Let me try one final time to explain what I'm getting at. A thought experiment: suppose things are somehow reversed, and Murdoch's television stations become the BBC. How do you feel about having to pay Mr Rupert Murdoch just in order to watch broadcast over-the-air TV?
Now, you're a defender of the licence fee, so of course you still approve of this on principle, right?
No. There's no private individual which gets to own and control the licence payer money. Approving of a corporation managed by a trust is not the same as approving a franchise for the personal benefit of a private individual (or public-private partnerships in general).
And it's "democracy" because the elected government granted him this exclusive franchise.
No. Giving high level control of some aspect of public service to private business is not democratic. Public ownership of public services is a necessary component of democratic government. (No, a decision isn't democratic just because some majority vote for the government which chooses it: consider any elected government suddenly deciding to remove the right to vote.)
They should forget about names and ideals and judge it by the same standards they judge anything else.
As for content provision, sure. But the quality of programming will certainly be affected by the organisation's reasons for creating/selecting those programmes, so the outcome is fairly predictable.
if Murdoch beams "shit" at you, then isn't it at least possible that the BBC might be doing the same thing?
It's possible that the BBC will fuck up, and then we have the mentioned methods to help correct it.
But that unlike Murdoch, there's nothing you can do about it?
To change Murdoch, I have to persuade enough people with the money and desire to watch Murdoch to stop paying Murdoch. To change the BBC, I merely have to encourage people - any people - to put forward their views on how the BBC can be improved. As for stopping the BBC, I can do that by campaigning for a BBC-hating government - but it is absurd to campaign against a strong broadcast voice representing the people, and (unless I'm really not in favour of democracy) I'd surely be spending the time trying to ensure that the public service broadcaster fairly represents the public?
Obligations mean nothing if you have no way to enforce them. The BBC Trust is a way of appearing accountable without actually being accountable, just like any other quango.
Except that the BBC listens to and acts on the reports of the BBC Trust, and the BBC Trust listens to the people, directly and via the government. Or do you have some alternative reality in your head in which the BBC's programming policies are set by some other method? If so, what is the method?
What are we going to do if we're unhappy with the BBC? Write to them? Oooh, scary.
Born after 1980, huh? Yes, the whole point in democracy is that you precisely state your grievances by writing/speaking/debating, rather than by having enough money to get your own way.
Only watch ITV1?
That may have an effect, and the BBC has had periods of getting pathologically obsessed with ratings. But the BBC does not need to aim for the greatest viewership. Its aim is to represent the people, not to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
Yeah, that'll show 'em! Whatever happens they still get paid. This. Is. The. Problem.
No. If the BBC becomes chronically unpopular because it stops responding to the needs of the people then a government with undemocratic tendencies will have no trouble eliminating the BBC.
Incidentally, you mention Cameron. You suggest he's against the BBC. Well, you might like to think about exactly how he "won" the election.
OK, assuming you regard the Palestinian cause as "left wing" and the Israeli as "right wing"... how about the report by the BBFC (sic) president remarking that the BBC did not adequately convey the Palestinians' unequal relationship with Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict? The report was quite clear that Palestinians in certain territories are living under Israeli occupation, a fact recognised by the UN including Britain (at least officially), but the BBC - in giving context - was considered slow to assert this whenever giving context to some event.
Using the term "left wing" more ideologically, can you think of a single example in the last decade where the BBC was considered to show bias for worker control of the means of production? Clause IV seems all but forgotten in the mainstream media.
I thought the word was intentionally placed there - it sounds nice as people/expect/ to accuse him of megalomania but the problem (if any) may be monomania, causing him to disregard the effect on people (and animals?) around him. Like Churchill said, a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
This all remains drama bullshit to detract from the actual purpose of Wikileaks to release pertinent information on misbehaviour. Disliking Assange and his seconds in command doesn't make Wikileaks' aim any less worthwhile.
The point is, your argument that Murdoch's broadcasts somehow justify the licence fee is more than a bit crazy.
You've omitted the reasoning between "your argument" and "more than a bit crazy" - would you mind providing it? Perhaps it'll give me a better warning of the kind of bullshit Cameron will come up with to further diminish the BBC.
If you want to talk about debts to society, then look no further than the BBC. What does the BBC owe us, the public, for the priviledge of owning all those buildings,
Sorry, did they steal your house or something? Also, priviledge (n): the precipice your envious detractor perceives you on and wants to push you off so he can take your place.
huge amounts of the broadcasting spectrum,
It doesn't "own" - it has an exclusive right to do certain things with it. This ability was earnt through a process more democratic than "have the money to pay a broadcast fee" and much more democratic than "sale to the highest bidder". Which do you prefer? A system of government which commits suicide by just selling control and assets off to the highest bidder, perhaps?
and of course the monopoly right to levy a tax on ownership of a television that receives anything over the air?
