In other other news, Goths sue over confusion with 90's Liverpudlian jingly-guitar dancefloor doom merchants who frequently tickled the top end of the indie & dance charts.
O2 aren't owned by British Telecom anymore, but for the record, I tried www.thepiratebay.org from O2 using 3G and it worked just fine.
British Telecom used to own Cellnet, which became O2, which was demerged in 2001 into an independent company which later got bought by the Spanish telco Telefonica.
(Still with me?)
British Telecom later set up their own in-house mobile service "BT Mobile" which piggybacks on their previous competitor, Vodafone.
commodore64_love: novel... it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
No, it can't. It can go into the public domain before you're dead (ie. you can grant it into the public domain), but it you don't do that before you die, then after you're dead the copyright remains with your estate for 70 years.
Unless you're considering "after I'm dead" to also mean "after I, my children and my grandchildren are dead"; technically true but I doubt that was what you had in mind (if so, your will needs to be very specific about your funeral arrangements; you'd be quite icky if you specified "bury me after I'm dead" and they postponed the action for 70 years).
Ironically, the problem I've had with steady 3G (and indeed steady GPRS) on commuter trains passing through rural areas, is that the trains move so fast the towers can't handover quickly enough. At 125mph and a tower every miles or so, you need to hand over two or three times a minute.
The obvious cheap solution is to slow down the trains.
The obvious second-most-cheap solution is to put WiFi APs on the trains themselves, and feed wired broadband off the trains' electrified overhead power lines. Cut out the need for 3G entirely, it's the wrong technology for broadband-to-trains.
I can't remember whether the Evesham-Oxford and Cheltenham-Swindon lines are electrified, though. Since Evesham-Oxford is single track, I doubt it...
Not wishing to promote O2 (who have shite customer service and whose iPhone lock-in deal is dreadful), but I pay 8 quid a month for unlimited 3G data. My phone downloads several hundred megs of podcasts a day, and O2 have never complained.
8 quid a month for, basically, as much web browsing as you can eat, is pretty fair.
It'll all fall down when people want to consume video and download several gigs of games, but as I've already said in the parent post, 3G is full of latency-fail for those applications anyway.
3G as an alternative to domestic fixed broadband in remote areas doesn't have to support many people. You're forgetting that the UK is a densely populated area. I live in what is considered a rural area - the Cotswolds (postcards of thatched cottages etc) - and I can get 2.5Mbit/s ADSL.
The areas we're talking about are really, really remote like the Scottish highlands and the deepest parts of English and Welsh moorland.
You're talking about two or three households per tower, plus three hikers sending cameraphone pics, two businessmen on an expenses-paid grouse shoot checking their email and a bloke on a tractor arguing with his boss. It'll cope fine.
My problem with the proposal is the conflation of 3G with broadband. 3G is not remotely equivalent to broadband, and I speak as someone who uses 3.5G regularly on my netbook in a high-signal urban area (Cheltenham). 3G has massively high ping times, it's unusable for anything other than browsing static web pages, FTP and SSH/Telnet sessions. Attempting to run video, gaming, VOIP or J2ME content over 3G is utter, utter pants.
The answer lies in the snappily titled "Memorandum of Understanding (PDF) Between Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) concerning Section 46 Sexual Offences Act 2003".
In short, anyone who is listed in advance by their employer, as an employee who performs IT security duties which may lead them to come into contact with child abuse images as part of their job, will not be prosecuted providing their contact with the images is kept to the minimum required to perform their duties.
For example, responding to a user who has received an unsolicited child abuse image and:
* Helping them delete it, or disconnecting their PC for subsequent investigation by the police is good, whereas
* Making a copy to use in their own investigation is bad (investigation of child abuse must be left to the police).
Obviously if you're in the UK, and you're in IT security, and you're likely to need to perform these kinds of duties, it is very important that you ensure your employer already has you listed as being so.
The consequence is that, since most employers don't want to have PCs sitting around switched off waiting for the police to investigate them, the vast majority of child abuse image evidence is deleted on sight (literally).
There are dozens of cities several times bigger than 350,000 people whose councils/mayors/local government already run primarily on Linux. Slashdot's been reporting them for, like, 15 years, and no major shift from Bug Number One has occurred.
Yup, which is exactly what community software should be doing. It makes no commercial sense to localise software for a country's language which has less speakers than the population of Cincinnati. Even, I suspect, if you are from that actual country.
