The facts are:- It's in beta, and it's proprietary. Will the beta fix either of these?
The beta is testing the network capacity, software and scalability of the project, along with the Peer-to-peer distribution that they are using. To use the MS DRM is probably the most trivial part of the whole system. How hard do you think it would be to change that at a later date?
By trialling with currently-existing and tested video DRM they are limiting the variables in the beta that could go wrong. That and the program owners (as the BBC doesn't own the complete rights to a good chunk of their programming) require DRM, you can't just remove it. What's needed is a proper, tested multi-format DRM system. Saying that, DRM directly conflicts with the interests of the Linux community, catch 22...
These protests are uncalled for so early in the development stage. If it doesn't get past this round do you think they'll try it again? Doubt it.
Re:We already have this in the UK
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
If you use the Oyster card (which could start another privacy debate i don't care about) which is the contactless top-up card for prepay tickets and period travelcards then it's a lot cheaper. £1.50 within Zone 1 and £1 within other zones. If your journey spans several zones then it costs more.
This system does screw over tourists who don't know about the card (or can't be bothered to get one for their holiday) as the minimum cash fare within Zone 1 is £4.
A package of cigarettes should cost me $1.50 not $10.50. I am sick of paying for all of these health freaks and hypochondriacs. Smokers being a drain on the healthcare system is pure myth. It is simple extortion that plays on people's irrational guilt for smoking. Health Canada has all the facts wrong as well.
Exactly, as Yes Prime Minister went on to demonstrate:
Hacker: Smoking related diseases cause over 100,000 premature deaths every year! Think of the burden on the NHS. Humphrey: Yes, but we've been into that. It has been shown that if those extra one hundred thousand people had lived to a ripe old age that they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security, than they did in medical treatment. So financially speaking it is unquestionably better that they continue to die at the present rate.
It then goes on to say how smokers are bravely laying down their lives for the good of society!
The BBC and Licensing?
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Although a rather unusual case when it comes to the world-wide status of DRM, the BBC has a reason for implementing DRM.
As one of the few British channels to make their content available online they have fine line to cross. The commerical channels funded by advertising offer a week or so's worth of TV to download for free with popular shows having a minimal fee (£0.99 to rent or £1.99 to purchase). This is all well and good, but the BBC cannot operate under this model. Either they release their content for free or don't release it at all to the British public.
There are few paths the BBC can take. At the moment for their online streaming media they use Geo-Targeting and attempt to restrict access to the UK public (although this can result in false negatives/positives) but provide the content itself for free. If they make it available to all for free they are breaking several points of their Royal Charter. They can either show the British public the shows for free and without advertising or broadcast it to foreigners with either a charge or adverts, but they cannot show it to the UK audience with adverts or a charge. This is where the problem lies.
The BBC's iPlayer has recently come under fire for being Windows only and DRM-riddled, but what can they do? They can either implement some form of UK-based DRM or not attempt to show programmes online at all. The BBC often doesn't own the content the broadcast in full and therefore aren't able to make their content available without caveats, and many of the companies they produce media in conjunction with require this. Coupled with their charter they are stuck with no online media at all or some form of DRM inbetween. I'd prefer the DRM version then to wait for some form of non-DRM equivalent to be implemented!
Re:Am I the only one who just doesn't care about H
on
Blue Blu-ray
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree with the quality difference, and when i move out i'll probably get me a HDTV instead of a standard one.
I recently went through the BBC Planet Earth site and downloaded all the HD clips they have. I believe they're only 720p as well (just checked, they are) and so i've been playing them on my 19" PC monitor which does 1440x900. People forget that standard PC displays can often play HD content! The video is just amazing, the details on some of the footage such as the Angel Falls. Any UK resident (or someone with a UK proxy at hand) i would highly recommend Planet Earth HD.
Put them on the HDTVs at work too, the number of people that stop and watch the telly we've got set up (compared to the shitty demo before) is startling.
I thought it'd be interesting to compare the US price drop to the EU give-them-extra-stuff-but-charge-the-same deal. I think the US one will have a lot more impact somehow...
As long as you are not messing with the machine, there is no crime here.
