This is probably difficult to understand for Americans, but the key factor that makes SV so amazing is that venture capitalists over there are a century ahead in terms of taking risks than anywhere else in the world
Most of Silicon Valley isn't amazing. Most businesses supported by that venture capital culture you're talking about fail.
The peculiar thing about SV is the glorification of failure. It's rather like the traditional American Dream, where everyone is going to be rich one day so huge numbers of ordinary people irrationally support policies that actively go against their interests and probably always will. The venture capital model is based on the idea that if you support 100 businesses, it doesn't matter if 99 of them blow your whole investment and then die, as long as the last one becomes the next Facebook or Google or Amazon.
You can get away with this in the US partly because there is a seemingly endless supply of kids who are willing to basically give up any sort of work-life balance for a while in the hope that they too will be the next Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. In Europe, you'll be hard pressed to find even a newbie in the industry who actually thinks stock options are worth anything these days, and several popular employment practices in the tech industry are literally illegal and would be viewed as worker exploitation.
In other news, look at the electronic devices around you, and tell me who designed the processors driving the majority of them. It's probably ARM, which is based here in Cambridge, UK and has an 11-figure market cap. Also here in Cambridge we have what is now HP Autonomy, and whatever you think about Autonomy and/or the HP acquisition, it is a matter of fact that someone paid 11 figures USD for that business, too. We do grow some substantial, widely influential tech businesses in Europe, they just aren't always the very biggest or highest profile ones.
It doesn't matter whether you have a smartphone; many of your friends and family do.
It doesn't matter whether you choose to share your photos on-line; many of your friends and family do.
It doesn't matter whether you don't use on-line mail services like Google Mail; many of your friends and family do.
A data mining exercise could easily determine that only a very small number of people have the same substantial group of contacts in common. Your social group is like a very public fingerprint. That lets the analysts put together the recurring face in photos, the recurring number in phone address books, the recurring e-mail address in mail history, and so on. And just like that, there is a shadow profile of you that is probably very accurate and comprehensive, without you volunteering or agreeing to a single aspect of it other than actually interacting with other people.
This is possible not because of any individual item of data that anyone collected about you, but because of the combination of data from many sources and of many types, which is a far more powerful thing. The ability to collect and work with such vast amounts of data is why privacy standards built around individual interactions and observations no longer make sense in 2015.
Thanks for the data. So if this actually affected millions of their customers (i.e., they didn't just have millions on that plan but millions who actually did not receive the level of service they paid for) and it was ongoing for a period of years (i.e., this wasn't some slip up for a single ad run, it was a sustained campaign of misleading information) then the fine in question is negligible. That's a pity.
Sure we can. When people don't act like that, you get places like Somalia or the region currently controlled by ISIS. While our systems in the West are far from perfect and have plenty of problems with bias and corruption, I think we can all reasonably agree that they are still better than actually throwing civilisation and organised government out the window and reverting to the gang with the bigger guns being in charge no matter what. At least the gang with the biggest guns over here has some semblance of democratic accountability and ethical mandate, flawed as they may be.
AT&T assumed that their advertising was fine until told otherwise.
Then perhaps they should have consulted lawyers and/or technical experts, given that apparently many millions of dollars were at stake? Given the obviously factually incorrect statement and the resources available to AT&T, I would not be inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt about their motives here, and I rather doubt any court is going to in the inevitable legal action to follow either.
They can't use facial recognition on you if they don't have a photo of you to start with. Unless you're hopelessly dumb and allowed photos of your face, linked with your name, to be posted on the Internet, that's not going to happen
What? I'd love for that to be true, but sadly it's all too easy these days. Numerous modern phone apps upload the entire address book of the user, with varying degrees of permission but some users will allow it anyway. Numerous modern photo sharing sites and social networks allow tagging of people. Hey, look, you're the person with these 37 friends in common when they run facial recognition on the thousands of photos those people have uploaded between them, and the number 123 555 4567 is also common to all those people but not in our database, and the name 24 of those people had for that phone number in their address book is "kheldan".
