Slower traffic should keep right Just to clarify; it is legal for slower traffic to drive on both the inside lane and the outside lane in your country? If so, which country are we talking about (USA?).
I can't quite understand how this system could work. Are you saying that different lanes can go at whatever speed they want? How do you know which side to overtake on? In the UK, we drive on the left, so we always overtake on the right (heck, you don't legally need a mirror on the left side of your vehicle, since theoretically you should never need to use it - although most modern cars do). Presumably you drive on the right, so always overtake on the left, correct? The only exception to this rule is on feeder lanes, such as leading up to a motorway junction (UKUS: "off ramp").
I'm getting very confused by this thread. Here it is illegal to drive slow in the fast lane (remember, we drive on the left so naming the lanes left/right won't help international comparisons). It's also illegal to drive too close to other vehicles. This is all illegal under "driving without due care and attention".
Furthermore all UK insurance companies also assume the car behind, in any accident, is responsible for the accident unless proven otherwise.
It is, however, perfectly legal to slam on your brakes and kill someone if they drive too close behind you, and then claim on the deceased's insurance. Unsurprisingly, this rarely happens; presumably the effects of natural selection rather than us being particularly law-abiding drivers (we speed, a LOT; 85mph on a motorway [interstate] is considered pretty average).
So if the person in front of me hits their brakes, and there's no reason I can see for them to do so, I don't touch mine You might wish to avoid visiting the UK. Here any vehicle that crashes into the back of another, is automatically assumed to be responsible for the accident unless proved otherwise. It's not a legal thing, but it is standard practice in the insurance industry.
Furthermore, the highway code requires that all vehicles keep a safe breaking distance from all others, and also the police will pull over anyone with suspected faulty brake lights.
I'd be very surprised if all of this wasn't also standard practice in your country too.
The following bad things invariably happen when you spam:
1. Your ISP will disconnect your internet connection.
2. Your hosting provider will close your website.
3. If you were stupid enough to use a real sender address, your email address will swiftly be overloaded with blowback, followed by your service provider terminating your email address.
Morals don't come in to it. Spam chews bandwidth and sysop hours, and threatens connectivity of the network due not merely to bandwidth, but also to other networks deciding they no longer want to talk to your service provider (blacklisting). Those three things alone will have your service disconnected long before you've reached any moral conclusion.
To spam effectively, you need to not care about losing your internet connection.
Whereas in the real world UK, I have to get an electrical contractor to fill in form BS 7671:2008 after I have simply replaced a smashed light switch.
The fact that I live out in the sticks and that I cannot find a qualified electrician who will drive out to do such a small job, seems not to bother either the department of information retrieval - erm, I mean the local council planning department, nor my house insurers.
FFS. Replacing a light switch is no more difficult than wiring a plug. If you're dumb enough to cock that up, you probably have someone who looks after you anyway.
Today, I am the Harry Tuttle of electrical wiring.
What I could do with are some really nice ducts to hide my anarcho-lightswitch, before Bob Hoskins and his long-capped friends mark me as a terrorist.
Done. I bought a Daihatsu Terios in 1999 and it still works fine today. 1.3 litre engine, weighs under a tonne, 40 MPG. 165,000 miles driven so far and no hassle. Permanent 4x4 system, you just point the steering wheel at a muddy field and it clambers over it - it won't climb Everest but it has taken me through floods here in the Tewkesbury area with no problems.
Rail passengers from the county of Yorkshire, England attacked rail passengers from London, England. These were British citizens attacking British citizens. Asking for ID wouldn't have made any difference.
I can see where the GP is coming from. You can't ban Yorkshiremen from trains, they're not terrorists until they actually enact their plan. Even if you did ban all Yorkshiremen from trains, there are an infinite number of other ways for Yorkshiremen to attack Londoners, or for people from other English counties to attack Londoners. All you'd achieve is the annoyance of all Yorkshiremen, the vast majority of whom aren't planning to injure Londoners.
