This from the party of "Green" everything? Here's the REAL story...a buddy of mine (who's dad is the chief engineer at an Amarillo, Texas TV station) tells me that it costs about $10,000 per month in electricity to run a transmitter. That's ONE transmitter - for either analog or digital. When you add a second transmitter, you double the juice, and double the cost.
It's even worst that than that since with digital you can have several "stations" on one "channel". Which you'd think would keep the "greenies" happy both with using less power and putting out less RF energy:)
Congress (or the FCC given enough authority from Congress) can say "If you want to keep your digital license, you have to keep your analog station running until the transition."
On the other hand a station can turn around and say "we have already made all the arrangements to switch and can't rely on the hardware even still being there after the 17th of Feb."
This is something I never get about animal rights protesters. They always want to equate some animals life with a human's life. Sure, you fight and even go to war to save unjustly taken human life but declaring a dog or cat's life to be equal to that of a human's is a but ridiculous.
As someone pointed out you don't tend to see the same thing happening with people protesting factory farming. Even stranger you don't see much in the way of protests against pest control.
Please do try to bear in mind that the SHAC "activists" are violent criminals, who have launched physical attacks on people involved in animal testing.
With a rather loose definition of "involved".
Whether you believe animal testing is right or wrong, that is not the way to go about protesting it.
It's also not credible for them to claim that terrorism was their only possible method of protesting. With the people recently jailed having put plenty of deliberate effort into terror.
Also from the details available, they seem to have quite correctly pulled that information as soon as they spotted it, before the police asked them to, and the problem was that the police demanded information that they didn't have. So what were they supposed to do?
Especially given that it would probably be a better use of police time to go after the website directly run by the terrorists in question. It seems rather strange that whilst the British Government has claimed the need for additional laws and extraordinary powers to detain "terrorist suspects" non of these appear to actually be used against what appears to be one of the most well organised terrorist groups active in the UK.
You seriously think that a terrorist organization would NOT take any sort of nuclear weapon?
The goal of terrorists is to create terror. Some terrorists will do this using fake bombs or simply the threat of bombs. There are also terrorists who don't use any kind of bombs. Even terrorists who do use actual bombs may be more interested in getting fairly small bombs very close to specific people (or groups of people). Someone like Ted Kaczynski may well say "no" even if offered a fully working Trident D5. Someone like Timothy McVeigh might be more interested...
No one is saying we have to introduce creationism or try to make evolution appear only as a theory (which some might argue it still is),
The "only a theory" thing is a spurious argument anyway. Because just about anything in science is a "theory" anyway. Yet only a fool jump off a cliff on the basis that gravity is "only a theory".
If the law was passed to make it free the first thing the child protection agency would do is request information on everyone.
That might happen initially. But since no investigator could handle information on everyone. Instead they'd type targeting specific groups of people, in a mixture of both individual's dislikes and whatever was "corporate policy".
Let's also not forget the Government plans to criminalise non-realistic images (cartoons etc) that have some appearance of an under-18 "child" (also note the age of consent is 16 in the UK - so a cartoon of a legal act will be illegal to possess); the bill was recently published.
IIRC this is already the case with photos/videos. There's also the whole issue of if it's possible to tell a person's age by appearance. On one hand you have supermarkets saying "If you look under 21/25 we will ask you for ID for age restricted products", when the highest applicable age is 18. As well as busses and trains requiring under 18's to produce proof of age or pay an adult fare. On the other hand you have younger (sometimes much younger) people able to get into "adult" venues such as pubs and nightclubs with little difficulty.
Our society(s) are going to have to accept the fact that even this modern world can be a dangerous place.
But what "danger" is or isn't considered acceptable is very much a social effect.
We have become so insulated, and mind you I'm not trying to argue for some Quaker type of lifestyle; I fully love progress/tech/etc, by our progress that any small hint of danger is blown way out of proportion.
With real dangers being ignored. Thus you end up with parents who are paranoid about their children using "The Internet" whilst being happy for the same children to cross a road to get to a playground.
And then you get the "won't someone think of the children!" crowd who take this already exaggerated situation and blow it up to the nth degree...well you get what we have here.
Also often without considering the consequences of what they want done in the name of "think of the children". So it wouldn't be too much of a suprise to find that actions taken actually made things more dangerous for children. e.g. Parents providing a "taxi service" transporting children to school which has had no effect on the number of child abductions. Whilst at the same time increasing air pollution around schools and the number of children injured/killed by traffic.
Police: But it's for the children!
Ford: Well why didn't you say? Have them, just have them. Do me a favour and take them off my hands. I'll throw in a full tank of fuel and fluffy dice.