Congratulations, your shadow account on the social network now has a name, phone number, and 2,547 geolocated and timestamped photographs taken over the past decade associated with you. Also, based on your social circles (and the contents of the e-mails you sent to friends and work colleagues who use major on-line e-mail hosts, and your complete web search history, both of which have also been linked to your shadow profile with over 99% reliability), there is a 97% chance you are male, an 83% chance you lean left politically, a 94% chance you are a Muslim, and next time you're up for new car insurance we do have some concerns because you were worrying about your eyesight six months ago.
Somehow, I suspect that in many first world countries today, if you set up a similar system with monitoring outside a venue like a government office or police station, and further cameras used to identify and track government staff to their home addresses (or potentially embarrassing alternatives), you would suddenly find yourself charged with some relatively recent and absurdly vague law involving collection of information that might be useful for preparing unspecified acts of terrorism, or something along those lines.
I'm not sure whether this is more a damning indictment of nebulous politics-of-fear laws or of nebulous privacy-is-dead laws, but it's a damning indictment of something about the way our world is working right now.
When you're in public, anyone can recognize you whether it be man or machine.
Not if the machines aren't there, they can't.
Anyone can take pictures of you and what you are doing.
And anyone can be thrown in jail for breaking the law, if we choose to make something illegal.
Your post makes me sad. I only just wrote a post of my own about why people who just say you have no right to privacy in public are the biggest problem here. I was really hoping to get more than two more screens down the discussion before I found someone who literally said that without the slightest nuance, qualification, or actual argument in favour of their position.
Yes, because privacy standards developed when going outside meant you might pass a neighbour in the street and otherwise were effectively anonymous are definitely still relevant in the era of widespread CCTV, global networks, effectively unlimited data storage and data mining resources, and modern biometric analysis.
If you're one of those people who says you have "no right to privacy outside your home", then you are the problem here. The point isn't how to interpret laws and ethical standards from decades or centuries ago in the modern era. The point is why we developed those laws and ethical standards in the first place and how we can achieve the analogous results (assuming we still want to) today given the capabilities and potential applications of modern technology.
There's no way to stop the inevitable march of technology, and so you need to find ways to live with it rather than trying to legislate around it which is a fool's errand and part of the reason our government has gotten totally out of control. And blasting people with a shotgun is not a solution in anyone's world but yours.
Well, no, legalising the blasting of such people with a shotgun would probably be a very effective way to protect the privacy rights of those who don't want the cameras on them. After all, there's no way to stop the inevitable march of weapons development, and so you need to find ways to live with it rather than trying to legislate around it, right?
Or we could, you know, act like grown ups. As soon as you acknowledge that while technology may be neutral and amoral the purposes for which that technology is used are not, and that civilised society has invented laws and justice systems in order to deal with issues where what we can do and what we collectively agree we should do are different, the whole debate becomes a lot more useful.
Serious question: Is that actually a proportionate penalty for the infraction?
For example, how does it compare to the revenues and/or profits that AT&T derived from customers who were on the supposedly unlimited plan over the period when the misleading advertising was going on?
If the effect of this is to cost the service provider at least the amount of extra profit they made, relative to what they would have received if those customers had been on the closest available limited plan that provided the relevant data volumes, then it's an effective deterrent.
If the cost to the service provider is significantly more than that, then it's a meaningful penalty, particularly if they are subject to further fines of the same magnitude or greater for any subsequent repetition of this kind of behaviour.
You're comparing some front-line network admin who changed a setting on some networking gear as requested by their management, to prioritise some traffic in a way that probably still left everyone better off than they were just a few years ago, probably with no knowledge or reasonable expectation of having knowledge of any commercial deals or what the effect would be on any specific customers... to Nazis who executed Jews in death camps?
And with a bit of anti-India racism as well?
It's pretty early in the thread for such a poor attempt at trolling, AC.
That link doesn't say anything about the inevitable updates for Windows 10 being free.
