It's not just about the price. There are two other factors that the media companies don't seem to get too clearly, either - convenience, which they do seem to have an inkling about, and timeliness, that is the most often overlooked. Since HBO & "Game of Thrones" seem to have been nominated as the standard case study for this, let's use that. Both of those also have a bearing on what the market might be prepared to pay for a legal download. As soon as a new episode airs in the US, the boards, forums, wikis, and everything else get updated within a matter of hours. This matters a lot for GoT, because while the overall storyline is following the books there are discrepencies that by implication rule out some of the theories people have about the way things might go based on what is in the books.
So, what's an overseas fan (or just one who may well have an HBO subscription, but is frequently travelling outside the US) supposed to do? Avoid anything connected with GoT online between the US airdate and their regional airdate, which may in some cases be after the next series starts airing in the US, starting the cycle anew? Nope. They are going to try and download it from the 'Net (duh!), and HBO has been held up as the poster child as to why that isn't likely to be legally viable, so the obvious final stop is the torrents. But what's a studio supposed to do? RTFComic! It should be obvious:
Make episodes available, globally, on day #1, both to air and download. It's not like you have to ship reals of film anymore; the whole world is just an Internet file transfer away.
Recognise that some people might not have access to reliable cable when they want to view, and make off-line viewing possible.
Make them easy to download based on having a valid account, not from being in a given location.
Don't insist downloaders have a cable subscription also (is this just HBO Go doing this?). See points #2 & #3.
You can charge a premium for downloads for the first few days (week?), reducing the price when the next episode airs or the DVDs etc. ship.
Get non-English (or whatever language the show was shot in) sub-titled/dubbed versions out as soon as they are available.
Be realistic about pricing - you are competing with free but not strictly legal. Incentivize; pay up front for the season rather than per-episode, get a discount. Offer discounts on the box-sets (there's no middleman, so why not?). How much will depend on the show, but even GoT isn't going to be able to get away with a cost of more than a couple of dollars per epsiode before too many people head for the Torrents.
Feel free to fingerprint downloads so you can tie them back to an account and sue the ass off anyone who uploads their downloads to the 'Net at large. Just make that clear in the ToS and on the download page.
HBO can pretty much do all of that, today, with the infrastructure they have for HBO Go, today, albeit with a considerable amount of additional bandwidth provision being required if it doesn't work. So, why not? It's all additional revenue that they weren't going to be getting before, so does the math really work out such that the offsets in losses from people who decide HBO Go is all they need and dump their cable subscriptions will cost HBO more than all of the GLOBAL audience that they reach for no significant extra outlay? Or can't they make it work with overseas distributors? What's wrong with telling them "We'll be making GoT Season #4 available globally to air and online to HBO Go subscribers in English from the end of March 2013, so you might want to arrange any dubbing/subtitling you want and arrange your local scheduling accordingly." Seriously, I can't figure out why they are not already doing this, unless it really is that they are short sighted idiots who still haven't realised that the world changed for them about a decade ago and they'd better get with the times. Can someone fill me in, please?
Um, why? Seriously, why on earth would you possibly think that there would be any benefit in restricting this law suit to just one industry when it clearly applies in principle to *every* industry that involves patents, even if not all of them are quite so litigious right now? OK, this law was probably paid for by IT industry lobbyists, but are things really that screwed up in US law making that if you don't fund the congress critters writing the legislation then you don't get covered and have to fund your own version of esentially the same legalese later on?
Not necessarily. It depends very much on the specific city, of course, but assuming that the harbour can manage any rise in sealevels through increasing quay heights, construction of berms, etc. then a sealevel rise could actually be beneficial to operations. Higher water levels would reduce the need for dredging and also reduce the impact of low tides on deeper hulled vessels' ability to come and go.
Of course, if you are actually on the beach, as it were, and can't simply retreat up the shoreline, then your options are going to be a good deal more limited. There are large areas are Bangladesh in particular that are going to be essentially rendered uninhabitable by any significant sealevel rises.
