I think you misunderstand the reasons for the creation of this law. It is not to safeguard us from censorship, or to protect providers from having to censor certain sites. It is to protect us consumer from those providers, preventing them from blocking certain traffic selectively and ask for a premium to have that block removed, and to prevent them from throttling bandwidth to services that compete with premium services they offer themselves. Since the providers were poised to do exactly that, this law is far from meaningless.
There is another exception, by the way: providers are still allowed to block certain sites at the request of the subscriber. There is a Dutch provider (Kliksafe) which offers pre-filtered Internet connections that are deemed safe for members of the Dutch Reformed church, whatever that means (maybe they shut off on Sunday...)
Limiting patent duration is a great idea (as is having a turnover cap), but there are plenty of cases where patents of a longer duration should be granted. I'd be in favour of a system where patent applications are examined for "triviality", i.e. how hard/expensive was it to come up with the invention being patented. Trivial crap like 1-click shopping then gets 3 years; the inventions that actually took some effort or thinking get perhaps 6 or 10 years, while stuff that takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop (like medicine) would get 20.
One of the main issues with the patent system is that a lot of stuff that should not be patentable passes muster at the patent office anyway. Unfortunately that is not an easy issue to fix, but having such patents be assigned to the lowest tier in a variable-duration scheme instead would at least mitigate the effects.
It would be nice if each icon came with an appropriate legal paragraph, concisely written but legally valid
Actually, the Mozilla privacy icons project aims to do just that. Strange, the Privacy Simplified website links to the Mozilla initiative... which makes me wonder what they hope to do better.
It would be nice if each icon came with an appropriate legal paragraph, concisely written but legally valid. Then grant the rights to use those icons only to sites that have the exact corresponding legal paragraph in their data privacy statement. That way, purveyors of web services can cobble together their own privacy statement from those standardised components, covering their needs and wants in legally correct but readable terms, and accompanied by well known icons that gives visitors the contents of the underlying privacy statement at a glance.
Of course, some sites want anything but a legible privacy statement, but there are plenty of sites who do not mind being up front about what they do with your data.
Multi color mixing generally makes for very poor lighting. Looking at the light source itself you will see "white", but refracted light off any surface will make the colors seem completely out of whack.
Sigh, the fear-monger's approach to risk management: "We can never be 100% sure". I'd prefer we take a rational approach, and approach the risk of nuclear power the way we do with many other risks. 1) Reduce the chance of accidents occurring, and 2) reduce the effects of an accident if it occurs. Especially #2 is promising, and though we're not there yet, there are already some reactors being contemplated that would reduce the effects of the worst-case accident by a vast amount, to the point were it would be about the same level as an accident at a chemical plant. Nasty, sure, but... worth the risk.
I would like to propose that "for the children" becomes the new Godwin. If you utter the phrase, the discussion is over, and you've lost the debate automatically.
What if authentication becomes mandatory for public sites (such as Slashdot)? I don't want to authenticate with my true identity, but I still want to use those services, and I have very good reason to not always post stuff under my true name. Not to hide stuff from the government, and I am actually OK with the authorities obtaining certain digital info on me, if I am suspect in a crime, and if a judge issues a "digital search warrant" (Of course neither condition will be added to this proposal, in NL they don't even need court approval anymore to search my house, for crying out loud). It is often in my best interest if my employer does not know what I post on the Web, and sometimes it is also in my employer's best interest if people who read my stuff do not know whom I work for.
The Dutch solution: just use some existing authentication scheme. A few days ago, CapGemini proposed a report to our government, and one of the proposals in it was to see if we could integrate DigiD with.... wait for it.... Facebook Connect (article in Dutch). DigiD is a digital identity scheme used by citizens to access Dutch government services like internal revenue and municipal services which require authentication. Hey, at least a Facebook account is free, right?
Bad analogy: I'm not stealing anything. Come to think of it, and considering that I'd never buy their overpriced DVDs laden with warnings and other unskippable crap, I am not even depriving them of a potential sale. However, I am giving myself access to their content that I haven't paid for. A better analogy would be sneaking into a movie theater without paying, though in that case I might be causing discomfort to paying patrons, which isn't the case when I download something.
