Muggers use mugging because there are weak people to steal money from. No weak people, no profit from mugging, no reason to mug in the first place.
Most people take anti-mugging precautions automatically without thinking about it.
You can't change the fact that you're female and/or small in stature, perhaps making you a more likely target to a mugger.
You can not go out alone late at night, not walk down dark alleys, not carry too much money with you, not get blind drunk in public, etc. etc. This are just common-sense anti-mugging precautions.
Not opening suspect emails, securing your PC correctly, using a paper shredder are all, likewise, common-sense anti-phishing precautions.
If you're in the UK like me, you know the story of Tony Martin, the farmer who disturbed two burglars in his house- for those that don't, Tony Martin served 5 years in prison for killing one of the burglars and wounding the other in the leg with an illegally possessed shotgun.
I can't remember the names of the burglars but the BBC have just paid the one who survived £4500 for assisting in making a documentary about the case.
I don't sympathise fully with Tony Martin but I do not believe that a convicted criminal should be allowed to make personal profit as a result of a crime they have committed - no different to what Mitnick is doing now.
Yes, he's served his time, he's paid his debt to society but he'd be a nobody now were it not for his previous hacker reputation.
We're getting a lot more into "Chip and Pin" cards over here in the UK now.
Presumably, therefore, credit card fraud in the future will not only require the obtaining of a credit card by fraudulent means but also some kind of hardware hack to use a cloned card.
Does that mean there could be a new crime of "phish and chipping"?
But how much worse would it be if Apple took over?
No, it would be better.
If only because the sight of Steve Jobs skipping up and down a stage with sweaty armpits screaming "Developers" over and over again would probably not be now giving me such bad nightmares...
PS. So how much public focus does Tsutomu Shimomura, the guy who caught Mitnick, get these days? Surely, by virtue of the fact he caught Mitnick, that makes him smarter...
still think it was wrong to make an analogy of hackers and paedophiles
Please take this comment in context - a convicted paedophile might well be suitable to work in computer security in the same way a convicted hacker might do a good job of running a children's playgroup! It's an analogy, nothing more - in the same way that cars and aircraft both have wheels...
While I don't believe a peadophile could help very much in preventing others in commiting similar crimes
This is going off-topic a little but why not? Perhaps he/she has information about where others of his ilk hang out on the Internet, obtain indecent pictures from, etc? All useful information to a police investigation...
I care much more for the innovative and unique individuals.
Right, so recognise the innovative and the unique, not the notorious...
I don't really see being technically inept or unfamiliar with computer usage and email security as having anything to do with being stupid or smart.
Sorry, but if you cannot take the cynical viewpoint of "reading between the lines" any information sent to you by anyone trying to make money from you, that makes you stupid in my book - whether that's a company trying to sell you their latest secure operating system or a phisher trying to scam you.
But I guess nerds like to believe being familiar with current technology somehow makes them superior to all those plebes who don't use computers much in their day to day lives.
No, it makes nerds like me superior to the plebs in just about all things computers - in the same way I'm a pleb when it comes to wood-working compared to a carpentry "nerd" friend of mine.
I remember playing Elite on a friend's one at about the age of 18! Never owned one though, I had ZX Spectrums, then the Commodore Amiga.
Mind you, the BBC Micro was more of an alliance between Acorn and the BBC - sure, any BBC program about computers at the time usually had a BBC Micro in it but I think it was not much more than a license for Acorn to use the BBC "brand name".
Scammers use phishing because there are stupid people to leech money from. No stupid people, no profit from phishing, no reason to phish in the first place.
The sooner people accept responsibility for their own lives and their own personal information, the sooner people realise that with every Bill or Law that gets passed, the more they hand over the controls of their lives to the nanny state.
If the stupid people can't be bothered to protect their private information, if they can't simply delete emails they don't 100% trust the source of, if they can't invest in a paper shredder, if they believe all those glossy adverts about the security of their chosen operating system, then more fool them.
But please don't let us smart people also lose our personal liberties as a result of their stupidity.
