there *must* be some installations in US cities too.
That's quite insightful, because I've always imagined the UK only placed bunkers in cities because they had nowhere else to put them. With the US having so much more space, I'd have thought that bunkers would all be out-of-town.
Just goes to show I shouldn't go around making assumptions about other countries. I guess I'm just jealous of all that spare land...:-)
ADSL & 0844/0809 ISDN routes using BT's TCP/IP network as soon as it hits the exchange.
Other ISDN & voice calls such as 0845 and geographic numbers route using the digital voice network which is often carried on seperate routes.
So some Manchester users will get ADSL/0844/0809 but not geographic/0845, others will get the opposite, and many will get no service at all.
Also note that the newer BT Highway ISDN master sockets (those with a USB port) are "intelligent" and shut themselves down in the event of even a partial fault, whereas older non-USB BT Highway & Euro ISDN master sockets are "non-intelligent" and will continue to re-attempt a connection even if the line is partially faulty, often with great success. Sometimes brute force is better than intelligence, even with digital comms.
Major UK cities - certainly London and Manchester - have existed as proper brick-built towns since the Roman empire around two thousand years ago. That's a LOT of digging, building and rebuilding. Hence it is very difficult to put anything in a city without being noticed - you have to knock something down, or at least disconnect something, first. It's quite common for a builder to discover two thousand year old foundation stones when putting up a new house. So bumping into 50-year-old three-mile-long nuclear bunker isn't exactly going to take much detective work.
Also we have a lot of people in a very small space- our country has 60 million people in an island only 600 miles long. We don't have any unpopulated deserts, mountain ranges or ice shelves where you could go and build an Evil Lair and not be noticed. Anywhere you do anything in the UK, you are going to get spotted by the general public.
During World War 2 there was a massive campaign to make it the average citizen's "duty" to keep quiet about strange millitary goings-on. This carried through to the Cold War. Nowadays, though, the main targets aren't secret bases, they're office blocks and hotels, so this duty of secrecy has faded.
Being a small country, we've never had the room to build enormous Area 51 style secret bases. Guardian (Manchester), Anchor (Birmingham) and Kingsway (London) only have about three miles of tunnels each, and they're the largest in the UK - absolutely tiny in comparison to the ranch estates possible in the USA. So our old bunkers are too small to be useful today and too crammed-in to be extended.
They're of no practical use. That's why you hear about them- because you're allowed to, they're useless. Heck, Guardian doesn't even have exchange equipment inside it any more - only the fiber cabling. Guardian is basically used only as a handy tunnel to save digging up the road- it isn't "secret", it's more "convenient and otherwise worthless" (the problem is, of course, that it was so convenient that they put *most* of Manchester's fibre down there, including most of the backups).
Whereas the US bunkers are presumably big enough and extendable enough to still be in use. So Joe Public isn't going to be poking his nose in there any time soon.
AC wrote: My suggestion was that TiVo should allow the thumbing of commercials. Then they could sell that information to advertisers so they'd know what commercials that people thought were good.
But the advertisers already know which ones are "good" from the company's perspective. They're the ones where airing them is quickly followed by a rise in sales.
Everything else- such as opinions on their asethetic value- doesn't really matter to advertising companies.
Whether you "like" or "dislike" the commercial is irrelevant from the advertiser's point of view. The only thing that matters is: did it result in you buying (more of) the product/service?
acoustix: Isn't destroying US currency against the law?
I don't think so, but it is definitely illegal in the UK. Defacing an image of the monarch. One of those daft treason laws which we still having lying around but no-one enforces anymore.
(Most banknotes have metal strips in them, so I've no idea why anyone would find it surprising that they catch fire when microwaved.)
It's RealAudio, not Shoutcast, but hey, you can't have everything.
This kind of power gives you interesting abilities. For instance, on my friends mailing list we were joking around pinpointing the exact second at which ex-minister Clare Short realised quite what she'd done by exposing UK spying activity against the UN on the Radio 4 interview this morning.
Problem with free Satellite is although you get much more in terms of numbers of free channels, you don't get the main Freeview quality channels UK History, UK Bright Ideas and FTN free- these are subscription-only on satellite.