Quite what Iceland thought it was doing when it declared independence from Denmark, I have no idea (well, other than sticking two fingers up at the Nazi occupation of the Danish mainland, which I'd concede was a worthwhile gesture, if only symbolic; they should have returned to Danish rule once WWII was over). It wasn't like Denmark was some massive imperial bad guy. If you look at all the successful small countries, from British imperial islands in the sun, to rich European micro-states like Luxembourg, they all ally themselves with a larger grouping, be it the British Commonwealth or the Benelux parliament or whatever. Iceland isn't even a member of the EU! Then they go bust and it's all "oooh, can we join the EU naw plz?" and "oooh, Microsoft R being nasty 2 uz". FFS.
The problem with your analogy is that there are no farms in Iceland, it's a small volcanic artic desert with a population of less than 350,000 and the whole country has gone bust.
Everyone's assuming Microsoft is proactively deciding to pursue a particular course of action.
Frankly, I think quite the opposite. I think that the whole of Iceland accounts for less than a single pixel on Microsoft's accounting graph, and that Iceland is so small that Microsoft haven't noticed yet.
We're in a situation where a country's monopolistic software provider is several orders of magnitude larger than the country itself.
The population of Iceland is less than 350,000, barely as big as a medium-sized town. It's less than a single pixel on Microsoft's profit graph. I bet that not only do they not care about Icelandic MCPs going bust, but they don't care if the whole country - all 350,000 of them - does or does not use Microsoft software.
My problem is similar, except that we had a seemingly endless supply of field mice. They're supposed to be an endangered species, but in the Cotswolds, UK, they're as common as rats.
We have a garden shed which contains a repeater for our public WiFi hotspot .
It also contains bedding for our chickens, and used to contain feed for the chickens and pets.
The mice population exploded, they were eating the cables and using the sheathing as bedding. We had an antique/old-junk chest [1] in the shed, they climbed up inside it and had families in the drawers.
I bought some plastic barrels to keep the chicken feed in, and moved the barrels down to the orchard where the apple fall meant plenty of easier food alternatives anyway.
That solved the mice problem - they just moved out. Mice don't appear to be persistent or fixated on anything, they just follow the food (or, more accurately, don't bother going anywhere there isn't any food).
Rats, on the other hand, are a total pain. They've discovered the bedding and are a nightmare. They're also of sufficient size and speed that it is of no consequence to them to bed down in the cosy shed, and then run back and forth to the orchard when they need a snack.
My solution with the rats was, initially, poison, which worked well but good rat poison is very expensive.
Eventually I just shot them with my pellet pistol. They don't breed as fast as the mice, they're big enough for me to get an accurate shot at, and provided I use the correct pellets (I recommend either Crossman PowerPell or Crossman VerminPell), they're disabled in one shot. I then walk over with an iron bar and dispatch them with a blow to the back of the head. My.177 CO2 gun doesn't have enough oomph nor a large enough caliber to kill with one shot and I'm certainly not going through the hassle of getting a firearms licence in the UK. I could get a.22 air rifle, but I'm not a great shot with rifles, I grew up with pistols.
The wife did try humane traps for a while, but even dumping them a mile away didn't seem to thin the numbers. Rats can travel far and never seem to forget where they want to go.
And I absolutely do not steal the 50-volt DC from British Telecom to run lighting during lengthy power cuts. No sir-ee! The fact that British phone boxes have lights running all day and night yet have no connection to the mains power grid never crossed my mind!
When on earth is it illegal for the British government to spy on us?
(Assuming us = British citizens located in the UK:)
* When you are a British government agency engaged in national security work whose terms of service expressly forbids spying on British Citizens located in the UK (IIRC this includes the SIS/MI6)
* When you are doing so ostensibly under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act but are failing to observe those regulations.
* When you are not covered by RIPA nor national security regulations, and are failing in your responsibilities under the Data Protection Act.
I don't actually have a problem with people monitoring me, so long as I have a right to check all records about me and correct any incorrect ones. That's pretty much what the Data Protection Act says. If it's an issue of national security, then, well duh, all governments are in the same boat and the UK is no different.
The loophole, if there is one, is the rather stupidly wide-ranging Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allows you to be monitored without your knowledge or right of reply if they suspect you of a variety of minor crimes such as dumping an old tyre in a hedge. The problem there is that these investigations are so common, that they are done by poorly trained local council staff who frequently mistake identities, and you have no right to become aware of the problem, nor correct it. Indeed, under most situations it is illegal to inform someone that they are being monitored under RIPA.
The root problem, therefore, is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which needs to be significantly re-written.
Mind you, it's easy for us Europeans to forget quite how large America is. Whilst almost all of even our most rural areas are covered by GPRS at minimum, there are vast, vast swathes of the US that are not.
If you then consider how large Africa is you begin to see the problem of bringing t'interweb to the third world.