No phishing scam has ever got me and they never will.
To even remotely suggest that he is in similar category as paedophile's is just idiotic and/or ignorant.
No, I made an analogy to a paedophile but if you looked elsewhere in my comment, you'd see that I don't consider Mitnick's crimes to have justified the sentence he got compared to other types of crime where, say, someone is injured or killed.
But the fact is that Mitnick is making his money now based primarily on his reputation of previous hacking activities is wrong. What about all the normal, hard-working people without criminal records who work in computer security, for example? Do they get the same kind of notoriety?
Sorry, Mitnick's a "celebrity", nothing more and whilst he has paid for his crimes, demonstrating the ability to commit a crime in the first place says a whole lot more about a person.
He's profiting from his crimes and that to me is wrong.
Think about it - we don't have special taxes for the above, so why should the BBC be any different?
If you're asking me the question as to whether I would prefer a BBC that I pay for rather than one funded from advertising, then I definitely choose the former - that's because (as I think you yourself imply) I consider the BBC to be a public service first, I don't want to be constantly bombarded by advertising and I think the BBC has undertaken TV and radio program projects that would not have been made by anyone else - therefore, in my mind, the BBC is there to cater to the minority audiences; not just the sci-fi geeks like me but also programming for the Asian community, etc. etc.
Whether that money comes from taxation or a license makes no real difference to me - likewise, I don't really use libraries, don't go to museums too often but I'm happy to help fund them for the people that do use them or for when I may want to use them myself in the future.
The point I'm trying to make is that the BBC's prime concern should be to provide a broad cross-section of programming to those that fund it. Through a licensing scheme, the BBC can focus on entertainment programming - if it was funded through taxation, the "public service" element would be brought to the forefront of people's minds (after all, we pay taxes for "services") so the obligation of the BBC would perhaps be broadened to more educational and public service programming. However, since the BBC seems to already do much in this regard anyway (look at the amount of foreign language material on the web-site for example) I don't see there being much of a change in what it would need to do.
On a related subject, I thought someone once told me that it was possible to get cheap audio copies of radio shows from a BBC archive resource somewhere.
Does anyone know if this is the case or if it's planned by the BBC themselves?
Stick all the virus-ridden, spyware-infected, Windows PC users in their own worm-infested part of the Internet and leave the rest of us sensible users on a nice, clean, empty superhighway!:-)
No one has yet mentioned the greatest jewel of the BBC: BBC radio.
They can scrap Radio 1 in an instance for all I care (mind you, I'm a grumpy middle-aged old man so it's endless pop tunes are not aimed at me) but Radio 4 is superb!
And when you can go into a Barnes & Noble bookstore in the US and see audio book CDs of the BBC's adaptations of Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc, is does fill you with a certain degree of pride over the BBC. Not to mention Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, etc.
I'd like to see the BBC adopt a model such as Mandrake use, i.e. people who like it pay, in order to keep it free for everyone to use.
I recognise the sentiment but I don't think it would work. Personally, as someone in a minority BBC audience in as much as I like comedy, sci-fi and fantasy broadcasting and good documentaries, with no interest in reality TV, soaps and other "dumbed down" TV, if I get a few hours of my programming a week, whether TV or radio, I'm more than happy with paying my TV license for that.
If I have an objection to the way the BBC operates, it's the pricing of media containing BBC shows. I fail to understand how a DVD or CD of a show I have already paid for (through my license) can be charged at the same price as, say, a standard audio CD or movie DVD.
So how come people can miraculously find the time and money to learn to drive a car when they're forced to getting a driving license before going out on the roads?
The purpose of a driving license is to give some kind of guarantee to other road users that you know what you are doing - so what's the difference applying the same argument to PCs and the Internet?
What does Google stand to gain by writing their own OS?
You're forgetting that we computer geeks with our in-depth workings of our operating systems are very much in a minority compared to the overall computer-using population.