Plus, of course, you have to have a dish, which is very offputting to people like my OAP Daily Mail-reading parents, who couldn't take my ex-OnDigital freeview box off me fast enough, despite only being able to get 2 of the 4 multiplexes. ITV2, BBC News 24, BBC4 and BBC7 was enough to sell that idea to them- they've since gone on to buy another brand-new STB and a stupidly large widescreen integrated digital television.
Bastards. Spending my inheritance on widescreen digital TVs. That's MY job!
In the UK we've had digital radio for about 3 years now which although popular, is technically much poorer than the USA system, and it looks like the USA has learned from our mistakes.
Instead of the sideband system mentioned in this Slashdot story, the UK DAB (Digtial Audio Broadcasting) system uses "multiplexes" of entire frequencies to broadcast several digital stations at once. So instead of each FM station carrying it's own digital data, there are an additional 5 digital-only FM multiplexes each carrying a variable number of channels.
And here's where our system starts to suck very badly IMHO.
Since there is only a limited number of multiplexes, each with a limited amount of bandwidth, there is competition to squeeze as many digital channels onto each multiplex as possible. The net result is that the bitrates for each station are lowered and lowered to fit more stations in.
Most stations run at 96kilobits/sec. Some run as low as 64kbit/s. A handful run at 128kbit/s. Only one station, the classical and jazz station BBC Radio 3, runs at 192kbit/sec- and that's the highest bitrate of any DAB station.
Now although admittedly there is no hiss or crackle and you don't have to remember the frequencies, what you get at the end of the day, due to the low bitrates, is something which sounds worse than a good FM radio or broadband Internet, and several times worse than what you get get from a digital TV decoder (all the DAB stations are also broadcast as audio-only channels on the UK's existing digital satellite, cable and digital-TV-through-a-normal-aerial television systems).
So this USA system, whereby each normal FM station carries an additional digital sideband, quite literally sounds a much better idea- it should allow more space for each station's own digital output thereby giving more more bandwidth to each station and less competition to fit into a restricted space.
Sigh. Speaking as a Brit myself, this ain't gonna happen .
The police are always asking for daft things. The government tries to give them guns so they can do what every other policeman in the world does and shoot the perps, they refuse and ask for super dooper wizbang tech. Then the government gets a hammering from the public and the House of Lords, who tell the government that either the wizbang tech doesn't work or is ludicrously expensive or is easily hackable, or, more often, all three.
Repeat ad infinitum. Booor-ing. Thank goodness that the armed response units the police do have, have the decency to carry P90 and MP5 submachine guns instead of pathetic little sidearms like most foriegn forces.
I spent the last two years doing call-out tech support for companies in rural Cotswolds, UK and I've seen several satellite broadband installations.
Each and every time it has been slower than a modem, let alone ISDN.
The problem isn't bandwidth, it's latency. Satellite ping times are in excess of 1500ms - sometimes as much as 4000ms. That compares to modem pings of 200-300, ISDN 60-150 and ADSL 30-80.
If you intend to download a small number of very, very large files (eg. FTP) then satellite broadband is great.
For anything else - email, web browsing, online games - satellite broadband sucks. Take a web page with 20 images and say your browser downloads four images at a time. That's 5x1500ms = 7.5 seconds delay right there and that's with good latency - it can be double or even slower than that. It all adds up to a genuinely awful browsing experience.
ISDN is the dog's balls for rural broadband right now. It costs 25 quid a month plus another 25 quid for an unmetered 128kbps ISP and with an ISDN bandwidth-on-demand router you'll think you're always on- since ISDN connects calls within 2 seconds, none of this hanging around for a modem.
drinkypoo: You need a wireless interface for each user
Why? Why not one interface with multiple antennas? (I'm new to wi-fi and need to learn; I did used to design antennas for pirate radio stations though)
I don't get anti-GM. I just end up in sarcasm mode, nodding, yeah, like "naturally" bred farm animals and crops are so normal.
Because "natural" cows would "normally" need to produce 10-20 litres of milk every single day in the "wild", what with them having enormous litters of, erm, one or two calves every, erm, one year. Maybe, in the "wild", cows bathe their young in milk every day or something. Can't think of anything else they need that much milk for.
