No government involved. Unlike most US airports, Heathrow is a purely private company. Slots are sold to airlines as a purely commercial transaction, with a long waiting list. (And, no, they wouldn't be auctioned off in some sort of unregulated capitalist environment: every company has to build a relationship with its customers if it wants to keep them as customers, so taking slots away from airlines, or trying to charge them more for slots would drive airlines to competitor airports, such as Gatwick. We assume Heathrow has worked out the highest price it can charge which airlines which make them a lot of money in other fees are willing to pay).
Heathrow doesn't want slots owned but no plane using them (because they make money from aircraft actually using the airport) so airlines which own slots are highly incentivised to make sure they are used, even if they are making no money from the flight.
Left/Right is an orthogonal axis from Authoritarian/Libertarian (with the latter meant in its true sense, not the US right-wing political faction of that name).
There are plenty of authoritarians in the Left and the Right. Here in the UK it includes both May and Blair. Fortunately there are also libertarians in both Left and Right including most of the LibDems and the Greens.
A lot longer ago than that. I started my kernel mode software development career in 1981, writing kernel code for RSX and VMS. The user/kernel space dichotomy had existed for many years before that! And the Mach microkernel was invented in about 1985.
This is exactly the behaviour we need to allow us to request the Library of Congress to create an exception to allow us to break Adobe's DRM so we don't have to use the Digital Editions spyware to read our legitimately purchased books. In the UK we can make a similar request to the Secretary of State.
And it still wants a date of birth and a gender (to create an account). If I am using an alias I am not going to provide either of those (the persona that I just created doesn't have a DOB or a gender).
So, it is still useless and I won't be signing up.
Most people commenting on this (particularly in the US) are confused. No sites are being taken down because of this ruling. No pages are even being removed from Google's index -- they can all still be found through Google.
What Google is being forced to do is to remove them from the search results when the search is for a particular person's name. The reason is nothing to do with a "right to be forgotten" (that is a separate issue altogether). The reason is because a search based on someone's name is regarded as the equivalent of researching and publishing a dossier on that person (like a credit report, or an employment history would be). Credit reference agencies have strict rules on what data they can keep, and for how long (at least in Europe), and so does any other entity who handles personal data. The reasoning is "why should Google be allowed to publish dossiers at virtually no cost to them, which flout the laws about such things, when everyone else who is in the personal data business has to spend a lot of money to do careful research and follow legal restrictions?"
You can argue about how close a search result is to a dossier, and whether Google should have to follow the personal data rules in these cases, but do not confuse this with the "right to be forgotten", which is about deleting information.
So, to follow on from PRISM and the decision this week that all data stored in a cloud run by a US company is available to anyone in US law enforcement, Congress wants to complete the task of throwing the US IT industry under a bus? No US company can be sued for giving any information they have to the government without permission? What are they thinking of?
Of course. The whole premise of the article is wrong: it is NOT more convenient for most people to stream. DVDs are much more convenient.
It is probably true if you are singleton, or in your twenties with no kids, living in a city centre flat, with high speed unlimited internet and toys like iPads.
However, for most ordinary people, with families, living in fairly large houses in suburbs, DVDs are much more practical. They work in any room in the house (DVD players are cheap to put next to all the TVs in the house), they work in the car or the bus or the train, all the kids can work a DVD player from a young age (without an account or a password), they don't rely on the home WiFi or the internet connection working well, they don't require putting a PC in the living room connected to the TV, they don't require interfering with the kids usage of the main family PC (or games console), etc, etc. DVDs are just so much more practical if you are over the age of 30. That is the market for the rent-by-mail services: harassed parents who want easily available family entertainment.
It will change, as today's young adults become parents and as technology moves on (chromecast is part of that). But for now, DVDs are much more important than streaming.
