Also, the BBC is a content producer where as Sky has a subscription service. You can't "get your TV from the BBC", you just watch the channels. Sky, on the other hand, is a "pay your money now, get content later" (unless you include Sky 3 and the crap they put on there, which is available on Freeview).
That's exactly what the situation is - people not wanting to let the Beeb show their content without DRM of some form. The difference between "BBC shows" and this situation seems to be where the content isn't actually the BBC's content.
The Beeb doesn't produce everything it shows - it does license some things (24 was on BBC2 at first, for example). When the BBC licenses content then it isn't the BBC's content and so the rights holders can put whatever demands they like on the BBC's use of it. You'd hope that'd mean that the Beeb would turn round in some situations and say "screw you, we just won't show it on one of the better channels in the UK then". If the Beeb won't play ball then they might end up going to ITV or Sky instead (lower viewers on Sky because less people have it, but built-in DRM) and people will have to put up with ~25% adverts in their show (shows like House last 1hr on TV or ~42-45 minutes on DVD)
Huge amount? ~£110 is a huge amount? Around £110 for decent channels with sensible news, decent presenters and a complete lack of overhyped drivel like Big Brother is a huge amount? Less than £10 per month, which is almost certainly less than most people pay for broadband or mobile phone contracts each month, is a huge amount? I'd rather have that any day over a full set of ITV/C4/Five-alikes.
As for DAB, surely it can only be a good thing? DAB has more channels, should pick them up better, and can supply additional information as well. It sounds like a good thing over most standard radios.
Freeview isn't any worse than standard terrestrial TV for most people, and should be better once they boost the digital signal. Teletext/Ceefax is faster, more controlled and more readable. BBC has four different news feeds, so you can always get things like weather forecasts without having to wait. Then you get a load of extra channels on top, all for the price of a cheap digibox.
Try telling that to all the producers of all of the disks I've rented recently. They all say (on top of the "copying is theft" lie) that circumventing the copy protection is illegal and has a fine up to (IIRC) ~£5000. There's normally two different screens, one from FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft, I think) and something like Copyright.org.uk.
I suspect the the law of unintended consequences will mean that we'll end up with ISPs that provide access only to http and https.
Or the unintended consequence will be that (shock horror) ISPs will only sell what they're actually able to sell, and people won't be expecting "all you can eat" Internet access for £5 per month! You want excessively more bandwidth than is the norm? Pay for it.
What happens after you've been disconnected? You get it fixed or you find an ISP who cares less and end up dragging the Internet down from somewhere else.
How do most clueless users manage to clean their machines, with no network access?
That'd be something like "a computer store" - one of the ones where they have Techs to help fix things.
And how do they get their access back ? What's the process to certify their rig as being "clean" ?
The obvious solution would be to reconnect, phone the ISP so they can re-enable your account, then get disconnected again if you're not cleaned.
Not too dissimilar to cars and MOTs in the UK. If your car seems like it is causing a hazard to others because you didn't maintain it properly then the police can impound it/force you to take it off the road. You've then got to either fix it yourself (but how do you get to the shops without a car? well, there are other methods) or get an expert to fix it. Once it is "fixed" then you're on your way again, unless the police spot you and still think it isn't good enough, at which point worse punishment may be necessary.
Comparatively cheap these days. Scripts for micro-blogging, standard blogging, etc? Freely available. Not just being another hype-follower? Priceless.
I suspect their are arguments like "because people use it" and "because people know it" and "because people don't need to make separate registrations". All it means is that you get buried in junk instead, or force people who wouldn't otherwise bother with an account on one of these "trendy" services to get an account just to comment (while avoiding the rest of the spam).
It's not just that they start at a number, but that each one starts at an arbitrary number. Fedora seems to start at 500, but openSUSE starts at 1000 (I think). That means I can't easily share media between the two if it is EXT3.
Matching usernames would be useful rather than UIDs, but I guess the problem is that the UID->username mapping is in the password file and so your removable EXT3 drive doesn't remember that it was "fredbob" with UID 500, which kind of matches "fredbob" with UID 1002 on this machine. All it knows is that it is all owned by UID 500.
I guess that leaves the one alternative as setting permissions to 777 on folders, but I think files will still end up 644ed.