No. It must specifically receive broadcast television. For example, my free amateur radio licence allows me to send amateur television, and you are able to receive it, without creating any requirement for a TV licence.
I suppose you could say it owes us some television programmes.. but what do we do if we don't like them? Where is the accountability? What do we do when we don't feel the debt is being repaid properly?
Write to the BBC about specific programmes; give feedback via the BBC Trust consultations and complaints service; fill the ballot box.
At least with Murdoch we can decide not to subscribe to Sky.
Nope. He still gets to beam his shit at me.
In any sane world we'd compare the BBC and News Corp and see they are pretty similar - both massive media corporations with huge influence.
Lots of entities are massive with huge influence. This doesn't mean that they're all equally useful, benevolent, moral, value-for-money, acceptable, etc.
And yet one of them also has the legal right to extract payment from us and provide nothing worthwhile in return. I'm sure you can justify this in your head, but it is still wrong.
The BBC doesn't have the legal right to "extract payment from us and provide nothing worthwhile in return". It has a host of obligations in return for the licence fee payment.
No institution is unbiased and representative all the time on everything - it's an impossible ideal. The best it can do is continuously to try to discover bias and disproportionate representation, publish its findings and take corrective action. You've given examples of how the BBC does that (and Murdoch never will).
There's a difference between showing bias and being unrepresentative, of course. It is one thing to be disproportionately represented by gays and ethnic minorities - the latter ties in with a history of London over-representation, since London's ethnic minority population exists in far greater proportion than almost everywhere else in the country. But when the people are protesting passionately against Thatcher en masse, is it your job to make the government's argument sound more reasonable than it really is?
The radio counterpart Any Questions? was hosted by one of my old schools and was "packed" with, well, mostly parents and students of the school. I live in a constituency which hasn't seen a Labour MP since before I was born, and the audience represented an even more well-off Tory-leaning set than was regular for the area.
I shan't ask you for proof of your assertion because it's obvious you're trolling in the guise of a well-known British stereotype.
Since the Murdoch signals are delivered by satellite,
Regulation (of another sort) has intervened to specifically prevent Murdoch's ownership of certain terrestrial broadcasters. Sky 3 sure is doing a good job of reaching the DVB-T-connected TV I'm sitting in front of, and most terrestrial broadcasters remain under private ownership.
the frequencies can be reused by other broadcasters. Indeed this is exactly what happens; if you point your dish in a different direction you can receive broadcasts from different satellites on other frequencies.
The fact that a signal is directional doesn't mean Murdoch gets any more natural right to ownership of the spectrum. There's no cone extending from his satellite a few centimetres down into the ground through everyone's property which he has an inherent right to use in any way.
Therefore you cannot (correctly) say that he has exclusive control of them.
I couldn't in any case, technically, because digital terrestrial channels are delivered on multiplexes managed by the cunts at Arqiva. But he has an exclusive right to content delivery on some part of the spectrum in the sense that you have the privilege of enjoying it uninterrupted. Put another way, I don't get to fly an aircraft over your village and interrupt his signal to rescue you from his dross. You pay for that privilege.
Murdoch is only occupying a small area of geostationary orbit, which is hardly property of the UK anyway.
The privilege of launching a satellite and controlling an area of space is yet another thing for which he owes the system which has given him the freedom and stability to do that - but that's another matter entirely.
I wouldn't call this attention whoring. Attention whoring involves being a whore. Neither the person who made the copy of the sites, nor the author of this post, are attempting to receive anything for what they have done.
Nonsense. Ben Metcalfe is a somewhat bitter ex-BBC employee and his reward is reputation (as it often is on the Interwebs). TFA, his web site and about 20 seconds' worth of mouse clicks between them make this clear.
A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them.
You seem to be overly worried about whether something can be called a "tax" or not based on whether it's compulsory (I'd like to propose, then, that food purchases are taxes because they are compulsory for survival). Consider instead the allocation of funds.
Scrapping Trident is a valid cost-cutting measure when the government has decided that it's overspending on unnecessary shit during a recession: if you scrap Trident, you suddenly have a few 10s of billions more GBP to allocate other than against an imaginary enemy who is already being sufficiently resisted.
Even tax on fags and booze goes to central government. The extra taxation isn't allocated for health or policiing services for cancer patients and drunks.
