This reminds me of Christmas and birthdays as a child, eagerly opening the cards from generous relatives in the hope of finding money, and often discovering only Book Tokens inside.
If you were really lucky and you caught the part time staff on a Saturday, sometimes they let you buy an LP or an audio cassette, even through they were only meant to exchange the tokens for actual books
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Sometimes it's important to realize geeks don't understand what normal people want in technology.
This is an important point which is often overlooked in technology discussion forums such as this one.
Steve's genius was in predicting the things nobody thought they wanted until he showed it to them. "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them," he once said. "By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
Yes, exactly - they are talking about what some call a "bare metal hypervisor" which normally means some very small minimalist operating system that serves just to get virtualization up and running.
Is it really THAT HARD to just pick an OS that meets your needs? Windows or Unix/Linux or OSX they are all very capable.
Fullheartedly agree. I use a few different OS in the course of my work, but the vast majority is done on my Mac. I sometimes run Windows applications (eg Visio) via Parallels on OS X and it all works perfectly well.
As long as everything works in a way that's convenient for me, I don't feel the need to search for technical problems I don't have in order to implement technical solutions I don't need.
I was told back in 2009 that Oracle had no intention of leaving IE 6 right when WIndows 7 was coming out. I was shocked as I knew businesses would be upgrading quickly... in the US and businesses have either upgraded, upgrading, or plan to upgrade in the next 6 months from what I seen. Bad time to keep supporting IE 6.
It just goes to show that Oracle know their customer base. I work with plenty of clients who have been "planning" to migrate away from legacy browsers, operating systems and applications for years.
In Oracles client base (ie, the enterprise market) it's not unusual to find several tens of thousands of employees, a few hundred departments, a couple of dozen operating systems, a few hundred applications, an army of in-house developers "tweaking" what everyone thought was a COTS package... and these are just the variables you can easily identify....
Whilst you're right in stating that almost all business are in the process of phasing out any remaining IE6, that process can be a very long and complex one when you scale up to enterprise environments and their associated legacy support requirements.
Yes, because websites will all be hosted in the magical cloud, which somehow transcends the need for servers, and nobody will ever, EVER want to host ANYTHING on their own servers. Idiot.
There isn't a -1 stupid moderation, so I substitute overrated.
When I was a young engineer in the early 90's most of my time was spent migrating services from mainframes to standalone servers. It was the epitome of progress - instead of these shared resources, you could have your very own dedicated resources, complete with redundant power, storage, memory, etc
At the time, one of the old engineers told me "we'll be changing all this back in 15 or 20 years, wait and see"
These days, I can appreciate the old man's wisdom. There are two trends which have been constant for as long as I've been working in IT:
A desire to centralise everything which is currently decentralised
A desire to decentralise everything which is currently centralised
Give it another 20 years, and I'll probably be seeing out the twighlight of my career dragging services back out of the "cloud" on to discrete hardware. Having your own dedicated resources will be the epitome of progress, compared to all that old-fashioned "cloud" computing.
Or maybe they are paid well enough that one hour of work is more than sufficient to support their lifestyle? There is no law that says you have to work eight hours per day.
The only people I know who can do this are independent consultants or contractors, where they set their own hours. You may not need an 8 hour per day job at market rate to support your lifestyle, but no one offers 2 hour per day jobs.
I'm one of those independent consultants you speak of, and usually my client contracts state that I will bill for a "Professional Working Day" - that is, the time it takes to get the job done on a particular day.
Some days I work 2 hours, some days I work 20 hours. If I wake up at 2am and feel like drawing up a project plan whilst I'm feeling productive, then I might work till 9am and call it a day. Likewise, some mornings I wake up and think "I'm not in the mood for work", so I go do something else instead for a couple of hours - usually those days are when I'm most productive later in the afternoon or evening.
