While your points about the snail's pace of web "standards" development are fair, it's also important not to go too far the other way. Not so long ago, another browser became dominant in market share through pushing new but not widely supported features its own way, and people started making web sites that were written specifically to work with that browser rather than any common standard.

That browser was Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, and the result was IE6.

Ideally, no. In practice, IME we aren't quite there yet: the focal distance for current in-car HUDs still tends to be significantly shorter than where a driver should normally be looking. However, it's still interesting to consider whether even the HUDs we have available today are an improvement on static instrument consoles, where the driver also has to look down/over, as well as changing focus to an even closer range.

Hopefully it goes without saying that using this kind of technology to display anything that isn't immediately relevant to driving (such as the notifications shown on their site right now) is crazy.

However, in a few years, I can imagine that navigation systems will use a combination of eye-tracking and HUD technology to skip the stylised graphics we use today and just highlight the required driving line directly on the road ahead. My other big wish for this kind of technology is enhancements for when visibility is poor: think night vision/IR with additional highlights on hazards such as a car ahead slowing down sharply or a pedestrian moving toward the road. Those kinds of qualitative improvements in driver awareness could save a lot of lives and a lot of time, not to mention the general frustration that sometimes comes with driving in unfamiliar places today.

You're misunderstanding that section of the DPA. It's about allowing journalists and the like to work with personal data so they can prepare a piece for publication, because otherwise it could become impossible for people like investigative journalists to even keep notes on their research, which is considered important enough to the public interest to merit special protection.

The section you quoted is not about the end result of any search research and preparation. It grants no special exemption to the usual privacy and data protection obligations for the publication itself.

That was my big take away from the article as well.

There are exactly two major Microsoft product lines I have any interest in, either professionally or personally: Windows and Office. One remains by far the most flexible platform for a general purpose computing device today. The other remains the standard for word processing and spreadsheets. All of these are useful to me almost every day.

However, I really have no interest in "the cloud" for everyday computing needs. As I've suggested many times, I think Microsoft really missed a trick by chasing the cloud hype instead of pushing "private clouds" -- a model with very practical arguments in its favour and where their breadth of products would have given them a distinct advantage over any other major tech firm today. But storing all my personal stuff or my sensitive business documents off-site, accessed over inherently unreliable and slow connections, with unknown security and privacy implications? I assumed that was a joke until I realised big businesses weren't laughing.

Similarly, I have no interest in paying recurring revenues for software that isn't either constantly adding significant value or dramatically better than anything I can get as a one-off purchase. For me personally, no software has ever met that benchmark so far. I do use properly licensed copies of things like MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, and I would and did happily pay for major upgrades that added significant value from time to time. But a rental model for everyday software that is so stagnant they couldn't get people to upgrade any other way? No thanks. There were and are many things these software companies could do that would be worth a lot of money to me, but why would they bother when they can just phone it in and rely on the lock-in lemmings to keep their bank account topped up anyway?

And I have even less interest in half-baked devices with ambiguous use cases. I'm typing this on a real keyboard, with a real mouse next to me, and a set of monitors that would make your puny 300+dpi tabletconvertiblenettopsurface with its physically small screen cry. Every now and then I have to suffer using a laptop in a meeting, and even the good ones are so pathetic compared to real workstations in every possible respect except portability that I cry. Nadella is welcome to promote a word processor running on a device with no keyboard. I'll take my 100ish error-free wpm typing speed and punctuation I can input with fewer than three not-real-key presses, thanks.

I think all of the above are basically hype-driven rather than benefit-driven. The cloud has some advantages, but they are oversold. Recurring revenues will be great until the benefits almost inevitably start to tail off compared to what people got before, the bean counters start protesting, and some young upstart company becomes the next Microsoft by adopting the radical policy of making useful software and selling it without a rental EULA full of catches. And these multi-purpose tablet/laptop hybrids are just Jacks of all trades so far: they lack the convenience of a phone or small tablet, and they cost significantly more than a proper laptop of otherwise similar spec with little practical advantage unless you really need touch-based input (which almost nothing running on such hardware today actually does).

So a strategy based on this will probably be very successful in the short term, when purchasing decisions made by suits at Fortune 500 companies are still driven by the hype, but if^Wwhen the correction happens -- and in some cases there are already signs that the hype is fading, and with hybrid devices it's not clear they will ever really take off in the first place -- Microsoft is going to be a mighty big ship to steer on a radically different course, with its two biggest engines poorly maintained and running well below capacity.