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
What is more, I regard the licence fee as the cost the viewer pays for (i) the content produced by the BBC; (ii) even if he chooses not to watch the BBC, the permission given by the people to private broadcasters to use parts of the e-m spectrum (and other artificial/natural monopolies) to broadcast stuff in their interests. The "cost" in this case is the right for the people to provide a counterpoint - something sorely lacking, in, say, the bastion of free press that is the USA.
The BBC is (ideally) the people's counterbalance to the freedom of the press belonging to the owners of the presses.
Yeah, that's where I'd draw the line and consider the licence unacceptable.
A well regulated TV licence funds a broadcast service separate from and balancing against dominant commercial interests. If Murdoch, say, is given a licence to broadcast on some frequency (parts of the e-m spectrum not being in any reasonable way ownable) then in return for exclusive access to broadcast on this frequency he and his customers must accept that the people get to have something to challenge a service acting in his interests.
IOW, if you're paying money for a Sky subscription, you're benefitting from Murdoch's exclusive control of various radio frequencies. In return for the people allocating those frequencies for your benefit, you gotta pay for the counterbalance that is the BBC.
"What about when TV goes all Internet and is no longer broadcast over the air?" I hear you hypothesise based on your own experience and that of half a dozen geeks who use iPlayer and torrents. Well, land communications networks suffer precisely the same problem of "natural" monopoly requiring regulation to ensure competition and balance. It's a variation of a net neutrality argument.
This all applies before you even consider the content value of the BBC.
True. Maintaining a web site may be more difficult, as it may involve interactive services. But I get the impression that what was being mirrored could essentially be put into book form.
Yes, electronic copies don't cost Auntie anything, which is sort of the point.
The electronic copy just made doesn't. So what you're saying is that this is a campaign for the BBC to link to the.torrent file for an archive of its decommissioned web sites?
If he's british then the matter of permission is a grey one: having paid his license fee it could be argued that he has a right to this material
Nothing of the sort can be argued. Firstly, the BBC isn't funded by general taxation. Secondly, even if it were, there is no English concept mirroring the US idea that Federal works are in the public domain. Actually, not even the US has that in practice, because so much work produced by private entities under contract to government remains the intellectual property of the private entity. Then you have all the software and documents that, for reasons from laziness to national security, are never released.
Of course, sticking it on BT for all to grab would complicate matters but I don't see Auntie getting her knickers in too much of a twist.
Perhaps not. Does everything on all these web sites have BBC copyright? What do the authors who perhaps have an affinity for the BBC but not for promoting random attention-whoring private individuals have to say? Is Bittorrent availability likely to elicit a BBC response, "We don't need to host this stuff - just download it from that Ben Metcalfe guy if you really care"?
Firstly, the privatisation began years ago under New Tories - the worst hit from a geeky PoV being selling of infrastructure to Siemens.
Secondly, the BBC isn't a public body in the sense that is, say, the British Army. The Army is funded by a general, compulsory taxes on income and other trade. The BBC is funded by a licence which you only need to pay if you choose to watch (possibly time-shifted) live broadcast television.
Thirdly, anyone who thinks that this round of government cost cutting is even slightly relevant to getting out of recession is an idiot. Money is wasted because government acts as an agent for private benefactors, in particular (i) units are sold off and services contracted back to well-back-scratched government officials at profit; (ii) money invested in private wars, trade and military, under the guise of "free trade" or defence of the realm. Much of our debt represents investment in banks from which (if we do things right) we stand to make huge profit once we've sold off again.
Finally, government debt per se is not bad - it acts as a mirror private wealth of creditors. What matters is whether debt is sustainable. The approach after WW2 to a record level of debt was to invest more to grow local technology, industry and services. The approach today is to burn all society's bridges for firewood. Thatcher executed round one, and Cameron prepares kindling for remaining edifices. Then there's nothing left, and Britain will have got exactly what she asked for.
(In the UK, if you own a device that can receive TV signals, you HAVE to have a TV license which the BBC gets funds from)
No. In the UK, iff you use a device to watch television as it is broadcast then your residence has to have a TV licence. A TV used for CCTV, amateur television or watching DVDs does not create a requirement for a licence. A computer used for iPlayer's "Watch live" service does create a requirement for a licence.
A license is some American invention which you probably need to jaywalk from the sidewalks to the theater.
So, what you're saying is that to reprint a book costs wildly less than to produce a book? That an electronic copy with no attempts to guarantee availability is much cheaper than a resilient set of servers which deliver instantly and accessibly to goodness-knows-how-many-people per minute? And that the cheapest thing of all is to do so without asking anyone's permission?
Look, we can all observe an assault undique to neuter and privatise the BBC. But OP is attention whoring with a cheap technical demonstration which alienates him from the very people he might think he is supporting.
