Just tried it. Giffgaff's site says: "Note: When setting your phone to block your access to 18+ content please be aware that this is limited to those sites, games or services where the content providers have a commercial relationship with giffgaff / The Telefonica group."
Does this mean you cannot turn the "porn" filter off at all, and it just allows you to access the 18+ content that Giffgaff has deemed appropriate?
I think the guy you're replying to may have got a false impression of the way the inspectors themselves behave, from the way the license fee guys continuously send increasingly threatening letters to anyone that doesn't have a license. When I was a student, I didn't have a TV license because I did not watch TV. I still don't. I got an endless stream of letters about the fact I was lacking a license, telling me I should send them a letter back explaining that I did not need one, and should submit to an inspection of my premises as evidence to show that I don't watch their frankly almost universally godawful TV shows.
I didn't, basically because this annoyed me. More and more letters arrived - one every few weeks - until eventually they were sending out these weird fake court summons papers, which were just mass printed with my name added to the bottom automatically. They were not court summons, or fines, or whatever they were clearly disguised as; instead, it said somewhere on them that this may be a taste of things to come if I did not pay up, and they found proof that I was - gasp - watching TV.
If we make an exact copy of a human brain, will it not just be an actual person? At which point we can't really experiment on it any more. After all, if we were okay with experimenting on a real living brain, why not just experiment on some random people? There's loads of them. They barely use those things anyway.
At the very least, this thing needs to have some means to communicate so that we know when it becomes sentient. Otherwise we might be experimenting on an actual, feeling, thinking person without even knowing about it.
I don't mean this project shouldn't happen. I just mean that the ethics need to be carefully considered first.
The aim is that, even if an academic publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal, a version of their article would simultaneously appear on the freely available repository.
It looks like they want the info published in the high impact journals, but also in the national archive. This sidesteps the whole "looking bad on a CV or research grant application" problem. Unless there's some licensing issue with the big journals, but you'd imagine the government could deal with that. Maybe.
This kid seems to have gotten the right idea. Maybe even if the teachers aren't using them properly, giving naturally curious kids access to a whole world of information will help them out anyway.
Or maybe that guy was just a unique case, I don't know. That video made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside however.
(If you can't be bothered to watch the video, shame on you! But also, it's about a child in Peru who works cleaning people's shoes on the streets. He has an OLPC laptop, though, and he uses it to educate himself with wikipedia.)
True, Galloway did just win that by-election. But as you yourself say, this is a rarity, and it's unlikely to have any real impact on national government. Looking at the history of British elections, it's almost always the Labour or Conservative parties in power. When there's a coalition - not very often - it's made up of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, just like now.
You could say it was a three party system if you wanted to stretch it, but the current coalition isn't really acting like anything more than a Conservative party, so I'm not really sure that would be much of an improvement.
It's not totally unassailable though, as you said. Which is good. It's just really, really difficult to change it. The original poster way above this was raving at us voters for bringing about this frankly rather scary surveillance proposal, but with it being that difficult to get any democratic change from the perspective of a single slashdot reader, we really don't have that much control over such matters.
You're right about the Scotland thing as well, which is why I said England instead of UK. It's a bit more complicated north of the border. I'm not sure escaping to another country is quite the same as democratic change though. I see you've mentioned tuition fees as well - unfortunately for us English, we still have to pay English tuition fees even if we run away to Scotland. They think of everything, don't they?
England doesn't have a national government. Local government tends to vary between the 3 major parties and often have coalitions and independent councillors.
As the other reply to this post says, that's not really true. We have local government, councils, and also of course local MPs - although they are part of the national parliament. It's not the local councils who are responsible for the proposed internet monitoring, it's the national government - a cabinet made up mostly of MPs that run the country nationally.
It's currently in a coalition, but this is the first time in ages that this has happened. Usually the Liberal Democrats have next to no power; hence the two party system. Even if it was a three party system, if all three of them were functionally identical this would have the same problem. As this coalition has shown; they are.
This actually makes the small minority of swing voters think they're empowered (95% of the votes in the UK are meaningless, it's only marginal votes in marginal constituencies that count). And they are, they get to choose between Labour and Conservative.
Yes, they get to choose between Labour and Conservative. That's the problem.
Those riots were generally people nicking TVs and trainers.
That's an over simplification. It's a matter of extensive debate at the moment, though, and I simply mentioned the riots in order to lead into my point that the general population is too apathetic, or more optimistically speaking, too content, for rebellion. Their causes are not really relevant to my point.
There was a lot of anger about bankers recently too, so occupy London camped outside of St Paul's, then enforced the view they were work-shy homeless hippies and fell off the the news radar before, quite rightly, being removed as the pointless eyesore it was.
That's a strange view to take. Is everyone angry about the bankers a work-shy hippie? I'm pretty angry about the economic situation, and I barely smell of patchouli at all.