The vast majority of people have been convinced by very clever marketing that what they actually need is a totally seamless operating system where they can just pay someone else to fix it when their PC goes wrong. (The reality of the situation is that all of us human beings are getting lazier and find it easier to throw money at a problem rather than getting off our backsides and learning the stuff ourselves - but that's another story).
The Internet is now synonymous to the PC, which is why MS were so successful getting IE embedded into Windows in the first place, consequently Google are taking planning to take things a stage further and hide the barriers between "the PC" and "the network" a bit more.
Incidentally, anyone who knows the architecture of UNIX and Linux understands that this kind of thing has been done for years on those kinds of OSes anyway - just look at the structure of the filesystem and you can hide all manner of remote disks and network partitions in there without the user needing to know anything about it.
However, I do think Google have their work cut out for them if they're planning to do this with Linux. Don't get me wrong, Linux is my personal choice of OS and it's getting easier for Joe Bloke to use all of the time. The problem is that Linux, and Google, are always going to be playing a catchup game with Joe Bloke user because clever marketing has convinced him that, as time goes on, he needs to care less and less about the OS his device runs on and just focus on what he needs that device to do. (The reality, of course, is that superbly clever Microsoft marketing has stopped Joe Bloke ever stopping and thinking about how much time he does have to spend updating virus checkers, install patches and run Spyware utilities.)
So I wish Google every success in getting the seamless OS developed but, even if they manage to do it, it will be a much different beast to the Linux we know, love and use currently.
If you look at the embedded market, for example, it could be argued that the most successful devices are those where you don't actually know what OS is running at their cores.
Provided that the money raised goes into an education initiative to give Joe Bloke some government sponsored training into how to use his computer properly, I don't see a problem.
Even go a stage further and insist every household has to have someone with a PC use accreditation to be able to connect to the Internet.
As a computer geek, I'm sick and tired of having to endlessly fix the crappy Windows PCs of friends and relatives, I'm totally bored with spending time keeping my machines (both Linux and Windows ones) updated only to still have my Internet connection slow to a crawl every time the latest Windows worm hits and maybe the government can "sponsor" non-commercial citizens' web-sites so that I'm not constantly bombarded by banner ads and pop-ups every time I load a page in my browser.
UK Gov. can even go a stage further and send out a free Knoppix CD with each PC Tax registration form:-)
Let's cut with this "verbal garnishing" crap as though you're some kind of Robin Hood fighting for the injustices of the poor.
Just because you can do something does not not make it right to do it. If you see a security weakness, whether it's in a computer system or in the outside world, then you carry out your social responsibility and let whoever needs to know about it.
Mitnick probably didn't deserve to serve the time in jail that he did, considering that you can serve less time in jail for a manslaughter or drunk-driving offence, but the guy's a criminal, end of story.
Seeking advice from Mitnick about security is as bad as asking a paedophile how to set up a childrens' playgroup.
Next you'll be trying to convince me that there's an nutty, rich, in-bred old English woman, with a grandson who dresses up in a Nazi uniform, handing out titles of the British Realm to convicted American monopolists!
A is NOT for Apple B is for Blue Screen C is for smelly Communist UNIX hippy programmers because D is for nice charming DotNet programmers E is for Excel F is for FrontPage G is for GMail but (H is for) Hotmail is better I is for Internet Explorer that used to incorporate (J is for) Java that we stole from Sun K is Knighthood, Lord Billy the Peer L is for very nasty hippy communist words we never speak M is for money, money, money, money and even more money N is for Netscape, who we totally trashed O is for Opera, who we'd like to have trashed also P is for PowerPoint Q is for Halo 2, starts selling at midnight R is for Redmond, our place of worship S is for Steve Ballmer, Sweaty armpits and Silly dancing T is for Trusted Computing because U is too stupid to be "trusted" with a computer V is for Volume Licensing, our "bread and butter" W is for Windows Media Player 10 which bundled with (X is for) XP stops (Y is for) your playing smelly Communist music we don't want you to and lets us keep you caged in the Microsoft (Z is for) human zoo.