It isn't about whether you have anything to hide. Even if you don't, there are many people you respect and value who do have important information to hide. Take your pick: your lawyer, your priest (who knows a lot of people's private problems), your doctor, your political representative, your schoolteacher, your favourite investigative journalist, your daughter's sexual health clinic, your local policeman,...
No so-called guardian of public morals or safety should be able to get access to any of that information without a properly constituted, and specifically targetted, warrant with a legal process. Whatever the suspected crime.
If you ever visit Germany, visit one of their Stasi museums -- and then think about what they achieved with 1980's technology. And then think about what an over-authoritarion local police chief, or regional FBI/CIA chief could achieve with today's technology.
I am amazed to see that post on Slashdot. I cannot believe there is anyone with a Slashdot account who stores passwords in a spreadsheet and prints them out!
Google "Password Safe" and go from there. You can even pay money for iPad apps that do the same thing if you like. And you can store your passwords securely, in the cloud, accessible from your phone and your PC.
And the train companies explicitly do it: if I try to buy a return ticket to London from my local station they will sell me a return to a suburb on the other side of London which is cheaper, and tell me to just use it to and from London. This is the train company telling me to do this and, of course it is perfectly valid under the UK conditions of carriage.
I disagree. Many of the marketing people in the B2B side of tech industries are former coders. They may not be current developers, but they have the background and experience to talk knowledgeably while also being marketing professionals.
There are plenty of people with the crossover of coding experience and good PR and interaction skills. Why aren't they being used in these projects?
I still use my N900 as my everyday phone. But it clearly can't last forever. I have bought a Jolla to replace it. It is definitely a work-in-progress, really only just usable (because of not-yet-implemented features, not poor UX) but the definite successor to the N900. It has a good team working on it, with updates adding new features all the time, and is building a community.
If you want to support a non-Apple, non-Android alternative and prefer as much openness as you can get, I recommend getting a Jolla.
My theory on this is that MS realise the future profits will come from phones and other devices (tablets, glasses, watches, TVs, fridges, etc.). Unfortunately, they are (still) NOWHERE in the phone business. The reason is apps -- they don't have any, so no one will use devices running MS software, so no one develops apps for the MS appstore. To fix this they HAVE TO force software developers to switch to apps in their app store, instead of desktop programs.
They can't kill desktop programs on mainstream PCs, yet -- no one would upgrade. But they can make sure that you can't run desktop programs on any new platforms. That is why they are so determined that Windows RT won't run ordinary programs. They see it is a question of corporate survival.
They tried this on the desktop with Win8 and the metro interface -- they got burnt and have had to pull back a bit in Win8.1 but I am sure it still remains their goal to make it really hard for new software to be deployed except as an app in their appstore even on the desktop.
I would really like to know why all those who have been hyperventilating over this thinks the government or anyone else for that matter gives a shit who you call or e-mail.
My email is very dull and boring. But there are people I respect who's email is NOT dull and boring. Campaigners, activists, even lawyers and policiticans. Unless I protest nosily, and adopt privacy tools myself, the government can get away with recording the correspondence of people for whom it does matter. In fact, they can even spot the ones to watch because they are the ones using encryption and privacy tools.
It matters because if you are campaigning to change this then you can be much more easily targetted. Both by the government and (possibly even more importantly) by commercial firms. If your car records everywhere you drive, and your insurance company collects the data, and then sells the data to the union busting company, it makes it much easier for them to find out who your friends are, where they live, where you meet up to plan your campaign, when it looks like you are gearing up for a demonstration or public action, etc.
I am not an activist, and my car data is boring and unlikely of much interest to anyone. But if I don't stand up for my privacy then the only people left standing up for it will be people who DO have something to hide (from someone), who will stick our like a sore thumb. If we want people to be able to exercise free speech, campaign against injustice, blow the whistle on abuses, and generally do things big companies might not like, then it is up to the rest of us to make sure we fight for everyone's right to privacy.
From time to time, if you are into using ebooks, you will find that there are titles you want that are not available in non-DRM versions.