Or maybe, just maybe, COWS AREN'T NATURAL ANY MORE THAN POODLES OR MASSIVE FIELDS OF CORN OR ANY OTHER OF THE 99% OF FLORA AND FAUNA AROUND US WHICH HAS BEEN DELIBERATELY BRED FOR PURPOSE.
Selective breeding, genetic modification... it's just a question of historical perspective.
You can mod me down for ranting now. It's just that picture struck home- a real, live cow is no more "natural" than the photoshopped woman with four breasts in your picture!
markt4: The dirty little secret of television producers is that nobody really knows how many people actually watch the ads to start with.
Spot on. You've managed to capture what I have been floundering to say exactly.
That is the secret which funds commerical TV programming. You and I and everyone with a VCR knows that we don't watch adverts, but the advertisers sure as hell had better not figure it out, lest all programming funding go the way of the pear.
Giving direct downloads would really be rubbing this secret in the face of the advertisers, and the broadcasters unsurprisingly don't want to do that, so direct downloads ain't going to happen.
Heck, since I live in the UK, I always flick over to commerical-free BBC News 24 rolling news channel whenever ads come on, then flick back three minutes later. When I have the remote, we don't watch adverts. At all. Ever. But if the advertisers figured this out, we'd be screwed.
...
Regarding your other point, corporate political bias is something we wouldn't really consider in the UK. The BBC have pretty much a stranglehold over in-depth analytical news programming. All the other news programs are nothing more than redtop tabloid reporting ("15 killed" gets 30 sec announcement with static photo; whereas "JLo's bum" gets 5 mins full feature with live interview and excerpt from her latest video), with the exception of Channel Four News which doesn't accept sponsorship.
Programme sponsorship and product placement are very tightly regulated in the UK anyway. There have been a very few cases of this kind of corporate politial bias, but they've tended to get shot down pretty smartish by people complaining to the regulators. Us Brits may not be very good at complaining loudly at restaurants, but when it comes to writing snotty letters about "Fair Play" and "That's Not Cricket, Old Chap", we tend to do so in deluges. If you lot played rugby without padding, you'd soon get the hang of complaining about foul play.
AC: Do advertisers really demand a guarantee that viewers will be forced to watch their content Clockwork Orange-style?
No, but the broadcasters sure as hell aren't going to do anything which might stop the advertisers from continuing to labour under the misunderstanding that that is indeed exactly what happens.
I see your point, but there is an invisible line that the advertisers & broadcasters see that you are not.
If people record it on TiVo/VHS or copy it on Kazaa, that is their own effort and their own responsibility. The broadcaster does not assist in any way.
The advertiser pays the broadcaster to pump out their advertisments interspersed with programming that keeps viewers watching.
Now if the broadcaster makes that programming available without the adverts or in a format that makes it easy for the viewer to remove/ffwd over the adverts, what the bloody hell is the advertiser paying for?.
You and I know that it isn't much effort to record the programming and remove/ffwd the ads.
But the advertiser thinks that he is paying for vast numbers of eyeballs who stay glued to the screen at specific times of day.
And the broadcaster, who gets money from the advertiser, is going to do absolutely nothing to dissuade the advertiser from that point of view, no matter how barmy, just as long as it keeps the money coming in.
salesgeek: for a reasonable - considering it was free on the air price
But it wasn't free. You may not have paid for that particular episode, but it was definitely paid for by someone. By the advertisers, mostly.
Possibly the channel was also a basic subscription cable package (Sky One, Fox's sister channel which shows Futurama first in the UK, is available only as part of a basic subscription; I guess that Fox is much the same in the US).
Would you be happy if the DVD/MPG/AVI they sold you for a "reasonable" price was crippled with some crummy tech that made it difficult to block/ffwd through the ads or which required you to insert your set-top-box smartcard every time you wanted to view it? Even if you could put up with that, do you really think that your average Slashdotter wouldn't be screaming blue murder at yet another closed file format?
Get this clear: just because you are enjoying something for no additional cost, that does not mean that it doesn't require any funding whatsoever.
-tji: Mars orbiting spacecraft (Odyssey or Mars Global Surveyor) at a rate of 128,000 bits/sec
See, I told you flat-rate ISDN is always the best solution when you can't get broadband!:-)
He can't be female, but he can be non-caucasian
on
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· Score: 1
howabout the next doctor being a woman?