A few times i've seen on the news about cashpoints here filled with £20 notes in the £10 drawer, and so nice payouts all round. These stories are also filled with details of people, sometimes in dressing gowns, going down there in the morning when it was found out and each person drawing out cash.
The bank simply adjusted accounts by the amount actually dispensed, no criminal charges though.
I've got Vista Business on my desktop and Vista Home Premium on my tablet PC.
Business runs perfectly fine on 1GB RAM with a P4 3.4Ghz HT, although it has a nice tenancy to load Media Player at low processor priority. I recently used the shadow-copy backup feature when i accidentally overwrote a day's work on a file with an old copy from another machine. Just select the file, view the previous versions stored and choose one to restore to. It's also running a WAMP server and various other things sit in the background.
Home Premium is running on a tablet PC with 512MB RAM and a Pentium M 1.7Ghz and integrated graphics (for which Intel aren't releasing any Vista drivers so i'm stuck with the MS ones). I've got it set to run Windows Classic theme (Vista Basic sucks and is quite a hog actually, but classic and Aero Glass seem to run ok), runs fast, has better tablet PC features than XP Tablet PC Edition and i manage to get 3.5 hours battery out of it running DivX videos still. Sometimes it'll slow down, but nothing like you're reporting.
Actually, i remember reading a newspaper report a year or so ago stating that the "American Dream" isn't all it's cracked up to be with social mobility being lower in the US than the majority of EU countries.
The social mobility of the US came from it being a very young country with resources to develop and huge opportunities. Now it's like most other countries, most of the easy sources of cash are developed, large companies blocking entry into the market by your small competitors by size alone. The social mobility now comes from quality education, good job opportunities and welfare to keep those who slip down to the lowest rung to keep going.
This is a plain, simple and well-known feature of MS Office that frankly is very useful. If you copy a spreadsheet graph across, the data also gets copied across so you are able to modify it later.
So what would the advantage of OSS software give? They could modify the program so that this data doesn't get released? Great. So we have a program that magically knows what data is classified, or we have a classified flag that can be added (or forgotten to be added by clerical staff). Would you allow classified data to be used to create a graph? Probably not.
As far as i remember OOo implements graph and data copying between various OOo applications in exactly the same way too. This is simply the poor sod that had to make the slideshow either not realising or forgetting that this happens.
This is why documents like this PowerPoint should be distributed in some format like a PDF, there is no reason to be able to modify the slideshow publically or see the source behind any of the graphics, charts or diagrams.
This has always been the way. The BBC operates as an internal and external company, with BBC World being entirely self-funding (and must do so under the BBC charter). The other main reason for the geoblocking on online BBC media is the fact that the BBC often are not the sole copyright owner with many productions being produced by studios for the BBC who often retain some rights.
This is from our "Reasoning about programming" exam (1st Year Computing at Imperial College, top Uni in Europe for CompSci). Granted, this exam is supposed to be about reasoning and logic about programming, but this is a perfect example of how to fuck up code. All indenting, spacing and newlines the same as the exam. The bold parts are in reference to questions set about the program.
int partition (int [] a, int x) { //Pre: none //Post: 0<=r<=a.length & // (A)i:int(0<=i<r-->a[i]<x & r<=i<a.length-->a[i]>=x) int greyStart = 0; int bigStart =a.length; while (greyStart < bigStart) {// Outer while loop // Variant: bigStart-greyStart // Invariant: 0<=greyStart<=bigStart<=a.length & // (A)i:int(0<=i< greyStart-->a[i]<x & // bigStart<=i<a.length-->a[i]>=x)
while((greyStart<bigStart) && (a[greyStart<x)){ // First inner loop: <b>See part(d)</b> (***) // Variant and Invariant: <b>See part(B)</b>
greyStart++;}
while((bigStart>greyStart) && (a[bigStart-1]>=x)) { // Variant: bisStart-greyStart
bigStart--;}
if (greyStart<bigStart) {
swap(a, greyStart, bigStart-1); //swaps a[greyStart with a[bigStart-1]
bigStart--; greyStart++;}
} return bigStart; }
And although there is the disclaimer at the top, we found code with similarly huge and utterly useless (or over the top) commenting from our programming lectures. This is at the stage where you're learning how to program, not at the stage where you're meant to learn about how to thoroughly prove programs mathematically.