It's a matter of principle for me. Buying any DRM-contaminated book is a sign to the publisher that this abomination is acceptable.
There are e-books with DRM from authors I have all published paper-books from. It sucks there are stories from my favorite authors I can't read but DRM is a red line I don't cross.
Exactly. I am upset that I won't be able to read the last books of my very favourite author (who is dying) for some years until they are eventually available DRM-free, but so be it. I don't buy physical books any more, I don't buy DRM-encumbered material, and I don't download pirated material.
Sell me content under a licence I feel acceptable and I am happy to buy it. If not, I will go without. Fortunately, there are many more DRM-free ebooks that I want to read than I have time to read them so I won't be going short of reading material.
If you happen not to have wired broadband in your home, I guess you can do that by occasionally tethering to a smartphone.
Oh, I love to listen to you metro types... I live in a rural area. I do have wired broadband but I certainly don't have mobile data coverage. The farms the other side of the village don't even get the wired broadband.
"If you don't have broadband just use a smartphone" ROTFL
If Amazon ever makes removing DRM impossible, I won't be buying from them.
Some of us don't buy DRM-encumbered books at all, for that reason. Of course it is easy to remove... it is in their interests that it is easy to remove so that even the people who don't like DRM will still buy from them! Well, sorry, but I choose not to do business with anyone who won't sell me their goods on terms I find agreeable. I won't support them while they are screwing other people even if I know how to stop them screwing me.
I pay fair prices for DRM-free books which I can own.
No. Metro is there because MS want to be a mobile phone OS company -- that is where the money is in the future. However, no third smartphone OS can be successful because of the App problem: there are no apps until the app developers see customers, and there are no customers until they can download apps. So, MS had this great idea: force every Windows PC user to use the same interface as their new phone OS. Create a ready built large market for app developers and so get a lot of apps developed quickly, ready for the phone users.
I hate MS as much as the next guy on/. but I have to admit this is a brilliant way to solve the problem that brought down Nokia and surmount the barriers to entry erected by Apple and Google.
Actually Europe had slower cell service because the EU mandated GSM.
You are mixing up the air interface with the rest of the infrastructure. Yes, CDMA has won over TDMA for the radio interface. Absolutely no question about it -- mainly because of the move to data, which can really benefit from the flexibility CDMA offers.
However, GSM has completely won for the infrastructure. The two big benefits of making the SIM card separate from the phone and standardising roaming across a large area (which ended up being the whole world) meant that GSM has completely dominated mobile infrastructure. The rest of the world even managed to have much higher mobile phone penetration and usage than the US in the 2G days, even though the US invented cellular networks (calling-party-pays helped as well, I will admit). The few remaining CDMA operators left in the world are losing subscribers and closing networks as they all move to 3GPP standards for 3G and beyond.
The thing we should be worrying about is that LTE does not have standardisation of frequency bands -- that fragmentation will severely damage roaming, which is a massive part of the business case that pays for the investment in the mobile networks we use today. The new iPhone, for example, has had to select a set of frequencies to support which will make it very limited in which LTE networks it can run on.
Prices in this sort of market (which includes all technology markets) aren't set by costs: they are set by willingness to pay. Like any business, the operators want to have different products at different price points in order to have both a low price entry-level service and a higher priced service which offers more. It is just like the airlines: you can get a cheap ticket which just gets you there or you can buy a lounge access as an add-on (even though your lounge usage costs them virtually nothing).
This sort of thing is going to happen more and more and is a good thing because it is the only way the basic service is going to be affordable to the lowest economic tiers. Without this sort of segmented offer, operators will not walk away from the high prices the high end users are willing to pay -- so you either pay a high price or you don't get the service at all!