Anyone who reads Dilbert on a regular basis will have seen the question often posed "How do you quantify 'work' when you're paid to think?". This is why consultants often charge a straight daily rate rather than clocking how many hours they sat behind a desk. That 2 hours at the gym, or the catch-up with an engineer over lunch is just as beneficial to my clients as the time I sit at a desk or in a meeting room. Inspiration time is arguably more important in my line of work than the actual deployment time. Once I have a fully formed idea, it doesn't take me long at all to properly document it and move on to the next workstream.
Some of my best inspiration comes when I'm out walking the dog through the woods. Too many companies don't realise their staff need time and space to think - so they end up hiring expensive consultants who are often no different from the staffers, other than the consultants have the freedom to give themselves the time and space to think and work effectively.
You are a tool. How can you support such a system which such great abuse of power possible?
You are welcome to your opinion, however I don't feel the need to issue any insults in your direction simply because our opinions differ.
I will answer your question though - there are actually a few reasons I'm in favour of City Centre CCTV:
My car is pretty safe parked on the street in the centre of London, Birmingham, Manchester, etc any time of the day or night
When clubs and bars close, there's always someone ready to pick a fight somewhere. The operator controlled CCTV means the police presence on the ground can be directed to where it's needed often before trouble gets out of hand
Operators are background checked, properly qualified, and must be SIA (Security Industry Authority) certified.
Frankly, I'm not important enough, interesting enough, or dangerous enough for anyone to waste their time tracking my every move on CCTV. If anyone tried, I think they would find it a boring job indeed!
I'm not saying the system is perfect - no system is - but personally I don't see the difference between a council-run CCTV system in the City Centre, with the operator directing the police to where they're needed, and the privately run system in every shop, club and bar, with the operator directing the private security to where they're needed.
I could see your point in the potential for abuse of power if they stuck a camera right outside my house for no reason, but we're talking about a system in a non-residental public place which is there for public safety.
There is definitely a noticeable difference in opinion between the US and the UK when it comes to CCTV - over here, I reckon a majority of people either consider it no big deal, or are actively in favour of these systems. Obviously opinions vary and there are certainly people in the UK as well who are bitterly opposed to any CCTV systems.
Ultimately, the reason I personally am in favour is that I consider the benefits to me (safety and security) outweigh the disbenefits to me (someone in a control room might notice me going about my business amongst the thousands of other people going about theirs). There are things that do bother me about my country, but CCTV in public places isn't one of them.
It's my understanding, that in places like the UK, vandals set a tire alight and throw it over the camera.
You're probably thinking of roadside speed cameras, which are almost universally unpopular, and often vandalised using a car tyre and some petrol (gasoline). The City centre operator-controlled cameras tend to be 30 or 40 feet off the ground and have a greater level of public support.
I believe the UK has amongst the highest concentration of cameras anywhere, but to be honest the vast majority of them are unmonitored and only inspected when retrospective evidence is required - with most images only retained for 30 days or so.
The Atlanta system seems more like the city centre schemes we have in the UK - they do actually provide a reasonable benefit in my opinion - especially late night at the weekends where police resources can be concentrated where they're most needed (ie around the bars and clubs) whilst keeping an overview of the surrounding area.
I've used the home keys for as long as I can remember (legacy from learning to type on an old manual keyboard in the 1980's and using vi pretty much daily for the past 20 years)
The one thing that has changed my habits recently though, was the Apple Magic Trackpad. I've always hated the mouse, and despise programs that make me take my hands away from the keyboard to navigate or access menu functions (hence my love of vi).
These days, though, I have my mouse on the right hand side and my trackpad on the left. I find that I actually use them interchangeably depending which hand is the most convenient to leave the keyboard. I find I spend a lot less time cursing GUIs with this configuration.
I do have a few typing quirks though - I only ever use the right shift key and I travel slightly away from the standard "touch typing" key-to-finger assignments, but it works for me.
When you or I go to the police and tell them our phone/computer was stolen, but we can track it via GPS from any computer and can even use the built-in camera to take pictures of the perpetrator, they tell us to take a hike and go read up on vigilante justice.
When Apple goes to the police with a missing phone, the police go with them, stick around to search a person's house, and in the last case...