The Group of Eight (G8) is an international forum for the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Together, these countries represent about 65% of the world economy.
The G8 is a group of the richest countries in the world and they get together to discuss matters between them. If they can't be arsed to cut emissions, what right do they have to impose them on other countries that aren't even in their little clique? The G8 should be deciding between them how to deal with issues that affect them, such as global warming, trade and such.
If Germany can reduce their emissions by 17%, the UK by 14% and France by 0.8% between 1990 and 2004 (Their targets were 8%), the US should be able to reduce their emissions too (They increased by 16%).
But to say: i remember the last g8 thing demanded major reform from usa while ignoring third world countries. if this is still the case, i could understand not wanting anything to do with it. Basically, "Why should i if they won't", what do you recon the 3rd world countries are going to say? "If the US is allowed to do as they please, why aren't we?". It's an incredibly selfish way of countering the fact the US isn't doing anything major to reduce emissions but you shouldn't blame them because other countries aren't either.
Much of the alarm about global warming is not centred on increased extreme weather conditions, it's about rising sea levels. How many of the US's (along with the World's) major cities are at huge risk if sea levels rise by several metres? The economics damage posed by higher sea levels is worrying. What about the areas of the world that are going to suffer due to increased temperatures? Europe is experiencing some relatively severe heat waves, it wouldn't be beneficial for these to be regular ocurrances.
Unfortunately if global warming is true, we lose if we keep pumping out greenhouse gasses at alarming rates, but if it isn't true there's nothing to lose by reducing emissions.
And why would introducing limits destroy the US economy, it's not destroying everyone else's. I mean, the way it works at the moment you're getting a free ride compared to the rest of the nations on those countries taking these measures up. A gradual introduction of measures over a long period of time aren't going to destroy anything, but suddenly having to rush measures in in the future would cripple the US. Why pollute more than you need to?
Google redirect UK users to their google.co.uk site automatically. Infact, the only way for me to use google.com is to directly query google.com (In the way Firefox search does). If i go to google.com i get the.co.uk search. Makes sense, better targeted advertising. This happens in other countries too (Ever Google'd with Tor? I've ended up with Polish and German google pages).
Next, I'll be able to replace my aging desktop. Coolness, where else but in America and in a Walmart?
Tesco and the UK. The larger stores sell those things you're going on about, and Tesco have sold desktop PCs in the past, but they're more of a short-term offer based thing, they don't sell PCs in general though.
I believe when i last saw this pop up it was a single school somewhere, and i believe it was a single Muslim school.
I came out of education a few years ago and we got plenty of education about the Holocaust, GCSE level History was two years mostly spent on the German history between WWI and WWII. Infact, i remember hearing that the German ambassador (or somesuch) was unhappy about how much our history lessons centred on this.
I clicked the link and laughed as soon as i saw the URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk./ They make no references to the number of schools or anything else.
Well, the local traffic wardens (South Kensington, London) carry digital cameras and take photos of anyone with a parking offense. It makes perfect sense considering how if it goes to court it's "them against me".
London has huge surveillance, look at the Ring of Steel from IRA bombings.
I was in Victoria train station yesterday on the way back from work. There are huge banks of CCTV, one for every ticket barrier, plus loads for every entrance and exit from the station. Victoria being one of the busiest stations in the country it's a vital network hub. Counting that along is probably 200-500 CCTV cameras for one station. There's several other stations of the same importance, CCTV adds up at a few sites.
The thing with mass CCTV in the sense we have now, they can't monitor them well enough to have the Orwellian society that people love to go on about. CCTV footage doesn't get looked at without a specific reason, those operating cameras don't bother looking at stuff unless there's a fuss or something happening, otherwise it all blends in. It's not as if there's a nice file with my name on it and all CCTV footage of me contained in it, it's just not feasible. With 4.2 million cameras that's 4.2 million man hours required to watch them all, think about it logically...