"Dumbass kids" was the tone of The Onion story, but yes, a toddler accidentally swallowing a magnet having put it in their mouth on the off-chance that it might be tasty is just a toddler doing what they do, if there are any dumbasses in that situation it's the parents for leaving the magnets lying around. Or maybe they just got careless that one time - it happens. That's a little different from one example of a "kid" who is old enough to consider using a pair of these magnets as an alternative to getting a piercing intended for providing an enhanced oral sex experience without considering the likely consequences ("gee, it can be really hard to separate these magnets!") is a dumbass, pure and simple.
Then again, what's the point of being a child if you spend all of your youth wrapped up in cotton wool and never get to be a dumbass every now and again?
OP was talking Computer Science, not IT, but didn't really clarify whether they wanted an CS job with a physical activity component (actually being out in the field), or a job with an increased potential for engaging in physical activity (time for PT part of your daily job spec) - depending on the precise role you can either, or both, from the defence industry. CS, as opposed to IT, is going to mean a heavier emphasis on the R&D and possibly some early commissioning sides of things rather than the operation and maintainance, so while there is definitely a potential for going out to some warzone, far more likely that the CS aspects would normally be a comfortable distance away from where people are shooting at you. I was thinking more of the development and (of particular interest to the OP) setting up and performing field tests of the IT systems used for say, UAVs, missiles, C&C/comms/targetting systems, and so on that keeps you on your feet and not sat behind a desk.
So, given that tablets run pretty much the same OSs (Android, iOS) as many phones, you'd consider the potential for touch-enabled versions of the large number of Java front-ends to client server/systems on tablet PCs to be a "narrow use case"? The key phrase in there is "SaaS". Don't just think front-ends to enterprise scale client/server database systems; think Google Apps, and the many other Cloud based applications that are no doubt going to be developed for the growing tablet market.
What about the military, or something connected with it? Plenty of IT and similar equipment in the modern armed forces, all of which needs setting up, maintaining, and decomissioning just like any it does everywhere else, and that will often entail getting the out into the field. Even if you are stuck behind a desk for much of the time, you'll still need to do some physical activity as part of the daily routine since the military wants all of their staff to be physically fit for obvious reasons. If the prospect of potentially having to go on the front line doesn't appeal, then there are plenty of similar roles with defence contractors providing specialist support to the military, often on (much) higher pay - especially if you are prepared to go into places that might get a little heated.
Hey, at least we know that it reality it takes at least a dozen dumbass kids now to ruin it for everyone else... The Onion pegged it at three, back in the day.
In reality, the gunman would probably just open up on the herd of people waiting to go through the screening process.
Sure, I'm about as big a opponent of the current security theatre as you can get. Indeed, I've even posited almost exactly what you just suggested right here on Slashdot, namely that those huge snaking queues of people waiting to go through airport security make one hell of a juicy target for someone with a suicide vest loaded with explosives and sharpnel. Big mostly open space, lots of potential victims all bunched together, and a large number of explosively propelled metal fragments; not hard to envisage more fatalities per bomber than the 9/11 hijackers managed through crashing planes into buildings, and it's always going to be on the insecure side of the primary security perimeter.
The OP, however, was suggesting how a notional extension of TSA/airport style security at movie theatres, and presumably other similar venues as well, might have made a difference so, assuming the fire escape wasn't propped open to allow someone's friends in for free, that means the gunman either goes postal away from the theatre, with more dispersed targets, or in the vicinity of presumably armed security who are at least to TSA standards of competence - and there's a scary thought in itself. I would like to think that security theatre to that degree would get so much opposition/ridicule that it would be laughed out of town and end the political career of whoever was dumb enough to propose it, but hey, the TSA is still around despite all of their screw-ups, so who knows what the tolerance of the US public for this kind of thing really is?