For the benefit of our/. overseas colleagues, the BBC broadcasts both multiple TV and Radio stations and does not obtain any income from advertising, instead being funded by the TV License - anyone in the UK who owns a TV (or any device for receiving TV signals) is expected to pay £126 (=$200 US approximately) per year for that service. The BBC can therefore be described as one of the last "public service" broadcasting services in the world.
With that said, as a "true Brit", the BBC has always been a broadcasting service that I have always been very proud of. It has come in for a lot of criticism recently, perhaps rightfully so, as it's played the "ratings chasing" game of copying other channels and broadcasting far too much reality TV dross in favour of good drama and comedy shows - however, bringing the BBC under some governmental control means that the BBC will hopefully be forced to provide varied programming again, rather than "dumbed down TV" for the masses.
In Britain, we can take great pride in the fact that world recognised shows like Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf, Dr Who, Monty Python's Flying Circus, etc exist because of the BBC - likewise the radio programming, specifically Radio 4 which originally did the HHGTTG radio shows and the adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, as well as numerous dramas and plays.
I'm happy to continue paying my TV license for good quality programming and lack of advertising. All we need now are some more good comedy shows and I'll be happy...
The final issue to mention is the BBC's web site which is of tremendously high quality. They put a lot of work into supporting media formats across multiple OSes (there's even some Linux support there!) and as someone who's trying to learn Spanish at the moment, there's a wealth of educational and language resource there also.
In Britain, we probably don't have too many things to be proud of but the BBC is our best trademark to the world and something we should cherish.
Most people seem to view P2P as the technology for copyright violation and piracy but people have been doing this for years on the 80,000+ newgroups on Usenet - if anything, the amount of MP3s, movies, warez, etc on Usenet makes the selection available on P2P networks look pretty insignificant.
The point I'm making is that for years, ISPs have been providing Usenet services to their subscribers, everyone knows that pirated material is on Usenet yet I've not heard of an ISP being forced to shut down the service due to pressures from the likes of the MPAA or RIAA.
...when Paramount actually start making Season 5 of Enterprise, just make sure you get your cut of their profits from the episode sales, merchandise and subsequent DVD releases.
Personally, I think this sucks. Paramount is a movie & TV monolith perfectly capable of financing this on their own if there is popular demand. If people care that much about a new Enterprise series, the solution is to apply pressure to Paramount with words, not money. If they still won't budge then start boycotting what they currently do.
This just demonstrates that throwing money at a problem is far easier to most people that getting up off their backsides and just taking direct positive action.
I wonder what sort of precedent this sets for the future - Joe Average funds the making of a movie/TV series as well as paying for cinema tickets/cable TV subscription and subsequent DVD release.
As Shatner said in the title of a recent book, "Get A Life!" - Paramount is taking you all for suckers and just sitting back reaping the profits...
Slashdot Mirror
Most people take anti-mugging precautions automatically without thinking about it.
You can't change the fact that you're female and/or small in stature, perhaps making you a more likely target to a mugger.
You can not go out alone late at night, not walk down dark alleys, not carry too much money with you, not get blind drunk in public, etc. etc. This are just common-sense anti-mugging precautions.
Not opening suspect emails, securing your PC correctly, using a paper shredder are all, likewise, common-sense anti-phishing precautions.
I can't remember the names of the burglars but the BBC have just paid the one who survived £4500 for assisting in making a documentary about the case.
I don't sympathise fully with Tony Martin but I do not believe that a convicted criminal should be allowed to make personal profit as a result of a crime they have committed - no different to what Mitnick is doing now.
Yes, he's served his time, he's paid his debt to society but he'd be a nobody now were it not for his previous hacker reputation.
Presumably, therefore, credit card fraud in the future will not only require the obtaining of a credit card by fraudulent means but also some kind of hardware hack to use a cloned card.
Does that mean there could be a new crime of "phish and chipping"?
I'll get my coat...
No, it would be better.