I've found a way to make yourself priceless - use the official build of Flash, but do it from Firefox on openSuse! Everything else Flash-based works fine for me, but I can't get past the first page of this "advert masquerading as a tool" because I don't have any boxes to select my gender or age! I can see the lists, just no checkboxes, and clicking in the rough areas doesn't help either. I take that to mean that theives can't steal my details and therefore my details are priceless:)
A co-worker had Virgin and bailed because it became unusable (excessive caps, even when he hadn't been downloading too much for that day).
I didn't say that £42 was normal, just that the levels of usable bandwidth that some people on/. had been hinting at as "normal" or possibly "bottom of the range" were well above the norm in the UK and normally quite expensive. Maybe they've dropped because of provider wars since I last checked them, but Sky have recently lowered their caps on their "Mid" package and prices are (I think) creeping up ever so slightly.
That's an ideal eventually, but I don't suppose the ISPs will want to get there in a hurry. As it is they're already complaining that the infrastructure is too old (well invest and update it, then!).
2. This kind of service is going to build customer demand for stable, fast, low latency connections. Presumably market forces will cause ISPs to provide at extortionate amounts.
There, fixed that for you;) As a UK broadband customer (albeit one who doesn't need much bandwidth), I can't see the ISPs offering the kind of levels that people expect in the US and other nations for a hell of a long time yet.
Someone commented on digital downloads recently that it was okay because 4GB was only a "small amount" of your average 30GB+ monthly cap. 30GB+? You're probably talking £30+ per month in the UK on top of your £12 per month phone line charge and some contorted "acceptable use policy", not the entry level £10-£15 that most people use.
Even that isn't always true. I was looking at the Wikipedia page for a band called Allister recently (checking whether a Fraggle Rock cover is actually them or whether it was like all of the "Reel Big Fish" ska punk covers that are by other bands) and apparently one of their albums cost a whole $700 to record! (source) The main expense seems to be egos, the big labels, or the egos at the big labels!
I guess when it comes to computers then unlimited anything is possible, but things that my host offers unlimited of (like addon/parked domains, emails and databases) are effectively unlimited because you're constrained only by your use of the alphabet and (eventually) some possible limits of standards (e.g. domain lengths stop you using a true "unlimited" number of domains, but you're still looking at stupidly huge numbers). Disk space and bandwidth are more physically limited things - there's no such thing as an "unlimited disk", although you could cluster large disks (but that must have a limit), and there's no such thing as an "unlimited pipe" (especially on shared hosting where you're not the only one using it) although 100Mbps would get you quite high.
<corporate-rep> No, that's not it at all. This will provide untold benefits to people. They need never again worry about going to the shops, whether it is in stock, whether they've lost the disk, whether they've got a powerful enough machine, or whether we're slowly depriving them of all rights, benefits...erm *cough* sorry, where was I? </corporate-rep>
As I've said in many of the "Downloads are the future" or "Perfect DRM system found" discussions before, give me the real thing and let me own it. Either that or *hugely* discount it and make it *very clear* that I'm actually just renting it (possibly over a long period) with conditions that mean that it can be yanked away from me at any time.
Every time I see either a host offering "unlimited bandwidth" or someone saying "why should I pick the host you're with? For $2 per month less I can go to X and get unlimited bandwidth" I always end up wanting to have the spare change to sign up for an account, set it up as a Linux ISO or package mirror and seeing how long it lasts! Somehow I doubt it'll be long, but "unlimited" suckers in enough people that it obviously works. And then they'll wonder why either a) their server is dog slow (erm, someone is trying to use their "unlimited" and they've overloaded it) or b) they get stopped from using their unlimited (erm, because it is neither possible to offer true unlimited nor financially viable to offer very high amounts at that price).
Where, in the sentencing of the crime, did it say that your crime wouldn't exclude you from certain jobs that are in some way related to the crime? Would you hire a known and convicted shoplifter in a store? Would you hire a known hacker in 90% of sysadmin jobs (i.e. not the "we need someone with insider skills and we spend lots of money to check and vet them")? Would you hire a known fraudster as a bank teller?
How about re-engineering ourselves instead for the better?
But doesn't that mean I have to put effort in to changing myself? Sod that, other people broke it so I'll let the scientists fix it and carry on as I was before;)
do you really think that those of the criminal mindset are going to carry one?
I'm not saying "carry it at all times", just that linking a person's ID to their crime is more accurate than linking it to a name that could have lots of collisions. If they commit another crime then you look up their ID and find the crimes, and if they can't supply the ID then you need a "produce card when charged with crime" law (note: not a "produce card on demand by police", but only when you're actually charged with a crime)
do you really think that the data integrity side of cards is fool proof?
