You and your 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' mates are the reason why Britain will be a fascist hell-hole in ten years. Having emigrated a couple of years ago, in no small part because of your beloved 'security' measures, I dread having to go back in case next time I can't get out again.
So if you've already emigrated then why do you care what is happening in Britain? And I don't accept your statement - nobody leaves the UK because of surveillance, they leave because of warmer weather, a better job, maybe even meeting a new spouse.
And yes, I already have a second home overseas and at some point I'll be emigrating too - not because of surveillance but because I'm getting close to thinking about retiring early and just enjoying the rest of my life in a nice warm climate.
Then you're a criminal retard; you claim in one sentence that you're law-abiding, and then in the next state that you break the law. How stupid can you get?
I doubt the criminal justice system views me as a law breaker purely for a minor driving offence - besides which, a speeding offence does not give you a criminal record. You've probably been too long out of the UK such that you need to do some reference reading before to bone up on current laws here before making facetious comments.
You're willing to hand the keys to total surveillance of the British people over to the government in the hope that it will reduce spam and 'nuisance calls'? Are you fucking insane?
With an English mother, I am born-and-bred "Berkshire" British - but I'm alive today because my late father, as a Ukrainian POW, was allowed to settle here after the war despite having fought alongside the Germans to fight back the Russians who were marching all over the Ukraine. Technically, he was an "enemy" of the British, was a POW over here for a few years after the war but was one of the lucky ones not sent back to be murdered by Stalin.
So you will pardon me if I actually recognise that Britain does actually have some things to make me quite proud of being British.
Even if you're crazy enough to trust Labour, what the fuck do you think a party like the BNP will do if they're ever elected and have these kind of surveillance measures in place? And don't say it can't happen; the neo-Nazis are gaining power across Europe, and a major European recession will lead to a major backlash looking for scapegoats.
Now that you know a bit about my personal history, don't you now feel rather stupid for making such a stupid assumption about what my political leanings possibly are? For you information, I am very pro-European unity, I think that the worst possible scenario for this country is the "limbo" state we are in now of neither being "in or out" and, quite frankly, I do not want to see Britain opting out the EEC only to be absorbed by the United States as a new member state.
I actually haven't been pro-Labour in years, Bliar made sure of that - and whilst I think Gordon Brown is not a particularly strong prime minister, the fact is that he's a damn good chancellor and a good example for Europe as to how to deal with a financial crisis. In other words, in the past few weeks I've become more pro-Labour than I have been in many years.
And based on the above, I won't even lower myself to comment on the BNP. I think you'll recogonise what my likely feelings are about those people.
Please do not make assumptions about someone purely on a few lines of opinion - you'll only end up making a fool of yourself.
This of course explains why eBay fees have increased yet again - as sellers we're paying for increased eBay efficiency meaning that we will get higher prices for our stuff and will not be answered by a useless eBay tosser after sitting in a call queue for 30 minutes.
Sure, I'm very much into privacy laws and not being snooped by the Government but as a home owner and car driver with a home phone and Internet connection, I am already registered in databases for Council Tax, the electoral role, the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) and with my telephone provider (even though I'm not in the UK phone white pages as deliberate "ex-directory"). So having to go on one more database for owning a mobile phone is pretty meaningless.
In addition to the above, perhaps if email addresses (for example) were also registered to unique individuals or organisations to the point of being traceable, then the whole issue of SPAM and worms would pretty much disappear overnight. I would be more than happy to register all of the email addresses I use for some minimum cost of, say, £1, such that the address is tied to a particular credit card that means it's a validated address.
No, I don't want to hand over my personal freedoms lightly, but I happen to be a law-abiding British Citizen without a criminal record who has no intentions of breaking the law. Sure, I've been hacked off for getting three points on my driving license and a £60 fine for driving at 7mph over the speed limit past a speed camera but if someone in a control room wants to watch me on CCTV going about my daily business then I hope they're not bored easily.
Yes, I'll be more than pissed off if someone in a black suit comes knocking on my door with a piece of CCTV footage or taped phone call but I'll worry about it when it happens.
