Whilst I'm no fan of unrestricted CCTV I don't see this as being a step towards tyranny.
Garages already have cameras in place to stop fuel theft (filling up and driving away -- one tankful can wipe out a day's earnings as the margins on fuel are low - why do you think forecourts also sell sweets, newspaper, groceries...).
Whether they should act as unpaid agents of the police in tracking the uninsured is debatable but uninsured driving is not a victimless crime.
If you're uninsured it's probably because you and/or the vehicle are a poor risk and more likely to get into an accident.
If you do get into an accident then innocent people could be disadvantaged (through injury and loss/damage to property) - who will pay to help them get back to the state they were in before? insurance companies - not if you're not insured (they're weaselly enough when you are!).
So the victim either loses out completely or, if they are very lucky may get a pittance from the criminal injuries compensation scheme - paid for by the taxpayer.
If the victim's car is damaged - they have to claim against their own insurance - losing "no claims discount" and getting higher premiums next year [and don't think about shopping around, the insurance companies pool claims data]. The insurers recoup this lost cost through putting up premiums for all of us.
Taking the uninsured driver to court may get him/her a conviction (more costs to the state/taxpayer to keep him/her in gaol or trying to recover fines) but precious little help in civil recovery for the victim.
The uninsured are a burden on everybody - I have no sympathy for them
In this case it seems a fair use.
Finally, since this is Slashdot, if you want a free market response - nobody is forcing you to buy petrol or drive uninsured - it's your choice; the garage also has freedom to mandate terms of sale.
Shame you posted AC - and shame I haven't any mod points because this is a pretty good post and a fair reflection on the attitudes of many.
You've missed a few nuances: The Daily Mail somehow contriving to blame "the fiasco" [ie any deviation from perfect performance] on the BBC, the EU, Muslims...
Rupert Murdoch's mates "hacking" the service (ie just exploiting human fallibility and poor security practices but glamorising it beyond belief)
The Slashdot meme of surveillance cameras everywhere - and how they'd use the bandwidth
The sanctimonious posing by Boris Johnson and cronies about how they're "investing for London" and the "Olympic legacy" -- followed by the quiet dismantling and removing of the service later.
I'm sure there are other suggestions - but your post was particularly good.
It has about as much credibility as my saying the population of the US is 80 Billion* based on extrapolating the population density of New York across the land area.
Can't we make a collective New Year's resolution to stop parroting stereotypes and to actually think/check sources/apply some critical analysis once in a while?
*rough order of magnitude - intended for illustration.
Or the I for one welcome that in Soviet Russia all of us belong your bases...??...profit
It is an interesting point though - has Slashdot groupthink got to the point where a reasonable chatbot could work -- I'm not thinking of a full Turing test - just be enough to fools a reasonable percentage of skim readers?
Some years ago I wrote a "Canonical Daily Mail Letters Page" generator which used phrases and a few key topics -- it worked (sort of) but I got bored and never quite got it polished enough to try out for real -- perhaps others are doing / already have done this for Slashdot??
I recall when wireless keyboards and mice first came out and one of our managers proudly bought a couple for the conference rooms to save unsightly wires.
Unfortunately he left a spare set in an easily accessible position and, even worse, left them all on their default settings.
When someone who's less than popular is presenting and people have a spare mouse tuned to the same channel you can imagine the fun to be had clicking their PowerPoint slides forward and backwards; even better when the culprits are outside the room.
The fact that the victim had upset the manager concerned did nothing to help his attempts to get sympathy / retribution
Just one criticism... you forgot to mention how "such an approach would interlock horizontally and vertically across business units to leverage the synergies arising from an ongoing optimsation of the function stream envisaged in the up-coming opportunity horizon".
Some years ago I came across a Word macro called Bullfighter [I can't remember who the original author was but I'd love to credit him/her]. This analysed text for excessive length and presence of buzz words.
If I had it now (and if it worked in Libre Office) I suspect my PC would have melted:-)
Just buy what you want/need when you want/need it.
I've never understood this "OMG Advertisers will know all about me!" -- just because a marketer targets you with adverts you don't have to act on them. Adverts are an invitation to trade - not a direct order..
Personally speaking, I choose what I buy based on need,features and value for money; if I consider adverts at all, it's generally in a negative way (if they can afford to spend serious amounts subsidising TV, radio etc then the price is too high)
Now if you are part of an enterprise domain, it seemingly takes even longer.
And if you have a corporate standard image with policies etc pushed out on each boot....