It'll be more accurate than names.
do you really think that the biometric side of the card isnt a total white elephant?
No, but like with the "IDs beyond your name" then biometrics are less likely to have collisions when done right.
do you really think that it'll be any extra help at all at all above and beyond the original criminal records data against criminals without the card, if just the database part exists? (assuming that a different political party would actually bother to scrap the cards?)
The database exists at the moment in the form of criminal records, and ID cards linked to those records would link the person to the record.
Airport workers and those working in secured facilities already need background/security checks and ID cards for the site, so what's so different about making other "we need background check" jobs have an ID system?
Why should people have to pay the police £60 to say that they're not a child molester?
Generally because people appreciate knowing that their children aren't being looked after by child molesters;)
Although, if you're talking about paying £60 to get an ID card so that you can get the identity check, I didn't read it that way. IMO it's one of the few useful ideas of ID cards - catch someone committing a crime (or attempting to get a job related to a crime they have committed) and you've got an easy link to their criminal record. No messing around, no mis-identification because names match (which happens on "no fly" lists), just a link of an ID to a crime.
In general, though, I don't trust the government's plans, what they'd do with the data and how safe they'd keep it.
They probably wrote football because they were talking about a game where the predominant contact with the ball is with the foot;)
I followed the link from the front page to the summary wondering how they'd managed to do a real football controller, started reading the description and wondered how that would work ("insert controller in ball then hold strap while still touching buttons"? that's a long way to stretch and an uncomfortable position). Then they said throwing and I realised they meant they'd made a controller for Rugby and Grid Iron/American Football, not football.
Now a real football controller - that'd be a bit harder to do without it being easily breakable or without easily breaking things in the room!
DRM does not restrict what people can do with their computers, it restricts them to infringe copyright.
Come back and say that once the DRM stops you doing something that you have a legal right to do (like making a legal backup, or moving it between devices when one device dies);)
Embedding the DRM to cater to the big record and film labels is the start of a slippery slope to not letting people use media that they bought as they want to. The labels cry "copyright infringement" (or the more inflamatory and incorrect "theft!"), but they just want to get people used to the idea that "downloading is a crime" so that they can get people to slowly give up their other rights and not care.
The delusion is thinking that screaming terms like "abuse" (repeated over and over), "poisoning education" (think of teh childraaan!) and "bribing officials" (libel ahoy!) is going to win hearts and minds.
You've obviously never looked at politics;)
"Think of the children" - yep, it is up there with "the terrorists will win" "abuse" - yep, that's the normal mud-slinging between parties "bribing officials" - that's generally given a lick of paint as "donations" and "lobbying", I believe
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the BBC is a content producer where as Sky has a subscription service. You can't "get your TV from the BBC", you just watch the channels. Sky, on the other hand, is a "pay your money now, get content later" (unless you include Sky 3 and the crap they put on there, which is available on Freeview).
That's exactly what the situation is - people not wanting to let the Beeb show their content without DRM of some form. The difference between "BBC shows" and this situation seems to be where the content isn't actually the BBC's content.
The Beeb doesn't produce everything it shows - it does license some things (24 was on BBC2 at first, for example). When the BBC licenses content then it isn't the BBC's content and so the rights holders can put whatever demands they like on the BBC's use of it. You'd hope that'd mean that the Beeb would turn round in some situations and say "screw you, we just won't show it on one of the better channels in the UK then". If the Beeb won't play ball then they might end up going to ITV or Sky instead (lower viewers on Sky because less people have it, but built-in DRM) and people will have to put up with ~25% adverts in their show (shows like House last 1hr on TV or ~42-45 minutes on DVD)
Huge amount? ~£110 is a huge amount? Around £110 for decent channels with sensible news, decent presenters and a complete lack of overhyped drivel like Big Brother is a huge amount? Less than £10 per month, which is almost certainly less than most people pay for broadband or mobile phone contracts each month, is a huge amount? I'd rather have that any day over a full set of ITV/C4/Five-alikes.
As for DAB, surely it can only be a good thing? DAB has more channels, should pick them up better, and can supply additional information as well. It sounds like a good thing over most standard radios.
Freeview isn't any worse than standard terrestrial TV for most people, and should be better once they boost the digital signal. Teletext/Ceefax is faster, more controlled and more readable. BBC has four different news feeds, so you can always get things like weather forecasts without having to wait. Then you get a load of extra channels on top, all for the price of a cheap digibox.