From reading the figures, the information gained from about 10,000 requests was useful in about 240 arrests. While a little on the low side for hit rate, it does show that they're targeting the searches at the moment.
To work out how well targeted these investigations are you'd need to look at how many of these 240 people were changed then what proportion of these were convicted. As well as the proportion found not guilty after a trial. The simple act of dragging an innocent person through a criminal trial is itself a serious injustice.
Let's face it, the only reason they have these crackdowns is that it makes the politicians look tough, without actually hurting a large number of voters. Violence and exploitation of children is a huge problem, but the internet porn factor is only a small part. Removing kids from violent or neglectful environments is expensive and controversial.
Especially since the vast majority of child abuse is perpetrated by close relatives. Many of which are nowhere as high profile as Karen Matthews.
I'd say A few pounds per person is a very small price to pay to ruin someone's life.
Many innocent people are accused and even convicted of "abuse" of children,
At least one terrorist group (SHAC) has a policy of making such false accusations against their targets
only to be exonerated after their businesses have failed due to boycott, they've lost their jobs, they've been driven from their communities, they've spent years in jail, etc.
It's not unknown for innocent people in the UK to be charged for time they have spent in jail. Even in cases where there is a malicious party who could be fined and prosecuted.
Absolutely, having these charges will hopefully reduce the amount of spurious fishing trips. Let's face it, if it didn't cost them, we all know how that would end.
Without them it would be a suprise if any of the requests wern't "spurious fishing trips". Possibly even to the point where actual child abusers are ignored, because they don't fit some bogus profile.
There is obviously a cost of some form to the ISP for providing this information, and it seems fair that this cost should be passed to the law enforcement organisations to be serviced out of their budget - this is what their budget is for. If it's not sufficient, they should lobby for it to be increased via taxation or other methods.
Presumably when police want some kind of forensic examination carried out by an external lab (which could include one attached to a different police force) they get charged a fee.
If information is made available freely and at the drop of a hat to third parties then it encourages misuse of that information and encourages scope creep to monitoring a wider population than you might originally have required.
Such a situation also has the effect of making any law enforcement considerably less effective. Since without some method to keep investigators "on task" they are likely to start looking for information on celebrities, people they have something against, etc. Things such as requiring a third party to issue a warrent or any search having a non trivial financial cost tends to mean that investigative powers tend only to be used where there is some reason and investigations to be quickly dropped in the case of false positives.
If you read Bill Gates' original prediction, he said that spam would be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as "payment at risk". This means that if an email gets marked as spam, then the sender will be billed for a cost whenever they send a spam email.
Subject to the two problems of a) identifying the actual sender and b) getting them to pay. People sending the postal version of spam generally don't feed it through franking machines belonging to others.
Nothing handles MSOffice files well, not even other Microsoft applications.
Sometimes this can even be an issue with what is in theory the same version of MS Office. On the other hand I've seen Openoffice.org open up MS Office format files which Word/Excel/Powerpoint point blank refuse to open....
For example, for management level correspondence, you need documents that open perfectly at destination; otherwise, your company will be embarrassed: remember some people uses PDF just because even between original MS-Offices', sometimes documents lose their structure and look pretty bad.. in my experience with OO this issue turns really nasty.
Openoffice.org has the ability to produce a PDF built in. Something which MS Office may eventually catch up with.
You do want your TV to respond to your remote control, download it's clock-setting and other background data, and be ready to boot up in a timely manner?
If a TV really needs a real time clock then something akin to a cheap wristwatch will do the trick. It can sync with an external source when it's switched on. Similarly it dosn't take much power for a circuit to detect a specific IR signal. Antique TVs which actually needed to "warm up" didn't come with clocks or remote controls in the first place.
Once could be an "isolated incident". But this is the second big scam involving Belkin, in the wake of the router that basically had built in adware...
How many does take to become "policy" or "conspiracy".
Seems to me that Belkin has a culture of corporate corruption over there. The best way to assure us that they have realized their mistake and to correct the problem is for heads to roll.
How could anyone be sure that these were the right heads?
CO to me usually means toxic and dangerous, not fuel source.
It is a fuel source and was a major part of "town gas/coal gas" which was the usual form of piped gas prior to "natural gas". Which is where they idea of people commiting suicide using gas comes from... Also used in the Second World war were reactors which partially burned wood to fuel internal combustion engines. Often for civilian use since the German military had priority access to regular fuel.
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This from the party of "Green" everything? Here's the REAL story...a buddy of mine (who's dad is the chief engineer at an Amarillo, Texas TV station) tells me that it costs about $10,000 per month in electricity to run a transmitter. That's ONE transmitter - for either analog or digital. When you add a second transmitter, you double the juice, and double the cost.