And to all the "freedom loving Americans" out there, I have a much bigger problem with your openly heavy-handed customs people and security types who are stood there stereotyping everyone that walks past them. The first time I entered your country on holiday during the late 80s, I was taken to one side and questioned heavily purely for having a Slavic-sounding surname in my passport.
Houses, cars and (at least) home phones are already registered to a person in every Western country as it stands - and if a few people with less better things to do with their time than make anonymous nuisance calls from unregistered "pay as you go" phones have to stop what they are currently doing then, so be it.
Nobody moves out of the UK due to surveillance, they do it to enjoy better weather, to have a better cost of living, because of a job or because they want to settle alongside other friends or family.
I'll be moving to Spain in the next 5-10 years for the climate and lifestyle - how many surveillance cameras there are here has no relevance to that decision.
The (more recent) James Bond movies are classic examples of where there is a lot of product placement (= advertising), especially with sports cars and then take a movie where there can be no product placement, like say "300".
A lot more people watched the last James Bond movie than 300, yet I don't recall it costing any less to see it at the cinema or buy it on DVD than for less than 300.
So will it be the same for games - the ads will appear but they will not cost any less.
Well, you did better than me in terms of seeing the Mac guy in Starbucks.
I always seem to go into those Starbucks where the token Mac user has precisely positioned himself in such a way so as to reflect the light from his lid-located silver Apple logo straight into the eyes of any customer who walks in...
I lost one user from Kubuntu to XP Cracked Edition because she _needed_ to read those forwards that her friends with boring jobs send her.
But presumably she didn't need it enough to go buy a proper licensed copy of XP?
I don't intend bleating on about piracy and I really don't want to play the Linux zealot here, but I do wish people would compare "like for like". Far too many people seem to forget that XP and MS Office are commercial products that they *should* be paying for whereas Open Office and Linux are obtainable freely.
If it was impossible to run cracked copies of Windows, MS Office and other Windows software and everyone had to pay for proper licenses, I'm sure a lot more people would take the trouble to actually try free software, rather than staying in a comfort zone and just assuming it cannot do what they need it to.
As another poster has already said, I've never seen a PPT that I couldn't import in Open Office. Sure, I don't use all of Powerpoint's features but, in my experience, the compatibility seems quite good.
...is simply due to the huge tactical error Microsoft has made over Netbooks & low-powered handhelds.
XP can be slimmed down relatively easily to run quite well on these devices but there is no chance with the size of Vista.
I'm sure that there is still a big demand for XP over Vista but I also understand (with my limited reading of MS product bulletins) that Windows 7 is being designed as a scaleable OS, presumably so it can run on these smaller devices. Therefore it makes commercial sense for MS to keep XP alive for their own reasons of getting onto Netbooks until Windows 7 is ready.
So it is not just because there is a continuing demand for XP from new PC buyers.
How about just buying the CD instead? Then you can get on with enjoying a nice, long piece of loss-free music without caring as to who gets what percentage.
Music has been my primary interest for 30-odd years, I've bought thousands of albums (on vinyl and CD) over the years and I believe a good music album is great value for money when I've legally sourced it as cheaply as possible.
Can I suggest that maybe if you spent a little more time finding a great album or two to listen to, you yourself might be a little less bitter in your attitude?
Read more of the posts here, it's almost impossible not to know that about 70% of the money goes to the label (or someone else) and they need to (if required) pay the royalties.
If I buy a piece of music and it was worth the money, why in hell do I care who gets what percentage? It's absolutely none of my business and irrelevant to whether or not I enjoy the music.
Yesterday, I spent about £60 on 20 CDs from Play.com because they're currently selling a load of great albums at £2.99 apiece. Many of those that I bought are remastered editions with anything up to 15 tracks (even more) on a CD.
I have a tangible disk with nice sleeve notes to read, no lossy compressed recordings and overall I'm averaging less than 29p a track.
And which of the myriads of artists who are all selling their music through their own little web sites should I go to without any "suggestions" from an advertisement that I might like a particular band in the first place?
Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter....said George Brussard of games developer 3D Realms when asked about the possible release dates for Duke Nukem Forever.
On the assumption that some of these "bad-boy L33T" virus, script and netbot writers read Slashdot, aren't we just playing into their hands by having any discussion about this subject?