Is it morally right? Of course not, even though it is considerably less immoral than stealing a hamburger at McD. But I also see it as the most effective means of protesting the current sales practices of the movie studios, and the best way to pressure them into selling content under conditions that are more consumer-friendly. If you'd leave it to them, they would not only retain full control of everything you buy from them, but also gain control of the distribution channels, effectively locking out competition. And looking at recent lobbying efforts as well as their contributions to emerging standards, that is exactly what they are after. If McD somehow managed to prevent me from buying a burger at a competing restaurant, I'd be a lot less hesitant to screw them by nicking a burger without paying.
Downloading of copyrighted material in NL is at best a legal grey area. Parliament is in the business of making laws and settings policies, and in the matter of this issue they can either make it unequivocally legal, outlaw it, or take the stance of GL: tolerate it until there's a real legal alternative. I agree with the latter approach.
That's why I have no issue with pirating movies. And it's why I in a rare occurrence fully agreed with the stance of the (Dutch) Green Left party: Not to prosecute (or allow to be prosecuted) private downloaders of movies, until the industry gives us a sane legal option.
Just look at the music industry. It's by no means perfect, but iTunes music is reasonably priced (especially compared to the price level of physical albums in NL), and I can get the songs out of iTunes and onto some other medium if I want to. Add to that a Spotify account that comes free with my internet hookup, and I have plenty of legal ways to get my music. The result? I spend more than in the days of physical CDs, and I get a lot more then I would have gotten before... and I haven't looked at illegal music downloads in ages.
A stylish ship would be nice... What little I have seen of cruise ships, they look like "luxury" (but not really) hotels on the inside, and on the outside they look like a housing project set adrift.
As the article states, this is already a non-issue for some companies, as they can simply offer Windows apps over Citrix. My client is already well set up to serve apps over Citrix, as it is a lot easier to distribute them to a small user group than to have to build an installer that will run on the locked-down Windows workstation. Switching to Linux in this ecosystem would be a relatively minor step.
Funny enough, that client has recently done the opposite: swap out some of the extreme high-end Linux workstations that some users needed, moving them into the datacenter, and letting those users access them through a virtual desktop on a standard company craptop. Strangely, almost all of those users are rather pleased with this arrangement, since they can still do the high-power computing they need, from a machine that has all the standard tools (Office, etc.) that the rest of the company uses.
By the way, virtual desktops have come a long way since Citrix, and there's no reason why you could not run Photoshop on them. I messed around with RGS from HP, which is capable of giving you a virtual desktop spanning several physical screens, and easily handles video, audio, 3D... we even tried Unreal Tournament on it, which worked well.
The death of the PC game market has been greatly exaggerated, for the past decade or so. But it does seem that the ability to run the latest red-hot games is much less of a factor in buying the next family PC than it was some years ago.
The comparison between Google and Siri is not as silly as it appears. Burrus thinks that the future of search belongs to intelligent agents, and that means more than just giving a dumb search engine a little bit of extra context in the form of personal data it has collected on you. Intelligence doesn't mean having data on where I am and what my friends "liked".
An "intelligent" agent (best to use the word with caution) should at the very least:
- understand your question;
- understand the material it is searching.
Google only does this at a very basic level, and in some cases Siri is ahead of the curve when it comes to semantic interpretation. Or more accurately: wolphram alpha is, when Siri passes your question on to it.
There's some nice research going on in semantic analysis of search queries and source material, and ways of turning that into a sematic drill-down into search results. That can come in the form of a visualisation of search results, or (in the future) something like this:
"Siri, I need a new washer"
- "Do you mean dishwasher, or laundry machine, or something else?"
"A laundry machine"
- "What features are you looking for? Low price, economy, capacity, quality, high-speed spin drying?"
"Well, the price is not that relevant though I want something from a reputable brand, and spend at most $800. I suppose most machines will have sufficient capacity."
- "I am assuming a standard-size machine. I found the following A-brand machines matching your criteria, along with prices and features. I highlighted a few machines that people seem to be particularly pleased with."
"Nr. 3 looks good, show me some reviews from trade magazines for that one, as well as what people have written about it. Is there a shop at the local Mega Mall that has them?"
- "Hang on. Yes, it is in stock. You can pick it up but they also do free delivery to this area".