In some ways, I wish Microsoft would charge for ongoing security and compatibility updates after a reasonable period, but in a transparent way.
Useful lifetimes for PCs are increasing (forced obsolescence aside) and it's not a viable business model to expect MS to sell a copy of an OS one day and then support the same OS indefinitely with no extra revenues. However, clearly a lot of people are happy with what they've got and don't feel the newer versions of the OS getting pumped out to try to increase those revenues are actually an improvement, so that model is unsatisfying for all concerned.
In contrast, charging a modest and honestly advertised fee for long term support after a reasonable initial period of free updates included in the original purchase seems like an everybody-wins proposition. Customers who want to stick with, say, Windows 7 for as long as their home computer works/it's their corporate standard/someone in IT likes it have the option to do so, without giving up on useful updates for things like security or compatibility with new hardware or networking standards. Customers who are interested in more radical change can buy newer software instead. Microsoft gets enough money to run a viable business model either way. As long as everyone knows what the deal is up-front and the update/fees are optional (so if you don't pay then you don't get the updates but you also don't get your existing software artificially nerfed) I don't see any huge downside here.
It turns out that I don't have several of those patches installed anyway. Some time ago, I switched my default policy to only applying security updates, ignoring anything else in Windows Update even if Microsoft marks it "important". They have abused that mechanism so many times now to try to install junk that is in no way necessary or in my interests that I simply don't trust them any more and only install non-security updates if I have a specific reason for doing so. So far, this has caused me zero problems (unlike a couple of "important" but non-security updates that originally motivated my change in policy).
Sorry, but unless you think my clients are no longer going to have power outlets in their office those few years down the road, I just don't see this as a big deal.
The first thing I do when I arrive at any remote office today is plug the laptop in, and then plug in a real mouse. I expect I'll do the same if I visit a remote office tomorrow, just like literally every other person in the room.
The article does mention that a 91Wh alternative battery is available when you configure the device, which presumably makes battery life (somewhat) more competitive.
I think the challenge with the current system and shared Euro currency isn't that a nation loses control of its own policies on things like taxation and trade, its that whether those policies actually work is significantly influenced by the equivalent policies set by other nations that share the currency. As we've seen in recent years, if some nations screw up their own economies due to poor management, corruption, or for any other reason, it does have a serious knock-on effect across the whole currency group.
So, although a shared currency doesn't in itself imply shared tax and spending policies, I suspect that more centralised government (and therefore necessarily less autonomy and sovereignty for each member state) will follow in practice. To a degree, it already has, with the nations that struggled worst after the crash effectively being forced into unpopular austerity policies by foreign influences in return for bail-out money or even having their entire governments replaced by technocrats for a while.
The mostly-unspoken underlying question here is whether the people of Europe actually want to bound together in that way. Some people do see a United States of Europe in the future. Generally speaking, the people of the UK don't, or at least don't want to give up our own national identity to become part of such an umbrella organisation, any more than Canada wants to be the 51st state just because some Canadians speak the same language as most people in the US and they share a border and some broadly similar political views.
[Free movement] just needs to be worked out, not abandoned.
In principle, I agree with you.
However, "working it out" when you're starting with the level of disparity between countries like the UK and Germany on the one hand and the "new Europe" nations on the other is a generational problem that will take many years to solve. It's not something that can be finished in a matter of months with a quick treaty or two.
In the meantime, if you immediately establish tight integration as something like joining the EU does, you have artificially increased the pressure on both the weaker and the stronger nations. Consider that Greece -- which was already an EU member and part of the Eurozone -- is still in serious economic trouble today, coming up to seven years after the big crash. There are still serious political frictions there over dealings with Europe, and there are still serious political frictions in nations like Germany, where they have been picking up the tab for all that time.
One possible alternative is to provide humanitarian and economic aid to less fortunate nations without such close formal ties. For example, the UK has a government department responsible for international development. It has thousands of staff, and now sends over £10B per year in aid funding, mostly to nations across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This makes the UK the #2 provider of official development aid (after the US) in absolute terms, and the #5 provider (after Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Denmark) relative to gross national income.