Oh, I don't know, "We're doing some security updates to our Gmail system and need you to enter a backup code to verify your details. Please click here to stop losing access to your account," sort of thing. Coming to your Gmail account might even make it look more authentic, but anywhere'll do.
I get that sort of phishing attempt all the time for banks.
If you have a file representing $500,000 on your hard drive, I guarantee that criminals more intelligent and sophisticated than you will expend the resources to penetrate whatever shitty home firewall security you have and install a keylogger on your machine, rendering the passphrase to your encrypted wallet as useful as your contribution to this thread.
The initial packet must come from one machine (doesn't have to be your own), and will be sent to machines it has connections to.
And that continues to be the problem, no matter how many times you try to handwave that this critical vulnerability can surely be solved by something else (Tor, whatever).
What has this to do with free flow? You have no/registered/ identity
The cash in my wallet is not registered to any particular identity, it's just covered with my fingerprints, skin samples, probably fragments of ink from my wallet, maybe cat hairs, and - for now - has the tell-tale property of actually being in my fucking wallet - so anyone monitoring my wallet's contents over time will have a pretty fucking good idea that I've just spent $10 somewhere if I have $10 less after going out somewhere.
you don't have any restrictions on how
Oh, I see, so I can just hand over a printed representation of a coin in my wallet to you? No, there is an extremely strict protocol for how I send the money. This isn't a bad thing - I can't give you real money by faxing a copy of a benjamin and destroying the original, either - but don't make shit up.
and why and to whom you can send money,
Well, I can't send $100,000 in used notes to the Taliban because the government says I can't, and if they have a good reason to suspect I'm doing so they will dump on me from a mile up. Similarly, the "why and to whom" for sending Bitcoins may be regulated - ultimately by somehow monitoring the path of packets between source and destination. The "impossible" will be regulated out of legality by requiring, in general terms, that currency transfers over a certain value are illegal if untraceable. Well, OK, these laws already exist in most countries, but because no-one takes Bitcoins seriously yet, the laws aren't implemented wrt/ Bitcoin exchange.
you don't even have to know any details about the person you are receiving money from,
Wow, it's almost as sophisticated as Western Union - somewhere there's an entity disguising the path between source and destination, and that's nothing new.
Receiving addresses are generated randomly, nobody/has/ to use an address twice.
More numbered accounts. This is not interesting.
You can discard the wallets that you don't want to use (though you will lose money if you don't empty them first).
So, I can discard something except that I have to announce to everyone what's happening to its contents first.
You can use online services to do all this if you don't want to maintain your own wallet.
It means that each transfer is recorded by the network with a sender and receiver address. You can make a new address for each transaction, and the address does not have to be known to anyone except the sender and receiver. When a transaction is spread each node will check if the coins which are beeing sent actually belong to the address sending the coins. Otherwise it would be possible to spend the same coins twice.
IOW, not "freely" at all. I have to announce my transaction to every single other person using the bitcoin system, and sufficient people using the bitcoin system have to be available with some sort of transaction history to make sure their earnings aren't being double-spent. For anonymity I have to rely on source, destination and machines close enough to my machine not being monitored. For security I have to rely on my networked machine not being compromised with a keylogger and uploader - more fucking likely than someone walking into my home and stealing my wallet, especially if something on my hard drive represents the value of, say, a shiny new house.
How many coins would be enough? How many microcoins? Nanocoins? Yattocoins? In the current version of the protocol you may send as little as 0.00000001 coin. This may be expanded when needed. His name is Satoshi, btw.
So what you're saying is that the protocol upgrade will mitigate slightly against the hoarding that always takes place with backed currencies.
So what if they monitor the networks? They have no means of finding out who owns an address, unless the owner reveals it. There is no practical limit on the number of addresses you may own or use. Addresses are just cryptokeys.
So where does the actual packet communicating the coin payment initially get sent from? Do I throw some pixie dust into the air and it simultaneously appears on all the computers involved in the BitCoin system, including the receiver? Does the doublespend check also simultaneously appear from pixie dust on all the computers involved in the BitCoin system?
Slashdot Mirror
Let me try one final time to explain what I'm getting at. A thought experiment: suppose things are somehow reversed, and Murdoch's television stations become the BBC. How do you feel about having to pay Mr Rupert Murdoch just in order to watch broadcast over-the-air TV?
Now, you're a defender of the licence fee, so of course you still approve of this on principle, right?
No. There's no private individual which gets to own and control the licence payer money. Approving of a corporation managed by a trust is not the same as approving a franchise for the personal benefit of a private individual (or public-private partnerships in general).