One or two dead TSA-types and (most likely) one dead gunman, vs. 12 dead, ~50 injured, a protracted media frenzy during an expensive court trial, then a series of appeals, culminating in probable incarceration and maybe execution?
Exactly. Why not name and shame in circumstances like this? It's not like it's going to do any harm, unless there's going law enforcement involvement in their near future. The big carriers might not take any action, but if enough smaller operators blackhole the provider in question then the impact on their operations, legit or otherwise, might be enough to encourage reconsideration.
Then again, it might not actually have much of an effect at all. I recall a similar "name and shame" exercise after a US CoLo provider who's name escapes me (HostNoc? DimeNoc?) got raided for hosting C&C servers. The CEO was denying any overt involvement, that they had no knowledge of the servers being there, and so. You'd expect a tightening up of security after that kind of PR debacle, right? Maybe set up some kind of IDS? Nope. Within a few months their IP space was just as filthy as ever and back into the null route list it went. It's still there, and since I've seen no traffic from them, well, there's no abuse to report and off the radar they go.
Nope. It's "could". Mobile cells don't all operate at the same frequency - they operate at a number of frequencies within a given band, so depending on how close your local cell's operating frequecies are to the frequencies your local TV stations are you could see some interference. There's also the possibility that you could be far enough away from your local tower that the interference is too weak to actually cause noticeable disruption to the TV signal.
Um. No. Iran and Lebanon don't even share a border and in any case it would be Syria (who is neighbors with Lebanon) that has the reputation for often quite blatant interference in Lebanese affairs.
Corporates want an integrated user platform that they can manage from a single console. What they can save on support engineers, management tools, training and other expenses they perceive are associated with running multiple platforms might just be enough to justify and extra few hundred bucks a seat.
With hindsight, this probably shouldn't be a big surprise. There were some reports earlier this year about Loch Ness having a small but measurable tidal activity; something like 1.5mm across its 35km length. Given that the instruments at the LHC are apparently so finely tuned that they can track continental drift[1], it shouldn't really come as a major revelation that they can detect lunar tidal activity across the diameter of the LHC.
[1] Coincidentally, I found out about this as part of the whole issue over neutrinos supposedly travelling faster than light, which was finally given the official "no they don't" by CERN today.
Not sure whether this is a stroke of genius or insanity on the part of Samsung's legal team, as it does create some potential conflict of interest issues for the other party, but as you say - "let's take the government to court" seldom ends well. It's also going to be interesting from the practical point of view; a lawyer is supposedly an impartial representative of their client, and it's kind of hard to be impartial when you arethe client. This is why you will quite often see law firms and members of the legal profession appoint an outside council to represent themselves when they are being taken to court themselves; the additional perspectives of an unbiased and unblinkered view can be worth paying for.
It's certainly a novel strategy though; has anyone actually sued a patent office in this way, and essentially accusing them of incompentence in the process, before? If it works here, it might be an interesting tactic to try in the other havens of patent insanity like the Eastern District of Texas...
Why not? It's a library, as in (most probably) a stand-alone binary file, is it not? Provided "lzo.dll" or whatever it was called was shipped as part of the package and only linked against, then there is no need to distribute the rest of the source code in order to achieve GPL compliance. Or am I misunderstanding the GPL FAQ?
Well, if you are going to split hairs, the mean is 100, but the median and mode are both 50. Since you are only totally correct in one case out of three (in the other two cases 2/3 of the set are average, not below), then statistically inclined moderators should be favouring the OP 2:1, although right now it's "Score: 4, Funny" vs. plain old "Score: 2"...
Care to take a stab at what percentage of moderators can't do stats?
+1 This. The situation is a lot better than it used to be, but VM software tends to have a problem with keeping an accurate clock and that can bite you in some interesting ways, such as:
Pretty much anything to do with authentication; that means Active Directory, Kerberos and LDAP for sure, and depending on your setup might also include backends hosted in those systems such as AD/LDAP integrated DHCP/DNS if you have short TTLs.