So again, if the UK were no longer part of the EU, this doesn't necessarily mean the UK would no longer support the economic development of the "new Europe" states. A cynic might also point out that unlike the EU, there are also actual accounts showing where the money for UK overseas aid is really going and robust mechanisms for reporting and shutting down fraudulent claimants.
For the near future, this kind of arrangement might be more beneficial to the nations receiving the aid and impose a lower risk on the nations giving it, without the mechanics of shared currencies and the like clouding the issue. So again, looking at the big picture, I don't see much of an argument for the UK becoming more tightly integrated with the EU and in particular joining the Eurozone given the current economic disparity among member states.
Precisely. And since, in terms of economic strength, everybody in the expanded EU most certainly isn't equal (please note that this is not intended as any sort of insult, merely a statement of fact) the free movement principle does not work well.
In particular, what has really happened in certain cases, for example with Poland and England, is that most of the movement has been one way. This puts strain on English services, but it's important to recognise that it also means many of the people who would be best placed to help Poland develop its own economy are among the most likely to find working in richer European countries more attractive and/or lucrative, creating a "brain drain" effect back home. In the long term, both nations could end up worse off because of the imbalance.
In principle, freedom of movement is a good idea, for both business and pleasure purposes. But on the business side, it does require reasonably balanced parties so the traffic at least roughly cancels out. This was the case in the early days when there were far fewer nations in the shared European machine, but with the expansion to nearly 30 actual or aspiring member states with much more diverse economic conditions, the same logic no longer holds.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably difficult to understand for Americans, but the key factor that makes SV so amazing is that venture capitalists over there are a century ahead in terms of taking risks than anywhere else in the world
Most of Silicon Valley isn't amazing. Most businesses supported by that venture capital culture you're talking about fail.
The peculiar thing about SV is the glorification of failure. It's rather like the traditional American Dream, where everyone is going to be rich one day so huge numbers of ordinary people irrationally support policies that actively go against their interests and probably always will. The venture capital model is based on the idea that if you support 100 businesses, it doesn't matter if 99 of them blow your whole investment and then die, as long as the last one becomes the next Facebook or Google or Amazon.
You can get away with this in the US partly because there is a seemingly endless supply of kids who are willing to basically give up any sort of work-life balance for a while in the hope that they too will be the next Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. In Europe, you'll be hard pressed to find even a newbie in the industry who actually thinks stock options are worth anything these days, and several popular employment practices in the tech industry are literally illegal and would be viewed as worker exploitation.
In other news, look at the electronic devices around you, and tell me who designed the processors driving the majority of them. It's probably ARM, which is based here in Cambridge, UK and has an 11-figure market cap. Also here in Cambridge we have what is now HP Autonomy, and whatever you think about Autonomy and/or the HP acquisition, it is a matter of fact that someone paid 11 figures USD for that business, too. We do grow some substantial, widely influential tech businesses in Europe, they just aren't always the very biggest or highest profile ones.
My friends typically respect my wishes as well, and it sounds like actually the two of us are in a similar position.
But most people aren't.
I think perhaps you misunderstood my point.
It doesn't matter whether you have a smartphone; many of your friends and family do.
It doesn't matter whether you choose to share your photos on-line; many of your friends and family do.
It doesn't matter whether you don't use on-line mail services like Google Mail; many of your friends and family do.
A data mining exercise could easily determine that only a very small number of people have the same substantial group of contacts in common. Your social group is like a very public fingerprint. That lets the analysts put together the recurring face in photos, the recurring number in phone address books, the recurring e-mail address in mail history, and so on. And just like that, there is a shadow profile of you that is probably very accurate and comprehensive, without you volunteering or agreeing to a single aspect of it other than actually interacting with other people.