If only because the sight of Steve Jobs skipping up and down a stage with sweaty armpits screaming "Developers" over and over again would probably not be now giving me such bad nightmares...
PS. So how much public focus does Tsutomu Shimomura, the guy who caught Mitnick, get these days? Surely, by virtue of the fact he caught Mitnick, that makes him smarter...
Please take this comment in context - a convicted paedophile might well be suitable to work in computer security in the same way a convicted hacker might do a good job of running a children's playgroup! It's an analogy, nothing more - in the same way that cars and aircraft both have wheels...
While I don't believe a peadophile could help very much in preventing others in commiting similar crimes
This is going off-topic a little but why not? Perhaps he/she has information about where others of his ilk hang out on the Internet, obtain indecent pictures from, etc? All useful information to a police investigation...
I care much more for the innovative and unique individuals.
Right, so recognise the innovative and the unique, not the notorious...
Sorry, but if you cannot take the cynical viewpoint of "reading between the lines" any information sent to you by anyone trying to make money from you, that makes you stupid in my book - whether that's a company trying to sell you their latest secure operating system or a phisher trying to scam you.
But I guess nerds like to believe being familiar with current technology somehow makes them superior to all those plebes who don't use computers much in their day to day lives.
No, it makes nerds like me superior to the plebs in just about all things computers - in the same way I'm a pleb when it comes to wood-working compared to a carpentry "nerd" friend of mine.
I remember playing Elite on a friend's one at about the age of 18! Never owned one though, I had ZX Spectrums, then the Commodore Amiga.
Mind you, the BBC Micro was more of an alliance between Acorn and the BBC - sure, any BBC program about computers at the time usually had a BBC Micro in it but I think it was not much more than a license for Acorn to use the BBC "brand name".
The sooner people accept responsibility for their own lives and their own personal information, the sooner people realise that with every Bill or Law that gets passed, the more they hand over the controls of their lives to the nanny state.
If the stupid people can't be bothered to protect their private information, if they can't simply delete emails they don't 100% trust the source of, if they can't invest in a paper shredder, if they believe all those glossy adverts about the security of their chosen operating system, then more fool them.
But please don't let us smart people also lose our personal liberties as a result of their stupidity.
No phishing scam has ever got me and they never will.
No, I made an analogy to a paedophile but if you looked elsewhere in my comment, you'd see that I don't consider Mitnick's crimes to have justified the sentence he got compared to other types of crime where, say, someone is injured or killed.
But the fact is that Mitnick is making his money now based primarily on his reputation of previous hacking activities is wrong. What about all the normal, hard-working people without criminal records who work in computer security, for example? Do they get the same kind of notoriety?
Sorry, Mitnick's a "celebrity", nothing more and whilst he has paid for his crimes, demonstrating the ability to commit a crime in the first place says a whole lot more about a person.
He's profiting from his crimes and that to me is wrong.
If you're asking me the question as to whether I would prefer a BBC that I pay for rather than one funded from advertising, then I definitely choose the former - that's because (as I think you yourself imply) I consider the BBC to be a public service first, I don't want to be constantly bombarded by advertising and I think the BBC has undertaken TV and radio program projects that would not have been made by anyone else - therefore, in my mind, the BBC is there to cater to the minority audiences; not just the sci-fi geeks like me but also programming for the Asian community, etc. etc.
Whether that money comes from taxation or a license makes no real difference to me - likewise, I don't really use libraries, don't go to museums too often but I'm happy to help fund them for the people that do use them or for when I may want to use them myself in the future.
The point I'm trying to make is that the BBC's prime concern should be to provide a broad cross-section of programming to those that fund it. Through a licensing scheme, the BBC can focus on entertainment programming - if it was funded through taxation, the "public service" element would be brought to the forefront of people's minds (after all, we pay taxes for "services") so the obligation of the BBC would perhaps be broadened to more educational and public service programming. However, since the BBC seems to already do much in this regard anyway (look at the amount of foreign language material on the web-site for example) I don't see there being much of a change in what it would need to do.