They probably booked their railway tickets using a debit or credit card anyway, which is just as secure (or not) as an ID card.
It isn't a winnable scenario. The solution is to negotiate a satisfactory draw. This worked well in Northern Ireland.
Also for those who are unclear on the definition of "UK", note that it is not the USA. Ergo any comparison with USian freedoms is stark raving bonkers. We don't have freedom of speech or freedom of assembly here, they have never been enshrined as rights (freedom of the press, though, is enforced by the Press Complaints Authority with arms-length backing from Her Majesty's Government).
For example, it is illegal to wear a t-shirt with a politican slogan in the street outside Parliament.
I've got a 486dx2-100 laptop (20MB RAM, 400MB HD, dual scan colour, floppy only, no CD/DVD, PCIMCA Cat5 card) which just about runs Damn Small Linux (via Poor Man's Install floppy and copying the rest of the install off the network).
I'd like to let my two-year-old daughter play with it, but she doesn't yet have the co-ordination to use Tux Paint.
Are there any low-resource simple games for toddlers?
Ideally I'd like something which displays a particular picture and plays a sound when she presses a key; for example, "a" might show a picture of an apple and the sound of someone saying "Apple".
From my point of view as a Brit, CCTV isn't invasive at all. I just ignore it, just like the criminals do.
There are so many cameras that only a tiny, tiny few could possibly ever be watched by anyone.
The only cameras that matter are the motoring cameras. I doubt speed cameras prevent accidents, but they certainly make me check my speed when driving through those particular areas. Were I to live in London, I'd probably care about the Congestion Zone cameras too, which enforce payment of the toll to drive into the city centre. Other than that... who cares?
I'm unlikely to ever want to do something illegal in view of a camera, but if I did, I could just wear a cheap disposable hooded sweatshirt, just like most teenagers do. CCTV must go down in history as the first security measure to prompt a fashion craze - the hoodie.
The point of CCTV is that it absorbs the excess money politicians and "concerned citizens" want to throw away trying to make themselves feel safe in areas that are already safe. If they didn't spend it on CCTV they'd spend it on something far more invasive, like vigilante-esque security guards. Personally I find CCTV to be far less invasive than a hobby-bobby on every street corner poking his nose into my business. If we actually paid for real people to prevent crime, imagine how inconvenient that would be for us law-abiding folk, constantly being stopped and asked where we were going or whatnot! Far better to spend it on technology that can be safely ignored by the sensible majority who are not fooled by the culture of fear and security theatre, whilst providing a living wage for the families of legions of factory workers, installation engineers and callcentre staff to manufacture, maintain and support them.
CCTV is wonderful. The bigots get something concrete they can point at to stop their misguided fearful moaning, and the rest of us can safely ignore it. Everybody wins!
A death certificate from the next of kin opens many doors.
Correct answer. ISPs will serve up almost anything when presented with correct, verifiable death certificate and a letter from the correct, verifiable next of kin stating that person X is authorised to take over the deceased's logins.
It is, sadly, a very slow process.
I was in the unfortunate situation of having to re-establish control over a number of friends and family's domains when their registrant, a friend of mine from uni, died quite expectedly (had a massive birth defect, estimated TTL 2 years, actual TTL 35 years).
The sad thing is that I am still very annoyed with my dead friend for not making better arrangements, given his condition. Which is definitely not how I want to remember him.
My own will now gives instructions on how to recover my domain registry username/password.
Imagine if bricklayers had to be paid by every person who visited a house they built several years ago.
That would be almost impossible to police.
But it is even more difficult to keep track of people who listen to music or watch video. That's even more difficult to police.
Instead, bricklayers get paid for making new buildings, and not for buildings they've already finished. Equally, artists should get paid for making new art, not art they've already finished.
What would you do, just start giving away that which you make your living on?
Yes, that is exactly what I would do - it is exactly what I do now.
