1. Cars will fail to read the road signs correctly 2. Someone will hack the road signs, leading to mayhem 3. Only a certain percentage of road fatalities are caused by people exceeding the listed speed limit
Why not fit cars with a voluntary limiter that users can enable themselves?
4. Automating all this stuff probably makes drivers less aware, which in itself may be bad for safety.
Also, the speed limits are frequently completely nonsensical - there are a number of roads I drive down with 30mph limits, which have "traffic calming" that would likely destroy your car if you did more than 10mph. In these situations, speed limits seem to serve no purpose - they used to tell you how fast you could safely drive in good conditions, but these days they are frequently intentionally making it dangerous to go anywhere near the speed limit...
Plusnet is owned by BT, but is run as an independent company with its own customer services department in Sheffield, England, which is much better than BT's customer service department in India.
Wonder why BT didn't just "sell" their customers and DDIs to Plusnet instead of instructing people to migrate.
And I love HD over grainy crappy old shit that takes forever to download, bring on UHD.
I'm curious where you're finding your HD video on the internet... Certainly the HD video on iplayer is such low bandwidth and it macroblocks on any fast moving video (for reference, BBC HD on DVB-S is 16Mbps H.264... BBC HD on iplayer is... not).
Even worse, it uses a proxy to hijack all port 53 DNS requests, so you can't choose an alternate server with the standard port.
My guess is that it probably does a few tricks with proxying both DNS and HTTP traffic to improve performance in light of the latency (e.g. 3-way TCP handshakes are going to take about 1050ms to complete under normal circumstances on your connection, whereas a proxy can eliminate the need to carry the 3-way handshake across the low latency connection. Local caching DNS would be a big help too, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was built into your router.)
I'm curious how satellite providers handle upstream - I presume they must do some kind of polling to fetch data from each user to avoid collisions, so that could also add to the latency.
Says who? A lot of gun owners have t-shirts and stickers which say things like "what part of 'shall not be infringed' do you not understand?" Maybe you don't like guns. Doesn't really matter because what the Constitution says is what it says.
I know Americans have some big hardon for guns, but here's my take on the US constitution (I'm not American BTW):
It's a bit like some ancient religious text - largely unchanging, even when parts of it make no sense at all in the modern era; also widely ignored (probably *because* parts of it make no sense at all in the modern era). Now don't get me wrong - there are a lot of protections in the constitution that _shouldn't_ be removed, and amending it is certainly dangerous because you need to ensure that it is amended for the good of the people rather than for the good of those in power.
Take the "right to bear arms", for example. What exactly is the purpose of this right? When the constitution was written, it was clear that the right to bear arms was to keep the government and military in check - the civilians could carry guns of comparable power to the military's weapons, and if the military stepped out of line they could face a serious threat from the population.
The gun nuts bang on about how their right to guns must not be infringed because they want to be able to fight "the man" if he steps out of line - well guess what, "the man" is trampling over everyone's rights and not one of those gun-toting rednecks is doing anything about it. So I guess that pretty much demonstrates that the gun nuts just want to be able to wave guns around, not to fulfill the original intention of the constitutional right to bear arms.
These days, the military has RPG launchers, fighter jets, missiles, grenades, nuclear weapons, etc. and there's not a lot the population can do against this since they are only armed with hand guns, rifles, shot guns, etc. On the other hand, do you *want* your local redneck gun nut having access to the same kind of fire power as the military? Seems a pretty bad plan to me.
So, you're left with this ancient law limiting the restrictions the government can place on firearms ownership, which appears to not serve its original purpose at all and leads to a lot of gun crime... Maybe time to rethink that law?
Apologies for posting as apparently anonymous coward (from the uk).... there are satellite alternatives who's prices have been getting more reasonable (no i don't work for a sat company), i do know someone that uses a home style service and they say it is good (they live on a canal boat). I monitor prices on the satellite stuff and it's getting much more reasonable especially if you were paying 17 quid for crap.... anyway might be worth a look for you... http://www.avonlinebroadband.co.uk/packages/
Lee
The problem with satellite broadband is the latency is very high, even compared to dialup (although the throughput can certainly be good), so whether its suitable depends on what you're using it for. Also, some of the satellite "internet" providers actually only provide access to the web, which is rather less useful.
Can't understand why businesses have standardised on an insecure proprietary system (which, I might add, is absolute hell to deal with from a firewalling perspective), rather than the industry standard open system...
Can the Skype team stop adding more and more crap to it, and start removing some of the existing bloat?
I want an instant messenger, not something that takes minutes to load, minutes to fetch messages (many of which i already read on another comp or on my phone, but it still alerts me like they are new messages), and when finally loaded i get bombarded with ads that do not interest me in the slightest, or offers to connect Skype to Facebook and the like, something i already told it to go do something anatomically impossible about more than once.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Only thing is I'm still looking for a decent SIP video client for Android - Sipdroid is excellent for voice calls, but its video support is completely broken.:(
taking pot-shots at the monumentally, epically difficult jobs of regulators is lazy comedy.
/ no, i am not a regulator, but I know what they do.
I would have more sympathy if the regulator's response to flagrant law-breaking wasn't always simply to write a "stongly worded" letter to the company responsible, reminding them of their legal obligations. I dunno, but if I personally broke the law, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get a letter reminding me that what I did was illegal and told not to do it again, especially if I'm doing the law breaking on a large and organised scale...
Those light-lined streets aren't lit anymore. Some busy streets have one light on every other light pole still powered and some streets don't have any powered lights.