On a cold boot, I can wander off, make a cup of tea, come back and it may just be ready. On a request for a reboot after a system update (and why it has to reboot after a change is yet another gripe) I could walk into town, go to the supermarket, buy a box of biscuits, queue up at the checkout, walk back and still be waiting for a usable system.
Strange that all that downtime x the number of users never really appears in TCO calculations -- I guess that's what meetings were invented for (so we'd have something to do without access to the IT infrastructure
"It should be the other way around; you are better off being undead in rural places, lots of brains available"
Following that logic Washington and Westminster should be the best places of all many brains, but as they belong to politicians, most would be hardly used and thus in "near perfect*" condition.
Elsewhere I read a comment along the lines of "poor brits having no guns to defend themselves" - completely missing the point that aggressors would also have guns and know where you lived.
Benjfowler -- I hope that you and your neighbours are safe and that the after effects of the riots aren't too severe; from the relative peace of a town outside London it looked bad. Good luck.
An interesting trend in the UK over the past few years has been for local companies to sponsor roundabouts.
I'm not sure who gets the cash (I suspect it's the local authority but could be the Highways Agency) but effectively, in exchange for providing gardening services (some flowers and a regular mowing of the grass) they get a discreet sign "Sponsored by XYZ" and company logo (some even plant flowers in the shape of their logo).
I've mentioned this before -- you don't need a rapid recharge at service stations if cars were fitted with standard sized batteries - just swap out your flat ones for fully charged units and let the garage charge them up overnight (or whenever power is lower cost in your vicinity).
In effect run your car on giant versions of an AA cell. If the form factor were suitable (with a convenient handle, relatively low weight and idiot-proof one-way-only fitting) then this could be run as a self service system -- customer drops their old battery in a dispenser, swipes their card and a new one pops out -- the dispenser could even route the flat battery to the charger units.
Suppliers can differentiate their products on the basis of capacity and max discharge rates.
Of course you'd either have to mandate standard battery sizes [through an independent organisation] or face each manufacturer making batteries with different form factors (so they can charge more money for them and use patents to stifle competition**) and then waiting for years for market forces to reduce variation.
This development could help the service stations reduce costs if it truly is possible to charge up more batteries in a shorter time.
** Cynical ? me? -- I've just been reading Slashdot for too long
I'd often daydreamed (but not had the knowledge or contacts to go through with it) of making toy "voodoo dolls" complete with pins.
I don't necessarily believe in them working but the stress relief when MS Word (yes I have to use it at work) does its own thing and messes up formatting again of having a Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates doll and a long pin or two handy would be worth anyone's money.
Guess I'll cross Mark Z off the list now.
Still, imagine how much a Darl figure would have been worth during the SCO saga.
This business idea given to the world free and gratis [but if you do decide to go into production, I wouldn't mind a sample to beta test for you]
I know it's confusing as the general rule is to use an before a word starting with a vowel, but English being English [and occasionally American:-)] there are exceptions.
If the word sounds like it starts with an implied "Y" sound (e.g. utopia sounds like yoo-topia, uniform sounds like yoo-niform) then use 'a' instead of 'an'.
There are also a few cases where a word starts with a [nearly] silent h when you use an instead of a (e.g. an honourable man, an hotel **).
If in doubt - say it out loud. If it sounds awkward with two successive vowel sounds, use 'an'.
** this is rapidly disappearing from common use in modern English - not sure it was ever used in American
I can see some markets being worried -- I'm looking with particular bitterness at the car parts business.
A few years ago I had a headlamp work loose on my car. On inspection the problem was the failure of a small (possibly deliberately feeble) plastic bracket which looked like it suffered a fatigue fracture. I had both parts which fitted together nicely but there was no hope of a simple repair with adhesive.
The cost for the replacement part (which had all of about 5p worth of plastic) was something like £15 [IIRC]. The car manufacturer, dealer and third party parts suppliers knew that their customers had to buy replacements, knew that the plastic part was sufficiently weirdly shaped to avoid work-arounds and knew that repair shops didn't care how much it cost as they could just pass it onto the customer. They were delighted that they could get away with charging such extortionate amounts.
Now fast forward to a case where the parts could be glued together (the strength doesn't matter) and then scanned / reprinted. Although it wouldn't be economical to get the printer for one single repair, a corner-shop facility charging, say £2.50 -- even as much as £5.00 -- would make themselves a nice return (and reach break-even quickly) and people like me would be happy with a significant saving.
This is the scenario which the vested interests would like to kill off.
The ECHR is a creation of the European Convention on Human Rights which was founded by the Council of Europe (which predates and has more members than the EU).