I get paid for writing bespoke software. The programs are customised to my employer's requirements. Anyone can have a copy of the software, because that isn't where the value is. The value is that I configured it just for them; I changed bits or wrote entirely new bits that fit them exactly. I wrote a new module to work with their esoteric payments system. I changed the software so the interface was accessible to their staff in another country.
Equally, with a music album, the value isn't in something that was written last week or fifty years ago. The value is in the tour ticket, the t-shirt and pre-ordering the next release. If the fans want a new album, they should have to group together and put enough money in the pot to make it worthwhile for the artist. When the artist releases the album, he gets paid that pot of money and no more. That way, the artist is encouraged to make new work, rather than be lazy and live off something he did in the 1960s. Meanwhile the fans maybe get an exclusive packaged CD, whilst everyone else in the world can take a free copy.
I never really thought about access for public footpaths, until I tried taking a pushchair over a stile and onto wet mud and loose gravel. The next plan - carry the baby - failed miserably within weeks, since my wife made the somewhat inconvenient mistake of feeding the baby. Neither myself nor the missus are what you might call slight, so our baby grew quite heavy before she could reliably walk.
Furthermore, trying to walk from A to B with a toddler provides an experience similar to trying to walk from A to B with a herd of cats. It may be a perfectly run-of-the-mill walk for you, but for Annabel, it is a new experience every metre of the way. Look, a blade of grass! Look, another blade of grass that is slightly different from the first! Look, a dandelion!
A month ago, we actually managed to get about half a mile from the car. It hailed. Annabel had never seen hailstones, except, apparently, in her nightmares. She screamed a lot.
Now the only walking I get is around shopping centres.
By the time she's old enough to go for long walks, I'll have died from lack of fresh air and exercise.
I quite agree. I deliberately run my own open public wifi hotspot, and I encourage others to do so too. I'm grateful to all the people out there who are as public-spirited and community-minded as myself.
What would be ideal, would be an industry standard that WiFi routers ship as open by default, throttled by default (say, no single user can gobble more than 75% of the broadband bandwidth), firewalled by default (say, only ports 53, 80 and 443 open outbound, no inbound unestablished connections), and optional encrypted VPN by default. Since most wireless APs are embedded Linux, that would be relatively easy to implement - and the VPN would be compatible with all the major OSes.
The problem is that the IT industry, like many industries, expects to find a pool of skilled and experienced available staff, at the drop of a hat, without the company putting in any effort themselves.
The solution is apprenticeships - a variant on "I wouldn't start from here", I admit, but the only workable solution nonetheless. Start the recruitment process two years in advance, and train up the monkeys to become experts. Another benefit is that apprenticeships, unlike university degrees, have no fixed syllabus and can quickly flex to meet new skill demand trends.
The problem with apprenticeships is that various governments have regulations against locking-in staff for long periods. Companies who invest in apprenticeships see their newly-trained staff bugger off to a better-paying competitor, who can afford to pay more since they haven't invested in apprenticeships, the moment they qualify. Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer. Governments also need to give companies better ability to fire apprentices who fail to meet expected grades on time.
Cheap, experienced, immediately available - pick any two.
To the people here in the U.S. who consider the Bush administration an oppressive theocratic regime, pay attention. This is the sort of thing an ACTUAL oppressive theocratic regime does...even when that regime is headed by a supposedly secular puppet dictator funded by (ta-da!) the Bush administration.
Still, not long now before the religious democracy deposes the dictator and puts an Islamist in charge of the nuclear button. Go democracy! It's America exporting liberty to the+++NO CARRIER
Well, we have this thing called 'the internet' and it allows all software to be distributed 'in bulk' to everyone using the internet
For values of "everyone" that are limited to broadband, yes.
For people on the edge of a mesh network that is operational provided none of the twelve intermediate XO laptops are switched off en-route to the next-but-one village that has a single 9600bps dial-up... no.
Er... I'm a UK Steam user, and I can assure you that the prices on Steam are in US Dollars- US$49.99 for The Orange Box, IIRC.