As for me, well, my little cottage next to a farm in the Cotswolds UK has ADSL plus my public WiFi hotspot; I drive from there to a suburban village five miles away, the entire journey covered by GPRS; I then take the bus into Cheltenham and that route is bathed in 3G/UTMS. So I can use the internet for the whole journey, from rural backwater to chic urban town, using just a 3G mobile phone, bluetooth and Asus Eee 901.
Mind you, GPRS & 3G... never mind the bandwidth, feel the latency.
Still, I fail to see what's so special about offline email. That's just POP3, or old-fashioned SMTP server-as-a-client, which has been happening for nigh on twenty years.
It's the North Sea, off England and Scotland. Want potable water, instantly, any time of the year? Open your mouth and tilt your head skywards. Problem solved.
The North Sea has severe rainstorms than anywhere else on Earth. It rains and howls a gale almost constantly.
Far more likely, is the problem of too much fresh rainwater causing the roof, of whatever you're trying to shelter under, to collapse. A good drainage system and rainwater butt is more likely to be an engineering necessity than an environmental nice-to-have in any North Sea dwelling. You'll notice from historical pictures of Sealand/Havenco that their single-storey shack has steel girders for roof joists. Nobody hauls steel girders twelve miles offshore purely for decoration, matey.
The English Channel would be comparatively welcoming compared to the North Sea, which is where they're actually located.
The English Channel runs along the south of England, north of France, and is home to the world's busiest shipping lane. Whereas the North Sea runs between England/Scotland and Scandinavia, and is possibly the most inhospitable non-frozen non-desert area on Earth.
On the plus side, access to drinking water is easy. Open your mouth and tilt your head skywards, you should get a mouthful of fresh rainwater in seconds, pretty much any time of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
In other other news, Goths sue over confusion with 90's Liverpudlian jingly-guitar dancefloor doom merchants who frequently tickled the top end of the indie & dance charts.
http://www.myspace.com/undertherosettastone
Civilised behaviour is not required to "win" at evolution.
We just had to kill more of them and make babies faster than they did.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2682654/idiocracy_opening_sequence/
they'll never get any ad revenue from me - I shop online from sites that earn my business.
How do I shop online from my local newspaper's website?
O2 aren't owned by British Telecom anymore, but for the record, I tried www.thepiratebay.org from O2 using 3G and it worked just fine.
British Telecom used to own Cellnet, which became O2, which was demerged in 2001 into an independent company which later got bought by the Spanish telco Telefonica.
(Still with me?)
British Telecom later set up their own in-house mobile service "BT Mobile" which piggybacks on their previous competitor, Vodafone.
commodore64_love: novel ... it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
No, it can't. It can go into the public domain before you're dead (ie. you can grant it into the public domain), but it you don't do that before you die, then after you're dead the copyright remains with your estate for 70 years.
Unless you're considering "after I'm dead" to also mean "after I, my children and my grandchildren are dead"; technically true but I doubt that was what you had in mind (if so, your will needs to be very specific about your funeral arrangements; you'd be quite icky if you specified "bury me after I'm dead" and they postponed the action for 70 years).
Ironically, the problem I've had with steady 3G (and indeed steady GPRS) on commuter trains passing through rural areas, is that the trains move so fast the towers can't handover quickly enough. At 125mph and a tower every miles or so, you need to hand over two or three times a minute.
The obvious cheap solution is to slow down the trains.
The obvious second-most-cheap solution is to put WiFi APs on the trains themselves, and feed wired broadband off the trains' electrified overhead power lines. Cut out the need for 3G entirely, it's the wrong technology for broadband-to-trains.
I can't remember whether the Evesham-Oxford and Cheltenham-Swindon lines are electrified, though. Since Evesham-Oxford is single track, I doubt it...
Not wishing to promote O2 (who have shite customer service and whose iPhone lock-in deal is dreadful), but I pay 8 quid a month for unlimited 3G data. My phone downloads several hundred megs of podcasts a day, and O2 have never complained.
8 quid a month for, basically, as much web browsing as you can eat, is pretty fair.
It'll all fall down when people want to consume video and download several gigs of games, but as I've already said in the parent post, 3G is full of latency-fail for those applications anyway.
3G as an alternative to domestic fixed broadband in remote areas doesn't have to support many people. You're forgetting that the UK is a densely populated area. I live in what is considered a rural area - the Cotswolds (postcards of thatched cottages etc) - and I can get 2.5Mbit/s ADSL.
The areas we're talking about are really, really remote like the Scottish highlands and the deepest parts of English and Welsh moorland.