This distinction is deliberately blurred by some of the more anti-European press, some multinational companies and political parties who like to portray the EU as some kind of supranational big government bogeyman. Conflating the ECHR with EU mandates serves this purpose well. This attitude (which is similar to the 'health and safety gone mad' stories regularly featured) ensures maximum press coverage and outrage at the more egregious cases where "villains get treated better than victims" whilst the wins for the "little man" often pass by without comment.
In reality, like most systems, there are undesirable effects when pushed to extremes (and these cannot and should not be denied) but overall the vast majority of the cases covered represent common sense protection for the individual.
Since we seem to be playing "prime pedant" I should point out that neither you, the OP or I will be in any personal danger from making that assumption.
And purely because we're playing pedant -- I almost feel ashamed to post this but...
Also, I'm quickly forgetting what "TV" is, as what few shows I watch aren't on a television, don't come over broadcast, don't come from television companies, and in which I don't watch any commercials.
But you're still paying for them:-(
For me, commercials are a positive disincentive to buy specific products -- Why should I pay a bit extra to cover the costs of the adverts which themselves pay for channels I don't watch?
The budgets for commercial stations are as big as or greater than publicly funded ones (like BBC) and that money has to come from somewhere -- our shopping bills. People moan about the UK licence fee because it's up front and not hidden in the weekly shop but the principle is exactly the same we're being charged for channels we choose not to watch!
And before the "free market rules" crowd start - after the major supermarkets have killed of most local trade, in most cases you only end up with a choice of which set of advertisers to subsidise. It's worse still for big ticket items - given the smaller sales volume, how much of the purchase price of a car goes to the TV companies (divide the total cost of adverts by units sold)?
Slashdot Mirror
With the Republic of Ireland
Whilst I'm no fan of unrestricted CCTV I don't see this as being a step towards tyranny.
Garages already have cameras in place to stop fuel theft (filling up and driving away -- one tankful can wipe out a day's earnings as the margins on fuel are low - why do you think forecourts also sell sweets, newspaper, groceries...).
Whether they should act as unpaid agents of the police in tracking the uninsured is debatable but uninsured driving is not a victimless crime.
If you're uninsured it's probably because you and/or the vehicle are a poor risk and more likely to get into an accident.
If you do get into an accident then innocent people could be disadvantaged (through injury and loss/damage to property) - who will pay to help them get back to the state they were in before? insurance companies - not if you're not insured (they're weaselly enough when you are!).
So the victim either loses out completely or, if they are very lucky may get a pittance from the criminal injuries compensation scheme - paid for by the taxpayer.
If the victim's car is damaged - they have to claim against their own insurance - losing "no claims discount" and getting higher premiums next year [and don't think about shopping around, the insurance companies pool claims data]. The insurers recoup this lost cost through putting up premiums for all of us.
Taking the uninsured driver to court may get him/her a conviction (more costs to the state/taxpayer to keep him/her in gaol or trying to recover fines) but precious little help in civil recovery for the victim.
The uninsured are a burden on everybody - I have no sympathy for them
In this case it seems a fair use.
Finally, since this is Slashdot, if you want a free market response - nobody is forcing you to buy petrol or drive uninsured - it's your choice; the garage also has freedom to mandate terms of sale.
So managers can move the goalposts more easily of course!
Shame you posted AC - and shame I haven't any mod points because this is a pretty good post and a fair reflection on the attitudes of many.
You've missed a few nuances:
The Daily Mail somehow contriving to blame "the fiasco" [ie any deviation from perfect performance] on the BBC, the EU, Muslims...
Rupert Murdoch's mates "hacking" the service (ie just exploiting human fallibility and poor security practices but glamorising it beyond belief)
The Slashdot meme of surveillance cameras everywhere - and how they'd use the bandwidth
The sanctimonious posing by Boris Johnson and cronies about how they're "investing for London" and the "Olympic legacy" -- followed by the quiet dismantling and removing of the service later.
I'm sure there are other suggestions - but your post was particularly good.
I agree - this meme deserves to die.
It has about as much credibility as my saying the population of the US is 80 Billion* based on extrapolating the population density of New York across the land area.
Can't we make a collective New Year's resolution to stop parroting stereotypes and to actually think/check sources/apply some critical analysis once in a while?
*rough order of magnitude - intended for illustration.
Or the I for one welcome that in Soviet Russia all of us belong your bases ...??...profit
It is an interesting point though - has Slashdot groupthink got to the point where a reasonable chatbot could work -- I'm not thinking of a full Turing test - just be enough to fools a reasonable percentage of skim readers?