That's because there's a difference between the value of an individual's retail handset and an industrial prototype.
In the Gizmodo instance, the cost of the loss wasn't a few hundred bucks for a handset - it was a few hundred thousand, or maybe even a few million bucks as potential customers abruptly stopped purchasing the current product line in the shops at the time.
If you or I contributed as many tax dollars to the US as Apple, we could probably expect a pretty darn attentive service from the police as well.
Well I'm in my mid 30's, and certainly had a decent book collection as a child...
Depends what you class as "extensive", but I certainly recall collecting:
Roald Dahl books (birthday / christmas present requests as a youngster)
Hardy Boys series (pocket money as a pre-teen)
Discworld series (as a teenager)
I don't think I was particularly unusual in my peers. I went to a standard state school (UK) and had all the latest technology at my disposal (ZX Spectrum, Sony Walkman, etc)
Thinking further back, I'm pretty sure I had a collection of "Mr Men" books too
Sounds like it. You place your order through the supermarket website, it is passed to your local delivery branch (which is a perfectly normal supermarket that has a few refrigerated vans) which fills the order.
Correct in the UK for all the supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, etc) but not for Ocado.
Tesco do have at least one "picking centre" in South London (Croydon), although this is basically a supermarket with no customers - they still push trollies down the aisles to pick up whatever's on your list before sticking it in a van and delivering it somewhere fiarly local.
As far as I know, Ocado is the only one in the UK which has a fully automated warehouse, and near national delivery (they deliver as far north as Manchester and beyond from the Hatfield warehouse).
Ocado is a different model from either the supermarkets or Amazon, in that Ocado is basically a large distribution network (which happens to deliver groceries). When you order online, their system already knows which of their vans will be in your area, and adjusts the pricing for delivery slots accordingly.
Most of the London orders are taken straight from Hatfield to the customer in the delivery van, there are also some distributions hubs dotted around the country - if you're in Manchester, for example, your order will be picked in Hatfield, loaded on to the Manchester shuttle truck, then unloaded in Manchester on to a van and forward to your door.
I guess this model probably has an effective radius of around 200 miles per warehouse - so it could scale up to US sizes, but would need serious investment. Ocado are currently building their second distribution centre in the Midlands - probably more to do with demand than distance.
Interesting, having clicked through the links on the OP, I got to This interview which gives us a better insight...
"Among the specific issues is ambiguity about how company policies and regulations are administered and enforced, Moll says. Many policies are set at the corporate level, but regional and store managers have discretion to change the rules or enforce them differently..."
Umm... correct me if I'm wrong, but this is how management works, and why there's a manager in every store adapting to what works best for their particular store.
Even pay has its variabilities. “They don’t really have a pay scale. I believe that’s largely up to each region and each market,” Moll says. Like most national companies, Apple’s pay rates vary according by region. But unlike most companies, store managers seem to have the ability to hire new employees at rates beyond the range, Moll says.
Again, this is a little thing called "empowerment" which means their store managers can actually make decisions on how to best run their particular store. I'm guessing the cost of living differs dramatically across all the locations where Apple has stores, and store mangers could use the discretion to retain particularly valuable staff who might have an extra hour's commute, for example?
"Moll also says there’s a lot of “favoritism among store management teams, or un-favoritism,” when good-performing employees are unfairly evaluated. “They try to find ways to get rid of those employees, where they may be scrutinized more than others,” he says"
Now this one seems to be the crux of the matter. personally I find it hard to believe that store managers are queuing up to get rid of their best performing employees. I could, however, understand if a store manager paid particular attention to someone who might be doing decent sales, but had an attitude problem that could cause issues.
From that interview, everything he says makes Apple look like a progressive employer who empowers their management to reward the staff who add value to the business. This sounds like sour grapes from someone who has worked "in multiple stores" and can't get past the shop floor for whatever reason. Could it be the big chip on his shoulder noticing that other people seem to be doing better than him?
Why is anyone even bothering to report this story?
One part time employee doesn't like his job, but his first thought isn't to quit and go work elsewhere?