:)
It's even worst that than that since with digital you can have several "stations" on one "channel". Which you'd think would keep the "greenies" happy both with using less power and putting out less RF energy
Congress (or the FCC given enough authority from Congress) can say "If you want to keep your digital license, you have to keep your analog station running until the transition."
On the other hand a station can turn around and say "we have already made all the arrangements to switch and can't rely on the hardware even still being there after the 17th of Feb."
There should also be other remedies available, such as prohibiting the CEOs of these companies from holding any company office for five years.
Or maybe have to publish their own phone number(s) for 5 years.
And as its "law", then how about the CCTV's all making a noise when they photograph everyone
Presumably you'd also be able to tell the frame rate from the noise made by the camera.
This is something I never get about animal rights protesters. They always want to equate some animals life with a human's life. Sure, you fight and even go to war to save unjustly taken human life but declaring a dog or cat's life to be equal to that of a human's is a but ridiculous.
As someone pointed out you don't tend to see the same thing happening with people protesting factory farming. Even stranger you don't see much in the way of protests against pest control.
Please do try to bear in mind that the SHAC "activists" are violent criminals, who have launched physical attacks on people involved in animal testing.
With a rather loose definition of "involved".
Whether you believe animal testing is right or wrong, that is not the way to go about protesting it.
It's also not credible for them to claim that terrorism was their only possible method of protesting. With the people recently jailed having put plenty of deliberate effort into terror.
Also from the details available, they seem to have quite correctly pulled that information as soon as they spotted it, before the police asked them to, and the problem was that the police demanded information that they didn't have. So what were they supposed to do?
Especially given that it would probably be a better use of police time to go after the website directly run by the terrorists in question. It seems rather strange that whilst the British Government has claimed the need for additional laws and extraordinary powers to detain "terrorist suspects" non of these appear to actually be used against what appears to be one of the most well organised terrorist groups active in the UK.
You seriously think that a terrorist organization would NOT take any sort of nuclear weapon?
The goal of terrorists is to create terror. Some terrorists will do this using fake bombs or simply the threat of bombs. There are also terrorists who don't use any kind of bombs. Even terrorists who do use actual bombs may be more interested in getting fairly small bombs very close to specific people (or groups of people).
Someone like Ted Kaczynski may well say "no" even if offered a fully working Trident D5. Someone like Timothy McVeigh might be more interested...
If he's built a WORKING replica, I would hope VERY soon!
If it's a working replica they might want to stay at least two and a half miles from it.
No one is saying we have to introduce creationism or try to make evolution appear only as a theory (which some might argue it still is),
The "only a theory" thing is a spurious argument anyway. Because just about anything in science is a "theory" anyway. Yet only a fool jump off a cliff on the basis that gravity is "only a theory".
If the law was passed to make it free the first thing the child protection agency would do is request information on everyone.
That might happen initially. But since no investigator could handle information on everyone. Instead they'd type targeting specific groups of people, in a mixture of both individual's dislikes and whatever was "corporate policy".
Let's also not forget the Government plans to criminalise non-realistic images (cartoons etc) that have some appearance of an under-18 "child" (also note the age of consent is 16 in the UK - so a cartoon of a legal act will be illegal to possess); the bill was recently published.
IIRC this is already the case with photos/videos.
There's also the whole issue of if it's possible to tell a person's age by appearance. On one hand you have supermarkets saying "If you look under 21/25 we will ask you for ID for age restricted products", when the highest applicable age is 18. As well as busses and trains requiring under 18's to produce proof of age or pay an adult fare. On the other hand you have younger (sometimes much younger) people able to get into "adult" venues such as pubs and nightclubs with little difficulty.
Our society(s) are going to have to accept the fact that even this modern world can be a dangerous place.
But what "danger" is or isn't considered acceptable is very much a social effect.
We have become so insulated, and mind you I'm not trying to argue for some Quaker type of lifestyle; I fully love progress/tech/etc, by our progress that any small hint of danger is blown way out of proportion.
With real dangers being ignored. Thus you end up with parents who are paranoid about their children using "The Internet" whilst being happy for the same children to cross a road to get to a playground.
And then you get the "won't someone think of the children!" crowd who take this already exaggerated situation and blow it up to the nth degree...well you get what we have here.
Also often without considering the consequences of what they want done in the name of "think of the children". So it wouldn't be too much of a suprise to find that actions taken actually made things more dangerous for children. e.g. Parents providing a "taxi service" transporting children to school which has had no effect on the number of child abductions. Whilst at the same time increasing air pollution around schools and the number of children injured/killed by traffic.
Police: But it's for the children!