Some years ago I wrote a "Canonical Daily Mail Letters Page" generator which used phrases and a few key topics -- it worked (sort of) but I got bored and never quite got it polished enough to try out for real -- perhaps others are doing / already have done this for Slashdot??
Off-topic but...
I recall when wireless keyboards and mice first came out and one of our managers proudly bought a couple for the conference rooms to save unsightly wires.
Unfortunately he left a spare set in an easily accessible position and, even worse, left them all on their default settings.
When someone who's less than popular is presenting and people have a spare mouse tuned to the same channel you can imagine the fun to be had clicking their PowerPoint slides forward and backwards; even better when the culprits are outside the room.
The fact that the victim had upset the manager concerned did nothing to help his attempts to get sympathy / retribution
Well said :-)
Just one criticism ... you forgot to mention how "such an approach would interlock horizontally and vertically across business units to leverage the synergies arising from an ongoing optimsation of the function stream envisaged in the up-coming opportunity horizon".
Some years ago I came across a Word macro called Bullfighter [I can't remember who the original author was but I'd love to credit him/her]. This analysed text for excessive length and presence of buzz words.
If I had it now (and if it worked in Libre Office) I suspect my PC would have melted :-)
I'm curious - how do you pronounce "honor"?
Don't know - but we pronounce honour as "on-err" :-)
At last a voice of sanity.
Just buy what you want/need when you want/need it.
I've never understood this "OMG Advertisers will know all about me!" -- just because a marketer targets you with adverts you don't have to act on them. Adverts are an invitation to trade - not a direct order..
Personally speaking, I choose what I buy based on need,features and value for money; if I consider adverts at all, it's generally in a negative way (if they can afford to spend serious amounts subsidising TV, radio etc then the price is too high)
Now if you are part of an enterprise domain, it seemingly takes even longer.
And if you have a corporate standard image with policies etc pushed out on each boot....
On a cold boot, I can wander off, make a cup of tea, come back and it may just be ready. On a request for a reboot after a system update (and why it has to reboot after a change is yet another gripe) I could walk into town, go to the supermarket, buy a box of biscuits, queue up at the checkout, walk back and still be waiting for a usable system.
Strange that all that downtime x the number of users never really appears in TCO calculations -- I guess that's what meetings were invented for (so we'd have something to do without access to the IT infrastructure
...and people ask me why I prefer Linux !
"It should be the other way around; you are better off being undead in rural places, lots of brains available"
Following that logic Washington and Westminster should be the best places of all many brains, but as they belong to politicians, most would be hardly used and thus in "near perfect*" condition.
*Only missing the "integrity" centres.
This is one of the more insightful postings here.
Elsewhere I read a comment along the lines of "poor brits having no guns to defend themselves" - completely missing the point that aggressors would also have guns and know where you lived.
Benjfowler -- I hope that you and your neighbours are safe and that the after effects of the riots aren't too severe; from the relative peace of a town outside London it looked bad. Good luck.
An interesting trend in the UK over the past few years has been for local companies to sponsor roundabouts.
I'm not sure who gets the cash (I suspect it's the local authority but could be the Highways Agency) but effectively, in exchange for providing gardening services (some flowers and a regular mowing of the grass) they get a discreet sign "Sponsored by XYZ" and company logo (some even plant flowers in the shape of their logo).
I've mentioned this before -- you don't need a rapid recharge at service stations if cars were fitted with standard sized batteries - just swap out your flat ones for fully charged units and let the garage charge them up overnight (or whenever power is lower cost in your vicinity).
In effect run your car on giant versions of an AA cell. If the form factor were suitable (with a convenient handle, relatively low weight and idiot-proof one-way-only fitting) then this could be run as a self service system -- customer drops their old battery in a dispenser, swipes their card and a new one pops out -- the dispenser could even route the flat battery to the charger units.
Suppliers can differentiate their products on the basis of capacity and max discharge rates.
Of course you'd either have to mandate standard battery sizes [through an independent organisation] or face each manufacturer making batteries with different form factors (so they can charge more money for them and use patents to stifle competition**) and then waiting for years for market forces to reduce variation.
This development could help the service stations reduce costs if it truly is possible to charge up more batteries in a shorter time.
** Cynical ? me? -- I've just been reading Slashdot for too long
I'd often daydreamed (but not had the knowledge or contacts to go through with it) of making toy "voodoo dolls" complete with pins.
I don't necessarily believe in them working but the stress relief when MS Word (yes I have to use it at work) does its own thing and messes up formatting again of having a Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates doll and a long pin or two handy would be worth anyone's money.
Guess I'll cross Mark Z off the list now.
Still, imagine how much a Darl figure would have been worth during the SCO saga.