Sorry, public transport isn't inferior to a car, but it should be used in tandem with a car. Public transport is great for commuting on. I love the ability to get on a train, sit down, stretch my feet out and read / work on laptop / play a games console and listen to some music.
For going to the shops it might make more sense to use a car, carry the shopping in the boot and not try and carry stuff on and off busses or trains.
And the biggest thing of all, congestion. If i wanted to drive to Uni from home it's a good 45 minutes, however i've only done this journey late on a Sunday or well after peak. If i were to do this in rush hour i'd forget about it. The train and tube take me about 45 mins start to finish (includes walking at both ends). Now the fact that a large proportion of people use public transport and the car still sucks makes a strong point.
Approximately 3 million tube journeys, 5 million bus journeys and several million more train journeys per day (operated by about 10 different franchises so no stats for that) show that transport doesn't suck that badly.
Never been to London? I hardly ever get on an empty bus, usually they run with a minimum of 10% capacity in our local area, easily going to 50% regularly and can at peak get overcrowded (although at this point they run a lot more frequently). Commuter services aren't that bad, especially if you pay for season tickets.
Now non-urban services may be relatively poor, i'll accept that. Long distance rail also sucks when it comes to pricing, but the commuter stuff isn't too bad.
A few of those features are implemented in London. Most London bus stops have a display showing the upcoming 10 busses with route number, destination and estimated timing based upon where on the route they are. We also get covered bus shelters and seating.
And on the same point, we've got a very good bus network and London is a massive example of Urban sprawl. There are hundreds of bus routes about the city connecting up regional areas and transport hubs. The service is frequent enough that getting the bus is completely feasable (I do it frequently as a student), due to bus lanes (be they a good thing for public transport or the bane of the car) busses can be quicker than car journeys and bypass traffic.
And due to recent investment there's new, cleaner and better busses on our routers. £1 per journey with a cap of £3 for unlimited bus travel.
London's prices vary considerably depending on what you do. A stanard zone 1-2 tube journey is £1.50 or £2.00 dependant on peak travel times, with £1 charge for all busses. There is a cap of about £5 per day if you use PAYG on Oyster card which is a pre-pay system (They want to phase out paper tickets, so a single journey paid for by cash costs £4).
Annual travel costs £1000 to £1700 (£600-£1100 without central London) depending on what zones you're travelling in, with significant discounts for students (33% off). This may seem expensive but this covers a tube network with trains running every 5-10 minutes in the City, busses that have improved hugely and are of similar frequency, trains, DLR, tram and riverboat services. Night busses mean bus services are 24 hour and make travel about the city quite easy.
Although Londoners love to bitch about the Tube and public transport in general, we've got it lucky compared to most places and it's the only feasable way to commute daily. It could be better but as a student i regularly use the tube and bus services. Although expensive don't forget that Londoners get a "London Allowance" ensuring they are actually paid more than other workers, along with the fact that London wages are generally higher.
I'd say it's more like a toolbox, where Windows provides you with a set of standardly used tools already included.
Linus is the toolbox, but you've got a huge store of screwdrivers and whatnot to choose from, with 5 different versions of the same screwdriver and a loads variations in size and shape.
It's nice to get a toolbox and get the same stuff as everyone else, rather than hunt for the 6/9th inch screwdriver amoungst the 61/90ths and the 58/90th versions.
Slashdot Mirror
The facts are:- It's in beta, and it's proprietary. Will the beta fix either of these?
The beta is testing the network capacity, software and scalability of the project, along with the Peer-to-peer distribution that they are using. To use the MS DRM is probably the most trivial part of the whole system. How hard do you think it would be to change that at a later date?
By trialling with currently-existing and tested video DRM they are limiting the variables in the beta that could go wrong. That and the program owners (as the BBC doesn't own the complete rights to a good chunk of their programming) require DRM, you can't just remove it. What's needed is a proper, tested multi-format DRM system. Saying that, DRM directly conflicts with the interests of the Linux community, catch 22...
These protests are uncalled for so early in the development stage. If it doesn't get past this round do you think they'll try it again? Doubt it.