Does anyone know if this is the case or if it's planned by the BBC themselves?
Stick all the virus-ridden, spyware-infected, Windows PC users in their own worm-infested part of the Internet and leave the rest of us sensible users on a nice, clean, empty superhighway! :-)
I'll happily pay a "toll charge" for that! :-)
They can scrap Radio 1 in an instance for all I care (mind you, I'm a grumpy middle-aged old man so it's endless pop tunes are not aimed at me) but Radio 4 is superb!
And when you can go into a Barnes & Noble bookstore in the US and see audio book CDs of the BBC's adaptations of Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc, is does fill you with a certain degree of pride over the BBC. Not to mention Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, etc.
I'd like to see the BBC adopt a model such as Mandrake use, i.e. people who like it pay, in order to keep it free for everyone to use.
I recognise the sentiment but I don't think it would work. Personally, as someone in a minority BBC audience in as much as I like comedy, sci-fi and fantasy broadcasting and good documentaries, with no interest in reality TV, soaps and other "dumbed down" TV, if I get a few hours of my programming a week, whether TV or radio, I'm more than happy with paying my TV license for that.
If I have an objection to the way the BBC operates, it's the pricing of media containing BBC shows. I fail to understand how a DVD or CD of a show I have already paid for (through my license) can be charged at the same price as, say, a standard audio CD or movie DVD.
The purpose of a driving license is to give some kind of guarantee to other road users that you know what you are doing - so what's the difference applying the same argument to PCs and the Internet?
You're forgetting that we computer geeks with our in-depth workings of our operating systems are very much in a minority compared to the overall computer-using population.
The vast majority of people have been convinced by very clever marketing that what they actually need is a totally seamless operating system where they can just pay someone else to fix it when their PC goes wrong. (The reality of the situation is that all of us human beings are getting lazier and find it easier to throw money at a problem rather than getting off our backsides and learning the stuff ourselves - but that's another story).
The Internet is now synonymous to the PC, which is why MS were so successful getting IE embedded into Windows in the first place, consequently Google are taking planning to take things a stage further and hide the barriers between "the PC" and "the network" a bit more.
Incidentally, anyone who knows the architecture of UNIX and Linux understands that this kind of thing has been done for years on those kinds of OSes anyway - just look at the structure of the filesystem and you can hide all manner of remote disks and network partitions in there without the user needing to know anything about it.
However, I do think Google have their work cut out for them if they're planning to do this with Linux. Don't get me wrong, Linux is my personal choice of OS and it's getting easier for Joe Bloke to use all of the time. The problem is that Linux, and Google, are always going to be playing a catchup game with Joe Bloke user because clever marketing has convinced him that, as time goes on, he needs to care less and less about the OS his device runs on and just focus on what he needs that device to do. (The reality, of course, is that superbly clever Microsoft marketing has stopped Joe Bloke ever stopping and thinking about how much time he does have to spend updating virus checkers, install patches and run Spyware utilities.)
So I wish Google every success in getting the seamless OS developed but, even if they manage to do it, it will be a much different beast to the Linux we know, love and use currently.
If you look at the embedded market, for example, it could be argued that the most successful devices are those where you don't actually know what OS is running at their cores.
Even go a stage further and insist every household has to have someone with a PC use accreditation to be able to connect to the Internet.
As a computer geek, I'm sick and tired of having to endlessly fix the crappy Windows PCs of friends and relatives, I'm totally bored with spending time keeping my machines (both Linux and Windows ones) updated only to still have my Internet connection slow to a crawl every time the latest Windows worm hits and maybe the government can "sponsor" non-commercial citizens' web-sites so that I'm not constantly bombarded by banner ads and pop-ups every time I load a page in my browser.
UK Gov. can even go a stage further and send out a free Knoppix CD with each PC Tax registration form :-)
No, you're a truly awful fraudster.
Let's cut with this "verbal garnishing" crap as though you're some kind of Robin Hood fighting for the injustices of the poor.