Try telling that to all the producers of all of the disks I've rented recently. They all say (on top of the "copying is theft" lie) that circumventing the copy protection is illegal and has a fine up to (IIRC) ~£5000. There's normally two different screens, one from FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft, I think) and something like Copyright.org.uk.
At least a 19 year life estimate is more realistic than the newer and more accurate clock that is said to lose only 1s over 300 million years!
Or the unintended consequence will be that (shock horror) ISPs will only sell what they're actually able to sell, and people won't be expecting "all you can eat" Internet access for £5 per month! You want excessively more bandwidth than is the norm? Pay for it.
What happens after you've been disconnected? You get it fixed or you find an ISP who cares less and end up dragging the Internet down from somewhere else.
That'd be something like "a computer store" - one of the ones where they have Techs to help fix things.
The obvious solution would be to reconnect, phone the ISP so they can re-enable your account, then get disconnected again if you're not cleaned.
Not too dissimilar to cars and MOTs in the UK. If your car seems like it is causing a hazard to others because you didn't maintain it properly then the police can impound it/force you to take it off the road. You've then got to either fix it yourself (but how do you get to the shops without a car? well, there are other methods) or get an expert to fix it. Once it is "fixed" then you're on your way again, unless the police spot you and still think it isn't good enough, at which point worse punishment may be necessary.
Comparatively cheap these days. Scripts for micro-blogging, standard blogging, etc? Freely available. Not just being another hype-follower? Priceless.
I suspect their are arguments like "because people use it" and "because people know it" and "because people don't need to make separate registrations". All it means is that you get buried in junk instead, or force people who wouldn't otherwise bother with an account on one of these "trendy" services to get an account just to comment (while avoiding the rest of the spam).
It's not just that they start at a number, but that each one starts at an arbitrary number. Fedora seems to start at 500, but openSUSE starts at 1000 (I think). That means I can't easily share media between the two if it is EXT3.
Matching usernames would be useful rather than UIDs, but I guess the problem is that the UID->username mapping is in the password file and so your removable EXT3 drive doesn't remember that it was "fredbob" with UID 500, which kind of matches "fredbob" with UID 1002 on this machine. All it knows is that it is all owned by UID 500.
I guess that leaves the one alternative as setting permissions to 777 on folders, but I think files will still end up 644ed.
I've found a way to make yourself priceless - use the official build of Flash, but do it from Firefox on openSuse! Everything else Flash-based works fine for me, but I can't get past the first page of this "advert masquerading as a tool" because I don't have any boxes to select my gender or age! I can see the lists, just no checkboxes, and clicking in the rough areas doesn't help either. I take that to mean that theives can't steal my details and therefore my details are priceless :)
A co-worker had Virgin and bailed because it became unusable (excessive caps, even when he hadn't been downloading too much for that day).
I didn't say that £42 was normal, just that the levels of usable bandwidth that some people on /. had been hinting at as "normal" or possibly "bottom of the range" were well above the norm in the UK and normally quite expensive. Maybe they've dropped because of provider wars since I last checked them, but Sky have recently lowered their caps on their "Mid" package and prices are (I think) creeping up ever so slightly.
That's an ideal eventually, but I don't suppose the ISPs will want to get there in a hurry. As it is they're already complaining that the infrastructure is too old (well invest and update it, then!).
There, fixed that for you ;) As a UK broadband customer (albeit one who doesn't need much bandwidth), I can't see the ISPs offering the kind of levels that people expect in the US and other nations for a hell of a long time yet.
Someone commented on digital downloads recently that it was okay because 4GB was only a "small amount" of your average 30GB+ monthly cap. 30GB+? You're probably talking £30+ per month in the UK on top of your £12 per month phone line charge and some contorted "acceptable use policy", not the entry level £10-£15 that most people use.
They're like Trigger's broom in Only Fools and Horses: still the same one, despite lots of changes.
Still, that doesn't change the fact that they produced an album on a budget of $700, including a cover of the Fraggle Rock theme!
Even that isn't always true. I was looking at the Wikipedia page for a band called Allister recently (checking whether a Fraggle Rock cover is actually them or whether it was like all of the "Reel Big Fish" ska punk covers that are by other bands) and apparently one of their albums cost a whole $700 to record! (source) The main expense seems to be egos, the big labels, or the egos at the big labels!