And it's "democracy" because the elected government granted him this exclusive franchise.
No. Giving high level control of some aspect of public service to private business is not democratic. Public ownership of public services is a necessary component of democratic government. (No, a decision isn't democratic just because some majority vote for the government which chooses it: consider any elected government suddenly deciding to remove the right to vote.)
They should forget about names and ideals and judge it by the same standards they judge anything else.
As for content provision, sure. But the quality of programming will certainly be affected by the organisation's reasons for creating/selecting those programmes, so the outcome is fairly predictable.
if Murdoch beams "shit" at you, then isn't it at least possible that the BBC might be doing the same thing?
It's possible that the BBC will fuck up, and then we have the mentioned methods to help correct it.
But that unlike Murdoch, there's nothing you can do about it?
To change Murdoch, I have to persuade enough people with the money and desire to watch Murdoch to stop paying Murdoch. To change the BBC, I merely have to encourage people - any people - to put forward their views on how the BBC can be improved. As for stopping the BBC, I can do that by campaigning for a BBC-hating government - but it is absurd to campaign against a strong broadcast voice representing the people, and (unless I'm really not in favour of democracy) I'd surely be spending the time trying to ensure that the public service broadcaster fairly represents the public?
Obligations mean nothing if you have no way to enforce them. The BBC Trust is a way of appearing accountable without actually being accountable, just like any other quango.
Except that the BBC listens to and acts on the reports of the BBC Trust, and the BBC Trust listens to the people, directly and via the government. Or do you have some alternative reality in your head in which the BBC's programming policies are set by some other method? If so, what is the method?
What are we going to do if we're unhappy with the BBC? Write to them? Oooh, scary.
Born after 1980, huh? Yes, the whole point in democracy is that you precisely state your grievances by writing/speaking/debating, rather than by having enough money to get your own way.
Only watch ITV1?
That may have an effect, and the BBC has had periods of getting pathologically obsessed with ratings. But the BBC does not need to aim for the greatest viewership. Its aim is to represent the people, not to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
Yeah, that'll show 'em! Whatever happens they still get paid. This. Is. The. Problem.
No. If the BBC becomes chronically unpopular because it stops responding to the needs of the people then a government with undemocratic tendencies will have no trouble eliminating the BBC.
Incidentally, you mention Cameron. You suggest he's against the BBC. Well, you might like to think about exactly how he "won" the election.
Because people
OK, assuming you regard the Palestinian cause as "left wing" and the Israeli as "right wing"... how about the report by the BBFC (sic) president remarking that the BBC did not adequately convey the Palestinians' unequal relationship with Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict? The report was quite clear that Palestinians in certain territories are living under Israeli occupation, a fact recognised by the UN including Britain (at least officially), but the BBC - in giving context - was considered slow to assert this whenever giving context to some event.
Using the term "left wing" more ideologically, can you think of a single example in the last decade where the BBC was considered to show bias for worker control of the means of production? Clause IV seems all but forgotten in the mainstream media.
I thought the word was intentionally placed there - it sounds nice as people /expect/ to accuse him of megalomania but the problem (if any) may be monomania, causing him to disregard the effect on people (and animals?) around him. Like Churchill said, a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
This all remains drama bullshit to detract from the actual purpose of Wikileaks to release pertinent information on misbehaviour. Disliking Assange and his seconds in command doesn't make Wikileaks' aim any less worthwhile.
So he knowingly let an animal abuser stay with him while he was housing a cat?
Assange might be guilty - we have no evidence. But this tit has just confessed to aiding in cat abuse. Isn't this the bit where /b/ turns up?
That's time-shifting, which is effectively watching as it is broadcast.
(And not to be confused with use of an online catch-up service, which is not time-shifting and does not require you to pay any licence fee.)
The point is, your argument that Murdoch's broadcasts somehow justify the licence fee is more than a bit crazy.
You've omitted the reasoning between "your argument" and "more than a bit crazy" - would you mind providing it? Perhaps it'll give me a better warning of the kind of bullshit Cameron will come up with to further diminish the BBC.
If you want to talk about debts to society, then look no further than the BBC. What does the BBC owe us, the public, for the priviledge of owning all those buildings,
Sorry, did they steal your house or something? Also, priviledge (n): the precipice your envious detractor perceives you on and wants to push you off so he can take your place.
huge amounts of the broadcasting spectrum,
It doesn't "own" - it has an exclusive right to do certain things with it. This ability was earnt through a process more democratic than "have the money to pay a broadcast fee" and much more democratic than "sale to the highest bidder". Which do you prefer? A system of government which commits suicide by just selling control and assets off to the highest bidder, perhaps?
and of course the monopoly right to levy a tax on ownership of a television that receives anything over the air?