You're talking about two or three households per tower, plus three hikers sending cameraphone pics, two businessmen on an expenses-paid grouse shoot checking their email and a bloke on a tractor arguing with his boss. It'll cope fine.
My problem with the proposal is the conflation of 3G with broadband. 3G is not remotely equivalent to broadband, and I speak as someone who uses 3.5G regularly on my netbook in a high-signal urban area (Cheltenham). 3G has massively high ping times, it's unusable for anything other than browsing static web pages, FTP and SSH/Telnet sessions. Attempting to run video, gaming, VOIP or J2ME content over 3G is utter, utter pants.
Never mind the bandwidth, feel the latency.
You're right, y'know. I've been married twice and the second one is up the duff with twins!
The answer lies in the snappily titled "Memorandum of Understanding (PDF) Between Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) concerning Section 46 Sexual Offences Act 2003".
In short, anyone who is listed in advance by their employer, as an employee who performs IT security duties which may lead them to come into contact with child abuse images as part of their job, will not be prosecuted providing their contact with the images is kept to the minimum required to perform their duties.
For example, responding to a user who has received an unsolicited child abuse image and:
* Helping them delete it, or disconnecting their PC for subsequent investigation by the police is good, whereas
* Making a copy to use in their own investigation is bad (investigation of child abuse must be left to the police).
Obviously if you're in the UK, and you're in IT security, and you're likely to need to perform these kinds of duties, it is very important that you ensure your employer already has you listed as being so.
The consequence is that, since most employers don't want to have PCs sitting around switched off waiting for the police to investigate them, the vast majority of child abuse image evidence is deleted on sight (literally).
There are dozens of cities several times bigger than 350,000 people whose councils/mayors/local government already run primarily on Linux. Slashdot's been reporting them for, like, 15 years, and no major shift from Bug Number One has occurred.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/14/2356254
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/05/2231246
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/04/1233241
Yup, which is exactly what community software should be doing. It makes no commercial sense to localise software for a country's language which has less speakers than the population of Cincinnati. Even, I suspect, if you are from that actual country.
Quite what Iceland thought it was doing when it declared independence from Denmark, I have no idea (well, other than sticking two fingers up at the Nazi occupation of the Danish mainland, which I'd concede was a worthwhile gesture, if only symbolic; they should have returned to Danish rule once WWII was over). It wasn't like Denmark was some massive imperial bad guy. If you look at all the successful small countries, from British imperial islands in the sun, to rich European micro-states like Luxembourg, they all ally themselves with a larger grouping, be it the British Commonwealth or the Benelux parliament or whatever. Iceland isn't even a member of the EU! Then they go bust and it's all "oooh, can we join the EU naw plz?" and "oooh, Microsoft R being nasty 2 uz". FFS.
The problem with your analogy is that there are no farms in Iceland, it's a small volcanic artic desert with a population of less than 350,000 and the whole country has gone bust.
Everyone's assuming Microsoft is proactively deciding to pursue a particular course of action.
Frankly, I think quite the opposite. I think that the whole of Iceland accounts for less than a single pixel on Microsoft's accounting graph, and that Iceland is so small that Microsoft haven't noticed yet.
We're in a situation where a country's monopolistic software provider is several orders of magnitude larger than the country itself.
The population of Iceland is less than 350,000, barely as big as a medium-sized town. It's less than a single pixel on Microsoft's profit graph. I bet that not only do they not care about Icelandic MCPs going bust, but they don't care if the whole country - all 350,000 of them - does or does not use Microsoft software.
My problem is similar, except that we had a seemingly endless supply of field mice. They're supposed to be an endangered species, but in the Cotswolds, UK, they're as common as rats.
We have a garden shed which contains a repeater for our public WiFi hotspot .
It also contains bedding for our chickens, and used to contain feed for the chickens and pets.
The mice population exploded, they were eating the cables and using the sheathing as bedding. We had an antique/old-junk chest [1] in the shed, they climbed up inside it and had families in the drawers.
I bought some plastic barrels to keep the chicken feed in, and moved the barrels down to the orchard where the apple fall meant plenty of easier food alternatives anyway.
That solved the mice problem - they just moved out. Mice don't appear to be persistent or fixated on anything, they just follow the food (or, more accurately, don't bother going anywhere there isn't any food).
Rats, on the other hand, are a total pain. They've discovered the bedding and are a nightmare. They're also of sufficient size and speed that it is of no consequence to them to bed down in the cosy shed, and then run back and forth to the orchard when they need a snack.
My solution with the rats was, initially, poison, which worked well but good rat poison is very expensive.