That's almost certainly what the industry now seems to call retargeting: you visit a vendor's site and either a bug belonging to the ad network or some sort of code added by the vendor themselves notifies the network that you were there, and possibly which page(s) or item(s) you appeared to be interested in.

The vendor can then use whether you'd been there before as a criteria for targeting their ads, and the network can prioritise showing you those ads in whatever allowance they have because in general they are much more likely to convert (not to mention being less annoying for the user, since if it's done properly then it's more likely that the ads will be of some relevance/interest rather than random spam).

This doesn't work very well at all if the vendor doesn't also indicate the completion of a successful sale to the network, though, as it leaves no way to remove you from the set of people likely to be interested in something once you already did make a typically one-time purchase. That's when you get that annoying "I already bought this!!!!11!!1eleven!" feeling.

Same here.

I love the idea of Open Source, community-driven projects, and I'm happy when they provide useful software to people for no cost, and I'm happy that there are people providing competition for the big name software companies.

I'm also a busy person. If I've got work to do or something important to finish personally, then realistically the cost of buying more polished commercial/proprietary software can often be justified instantly.

That might be because it has comprehensive documentation, but much the same applies to the usual FOSS weaknesses: ease of use, or compatibility with industry standards, convenient availability of professional consultancy and training, and so on.

(Of course, I am similarly sceptical about proprietary commercial software where the documentation or ease of use don't justify the high prices sometimes asked. This isn't about FOSS, it's about whether it's worth spending real money to get a much more practically useful product.)

I'm not sure whether that's strictly true, but I'm also not sure why it's relevant. Even if we assume Facebook intends to show a fixed X amount of ads to each user per visit/unit of time/number of other entries in their feed, Facebook ads run on an auction system. The targeting available to advertisers is quite objective about who is and isn't included in the potential audience, and any given ad is only going to be shown to qualified users. But those qualifications can be as simple as the country you're in or being a friend of someone with a certain interest, so even if someone hasn't given much information themselves, there are always things that Facebook have a very high probability of determining correctly.

Yes and no. They let their platform get taken over by the kind of users who will choose to buy $1 "make your iPhone a torch" applications, which makes it less appealing to users who might pay more money for better apps.

In some of the best restaurants in the world, that is exactly what happens, but that's not really the point.

A better analogy would be to say that you won't go to a fine dining restaurant and find plastic cheeseburger and fries at fast food prices on the menu.

Millions of people voluntarily give all kinds of relevant information about themselves to Facebook. Even without any serious data mining, and ignoring the people who deliberately create garbage data accounts, Facebook probably already have more accurate demographic data about their users than most advertising channels. For example, knowing about major life events like someone getting married or having a baby are advertising gold for some markets.

At the scale they're working on, even trivial analysis of the underlying graph is probably quite informative as well. If 60% of your friends are interested in a certain thing, there's a fair chance you are too, even if you didn't explicitly indicate this.

These posts are getting very long, so I'll gloss over a few areas where it seems we basically agree anyway and pick up on some of the more interesting points...

Funnily enough, ABC was exactly the network I had in mind as I wrote my previous comments. We get the ABC nightly news bulletin shown on our own BBC News channel, and sometimes the degree of dumbing down, "patriotic" chest-thumping, and overtly biased commentary literally makes my cringe. It's awful. Maybe that's just the main bulletin and some of its other content is better?

Like you, we have other more "heavyweight" news sources available here in the UK, but the good ol' BBC is probably about as mainstream as it gets. For all the claims of bias it receives (it's a big target, and people of all political persuasions seem to claim it's biased against them any time they get negative coverage) I think overall it does pretty well. Certainly no-one with a reasonably well-educated, middle-class kind of background here is going to take the tabloid stuff too seriously with that kind of alternative.

Out of genuine curiosity, what would you consider to be "good" and reasonably neutral news media in the US?

That comment surprises me. I've no reason to doubt your personal experience, but I do wonder what kind of Europeans you're talking to if such basic misunderstandings are so universal. Granted I'm not the average UK guy in this respect -- I'm a geek who spends a fair bit of time on-line discussing stuff with other geeks from all round the world, and I'm lucky enough to have had very good education and come from a stable, middle class background -- but I can't imagine that anyone I know who takes an interests in these kinds of political issues wouldn't be aware that not everyone in the world uses a parliamentary system of government. I expect most who have had any significant discussions about the US at least understand the general separation of powers idea at the executive/legislature/judiciary level, even if they don't necessarily know the intricacies of your legislative structure and so on.