If you use the Oyster card (which could start another privacy debate i don't care about) which is the contactless top-up card for prepay tickets and period travelcards then it's a lot cheaper. £1.50 within Zone 1 and £1 within other zones. If your journey spans several zones then it costs more.
This system does screw over tourists who don't know about the card (or can't be bothered to get one for their holiday) as the minimum cash fare within Zone 1 is £4.
A package of cigarettes should cost me $1.50 not $10.50. I am sick of paying for all of these health freaks and hypochondriacs. Smokers being a drain on the healthcare system is pure myth. It is simple extortion that plays on people's irrational guilt for smoking. Health Canada has all the facts wrong as well.
Exactly, as Yes Prime Minister went on to demonstrate:
Hacker: Smoking related diseases cause over 100,000 premature deaths every year! Think of the burden on the NHS.
Humphrey: Yes, but we've been into that. It has been shown that if those extra one hundred thousand people had lived to a ripe old age that they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security, than they did in medical treatment. So financially speaking it is unquestionably better that they continue to die at the present rate.
It then goes on to say how smokers are bravely laying down their lives for the good of society!
Although a rather unusual case when it comes to the world-wide status of DRM, the BBC has a reason for implementing DRM.
As one of the few British channels to make their content available online they have fine line to cross. The commerical channels funded by advertising offer a week or so's worth of TV to download for free with popular shows having a minimal fee (£0.99 to rent or £1.99 to purchase). This is all well and good, but the BBC cannot operate under this model. Either they release their content for free or don't release it at all to the British public.
There are few paths the BBC can take. At the moment for their online streaming media they use Geo-Targeting and attempt to restrict access to the UK public (although this can result in false negatives/positives) but provide the content itself for free. If they make it available to all for free they are breaking several points of their Royal Charter. They can either show the British public the shows for free and without advertising or broadcast it to foreigners with either a charge or adverts, but they cannot show it to the UK audience with adverts or a charge. This is where the problem lies.
The BBC's iPlayer has recently come under fire for being Windows only and DRM-riddled, but what can they do? They can either implement some form of UK-based DRM or not attempt to show programmes online at all. The BBC often doesn't own the content the broadcast in full and therefore aren't able to make their content available without caveats, and many of the companies they produce media in conjunction with require this. Coupled with their charter they are stuck with no online media at all or some form of DRM inbetween. I'd prefer the DRM version then to wait for some form of non-DRM equivalent to be implemented!
I agree with the quality difference, and when i move out i'll probably get me a HDTV instead of a standard one.
I recently went through the BBC Planet Earth site and downloaded all the HD clips they have. I believe they're only 720p as well (just checked, they are) and so i've been playing them on my 19" PC monitor which does 1440x900. People forget that standard PC displays can often play HD content! The video is just amazing, the details on some of the footage such as the Angel Falls. Any UK resident (or someone with a UK proxy at hand) i would highly recommend Planet Earth HD.
Put them on the HDTVs at work too, the number of people that stop and watch the telly we've got set up (compared to the shitty demo before) is startling.
I thought it'd be interesting to compare the US price drop to the EU give-them-extra-stuff-but-charge-the-same deal. I think the US one will have a lot more impact somehow...
As long as you are not messing with the machine, there is no crime here.
A few times i've seen on the news about cashpoints here filled with £20 notes in the £10 drawer, and so nice payouts all round. These stories are also filled with details of people, sometimes in dressing gowns, going down there in the morning when it was found out and each person drawing out cash.
The bank simply adjusted accounts by the amount actually dispensed, no criminal charges though.
I've got Vista Business on my desktop and Vista Home Premium on my tablet PC.
Business runs perfectly fine on 1GB RAM with a P4 3.4Ghz HT, although it has a nice tenancy to load Media Player at low processor priority. I recently used the shadow-copy backup feature when i accidentally overwrote a day's work on a file with an old copy from another machine. Just select the file, view the previous versions stored and choose one to restore to. It's also running a WAMP server and various other things sit in the background.