This business idea given to the world free and gratis [but if you do decide to go into production, I wouldn't mind a sample to beta test for you]
Sorry - "a utopia" is correct.
I know it's confusing as the general rule is to use an before a word starting with a vowel, but English being English [and occasionally American :-)] there are exceptions.
If the word sounds like it starts with an implied "Y" sound (e.g. utopia sounds like yoo-topia, uniform sounds like yoo-niform) then use 'a' instead of 'an'.
There are also a few cases where a word starts with a [nearly] silent h when you use an instead of a (e.g. an honourable man, an hotel **).
If in doubt - say it out loud. If it sounds awkward with two successive vowel sounds, use 'an'.
** this is rapidly disappearing from common use in modern English - not sure it was ever used in American
Or just have a few hostages lined up as human shields?
Shocking as it is for some on Slashdot....guns are not always the answer and most people get through life quite happily without them.
Salesman: The maths geeks will tell you it's 4 but for today only I can let you have it for 3.75
Government statistician: What do you want it to be?
Tabloid newspaper: Shock horror! Four in a bed orgy!
I know you meant it rhetorically but...
I can see some markets being worried -- I'm looking with particular bitterness at the car parts business.
A few years ago I had a headlamp work loose on my car. On inspection the problem was the failure of a small (possibly deliberately feeble) plastic bracket which looked like it suffered a fatigue fracture. I had both parts which fitted together nicely but there was no hope of a simple repair with adhesive.
The cost for the replacement part (which had all of about 5p worth of plastic) was something like £15 [IIRC]. The car manufacturer, dealer and third party parts suppliers knew that their customers had to buy replacements, knew that the plastic part was sufficiently weirdly shaped to avoid work-arounds and knew that repair shops didn't care how much it cost as they could just pass it onto the customer. They were delighted that they could get away with charging such extortionate amounts.
Now fast forward to a case where the parts could be glued together (the strength doesn't matter) and then scanned / reprinted. Although it wouldn't be economical to get the printer for one single repair, a corner-shop facility charging, say £2.50 -- even as much as £5.00 -- would make themselves a nice return (and reach break-even quickly) and people like me would be happy with a significant saving.
This is the scenario which the vested interests would like to kill off.
Strictly speaking it's not just in the EU
The ECHR is a creation of the European Convention on Human Rights which was founded by the Council of Europe (which predates and has more members than the EU).
This distinction is deliberately blurred by some of the more anti-European press, some multinational companies and political parties who like to portray the EU as some kind of supranational big government bogeyman. Conflating the ECHR with EU mandates serves this purpose well. This attitude (which is similar to the 'health and safety gone mad' stories regularly featured) ensures maximum press coverage and outrage at the more egregious cases where "villains get treated better than victims" whilst the wins for the "little man" often pass by without comment.
In reality, like most systems, there are undesirable effects when pushed to extremes (and these cannot and should not be denied) but overall the vast majority of the cases covered represent common sense protection for the individual.
Since we seem to be playing "prime pedant" I should point out that neither you, the OP or I will be in any personal danger from making that assumption.
And purely because we're playing pedant -- I almost feel ashamed to post this but...
it should be neither .... nor
I agree with the original sentiment BTW
It's only a model
They said the same thing about Camelot !
Also, I'm quickly forgetting what "TV" is, as what few shows I watch aren't on a television, don't come over broadcast, don't come from television companies, and in which I don't watch any commercials.
But you're still paying for them :-(
For me, commercials are a positive disincentive to buy specific products -- Why should I pay a bit extra to cover the costs of the adverts which themselves pay for channels I don't watch?
The budgets for commercial stations are as big as or greater than publicly funded ones (like BBC) and that money has to come from somewhere -- our shopping bills. People moan about the UK licence fee because it's up front and not hidden in the weekly shop but the principle is exactly the same we're being charged for channels we choose not to watch!
And before the "free market rules" crowd start - after the major supermarkets have killed of most local trade, in most cases you only end up with a choice of which set of advertisers to subsidise. It's worse still for big ticket items - given the smaller sales volume, how much of the purchase price of a car goes to the TV companies (divide the total cost of adverts by units sold)?
Unless I'm having a "senior moment" this actually favours torrents :-)
1 Gbyte = 1000 MByte (or 1024 let's not open up tat argument again !!) so 1Gbyte of HTML would be $1000 (more than torrent)
Side issue: Wouldn't traffic shaping mean that they'd lose "Common Carrier" status as they are now inspecting packet data [albeit header only] ?
Personally speaking, it's academic anyway -- BT lost any chance of my being a customer after the Phorm fiasco.