No. It must specifically receive broadcast television. For example, my free amateur radio licence allows me to send amateur television, and you are able to receive it, without creating any requirement for a TV licence.
I suppose you could say it owes us some television programmes.. but what do we do if we don't like them? Where is the accountability? What do we do when we don't feel the debt is being repaid properly?
Write to the BBC about specific programmes; give feedback via the BBC Trust consultations and complaints service; fill the ballot box.
At least with Murdoch we can decide not to subscribe to Sky.
Nope. He still gets to beam his shit at me.
In any sane world we'd compare the BBC and News Corp and see they are pretty similar - both massive media corporations with huge influence.
Lots of entities are massive with huge influence. This doesn't mean that they're all equally useful, benevolent, moral, value-for-money, acceptable, etc.
And yet one of them also has the legal right to extract payment from us and provide nothing worthwhile in return. I'm sure you can justify this in your head, but it is still wrong.
The BBC doesn't have the legal right to "extract payment from us and provide nothing worthwhile in return". It has a host of obligations in return for the licence fee payment.
No institution is unbiased and representative all the time on everything - it's an impossible ideal. The best it can do is continuously to try to discover bias and disproportionate representation, publish its findings and take corrective action. You've given examples of how the BBC does that (and Murdoch never will).
There's a difference between showing bias and being unrepresentative, of course. It is one thing to be disproportionately represented by gays and ethnic minorities - the latter ties in with a history of London over-representation, since London's ethnic minority population exists in far greater proportion than almost everywhere else in the country. But when the people are protesting passionately against Thatcher en masse, is it your job to make the government's argument sound more reasonable than it really is?
Did they explain to you that attempted suicide is illegal all over the place?
In the '60s, yes.
Uh, the definition of a tax is that it is compulsory,
It is not compulsory to watch TV as it is broadcast, so you'll need to give a better definition than that.
AFAICT, starving yourself is the only legal way to commit suicide in most jurisdictions.
The '60s called.
The radio counterpart Any Questions? was hosted by one of my old schools and was "packed" with, well, mostly parents and students of the school. I live in a constituency which hasn't seen a Labour MP since before I was born, and the audience represented an even more well-off Tory-leaning set than was regular for the area.
I shan't ask you for proof of your assertion because it's obvious you're trolling in the guise of a well-known British stereotype.
Since the Murdoch signals are delivered by satellite,
Regulation (of another sort) has intervened to specifically prevent Murdoch's ownership of certain terrestrial broadcasters. Sky 3 sure is doing a good job of reaching the DVB-T-connected TV I'm sitting in front of, and most terrestrial broadcasters remain under private ownership.
the frequencies can be reused by other broadcasters. Indeed this is exactly what happens; if you point your dish in a different direction you can receive broadcasts from different satellites on other frequencies.
The fact that a signal is directional doesn't mean Murdoch gets any more natural right to ownership of the spectrum. There's no cone extending from his satellite a few centimetres down into the ground through everyone's property which he has an inherent right to use in any way.
Therefore you cannot (correctly) say that he has exclusive control of them.
I couldn't in any case, technically, because digital terrestrial channels are delivered on multiplexes managed by the cunts at Arqiva. But he has an exclusive right to content delivery on some part of the spectrum in the sense that you have the privilege of enjoying it uninterrupted. Put another way, I don't get to fly an aircraft over your village and interrupt his signal to rescue you from his dross. You pay for that privilege.
Murdoch is only occupying a small area of geostationary orbit, which is hardly property of the UK anyway.
The privilege of launching a satellite and controlling an area of space is yet another thing for which he owes the system which has given him the freedom and stability to do that - but that's another matter entirely.
I wouldn't call this attention whoring. Attention whoring involves being a whore. Neither the person who made the copy of the sites, nor the author of this post, are attempting to receive anything for what they have done.
Nonsense. Ben Metcalfe is a somewhat bitter ex-BBC employee and his reward is reputation (as it often is on the Interwebs). TFA, his web site and about 20 seconds' worth of mouse clicks between them make this clear.
A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them.
You seem to be overly worried about whether something can be called a "tax" or not based on whether it's compulsory (I'd like to propose, then, that food purchases are taxes because they are compulsory for survival). Consider instead the allocation of funds.
Scrapping Trident is a valid cost-cutting measure when the government has decided that it's overspending on unnecessary shit during a recession: if you scrap Trident, you suddenly have a few 10s of billions more GBP to allocate other than against an imaginary enemy who is already being sufficiently resisted.