According to canon, Timelords can only regenerate into their same sex. This was demonstrated in the Romana regeneration scene (which also hinted that some Time Lords have virtually unlimited regenerations- maybe only females or aristocracy).
The "Doctor Who as female" thing was a charity comedy parody, it was not canon.
However, Time Lords can regenerate as different humanoid races (the scene shows Romana regenerating as various different creeds).
There was also an unofficial "afro-carribean Doctor Who" sketch done by black comedian Lenny Henry in his self-titled 1980's BBC comedy series. Official Doctor Who lore does allow for a non-caucasian Doctor Who.
There have also been several hints in the official series that the Doctor had already had previous regenerations before the William Hartnell incarnation that we presumed was number one. If so, this would mean either that the next official regeneration would be his penultimate or last, or that the Doctor, like the Master, is cheating death (this would explain why he ran away from his society).
New Doctor Who to be filmed in Wales, not England
on
Doctor Who Comeback
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· Score: 1
The new Dr Who series is to be filmed in Wales, instead of around the London area as per the old series.
Presumably this is because all the gravel pits in the south of England have been filled with
landfill refuse or been turned into windsurfing lakes for yuppie scum.
It was either filming in Welsh coal tips or:
Golfcourse of the Daleks
Yachtting with Cybermen
The Great Methane Gas Explosion of Galifrey
You appear to be making the mistake of assuming that the RIAA give a toss about the masses. From what I've seen, of the RIAA reports and my personal encounters with the UK's similar PRS, they don't give a shite.
The RIAA "care" for the masses like a farmer "cares" for battery hens.
Their point of view is that the masses are mindless scum who are stupid enough to pay over the odds for regurgitated populist crap. As far as the RIAA is concerned:
There is an important lesson within all this glib despondancy. We have to figure out a way to make them care. Pissing them off isn't going to work, they'll treat us like flies, minor annoyances to be swatted by heavy-handed action until the rest of the swarm learn to keep clear. What we need is something much bigger. We need to change the law to put the filesharers in the right. We need to a root and branch review of copyright. "Intellectual" property law needs to be rewritten from scratch.
Er, mate, Nokia have been making superb digital TV set-top-boxes for the European market for donkey's years. Mobile phones are the new market for them, they've been making STBs for longer than that.
Ask anyone about the UK's digital terrestrial system (multi-channel digital TV through an aerial- no subscription, no cable, no dish required) and everyone will tell you that Nokia is one of the top three brands- faster channel switching, faster menus, faster multimedia content, and it doesn't crash.
Crikey, are you sure? Have you checked again recently?
Here in the UK, where we usually complain about the high price of everything compared to the bargains in the USA, you can get all-inclusive 128K ISDN for less than 50 (US$75) per month. 25 quid a month for ISDN line rental (includes regular telephone line rental) and 25-35 quid for a reasonable inclusive-hours ISDN plan (I recommend SurfAnyTime who are a bit pricier than the others but have multiple redundant freephone numbers and the support is second to none).
Townies, governments and companies all seem to have forgotten about ISDN, to the point that it is very difficult to spread the word:
IF YOU LIVE OUTSIDE BROADBAND, ISDN IS PROBABLY AVAILABLE AND WILL DO MOST OF WHAT YOU WANT
Pseudo always-on: less than 2 seconds to connect
Low ping times, in the region of 40-80ms
Decent bandwidth, 128kbps is half the speed of entry-level broadband- more than sufficient for all but the most hardened downloaders.
Usually less than twice the cost of broadband
You can make telephone calls at the same time as connecting to the Internet (although the speed drops to 64k- you can use Windows/Linux or router built-in Bandwidth On Demand feature to control this).
Admittedly what I'm basically saying is that ISDN is half the speed for twice the cost, but- IT IS AVAILABLE VIRTUALLY EVERYWHERE, IT'S ALMOST AS GOOD AS BROADBAND, IT'S WAY BETTER THAN A MODEM AND IT WORKS.
ISDN will even do fancy stuff like remote ringback connections. I've got mine set up so that when I ring my 3rd number from my mobile phone (with ISDN you get 3 telephone numbers), it automatically dials up and updates its dynamic DNS so I can VNC/FTP in to my home machine from anywhere in the world.