Eventually I just shot them with my pellet pistol. They don't breed as fast as the mice, they're big enough for me to get an accurate shot at, and provided I use the correct pellets (I recommend either Crossman PowerPell or Crossman VerminPell), they're disabled in one shot. I then walk over with an iron bar and dispatch them with a blow to the back of the head. My .177 CO2 gun doesn't have enough oomph nor a large enough caliber to kill with one shot and I'm certainly not going through the hassle of getting a firearms licence in the UK. I could get a .22 air rifle, but I'm not a great shot with rifles, I grew up with pistols.
The wife did try humane traps for a while, but even dumping them a mile away didn't seem to thin the numbers. Rats can travel far and never seem to forget where they want to go.
And I absolutely do not steal the 50-volt DC from British Telecom to run lighting during lengthy power cuts. No sir-ee! The fact that British phone boxes have lights running all day and night yet have no connection to the mains power grid never crossed my mind!
When on earth is it illegal for the British government to spy on us?
(Assuming us = British citizens located in the UK:)
* When you are a British government agency engaged in national security work whose terms of service expressly forbids spying on British Citizens located in the UK (IIRC this includes the SIS/MI6)
* When you are doing so ostensibly under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act but are failing to observe those regulations.
* When you are not covered by RIPA nor national security regulations, and are failing in your responsibilities under the Data Protection Act.
I don't actually have a problem with people monitoring me, so long as I have a right to check all records about me and correct any incorrect ones. That's pretty much what the Data Protection Act says. If it's an issue of national security, then, well duh, all governments are in the same boat and the UK is no different.
The loophole, if there is one, is the rather stupidly wide-ranging Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which allows you to be monitored without your knowledge or right of reply if they suspect you of a variety of minor crimes such as dumping an old tyre in a hedge. The problem there is that these investigations are so common, that they are done by poorly trained local council staff who frequently mistake identities, and you have no right to become aware of the problem, nor correct it. Indeed, under most situations it is illegal to inform someone that they are being monitored under RIPA.
The root problem, therefore, is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which needs to be significantly re-written.
...and some of us are so old that we're back in diapers and need to change them ourselves.
(Reassuringly, Firefox's En-GB spellchecker barfed at "diapers", but sadly didn't suggest "nappies". Jolly good show.)
Or 3G/UTMS/GPRS?
Mind you, it's easy for us Europeans to forget quite how large America is. Whilst almost all of even our most rural areas are covered by GPRS at minimum, there are vast, vast swathes of the US that are not.
If you then consider how large Africa is you begin to see the problem of bringing t'interweb to the third world.
As for me, well, my little cottage next to a farm in the Cotswolds UK has ADSL plus my public WiFi hotspot; I drive from there to a suburban village five miles away, the entire journey covered by GPRS; I then take the bus into Cheltenham and that route is bathed in 3G/UTMS. So I can use the internet for the whole journey, from rural backwater to chic urban town, using just a 3G mobile phone, bluetooth and Asus Eee 901.
Mind you, GPRS & 3G... never mind the bandwidth, feel the latency.
Still, I fail to see what's so special about offline email. That's just POP3, or old-fashioned SMTP server-as-a-client, which has been happening for nigh on twenty years.
Should have paid attention last time around.
Those are subsets of the three supersets.
politicians will completely and utterly ignore petitions and street marches
Yes. We have an alternative system called voting. I recommend that you use it.
Central Park is a planned, man-made structure. It is no more natural than the skyscrapers that surround it.
There are only three types of natural areas; deserts (including frozen deserts), forests and savannah/heath. Everything else is artificial.
no potable water
It's the North Sea, off England and Scotland. Want potable water, instantly, any time of the year? Open your mouth and tilt your head skywards. Problem solved.
The North Sea has severe rainstorms than anywhere else on Earth. It rains and howls a gale almost constantly.
Far more likely, is the problem of too much fresh rainwater causing the roof, of whatever you're trying to shelter under, to collapse. A good drainage system and rainwater butt is more likely to be an engineering necessity than an environmental nice-to-have in any North Sea dwelling. You'll notice from historical pictures of Sealand/Havenco that their single-storey shack has steel girders for roof joists. Nobody hauls steel girders twelve miles offshore purely for decoration, matey.
The English Channel would be comparatively welcoming compared to the North Sea, which is where they're actually located.
The English Channel runs along the south of England, north of France, and is home to the world's busiest shipping lane. Whereas the North Sea runs between England/Scotland and Scandinavia, and is possibly the most inhospitable non-frozen non-desert area on Earth.
On the plus side, access to drinking water is easy. Open your mouth and tilt your head skywards, you should get a mouthful of fresh rainwater in seconds, pretty much any time of the year.