And so on. For this, the search engine needs to understand many things: that there are kinds of "washers", that they have specific properties that may or may not be relevant, that there is a standard size for washing machines, what a "reputable brand" is and which brands qualify, and it needs to be able to interpret shop websites to figure out if they carry a particular model, what their price is, and if they deliver. Google does none of this. Wolphram alpha has some capabilities in this area (type in "dishwasher properties" for example). In the future, when these engines become better at interpreting meaning, we will have conversations with our search engine. That will be the game-changer, and something that could render Google obsolete (if they don;t get into the game themselves).
I know what you mean... I'm close to releasing an app; it's for a niche market and probably small enough to fly under the radar, but I hate the thought of some random asshat coming along to levy a tax on my work, or for some corporation with a competing product to crush me in court. Just because the patent office saw fit to grant a patent for being somewhere first (rather than for hard work leading to a genuine invention), and because I have a 1-click buy button with rounded corners in my app. And yes, as a programmer in someone's employ, this can hurt you too, if the trolls decide to go after the cool startup or struggling innovator you work for.
Way to foster innovation (which was one of the purposes of modern patents).
Ahh, the EWI building hack (at the time it was still the EE faculty, I believe?). Where I whiled away many an hour playing X-pilot, on the department's Sun workstations. And remembering when amazingly we got Unix going on a PC thanks to the hard work of a guy called Linus. Good times...
Soon? Hardly. Too many parties in the Netherlands are in favor of ACTA, or will support it out of political expediency. And that goes for a lot of similar issues. It's pretty sad that for many 'digital' rights, we have to turn to the left. Our Liberals (here it means something like very soft core libertarians; they are centre-right) never really got these issues, and they've gone from bad to worse in the last 2 years of governing.
Still, it's not enough to make me vote socialist...
It probably works different in different countries. In most of Europe, double jeopardy (or "ne bis in idem") means you cannot be convicted or prosecuted for something that you have already been tried for. This goes only for criminal proceedings, but "already been tried" explicitly includes being tried for the crime in another country (I'm not sure if certain countries with iffy legal reputations are excluded here).
However, civil suits are excluded from this clause: in your transmitter example you can only be tried once for criminal charges, but all victims have the right to seek damages in a civil suit, individually or in class action suits. And being ordered to pay damages does not free you from criminal charges either. Incidentally I find it rather weird that (in the US at least) one can be sued for damages by a victim even after you've been cleared of charges in a criminal proceedings for the same case.
Double jeopardy is about not being punished for the same crime twice. The real question is: should what they did be regarded as two separate crimes in two countries? I think one should think long and hard before answering this in the affirmative. Consider: you grab a movie from the Pirate bay, and seed parts of it to torrent peers in 15 other countries. Is it fair to be convicted in each country separately?
There are many cases where you'd want to give your data to online entities. Slashdot has my email address. Amazon has my physical address, which kind of helps them delivering the stuff I order from them to my doorstep. The utility company has my physical address and my bank details. And so on. Sure, you could pay everything in cash, not order anything online or set up a P.O. Box, and create dedicated email addresses and identities for every site that makes you sign up. But I'd rather not go through the trouble.
Berners-Lee has it arse-backwards, by the way: instead of promising what they won't do, companies should simply follow the law laid down in a number of European countries: if you collect data on your customers, you can only use that data for the stated purpose, and nothing else. Now, I don't mind Amazon and Google having certain data on me. As long as they play nice. Which means some additional rules:
- Don't state that you'll use my data in every which way you see fit: use it only for those purposes that I had in mind when I gave you my data.
- Don't bury your data privacy statement in 54 pages of legalese: the statement should be visible, clear, and at most half a page (I wouldn't mind that rule to be made into law...)
- Be very clear on which 3rd parties you share my data with, for what purposes (see the first rule), and under what conditions.
- You will protect my data well.
- At any time I will have the option to rescind my permission to use my data. (by the way, that does not amount to that godawfully misguided "right to be forgotten" idea. It pertains to personal data that is a shared secret between me and some company, not to public contributions I or others have made)
Of course companies could simply ignore the law and share my data anyway, but at least they'd be breaking the law and you could take them to court if you catch them at it. That is perhaps what Berners-Lee is hinting at: it'd be a lot better if data was shared under clear and enforceable agreements, and agreements that benefit the data owner, not the recipient.