You forgot the link to the Amnesty International report on the US for comparison
I didn't forget; I don't live in the US. Since the US has the death penalty and an armed police force, I don't think they're a good baseline when it comes to human rights.
Perhaps you meant the report for the UK - where I live - which does't have the death penalty nor torture and has less than half a dozen suspicious deaths in custody in the past decade, and where most of the human rights violations revolve around the imprisonment of freedom fighters rather than physical abuse of citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
Did the researchers actually check that the passwords worked, or were they tricked out of chocolate by some very wise, if lying, respondants?
That's quite insightful, because I've always imagined the UK only placed bunkers in cities because they had nowhere else to put them. With the US having so much more space, I'd have thought that bunkers would all be out-of-town.
Just goes to show I shouldn't go around making assumptions about other countries. I guess I'm just jealous of all that spare land... :-)
Other ISDN & voice calls such as 0845 and geographic numbers route using the digital voice network which is often carried on seperate routes.
So some Manchester users will get ADSL/0844/0809 but not geographic/0845, others will get the opposite, and many will get no service at all.
Also note that the newer BT Highway ISDN master sockets (those with a USB port) are "intelligent" and shut themselves down in the event of even a partial fault, whereas older non-USB BT Highway & Euro ISDN master sockets are "non-intelligent" and will continue to re-attempt a connection even if the line is partially faulty, often with great success. Sometimes brute force is better than intelligence, even with digital comms.
Major UK cities - certainly London and Manchester - have existed as proper brick-built towns since the Roman empire around two thousand years ago. That's a LOT of digging, building and rebuilding. Hence it is very difficult to put anything in a city without being noticed - you have to knock something down, or at least disconnect something, first. It's quite common for a builder to discover two thousand year old foundation stones when putting up a new house. So bumping into 50-year-old three-mile-long nuclear bunker isn't exactly going to take much detective work.
Also we have a lot of people in a very small space- our country has 60 million people in an island only 600 miles long. We don't have any unpopulated deserts, mountain ranges or ice shelves where you could go and build an Evil Lair and not be noticed. Anywhere you do anything in the UK, you are going to get spotted by the general public.
During World War 2 there was a massive campaign to make it the average citizen's "duty" to keep quiet about strange millitary goings-on. This carried through to the Cold War. Nowadays, though, the main targets aren't secret bases, they're office blocks and hotels, so this duty of secrecy has faded.
Being a small country, we've never had the room to build enormous Area 51 style secret bases. Guardian (Manchester), Anchor (Birmingham) and Kingsway (London) only have about three miles of tunnels each, and they're the largest in the UK - absolutely tiny in comparison to the ranch estates possible in the USA. So our old bunkers are too small to be useful today and too crammed-in to be extended.
They're of no practical use. That's why you hear about them- because you're allowed to, they're useless. Heck, Guardian doesn't even have exchange equipment inside it any more - only the fiber cabling. Guardian is basically used only as a handy tunnel to save digging up the road- it isn't "secret", it's more "convenient and otherwise worthless" (the problem is, of course, that it was so convenient that they put *most* of Manchester's fibre down there, including most of the backups).
Whereas the US bunkers are presumably big enough and extendable enough to still be in use. So Joe Public isn't going to be poking his nose in there any time soon.
But the advertisers already know which ones are "good" from the company's perspective. They're the ones where airing them is quickly followed by a rise in sales.
Everything else- such as opinions on their asethetic value- doesn't really matter to advertising companies.
Whether you "like" or "dislike" the commercial is irrelevant from the advertiser's point of view. The only thing that matters is: did it result in you buying (more of) the product/service?
I don't think so, but it is definitely illegal in the UK. Defacing an image of the monarch. One of those daft treason laws which we still having lying around but no-one enforces anymore.
(Most banknotes have metal strips in them, so I've no idea why anyone would find it surprising that they catch fire when microwaved.)
It's RealAudio, not Shoutcast, but hey, you can't have everything.
This kind of power gives you interesting abilities. For instance, on my friends mailing list we were joking around pinpointing the exact second at which ex-minister Clare Short realised quite what she'd done by exposing UK spying activity against the UN on the Radio 4 interview this morning.