This is possible not because of any individual item of data that anyone collected about you, but because of the combination of data from many sources and of many types, which is a far more powerful thing. The ability to collect and work with such vast amounts of data is why privacy standards built around individual interactions and observations no longer make sense in 2015.
Thanks for the data. So if this actually affected millions of their customers (i.e., they didn't just have millions on that plan but millions who actually did not receive the level of service they paid for) and it was ongoing for a period of years (i.e., this wasn't some slip up for a single ad run, it was a sustained campaign of misleading information) then the fine in question is negligible. That's a pity.
Sure we can. When people don't act like that, you get places like Somalia or the region currently controlled by ISIS. While our systems in the West are far from perfect and have plenty of problems with bias and corruption, I think we can all reasonably agree that they are still better than actually throwing civilisation and organised government out the window and reverting to the gang with the bigger guns being in charge no matter what. At least the gang with the biggest guns over here has some semblance of democratic accountability and ethical mandate, flawed as they may be.
AT&T assumed that their advertising was fine until told otherwise.
Then perhaps they should have consulted lawyers and/or technical experts, given that apparently many millions of dollars were at stake? Given the obviously factually incorrect statement and the resources available to AT&T, I would not be inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt about their motives here, and I rather doubt any court is going to in the inevitable legal action to follow either.
They can't use facial recognition on you if they don't have a photo of you to start with. Unless you're hopelessly dumb and allowed photos of your face, linked with your name, to be posted on the Internet, that's not going to happen
What? I'd love for that to be true, but sadly it's all too easy these days. Numerous modern phone apps upload the entire address book of the user, with varying degrees of permission but some users will allow it anyway. Numerous modern photo sharing sites and social networks allow tagging of people. Hey, look, you're the person with these 37 friends in common when they run facial recognition on the thousands of photos those people have uploaded between them, and the number 123 555 4567 is also common to all those people but not in our database, and the name 24 of those people had for that phone number in their address book is "kheldan".
Congratulations, your shadow account on the social network now has a name, phone number, and 2,547 geolocated and timestamped photographs taken over the past decade associated with you. Also, based on your social circles (and the contents of the e-mails you sent to friends and work colleagues who use major on-line e-mail hosts, and your complete web search history, both of which have also been linked to your shadow profile with over 99% reliability), there is a 97% chance you are male, an 83% chance you lean left politically, a 94% chance you are a Muslim, and next time you're up for new car insurance we do have some concerns because you were worrying about your eyesight six months ago.
Somehow, I suspect that in many first world countries today, if you set up a similar system with monitoring outside a venue like a government office or police station, and further cameras used to identify and track government staff to their home addresses (or potentially embarrassing alternatives), you would suddenly find yourself charged with some relatively recent and absurdly vague law involving collection of information that might be useful for preparing unspecified acts of terrorism, or something along those lines.
I'm not sure whether this is more a damning indictment of nebulous politics-of-fear laws or of nebulous privacy-is-dead laws, but it's a damning indictment of something about the way our world is working right now.
When you're in public, anyone can recognize you whether it be man or machine.
Not if the machines aren't there, they can't.
Anyone can take pictures of you and what you are doing.
And anyone can be thrown in jail for breaking the law, if we choose to make something illegal.
Your post makes me sad. I only just wrote a post of my own about why people who just say you have no right to privacy in public are the biggest problem here. I was really hoping to get more than two more screens down the discussion before I found someone who literally said that without the slightest nuance, qualification, or actual argument in favour of their position.
Yes, because privacy standards developed when going outside meant you might pass a neighbour in the street and otherwise were effectively anonymous are definitely still relevant in the era of widespread CCTV, global networks, effectively unlimited data storage and data mining resources, and modern biometric analysis.
If you're one of those people who says you have "no right to privacy outside your home", then you are the problem here. The point isn't how to interpret laws and ethical standards from decades or centuries ago in the modern era. The point is why we developed those laws and ethical standards in the first place and how we can achieve the analogous results (assuming we still want to) today given the capabilities and potential applications of modern technology.
No problem.