Would we not be better off just not making any mention of it?
I mean, what's the worst that can happen? My Internet connection goes down for 48 hours until someone fixes the problem, during which time I can:
- Start actually *looking through* my pr0n collection rather than just spending my time finding more of it to download - With the 2 hours I save daily not doing an "emerge world" on Gentoo, I'll be able to listen to some nice music
Hell, I may even dollop on some Factor 50 suntan on my pallid flash and venture out into the scorching UK Autumn sunlight for a couple of minutes...
I read in an interview a while ago that he uses Debian Linux on his laptop and since this is a distro that installs a GUI by default, he might well use Firefox. Even on a command-line only machine, he could use Lynx as a browser.
Sure, he's written a heap of command-line only tools but I don't ever recall him saying anywhere that he doesn't use a GUI or a browser.
RMS is a bit of a nutcase but your statement above is entirely incorrect.
Can I ask you what effects Linux is having in the Third World, for example, where people who cannot afford expensive software licenses and brand new PCs can have access to the Internet using recycled computers and Linux? Please remember that Linux is officially just the kernel, the tools running on top of it are free tools that RMS has played a big hand in writing himself and publicising.
And I do hope you're not being a hypocrite and using Firefox while you browse Slashdot - because RMS has done his bit to bring free software to the forefront and tools like that exist because of what he and others have done for the movement.
I doubt very much that RMS can bring the whole closed software movement to halt but the man makes a very good point when he highlights issues of trusting closed software with your data.
Slashdot Mirror
You and your 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' mates are the reason why Britain will be a fascist hell-hole in ten years. Having emigrated a couple of years ago, in no small part because of your beloved 'security' measures, I dread having to go back in case next time I can't get out again.
So if you've already emigrated then why do you care what is happening in Britain? And I don't accept your statement - nobody leaves the UK because of surveillance, they leave because of warmer weather, a better job, maybe even meeting a new spouse.
And yes, I already have a second home overseas and at some point I'll be emigrating too - not because of surveillance but because I'm getting close to thinking about retiring early and just enjoying the rest of my life in a nice warm climate.
Then you're a criminal retard; you claim in one sentence that you're law-abiding, and then in the next state that you break the law. How stupid can you get?
I doubt the criminal justice system views me as a law breaker purely for a minor driving offence - besides which, a speeding offence does not give you a criminal record. You've probably been too long out of the UK such that you need to do some reference reading before to bone up on current laws here before making facetious comments.
You're willing to hand the keys to total surveillance of the British people over to the government in the hope that it will reduce spam and 'nuisance calls'? Are you fucking insane?
With an English mother, I am born-and-bred "Berkshire" British - but I'm alive today because my late father, as a Ukrainian POW, was allowed to settle here after the war despite having fought alongside the Germans to fight back the Russians who were marching all over the Ukraine. Technically, he was an "enemy" of the British, was a POW over here for a few years after the war but was one of the lucky ones not sent back to be murdered by Stalin.
So you will pardon me if I actually recognise that Britain does actually have some things to make me quite proud of being British.
Even if you're crazy enough to trust Labour, what the fuck do you think a party like the BNP will do if they're ever elected and have these kind of surveillance measures in place? And don't say it can't happen; the neo-Nazis are gaining power across Europe, and a major European recession will lead to a major backlash looking for scapegoats.
Now that you know a bit about my personal history, don't you now feel rather stupid for making such a stupid assumption about what my political leanings possibly are? For you information, I am very pro-European unity, I think that the worst possible scenario for this country is the "limbo" state we are in now of neither being "in or out" and, quite frankly, I do not want to see Britain opting out the EEC only to be absorbed by the United States as a new member state.
I actually haven't been pro-Labour in years, Bliar made sure of that - and whilst I think Gordon Brown is not a particularly strong prime minister, the fact is that he's a damn good chancellor and a good example for Europe as to how to deal with a financial crisis. In other words, in the past few weeks I've become more pro-Labour than I have been in many years.
And based on the above, I won't even lower myself to comment on the BNP. I think you'll recogonise what my likely feelings are about those people.
Please do not make assumptions about someone purely on a few lines of opinion - you'll only end up making a fool of yourself.