Home Premium is running on a tablet PC with 512MB RAM and a Pentium M 1.7Ghz and integrated graphics (for which Intel aren't releasing any Vista drivers so i'm stuck with the MS ones). I've got it set to run Windows Classic theme (Vista Basic sucks and is quite a hog actually, but classic and Aero Glass seem to run ok), runs fast, has better tablet PC features than XP Tablet PC Edition and i manage to get 3.5 hours battery out of it running DivX videos still. Sometimes it'll slow down, but nothing like you're reporting.
IE7 sucks on both...
Actually, i remember reading a newspaper report a year or so ago stating that the "American Dream" isn't all it's cracked up to be with social mobility being lower in the US than the majority of EU countries.
The social mobility of the US came from it being a very young country with resources to develop and huge opportunities. Now it's like most other countries, most of the easy sources of cash are developed, large companies blocking entry into the market by your small competitors by size alone. The social mobility now comes from quality education, good job opportunities and welfare to keep those who slip down to the lowest rung to keep going.
Naa, wouldn't get enough to cover the train fare :p
This is a plain, simple and well-known feature of MS Office that frankly is very useful. If you copy a spreadsheet graph across, the data also gets copied across so you are able to modify it later.
So what would the advantage of OSS software give? They could modify the program so that this data doesn't get released? Great. So we have a program that magically knows what data is classified, or we have a classified flag that can be added (or forgotten to be added by clerical staff). Would you allow classified data to be used to create a graph? Probably not.
As far as i remember OOo implements graph and data copying between various OOo applications in exactly the same way too. This is simply the poor sod that had to make the slideshow either not realising or forgetting that this happens.
This is why documents like this PowerPoint should be distributed in some format like a PDF, there is no reason to be able to modify the slideshow publically or see the source behind any of the graphics, charts or diagrams.
This has always been the way. The BBC operates as an internal and external company, with BBC World being entirely self-funding (and must do so under the BBC charter). The other main reason for the geoblocking on online BBC media is the fact that the BBC often are not the sole copyright owner with many productions being produced by studios for the BBC who often retain some rights.
Do you know what the G8 even is?:
The Group of Eight (G8) is an international forum for the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Together, these countries represent about 65% of the world economy.
The G8 is a group of the richest countries in the world and they get together to discuss matters between them. If they can't be arsed to cut emissions, what right do they have to impose them on other countries that aren't even in their little clique? The G8 should be deciding between them how to deal with issues that affect them, such as global warming, trade and such.
If Germany can reduce their emissions by 17%, the UK by 14% and France by 0.8% between 1990 and 2004 (Their targets were 8%), the US should be able to reduce their emissions too (They increased by 16%).
But to say:
i remember the last g8 thing demanded major reform from usa while ignoring third world countries. if this is still the case, i could understand not wanting anything to do with it.
Basically, "Why should i if they won't", what do you recon the 3rd world countries are going to say? "If the US is allowed to do as they please, why aren't we?". It's an incredibly selfish way of countering the fact the US isn't doing anything major to reduce emissions but you shouldn't blame them because other countries aren't either.
Right:
Much of the alarm about global warming is not centred on increased extreme weather conditions, it's about rising sea levels. How many of the US's (along with the World's) major cities are at huge risk if sea levels rise by several metres? The economics damage posed by higher sea levels is worrying. What about the areas of the world that are going to suffer due to increased temperatures? Europe is experiencing some relatively severe heat waves, it wouldn't be beneficial for these to be regular ocurrances.
Unfortunately if global warming is true, we lose if we keep pumping out greenhouse gasses at alarming rates, but if it isn't true there's nothing to lose by reducing emissions.
And why would introducing limits destroy the US economy, it's not destroying everyone else's. I mean, the way it works at the moment you're getting a free ride compared to the rest of the nations on those countries taking these measures up. A gradual introduction of measures over a long period of time aren't going to destroy anything, but suddenly having to rush measures in in the future would cripple the US. Why pollute more than you need to?
Google redirect UK users to their google.co.uk site automatically. Infact, the only way for me to use google.com is to directly query google.com (In the way Firefox search does). If i go to google.com i get the .co.uk search. Makes sense, better targeted advertising. This happens in other countries too (Ever Google'd with Tor? I've ended up with Polish and German google pages).
Next, I'll be able to replace my aging desktop. Coolness, where else but in America and in a Walmart?