That equates to around 25 quid. The retail box, in high street shops, has a "recommended retail price" (RRP) of £35 (US$70), but almost all shops, and even Amazon UK, have got it discounted to £24.99 . Given that I'll get a shiny box to put on my O'Reilly Wall, plus hopefully some manuals, I'll get the real box as opposed to the virtual one (I don't imagine I'll ever actually use the DVD, mind).
Don't get me wrong, us Brits get shafted on pricing on a lot of stuff, and I enjoy sticking it to The Man as much as the next armchair anarchist, but in this particular instance, Valve and Steam have helped promote price equality by pushing digital distribution.
Having said all that, I'm getting The Orange Box for my birthday next week, and I'm going to be mightily annoyed if it locks up when I take my laptop to my sister's house in Holland or any business hotel in America.
There is no way this is going to get thrown out. The servicing chain will loose, loose big time, and frankly I'm amazed such a big brand has been this dumb.
Fees for playing the radio or CDs in shops or offices are well known in the UK. The law may well be an ass, but this particular law is very well known, and any businessman who claims ignorance or rebellion is going to get squished in court.
Kwik-Fit are the most well-known brand of chain garages in the UK. That they've been stupid enough to let employees play the radio in the presence of their customers, without getting a licence, is overwhelmingly their own look-out, pathetic bloody company I've no sympathy at all </vogon>
Personally I find almost all instances of intellectual property rights fundamentally flawed, but I'm not stupid enough to try that as an argument in court against a licence fee which has been collected nationwide, in every corner shop and mall, without exception, for fifty odd years. Pick yer bloody battles, mate.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't quite understand how this system could work. Are you saying that different lanes can go at whatever speed they want? How do you know which side to overtake on? In the UK, we drive on the left, so we always overtake on the right (heck, you don't legally need a mirror on the left side of your vehicle, since theoretically you should never need to use it - although most modern cars do). Presumably you drive on the right, so always overtake on the left, correct? The only exception to this rule is on feeder lanes, such as leading up to a motorway junction (UKUS: "off ramp").
I'm getting very confused by this thread. Here it is illegal to drive slow in the fast lane (remember, we drive on the left so naming the lanes left/right won't help international comparisons). It's also illegal to drive too close to other vehicles. This is all illegal under "driving without due care and attention".
Furthermore all UK insurance companies also assume the car behind, in any accident, is responsible for the accident unless proven otherwise.
It is, however, perfectly legal to slam on your brakes and kill someone if they drive too close behind you, and then claim on the deceased's insurance. Unsurprisingly, this rarely happens; presumably the effects of natural selection rather than us being particularly law-abiding drivers (we speed, a LOT; 85mph on a motorway [interstate] is considered pretty average).
Furthermore, the highway code requires that all vehicles keep a safe breaking distance from all others, and also the police will pull over anyone with suspected faulty brake lights.
I'd be very surprised if all of this wasn't also standard practice in your country too.
The following bad things invariably happen when you spam:
1. Your ISP will disconnect your internet connection.
2. Your hosting provider will close your website.
3. If you were stupid enough to use a real sender address, your email address will swiftly be overloaded with blowback, followed by your service provider terminating your email address.
Morals don't come in to it. Spam chews bandwidth and sysop hours, and threatens connectivity of the network due not merely to bandwidth, but also to other networks deciding they no longer want to talk to your service provider (blacklisting). Those three things alone will have your service disconnected long before you've reached any moral conclusion.
To spam effectively, you need to not care about losing your internet connection.
(Disclaimer: I used to work for MessageLabs)
Whereas in the real world UK, I have to get an electrical contractor to fill in form BS 7671:2008 after I have simply replaced a smashed light switch.
The fact that I live out in the sticks and that I cannot find a qualified electrician who will drive out to do such a small job, seems not to bother either the department of information retrieval - erm, I mean the local council planning department, nor my house insurers.
FFS. Replacing a light switch is no more difficult than wiring a plug. If you're dumb enough to cock that up, you probably have someone who looks after you anyway.
Today, I am the Harry Tuttle of electrical wiring.