NTP servers. Just don't go there. It should be obvious why, given the statement above!
System logging - you can forget about having accurately time synchronised system logs on VMs. The best solution here is to send all your VM logs to a central server and make sure the timestamps come from that server and not the remote one. Needless to say, this also needs to be a physical machine.
In addition, it should be pretty much a no-brainer that anything that tends to saturate I/O, whether that's CPU, disk, network or something else generally doesn't play well with co-hosted VMs when it's doing its thing, things like number crunchers, database servers, busy web servers and so on, all need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
This would be information seized during the raid, so no, the NZ authorities obviously didn't get to see it before approving the raid. As far as I am aware, a fair trial in the US, and presumably NZ, requires that the defence team have access to all of the data gathered by the prosecution so there's a potential for this to backfire on the US big time. By all accounts Kim seems to be something of a scumbag, but so far, in this matter at least, he is still innocent until proven guilty; since there are growing grounds for a mistrial due to withholding evidence it's entirely possible that the NZ judge could react to further shenanigans by simply throwing the case out and denying extradition. That would leave Kim unable to travel to the US or certain other countries with favourable extradition treaties, but given some of the alternatives I doubt he'd be complaining too much.
This isn't about banning cookies, it's about banning user tracking without consent - which includes far more than cookies; browser fingerprints being the main candidate, so the correct intent is there. For a start, it's perfectly OK within the law to set a cookie that tells the site to not track that user, which I suspect will form the bulk of the (incorrect) complaints received by the ICO, but you can't use that cookie to track the user across your site, or any affiliate sites.
The problem with this legislation isn't the intent, it's the complete lack of clarity coming from the ICO who are responsible for its adminstration and enforcement. The law essentially boils down to "do not track your users without their consent", which the ICO has then muddied the waters over by making some vague remarks about implied consent being OK without explaining exactly what they mean. There is a great deal of confusion over whether the request to opt-in/out needs to be overt (i.e. a click-through or banner), whether or not you can set a "do not track" cookie (you can), and so on.
It's not being helped by some totally lame implementations of the consent request, most probably due to lack of clarity from the ICO about what can and can't be done, in the cases of users with cookies and/or JavaScript disabled for a site. A frequent occurance in this case seems to be that such users either have to go through the consent request every visit or have a consent banner permanantly displayed on the screen. Both these problems could (and I'll emphasis that "could") go away quite simply if the ICO were to state that:
If using a script to prompt for consent and if that script is blocked then default to "do not track"
It's OK to try and set a cookie, read it back and if that fails assume cookies are blocked by the user and implied consent = "do not track", otherwise prompt the user for consent and act accordingly.
But all that assumes that the websites are going to act in the best interests of their users over the best interests of their bottom line; in many cases sites will be dependant on the revenue they can raise from their users, and a tracked user is going to be better targetted with ads, and thus more likely to click through, than one that is not. The more inconvenient it is for users to opt out of tracking, the more likely we are going to see those sites taking that track. Kudos on that front to the BBC who have a well thought out and graded set of cookie policies you can opt into ranging from "necessary", through "functionality" and "performance", to "behavioural advertising".
Slashdot Mirror
So, what's an overseas fan (or just one who may well have an HBO subscription, but is frequently travelling outside the US) supposed to do? Avoid anything connected with GoT online between the US airdate and their regional airdate, which may in some cases be after the next series starts airing in the US, starting the cycle anew? Nope. They are going to try and download it from the 'Net (duh!), and HBO has been held up as the poster child as to why that isn't likely to be legally viable, so the obvious final stop is the torrents. But what's a studio supposed to do? RTFComic! It should be obvious:
HBO can pretty much do all of that, today, with the infrastructure they have for HBO Go, today, albeit with a considerable amount of additional bandwidth provision being required if it doesn't work. So, why not? It's all additional revenue that they weren't going to be getting before, so does the math really work out such that the offsets in losses from people who decide HBO Go is all they need and dump their cable subscriptions will cost HBO more than all of the GLOBAL audience that they reach for no significant extra outlay? Or can't they make it work with overseas distributors? What's wrong with telling them "We'll be making GoT Season #4 available globally to air and online to HBO Go subscribers in English from the end of March 2013, so you might want to arrange any dubbing/subtitling you want and arrange your local scheduling accordingly." Seriously, I can't figure out why they are not already doing this, unless it really is that they are short sighted idiots who still haven't realised that the world changed for them about a decade ago and they'd better get with the times. Can someone fill me in, please?
