...BT Vision (http://www.bt.com/vision is a fairly good option, especially if you already have a subscription with BT as an ISP.
I'm a BT internet subscriber and got my Freeview-supporting DVR from BT a few months ago for £90 installation fee (the box was free), but apparently there will be a self-install option later this year that will bring the cost down to about £30.
The BT solution also connects to your DSL line and allows on-demand (pay-per-view or subscription) viewing of TV and Movie content (plus Premiership football later this year) at near-DVD quality. Apparently some HD content may be added in the future but this will be downloaded to the DVR rather than streamed.
I won't go into more detail on the box as there are loads of reviews around the net, but one of the nice features is the HDMI output which upscales the Freeview picutre to 720p or 1080i (there are only test broadcasts in the Croyden area of HD Freeview at the moment) and also displays the interface in the higher resolution.
P.S. I'm not affiliated with BT in any way, just a satisfied customer.
...the Telephone Preference Service http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/tps/ are the people to get in touch with.
I registered with them a few years ago and haven't had any marketing calls since.
I agree and I think what you're suggesting would work, it's just that the individual is the one responsible for identifying themselves in the image rather than Google. I think the way this works with CCTV footage at the moment is that you have to already know where and when you were caught on camera to stand a chance of retrieving the footage.
So if you spotted yourself on streetview, I think you would have to send Google a request telling them where you were photographed and ask them to blur you out or whatever.
As an aside I know a few people who have tried to retrieve CCTV footage of themselves taken in banks etc. Each time the response of the bank has been that the footage has been mysteriously 'misplaced', so something tells me that most institutions don't have very robust processes for dealing with these kind of requests.
I don't think the UK (which you seem to have confused with Britain) Data Protection Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_protection_act) would apply in this case, as Google would have no way of identifying that the person in the image was in fact you.
As far as I know, all the DPA states is that data which can be used to identify an individual can only be stored so long as it is used for the original purpose for which it was collected, with the consent of the individual concerned.
Won't it be great? Getting all those worms delivered at breakneck speeds? At least with all the new bandwidth the worms will be able to take over your PC in glorious High Definition.
At some point in China, the web is going to become much more important with regards to economic growth. If the major players like Google and Yahoo! did pull out of that market, it might eventually force China to rethink their 'great firewall' policy in order for them to compete on a level playing field with the more web-driven economies elsewhere - search and web driven advertising are pretty important to these economies.
Of course, Google et al are worried that pulling out would lead to competing technologies being developed in China free from their market presence, and they would quite like to hold on to their near-monopoly for obvious reasons.
The Waste Electrical And Electronic Equipment Directive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and _Electronic_Equipment_Directive) in the EU covers the recycling of all electrical goods (including computers) by their manufacturers. The manufacturers are supposed to cover all the costs and all member states were meant to have adjusted their local laws by 2005.
Some people say this is one of the reasons that people in the UK pay so much more for their electronic goods than people in the US (can't find a source right now). Maybe now that everyone has to burden the costs (not just those in the EU) we'll start to see some fairer pricing over here in the UK.
I'd be happy with an Earth 1.5 - somewhere with the resources necessary to build a sustainable existence, even if humans are not able to wander around on the surface unaided.
Of course, since this is Slashdot, I am obliged to assert my happiness that only 5% are using Vista and call them poor souls.
If you assume that gamers will probably be the last people to upgrade to Vista given the performance hit and the current state of video drivers (especially those from nVidia), 5% is actually quite a high proportion.
Anyone looking to make the next WoW killer would be well advised to look at the way Blizzard went about it.
A MMORPG is not something that can be turned out in a couple of years with a standard development team to make use of some film licence; it takes significant investment, in terms of time, manpower and cash.
Of course, that's not to say that using existing fictitious worlds as a starting point is a bad idea - MMOs need a lot of content to sustain them and getting the appropriate intellectual property owners on board could make sense. I think a lot of the obvious licences have already been used for MMOs though (Star Wars, the Matrix and Lord of the Rings spring to mind).
End-user involvement is critical to the success of a MMO game. Any MMO game that is developed behind closed doors and then unleashed on the world is doomed to failure in my opinion. Extensive alpha and beta programmes open to anyone willing to participate are something the industry are going to have to get used to. If your game is any good chances are that the guys you had playing in beta will spread the word and you'll have a ready made subscriber-base when you go live.
Allowing users to request a DVD backup of their e-mail sounds slightly implausible.
It might be easier if they allowed users to download a compressed archive of their e-mails instead (say in zip format). Most e-mails are plain text and would compress quite well, saving users bandwidth and lengthy download times.