This of course explains why eBay fees have increased yet again - as sellers we're paying for increased eBay efficiency meaning that we will get higher prices for our stuff and will not be answered by a useless eBay tosser after sitting in a call queue for 30 minutes.
Cool!
...I don't see why this is such a bad idea.
Sure, I'm very much into privacy laws and not being snooped by the Government but as a home owner and car driver with a home phone and Internet connection, I am already registered in databases for Council Tax, the electoral role, the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) and with my telephone provider (even though I'm not in the UK phone white pages as deliberate "ex-directory"). So having to go on one more database for owning a mobile phone is pretty meaningless.
In addition to the above, perhaps if email addresses (for example) were also registered to unique individuals or organisations to the point of being traceable, then the whole issue of SPAM and worms would pretty much disappear overnight. I would be more than happy to register all of the email addresses I use for some minimum cost of, say, £1, such that the address is tied to a particular credit card that means it's a validated address.
No, I don't want to hand over my personal freedoms lightly, but I happen to be a law-abiding British Citizen without a criminal record who has no intentions of breaking the law. Sure, I've been hacked off for getting three points on my driving license and a £60 fine for driving at 7mph over the speed limit past a speed camera but if someone in a control room wants to watch me on CCTV going about my daily business then I hope they're not bored easily.
Yes, I'll be more than pissed off if someone in a black suit comes knocking on my door with a piece of CCTV footage or taped phone call but I'll worry about it when it happens.
And to all the "freedom loving Americans" out there, I have a much bigger problem with your openly heavy-handed customs people and security types who are stood there stereotyping everyone that walks past them. The first time I entered your country on holiday during the late 80s, I was taken to one side and questioned heavily purely for having a Slavic-sounding surname in my passport.
Houses, cars and (at least) home phones are already registered to a person in every Western country as it stands - and if a few people with less better things to do with their time than make anonymous nuisance calls from unregistered "pay as you go" phones have to stop what they are currently doing then, so be it.
My point exactly - you moved beacuse of a German fiancee, so why bring up surveillance as a reason then?
Actually, you can watch any video by an "indie" band as they are all laboratory-grown clones of each other - Goldfrapp, Peaches, whatever...
Please stop being a martyr.
Nobody moves out of the UK due to surveillance, they do it to enjoy better weather, to have a better cost of living, because of a job or because they want to settle alongside other friends or family.
I'll be moving to Spain in the next 5-10 years for the climate and lifestyle - how many surveillance cameras there are here has no relevance to that decision.
Presumably, then, American girls are like Steve Ballmer in their pants?
If you don't believe me, look at movies.
The (more recent) James Bond movies are classic examples of where there is a lot of product placement (= advertising), especially with sports cars and then take a movie where there can be no product placement, like say "300".
A lot more people watched the last James Bond movie than 300, yet I don't recall it costing any less to see it at the cinema or buy it on DVD than for less than 300.
So will it be the same for games - the ads will appear but they will not cost any less.
I'm afraid I cannot comment. In 30 years of using computers, I've used a lot of UNIX, Linux and Windows, as well as a few other lesser-known OSes.
But I can't comment on OS X because in all those years I have never once found a need to either use or buy anything from Apple.
Well, you did better than me in terms of seeing the Mac guy in Starbucks.
I always seem to go into those Starbucks where the token Mac user has precisely positioned himself in such a way so as to reflect the light from his lid-located silver Apple logo straight into the eyes of any customer who walks in...
I lost one user from Kubuntu to XP Cracked Edition because she _needed_ to read those forwards that her friends with boring jobs send her.
But presumably she didn't need it enough to go buy a proper licensed copy of XP?
I don't intend bleating on about piracy and I really don't want to play the Linux zealot here, but I do wish people would compare "like for like". Far too many people seem to forget that XP and MS Office are commercial products that they *should* be paying for whereas Open Office and Linux are obtainable freely.
If it was impossible to run cracked copies of Windows, MS Office and other Windows software and everyone had to pay for proper licenses, I'm sure a lot more people would take the trouble to actually try free software, rather than staying in a comfort zone and just assuming it cannot do what they need it to.