I agree. But what is the alternative? England, which is where this is happening, has an effective two party system. Like most places. On an individual basis, you realistically have two choices, and they will both lead to the same thing.
Theoretically, someone should be able to start their own party, and get voted into power by running policies specifically for the people. This is more difficult than it sounds, however, because you have to take into account that people do not vote rationally. Some might, relatively speaking, but probably the majority just vote for the same party forever.
A popular uprising is a route around this. This requires the populace to be angrier and less apathetic than they are now, though, and while we had some nasty riots recently, they were nowhere near the numbers required to actually pull off a regime change. To get one of those, the living conditions in the country in question need to be much, much worse than they currently are in the UK.
Blame can only be placed on the individual voter up to a certain point, as they have to work within the system they have, and with the people they are surrounded by. Of course, the people causing this problem are all individual voters too. But they are unlikely to be reading comments on slashdot. Even if you shouted this in their face, they would probably react with hostility, because their behaviour isn't really guided by stone-cold logic, and a lot of people don't like their behaviour being questioned. Also, you'd be shouting in their face.
This situation isn't as bad as it sounds, though. If quality of life here got really bad, a popular uprising would occur. It's self regulating - if the system gets that bad, it will get replaced. If it doesn't, then hey, things are going pretty well, relatively speaking. Unless technology gets so advanced that rebellion becomes impossible, in which case, we'll all be screwed.
I don't think we have psychometric testing that is accurate enough for this to work, unfortunately. You'd get too many false positives and false negatives. Also, whoever controlled the testing criteria would have a little too much power.
I don't actually think the Pandora team are going for the number 1 slot in the console market. They're not that stupid. They're trying to make a profit by catering to a niche that I, and probably a lot of geeks, fit into.
Where else are you gonna find what is, for all intents and purposes, a fully functional PC with a QWERTY keyboard that'll fit in your pocket and play a ton of emulated games?
Fair enough then. On first reading I was under the impression you were saying pirating it instead of buying due to DRM was bad, because you were countering a wrong(Adding ridiculous DRM) with another wrong (piracy). But as you meant you just shouldn't mention that in the email itself, that actually makes sense. My mistake
I live in the UK, and my ISP basically already applies this system, to varying degrees. The cheaper packages they offer have something very similar to this enabled; you can also pay extra to get decent speeds across more or less all types of traffic.
Unfortunately they also cap your monthly bandwith usage as well, although that's also subject to how much you wanna pay.
I can only assume everyone mentioning "European ISPs" that are somehow super-fast and provide unlimited transfers are talking about France and the like, and not including the UK, because here, there's bandwith capping abound. Of course that's just fine by me, i'd rather be differentiated from Europe as much as possible, thankyouverymuch.
It's also worth noting, that the last two graphics cards I had - one on a laptop machine, one on a desktop - Both of them more or less stopped working due to massive driver glitches that ATI just couldn't be bothered to fix.
This despite the desktop chip only being out for a couple of months.
So yeah, guess there's more than performance to consider when grabbing a graphics card..
It doesn't sound all that likely that this will become actively enforced in a hell of a lot of places. In the UK, for example, the BBC's online download service, the iPlayer, uses P2P technology to serve up the programs you've paid for with your TV license.
I can't see UK government, ridiculously inept as they are, shutting down the iPlayer. Why? Because they use it as an excuse to charge you for a TV license when you've only got a computer.
And if there's one thing the UK government like, it's badly disguised taxes.
Offline mode is horribly buggy and will frequently choose not to work(I found this out by experience while at uni, where Steam is blocked from working on their network).
In fact, I think there's a time limit on it. Or at least there used to be - you have to come online to activate your game again if you've been in Offline Mode too long. This happened to one of my friends, who was only using offline mode because his account had gone wrong and he'd lost all the games he'd purchased.
Okay, I was actually hoping for some research into whether the camouflage on actual physical zebras was effective. This is just really disappointing, people. Rectify the mistake immediately.
Yeah... Got the same problem on my laptop, with the same graphics chipset. It just locks up after the login screen appears, or occasionally just after the desktop loads. Guess the drivers don't like the mobile x700 card.
Slashdot Mirror
Just tried it. Giffgaff's site says: "Note: When setting your phone to block your access to 18+ content please be aware that this is limited to those sites, games or services where the content providers have a commercial relationship with giffgaff / The Telefonica group."
Does this mean you cannot turn the "porn" filter off at all, and it just allows you to access the 18+ content that Giffgaff has deemed appropriate?
Agreed. What's the point in living in an imaginary world anyway?