Depends where you are - where I live they tried that, and there was outcry. I don't understand why - with every other light turned off it *still* seemed too bright to me. They also decided to turn the street lights off on some streets between the hours of 1am and 5am, and people complained that it was endangering the elderly and school children (who are obviously all going to school at 5am?!)... Eventually the council got voted out and the new council undid all that good work.
The batteries do indeed seem to degrade quickly (even third party ones); and they seem to lose calibration very quickly too. The customer service is terrible and the BIOS has the aforementioned bug, but other than that the machine actually isn't too bad (which I guess is a good thing since customer support clearly aren't going to care if anything is wrong with it).
Sadly, most companies won't allow the customer to talk directly to engineering.
I didn't want to talk directly to engineering, I just wanted someone to pass the patch on to the right people and get a fixed BIOS to a defective product line. Instead they thought it was better customer service to thrown my emails into the bitbucket. That's the kind of customer service that gets a company onto my blacklist.
FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.
TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.
FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.
TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.
My daughter has reading troubles that I believe were consistent with dyslexia. We voiced our concerns to the school and they told us it was a medical issue not a school issue. So we talked with her doctor who informed us that dyslexia was a school problem and not a medical problem. To have her diagnosed officially we would have to had paid a large amount out of pocket and even then the school would not do anything beyond what help she already received in her reading group. If dyslexia is so common I can't understand why it is swept under the rug like it doesn't exist.
As far as I can tell, here in the UK it isn't swept under the rug - schools seem to take it very seriously and provide extra help, and dyslexic people can qualify for government grants for equipment to help them, etc. From the comments I'm seeing here it sounds like the US is pretty backwards when it comes to dyslexia. (And you're right - its extremely common, I know a lot of dyslexics).
Clearly you have an agenda and aren't interested in views that don't conform to your idea that information is free naturally.
No agenda; I'm just saying that the premise of DRM cannot do anything to reduce copyright infringement because DRM can always be bypassed trivially by just downloading a copy that someone else has already removed the DRM from. Meanwhile, DRM probably actually increases the amount of infringement and makes it more socially acceptable because it prevents the legitimate customers from doing reasonable things with the content they have purchased, making copyright infringement a more attractive option.
Not once have you explained how DRM can reduce copyright infringement, you have simply said that it "must be enacted" without explaining how enacting it can do anything to solve any problem.
You make the same broad assumptions about its current flaws and underlying business models that i see everywhere...they are simply incorrect In many cases.
Please, list a few incorrect assumptions I've made...
One example is that Drm ripping is any different than someone pirating airwave tv. These ideas form the basis of the rest of your argument so i have trouble reconciling that with reality. I hope you find this more respectful than my original statement about the validity of your points
Firstly, I wasn't talking about airwave TV - you were talking about how a service like itunes is "pretty reasonable" and I pointed out that it was completely useless due to the DRM they are imposing; you then went off on one about how great DRM is and how we have to have it. itunes is *not* airwave TV.
Secondly, I haven't made any such assumption - in both cases, if they place lots of restrictions on the legitimate content that greatly inconveniences the consumer then they can expect the consumer to go to the bootleg content instead. This is true whether it be DRM, regional availability (e.g. staggering global release dates, or just plain not making content available in some regions at all), some requirement to pay a lot for a bunch of channels you're not intrested in just to see one programme, or any other restriction.
There are certain levels of DRM that the public will likely accept - for example, many satellite broadcasters make CI modules available so that you can use whatever receiving equipment you like and can do what you like with the resulting decrypted video. All I'm saying is that the more inconvenient things get for the consumer (which is directly linked to the amount of control the media companies try to exert), the more likely an otherwise law abiding consumer is to say "sod it" and just download an illegal copy without those restrictions. And once a large number of otherwise law abiding citizens are infringing copyright, it becomes socially acceptable to do so and more people join in - this is where we are right now, and the only way the media industry is going to reduce copyright infringement is by making it socially unacceptable, and that will never happen while there are so many completely legitimate reasons why people can't use the official media for perfectly normal activities.
>And completely useless due to DRM and the fact that I need to buy a computer dedicated to watching TV on. No thanks.
Not really, this is completely achievable without a PC. You may find an Apple TV helpful, but I can understand that this is undesirable to you.
I have a perfectly good TV and a perfectly good media PC. The DRM in iTunes media would prevent me using it on these devices. The DRM also stops me using it on my phone, my workstation, my laptop or my partner's phone or tablet. So what you're saying is that in order to use what you describe as a "pretty reasonable" way of accessing content seems pretty unreasonable to me, since, purely because of the restrictions imposed by the content producer, I would have to purchase expensive brand new hardware in order to watch their content. Or alternatively I could just download it illegally.
So I ask again: why would the content producers expect people to pay for content that is of considerably less use to the consumer than the black market version? The content producers have always told the public that the reason they shouldn't use bootleg versions is because they are "low quality", but with the advent of DRM and high quality rips, it is actually the legit versions that are "low quality" when compared to the bootlegs.
(To reiterate, I don't generally download TV and movies illegally; I simply can't be bothered with dealing with this crap at all, so the content producers just lose my business; but I can completely understand why people do illegally download this content - its largely because the content producers are intentionally making it hard for people to get and use content legitimately)
I'm not saying DRM today is appropriate or even desireable, but some form must be enacted to ensure security of contents.
This is impossible. As I explained, to the consumer DRM massively reduces the value and quality of the product; it only takes one person to remove the DRM and post a copy online in order for everyone else to find it easier to simply download it than deal with your DRM. No matter how much DRM you have, you can never stop *everyone* from removing it - even if it requires expensive equipment to strip the DRM, someone will do it and post the results online for everyone else to download.
The only other way is to broadcast to everyone and force them to watch commercials.