Unions are a relic of the "one job for life" generation. These days worker mobility does more to keep a check on pay and conditions than any of the unions, who care only about what power they can hold on to for the union leaders themselves.
Perhaps this chap might be about to discover a thing or two about the flexible job market himself - I doubt very much a part time retail drone generating headlines like this would go down well with any employer.
I'll be calling them [npg.org.uk] first thing Monday (in my capacity as "just a blogger on Wikimedia-related topics") to establish just what they think they're doing here. Other bloggers and, if interested, journalists may wish to do the same, to establish what their consistent response is.
"The basic idea is that you don't have to consent to a breathalyser test; however, the police equally don't have to let you go if they suspect you'd fail it."
In the UK you can be charged with "failing to provide a breath specimin", which then leads to instant arrest... whereby you are requested for a blood sample. Again you may refuse to comply, but you will be charged with failure to provide a specimin.
"One question is: who would actually be writing these laws that would go through without parliamentary approval, if not parliament?"
That would be the Civil Service, which reminds me of a joke I heard the other week on Radio 2...
A prostitute, and architect and a civil servant are arguing over who works in the oldest profession.
"Everyone knows mine is the oldest profession, back to biblical times", claims the prostitute. "Ah..", says the architect, "but God created order out of the chaos; therefore architecture is older than prostitution". The prostitue reluctantly agrees. "Who do you think created the chaos?", asks the Civil Servant.
"How much does the gov't spend to administer/collect this tax and find/prosecute offenders?...
The Government doesn't spend a penny - the TV Licensing Authority is the independent self-funding revenue department for the BBC....By funding the BBC out of general tax revenue, the second amount will be reduced to zero.
It wouldn't reduce the evasion rate to zero - it would simply be moving the responsibility for reprimanding offenders from the TV Licensing Authority to HM Revenue and Customs, and placing the BBC in direct State control.
You don't need a TV licence unless your television is set up to receive broadcast programmes.
In my house, we don't watch any broadcast programmes, but we do watch a lot of DVD's, so we have a set hooked up to our DVD player.
Recently we were getting increasingly threatening letters from the TV Licensing people, which I ignored after checking checking on http://tvlicensing.co.uk/information/index.jsp#lin k1 which states you need a licence "If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes"
Roll on a couple of weeks and one of the TV inspectors came knocking on my door, had a quick look at my setup and agreed I don't need to pay a license as I had no aerial and no way of receiving broadcast programmes.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of Christmas and birthdays as a child, eagerly opening the cards from generous relatives in the hope of finding money, and often discovering only Book Tokens inside.
If you were really lucky and you caught the part time staff on a Saturday, sometimes they let you buy an LP or an audio cassette, even through they were only meant to exchange the tokens for actual books
Sometimes it's important to realize geeks don't understand what normal people want in technology.
This is an important point which is often overlooked in technology discussion forums such as this one.
Steve's genius was in predicting the things nobody thought they wanted until he showed it to them. "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them," he once said. "By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
Yes, exactly - they are talking about what some call a "bare metal hypervisor" which normally means some very small minimalist operating system that serves just to get virtualization up and running.
Is it really THAT HARD to just pick an OS that meets your needs? Windows or Unix/Linux or OSX they are all very capable.
Fullheartedly agree. I use a few different OS in the course of my work, but the vast majority is done on my Mac. I sometimes run Windows applications (eg Visio) via Parallels on OS X and it all works perfectly well.
As long as everything works in a way that's convenient for me, I don't feel the need to search for technical problems I don't have in order to implement technical solutions I don't need.
I was told back in 2009 that Oracle had no intention of leaving IE 6 right when WIndows 7 was coming out. I was shocked as I knew businesses would be upgrading quickly... in the US and businesses have either upgraded, upgrading, or plan to upgrade in the next 6 months from what I seen. Bad time to keep supporting IE 6.
It just goes to show that Oracle know their customer base. I work with plenty of clients who have been "planning" to migrate away from legacy browsers, operating systems and applications for years.