That's an interesting perspective, but not one I see from here. Obviously it's true that the Democrats and Republicans generally argue for different things as their principles. But when you look at the policies they have actually implemented in government, and compare it to the breadth of opinion you get even among mainstream parties across Europe, it doesn't look like there's all that much difference between them in the big picture.

For example, it's taken until the Obama administration for anyone to even try implementing universal healthcare. That is something many (though of course not all) in Europe would consider a basic requirement for any civilised society in the 21st century.

But who in mainstream US politics is arguing for, say, reform of working conditions? The US has some of the worst protection for employees of any country in the developed world. The demonstrated positions of both major parties in the US are very right wing/capitalist.

Who is arguing for dramatic shifts in tax levels for the rich/the poor/large corporations/small businesses? The parties often claim to be diametrically opposed on such issues, but the reality is that what they do when actually in government is fine-tune a few percentages. It seems very rare for either to make a fundamental change in the degree of redistribution of wealth, or the balance of public vs. private provision of services -- again, Obamacare is probably the first radical change in this respect that has actually been pushed through by either party for a generation.

Who is proposing a dramatic reduction in funding for the the military-industrial complex, with the released funds redirected to other government functions or given back as tax cuts? It seems we agree that none of our countries should be as aggressive as they sometimes are in pushing their own cultures and laws extra-territorially, yet the US retains an absurdly large military and measured by such blunt statistics as body count, today's United States remains one of the most aggressive and hostile cultures in modern history.

Again, I'm not really sure what you mean there. Which candidates are you talking about? While the leaders of major political parties do come under a lot of scrutiny, a lot of our national politics is more about the party itself than the individual MP you're voting for in a general election, unless someone either very good or very bad is running as a party's candidate in some particular constituency.

Our politicians for the most part don't do the happily married family man/woman song and dance that seems pervasive in the US, because frankly most of us don't consider it particularly relevant, and for the most part our media know better than to go after a public figure's non-public family for a story if there isn't a genuine public interest. In your own terms, we generally don't vote on those issues, so it doesn't matter that we aren't fully informed about them. Unless there is a demonstration of something like hypocrisy or deception, in which case it's fair game and generally will be widely reported if the word gets out, we just don't care, because it's irrelevant to how well someone will do their job as a representative of their constituents.

Again, I emphasize that I was talking somewhat hyperbolically before.

But in case you wanted a genuine answer, it is actually rather easy. Firstly, they'd go after the corporate officers based on Europe. Secondly, if any corporate officer who was American ever entered Europe (even flying over European airspace or in temporary transit through a connection at a European airport) they would be subject to arrest.

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it. Particularly in regard to the Internet, control of infrastructure, exporting of laws, and surveillance, the US is not a popular country in Europe right now. Major US tech companies are already protesting about the damage to their reputations and ultimately profits that has been caused by various US government actions in recent years.

For example, there are already on-line services that guarantee to store data only within the EEA, so the data protection rules about exports don't apply, and this is already becoming a commercial advantage for them over their US competitors. There are already questions being asked openly in security-sensitive organisations about whether once unquestioned US brands like Cisco, Dell and Apple are appropriate suppliers for computing and communications equipment. Now that governments have started doing things like seizing domain names, it is probably only a matter of time before ICANN loses its overall authority as well.

As far as I can see, there is absolutely no possible upside to any of this for US businesses, and ultimately for the US economy and government. And it has effectively been brought about by the US doing exactly what we were talking about -- using dubious mechanisms to export its laws and culture abroad -- for some time now. The only difference is that this time, some of the rest of the world decided to do the same thing back, and the US doesn't like it when that sort of thing happens. It's used to everyone taking for granted that keeping the US friendly will be more important in the long run and letting minor transgressions slide is diplomatically justified, but in the current European political climate that assumption isn't what it used to be.

I realise that there is a relatively strong cultural distinction here.

I would first point out in return that many Europeans have seen what government power looks like when too many people know too much personal information about everyone. I have friends here in the UK whose families fled Germany and German-occupied territory during WW2. I have personally talked to people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who were literally lucky to escape with their lives. There is a reason that privacy is a big issue in Europe, and in particular in places like Germany and France.