Not true at all. The majority of people don't want to watch content illegally - what the content producers must do is: 1. Let people use the product how they like instead of placing all kinds of technological limitations on what they can do with it. 2. Stop treating the paying customers like criminals - when I *pay* for a DVD I don't see why I should have to sit through an unskippable video telling me how bad I am for "stealing" (infringing copyright). If I didn't pay for it then that crap would've been stripped off and I wouldn't have to put up with it. 3. Treat your customers with some respect - by all means stick some adverts on a DVD, but let people skip them if they're not interested. 4. Stop trying to stick it to the customer with region controls - if the content producer is allowed to make use of the global market to reduce costs, then why the hell shouldn't the customer be allowed to do the same? Secondly, using region controls invariably means some people have no legal way to access the content, so you can't very well complain when they take the not-so-legal approach. 5. Price things sensibly. 6. Accept that some people will always infringe copyright, whatever you do; just like some people will always shop-lift. You can't stop them, but treating *everyone* like criminals just encourages more people to try and stick it to you.
What the content industry needs to do to reduce copyright infringement is to make it socially unacceptable - they can do this by ensuring that there are as few legitimate reasons for infringing as pos
I just want to point out a service like Itunes is pretty reasonable
And completely useless due to DRM and the fact that I need to buy a computer dedicated to watching TV on. No thanks.
You will also never get a la carte without accepting some form of DRM
Then I guess the media industry will continue to not get my business.
To be clear: DRM does not achieve anything positive for anyone (including the content producers). It reduces the value of the legitimate product without doing anything to get rid of the illegal copies. Why would someone pay good money for content that they can only use in extremely restricted ways when the black market offers the same content with all the DRM already removed so you don't need to concern yourself with crazy ideas like only being able to watch it on a small subset of devices, etc?
Yes, the ad-supported model isn't ideal, and has been exploited by bad people. But the reality is that you get free content where the percentage of pixels on a page devoted to ads is typically much less than the percentage minutes of ads on free OTA television, and less than the percentage of inches in a $4.95 magazine. Oh boo-hoo.
The "free" OTA television I watch has no ads - it is funded through my taxes. If I want, I can pay extra for "pay TV" - that costs more than my TV licence for less content, *and* includes adverts. Please forgive me if I don't take the pay TV providers up on their "generous" offer.
Magazines do indeed often include advertising. And I don't mind that at all - the advertising sits there on the page, to be either looked at or ignored as the reader sees fit. It doesn't flash multi-colours distractingly all the time the reader is trying to read the article, it doesn't play loud music as soon as you open the magazine, it doesn't sit there using the CPU that you need for something else you're doing at the same time, or running down your battery when you're not plugged into the mains, it doesn't require me to do something to get rid of the advert before I can actually read the article. Nor does it report back to the advertiser how long I looked at the ad, what other ads I looked at, what things I've previously bought after seeing adverts, what other magazines I read, etc.
I am perfectly happy for web pages to have adverts - I recognise that the web hosts need to get an income from somewhere, and I don't mind some static adverts sitting unobtrusively to the side of the article I'm reading. You can even target them to the subject that the page is discussing - hell, I've actually found these types of ads useful on occasion since they sometimes advertise things highly relevant to the subject matter at hand.
What is _not_ cool with me is being downright obnoxious to get me to view the advert instead of the article; and what isn't cool is collecting data about me. And advertisers *know* they are doing stuff that really pisses people off - they started off with popups and popunders, which pissed everyone off to the point that they invented popup blockers. Then they figured out how to get around the popup blockers *knowing full well that people enabled them because they found popups obnoxious*, so the popub blockers were improved. Then they started using floating objects within the page to get a popup-like effect, even though they have been repeatedly shown that people don't like popups at all and will go to lengths to stop them. So now people are blocking the advertising completely - that's entirely the advertisers' own fault. If they had stuck to magazine-style static adverts that you could either read or ignore without having to actively dismiss them to read the article then almost no one would bother to do any ad blocking at all.
However you cut it, under 1 in every 10000 adverts is ever going to be useful to me. If I get to see that 1 advert and ignore the other 9999 without any effort then that's good for the advertiser since they get my business from that 1 ad, and its good for me coz I've been informed about something useful. If I have to actively do something to get rid of those 9999 irrelevant adverts then I'm sorry but it just isn't worth my effort to make sure than the 1 interesting ad gets through so the advertiser loses out.
The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.
Firstly, no one is stealing any content - the content owner still has their content, I haven't removed it from their posession. Even doing what the media industry does and equating "stealing" with "copyright infringement" doesn't help you here - the content was put on the web freely, there were no technical restrictions stopping me accessing
Security issues aside, wireless connectivity uses some small amount of power. To me this is energy wasting of the highest order. My lightbulbs constantly listening for the one time per month that maybe I want to turn them on from my phone? Yes please and a side of mountain top removal coal mining please!
With a computer controllable lighting system you may well be able to save energy by exercising better (automated) control over the lights - for example, automatically tuning them to the most appropriate brightness based on the current environment rather than running them at full power all the time, tracking where people are in the house and automatically turning the lights off in unused rooms, etc. That said, with the power requirements of modern LED lights, this does seem like rather a small potential saving.
As far as I can tell this isn't even a security hole in the lighting itself - they used a java exploit to gain control of the mac that was already controlling the lights. I'd be more interested if you could do a drive-by attack on the lighting system itself.
The pirated version is a download that you can watch on any device any time. The Netflix stream requires Silverlight, so I can't use it on the FreeBSD box connected to my projector nor on one of my tablets. The other tablet runs Android, so there is a Netflix streaming app, but I don't think it lets me download things and I mostly want to watch things on the tablet when I'm on a train or plane (spotty / expensive / unavailable Internet access).