As another poster has already said, I've never seen a PPT that I couldn't import in Open Office. Sure, I don't use all of Powerpoint's features but, in my experience, the compatibility seems quite good.
For your information, just about all the applications that are listed as having been removed in Vista can be removed with a tool like XPLite in XP.
...is simply due to the huge tactical error Microsoft has made over Netbooks & low-powered handhelds.
XP can be slimmed down relatively easily to run quite well on these devices but there is no chance with the size of Vista.
I'm sure that there is still a big demand for XP over Vista but I also understand (with my limited reading of MS product bulletins) that Windows 7 is being designed as a scaleable OS, presumably so it can run on these smaller devices. Therefore it makes commercial sense for MS to keep XP alive for their own reasons of getting onto Netbooks until Windows 7 is ready.
So it is not just because there is a continuing demand for XP from new PC buyers.
...and if you were slightly better informed before making your comments you'd realise that Linux also supports Hibernate functions as well.
How about just buying the CD instead? Then you can get on with enjoying a nice, long piece of loss-free music without caring as to who gets what percentage.
Why would I want to crush the music industry?
Music has been my primary interest for 30-odd years, I've bought thousands of albums (on vinyl and CD) over the years and I believe a good music album is great value for money when I've legally sourced it as cheaply as possible.
Can I suggest that maybe if you spent a little more time finding a great album or two to listen to, you yourself might be a little less bitter in your attitude?
Read more of the posts here, it's almost impossible not to know that about 70% of the money goes to the label (or someone else) and they need to (if required) pay the royalties.
If I buy a piece of music and it was worth the money, why in hell do I care who gets what percentage? It's absolutely none of my business and irrelevant to whether or not I enjoy the music.
Yesterday, I spent about £60 on 20 CDs from Play.com because they're currently selling a load of great albums at £2.99 apiece. Many of those that I bought are remastered editions with anything up to 15 tracks (even more) on a CD.
I have a tangible disk with nice sleeve notes to read, no lossy compressed recordings and overall I'm averaging less than 29p a track.
So beat that.
And which of the myriads of artists who are all selling their music through their own little web sites should I go to without any "suggestions" from an advertisement that I might like a particular band in the first place?
Erm... yes, but this amplifier goes up to 11.
Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. ...said George Brussard of games developer 3D Realms when asked about the possible release dates for Duke Nukem Forever.
On the assumption that some of these "bad-boy L33T" virus, script and netbot writers read Slashdot, aren't we just playing into their hands by having any discussion about this subject?
Would we not be better off just not making any mention of it?
I mean, what's the worst that can happen? My Internet connection goes down for 48 hours until someone fixes the problem, during which time I can:
- Start actually *looking through* my pr0n collection rather than just spending my time finding more of it to download
- With the 2 hours I save daily not doing an "emerge world" on Gentoo, I'll be able to listen to some nice music
Hell, I may even dollop on some Factor 50 suntan on my pallid flash and venture out into the scorching UK Autumn sunlight for a couple of minutes...
Man, Slashdot needs to make an exception in your case and allow a maximum "+10 Funny" moderation for your response!
Working in the (somewhat UDP-reliant) telecoms and VoIP industry, your comment had me in stitches.
Please award yourself a pat on the back for making my day!!! :-)
I read in an interview a while ago that he uses Debian Linux on his laptop and since this is a distro that installs a GUI by default, he might well use Firefox. Even on a command-line only machine, he could use Lynx as a browser.
Sure, he's written a heap of command-line only tools but I don't ever recall him saying anywhere that he doesn't use a GUI or a browser.
His impact on society: irrelevant.
RMS is a bit of a nutcase but your statement above is entirely incorrect.
Can I ask you what effects Linux is having in the Third World, for example, where people who cannot afford expensive software licenses and brand new PCs can have access to the Internet using recycled computers and Linux? Please remember that Linux is officially just the kernel, the tools running on top of it are free tools that RMS has played a big hand in writing himself and publicising.
And I do hope you're not being a hypocrite and using Firefox while you browse Slashdot - because RMS has done his bit to bring free software to the forefront and tools like that exist because of what he and others have done for the movement.
I doubt very much that RMS can bring the whole closed software movement to halt but the man makes a very good point when he highlights issues of trusting closed software with your data.