What I could do with are some really nice ducts to hide my anarcho-lightswitch, before Bob Hoskins and his long-capped friends mark me as a terrorist.
why not just make a lighter SUV?
Done. I bought a Daihatsu Terios in 1999 and it still works fine today. 1.3 litre engine, weighs under a tonne, 40 MPG. 165,000 miles driven so far and no hassle. Permanent 4x4 system, you just point the steering wheel at a muddy field and it clambers over it - it won't climb Everest but it has taken me through floods here in the Tewkesbury area with no problems.
Also consider the Suzuki Jimny.
London on 7/7?
Rail passengers from the county of Yorkshire, England attacked rail passengers from London, England. These were British citizens attacking British citizens. Asking for ID wouldn't have made any difference.
I can see where the GP is coming from. You can't ban Yorkshiremen from trains, they're not terrorists until they actually enact their plan. Even if you did ban all Yorkshiremen from trains, there are an infinite number of other ways for Yorkshiremen to attack Londoners, or for people from other English counties to attack Londoners. All you'd achieve is the annoyance of all Yorkshiremen, the vast majority of whom aren't planning to injure Londoners.
They probably booked their railway tickets using a debit or credit card anyway, which is just as secure (or not) as an ID card.
It isn't a winnable scenario. The solution is to negotiate a satisfactory draw. This worked well in Northern Ireland.
Also for those who are unclear on the definition of "UK", note that it is not the USA. Ergo any comparison with USian freedoms is stark raving bonkers. We don't have freedom of speech or freedom of assembly here, they have never been enshrined as rights (freedom of the press, though, is enforced by the Press Complaints Authority with arms-length backing from Her Majesty's Government).
For example, it is illegal to wear a t-shirt with a politican slogan in the street outside Parliament.
I thought everyone with five or more digits had to use the "Brazillian electrician" euphemism now?
I've got a 486dx2-100 laptop (20MB RAM, 400MB HD, dual scan colour, floppy only, no CD/DVD, PCIMCA Cat5 card) which just about runs Damn Small Linux (via Poor Man's Install floppy and copying the rest of the install off the network).
I'd like to let my two-year-old daughter play with it, but she doesn't yet have the co-ordination to use Tux Paint.
Are there any low-resource simple games for toddlers?
Ideally I'd like something which displays a particular picture and plays a sound when she presses a key; for example, "a" might show a picture of an apple and the sound of someone saying "Apple".
From my point of view as a Brit, CCTV isn't invasive at all. I just ignore it, just like the criminals do.
There are so many cameras that only a tiny, tiny few could possibly ever be watched by anyone.
The only cameras that matter are the motoring cameras. I doubt speed cameras prevent accidents, but they certainly make me check my speed when driving through those particular areas. Were I to live in London, I'd probably care about the Congestion Zone cameras too, which enforce payment of the toll to drive into the city centre. Other than that... who cares?
I'm unlikely to ever want to do something illegal in view of a camera, but if I did, I could just wear a cheap disposable hooded sweatshirt, just like most teenagers do. CCTV must go down in history as the first security measure to prompt a fashion craze - the hoodie.
The point of CCTV is that it absorbs the excess money politicians and "concerned citizens" want to throw away trying to make themselves feel safe in areas that are already safe. If they didn't spend it on CCTV they'd spend it on something far more invasive, like vigilante-esque security guards. Personally I find CCTV to be far less invasive than a hobby-bobby on every street corner poking his nose into my business. If we actually paid for real people to prevent crime, imagine how inconvenient that would be for us law-abiding folk, constantly being stopped and asked where we were going or whatnot! Far better to spend it on technology that can be safely ignored by the sensible majority who are not fooled by the culture of fear and security theatre, whilst providing a living wage for the families of legions of factory workers, installation engineers and callcentre staff to manufacture, maintain and support them.
CCTV is wonderful. The bigots get something concrete they can point at to stop their misguided fearful moaning, and the rest of us can safely ignore it. Everybody wins!