However, personally, I don't think that tethering is likely to remain as an add-on for long -- it just isn't valuable enough to people. New network features will allow operators to use things which are much more valuable to differentiate their plans in the future (like higher definition video).
somebody made the extremely astute comment that to do the kind of thing they are saying they want to do, the ISP would have to slow down everyone else. because there is simply no such thing as speeding up only one website selectively, there is only artificially slowing everyone down (except for those who pay up). this isn't capitalism, this is monopolistic blackmail
No, it is much more subtle than that nowadays.
Led by the mobile business, there is a move to per-user bandwidth-based tariffs. I may subscribe to 1Mbps access at a certain price, while you subscribe to 10Mbps access at a higher price. That seems fair to most people (it works for flights, hotels, insurance, healthcare, etc...). These tariffs also come with options for users to pay for temporary bandwidth increases (I need more bandwidth this weekend).
In that model, it is perfectly reasonable that a site that wants to sell me something (e.g. a movie rental, delivered using streaming) might arrange with the network for a temporary bandwidth increase just for the session being used to deliver their content, and included in the price of my rental. Once you have that, it seems reasonable that BT and YouTube might decide it is in their joint interests for every BT subscriber, whichever tariff they are on, to have access to YouTube at (say) 5Mbps -- money would change hands, although I do not know in which direction in that example.
All of that is perfectly reasonable, as long as I am still receiving the 1Mbps service to the general internet that I am paying for. Regulation should be making sure that I get what I pay for, not worrying about what other people may be paying for. The move to bandwidth-based tariffs will bring much more clarity in what you are paying for, and better controls for ISPs to deliver it. There will still be over-allocation (just as with flights), but the regulation should control what happens when the over-allocation causes breaches of the bandwidth guarantees (just as it does for flights). The ISP industry will manage that just as the airline industry does today -- and if the regulator insists that stats are published, people will be able to choose ISPs who do more or less over-allocation (who will be more or less expensive) depending on their own personal preferences.
Slashdot Mirror
No government involved. Unlike most US airports, Heathrow is a purely private company. Slots are sold to airlines as a purely commercial transaction, with a long waiting list. (And, no, they wouldn't be auctioned off in some sort of unregulated capitalist environment: every company has to build a relationship with its customers if it wants to keep them as customers, so taking slots away from airlines, or trying to charge them more for slots would drive airlines to competitor airports, such as Gatwick. We assume Heathrow has worked out the highest price it can charge which airlines which make them a lot of money in other fees are willing to pay).
Heathrow doesn't want slots owned but no plane using them (because they make money from aircraft actually using the airport) so airlines which own slots are highly incentivised to make sure they are used, even if they are making no money from the flight.
Left/Right is an orthogonal axis from Authoritarian/Libertarian (with the latter meant in its true sense, not the US right-wing political faction of that name).
There are plenty of authoritarians in the Left and the Right. Here in the UK it includes both May and Blair. Fortunately there are also libertarians in both Left and Right including most of the LibDems and the Greens.
https://www.politicalcompass.o... has a good description of this.
A lot longer ago than that. I started my kernel mode software development career in 1981, writing kernel code for RSX and VMS. The user/kernel space dichotomy had existed for many years before that! And the Mach microkernel was invented in about 1985.
This is exactly the behaviour we need to allow us to request the Library of Congress to create an exception to allow us to break Adobe's DRM so we don't have to use the Digital Editions spyware to read our legitimately purchased books. In the UK we can make a similar request to the Secretary of State.
And it still wants a date of birth and a gender (to create an account). If I am using an alias I am not going to provide either of those (the persona that I just created doesn't have a DOB or a gender).
So, it is still useless and I won't be signing up.
Most people commenting on this (particularly in the US) are confused. No sites are being taken down because of this ruling. No pages are even being removed from Google's index -- they can all still be found through Google.