I guess when it comes to computers then unlimited anything is possible, but things that my host offers unlimited of (like addon/parked domains, emails and databases) are effectively unlimited because you're constrained only by your use of the alphabet and (eventually) some possible limits of standards (e.g. domain lengths stop you using a true "unlimited" number of domains, but you're still looking at stupidly huge numbers). Disk space and bandwidth are more physically limited things - there's no such thing as an "unlimited disk", although you could cluster large disks (but that must have a limit), and there's no such thing as an "unlimited pipe" (especially on shared hosting where you're not the only one using it) although 100Mbps would get you quite high.
<corporate-rep>
No, that's not it at all. This will provide untold benefits to people. They need never again worry about going to the shops, whether it is in stock, whether they've lost the disk, whether they've got a powerful enough machine, or whether we're slowly depriving them of all rights, benefits...erm *cough* sorry, where was I?
</corporate-rep>
As I've said in many of the "Downloads are the future" or "Perfect DRM system found" discussions before, give me the real thing and let me own it. Either that or *hugely* discount it and make it *very clear* that I'm actually just renting it (possibly over a long period) with conditions that mean that it can be yanked away from me at any time.
Every time I see either a host offering "unlimited bandwidth" or someone saying "why should I pick the host you're with? For $2 per month less I can go to X and get unlimited bandwidth" I always end up wanting to have the spare change to sign up for an account, set it up as a Linux ISO or package mirror and seeing how long it lasts! Somehow I doubt it'll be long, but "unlimited" suckers in enough people that it obviously works. And then they'll wonder why either a) their server is dog slow (erm, someone is trying to use their "unlimited" and they've overloaded it) or b) they get stopped from using their unlimited (erm, because it is neither possible to offer true unlimited nor financially viable to offer very high amounts at that price).
Where, in the sentencing of the crime, did it say that your crime wouldn't exclude you from certain jobs that are in some way related to the crime? Would you hire a known and convicted shoplifter in a store? Would you hire a known hacker in 90% of sysadmin jobs (i.e. not the "we need someone with insider skills and we spend lots of money to check and vet them")? Would you hire a known fraudster as a bank teller?
But doesn't that mean I have to put effort in to changing myself? Sod that, other people broke it so I'll let the scientists fix it and carry on as I was before ;)
I'm not saying "carry it at all times", just that linking a person's ID to their crime is more accurate than linking it to a name that could have lots of collisions. If they commit another crime then you look up their ID and find the crimes, and if they can't supply the ID then you need a "produce card when charged with crime" law (note: not a "produce card on demand by police", but only when you're actually charged with a crime)
It'll be more accurate than names.
No, but like with the "IDs beyond your name" then biometrics are less likely to have collisions when done right.
The database exists at the moment in the form of criminal records, and ID cards linked to those records would link the person to the record.
Airport workers and those working in secured facilities already need background/security checks and ID cards for the site, so what's so different about making other "we need background check" jobs have an ID system?
Generally because people appreciate knowing that their children aren't being looked after by child molesters ;)
Although, if you're talking about paying £60 to get an ID card so that you can get the identity check, I didn't read it that way. IMO it's one of the few useful ideas of ID cards - catch someone committing a crime (or attempting to get a job related to a crime they have committed) and you've got an easy link to their criminal record. No messing around, no mis-identification because names match (which happens on "no fly" lists), just a link of an ID to a crime.
In general, though, I don't trust the government's plans, what they'd do with the data and how safe they'd keep it.
They probably wrote football because they were talking about a game where the predominant contact with the ball is with the foot ;)
I followed the link from the front page to the summary wondering how they'd managed to do a real football controller, started reading the description and wondered how that would work ("insert controller in ball then hold strap while still touching buttons"? that's a long way to stretch and an uncomfortable position). Then they said throwing and I realised they meant they'd made a controller for Rugby and Grid Iron/American Football, not football.
Now a real football controller - that'd be a bit harder to do without it being easily breakable or without easily breaking things in the room!
Come back and say that once the DRM stops you doing something that you have a legal right to do (like making a legal backup, or moving it between devices when one device dies) ;)
Embedding the DRM to cater to the big record and film labels is the start of a slippery slope to not letting people use media that they bought as they want to. The labels cry "copyright infringement" (or the more inflamatory and incorrect "theft!"), but they just want to get people used to the idea that "downloading is a crime" so that they can get people to slowly give up their other rights and not care.
You've obviously never looked at politics ;)
"Think of the children" - yep, it is up there with "the terrorists will win"
"abuse" - yep, that's the normal mud-slinging between parties
"bribing officials" - that's generally given a lick of paint as "donations" and "lobbying", I believe