I'm going to add to this - I don't watch (or know anything about) this particular programme, *but* I don't watch a lot of premium TV and I'm unwilling to pay the high prices for a large number of channels that I'll never watch. I did used to subscribe to Sky, but then I realised I was watching maybe 2 or 3 series over the course of a year - it just wasn't worth the high price since that makes it many times the price of just buying the DVDs later; so I dropped my Sky subscription. If I were able to pay a _reasonable_ pay-per-view fee to download a series at the same time as it is scheduled on broadcast TV, *and* I didn't have to deal with the DRM then I would do this for a small number of programmes. But the media industry don't want that - they want exclusive deals that means I have to pay for a load of content I'm not interested in seeing, and want to use DRM to ensure I can't watch what I pay for anyway.
(FWIW, I don't download TV programmes illegally - I simply don't bother watching them at all. If they can't provide a sensible way for me to watch content, I've got better things to spend my time and money doing. Mostly the TV I watch these days comes from the BBC channels or S4C with the occasional movie on rented DVD)
Until then, I'll keep getting the shiny disks through the post.
I did used to use LoveFilm and get shiny DVDs through the post. However, they repeatedly screwed up, made fraudulent charges (even after I gave them plenty of warning that the charges they were intending to make were not authorised) and refused to refund them. Their customer services team initially told me they would sort it out, and then when they didn't they started saying the wouldn't fix it because what had previously admitted had gone wrong with their own systems couldn't possibly have gone wrong and it was therefore not their fault. In the end my bank decided that LoveFilm had committed fraud and returned my subscription fees through a chargeback, so I've not touched them again. Unfortunately last time I checked, all the DVDs-through-the-post services in the UK seemed to be run by either LoveFilm or Blockbuster, and Blockbuster expected you to rent far more DVDs each month than I'm interested in watching. If I could find a LoveFilm-style service that wasn't run by LoveFilm and had a suitable "light user" subscription then I'd probably start doing that again, but for now I just pop down to the local video shop every so often and rent something there.
They move the authentication process to a few providers rather than hundreds. The few used are more likely to be secure and less likely to need complex authentication each time.
Or: They move the authentication process to a few providers rather than hundreds. The few used are more likely to be heavilly targetted by spammers and less likely to do the required job.
Authentication and determining trust (i.e. determining whether the "user" can be trusted not to spam) are two separate problems that are perpetually bundled together inappropriately. IMHO they need to be separated:
The authentication service provider needs to be someone the user trusts - when I go to some-random-blog.com and have to authenticate to leave a comment, the blog can contact my authentication server to find out who I am. The blog doesn't need to know how my authentication server is authenticating me (could be a password, or kerberos, or whatever), all the blog needs is confirmation from the auth server that I really am who I say I am. So I can log in with "me@example.com", the blog makes a DNS SRV lookup on example.com to find the auth server, does a challenge/response handshake with the auth server that proves that the auth server has determined that I really am me@example.com. The authentication server can be run by myself, my ISP, my email provider, facebook (if I were insane), whoever - the important thing is that the authentication provider is someone I trust and no one else gets my actual authentication credentials. This immediately massively reduces the threat of leaked passwords, etc. since I'm not having to hand my passwords out to random people I don't trust.
The "trust provider" (i.e. the service provider that determines whether or not I'm a spammer) needs to be someone the blog owner trusts - it could be run by the blog owner themselves, or some third party (google, etc.). All it does is some verification that my ID (me@example.com in the example above) is used by a human. The blog asks the trust provider for verification, the trust provider says "this ID doesn't belong to a spammer" and the blog allows me to post. I guess some kind of feedback mechanism would be good so the blog owner can inform the trust provider if I start spamming.
This even provides some level of anonymity - I can have multiple IDs all backed by the same authentication credentials at the same server if I want, and it could be arranged so the blog itself never even sees my ID, only the trust provider actually needs to see it. And if I *really* trust my authentication service (i.e. if I run it myself) then I only need one set of authentication credentials in order to log into anything - whether that be slashdot or my bank - because no one except my auth service actually ever gets trusted to see those credentials.
Of course they do - if you're banned from downloading more than a terabyte a month (for example) during the peak periods then that will inherently push the high users away from using vast amounts of bandwidth during peak periods, reducing congestion.
and discourages new legal usages.
Placing arbitrary bans on certain technologies (e.g. telling people they aren't allowed to run any servers) seems like a pretty good way of discouraging new legal uses.
Throttling typically costs more than adding new bandwidth, except when a networks is horrible miss-managed or the ISP cannot afford to purchase large enough bulk bandwidth to get decent rates.
If adding new bandwidth is so cheap, Google should have no problems with people running high bandwidth servers on their connection. Again, to reiterate: google is not banning the use of lots of bandwidth, they are banning the use of the internet connection for certain applications which may or may not use lots of bandwidth - the only reason to care about the application and not the resources it is using is because they want to create a price differential, not because its having an impact on their network.
And what might those be? Don't say data caps or throttling.
And what's wrong with data caps and throttling?
If you don't want someone to use more than a certain amount of bandwidth, publish that limit and put in traffic management to throttle them if they exceed it rather than simply banning one specific application that may or may not use a lot of bandwidth whilst allowing many others that would also use a lot of bandwidth.
IMHO the only thing that's ever been wrong with data caps and throttling is when ISPs sell the connections as "unlimited" rather than being honest about what you're being sold.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Cars will fail to read the road signs correctly
2. Someone will hack the road signs, leading to mayhem
3. Only a certain percentage of road fatalities are caused by people exceeding the listed speed limit
Why not fit cars with a voluntary limiter that users can enable themselves?