Critical? I have seen departments that operate rather well despite the fully incompetent middle managers in charge of them. Managers are important, sure, but so is the network engineer who keeps the bits flowing, and the lady from finance who makes sure that we all get our paychecks on time. And that's just it: if you look at what middle management actually is, the conclusion is that management is part of the plumbing, just like IT, Finance, Legal, etc. Necessary, but hardly strategic... in large firms, middle managers love to pretend they are involved in strategy, but that mostly amounts to reshuffling peons and suppliers a little. It would well behoove those managers to remember that they too are just employees of the company, not gods incarnate.
Executives are much less overrated perhaps (though the inflated egos are certainly there), but again the problem is: there's an awful lot of bad apples in the bunch. Not a surprise if you recruit them from middle management. And it's no surprise either that (in my experience at least) executives often love to talk to non-managers or to free thinkers and artsy folks from outside the company. Their subordinate managers are shopkeepers and poor strategists; talking to other people is more likely to yield a fresh perspective.
By the way, if you get the feeling that I am laying in to middle management rather harshly... I am. I think there is a world to be gained by having *good* middle management in place, but it will require a whole different breed of managers. (Read "Managers, not MBAs" some time).
That's the problem right there: management is vastly overrated as a profession; it's interesting that moving into management is always perceived as a step up. I've seen plenty of managers expressing shock and horror at finding that some of their underlings make more than they do, and it seems that they've quickly moved to address that issue; it doesn't happen all that often anymore. Management is important and all that, but it does seem that somehow we got stuck in a loop with inflated egos pushing up inflated salaries and vice versa.
Another problem is that a lot of companies seem to have problems coming up with good career paths for scientists and engineers. Especially career paths that don't end up in management. The other day, a fellow contractor working for my client asked me to provide input for his yearly appraisal. One section of the form was titled "future potential", where I was asked my opinion on what level the person would be able to attain in 5 years time, and what level he'd be at the top of his career. The choices were jobs like "programme manager", "department manager", "division manager"... the only option that didn't have the word manager in it was "CEO". And this is supposed to be a career path for an IT architect working for a tech firm?
In general, techies are poorly understood, poorly managed, underpaid and not well respected. And all of these go hand in hand. Small wonder that young people are choosing other career options.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you misunderstand the reasons for the creation of this law. It is not to safeguard us from censorship, or to protect providers from having to censor certain sites. It is to protect us consumer from those providers, preventing them from blocking certain traffic selectively and ask for a premium to have that block removed, and to prevent them from throttling bandwidth to services that compete with premium services they offer themselves. Since the providers were poised to do exactly that, this law is far from meaningless.
There is another exception, by the way: providers are still allowed to block certain sites at the request of the subscriber. There is a Dutch provider (Kliksafe) which offers pre-filtered Internet connections that are deemed safe for members of the Dutch Reformed church, whatever that means (maybe they shut off on Sunday...)
Limiting patent duration is a great idea (as is having a turnover cap), but there are plenty of cases where patents of a longer duration should be granted. I'd be in favour of a system where patent applications are examined for "triviality", i.e. how hard/expensive was it to come up with the invention being patented. Trivial crap like 1-click shopping then gets 3 years; the inventions that actually took some effort or thinking get perhaps 6 or 10 years, while stuff that takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop (like medicine) would get 20.
One of the main issues with the patent system is that a lot of stuff that should not be patentable passes muster at the patent office anyway. Unfortunately that is not an easy issue to fix, but having such patents be assigned to the lowest tier in a variable-duration scheme instead would at least mitigate the effects.
It would be nice if each icon came with an appropriate legal paragraph, concisely written but legally valid
Actually, the Mozilla privacy icons project aims to do just that. Strange, the Privacy Simplified website links to the Mozilla initiative... which makes me wonder what they hope to do better.
It would be nice if each icon came with an appropriate legal paragraph, concisely written but legally valid. Then grant the rights to use those icons only to sites that have the exact corresponding legal paragraph in their data privacy statement. That way, purveyors of web services can cobble together their own privacy statement from those standardised components, covering their needs and wants in legally correct but readable terms, and accompanied by well known icons that gives visitors the contents of the underlying privacy statement at a glance.
Of course, some sites want anything but a legible privacy statement, but there are plenty of sites who do not mind being up front about what they do with your data.
Multi color mixing generally makes for very poor lighting. Looking at the light source itself you will see "white", but refracted light off any surface will make the colors seem completely out of whack.