Problem with free Satellite is although you get much more in terms of numbers of free channels, you don't get the main Freeview quality channels UK History, UK Bright Ideas and FTN free- these are subscription-only on satellite.
Plus, of course, you have to have a dish, which is very offputting to people like my OAP Daily Mail-reading parents, who couldn't take my ex-OnDigital freeview box off me fast enough, despite only being able to get 2 of the 4 multiplexes. ITV2, BBC News 24, BBC4 and BBC7 was enough to sell that idea to them- they've since gone on to buy another brand-new STB and a stupidly large widescreen integrated digital television.
Bastards. Spending my inheritance on widescreen digital TVs. That's MY job!
Instead of the sideband system mentioned in this Slashdot story, the UK DAB (Digtial Audio Broadcasting) system uses "multiplexes" of entire frequencies to broadcast several digital stations at once. So instead of each FM station carrying it's own digital data, there are an additional 5 digital-only FM multiplexes each carrying a variable number of channels.
And here's where our system starts to suck very badly IMHO.
Since there is only a limited number of multiplexes, each with a limited amount of bandwidth, there is competition to squeeze as many digital channels onto each multiplex as possible. The net result is that the bitrates for each station are lowered and lowered to fit more stations in.
Most stations run at 96kilobits/sec. Some run as low as 64kbit/s. A handful run at 128kbit/s. Only one station, the classical and jazz station BBC Radio 3, runs at 192kbit/sec- and that's the highest bitrate of any DAB station.
Now although admittedly there is no hiss or crackle and you don't have to remember the frequencies, what you get at the end of the day, due to the low bitrates, is something which sounds worse than a good FM radio or broadband Internet, and several times worse than what you get get from a digital TV decoder (all the DAB stations are also broadcast as audio-only channels on the UK's existing digital satellite, cable and digital-TV-through-a-normal-aerial television systems).
So this USA system, whereby each normal FM station carries an additional digital sideband, quite literally sounds a much better idea- it should allow more space for each station's own digital output thereby giving more more bandwidth to each station and less competition to fit into a restricted space.
The police are always asking for daft things. The government tries to give them guns so they can do what every other policeman in the world does and shoot the perps, they refuse and ask for super dooper wizbang tech. Then the government gets a hammering from the public and the House of Lords, who tell the government that either the wizbang tech doesn't work or is ludicrously expensive or is easily hackable, or, more often, all three.
Repeat ad infinitum. Booor-ing. Thank goodness that the armed response units the police do have, have the decency to carry P90 and MP5 submachine guns instead of pathetic little sidearms like most foriegn forces.
I spent the last two years doing call-out tech support for companies in rural Cotswolds, UK and I've seen several satellite broadband installations.
Each and every time it has been slower than a modem, let alone ISDN.
The problem isn't bandwidth, it's latency. Satellite ping times are in excess of 1500ms - sometimes as much as 4000ms. That compares to modem pings of 200-300, ISDN 60-150 and ADSL 30-80.
If you intend to download a small number of very, very large files (eg. FTP) then satellite broadband is great.
For anything else - email, web browsing, online games - satellite broadband sucks. Take a web page with 20 images and say your browser downloads four images at a time. That's 5x1500ms = 7.5 seconds delay right there and that's with good latency - it can be double or even slower than that. It all adds up to a genuinely awful browsing experience.
ISDN is the dog's balls for rural broadband right now. It costs 25 quid a month plus another 25 quid for an unmetered 128kbps ISP and with an ISDN bandwidth-on-demand router you'll think you're always on- since ISDN connects calls within 2 seconds, none of this hanging around for a modem.
We do? I apologise unreservedly. I'll try harder.
drinkypoo: You need a wireless interface for each user
Why? Why not one interface with multiple antennas? (I'm new to wi-fi and need to learn; I did used to design antennas for pirate radio stations though)
How about: "Intellectual is to Property as Marmalade is to Spanner" ?
I don't get anti-GM. I just end up in sarcasm mode, nodding, yeah, like "naturally" bred farm animals and crops are so normal.
Because "natural" cows would "normally" need to produce 10-20 litres of milk every single day in the "wild", what with them having enormous litters of, erm, one or two calves every, erm, one year. Maybe, in the "wild", cows bathe their young in milk every day or something. Can't think of anything else they need that much milk for.