4. Automating all this stuff probably makes drivers less aware, which in itself may be bad for safety.
Also, the speed limits are frequently completely nonsensical - there are a number of roads I drive down with 30mph limits, which have "traffic calming" that would likely destroy your car if you did more than 10mph. In these situations, speed limits seem to serve no purpose - they used to tell you how fast you could safely drive in good conditions, but these days they are frequently intentionally making it dangerous to go anywhere near the speed limit...
Plusnet is owned by BT, but is run as an independent company with its own customer services department in Sheffield, England, which is much better than BT's customer service department in India.
Wonder why BT didn't just "sell" their customers and DDIs to Plusnet instead of instructing people to migrate.
And I love HD over grainy crappy old shit that takes forever to download, bring on UHD.
I'm curious where you're finding your HD video on the internet... Certainly the HD video on iplayer is such low bandwidth and it macroblocks on any fast moving video (for reference, BBC HD on DVB-S is 16Mbps H.264... BBC HD on iplayer is... not).
Even worse, it uses a proxy to hijack all port 53 DNS requests, so you can't choose an alternate server with the standard port.
My guess is that it probably does a few tricks with proxying both DNS and HTTP traffic to improve performance in light of the latency (e.g. 3-way TCP handshakes are going to take about 1050ms to complete under normal circumstances on your connection, whereas a proxy can eliminate the need to carry the 3-way handshake across the low latency connection. Local caching DNS would be a big help too, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was built into your router.)
I'm curious how satellite providers handle upstream - I presume they must do some kind of polling to fetch data from each user to avoid collisions, so that could also add to the latency.
Says who? A lot of gun owners have t-shirts and stickers which say things like "what part of 'shall not be infringed' do you not understand?" Maybe you don't like guns. Doesn't really matter because what the Constitution says is what it says.
I know Americans have some big hardon for guns, but here's my take on the US constitution (I'm not American BTW):
It's a bit like some ancient religious text - largely unchanging, even when parts of it make no sense at all in the modern era; also widely ignored (probably *because* parts of it make no sense at all in the modern era). Now don't get me wrong - there are a lot of protections in the constitution that _shouldn't_ be removed, and amending it is certainly dangerous because you need to ensure that it is amended for the good of the people rather than for the good of those in power.
Take the "right to bear arms", for example. What exactly is the purpose of this right? When the constitution was written, it was clear that the right to bear arms was to keep the government and military in check - the civilians could carry guns of comparable power to the military's weapons, and if the military stepped out of line they could face a serious threat from the population.
The gun nuts bang on about how their right to guns must not be infringed because they want to be able to fight "the man" if he steps out of line - well guess what, "the man" is trampling over everyone's rights and not one of those gun-toting rednecks is doing anything about it. So I guess that pretty much demonstrates that the gun nuts just want to be able to wave guns around, not to fulfill the original intention of the constitutional right to bear arms.
These days, the military has RPG launchers, fighter jets, missiles, grenades, nuclear weapons, etc. and there's not a lot the population can do against this since they are only armed with hand guns, rifles, shot guns, etc. On the other hand, do you *want* your local redneck gun nut having access to the same kind of fire power as the military? Seems a pretty bad plan to me.
So, you're left with this ancient law limiting the restrictions the government can place on firearms ownership, which appears to not serve its original purpose at all and leads to a lot of gun crime... Maybe time to rethink that law?
Apologies for posting as apparently anonymous coward (from the uk).... there are satellite alternatives who's prices have been getting more reasonable (no i don't work for a sat company), i do know someone that uses a home style service and they say it is good (they live on a canal boat). I monitor prices on the satellite stuff and it's getting much more reasonable especially if you were paying 17 quid for crap.... anyway might be worth a look for you... http://www.avonlinebroadband.co.uk/packages/
Lee
The problem with satellite broadband is the latency is very high, even compared to dialup (although the throughput can certainly be good), so whether its suitable depends on what you're using it for. Also, some of the satellite "internet" providers actually only provide access to the web, which is rather less useful.
Work requirement, that's why i'm stuck with Skype
Can't understand why businesses have standardised on an insecure proprietary system (which, I might add, is absolute hell to deal with from a firewalling perspective), rather than the industry standard open system...
Can the Skype team stop adding more and more crap to it, and start removing some of the existing bloat?
I want an instant messenger, not something that takes minutes to load, minutes to fetch messages (many of which i already read on another comp or on my phone, but it still alerts me like they are new messages), and when finally loaded i get bombarded with ads that do not interest me in the slightest, or offers to connect Skype to Facebook and the like, something i already told it to go do something anatomically impossible about more than once.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Umm, why not use something like Jitsi instead?
Only thing is I'm still looking for a decent SIP video client for Android - Sipdroid is excellent for voice calls, but its video support is completely broken. :(
taking pot-shots at the monumentally, epically difficult jobs of regulators is lazy comedy.
/ no, i am not a regulator, but I know what they do.
I would have more sympathy if the regulator's response to flagrant law-breaking wasn't always simply to write a "stongly worded" letter to the company responsible, reminding them of their legal obligations. I dunno, but if I personally broke the law, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get a letter reminding me that what I did was illegal and told not to do it again, especially if I'm doing the law breaking on a large and organised scale...
Those light-lined streets aren't lit anymore. Some busy streets have one light on every other light pole still powered and some streets don't have any powered lights.