:)
Ford: Well why didn't you say? Have them, just have them. Do me a favour and take them off my hands. I'll throw in a full tank of fuel and fluffy dice.
Assuming they didn't want a full tankER of fuel
From reading the figures, the information gained from about 10,000 requests was useful in about 240 arrests. While a little on the low side for hit rate, it does show that they're targeting the searches at the moment.
To work out how well targeted these investigations are you'd need to look at how many of these 240 people were changed then what proportion of these were convicted. As well as the proportion found not guilty after a trial. The simple act of dragging an innocent person through a criminal trial is itself a serious injustice.
Let's face it, the only reason they have these crackdowns is that it makes the politicians look tough, without actually hurting a large number of voters. Violence and exploitation of children is a huge problem, but the internet porn factor is only a small part. Removing kids from violent or neglectful environments is expensive and controversial.
Especially since the vast majority of child abuse is perpetrated by close relatives. Many of which are nowhere as high profile as Karen Matthews.
I'd say A few pounds per person is a very small price to pay to ruin someone's life.
Many innocent people are accused and even convicted of "abuse" of children,
At least one terrorist group (SHAC) has a policy of making such false accusations against their targets
only to be exonerated after their businesses have failed due to boycott, they've lost their jobs, they've been driven from their communities, they've spent years in jail, etc.
It's not unknown for innocent people in the UK to be charged for time they have spent in jail. Even in cases where there is a malicious party who could be fined and prosecuted.
Absolutely, having these charges will hopefully reduce the amount of spurious fishing trips. Let's face it, if it didn't cost them, we all know how that would end.
Without them it would be a suprise if any of the requests wern't "spurious fishing trips". Possibly even to the point where actual child abusers are ignored, because they don't fit some bogus profile.
There is obviously a cost of some form to the ISP for providing this information, and it seems fair that this cost should be passed to the law enforcement organisations to be serviced out of their budget - this is what their budget is for. If it's not sufficient, they should lobby for it to be increased via taxation or other methods.
Presumably when police want some kind of forensic examination carried out by an external lab (which could include one attached to a different police force) they get charged a fee.
If information is made available freely and at the drop of a hat to third parties then it encourages misuse of that information and encourages scope creep to monitoring a wider population than you might originally have required.
Such a situation also has the effect of making any law enforcement considerably less effective. Since without some method to keep investigators "on task" they are likely to start looking for information on celebrities, people they have something against, etc. Things such as requiring a third party to issue a warrent or any search having a non trivial financial cost tends to mean that investigative powers tend only to be used where there is some reason and investigations to be quickly dropped in the case of false positives.
If you read Bill Gates' original prediction, he said that spam would be killed through the electronic equivalent of a stamp, also known as "payment at risk". This means that if an email gets marked as spam, then the sender will be billed for a cost whenever they send a spam email.
Subject to the two problems of a) identifying the actual sender and b) getting them to pay.
People sending the postal version of spam generally don't feed it through franking machines belonging to others.
Nothing handles MSOffice files well, not even other Microsoft applications.
Sometimes this can even be an issue with what is in theory the same version of MS Office. On the other hand I've seen Openoffice.org open up MS Office format files which Word/Excel/Powerpoint point blank refuse to open....
For example, for management level correspondence, you need documents that open perfectly at destination; otherwise, your company will be embarrassed: remember some people uses PDF just because even between original MS-Offices', sometimes documents lose their structure and look pretty bad.. in my experience with OO this issue turns really nasty.
Openoffice.org has the ability to produce a PDF built in. Something which MS Office may eventually catch up with.
You do want your TV to respond to your remote control, download it's clock-setting and other background data, and be ready to boot up in a timely manner?
If a TV really needs a real time clock then something akin to a cheap wristwatch will do the trick. It can sync with an external source when it's switched on. Similarly it dosn't take much power for a circuit to detect a specific IR signal.
Antique TVs which actually needed to "warm up" didn't come with clocks or remote controls in the first place.
Once could be an "isolated incident". But this is the second big scam involving Belkin, in the wake of the router that basically had built in adware...
How many does take to become "policy" or "conspiracy".
Seems to me that Belkin has a culture of corporate corruption over there. The best way to assure us that they have realized their mistake and to correct the problem is for heads to roll.
How could anyone be sure that these were the right heads?
CO to me usually means toxic and dangerous, not fuel source.
It is a fuel source and was a major part of "town gas/coal gas" which was the usual form of piped gas prior to "natural gas". Which is where they idea of people commiting suicide using gas comes from...
Also used in the Second World war were reactors which partially burned wood to fuel internal combustion engines. Often for civilian use since the German military had priority access to regular fuel.