Or maybe, just maybe, COWS AREN'T NATURAL ANY MORE THAN POODLES OR MASSIVE FIELDS OF CORN OR ANY OTHER OF THE 99% OF FLORA AND FAUNA AROUND US WHICH HAS BEEN DELIBERATELY BRED FOR PURPOSE.
Selective breeding, genetic modification... it's just a question of historical perspective.
You can mod me down for ranting now. It's just that picture struck home- a real, live cow is no more "natural" than the photoshopped woman with four breasts in your picture!
Spot on. You've managed to capture what I have been floundering to say exactly.
That is the secret which funds commerical TV programming. You and I and everyone with a VCR knows that we don't watch adverts, but the advertisers sure as hell had better not figure it out, lest all programming funding go the way of the pear.
Giving direct downloads would really be rubbing this secret in the face of the advertisers, and the broadcasters unsurprisingly don't want to do that, so direct downloads ain't going to happen.
Heck, since I live in the UK, I always flick over to commerical-free BBC News 24 rolling news channel whenever ads come on, then flick back three minutes later. When I have the remote, we don't watch adverts. At all. Ever. But if the advertisers figured this out, we'd be screwed.
Regarding your other point, corporate political bias is something we wouldn't really consider in the UK. The BBC have pretty much a stranglehold over in-depth analytical news programming. All the other news programs are nothing more than redtop tabloid reporting ("15 killed" gets 30 sec announcement with static photo; whereas "JLo's bum" gets 5 mins full feature with live interview and excerpt from her latest video), with the exception of Channel Four News which doesn't accept sponsorship.
Programme sponsorship and product placement are very tightly regulated in the UK anyway. There have been a very few cases of this kind of corporate politial bias, but they've tended to get shot down pretty smartish by people complaining to the regulators. Us Brits may not be very good at complaining loudly at restaurants, but when it comes to writing snotty letters about "Fair Play" and "That's Not Cricket, Old Chap", we tend to do so in deluges. If you lot played rugby without padding, you'd soon get the hang of complaining about foul play.
No, but the broadcasters sure as hell aren't going to do anything which might stop the advertisers from continuing to labour under the misunderstanding that that is indeed exactly what happens.
I see your point, but there is an invisible line that the advertisers & broadcasters see that you are not.
If people record it on TiVo/VHS or copy it on Kazaa, that is their own effort and their own responsibility. The broadcaster does not assist in any way.
The advertiser pays the broadcaster to pump out their advertisments interspersed with programming that keeps viewers watching.
Now if the broadcaster makes that programming available without the adverts or in a format that makes it easy for the viewer to remove/ffwd over the adverts, what the bloody hell is the advertiser paying for?.
You and I know that it isn't much effort to record the programming and remove/ffwd the ads.
But the advertiser thinks that he is paying for vast numbers of eyeballs who stay glued to the screen at specific times of day.
And the broadcaster, who gets money from the advertiser, is going to do absolutely nothing to dissuade the advertiser from that point of view, no matter how barmy, just as long as it keeps the money coming in.
But it wasn't free. You may not have paid for that particular episode, but it was definitely paid for by someone. By the advertisers, mostly.
Possibly the channel was also a basic subscription cable package (Sky One, Fox's sister channel which shows Futurama first in the UK, is available only as part of a basic subscription; I guess that Fox is much the same in the US).
Would you be happy if the DVD/MPG/AVI they sold you for a "reasonable" price was crippled with some crummy tech that made it difficult to block/ffwd through the ads or which required you to insert your set-top-box smartcard every time you wanted to view it? Even if you could put up with that, do you really think that your average Slashdotter wouldn't be screaming blue murder at yet another closed file format?
Get this clear: just because you are enjoying something for no additional cost, that does not mean that it doesn't require any funding whatsoever.
See, I told you flat-rate ISDN is always the best solution when you can't get broadband! :-)
According to canon, Timelords can only regenerate into their same sex. This was demonstrated in the Romana regeneration scene (which also hinted that some Time Lords have virtually unlimited regenerations- maybe only females or aristocracy).
The "Doctor Who as female" thing was a charity comedy parody, it was not canon.