Depends where you are - where I live they tried that, and there was outcry. I don't understand why - with every other light turned off it *still* seemed too bright to me. They also decided to turn the street lights off on some streets between the hours of 1am and 5am, and people complained that it was endangering the elderly and school children (who are obviously all going to school at 5am?!)... Eventually the council got voted out and the new council undid all that good work.
The batteries do indeed seem to degrade quickly (even third party ones); and they seem to lose calibration very quickly too. The customer service is terrible and the BIOS has the aforementioned bug, but other than that the machine actually isn't too bad (which I guess is a good thing since customer support clearly aren't going to care if anything is wrong with it).
Sadly, most companies won't allow the customer to talk directly to engineering.
I didn't want to talk directly to engineering, I just wanted someone to pass the patch on to the right people and get a fixed BIOS to a defective product line. Instead they thought it was better customer service to thrown my emails into the bitbucket. That's the kind of customer service that gets a company onto my blacklist.
FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.
http://www.nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml
TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.
FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.
http://www.nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml
TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.
My daughter has reading troubles that I believe were consistent with dyslexia. We voiced our concerns to the school and they told us it was a medical issue not a school issue. So we talked with her doctor who informed us that dyslexia was a school problem and not a medical problem. To have her diagnosed officially we would have to had paid a large amount out of pocket and even then the school would not do anything beyond what help she already received in her reading group. If dyslexia is so common I can't understand why it is swept under the rug like it doesn't exist.
As far as I can tell, here in the UK it isn't swept under the rug - schools seem to take it very seriously and provide extra help, and dyslexic people can qualify for government grants for equipment to help them, etc. From the comments I'm seeing here it sounds like the US is pretty backwards when it comes to dyslexia. (And you're right - its extremely common, I know a lot of dyslexics).
Clearly you have an agenda and aren't interested in views that don't conform to your idea that information is free naturally.
No agenda; I'm just saying that the premise of DRM cannot do anything to reduce copyright infringement because DRM can always be bypassed trivially by just downloading a copy that someone else has already removed the DRM from. Meanwhile, DRM probably actually increases the amount of infringement and makes it more socially acceptable because it prevents the legitimate customers from doing reasonable things with the content they have purchased, making copyright infringement a more attractive option.
Not once have you explained how DRM can reduce copyright infringement, you have simply said that it "must be enacted" without explaining how enacting it can do anything to solve any problem.
You make the same broad assumptions about its current flaws and underlying business models that i see everywhere...they are simply incorrect In many cases.
Please, list a few incorrect assumptions I've made...
One example is that Drm ripping is any different than someone pirating airwave tv. These ideas form the basis of the rest of your argument so i have trouble reconciling that with reality. I hope you find this more respectful than my original statement about the validity of your points
Firstly, I wasn't talking about airwave TV - you were talking about how a service like itunes is "pretty reasonable" and I pointed out that it was completely useless due to the DRM they are imposing; you then went off on one about how great DRM is and how we have to have it. itunes is *not* airwave TV.
Secondly, I haven't made any such assumption - in both cases, if they place lots of restrictions on the legitimate content that greatly inconveniences the consumer then they can expect the consumer to go to the bootleg content instead. This is true whether it be DRM, regional availability (e.g. staggering global release dates, or just plain not making content available in some regions at all), some requirement to pay a lot for a bunch of channels you're not intrested in just to see one programme, or any other restriction.
There are certain levels of DRM that the public will likely accept - for example, many satellite broadcasters make CI modules available so that you can use whatever receiving equipment you like and can do what you like with the resulting decrypted video. All I'm saying is that the more inconvenient things get for the consumer (which is directly linked to the amount of control the media companies try to exert), the more likely an otherwise law abiding consumer is to say "sod it" and just download an illegal copy without those restrictions. And once a large number of otherwise law abiding citizens are infringing copyright, it becomes socially acceptable to do so and more people join in - this is where we are right now, and the only way the media industry is going to reduce copyright infringement is by making it socially unacceptable, and that will never happen while there are so many completely legitimate reasons why people can't use the official media for perfectly normal activities.
>And completely useless due to DRM and the fact that I need to buy a computer dedicated to watching TV on. No thanks.
Not really, this is completely achievable without a PC. You may find an Apple TV helpful, but I can understand that this is undesirable to you.
I have a perfectly good TV and a perfectly good media PC. The DRM in iTunes media would prevent me using it on these devices. The DRM also stops me using it on my phone, my workstation, my laptop or my partner's phone or tablet. So what you're saying is that in order to use what you describe as a "pretty reasonable" way of accessing content seems pretty unreasonable to me, since, purely because of the restrictions imposed by the content producer, I would have to purchase expensive brand new hardware in order to watch their content. Or alternatively I could just download it illegally.
So I ask again: why would the content producers expect people to pay for content that is of considerably less use to the consumer than the black market version? The content producers have always told the public that the reason they shouldn't use bootleg versions is because they are "low quality", but with the advent of DRM and high quality rips, it is actually the legit versions that are "low quality" when compared to the bootlegs.
(To reiterate, I don't generally download TV and movies illegally; I simply can't be bothered with dealing with this crap at all, so the content producers just lose my business; but I can completely understand why people do illegally download this content - its largely because the content producers are intentionally making it hard for people to get and use content legitimately)
I'm not saying DRM today is appropriate or even desireable, but some form must be enacted to ensure security of contents.
This is impossible. As I explained, to the consumer DRM massively reduces the value and quality of the product; it only takes one person to remove the DRM and post a copy online in order for everyone else to find it easier to simply download it than deal with your DRM. No matter how much DRM you have, you can never stop *everyone* from removing it - even if it requires expensive equipment to strip the DRM, someone will do it and post the results online for everyone else to download.