There's no way to stop the inevitable march of technology, and so you need to find ways to live with it rather than trying to legislate around it which is a fool's errand and part of the reason our government has gotten totally out of control. And blasting people with a shotgun is not a solution in anyone's world but yours.
Well, no, legalising the blasting of such people with a shotgun would probably be a very effective way to protect the privacy rights of those who don't want the cameras on them. After all, there's no way to stop the inevitable march of weapons development, and so you need to find ways to live with it rather than trying to legislate around it, right?
Or we could, you know, act like grown ups. As soon as you acknowledge that while technology may be neutral and amoral the purposes for which that technology is used are not, and that civilised society has invented laws and justice systems in order to deal with issues where what we can do and what we collectively agree we should do are different, the whole debate becomes a lot more useful.
Serious question: Is that actually a proportionate penalty for the infraction?
For example, how does it compare to the revenues and/or profits that AT&T derived from customers who were on the supposedly unlimited plan over the period when the misleading advertising was going on?
If the effect of this is to cost the service provider at least the amount of extra profit they made, relative to what they would have received if those customers had been on the closest available limited plan that provided the relevant data volumes, then it's an effective deterrent.
If the cost to the service provider is significantly more than that, then it's a meaningful penalty, particularly if they are subject to further fines of the same magnitude or greater for any subsequent repetition of this kind of behaviour.
You're comparing some front-line network admin who changed a setting on some networking gear as requested by their management, to prioritise some traffic in a way that probably still left everyone better off than they were just a few years ago, probably with no knowledge or reasonable expectation of having knowledge of any commercial deals or what the effect would be on any specific customers... to Nazis who executed Jews in death camps?
And with a bit of anti-India racism as well?
It's pretty early in the thread for such a poor attempt at trolling, AC.
That link doesn't say anything about the inevitable updates for Windows 10 being free.
In some ways, I wish Microsoft would charge for ongoing security and compatibility updates after a reasonable period, but in a transparent way.
Useful lifetimes for PCs are increasing (forced obsolescence aside) and it's not a viable business model to expect MS to sell a copy of an OS one day and then support the same OS indefinitely with no extra revenues. However, clearly a lot of people are happy with what they've got and don't feel the newer versions of the OS getting pumped out to try to increase those revenues are actually an improvement, so that model is unsatisfying for all concerned.
In contrast, charging a modest and honestly advertised fee for long term support after a reasonable initial period of free updates included in the original purchase seems like an everybody-wins proposition. Customers who want to stick with, say, Windows 7 for as long as their home computer works/it's their corporate standard/someone in IT likes it have the option to do so, without giving up on useful updates for things like security or compatibility with new hardware or networking standards. Customers who are interested in more radical change can buy newer software instead. Microsoft gets enough money to run a viable business model either way. As long as everyone knows what the deal is up-front and the update/fees are optional (so if you don't pay then you don't get the updates but you also don't get your existing software artificially nerfed) I don't see any huge downside here.
Interesting, thanks.
It turns out that I don't have several of those patches installed anyway. Some time ago, I switched my default policy to only applying security updates, ignoring anything else in Windows Update even if Microsoft marks it "important". They have abused that mechanism so many times now to try to install junk that is in no way necessary or in my interests that I simply don't trust them any more and only install non-security updates if I have a specific reason for doing so. So far, this has caused me zero problems (unlike a couple of "important" but non-security updates that originally motivated my change in policy).
Sorry, but unless you think my clients are no longer going to have power outlets in their office those few years down the road, I just don't see this as a big deal.
The first thing I do when I arrive at any remote office today is plug the laptop in, and then plug in a real mouse. I expect I'll do the same if I visit a remote office tomorrow, just like literally every other person in the room.
One can buy a far better desktop machine and a UPS for that money. And it would be user-serviceable and upgradeable.
A bit harder to transport to a client's office, though.
These machines are obviously aimed at a particular niche that full desktop workstations can't cater for.
The article says you have have Win 7 Pro with this one instead of Win 8.1 if you want.