Um, why? Seriously, why on earth would you possibly think that there would be any benefit in restricting this law suit to just one industry when it clearly applies in principle to *every* industry that involves patents, even if not all of them are quite so litigious right now? OK, this law was probably paid for by IT industry lobbyists, but are things really that screwed up in US law making that if you don't fund the congress critters writing the legislation then you don't get covered and have to fund your own version of esentially the same legalese later on?
Not necessarily. It depends very much on the specific city, of course, but assuming that the harbour can manage any rise in sealevels through increasing quay heights, construction of berms, etc. then a sealevel rise could actually be beneficial to operations. Higher water levels would reduce the need for dredging and also reduce the impact of low tides on deeper hulled vessels' ability to come and go.
Of course, if you are actually on the beach, as it were, and can't simply retreat up the shoreline, then your options are going to be a good deal more limited. There are large areas are Bangladesh in particular that are going to be essentially rendered uninhabitable by any significant sealevel rises.
"Dumbass kids" was the tone of The Onion story, but yes, a toddler accidentally swallowing a magnet having put it in their mouth on the off-chance that it might be tasty is just a toddler doing what they do, if there are any dumbasses in that situation it's the parents for leaving the magnets lying around. Or maybe they just got careless that one time - it happens. That's a little different from one example of a "kid" who is old enough to consider using a pair of these magnets as an alternative to getting a piercing intended for providing an enhanced oral sex experience without considering the likely consequences ("gee, it can be really hard to separate these magnets!") is a dumbass, pure and simple.
Then again, what's the point of being a child if you spend all of your youth wrapped up in cotton wool and never get to be a dumbass every now and again?
OP was talking Computer Science, not IT, but didn't really clarify whether they wanted an CS job with a physical activity component (actually being out in the field), or a job with an increased potential for engaging in physical activity (time for PT part of your daily job spec) - depending on the precise role you can either, or both, from the defence industry. CS, as opposed to IT, is going to mean a heavier emphasis on the R&D and possibly some early commissioning sides of things rather than the operation and maintainance, so while there is definitely a potential for going out to some warzone, far more likely that the CS aspects would normally be a comfortable distance away from where people are shooting at you. I was thinking more of the development and (of particular interest to the OP) setting up and performing field tests of the IT systems used for say, UAVs, missiles, C&C/comms/targetting systems, and so on that keeps you on your feet and not sat behind a desk.
So, given that tablets run pretty much the same OSs (Android, iOS) as many phones, you'd consider the potential for touch-enabled versions of the large number of Java front-ends to client server/systems on tablet PCs to be a "narrow use case"? The key phrase in there is "SaaS". Don't just think front-ends to enterprise scale client/server database systems; think Google Apps, and the many other Cloud based applications that are no doubt going to be developed for the growing tablet market.
What about the military, or something connected with it? Plenty of IT and similar equipment in the modern armed forces, all of which needs setting up, maintaining, and decomissioning just like any it does everywhere else, and that will often entail getting the out into the field. Even if you are stuck behind a desk for much of the time, you'll still need to do some physical activity as part of the daily routine since the military wants all of their staff to be physically fit for obvious reasons. If the prospect of potentially having to go on the front line doesn't appeal, then there are plenty of similar roles with defence contractors providing specialist support to the military, often on (much) higher pay - especially if you are prepared to go into places that might get a little heated.