What Google is being forced to do is to remove them from the search results when the search is for a particular person's name. The reason is nothing to do with a "right to be forgotten" (that is a separate issue altogether). The reason is because a search based on someone's name is regarded as the equivalent of researching and publishing a dossier on that person (like a credit report, or an employment history would be). Credit reference agencies have strict rules on what data they can keep, and for how long (at least in Europe), and so does any other entity who handles personal data. The reasoning is "why should Google be allowed to publish dossiers at virtually no cost to them, which flout the laws about such things, when everyone else who is in the personal data business has to spend a lot of money to do careful research and follow legal restrictions?"
You can argue about how close a search result is to a dossier, and whether Google should have to follow the personal data rules in these cases, but do not confuse this with the "right to be forgotten", which is about deleting information.
So, to follow on from PRISM and the decision this week that all data stored in a cloud run by a US company is available to anyone in US law enforcement, Congress wants to complete the task of throwing the US IT industry under a bus? No US company can be sued for giving any information they have to the government without permission? What are they thinking of?
Of course. The whole premise of the article is wrong: it is NOT more convenient for most people to stream. DVDs are much more convenient.
It is probably true if you are singleton, or in your twenties with no kids, living in a city centre flat, with high speed unlimited internet and toys like iPads.
However, for most ordinary people, with families, living in fairly large houses in suburbs, DVDs are much more practical. They work in any room in the house (DVD players are cheap to put next to all the TVs in the house), they work in the car or the bus or the train, all the kids can work a DVD player from a young age (without an account or a password), they don't rely on the home WiFi or the internet connection working well, they don't require putting a PC in the living room connected to the TV, they don't require interfering with the kids usage of the main family PC (or games console), etc, etc. DVDs are just so much more practical if you are over the age of 30. That is the market for the rent-by-mail services: harassed parents who want easily available family entertainment.
It will change, as today's young adults become parents and as technology moves on (chromecast is part of that). But for now, DVDs are much more important than streaming.
It isn't about whether you have anything to hide. Even if you don't, there are many people you respect and value who do have important information to hide. Take your pick: your lawyer, your priest (who knows a lot of people's private problems), your doctor, your political representative, your schoolteacher, your favourite investigative journalist, your daughter's sexual health clinic, your local policeman, ...
No so-called guardian of public morals or safety should be able to get access to any of that information without a properly constituted, and specifically targetted, warrant with a legal process. Whatever the suspected crime.
If you ever visit Germany, visit one of their Stasi museums -- and then think about what they achieved with 1980's technology. And then think about what an over-authoritarion local police chief, or regional FBI/CIA chief could achieve with today's technology.
I am amazed to see that post on Slashdot. I cannot believe there is anyone with a Slashdot account who stores passwords in a spreadsheet and prints them out!
Google "Password Safe" and go from there. You can even pay money for iPad apps that do the same thing if you like. And you can store your passwords securely, in the cloud, accessible from your phone and your PC.
And the train companies explicitly do it: if I try to buy a return ticket to London from my local station they will sell me a return to a suburb on the other side of London which is cheaper, and tell me to just use it to and from London. This is the train company telling me to do this and, of course it is perfectly valid under the UK conditions of carriage.
I disagree. Many of the marketing people in the B2B side of tech industries are former coders. They may not be current developers, but they have the background and experience to talk knowledgeably while also being marketing professionals.
There are plenty of people with the crossover of coding experience and good PR and interaction skills. Why aren't they being used in these projects?
I still use my N900 as my everyday phone. But it clearly can't last forever. I have bought a Jolla to replace it. It is definitely a work-in-progress, really only just usable (because of not-yet-implemented features, not poor UX) but the definite successor to the N900. It has a good team working on it, with updates adding new features all the time, and is building a community.
If you want to support a non-Apple, non-Android alternative and prefer as much openness as you can get, I recommend getting a Jolla.
My theory on this is that MS realise the future profits will come from phones and other devices (tablets, glasses, watches, TVs, fridges, etc.). Unfortunately, they are (still) NOWHERE in the phone business. The reason is apps -- they don't have any, so no one will use devices running MS software, so no one develops apps for the MS appstore. To fix this they HAVE TO force software developers to switch to apps in their app store, instead of desktop programs.