Sigh, the fear-monger's approach to risk management: "We can never be 100% sure". I'd prefer we take a rational approach, and approach the risk of nuclear power the way we do with many other risks. 1) Reduce the chance of accidents occurring, and 2) reduce the effects of an accident if it occurs. Especially #2 is promising, and though we're not there yet, there are already some reactors being contemplated that would reduce the effects of the worst-case accident by a vast amount, to the point were it would be about the same level as an accident at a chemical plant. Nasty, sure, but... worth the risk.
I would like to propose that "for the children" becomes the new Godwin. If you utter the phrase, the discussion is over, and you've lost the debate automatically.
What if authentication becomes mandatory for public sites (such as Slashdot)? I don't want to authenticate with my true identity, but I still want to use those services, and I have very good reason to not always post stuff under my true name. Not to hide stuff from the government, and I am actually OK with the authorities obtaining certain digital info on me, if I am suspect in a crime, and if a judge issues a "digital search warrant" (Of course neither condition will be added to this proposal, in NL they don't even need court approval anymore to search my house, for crying out loud). It is often in my best interest if my employer does not know what I post on the Web, and sometimes it is also in my employer's best interest if people who read my stuff do not know whom I work for.
The Dutch solution: just use some existing authentication scheme. A few days ago, CapGemini proposed a report to our government, and one of the proposals in it was to see if we could integrate DigiD with.... wait for it.... Facebook Connect (article in Dutch). DigiD is a digital identity scheme used by citizens to access Dutch government services like internal revenue and municipal services which require authentication. Hey, at least a Facebook account is free, right?
Bad analogy: I'm not stealing anything. Come to think of it, and considering that I'd never buy their overpriced DVDs laden with warnings and other unskippable crap, I am not even depriving them of a potential sale. However, I am giving myself access to their content that I haven't paid for. A better analogy would be sneaking into a movie theater without paying, though in that case I might be causing discomfort to paying patrons, which isn't the case when I download something.
Is it morally right? Of course not, even though it is considerably less immoral than stealing a hamburger at McD. But I also see it as the most effective means of protesting the current sales practices of the movie studios, and the best way to pressure them into selling content under conditions that are more consumer-friendly. If you'd leave it to them, they would not only retain full control of everything you buy from them, but also gain control of the distribution channels, effectively locking out competition. And looking at recent lobbying efforts as well as their contributions to emerging standards, that is exactly what they are after. If McD somehow managed to prevent me from buying a burger at a competing restaurant, I'd be a lot less hesitant to screw them by nicking a burger without paying.
Downloading of copyrighted material in NL is at best a legal grey area. Parliament is in the business of making laws and settings policies, and in the matter of this issue they can either make it unequivocally legal, outlaw it, or take the stance of GL: tolerate it until there's a real legal alternative. I agree with the latter approach.
That's why I have no issue with pirating movies. And it's why I in a rare occurrence fully agreed with the stance of the (Dutch) Green Left party: Not to prosecute (or allow to be prosecuted) private downloaders of movies, until the industry gives us a sane legal option.
Just look at the music industry. It's by no means perfect, but iTunes music is reasonably priced (especially compared to the price level of physical albums in NL), and I can get the songs out of iTunes and onto some other medium if I want to. Add to that a Spotify account that comes free with my internet hookup, and I have plenty of legal ways to get my music. The result? I spend more than in the days of physical CDs, and I get a lot more then I would have gotten before... and I haven't looked at illegal music downloads in ages.
A stylish ship would be nice... What little I have seen of cruise ships, they look like "luxury" (but not really) hotels on the inside, and on the outside they look like a housing project set adrift.
As the article states, this is already a non-issue for some companies, as they can simply offer Windows apps over Citrix. My client is already well set up to serve apps over Citrix, as it is a lot easier to distribute them to a small user group than to have to build an installer that will run on the locked-down Windows workstation. Switching to Linux in this ecosystem would be a relatively minor step.
Funny enough, that client has recently done the opposite: swap out some of the extreme high-end Linux workstations that some users needed, moving them into the datacenter, and letting those users access them through a virtual desktop on a standard company craptop. Strangely, almost all of those users are rather pleased with this arrangement, since they can still do the high-power computing they need, from a machine that has all the standard tools (Office, etc.) that the rest of the company uses.