Hey, at least we know that it reality it takes at least a dozen dumbass kids now to ruin it for everyone else... The Onion pegged it at three, back in the day.
The Police's "Every Breath You Take (I'll be watching you)" should raise paranoia levels nicely.
Sure, I'm about as big a opponent of the current security theatre as you can get. Indeed, I've even posited almost exactly what you just suggested right here on Slashdot, namely that those huge snaking queues of people waiting to go through airport security make one hell of a juicy target for someone with a suicide vest loaded with explosives and sharpnel. Big mostly open space, lots of potential victims all bunched together, and a large number of explosively propelled metal fragments; not hard to envisage more fatalities per bomber than the 9/11 hijackers managed through crashing planes into buildings, and it's always going to be on the insecure side of the primary security perimeter.
The OP, however, was suggesting how a notional extension of TSA/airport style security at movie theatres, and presumably other similar venues as well, might have made a difference so, assuming the fire escape wasn't propped open to allow someone's friends in for free, that means the gunman either goes postal away from the theatre, with more dispersed targets, or in the vicinity of presumably armed security who are at least to TSA standards of competence - and there's a scary thought in itself. I would like to think that security theatre to that degree would get so much opposition/ridicule that it would be laughed out of town and end the political career of whoever was dumb enough to propose it, but hey, the TSA is still around despite all of their screw-ups, so who knows what the tolerance of the US public for this kind of thing really is?
One or two dead TSA-types and (most likely) one dead gunman, vs. 12 dead, ~50 injured, a protracted media frenzy during an expensive court trial, then a series of appeals, culminating in probable incarceration and maybe execution?
Exactly. Why not name and shame in circumstances like this? It's not like it's going to do any harm, unless there's going law enforcement involvement in their near future. The big carriers might not take any action, but if enough smaller operators blackhole the provider in question then the impact on their operations, legit or otherwise, might be enough to encourage reconsideration.
Then again, it might not actually have much of an effect at all. I recall a similar "name and shame" exercise after a US CoLo provider who's name escapes me (HostNoc? DimeNoc?) got raided for hosting C&C servers. The CEO was denying any overt involvement, that they had no knowledge of the servers being there, and so. You'd expect a tightening up of security after that kind of PR debacle, right? Maybe set up some kind of IDS? Nope. Within a few months their IP space was just as filthy as ever and back into the null route list it went. It's still there, and since I've seen no traffic from them, well, there's no abuse to report and off the radar they go.
Nope. It's "could". Mobile cells don't all operate at the same frequency - they operate at a number of frequencies within a given band, so depending on how close your local cell's operating frequecies are to the frequencies your local TV stations are you could see some interference. There's also the possibility that you could be far enough away from your local tower that the interference is too weak to actually cause noticeable disruption to the TV signal.
Well sure, of course you'd only use BT for legitimate seafood - it's like the Sea Food Association of America PSA says; "You wouldn't eat Flipper..."
Um. No. Iran and Lebanon don't even share a border and in any case it would be Syria (who is neighbors with Lebanon) that has the reputation for often quite blatant interference in Lebanese affairs.
Corporates want an integrated user platform that they can manage from a single console. What they can save on support engineers, management tools, training and other expenses they perceive are associated with running multiple platforms might just be enough to justify and extra few hundred bucks a seat.
With hindsight, this probably shouldn't be a big surprise. There were some reports earlier this year about Loch Ness having a small but measurable tidal activity; something like 1.5mm across its 35km length. Given that the instruments at the LHC are apparently so finely tuned that they can track continental drift[1], it shouldn't really come as a major revelation that they can detect lunar tidal activity across the diameter of the LHC.
[1] Coincidentally, I found out about this as part of the whole issue over neutrinos supposedly travelling faster than light, which was finally given the official "no they don't" by CERN today.