The only other way is to broadcast to everyone and force them to watch commercials.
Not true at all. The majority of people don't want to watch content illegally - what the content producers must do is:
1. Let people use the product how they like instead of placing all kinds of technological limitations on what they can do with it.
2. Stop treating the paying customers like criminals - when I *pay* for a DVD I don't see why I should have to sit through an unskippable video telling me how bad I am for "stealing" (infringing copyright). If I didn't pay for it then that crap would've been stripped off and I wouldn't have to put up with it.
3. Treat your customers with some respect - by all means stick some adverts on a DVD, but let people skip them if they're not interested.
4. Stop trying to stick it to the customer with region controls - if the content producer is allowed to make use of the global market to reduce costs, then why the hell shouldn't the customer be allowed to do the same? Secondly, using region controls invariably means some people have no legal way to access the content, so you can't very well complain when they take the not-so-legal approach.
5. Price things sensibly.
6. Accept that some people will always infringe copyright, whatever you do; just like some people will always shop-lift. You can't stop them, but treating *everyone* like criminals just encourages more people to try and stick it to you.
What the content industry needs to do to reduce copyright infringement is to make it socially unacceptable - they can do this by ensuring that there are as few legitimate reasons for infringing as pos
I just want to point out a service like Itunes is pretty reasonable
And completely useless due to DRM and the fact that I need to buy a computer dedicated to watching TV on. No thanks.
You will also never get a la carte without accepting some form of DRM
Then I guess the media industry will continue to not get my business.
To be clear: DRM does not achieve anything positive for anyone (including the content producers). It reduces the value of the legitimate product without doing anything to get rid of the illegal copies. Why would someone pay good money for content that they can only use in extremely restricted ways when the black market offers the same content with all the DRM already removed so you don't need to concern yourself with crazy ideas like only being able to watch it on a small subset of devices, etc?
Yes, the ad-supported model isn't ideal, and has been exploited by bad people. But the reality is that you get free content where the percentage of pixels on a page devoted to ads is typically much less than the percentage minutes of ads on free OTA television, and less than the percentage of inches in a $4.95 magazine. Oh boo-hoo.
The "free" OTA television I watch has no ads - it is funded through my taxes. If I want, I can pay extra for "pay TV" - that costs more than my TV licence for less content, *and* includes adverts. Please forgive me if I don't take the pay TV providers up on their "generous" offer.
Magazines do indeed often include advertising. And I don't mind that at all - the advertising sits there on the page, to be either looked at or ignored as the reader sees fit. It doesn't flash multi-colours distractingly all the time the reader is trying to read the article, it doesn't play loud music as soon as you open the magazine, it doesn't sit there using the CPU that you need for something else you're doing at the same time, or running down your battery when you're not plugged into the mains, it doesn't require me to do something to get rid of the advert before I can actually read the article. Nor does it report back to the advertiser how long I looked at the ad, what other ads I looked at, what things I've previously bought after seeing adverts, what other magazines I read, etc.
I am perfectly happy for web pages to have adverts - I recognise that the web hosts need to get an income from somewhere, and I don't mind some static adverts sitting unobtrusively to the side of the article I'm reading. You can even target them to the subject that the page is discussing - hell, I've actually found these types of ads useful on occasion since they sometimes advertise things highly relevant to the subject matter at hand.
What is _not_ cool with me is being downright obnoxious to get me to view the advert instead of the article; and what isn't cool is collecting data about me. And advertisers *know* they are doing stuff that really pisses people off - they started off with popups and popunders, which pissed everyone off to the point that they invented popup blockers. Then they figured out how to get around the popup blockers *knowing full well that people enabled them because they found popups obnoxious*, so the popub blockers were improved. Then they started using floating objects within the page to get a popup-like effect, even though they have been repeatedly shown that people don't like popups at all and will go to lengths to stop them. So now people are blocking the advertising completely - that's entirely the advertisers' own fault. If they had stuck to magazine-style static adverts that you could either read or ignore without having to actively dismiss them to read the article then almost no one would bother to do any ad blocking at all.
However you cut it, under 1 in every 10000 adverts is ever going to be useful to me. If I get to see that 1 advert and ignore the other 9999 without any effort then that's good for the advertiser since they get my business from that 1 ad, and its good for me coz I've been informed about something useful. If I have to actively do something to get rid of those 9999 irrelevant adverts then I'm sorry but it just isn't worth my effort to make sure than the 1 interesting ad gets through so the advertiser loses out.
The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.
Firstly, no one is stealing any content - the content owner still has their content, I haven't removed it from their posession. Even doing what the media industry does and equating "stealing" with "copyright infringement" doesn't help you here - the content was put on the web freely, there were no technical restrictions stopping me accessing
Security issues aside, wireless connectivity uses some small amount of power. To me this is energy wasting of the highest order. My lightbulbs constantly listening for the one time per month that maybe I want to turn them on from my phone? Yes please and a side of mountain top removal coal mining please!
With a computer controllable lighting system you may well be able to save energy by exercising better (automated) control over the lights - for example, automatically tuning them to the most appropriate brightness based on the current environment rather than running them at full power all the time, tracking where people are in the house and automatically turning the lights off in unused rooms, etc. That said, with the power requirements of modern LED lights, this does seem like rather a small potential saving.
As far as I can tell this isn't even a security hole in the lighting itself - they used a java exploit to gain control of the mac that was already controlling the lights. I'd be more interested if you could do a drive-by attack on the lighting system itself.