They can't kill desktop programs on mainstream PCs, yet -- no one would upgrade. But they can make sure that you can't run desktop programs on any new platforms. That is why they are so determined that Windows RT won't run ordinary programs. They see it is a question of corporate survival.
They tried this on the desktop with Win8 and the metro interface -- they got burnt and have had to pull back a bit in Win8.1 but I am sure it still remains their goal to make it really hard for new software to be deployed except as an app in their appstore even on the desktop.
I would really like to know why all those who have been hyperventilating over this thinks the government or anyone else for that matter gives a shit who you call or e-mail.
My email is very dull and boring. But there are people I respect who's email is NOT dull and boring. Campaigners, activists, even lawyers and policiticans. Unless I protest nosily, and adopt privacy tools myself, the government can get away with recording the correspondence of people for whom it does matter. In fact, they can even spot the ones to watch because they are the ones using encryption and privacy tools.
Remind yourself of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
It matters because if you are campaigning to change this then you can be much more easily targetted. Both by the government and (possibly even more importantly) by commercial firms. If your car records everywhere you drive, and your insurance company collects the data, and then sells the data to the union busting company, it makes it much easier for them to find out who your friends are, where they live, where you meet up to plan your campaign, when it looks like you are gearing up for a demonstration or public action, etc.
I am not an activist, and my car data is boring and unlikely of much interest to anyone. But if I don't stand up for my privacy then the only people left standing up for it will be people who DO have something to hide (from someone), who will stick our like a sore thumb. If we want people to be able to exercise free speech, campaign against injustice, blow the whistle on abuses, and generally do things big companies might not like, then it is up to the rest of us to make sure we fight for everyone's right to privacy.
From time to time, if you are into using ebooks, you will find that there are titles you want that are not available in non-DRM versions.
It's a matter of principle for me. Buying any DRM-contaminated book is a sign to the publisher that this abomination is acceptable.
There are e-books with DRM from authors I have all published paper-books from. It sucks there are stories from my favorite authors I can't read but DRM is a red line I don't cross.
Exactly. I am upset that I won't be able to read the last books of my very favourite author (who is dying) for some years until they are eventually available DRM-free, but so be it. I don't buy physical books any more, I don't buy DRM-encumbered material, and I don't download pirated material.
Sell me content under a licence I feel acceptable and I am happy to buy it. If not, I will go without. Fortunately, there are many more DRM-free ebooks that I want to read than I have time to read them so I won't be going short of reading material.
If you happen not to have wired broadband in your home, I guess you can do that by occasionally tethering to a smartphone.
Oh, I love to listen to you metro types... I live in a rural area. I do have wired broadband but I certainly don't have mobile data coverage. The farms the other side of the village don't even get the wired broadband.
"If you don't have broadband just use a smartphone" ROTFL
If Amazon ever makes removing DRM impossible, I won't be buying from them.
Some of us don't buy DRM-encumbered books at all, for that reason. Of course it is easy to remove... it is in their interests that it is easy to remove so that even the people who don't like DRM will still buy from them! Well, sorry, but I choose not to do business with anyone who won't sell me their goods on terms I find agreeable. I won't support them while they are screwing other people even if I know how to stop them screwing me.
I pay fair prices for DRM-free books which I can own.
No. Metro is there because MS want to be a mobile phone OS company -- that is where the money is in the future. However, no third smartphone OS can be successful because of the App problem: there are no apps until the app developers see customers, and there are no customers until they can download apps. So, MS had this great idea: force every Windows PC user to use the same interface as their new phone OS. Create a ready built large market for app developers and so get a lot of apps developed quickly, ready for the phone users.
I hate MS as much as the next guy on /. but I have to admit this is a brilliant way to solve the problem that brought down Nokia and surmount the barriers to entry erected by Apple and Google.