Even tax on fags and booze goes to central government. The extra taxation isn't allocated for health or policiing services for cancer patients and drunks.
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
What is more, I regard the licence fee as the cost the viewer pays for (i) the content produced by the BBC; (ii) even if he chooses not to watch the BBC, the permission given by the people to private broadcasters to use parts of the e-m spectrum (and other artificial/natural monopolies) to broadcast stuff in their interests. The "cost" in this case is the right for the people to provide a counterpoint - something sorely lacking, in, say, the bastion of free press that is the USA.
The BBC is (ideally) the people's counterbalance to the freedom of the press belonging to the owners of the presses.
Yeah, that's where I'd draw the line and consider the licence unacceptable.
A well regulated TV licence funds a broadcast service separate from and balancing against dominant commercial interests. If Murdoch, say, is given a licence to broadcast on some frequency (parts of the e-m spectrum not being in any reasonable way ownable) then in return for exclusive access to broadcast on this frequency he and his customers must accept that the people get to have something to challenge a service acting in his interests.
IOW, if you're paying money for a Sky subscription, you're benefitting from Murdoch's exclusive control of various radio frequencies. In return for the people allocating those frequencies for your benefit, you gotta pay for the counterbalance that is the BBC.
"What about when TV goes all Internet and is no longer broadcast over the air?" I hear you hypothesise based on your own experience and that of half a dozen geeks who use iPlayer and torrents. Well, land communications networks suffer precisely the same problem of "natural" monopoly requiring regulation to ensure competition and balance. It's a variation of a net neutrality argument.
This all applies before you even consider the content value of the BBC.
Websites aren't books.
True. Maintaining a web site may be more difficult, as it may involve interactive services. But I get the impression that what was being mirrored could essentially be put into book form.
Yes, electronic copies don't cost Auntie anything, which is sort of the point.
The electronic copy just made doesn't. So what you're saying is that this is a campaign for the BBC to link to the .torrent file for an archive of its decommissioned web sites?
If he's british then the matter of permission is a grey one: having paid his license fee it could be argued that he has a right to this material
Nothing of the sort can be argued. Firstly, the BBC isn't funded by general taxation. Secondly, even if it were, there is no English concept mirroring the US idea that Federal works are in the public domain. Actually, not even the US has that in practice, because so much work produced by private entities under contract to government remains the intellectual property of the private entity. Then you have all the software and documents that, for reasons from laziness to national security, are never released.
Of course, sticking it on BT for all to grab would complicate matters but I don't see Auntie getting her knickers in too much of a twist.
Perhaps not. Does everything on all these web sites have BBC copyright? What do the authors who perhaps have an affinity for the BBC but not for promoting random attention-whoring private individuals have to say? Is Bittorrent availability likely to elicit a BBC response, "We don't need to host this stuff - just download it from that Ben Metcalfe guy if you really care"?
Firstly, the privatisation began years ago under New Tories - the worst hit from a geeky PoV being selling of infrastructure to Siemens.
Secondly, the BBC isn't a public body in the sense that is, say, the British Army. The Army is funded by a general, compulsory taxes on income and other trade. The BBC is funded by a licence which you only need to pay if you choose to watch (possibly time-shifted) live broadcast television.
Thirdly, anyone who thinks that this round of government cost cutting is even slightly relevant to getting out of recession is an idiot. Money is wasted because government acts as an agent for private benefactors, in particular (i) units are sold off and services contracted back to well-back-scratched government officials at profit; (ii) money invested in private wars, trade and military, under the guise of "free trade" or defence of the realm. Much of our debt represents investment in banks from which (if we do things right) we stand to make huge profit once we've sold off again.
Finally, government debt per se is not bad - it acts as a mirror private wealth of creditors. What matters is whether debt is sustainable. The approach after WW2 to a record level of debt was to invest more to grow local technology, industry and services. The approach today is to burn all society's bridges for firewood. Thatcher executed round one, and Cameron prepares kindling for remaining edifices. Then there's nothing left, and Britain will have got exactly what she asked for.
(In the UK, if you own a device that can receive TV signals, you HAVE to have a TV license which the BBC gets funds from)
No. In the UK, iff you use a device to watch television as it is broadcast then your residence has to have a TV licence. A TV used for CCTV, amateur television or watching DVDs does not create a requirement for a licence. A computer used for iPlayer's "Watch live" service does create a requirement for a licence.
A license is some American invention which you probably need to jaywalk from the sidewalks to the theater.
So, what you're saying is that to reprint a book costs wildly less than to produce a book? That an electronic copy with no attempts to guarantee availability is much cheaper than a resilient set of servers which deliver instantly and accessibly to goodness-knows-how-many-people per minute? And that the cheapest thing of all is to do so without asking anyone's permission?