In Oracles client base (ie, the enterprise market) it's not unusual to find several tens of thousands of employees, a few hundred departments, a couple of dozen operating systems, a few hundred applications, an army of in-house developers "tweaking" what everyone thought was a COTS package... and these are just the variables you can easily identify....
Whilst you're right in stating that almost all business are in the process of phasing out any remaining IE6, that process can be a very long and complex one when you scale up to enterprise environments and their associated legacy support requirements.
Yes, because websites will all be hosted in the magical cloud, which somehow transcends the need for servers, and nobody will ever, EVER want to host ANYTHING on their own servers. Idiot.
There isn't a -1 stupid moderation, so I substitute overrated.
When I was a young engineer in the early 90's most of my time was spent migrating services from mainframes to standalone servers. It was the epitome of progress - instead of these shared resources, you could have your very own dedicated resources, complete with redundant power, storage, memory, etc
At the time, one of the old engineers told me "we'll be changing all this back in 15 or 20 years, wait and see"
These days, I can appreciate the old man's wisdom. There are two trends which have been constant for as long as I've been working in IT:
Give it another 20 years, and I'll probably be seeing out the twighlight of my career dragging services back out of the "cloud" on to discrete hardware. Having your own dedicated resources will be the epitome of progress, compared to all that old-fashioned "cloud" computing.
The only people I know who can do this are independent consultants or contractors, where they set their own hours. You may not need an 8 hour per day job at market rate to support your lifestyle, but no one offers 2 hour per day jobs.
I'm one of those independent consultants you speak of, and usually my client contracts state that I will bill for a "Professional Working Day" - that is, the time it takes to get the job done on a particular day.
Some days I work 2 hours, some days I work 20 hours. If I wake up at 2am and feel like drawing up a project plan whilst I'm feeling productive, then I might work till 9am and call it a day. Likewise, some mornings I wake up and think "I'm not in the mood for work", so I go do something else instead for a couple of hours - usually those days are when I'm most productive later in the afternoon or evening.
Anyone who reads Dilbert on a regular basis will have seen the question often posed "How do you quantify 'work' when you're paid to think?". This is why consultants often charge a straight daily rate rather than clocking how many hours they sat behind a desk. That 2 hours at the gym, or the catch-up with an engineer over lunch is just as beneficial to my clients as the time I sit at a desk or in a meeting room. Inspiration time is arguably more important in my line of work than the actual deployment time. Once I have a fully formed idea, it doesn't take me long at all to properly document it and move on to the next workstream.
Some of my best inspiration comes when I'm out walking the dog through the woods. Too many companies don't realise their staff need time and space to think - so they end up hiring expensive consultants who are often no different from the staffers, other than the consultants have the freedom to give themselves the time and space to think and work effectively.
You are a tool. How can you support such a system which such great abuse of power possible?
You are welcome to your opinion, however I don't feel the need to issue any insults in your direction simply because our opinions differ.
I will answer your question though - there are actually a few reasons I'm in favour of City Centre CCTV:
I'm not saying the system is perfect - no system is - but personally I don't see the difference between a council-run CCTV system in the City Centre, with the operator directing the police to where they're needed, and the privately run system in every shop, club and bar, with the operator directing the private security to where they're needed.
I could see your point in the potential for abuse of power if they stuck a camera right outside my house for no reason, but we're talking about a system in a non-residental public place which is there for public safety.
There is definitely a noticeable difference in opinion between the US and the UK when it comes to CCTV - over here, I reckon a majority of people either consider it no big deal, or are actively in favour of these systems. Obviously opinions vary and there are certainly people in the UK as well who are bitterly opposed to any CCTV systems.
Ultimately, the reason I personally am in favour is that I consider the benefits to me (safety and security) outweigh the disbenefits to me (someone in a control room might notice me going about my business amongst the thousands of other people going about theirs). There are things that do bother me about my country, but CCTV in public places isn't one of them.
How's that working for London?
Well there's places in London I occasionally walk though alone in the evening, where I find the presence of CCTV reassuring.