The article does mention that a 91Wh alternative battery is available when you configure the device, which presumably makes battery life (somewhat) more competitive.
I think the challenge with the current system and shared Euro currency isn't that a nation loses control of its own policies on things like taxation and trade, its that whether those policies actually work is significantly influenced by the equivalent policies set by other nations that share the currency. As we've seen in recent years, if some nations screw up their own economies due to poor management, corruption, or for any other reason, it does have a serious knock-on effect across the whole currency group.
So, although a shared currency doesn't in itself imply shared tax and spending policies, I suspect that more centralised government (and therefore necessarily less autonomy and sovereignty for each member state) will follow in practice. To a degree, it already has, with the nations that struggled worst after the crash effectively being forced into unpopular austerity policies by foreign influences in return for bail-out money or even having their entire governments replaced by technocrats for a while.
The mostly-unspoken underlying question here is whether the people of Europe actually want to bound together in that way. Some people do see a United States of Europe in the future. Generally speaking, the people of the UK don't, or at least don't want to give up our own national identity to become part of such an umbrella organisation, any more than Canada wants to be the 51st state just because some Canadians speak the same language as most people in the US and they share a border and some broadly similar political views.
[Free movement] just needs to be worked out, not abandoned.
In principle, I agree with you.
However, "working it out" when you're starting with the level of disparity between countries like the UK and Germany on the one hand and the "new Europe" nations on the other is a generational problem that will take many years to solve. It's not something that can be finished in a matter of months with a quick treaty or two.
In the meantime, if you immediately establish tight integration as something like joining the EU does, you have artificially increased the pressure on both the weaker and the stronger nations. Consider that Greece -- which was already an EU member and part of the Eurozone -- is still in serious economic trouble today, coming up to seven years after the big crash. There are still serious political frictions there over dealings with Europe, and there are still serious political frictions in nations like Germany, where they have been picking up the tab for all that time.
One possible alternative is to provide humanitarian and economic aid to less fortunate nations without such close formal ties. For example, the UK has a government department responsible for international development. It has thousands of staff, and now sends over £10B per year in aid funding, mostly to nations across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This makes the UK the #2 provider of official development aid (after the US) in absolute terms, and the #5 provider (after Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Denmark) relative to gross national income.
So again, if the UK were no longer part of the EU, this doesn't necessarily mean the UK would no longer support the economic development of the "new Europe" states. A cynic might also point out that unlike the EU, there are also actual accounts showing where the money for UK overseas aid is really going and robust mechanisms for reporting and shutting down fraudulent claimants.
For the near future, this kind of arrangement might be more beneficial to the nations receiving the aid and impose a lower risk on the nations giving it, without the mechanics of shared currencies and the like clouding the issue. So again, looking at the big picture, I don't see much of an argument for the UK becoming more tightly integrated with the EU and in particular joining the Eurozone given the current economic disparity among member states.
This only works as long as everybody is equal.
Precisely. And since, in terms of economic strength, everybody in the expanded EU most certainly isn't equal (please note that this is not intended as any sort of insult, merely a statement of fact) the free movement principle does not work well.
In particular, what has really happened in certain cases, for example with Poland and England, is that most of the movement has been one way. This puts strain on English services, but it's important to recognise that it also means many of the people who would be best placed to help Poland develop its own economy are among the most likely to find working in richer European countries more attractive and/or lucrative, creating a "brain drain" effect back home. In the long term, both nations could end up worse off because of the imbalance.
In principle, freedom of movement is a good idea, for both business and pleasure purposes. But on the business side, it does require reasonably balanced parties so the traffic at least roughly cancels out. This was the case in the early days when there were far fewer nations in the shared European machine, but with the expansion to nearly 30 actual or aspiring member states with much more diverse economic conditions, the same logic no longer holds.
What we have now is a specific problem caused by the financial crisis.
Which of course was itself neither caused nor amplified by the underlying financial strains within the EU and particularly the Eurozone, right?