Look, we can all observe an assault undique to neuter and privatise the BBC. But OP is attention whoring with a cheap technical demonstration which alienates him from the very people he might think he is supporting.
"Freedom in the US is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
tl;dr Property is theft.
Oh, I don't know, "We're doing some security updates to our Gmail system and need you to enter a backup code to verify your details. Please click here to stop losing access to your account," sort of thing. Coming to your Gmail account might even make it look more authentic, but anywhere'll do.
I get that sort of phishing attempt all the time for banks.
If you have a file representing $500,000 on your hard drive, I guarantee that criminals more intelligent and sophisticated than you will expend the resources to penetrate whatever shitty home firewall security you have and install a keylogger on your machine, rendering the passphrase to your encrypted wallet as useful as your contribution to this thread.
The initial packet must come from one machine (doesn't have to be your own), and will be sent to machines it has connections to.
And that continues to be the problem, no matter how many times you try to handwave that this critical vulnerability can surely be solved by something else (Tor, whatever).
Rather than trying to make wallets anonymous, how about making transactions anonymous?
So, phishing + replay.
What has this to do with free flow? You have no /registered/ identity
The cash in my wallet is not registered to any particular identity, it's just covered with my fingerprints, skin samples, probably fragments of ink from my wallet, maybe cat hairs, and - for now - has the tell-tale property of actually being in my fucking wallet - so anyone monitoring my wallet's contents over time will have a pretty fucking good idea that I've just spent $10 somewhere if I have $10 less after going out somewhere.
you don't have any restrictions on how
Oh, I see, so I can just hand over a printed representation of a coin in my wallet to you? No, there is an extremely strict protocol for how I send the money. This isn't a bad thing - I can't give you real money by faxing a copy of a benjamin and destroying the original, either - but don't make shit up.
and why and to whom you can send money,
Well, I can't send $100,000 in used notes to the Taliban because the government says I can't, and if they have a good reason to suspect I'm doing so they will dump on me from a mile up. Similarly, the "why and to whom" for sending Bitcoins may be regulated - ultimately by somehow monitoring the path of packets between source and destination. The "impossible" will be regulated out of legality by requiring, in general terms, that currency transfers over a certain value are illegal if untraceable. Well, OK, these laws already exist in most countries, but because no-one takes Bitcoins seriously yet, the laws aren't implemented wrt/ Bitcoin exchange.
you don't even have to know any details about the person you are receiving money from,
Wow, it's almost as sophisticated as Western Union - somewhere there's an entity disguising the path between source and destination, and that's nothing new.
Receiving addresses are generated randomly, nobody /has/ to use an address twice.
More numbered accounts. This is not interesting.
You can discard the wallets that you don't want to use (though you will lose money if you don't empty them first).
So, I can discard something except that I have to announce to everyone what's happening to its contents first.
You can use online services to do all this if you don't want to maintain your own wallet.
Oh, oh, like a bank!
You can connect to them via i2p or tor.
So is it anonymous on its own, or not?
It means that each transfer is recorded by the network with a sender and receiver address. You can make a new address for each transaction, and the address does not have to be known to anyone except the sender and receiver. When a transaction is spread each node will check if the coins which are beeing sent actually belong to the address sending the coins. Otherwise it would be possible to spend the same coins twice.
IOW, not "freely" at all. I have to announce my transaction to every single other person using the bitcoin system, and sufficient people using the bitcoin system have to be available with some sort of transaction history to make sure their earnings aren't being double-spent. For anonymity I have to rely on source, destination and machines close enough to my machine not being monitored. For security I have to rely on my networked machine not being compromised with a keylogger and uploader - more fucking likely than someone walking into my home and stealing my wallet, especially if something on my hard drive represents the value of, say, a shiny new house.
How many coins would be enough? How many microcoins? Nanocoins? Yattocoins? In the current version of the protocol you may send as little as 0.00000001 coin. This may be expanded when needed. His name is Satoshi, btw.
So what you're saying is that the protocol upgrade will mitigate slightly against the hoarding that always takes place with backed currencies.
So what if they monitor the networks? They have no means of finding out who owns an address, unless the owner reveals it. There is no practical limit on the number of addresses you may own or use. Addresses are just cryptokeys.
So where does the actual packet communicating the coin payment initially get sent from? Do I throw some pixie dust into the air and it simultaneously appears on all the computers involved in the BitCoin system, including the receiver? Does the doublespend check also simultaneously appear from pixie dust on all the computers involved in the BitCoin system?