I would also point out that this case had nothing to do with state suppression of free speech. It was a case brought by a private individual, under reasonable circumstances, according to the same law that applies to everyone here. There was no inherent imbalance of power, where a mighty state imposed censorship on a citizen whose views disagreed with those of the current political administration. If anything, the imbalance of power was in favour of Google, and this was just the law reminding the big guy that it applies equally to him too.

Finally, with the greatest of respect, I have to dispute your characterisation of Americans. The people of the US today allow their opinions to be dictated by powerful organisations all the time.

Your media do it: I've seen the major US TV networks, and the blatant bias in their presentation of news stories is almost comical to someone who's used to international coverage. It's not as if we don't have the same issues to deal with, but even the most reputable of US TV networks is barely above what we would call tabloid journalism (which is very much a derogatory term here -- tabloids have a reputation for peddling exactly the kinds of half-truths and semi-factual stories we are talking about).

Your creative industries do it: As we've discussed elsewhere on Slashdot recently, the US is by far the biggest supporter of IP protections in the world, and has no problems using diplomatic and political leverage to export its cultural preferences to as much of the rest of the world as it can in that department.

And of course, your politicians certainly do it: The US government today is among the most transparently bought-and-paid-for by powerful special interest groups in the entire first world, and everyone knows it. Everyone knows that the kind of negative campaigning you alluded to happens, too. And yet, as a society you continue voting for one of the two big parties that, again, by international standards are barely distinct on the political spectrum (and ironically much more pro-big-government than many mainstream political parties across Europe).

I have yet to meet that journalist.

Here in the UK we see a lot of criticism, sometimes more overt than others, of the policies and track records of competing political parties. That is as it should be.

What we see relatively rarely is the outright character assassination that seems to be de rigeur in US politics. Sometimes the major parties do try it, if they really want to get rid of a particular personality among their competition. To be fair, sometimes they do also succeed, but more often I think it just winds up being a plague on both their houses and a distraction from the real issues. It is, as we say here, not playing cricket.

Perhaps this plays into your point that the negative comments should be allowed, and of course we do culturally accept them up to a point. But generally going after a public figure based on irrelevant facts such as their religion or sexuality or publishing things like the home address and phone number of a celebrity are not well regarded, even if the information in question is factually accurate. On balance, as a society, we tend to feel that even public figures are entitled to a private life, as long as it doesn't interfere with whatever they do in their public life (e.g., a politician arguing in public for the importance of state schools, yet sending all their own kids to expensive private schools that most parents can't afford).

I used to live right next to one of the UK's national reference libraries. I'm well aware of what they do.

But that argument is missing the point. This isn't about whether information exists at all. It isn't about whether a historian who is willing to spend time properly investigating something should be able to look up the facts.

This is about whether information -- specifically, information that is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive -- is easily available to a vast audience for negligible effort and cost. The practical consequences of dubious and/or misleading information that is widely distributed are much worse for innocent individuals than the practical consequences of such information if it is only looked up by people who care enough to make a significant effort to find it and who are probably looking for other related information as well. Scale matters.

The essence of the technologies might not have changed, but their implications have changed dramatically. A friend photographing you having a good night out and e-mailing that picture to you is a fun memory for you to share. 853 people photographing you incidentally over the course of a few days and uploading their snaps along with accompanying time and place metadata to a photo sharing web site where they are run through image recognition and thereby connected with your own profiles in other database? That is starting to look like someone you don't know has a pretty detailed picture of your life, and chances are that anything they do with that picture will be in their interests rather than yours.

There are certainly two ways to attack this problem: much more transparency or much less. And I have some sympathy with the idea that radical transparency is a better solution, at least in theory.

The trouble is that in practice, radical transparency only works if you can reach a fairly extreme position, where all or at least a heavy majority of relevant information is available and where everyone interested in the topic will give equal weight to all of it. That is, everyone must speak with the same voice, and everyone must listen to everyone else equally before forming opinions and making decisions.

I'm not sure that is ever going to be a realistic goal, at least not without radical changes in society probably taking place over several generations. As jd pointed out, we are a long way from that sort of idealised culture today and almost all of us are too quick to make judgements, even when those judgements might have a profoundly unfair effect on someone else.

In the meantime, in the real world we live in today, the further you move in that direction the worse things become for the victims. And that is why, although I have some sympathy with the radical transparency philosophy, on balance I support reasonable measures to actively defend privacy and keep personal data in confidence in preference to greater freedom of speech.