I think the guy you're replying to may have got a false impression of the way the inspectors themselves behave, from the way the license fee guys continuously send increasingly threatening letters to anyone that doesn't have a license. When I was a student, I didn't have a TV license because I did not watch TV. I still don't. I got an endless stream of letters about the fact I was lacking a license, telling me I should send them a letter back explaining that I did not need one, and should submit to an inspection of my premises as evidence to show that I don't watch their frankly almost universally godawful TV shows.
I didn't, basically because this annoyed me. More and more letters arrived - one every few weeks - until eventually they were sending out these weird fake court summons papers, which were just mass printed with my name added to the bottom automatically. They were not court summons, or fines, or whatever they were clearly disguised as; instead, it said somewhere on them that this may be a taste of things to come if I did not pay up, and they found proof that I was - gasp - watching TV.
It was all pretty sinister to be honest.
If we make an exact copy of a human brain, will it not just be an actual person? At which point we can't really experiment on it any more. After all, if we were okay with experimenting on a real living brain, why not just experiment on some random people? There's loads of them. They barely use those things anyway.
At the very least, this thing needs to have some means to communicate so that we know when it becomes sentient. Otherwise we might be experimenting on an actual, feeling, thinking person without even knowing about it.
I don't mean this project shouldn't happen. I just mean that the ethics need to be carefully considered first.
Correct grammar is the difference between helping your uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
The aim is that, even if an academic publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal, a version of their article would simultaneously appear on the freely available repository.
It looks like they want the info published in the high impact journals, but also in the national archive. This sidesteps the whole "looking bad on a CV or research grant application" problem. Unless there's some licensing issue with the big journals, but you'd imagine the government could deal with that. Maybe.
This kid seems to have gotten the right idea. Maybe even if the teachers aren't using them properly, giving naturally curious kids access to a whole world of information will help them out anyway.
Or maybe that guy was just a unique case, I don't know. That video made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside however.
(If you can't be bothered to watch the video, shame on you! But also, it's about a child in Peru who works cleaning people's shoes on the streets. He has an OLPC laptop, though, and he uses it to educate himself with wikipedia.)
True, Galloway did just win that by-election. But as you yourself say, this is a rarity, and it's unlikely to have any real impact on national government. Looking at the history of British elections, it's almost always the Labour or Conservative parties in power. When there's a coalition - not very often - it's made up of Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, just like now.
You could say it was a three party system if you wanted to stretch it, but the current coalition isn't really acting like anything more than a Conservative party, so I'm not really sure that would be much of an improvement.
It's not totally unassailable though, as you said. Which is good. It's just really, really difficult to change it. The original poster way above this was raving at us voters for bringing about this frankly rather scary surveillance proposal, but with it being that difficult to get any democratic change from the perspective of a single slashdot reader, we really don't have that much control over such matters.
You're right about the Scotland thing as well, which is why I said England instead of UK. It's a bit more complicated north of the border. I'm not sure escaping to another country is quite the same as democratic change though. I see you've mentioned tuition fees as well - unfortunately for us English, we still have to pay English tuition fees even if we run away to Scotland. They think of everything, don't they?
England doesn't have a national government. Local government tends to vary between the 3 major parties and often have coalitions and independent councillors.
As the other reply to this post says, that's not really true. We have local government, councils, and also of course local MPs - although they are part of the national parliament. It's not the local councils who are responsible for the proposed internet monitoring, it's the national government - a cabinet made up mostly of MPs that run the country nationally.
It's currently in a coalition, but this is the first time in ages that this has happened. Usually the Liberal Democrats have next to no power; hence the two party system. Even if it was a three party system, if all three of them were functionally identical this would have the same problem. As this coalition has shown; they are.
This actually makes the small minority of swing voters think they're empowered (95% of the votes in the UK are meaningless, it's only marginal votes in marginal constituencies that count). And they are, they get to choose between Labour and Conservative.
Yes, they get to choose between Labour and Conservative. That's the problem.
Those riots were generally people nicking TVs and trainers.
That's an over simplification. It's a matter of extensive debate at the moment, though, and I simply mentioned the riots in order to lead into my point that the general population is too apathetic, or more optimistically speaking, too content, for rebellion. Their causes are not really relevant to my point.
There was a lot of anger about bankers recently too, so occupy London camped outside of St Paul's, then enforced the view they were work-shy homeless hippies and fell off the the news radar before, quite rightly, being removed as the pointless eyesore it was.
That's a strange view to take. Is everyone angry about the bankers a work-shy hippie? I'm pretty angry about the economic situation, and I barely smell of patchouli at all.
I agree. But what is the alternative? England, which is where this is happening, has an effective two party system. Like most places. On an individual basis, you realistically have two choices, and they will both lead to the same thing.
Theoretically, someone should be able to start their own party, and get voted into power by running policies specifically for the people. This is more difficult than it sounds, however, because you have to take into account that people do not vote rationally. Some might, relatively speaking, but probably the majority just vote for the same party forever.