However, Time Lords can regenerate as different humanoid races (the scene shows Romana regenerating as various different creeds).
There was also an unofficial "afro-carribean Doctor Who" sketch done by black comedian Lenny Henry in his self-titled 1980's BBC comedy series. Official Doctor Who lore does allow for a non-caucasian Doctor Who.
There have also been several hints in the official series that the Doctor had already had previous regenerations before the William Hartnell incarnation that we presumed was number one. If so, this would mean either that the next official regeneration would be his penultimate or last, or that the Doctor, like the Master, is cheating death (this would explain why he ran away from his society).
Presumably this is because all the gravel pits in the south of England have been filled with landfill refuse or been turned into windsurfing lakes for yuppie scum.
It was either filming in Welsh coal tips or:
Golfcourse of the Daleks
Yachtting with Cybermen
The Great Methane Gas Explosion of Galifrey
ps. air date is 2005
You appear to be making the mistake of assuming that the RIAA give a toss about the masses. From what I've seen, of the RIAA reports and my personal encounters with the UK's similar PRS, they don't give a shite.
The RIAA "care" for the masses like a farmer "cares" for battery hens.
Their point of view is that the masses are mindless scum who are stupid enough to pay over the odds for regurgitated populist crap. As far as the RIAA is concerned:
the masses exist to be exploited.
And to be fair, you can see how they might reach this conclusion.
There is an important lesson within all this glib despondancy. We have to figure out a way to make them care. Pissing them off isn't going to work, they'll treat us like flies, minor annoyances to be swatted by heavy-handed action until the rest of the swarm learn to keep clear. What we need is something much bigger. We need to change the law to put the filesharers in the right. We need to a root and branch review of copyright. "Intellectual" property law needs to be rewritten from scratch.
Er, mate, Nokia have been making superb digital TV set-top-boxes for the European market for donkey's years. Mobile phones are the new market for them, they've been making STBs for longer than that.
Ask anyone about the UK's digital terrestrial system (multi-channel digital TV through an aerial- no subscription, no cable, no dish required) and everyone will tell you that Nokia is one of the top three brands- faster channel switching, faster menus, faster multimedia content, and it doesn't crash.
Crikey, are you sure? Have you checked again recently?
Here in the UK, where we usually complain about the high price of everything compared to the bargains in the USA, you can get all-inclusive 128K ISDN for less than 50 (US$75) per month. 25 quid a month for ISDN line rental (includes regular telephone line rental) and 25-35 quid for a reasonable inclusive-hours ISDN plan (I recommend SurfAnyTime who are a bit pricier than the others but have multiple redundant freephone numbers and the support is second to none).
Townies, governments and companies all seem to have forgotten about ISDN, to the point that it is very difficult to spread the word:
IF YOU LIVE OUTSIDE BROADBAND, ISDN IS PROBABLY AVAILABLE AND WILL DO MOST OF WHAT YOU WANT
Pseudo always-on: less than 2 seconds to connect
Low ping times, in the region of 40-80ms
Decent bandwidth, 128kbps is half the speed of entry-level broadband- more than sufficient for all but the most hardened downloaders.
Usually less than twice the cost of broadband
You can make telephone calls at the same time as connecting to the Internet (although the speed drops to 64k- you can use Windows/Linux or router built-in Bandwidth On Demand feature to control this).
Admittedly what I'm basically saying is that ISDN is half the speed for twice the cost, but- IT IS AVAILABLE VIRTUALLY EVERYWHERE, IT'S ALMOST AS GOOD AS BROADBAND, IT'S WAY BETTER THAN A MODEM AND IT WORKS.
ISDN will even do fancy stuff like remote ringback connections. I've got mine set up so that when I ring my 3rd number from my mobile phone (with ISDN you get 3 telephone numbers), it automatically dials up and updates its dynamic DNS so I can VNC/FTP in to my home machine from anywhere in the world.
I didn't forget; I don't live in the US. Since the US has the death penalty and an armed police force, I don't think they're a good baseline when it comes to human rights.
Perhaps you meant the report for the UK - where I live - which does't have the death penalty nor torture and has less than half a dozen suspicious deaths in custody in the past decade, and where most of the human rights violations revolve around the imprisonment of freedom fighters rather than physical abuse of citizens.