Maybe GMail could do something clever like concatenating e-mail chains into single e-mails when they are downloaded over POP3 (a configurable option, naturally) like they do in their UI; this would save bandwidth and download times too.
Slashdot Mirror
...BT Vision (http://www.bt.com/vision is a fairly good option, especially if you already have a subscription with BT as an ISP.
I'm a BT internet subscriber and got my Freeview-supporting DVR from BT a few months ago for £90 installation fee (the box was free), but apparently there will be a self-install option later this year that will bring the cost down to about £30.
The BT solution also connects to your DSL line and allows on-demand (pay-per-view or subscription) viewing of TV and Movie content (plus Premiership football later this year) at near-DVD quality. Apparently some HD content may be added in the future but this will be downloaded to the DVR rather than streamed.
I won't go into more detail on the box as there are loads of reviews around the net, but one of the nice features is the HDMI output which upscales the Freeview picutre to 720p or 1080i (there are only test broadcasts in the Croyden area of HD Freeview at the moment) and also displays the interface in the higher resolution.
P.S. I'm not affiliated with BT in any way, just a satisfied customer.
...the Telephone Preference Service http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/tps/ are the people to get in touch with.
I registered with them a few years ago and haven't had any marketing calls since.
I agree and I think what you're suggesting would work, it's just that the individual is the one responsible for identifying themselves in the image rather than Google. I think the way this works with CCTV footage at the moment is that you have to already know where and when you were caught on camera to stand a chance of retrieving the footage.
So if you spotted yourself on streetview, I think you would have to send Google a request telling them where you were photographed and ask them to blur you out or whatever.
As an aside I know a few people who have tried to retrieve CCTV footage of themselves taken in banks etc. Each time the response of the bank has been that the footage has been mysteriously 'misplaced', so something tells me that most institutions don't have very robust processes for dealing with these kind of requests.
I don't think the UK (which you seem to have confused with Britain) Data Protection Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_protection_act) would apply in this case, as Google would have no way of identifying that the person in the image was in fact you.
As far as I know, all the DPA states is that data which can be used to identify an individual can only be stored so long as it is used for the original purpose for which it was collected, with the consent of the individual concerned.
At some point in China, the web is going to become much more important with regards to economic growth. If the major players like Google and Yahoo! did pull out of that market, it might eventually force China to rethink their 'great firewall' policy in order for them to compete on a level playing field with the more web-driven economies elsewhere - search and web driven advertising are pretty important to these economies.
Of course, Google et al are worried that pulling out would lead to competing technologies being developed in China free from their market presence, and they would quite like to hold on to their near-monopoly for obvious reasons.
The Waste Electrical And Electronic Equipment Directive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and _Electronic_Equipment_Directive) in the EU covers the recycling of all electrical goods (including computers) by their manufacturers. The manufacturers are supposed to cover all the costs and all member states were meant to have adjusted their local laws by 2005.
Some people say this is one of the reasons that people in the UK pay so much more for their electronic goods than people in the US (can't find a source right now). Maybe now that everyone has to burden the costs (not just those in the EU) we'll start to see some fairer pricing over here in the UK.
I'd be happy with an Earth 1.5 - somewhere with the resources necessary to build a sustainable existence, even if humans are not able to wander around on the surface unaided.
Anyone looking to make the next WoW killer would be well advised to look at the way Blizzard went about it. A MMORPG is not something that can be turned out in a couple of years with a standard development team to make use of some film licence; it takes significant investment, in terms of time, manpower and cash. Of course, that's not to say that using existing fictitious worlds as a starting point is a bad idea - MMOs need a lot of content to sustain them and getting the appropriate intellectual property owners on board could make sense. I think a lot of the obvious licences have already been used for MMOs though (Star Wars, the Matrix and Lord of the Rings spring to mind). End-user involvement is critical to the success of a MMO game. Any MMO game that is developed behind closed doors and then unleashed on the world is doomed to failure in my opinion. Extensive alpha and beta programmes open to anyone willing to participate are something the industry are going to have to get used to. If your game is any good chances are that the guys you had playing in beta will spread the word and you'll have a ready made subscriber-base when you go live.
Allowing users to request a DVD backup of their e-mail sounds slightly implausible. It might be easier if they allowed users to download a compressed archive of their e-mails instead (say in zip format). Most e-mails are plain text and would compress quite well, saving users bandwidth and lengthy download times. Maybe GMail could do something clever like concatenating e-mail chains into single e-mails when they are downloaded over POP3 (a configurable option, naturally) like they do in their UI; this would save bandwidth and download times too.