It's my understanding, that in places like the UK, vandals set a tire alight and throw it over the camera.
You're probably thinking of roadside speed cameras, which are almost universally unpopular, and often vandalised using a car tyre and some petrol (gasoline). The City centre operator-controlled cameras tend to be 30 or 40 feet off the ground and have a greater level of public support.
I believe the UK has amongst the highest concentration of cameras anywhere, but to be honest the vast majority of them are unmonitored and only inspected when retrospective evidence is required - with most images only retained for 30 days or so.
The Atlanta system seems more like the city centre schemes we have in the UK - they do actually provide a reasonable benefit in my opinion - especially late night at the weekends where police resources can be concentrated where they're most needed (ie around the bars and clubs) whilst keeping an overview of the surrounding area.
Indeed, Regenerative Braking has been around for years, and is in effective use around the world in various guises.
The original article reads more like a marketing shot from Vycon's PR department than a news bulletin.
I've used the home keys for as long as I can remember (legacy from learning to type on an old manual keyboard in the 1980's and using vi pretty much daily for the past 20 years)
The one thing that has changed my habits recently though, was the Apple Magic Trackpad. I've always hated the mouse, and despise programs that make me take my hands away from the keyboard to navigate or access menu functions (hence my love of vi).
These days, though, I have my mouse on the right hand side and my trackpad on the left. I find that I actually use them interchangeably depending which hand is the most convenient to leave the keyboard. I find I spend a lot less time cursing GUIs with this configuration.
I do have a few typing quirks though - I only ever use the right shift key and I travel slightly away from the standard "touch typing" key-to-finger assignments, but it works for me.
When you or I go to the police and tell them our phone/computer was stolen, but we can track it via GPS from any computer and can even use the built-in camera to take pictures of the perpetrator, they tell us to take a hike and go read up on vigilante justice.
When Apple goes to the police with a missing phone, the police go with them, stick around to search a person's house, and in the last case...
That's because there's a difference between the value of an individual's retail handset and an industrial prototype.
In the Gizmodo instance, the cost of the loss wasn't a few hundred bucks for a handset - it was a few hundred thousand, or maybe even a few million bucks as potential customers abruptly stopped purchasing the current product line in the shops at the time.
If you or I contributed as many tax dollars to the US as Apple, we could probably expect a pretty darn attentive service from the police as well.
Depends what you class as "extensive", but I certainly recall collecting:
I don't think I was particularly unusual in my peers. I went to a standard state school (UK) and had all the latest technology at my disposal (ZX Spectrum, Sony Walkman, etc)
Thinking further back, I'm pretty sure I had a collection of "Mr Men" books too
Correct in the UK for all the supermarkets (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, etc) but not for Ocado.
Tesco do have at least one "picking centre" in South London (Croydon), although this is basically a supermarket with no customers - they still push trollies down the aisles to pick up whatever's on your list before sticking it in a van and delivering it somewhere fiarly local.
As far as I know, Ocado is the only one in the UK which has a fully automated warehouse, and near national delivery (they deliver as far north as Manchester and beyond from the Hatfield warehouse).
Ocado is a different model from either the supermarkets or Amazon, in that Ocado is basically a large distribution network (which happens to deliver groceries). When you order online, their system already knows which of their vans will be in your area, and adjusts the pricing for delivery slots accordingly.
Most of the London orders are taken straight from Hatfield to the customer in the delivery van, there are also some distributions hubs dotted around the country - if you're in Manchester, for example, your order will be picked in Hatfield, loaded on to the Manchester shuttle truck, then unloaded in Manchester on to a van and forward to your door.
I guess this model probably has an effective radius of around 200 miles per warehouse - so it could scale up to US sizes, but would need serious investment. Ocado are currently building their second distribution centre in the Midlands - probably more to do with demand than distance.
Umm... correct me if I'm wrong, but this is how management works, and why there's a manager in every store adapting to what works best for their particular store.