The pirated version is a download that you can watch on any device any time. The Netflix stream requires Silverlight, so I can't use it on the FreeBSD box connected to my projector nor on one of my tablets. The other tablet runs Android, so there is a Netflix streaming app, but I don't think it lets me download things and I mostly want to watch things on the tablet when I'm on a train or plane (spotty / expensive / unavailable Internet access).
I'm going to add to this - I don't watch (or know anything about) this particular programme, *but* I don't watch a lot of premium TV and I'm unwilling to pay the high prices for a large number of channels that I'll never watch. I did used to subscribe to Sky, but then I realised I was watching maybe 2 or 3 series over the course of a year - it just wasn't worth the high price since that makes it many times the price of just buying the DVDs later; so I dropped my Sky subscription. If I were able to pay a _reasonable_ pay-per-view fee to download a series at the same time as it is scheduled on broadcast TV, *and* I didn't have to deal with the DRM then I would do this for a small number of programmes. But the media industry don't want that - they want exclusive deals that means I have to pay for a load of content I'm not interested in seeing, and want to use DRM to ensure I can't watch what I pay for anyway.
(FWIW, I don't download TV programmes illegally - I simply don't bother watching them at all. If they can't provide a sensible way for me to watch content, I've got better things to spend my time and money doing. Mostly the TV I watch these days comes from the BBC channels or S4C with the occasional movie on rented DVD)
Until then, I'll keep getting the shiny disks through the post.
I did used to use LoveFilm and get shiny DVDs through the post. However, they repeatedly screwed up, made fraudulent charges (even after I gave them plenty of warning that the charges they were intending to make were not authorised) and refused to refund them. Their customer services team initially told me they would sort it out, and then when they didn't they started saying the wouldn't fix it because what had previously admitted had gone wrong with their own systems couldn't possibly have gone wrong and it was therefore not their fault. In the end my bank decided that LoveFilm had committed fraud and returned my subscription fees through a chargeback, so I've not touched them again. Unfortunately last time I checked, all the DVDs-through-the-post services in the UK seemed to be run by either LoveFilm or Blockbuster, and Blockbuster expected you to rent far more DVDs each month than I'm interested in watching. If I could find a LoveFilm-style service that wasn't run by LoveFilm and had a suitable "light user" subscription then I'd probably start doing that again, but for now I just pop down to the local video shop every so often and rent something there.
They move the authentication process to a few providers rather than hundreds. The few used are more likely to be secure and less likely to need complex authentication each time.
Or: They move the authentication process to a few providers rather than hundreds. The few used are more likely to be heavilly targetted by spammers and less likely to do the required job.
Authentication and determining trust (i.e. determining whether the "user" can be trusted not to spam) are two separate problems that are perpetually bundled together inappropriately. IMHO they need to be separated:
The authentication service provider needs to be someone the user trusts - when I go to some-random-blog.com and have to authenticate to leave a comment, the blog can contact my authentication server to find out who I am. The blog doesn't need to know how my authentication server is authenticating me (could be a password, or kerberos, or whatever), all the blog needs is confirmation from the auth server that I really am who I say I am. So I can log in with "me@example.com", the blog makes a DNS SRV lookup on example.com to find the auth server, does a challenge/response handshake with the auth server that proves that the auth server has determined that I really am me@example.com. The authentication server can be run by myself, my ISP, my email provider, facebook (if I were insane), whoever - the important thing is that the authentication provider is someone I trust and no one else gets my actual authentication credentials. This immediately massively reduces the threat of leaked passwords, etc. since I'm not having to hand my passwords out to random people I don't trust.
The "trust provider" (i.e. the service provider that determines whether or not I'm a spammer) needs to be someone the blog owner trusts - it could be run by the blog owner themselves, or some third party (google, etc.). All it does is some verification that my ID (me@example.com in the example above) is used by a human. The blog asks the trust provider for verification, the trust provider says "this ID doesn't belong to a spammer" and the blog allows me to post. I guess some kind of feedback mechanism would be good so the blog owner can inform the trust provider if I start spamming.
This even provides some level of anonymity - I can have multiple IDs all backed by the same authentication credentials at the same server if I want, and it could be arranged so the blog itself never even sees my ID, only the trust provider actually needs to see it. And if I *really* trust my authentication service (i.e. if I run it myself) then I only need one set of authentication credentials in order to log into anything - whether that be slashdot or my bank - because no one except my auth service actually ever gets trusted to see those credentials.
Data caps do not help congestion in any form
Of course they do - if you're banned from downloading more than a terabyte a month (for example) during the peak periods then that will inherently push the high users away from using vast amounts of bandwidth during peak periods, reducing congestion.
and discourages new legal usages.
Placing arbitrary bans on certain technologies (e.g. telling people they aren't allowed to run any servers) seems like a pretty good way of discouraging new legal uses.
Throttling typically costs more than adding new bandwidth, except when a networks is horrible miss-managed or the ISP cannot afford to purchase large enough bulk bandwidth to get decent rates.
If adding new bandwidth is so cheap, Google should have no problems with people running high bandwidth servers on their connection. Again, to reiterate: google is not banning the use of lots of bandwidth, they are banning the use of the internet connection for certain applications which may or may not use lots of bandwidth - the only reason to care about the application and not the resources it is using is because they want to create a price differential, not because its having an impact on their network.
And what might those be? Don't say data caps or throttling.
And what's wrong with data caps and throttling?
If you don't want someone to use more than a certain amount of bandwidth, publish that limit and put in traffic management to throttle them if they exceed it rather than simply banning one specific application that may or may not use a lot of bandwidth whilst allowing many others that would also use a lot of bandwidth.
IMHO the only thing that's ever been wrong with data caps and throttling is when ISPs sell the connections as "unlimited" rather than being honest about what you're being sold.