Exactly right. This isn't a moral question, it's a legal procedure. The legal procedure exists and is very well established.
You clearly don't manage domains, email or web for your family.
When I pop off, my daughter will need her email to continue working.
A death certificate from the next of kin opens many doors.
Correct answer. ISPs will serve up almost anything when presented with correct, verifiable death certificate and a letter from the correct, verifiable next of kin stating that person X is authorised to take over the deceased's logins.
It is, sadly, a very slow process.
I was in the unfortunate situation of having to re-establish control over a number of friends and family's domains when their registrant, a friend of mine from uni, died quite expectedly (had a massive birth defect, estimated TTL 2 years, actual TTL 35 years).
The sad thing is that I am still very annoyed with my dead friend for not making better arrangements, given his condition. Which is definitely not how I want to remember him.
My own will now gives instructions on how to recover my domain registry username/password.
To put it another way:
Imagine if bricklayers had to be paid by every person who visited a house they built several years ago.
That would be almost impossible to police.
But it is even more difficult to keep track of people who listen to music or watch video. That's even more difficult to police.
Instead, bricklayers get paid for making new buildings, and not for buildings they've already finished. Equally, artists should get paid for making new art, not art they've already finished.
What would you do, just start giving away that which you make your living on?
Yes, that is exactly what I would do - it is exactly what I do now.
I get paid for writing bespoke software. The programs are customised to my employer's requirements. Anyone can have a copy of the software, because that isn't where the value is. The value is that I configured it just for them; I changed bits or wrote entirely new bits that fit them exactly. I wrote a new module to work with their esoteric payments system. I changed the software so the interface was accessible to their staff in another country.
Equally, with a music album, the value isn't in something that was written last week or fifty years ago. The value is in the tour ticket, the t-shirt and pre-ordering the next release. If the fans want a new album, they should have to group together and put enough money in the pot to make it worthwhile for the artist. When the artist releases the album, he gets paid that pot of money and no more. That way, the artist is encouraged to make new work, rather than be lazy and live off something he did in the 1960s. Meanwhile the fans maybe get an exclusive packaged CD, whilst everyone else in the world can take a free copy.
This is called Street Performer Protocol.
People should be paid for doing, not paid for something they have done.
You, sir, are entrely right.
I never really thought about access for public footpaths, until I tried taking a pushchair over a stile and onto wet mud and loose gravel. The next plan - carry the baby - failed miserably within weeks, since my wife made the somewhat inconvenient mistake of feeding the baby. Neither myself nor the missus are what you might call slight, so our baby grew quite heavy before she could reliably walk.
Furthermore, trying to walk from A to B with a toddler provides an experience similar to trying to walk from A to B with a herd of cats. It may be a perfectly run-of-the-mill walk for you, but for Annabel, it is a new experience every metre of the way. Look, a blade of grass! Look, another blade of grass that is slightly different from the first! Look, a dandelion!
A month ago, we actually managed to get about half a mile from the car. It hailed. Annabel had never seen hailstones, except, apparently, in her nightmares. She screamed a lot.
Now the only walking I get is around shopping centres.
By the time she's old enough to go for long walks, I'll have died from lack of fresh air and exercise.
I quite agree. I deliberately run my own open public wifi hotspot, and I encourage others to do so too. I'm grateful to all the people out there who are as public-spirited and community-minded as myself.
I've bandwidth-throttled and firewalled anyone who doesn't come in on the encrypted VPN though, to be on the safe side (documented here: http://www.nam-vets.org/frampton/hotspot-howto.php ).
What would be ideal, would be an industry standard that WiFi routers ship as open by default, throttled by default (say, no single user can gobble more than 75% of the broadband bandwidth), firewalled by default (say, only ports 53, 80 and 443 open outbound, no inbound unestablished connections), and optional encrypted VPN by default. Since most wireless APs are embedded Linux, that would be relatively easy to implement - and the VPN would be compatible with all the major OSes.
where will we find them right now
There's yer problem, right there, guv.