Again, this is a little thing called "empowerment" which means their store managers can actually make decisions on how to best run their particular store. I'm guessing the cost of living differs dramatically across all the locations where Apple has stores, and store mangers could use the discretion to retain particularly valuable staff who might have an extra hour's commute, for example?
Now this one seems to be the crux of the matter. personally I find it hard to believe that store managers are queuing up to get rid of their best performing employees. I could, however, understand if a store manager paid particular attention to someone who might be doing decent sales, but had an attitude problem that could cause issues.
From that interview, everything he says makes Apple look like a progressive employer who empowers their management to reward the staff who add value to the business. This sounds like sour grapes from someone who has worked "in multiple stores" and can't get past the shop floor for whatever reason. Could it be the big chip on his shoulder noticing that other people seem to be doing better than him?
Why is anyone even bothering to report this story?
One part time employee doesn't like his job, but his first thought isn't to quit and go work elsewhere?
Unions are a relic of the "one job for life" generation. These days worker mobility does more to keep a check on pay and conditions than any of the unions, who care only about what power they can hold on to for the union leaders themselves.
Perhaps this chap might be about to discover a thing or two about the flexible job market himself - I doubt very much a part time retail drone generating headlines like this would go down well with any employer.
I'll be calling them [npg.org.uk] first thing Monday (in my capacity as "just a blogger on Wikimedia-related topics") to establish just what they think they're doing here. Other bloggers and, if interested, journalists may wish to do the same, to establish what their consistent response is.
Don't you feel a more honest approach would be to call them in your capacity as Press Officer for Wikimedia UK and a Volunteer Media Contact for the Wikimedia Foundation.?
It seems you have a lot to say on this particular subject without making clear your motives?
The key was pretty important on the BBC micro if you wanted to boot from floppy disk + or from Econet.
"The basic idea is that you don't have to consent to a breathalyser test; however, the police equally don't have to let you go if they suspect you'd fail it."
In the UK you can be charged with "failing to provide a breath specimin", which then leads to instant arrest... whereby you are requested for a blood sample. Again you may refuse to comply, but you will be charged with failure to provide a specimin.
"One question is: who would actually be writing these laws that would go through without parliamentary approval, if not parliament?"
That would be the Civil Service, which reminds me of a joke I heard the other week on Radio 2...
A prostitute, and architect and a civil servant are arguing over who works in the oldest profession.
"Everyone knows mine is the oldest profession, back to biblical times", claims the prostitute.
"Ah..", says the architect, "but God created order out of the chaos; therefore architecture is older than prostitution".
The prostitue reluctantly agrees.
"Who do you think created the chaos?", asks the Civil Servant.
They pick up the signal generated by the oscillator in part of the tuning signal.
"How much does the gov't spend to administer/collect this tax and find/prosecute offenders?...
...By funding the BBC out of general tax revenue, the second amount will be reduced to zero.
The Government doesn't spend a penny - the TV Licensing Authority is the independent self-funding revenue department for the BBC.
It wouldn't reduce the evasion rate to zero - it would simply be moving the responsibility for reprimanding offenders from the TV Licensing Authority to HM Revenue and Customs, and placing the BBC in direct State control.
"Why did you let them in?"
Because my missus was panicking at the threatening letters and about to sign a Direct Debit form, so I let them in to prove to her I was right.
Ever tried telling your woman you're right about something when you know you're right?
"Isn't this a burden on the poor? Don't the richer people pay a lot less relative to their income?"
Do rich people have to pay more for satelite / cable TV where you live? Do the TV companies subsidies the poor?
You don't need a TV licence unless your television is set up to receive broadcast programmes.
n k1 which states you need a licence "If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes"
In my house, we don't watch any broadcast programmes, but we do watch a lot of DVD's, so we have a set hooked up to our DVD player.
Recently we were getting increasingly threatening letters from the TV Licensing people, which I ignored after checking checking on http://tvlicensing.co.uk/information/index.jsp#li
Roll on a couple of weeks and one of the TV inspectors came knocking on my door, had a quick look at my setup and agreed I don't need to pay a license as I had no aerial and no way of receiving broadcast programmes.
Result!