Just because you can do something does not not make it right to do it. If you see a security weakness, whether it's in a computer system or in the outside world, then you carry out your social responsibility and let whoever needs to know about it.
Mitnick probably didn't deserve to serve the time in jail that he did, considering that you can serve less time in jail for a manslaughter or drunk-driving offence, but the guy's a criminal, end of story.
Seeking advice from Mitnick about security is as bad as asking a paedophile how to set up a childrens' playgroup.
...Go pester Daddy to go buy a legitimate copy of XP and this ice cream's yours!"
I mean, COME ON!
Next you'll be trying to convince me that there's an nutty, rich, in-bred old English woman, with a grandson who dresses up in a Nazi uniform, handing out titles of the British Realm to convicted American monopolists!
Oh, wait...
A is NOT for Apple
B is for Blue Screen
C is for smelly Communist UNIX hippy programmers because
D is for nice charming DotNet programmers
E is for Excel
F is for FrontPage
G is for GMail but
(H is for) Hotmail is better
I is for Internet Explorer that used to incorporate
(J is for) Java that we stole from Sun
K is Knighthood, Lord Billy the Peer
L is for very nasty hippy communist words we never speak
M is for money, money, money, money and even more money
N is for Netscape, who we totally trashed
O is for Opera, who we'd like to have trashed also
P is for PowerPoint
Q is for Halo 2, starts selling at midnight
R is for Redmond, our place of worship
S is for Steve Ballmer, Sweaty armpits and Silly dancing
T is for Trusted Computing because
U is too stupid to be "trusted" with a computer
V is for Volume Licensing, our "bread and butter"
W is for Windows Media Player 10 which bundled with
(X is for) XP stops
(Y is for) your playing smelly Communist music we don't want you to and lets us keep you caged in the Microsoft
(Z is for) human zoo.
With that said, as a "true Brit", the BBC has always been a broadcasting service that I have always been very proud of. It has come in for a lot of criticism recently, perhaps rightfully so, as it's played the "ratings chasing" game of copying other channels and broadcasting far too much reality TV dross in favour of good drama and comedy shows - however, bringing the BBC under some governmental control means that the BBC will hopefully be forced to provide varied programming again, rather than "dumbed down TV" for the masses.
In Britain, we can take great pride in the fact that world recognised shows like Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf, Dr Who, Monty Python's Flying Circus, etc exist because of the BBC - likewise the radio programming, specifically Radio 4 which originally did the HHGTTG radio shows and the adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, as well as numerous dramas and plays.
I'm happy to continue paying my TV license for good quality programming and lack of advertising. All we need now are some more good comedy shows and I'll be happy...
The final issue to mention is the BBC's web site which is of tremendously high quality. They put a lot of work into supporting media formats across multiple OSes (there's even some Linux support there!) and as someone who's trying to learn Spanish at the moment, there's a wealth of educational and language resource there also.
In Britain, we probably don't have too many things to be proud of but the BBC is our best trademark to the world and something we should cherish.
The point I'm making is that for years, ISPs have been providing Usenet services to their subscribers, everyone knows that pirated material is on Usenet yet I've not heard of an ISP being forced to shut down the service due to pressures from the likes of the MPAA or RIAA.
Just strikes me as curios, that's all...
In the UK, some stores try to sell Star Trek series at anything up to £79.95 - that's about $150 at current exchange rates!
Personally, I think this sucks. Paramount is a movie & TV monolith perfectly capable of financing this on their own if there is popular demand. If people care that much about a new Enterprise series, the solution is to apply pressure to Paramount with words, not money. If they still won't budge then start boycotting what they currently do.
This just demonstrates that throwing money at a problem is far easier to most people that getting up off their backsides and just taking direct positive action.
I wonder what sort of precedent this sets for the future - Joe Average funds the making of a movie/TV series as well as paying for cinema tickets/cable TV subscription and subsequent DVD release.
As Shatner said in the title of a recent book, "Get A Life!" - Paramount is taking you all for suckers and just sitting back reaping the profits...