed up the two areas, they're not at all alike.
The Reg covered it yesterday and noted that Mandelson denied this report -- given they're due for an election in less than a year I can't believe they'd go out of their way to alienate voters.
New Labour are effectively a lame duck government at this point: they have no realistic chance of retaining power after the next election. Indeed, IIRC there have been low points in their popularity recently where according to the polls and given how our electoral system works, they might even have been pushed into third place if the election had been held at that time.
Unfortunately, this puts them rather in the position of a trapped animal that has no choice but to fight: they have nothing left to lose, so they can institute as many poor policies as they like in the next year and no-one can do anything to stop them or punish them. Thus we see the continued madness with things like ID cards and databases (which pretty much all of the other big parties oppose), and we also see lobbyist-friendly measures in fields like copyright that aren't important enough to swing lots of votes but do gather favour for when electoral funding time comes around.
Oh, and Mandelson is the textbook example of why our political system is broken: he couldn't hold on to legitimate, elected office, and for years he's been doing the rounds in unelected but powerful positions thanks to friends in high places. Then again, I suppose it's no less damning that he should head the government in Brown's absence than that Brown himself should head the government when his party were elected after giving explicit guarantees that people weren't voting for this scenario. The sooner we get move to genuinely representative democracy in this country, the better.