The problem is that the IT industry, like many industries, expects to find a pool of skilled and experienced available staff, at the drop of a hat, without the company putting in any effort themselves.
The solution is apprenticeships - a variant on "I wouldn't start from here", I admit, but the only workable solution nonetheless. Start the recruitment process two years in advance, and train up the monkeys to become experts. Another benefit is that apprenticeships, unlike university degrees, have no fixed syllabus and can quickly flex to meet new skill demand trends.
The problem with apprenticeships is that various governments have regulations against locking-in staff for long periods. Companies who invest in apprenticeships see their newly-trained staff bugger off to a better-paying competitor, who can afford to pay more since they haven't invested in apprenticeships, the moment they qualify. Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer. Governments also need to give companies better ability to fire apprentices who fail to meet expected grades on time.
Cheap, experienced, immediately available - pick any two.
To the people here in the U.S. who consider the Bush administration an oppressive theocratic regime, pay attention. This is the sort of thing an ACTUAL oppressive theocratic regime does ...even when that regime is headed by a supposedly secular puppet dictator funded by (ta-da!) the Bush administration.
Still, not long now before the religious democracy deposes the dictator and puts an Islamist in charge of the nuclear button. Go democracy! It's America exporting liberty to the+++NO CARRIER
Wednesday - MI5 issues report complaining they don't have the tools to intercept internet telephony
Thursday - BOTH Middle-Eastern internet trunk routes that pass near the large British naval base in Cyprus suddenly go dark for a conveniently precise period of one week
Oh, we're subtle, I'll give you that.
worry about one thing...the bottom line.
The BBC is a semi-independent government-funded agency, it does not have a "bottom line". It is a not-for-profit corporation.
Any organisation that complains about US$7 BILLION government funding being too small, clearly has big problems.
Well, we have this thing called 'the internet' and it allows all software to be distributed 'in bulk' to everyone using the internet
For values of "everyone" that are limited to broadband, yes.
For people on the edge of a mesh network that is operational provided none of the twelve intermediate XO laptops are switched off en-route to the next-but-one village that has a single 9600bps dial-up... no.
Er... I'm a UK Steam user, and I can assure you that the prices on Steam are in US Dollars- US$49.99 for The Orange Box, IIRC.
That equates to around 25 quid. The retail box, in high street shops, has a "recommended retail price" (RRP) of £35 (US$70), but almost all shops, and even Amazon UK, have got it discounted to £24.99 . Given that I'll get a shiny box to put on my O'Reilly Wall, plus hopefully some manuals, I'll get the real box as opposed to the virtual one (I don't imagine I'll ever actually use the DVD, mind).
Don't get me wrong, us Brits get shafted on pricing on a lot of stuff, and I enjoy sticking it to The Man as much as the next armchair anarchist, but in this particular instance, Valve and Steam have helped promote price equality by pushing digital distribution.
Having said all that, I'm getting The Orange Box for my birthday next week, and I'm going to be mightily annoyed if it locks up when I take my laptop to my sister's house in Holland or any business hotel in America.
There is no way this is going to get thrown out. The servicing chain will loose, loose big time, and frankly I'm amazed such a big brand has been this dumb.
Fees for playing the radio or CDs in shops or offices are well known in the UK. The law may well be an ass, but this particular law is very well known, and any businessman who claims ignorance or rebellion is going to get squished in court.
Kwik-Fit are the most well-known brand of chain garages in the UK. That they've been stupid enough to let employees play the radio in the presence of their customers, without getting a licence, is overwhelmingly their own look-out, pathetic bloody company I've no sympathy at all </vogon>
Licences and tarrifs are well known, well publicised, easy to obtain and inexpensive.
Personally I find almost all instances of intellectual property rights fundamentally flawed, but I'm not stupid enough to try that as an argument in court against a licence fee which has been collected nationwide, in every corner shop and mall, without exception, for fifty odd years. Pick yer bloody battles, mate.