By the way, virtual desktops have come a long way since Citrix, and there's no reason why you could not run Photoshop on them. I messed around with RGS from HP, which is capable of giving you a virtual desktop spanning several physical screens, and easily handles video, audio, 3D... we even tried Unreal Tournament on it, which worked well.
The death of the PC game market has been greatly exaggerated, for the past decade or so. But it does seem that the ability to run the latest red-hot games is much less of a factor in buying the next family PC than it was some years ago.
Yes, but this one has rounded corners! (And poor 3G reception...)
The comparison between Google and Siri is not as silly as it appears. Burrus thinks that the future of search belongs to intelligent agents, and that means more than just giving a dumb search engine a little bit of extra context in the form of personal data it has collected on you. Intelligence doesn't mean having data on where I am and what my friends "liked".
An "intelligent" agent (best to use the word with caution) should at the very least:
- understand your question;
- understand the material it is searching.
Google only does this at a very basic level, and in some cases Siri is ahead of the curve when it comes to semantic interpretation. Or more accurately: wolphram alpha is, when Siri passes your question on to it.
There's some nice research going on in semantic analysis of search queries and source material, and ways of turning that into a sematic drill-down into search results. That can come in the form of a visualisation of search results, or (in the future) something like this:
"Siri, I need a new washer"
- "Do you mean dishwasher, or laundry machine, or something else?"
"A laundry machine"
- "What features are you looking for? Low price, economy, capacity, quality, high-speed spin drying?"
"Well, the price is not that relevant though I want something from a reputable brand, and spend at most $800. I suppose most machines will have sufficient capacity."
- "I am assuming a standard-size machine. I found the following A-brand machines matching your criteria, along with prices and features. I highlighted a few machines that people seem to be particularly pleased with."
"Nr. 3 looks good, show me some reviews from trade magazines for that one, as well as what people have written about it. Is there a shop at the local Mega Mall that has them?"
- "Hang on. Yes, it is in stock. You can pick it up but they also do free delivery to this area".
And so on. For this, the search engine needs to understand many things: that there are kinds of "washers", that they have specific properties that may or may not be relevant, that there is a standard size for washing machines, what a "reputable brand" is and which brands qualify, and it needs to be able to interpret shop websites to figure out if they carry a particular model, what their price is, and if they deliver. Google does none of this. Wolphram alpha has some capabilities in this area (type in "dishwasher properties" for example). In the future, when these engines become better at interpreting meaning, we will have conversations with our search engine. That will be the game-changer, and something that could render Google obsolete (if they don;t get into the game themselves).
I know what you mean... I'm close to releasing an app; it's for a niche market and probably small enough to fly under the radar, but I hate the thought of some random asshat coming along to levy a tax on my work, or for some corporation with a competing product to crush me in court. Just because the patent office saw fit to grant a patent for being somewhere first (rather than for hard work leading to a genuine invention), and because I have a 1-click buy button with rounded corners in my app. And yes, as a programmer in someone's employ, this can hurt you too, if the trolls decide to go after the cool startup or struggling innovator you work for.
Way to foster innovation (which was one of the purposes of modern patents).
Ahh, the EWI building hack (at the time it was still the EE faculty, I believe?). Where I whiled away many an hour playing X-pilot, on the department's Sun workstations. And remembering when amazingly we got Unix going on a PC thanks to the hard work of a guy called Linus. Good times...
Soon? Hardly. Too many parties in the Netherlands are in favor of ACTA, or will support it out of political expediency. And that goes for a lot of similar issues. It's pretty sad that for many 'digital' rights, we have to turn to the left. Our Liberals (here it means something like very soft core libertarians; they are centre-right) never really got these issues, and they've gone from bad to worse in the last 2 years of governing.
...
Still, it's not enough to make me vote socialist
It probably works different in different countries. In most of Europe, double jeopardy (or "ne bis in idem") means you cannot be convicted or prosecuted for something that you have already been tried for. This goes only for criminal proceedings, but "already been tried" explicitly includes being tried for the crime in another country (I'm not sure if certain countries with iffy legal reputations are excluded here).
However, civil suits are excluded from this clause: in your transmitter example you can only be tried once for criminal charges, but all victims have the right to seek damages in a civil suit, individually or in class action suits. And being ordered to pay damages does not free you from criminal charges either. Incidentally I find it rather weird that (in the US at least) one can be sued for damages by a victim even after you've been cleared of charges in a criminal proceedings for the same case.
