Slashdot Mirror

Has it actually been passed?

I saw this story on Slashdot yesterday (Thursday) and it's now Friday morning (10am in England) and there is nothing on the BBC and no update to the parliament.uk page regarding the bill.

Is there a chance this hasn't actually been passed which is why it's not being reported? The BBC has no recent (within last week) news on this.

OK, so searching with Google News I can now see a few UK papers picking this up today: The Independent, Digital Trends, Out-Law, and Press Gazetta but they are not what you'd consider main-stream.

Fuck the main-stream media.

Fuck the UK government.

That's correct: its demographic is neither technically literate nor particularly well-informed or erudite, and comprises a large and influential chunk of the UK electorate. It has the second-highest circulation in the UK, with a slowly rising circulation, and has been the most-visited UK newspaper website for some time. Politicians in the UK therefore take its bigoted rants very seriously, just as Fox News is taken seriously by politicians in the US.

That's correct: its demographic is neither technically literate nor particularly well-informed or erudite, and comprises a large and influential chunk of the UK electorate. It has the second-highest circulation in the UK, with a slowly rising circulation, and has been the most-visited UK newspaper website for some time.

Politicians in the UK therefore take its bigoted rants very seriously, just as Fox News is taken seriously by politicians in the US.

The Times circulation is 500,000 -ish. So 4x that paying for the web edition looks pretty good.

I thought the received wisdom was that when free websites put up a paywall, they lose 90% of their traffic. The Times seems to have done rather better.

Has he failed?

WSJ.com is a success. The Times? Too early to know, but there are reports that News of the World is following, so The Times' experience can't have been a disaster.

ComScore‘s figures suggested the number of unique visitors to The Times web site dropped from 2.79 million in May to 1.61 million in July and that page views fell from 29 million in May to nine million in July as well as readers spending less time on the site. However, consider that first set of numbers again: Prior to the paywall, the site was getting 2.79 million users accessing the site for free. Now it has 1.61 million but all have paid a price to be there. On a figures basis 2.79 million of nothing is nothing but 1.61 million paying a £1 is a lot, lot more revenue.

The Guardian is indeed an excellent source of free news, but with pre-tax losses of nearly $134m last year, it's anyone's guess how long that will last.

The BBC isn't in the same boat, of course, since it's funded by British licence fee payers, but should the Conservatives win the next general election, its operation also looks set to be scaled back considerably.

We don't know if the Asker is leaving in uniform and will have access to anywhere near that level of support.

If I weren't going out there on government orders and with their full support on the ground, I wouldn't even consider going without a satellite phone. Cell phone towers and the ISPs are often the first thing to go in a coup, and the country in question is anything but stable.

I'd suggest grabbing a prepaid Thuraya phone, just-in-case. They're cheap ($0.90/minute?) and tiny, no larger than a ~1999 Nokia phone until you extend the antenna. It's also possible to get ISP service over the phone, in a pinch. Their site kinda sucks, but the service doesn't: http://www.thuraya.com/

They can be useful in other situations, as well: http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=29876

I'm not familiar with the alternatives (Thuraya's the only service I've seen set up storefronts in my current home of India), but your colleagues in country may be able to give more and better advice.

Luckily we live the the most democratic place on the planet. Where free speech and freedom to public protect are enshrined in the constitution. Except outside Parliament Square and American military bases and drug testing labs and .. anywhere else for that matter. You also risk getting arrested if you try and talk to any of the protesters. Try it if you don't believe me. One other method of intimidation is the mass photographing of protectors by the Police Forward Intelligence Team and ironically the seizure of photographs by legitimate journalists.

--

"Freedom of speech without freedom of response is meaningless"

"Without privacy, there cannot be freedom. And without freedom, there cannot be personal or social growth"

This might be explained in TFA but I don't have time to Bugmenot the NYTimes right now.

Or even attempt to click the link apparently, since it opens right up to the article. The NYTimes hasnt required a login for almost an entire year now.

The Daily Telegraph is not the UK's biggest selling news paper by a long shot/a.