To combine the ideas of two posters above, what is needed is:

• Split personal information in 'private' and 'public' info. For example, your facebook friends are (I think?) public, while the email addresses and mobile numbers of your contacts are generally private. There should be sane default settings that can be altered.
• Allow any apps that ask for permission to see personal information X three choices: allow, allow public only, deny. The app should not be able to see the difference between allow and allow public only, it just gets less info. The email address and phone number of the default contacts (customer service, voicemail etc) will be public, so the app will generally get some email addresses to send spam to if that's what it does.
• Make it easy for apps to run with minimum privileges. For example, if I would creata an agenda app that allows the user to email directly to someone attending a meeting, I really don't need to either see emails or control the email app. What is needed is an API function "email this person", which would open an email editor with the email address of the person (which is never given to 'my' app). Same for calling people. In this way, apps can give rich features while using only 'public' personal information. Note: I don't know whether these things are possible atm, I'm a phone user, not a (phone) developer.
• Finally, it should be possible to limit the 'requires internet access ' to the domain the app came from ('a la java'). Again, the app should not see this difference, just get connection refused on other addresses.

Anyway, I'm a user rather than a (phone) developer, and I guess a lot of people don't care so much about their private parts, but it seems that awareness is growing...

Wollt ihr den totalen Grieg?

That depends on your specific situation. In my case, I had two fears: #1 that my employer would prevent me from working on 'my' software if I leave, and #2 that a competitor would 'run away' with my software without sharing back.

If your only fear is #1, then surely you want the most permissive license, i.e. BSD or equivalent. In my case, both fears lead me to use the (Affero) GPL.

Using a copyleft license might actually help get permission from legal since you will have to* share any improvements you make back with the company. If I were the employer, I would sooner license as GPL than as BSD, since BSD essentially turns it into shared copyright, while in GPL the copyright owner has a substantially better legal position than the licensee.

You could even present it as a proper 'two-way' contract: you give all IP on the specific project to them (preventing any future difficulty over the legality of the employment conditions and fighting over whether all work was actually done during your tenure) and in return they license it to you. Reducing risk and uncertainty for the employer might be language that the legal people understand.

*) obviously, you only have to share back when you distribute or (under the Affero clause) when you offer it as a service on the internet

What I did at my current (academic) job is to keep copyright with my employer, but have them license it back to me under GPL. This means that if I move jobs or start my own business I can keep working on these projects. You can sell it to them as showing how they (ie, you) contribute to the community etc, and that they keep all IP so there is no danger of you suing them and they can always relicense.

Downside is of course that your future business model would have to build around an OSS core, but there are various options (OSS backend with proprietary frontend, web business / software as a service (no distribution = no requirement to give source code), proprietary modules that actually make it work (but make sure that the proprietary part cannot be construed as a derived work), etc etc.

EU law has direct force in national law, EU law trumps national law, and questions of interpretation of EU law are handled by the EU court, whose decisions are binding for the national courts. The EU is very far from toothless in areas where it has legal competence.

If they are indeed replacing the '95 directive the "published document" will have the form of a EU directive, which member states are compelled to turn into national law. If they don't do so, the EC (or, I think, any citizen with standing) can sue them in the EU court for failing to comply.

What you are referring to as toothless is probably in issue domains like foreigh affairs and defense, where the member states have full competence and the only thing the EU can do is try to forge some sort of consensus.

I'm a very happy user of xmonad tiling window manager, but there is indeed a big learning curve and a lot of keyboard hitting. I've seen screenshots of beautiful xmonad setups but mine is quite dull and I'm not willing to invest time in learning config-fu to beautify things.

It would be fantastic if someone could make a tiling window manager based distribution ("XMonabuntu"? :-)) that just works out of the box and has some point-and-click configurability and theming support.

In the Netherlands, there is a "knowledge worker" rule that says that if you can find a job that requires a degree and pays X% better than minimum (or modal?) wage, it's easy to get a working permit, plus you get a huge tax break (although I think there are cutting down on the latter). Any decent sized company will have someone in the HRM department who knows these rules and can help with the paper work.

If you are here 5 years and pass a test you can apply for citizenship but that might require renouncing your US citizenship.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081210140645AADMNkG

Whats the difference between Straight and Strait?
Straight, as in a line without a waver or curve.
Strait: "A strait is a narrow, navigable channel of water that connects two larger navigable bodies of water. "

And for the love of foreigners, if you guys do something about your spelling issues, please remove unsounded letters (like the "gh" in straight"), don't add any more of them. That's just cheating at scrabble!

Related question: I would like to use a tablet for grading and correcting assignments and reading and annotating papers (all pdf). I would need it to sync to a storage for pdf files, preferably with a means of adding metadata (tags, bibliography, etc) with a good frontend on the PC as well.

Are there any good apps/applications for that now? Because then I might consider getting a tablet. Is it worth trying to get an e-ink device? Are there any e-ink devices running a sensible OS?

Funny, I just started using PGP last week and was surprised at the ease of setup and use. As I don't actually know anyone who uses it I don't think I can encrypt mail (as they would need to have a keypair), but I do sign all my mail, and even outlook users see the little 'seal' icon, even though gmail users don't apparently.

(Ubuntu 11.10 + evolution)