Double jeopardy is about not being punished for the same crime twice. The real question is: should what they did be regarded as two separate crimes in two countries? I think one should think long and hard before answering this in the affirmative. Consider: you grab a movie from the Pirate bay, and seed parts of it to torrent peers in 15 other countries. Is it fair to be convicted in each country separately?
There are many cases where you'd want to give your data to online entities. Slashdot has my email address. Amazon has my physical address, which kind of helps them delivering the stuff I order from them to my doorstep. The utility company has my physical address and my bank details. And so on. Sure, you could pay everything in cash, not order anything online or set up a P.O. Box, and create dedicated email addresses and identities for every site that makes you sign up. But I'd rather not go through the trouble.
Berners-Lee has it arse-backwards, by the way: instead of promising what they won't do, companies should simply follow the law laid down in a number of European countries: if you collect data on your customers, you can only use that data for the stated purpose, and nothing else. Now, I don't mind Amazon and Google having certain data on me. As long as they play nice. Which means some additional rules:
- Don't state that you'll use my data in every which way you see fit: use it only for those purposes that I had in mind when I gave you my data.
- Don't bury your data privacy statement in 54 pages of legalese: the statement should be visible, clear, and at most half a page (I wouldn't mind that rule to be made into law...)
- Be very clear on which 3rd parties you share my data with, for what purposes (see the first rule), and under what conditions.
- You will protect my data well.
- At any time I will have the option to rescind my permission to use my data. (by the way, that does not amount to that godawfully misguided "right to be forgotten" idea. It pertains to personal data that is a shared secret between me and some company, not to public contributions I or others have made)
Of course companies could simply ignore the law and share my data anyway, but at least they'd be breaking the law and you could take them to court if you catch them at it. That is perhaps what Berners-Lee is hinting at: it'd be a lot better if data was shared under clear and enforceable agreements, and agreements that benefit the data owner, not the recipient.
Critical? I have seen departments that operate rather well despite the fully incompetent middle managers in charge of them. Managers are important, sure, but so is the network engineer who keeps the bits flowing, and the lady from finance who makes sure that we all get our paychecks on time. And that's just it: if you look at what middle management actually is, the conclusion is that management is part of the plumbing, just like IT, Finance, Legal, etc. Necessary, but hardly strategic... in large firms, middle managers love to pretend they are involved in strategy, but that mostly amounts to reshuffling peons and suppliers a little. It would well behoove those managers to remember that they too are just employees of the company, not gods incarnate.
Executives are much less overrated perhaps (though the inflated egos are certainly there), but again the problem is: there's an awful lot of bad apples in the bunch. Not a surprise if you recruit them from middle management. And it's no surprise either that (in my experience at least) executives often love to talk to non-managers or to free thinkers and artsy folks from outside the company. Their subordinate managers are shopkeepers and poor strategists; talking to other people is more likely to yield a fresh perspective.
By the way, if you get the feeling that I am laying in to middle management rather harshly... I am. I think there is a world to be gained by having *good* middle management in place, but it will require a whole different breed of managers. (Read "Managers, not MBAs" some time).
That's the problem right there: management is vastly overrated as a profession; it's interesting that moving into management is always perceived as a step up. I've seen plenty of managers expressing shock and horror at finding that some of their underlings make more than they do, and it seems that they've quickly moved to address that issue; it doesn't happen all that often anymore. Management is important and all that, but it does seem that somehow we got stuck in a loop with inflated egos pushing up inflated salaries and vice versa.
Another problem is that a lot of companies seem to have problems coming up with good career paths for scientists and engineers. Especially career paths that don't end up in management. The other day, a fellow contractor working for my client asked me to provide input for his yearly appraisal. One section of the form was titled "future potential", where I was asked my opinion on what level the person would be able to attain in 5 years time, and what level he'd be at the top of his career. The choices were jobs like "programme manager", "department manager", "division manager"... the only option that didn't have the word manager in it was "CEO". And this is supposed to be a career path for an IT architect working for a tech firm?
In general, techies are poorly understood, poorly managed, underpaid and not well respected. And all of these go hand in hand. Small wonder that young people are choosing other career options.