A popular uprising is a route around this. This requires the populace to be angrier and less apathetic than they are now, though, and while we had some nasty riots recently, they were nowhere near the numbers required to actually pull off a regime change. To get one of those, the living conditions in the country in question need to be much, much worse than they currently are in the UK.
Blame can only be placed on the individual voter up to a certain point, as they have to work within the system they have, and with the people they are surrounded by. Of course, the people causing this problem are all individual voters too. But they are unlikely to be reading comments on slashdot. Even if you shouted this in their face, they would probably react with hostility, because their behaviour isn't really guided by stone-cold logic, and a lot of people don't like their behaviour being questioned. Also, you'd be shouting in their face.
This situation isn't as bad as it sounds, though. If quality of life here got really bad, a popular uprising would occur. It's self regulating - if the system gets that bad, it will get replaced. If it doesn't, then hey, things are going pretty well, relatively speaking. Unless technology gets so advanced that rebellion becomes impossible, in which case, we'll all be screwed.
I don't think we have psychometric testing that is accurate enough for this to work, unfortunately. You'd get too many false positives and false negatives. Also, whoever controlled the testing criteria would have a little too much power.
I'm genuinely curious about this - is there actually any compelling evidence that trying to target your customer's subconscious actually works?
People seem to take it for granted that it does, but I've never seen anyone actually prove it.
I don't actually think the Pandora team are going for the number 1 slot in the console market.
They're not that stupid. They're trying to make a profit by catering to a niche that I, and probably a lot of geeks, fit into.
Where else are you gonna find what is, for all intents and purposes, a fully functional PC with a QWERTY keyboard that'll fit in your pocket and play a ton of emulated games?
You wont. Hence the point in this product.
Fair enough then. On first reading I was under the impression you were saying pirating it instead of buying due to DRM was bad, because you were countering a wrong(Adding ridiculous DRM) with another wrong (piracy). But as you meant you just shouldn't mention that in the email itself, that actually makes sense.
My mistake
You do realise that threatening wrongs with wrongs is what the justice system consists of, right?
Imprisoning someone against their will is illegal, after all.
I live in the UK, and my ISP basically already applies this system, to varying degrees. The cheaper packages they offer have something very similar to this enabled; you can also pay extra to get decent speeds across more or less all types of traffic.
Unfortunately they also cap your monthly bandwith usage as well, although that's also subject to how much you wanna pay.
I can only assume everyone mentioning "European ISPs" that are somehow super-fast and provide unlimited transfers are talking about France and the like, and not including the UK, because here, there's bandwith capping abound. Of course that's just fine by me, i'd rather be differentiated from Europe as much as possible, thankyouverymuch.
I don't think when I watch commercials, I just watch them."
Oh no. There's no hope left for this species.
I propose we create evacuation ships, with a basic puzzle on the door to keep the mindless consumer drones out. Something that says:
"Should you buy the hyper-deluxe Nike Air ExtraSmooooveWalkers or the Adidas Classic AllStars for your weekly jog at the Virgin Mega-Gym?"
Of course, the correct answer is "No."
It's also worth noting, that the last two graphics cards I had - one on a laptop machine, one on a desktop - Both of them more or less stopped working due to massive driver glitches that ATI just couldn't be bothered to fix.
This despite the desktop chip only being out for a couple of months.
So yeah, guess there's more than performance to consider when grabbing a graphics card..
It doesn't sound all that likely that this will become actively enforced in a hell of a lot of places. In the UK, for example, the BBC's online download service, the iPlayer, uses P2P technology to serve up the programs you've paid for with your TV license.
I can't see UK government, ridiculously inept as they are, shutting down the iPlayer. Why? Because they use it as an excuse to charge you for a TV license when you've only got a computer.
And if there's one thing the UK government like, it's badly disguised taxes.
Offline mode is horribly buggy and will frequently choose not to work(I found this out by experience while at uni, where Steam is blocked from working on their network).
In fact, I think there's a time limit on it. Or at least there used to be - you have to come online to activate your game again if you've been in Offline Mode too long. This happened to one of my friends, who was only using offline mode because his account had gone wrong and he'd lost all the games he'd purchased.
Okay, I was actually hoping for some research into whether the camouflage on actual physical zebras was effective. This is just really disappointing, people. Rectify the mistake immediately.
Dude, wasn't there a law against unification of Germany and Austria after that whole trying-to-take-over-the-world thing a few years ago?
When I do that... It adds the song to another on-the-go playlist, lol
Well, uh... They could let you remove songs from a playlist without needing to plug it into a PC. Maybe.
Yeah... Got the same problem on my laptop, with the same graphics chipset. It just locks up after the login screen appears, or occasionally just after the desktop loads. Guess the drivers don't like the mobile x700 card.