We're not all dead. Some of those of us involved in OSI networking are still around!
Be scared. Be very scared.
Actually Europe had slower cell service because the EU mandated GSM.
You are mixing up the air interface with the rest of the infrastructure. Yes, CDMA has won over TDMA for the radio interface. Absolutely no question about it -- mainly because of the move to data, which can really benefit from the flexibility CDMA offers.
However, GSM has completely won for the infrastructure. The two big benefits of making the SIM card separate from the phone and standardising roaming across a large area (which ended up being the whole world) meant that GSM has completely dominated mobile infrastructure. The rest of the world even managed to have much higher mobile phone penetration and usage than the US in the 2G days, even though the US invented cellular networks (calling-party-pays helped as well, I will admit). The few remaining CDMA operators left in the world are losing subscribers and closing networks as they all move to 3GPP standards for 3G and beyond.
The thing we should be worrying about is that LTE does not have standardisation of frequency bands -- that fragmentation will severely damage roaming, which is a massive part of the business case that pays for the investment in the mobile networks we use today. The new iPhone, for example, has had to select a set of frequencies to support which will make it very limited in which LTE networks it can run on.
Prices in this sort of market (which includes all technology markets) aren't set by costs: they are set by willingness to pay. Like any business, the operators want to have different products at different price points in order to have both a low price entry-level service and a higher priced service which offers more. It is just like the airlines: you can get a cheap ticket which just gets you there or you can buy a lounge access as an add-on (even though your lounge usage costs them virtually nothing).
This sort of thing is going to happen more and more and is a good thing because it is the only way the basic service is going to be affordable to the lowest economic tiers. Without this sort of segmented offer, operators will not walk away from the high prices the high end users are willing to pay -- so you either pay a high price or you don't get the service at all!
However, personally, I don't think that tethering is likely to remain as an add-on for long -- it just isn't valuable enough to people. New network features will allow operators to use things which are much more valuable to differentiate their plans in the future (like higher definition video).
somebody made the extremely astute comment that to do the kind of thing they are saying they want to do, the ISP would have to slow down everyone else. because there is simply no such thing as speeding up only one website selectively, there is only artificially slowing everyone down (except for those who pay up). this isn't capitalism, this is monopolistic blackmail
No, it is much more subtle than that nowadays.
Led by the mobile business, there is a move to per-user bandwidth-based tariffs. I may subscribe to 1Mbps access at a certain price, while you subscribe to 10Mbps access at a higher price. That seems fair to most people (it works for flights, hotels, insurance, healthcare, etc...). These tariffs also come with options for users to pay for temporary bandwidth increases (I need more bandwidth this weekend).
In that model, it is perfectly reasonable that a site that wants to sell me something (e.g. a movie rental, delivered using streaming) might arrange with the network for a temporary bandwidth increase just for the session being used to deliver their content, and included in the price of my rental. Once you have that, it seems reasonable that BT and YouTube might decide it is in their joint interests for every BT subscriber, whichever tariff they are on, to have access to YouTube at (say) 5Mbps -- money would change hands, although I do not know in which direction in that example.
All of that is perfectly reasonable, as long as I am still receiving the 1Mbps service to the general internet that I am paying for. Regulation should be making sure that I get what I pay for, not worrying about what other people may be paying for. The move to bandwidth-based tariffs will bring much more clarity in what you are paying for, and better controls for ISPs to deliver it. There will still be over-allocation (just as with flights), but the regulation should control what happens when the over-allocation causes breaches of the bandwidth guarantees (just as it does for flights). The ISP industry will manage that just as the airline industry does today -- and if the regulator insists that stats are published, people will be able to choose ISPs who do more or less over-allocation (who will be more or less expensive) depending on their own personal preferences.
The Harwell machine is programmable, but the program is on a loop of paper tape, making anything other than one simple loop very problematical.
So that's where the GTK guys got the idea!