Although it wasn't an 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS upgrade it went well and runs well. Long may it run.
This dance has been in full swing for a while now and seems not to be going anywhere but round and round, which is OK as far as dancing goes. There are informed people who have made informed posts from various countries but I keep coming back to two main points. One: if social sites, or, any person or company is profiting from your personal information then that information has value. If your personal information has value and you contract for it's use then it's up to you to limit the use the other contracting party can make of your personal information and the consideration you should receive for giving up your personal information. Capacity (old enough to contract), Consideration (value received) and Agency (legal right to contract for the goods and services) are fundamental. Basic contract law, like basic statistics, is fundamental to negotiating one's way in a modern world. It must be part of any grade school curriculum. Evidently most people are as woefully ignorant of the basics of contract law as they are of statistics and aren't able to competently navigate a modern market place. One option might be for everyone to incorporate and seed their Me corp. with their private information as an asset. I recognize this is in some ways an outlandish proposition but OTOH it may be a good way to instruct individuals from the age of majority in how to conduct their affairs in a market place where contracts have an air of sanctity and much legal weight. Secondly, (just as an aside I don't have a face book account, no myspace, no youtube) the whole social networking scene reminds me of ancient news reels from the 20s and 30s when people sat atop flagpoles and swallowed live goldfish just to get their mugs front and centre on a newsreel and make a splash in the shallow end of the new medium. Don't dismiss the possibility that all they big market cap social networking sites will just die off like personal web sites from the late 90s. As people realize they're being ripped off and as people become versed in technology the reliance on big social sites might fade as fast as they appeared and the content they hosted will be, for the most part, lost and forgotten.
There are other completely free products that have matched Nero's (former) minimalist approach.
I don't disagree and would add in CDex as another example, but Nero is one of the few for profit companies that seem to have made an effort to put out a good product at a fair price. There's always been a few companies whose PC products are reasonably priced and worth the cost. Norton Utilities was perhaps the most shining example. I almost always get a free light version of Nero software when I buy a high end optical drive or a TV card/ripper. I'll pick up their latest full suite when it pops up on my radar screen at half price because the lite version still measures up well against the free stuff. One of the biggest problems vendors like Nero face is that MS knows it has to keep adding brain candy apps for the point and click crowd and MS will drive niche vendors out of business to keep their OS/Office products afloat. It's just a temporary bother because an OS in 10 years time will come with a full suite of audio video scrapbook apps for mom and pop and the kids to play with.
just my loose change
Privacy is the natural state
My reading of your post coupled to my understanding prompting my post suggests the issue could get very tricksy, very quickly, but be interesting nonetheless. IIRC the context in which Bacon made his remark, I'm unable to source it, addressed the idea that physical law trumped idle conjecture and placed constraints on the possible. When I commented on privacy in nature I wasn't referring to a sort of J-J Rousseau theory of social contract but rather to the state in the wild as it exists between all animals. In nature territory defended against competing life forms may be the closest analogy to privacy, but like I said this could all get very tricky. Mill (the younger?) and Locke spoke to government and private property. Private property and privacy are social constructs, as is government. I've a bad feeling I'm missing an obvious premise here but at least I'd like to point out my comment on privacy was directed to the much broader context of nature rather than human artifacts and artifice.
cheers
I don't think you can accurately model inferences from personal data; non-sequiturs abound.
You can, if you're wreckless.
, privacy is going to have to adjust to what is now possible. While some of the things that are now possible are scary to people, many add to the public good.
"While all things are possible, not all things are permitted."Francis Bacon (17th C)
Bacon made his remark in a different context but I think it's germane in that privacy is legislated and enforced, and not naturally occurring.
Britain, at least from my POV, has undertaken a huge, perhaps unprecedented social experiment in immigration and mosaic, cultural restructuring. Significant immigration is necessary to bolster a competitive country's domestic workforce and it's international competitiveness, but, as everyone knows, it almost always brings with it social problems. The hue and cry historical precedent, in a skewed way speaks to a more European openness to a community policing itself whether by a sort of neighbourhood watch or a ring of cameras monitoring the streets. It's possible that North Americans, especially in the U.S.A. and Canada, are more sensitive to privacy concerns because development of the new world permitted far greater degree of privacy.
The above aside, I'm deeply vested in the concerns of the article because I'm interested in statistical modeling of political decisions and ways of abstracting inferences from personal data. I was fairly well schooled in statistics and probability to an undergraduate level but don't pretend to as wide an understanding of the field as I once had. While my interest is keyed to the problems of the individual in relation to the group, the relationship between an individual to the social unit speaks directly to privacy concerns. If my fledgling hypotheses are in any way indicative of what might be on the horizon then it's likely that along with the milieu that has spawned our current privacy concerns there are new tools that will let data be abstracted from the new milieu in a way that not only safeguards the privacy of individuals but might enhance one's privacy. Without blurting out my tentative ideas, possibly lucrative, and getting bitch slapped by some stats prof, I still think it's fair to say there's lots of room and time for the data that is now available to spawn a new tool set that will correct any current incursions into personal privacy.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.