Not sure whether this is a stroke of genius or insanity on the part of Samsung's legal team, as it does create some potential conflict of interest issues for the other party, but as you say - "let's take the government to court" seldom ends well. It's also going to be interesting from the practical point of view; a lawyer is supposedly an impartial representative of their client, and it's kind of hard to be impartial when you arethe client. This is why you will quite often see law firms and members of the legal profession appoint an outside council to represent themselves when they are being taken to court themselves; the additional perspectives of an unbiased and unblinkered view can be worth paying for.
It's certainly a novel strategy though; has anyone actually sued a patent office in this way, and essentially accusing them of incompentence in the process, before? If it works here, it might be an interesting tactic to try in the other havens of patent insanity like the Eastern District of Texas...
Why not? It's a library, as in (most probably) a stand-alone binary file, is it not? Provided "lzo.dll" or whatever it was called was shipped as part of the package and only linked against, then there is no need to distribute the rest of the source code in order to achieve GPL compliance. Or am I misunderstanding the GPL FAQ?
You do know that NASA has other launch vehicles than the Shuttle, right?
Well, if you are going to split hairs, the mean is 100, but the median and mode are both 50. Since you are only totally correct in one case out of three (in the other two cases 2/3 of the set are average, not below), then statistically inclined moderators should be favouring the OP 2:1, although right now it's "Score: 4, Funny" vs. plain old "Score: 2"...
Care to take a stab at what percentage of moderators can't do stats?
In addition, it should be pretty much a no-brainer that anything that tends to saturate I/O, whether that's CPU, disk, network or something else generally doesn't play well with co-hosted VMs when it's doing its thing, things like number crunchers, database servers, busy web servers and so on, all need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Maybe it's just contemplating the celstial equivalent of a wafer thin after-dinner mint.
I'd imagine the after effects might be a little more colourful than with Mr. Creosote though...
This would be information seized during the raid, so no, the NZ authorities obviously didn't get to see it before approving the raid. As far as I am aware, a fair trial in the US, and presumably NZ, requires that the defence team have access to all of the data gathered by the prosecution so there's a potential for this to backfire on the US big time. By all accounts Kim seems to be something of a scumbag, but so far, in this matter at least, he is still innocent until proven guilty; since there are growing grounds for a mistrial due to withholding evidence it's entirely possible that the NZ judge could react to further shenanigans by simply throwing the case out and denying extradition. That would leave Kim unable to travel to the US or certain other countries with favourable extradition treaties, but given some of the alternatives I doubt he'd be complaining too much.
The problem with this legislation isn't the intent, it's the complete lack of clarity coming from the ICO who are responsible for its adminstration and enforcement. The law essentially boils down to "do not track your users without their consent", which the ICO has then muddied the waters over by making some vague remarks about implied consent being OK without explaining exactly what they mean. There is a great deal of confusion over whether the request to opt-in/out needs to be overt (i.e. a click-through or banner), whether or not you can set a "do not track" cookie (you can), and so on.
It's not being helped by some totally lame implementations of the consent request, most probably due to lack of clarity from the ICO about what can and can't be done, in the cases of users with cookies and/or JavaScript disabled for a site. A frequent occurance in this case seems to be that such users either have to go through the consent request every visit or have a consent banner permanantly displayed on the screen. Both these problems could (and I'll emphasis that "could") go away quite simply if the ICO were to state that:
But all that assumes that the websites are going to act in the best interests of their users over the best interests of their bottom line; in many cases sites will be dependant on the revenue they can raise from their users, and a tracked user is going to be better targetted with ads, and thus more likely to click through, than one that is not. The more inconvenient it is for users to opt out of tracking, the more likely we are going to see those sites taking that track. Kudos on that front to the BBC who have a well thought out and graded set of cookie policies you can opt into ranging from "necessary", through "functionality" and "performance", to "behavioural advertising".