Tesco and the UK. The larger stores sell those things you're going on about, and Tesco have sold desktop PCs in the past, but they're more of a short-term offer based thing, they don't sell PCs in general though.
I believe when i last saw this pop up it was a single school somewhere, and i believe it was a single Muslim school.
I came out of education a few years ago and we got plenty of education about the Holocaust, GCSE level History was two years mostly spent on the German history between WWI and WWII. Infact, i remember hearing that the German ambassador (or somesuch) was unhappy about how much our history lessons centred on this.
I clicked the link and laughed as soon as i saw the URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk./ They make no references to the number of schools or anything else.
Well, the local traffic wardens (South Kensington, London) carry digital cameras and take photos of anyone with a parking offense. It makes perfect sense considering how if it goes to court it's "them against me".
London has huge surveillance, look at the Ring of Steel from IRA bombings.
I was in Victoria train station yesterday on the way back from work. There are huge banks of CCTV, one for every ticket barrier, plus loads for every entrance and exit from the station. Victoria being one of the busiest stations in the country it's a vital network hub. Counting that along is probably 200-500 CCTV cameras for one station. There's several other stations of the same importance, CCTV adds up at a few sites.
The thing with mass CCTV in the sense we have now, they can't monitor them well enough to have the Orwellian society that people love to go on about. CCTV footage doesn't get looked at without a specific reason, those operating cameras don't bother looking at stuff unless there's a fuss or something happening, otherwise it all blends in. It's not as if there's a nice file with my name on it and all CCTV footage of me contained in it, it's just not feasible. With 4.2 million cameras that's 4.2 million man hours required to watch them all, think about it logically...
Sorry, public transport isn't inferior to a car, but it should be used in tandem with a car. Public transport is great for commuting on. I love the ability to get on a train, sit down, stretch my feet out and read / work on laptop / play a games console and listen to some music.
For going to the shops it might make more sense to use a car, carry the shopping in the boot and not try and carry stuff on and off busses or trains.
And the biggest thing of all, congestion. If i wanted to drive to Uni from home it's a good 45 minutes, however i've only done this journey late on a Sunday or well after peak. If i were to do this in rush hour i'd forget about it. The train and tube take me about 45 mins start to finish (includes walking at both ends). Now the fact that a large proportion of people use public transport and the car still sucks makes a strong point.
Approximately 3 million tube journeys, 5 million bus journeys and several million more train journeys per day (operated by about 10 different franchises so no stats for that) show that transport doesn't suck that badly.
Never been to London? I hardly ever get on an empty bus, usually they run with a minimum of 10% capacity in our local area, easily going to 50% regularly and can at peak get overcrowded (although at this point they run a lot more frequently). Commuter services aren't that bad, especially if you pay for season tickets.
Now non-urban services may be relatively poor, i'll accept that. Long distance rail also sucks when it comes to pricing, but the commuter stuff isn't too bad.
A few of those features are implemented in London. Most London bus stops have a display showing the upcoming 10 busses with route number, destination and estimated timing based upon where on the route they are. We also get covered bus shelters and seating.
And on the same point, we've got a very good bus network and London is a massive example of Urban sprawl. There are hundreds of bus routes about the city connecting up regional areas and transport hubs. The service is frequent enough that getting the bus is completely feasable (I do it frequently as a student), due to bus lanes (be they a good thing for public transport or the bane of the car) busses can be quicker than car journeys and bypass traffic.
And due to recent investment there's new, cleaner and better busses on our routers. £1 per journey with a cap of £3 for unlimited bus travel.
London's prices vary considerably depending on what you do. A stanard zone 1-2 tube journey is £1.50 or £2.00 dependant on peak travel times, with £1 charge for all busses. There is a cap of about £5 per day if you use PAYG on Oyster card which is a pre-pay system (They want to phase out paper tickets, so a single journey paid for by cash costs £4).
Annual travel costs £1000 to £1700 (£600-£1100 without central London) depending on what zones you're travelling in, with significant discounts for students (33% off). This may seem expensive but this covers a tube network with trains running every 5-10 minutes in the City, busses that have improved hugely and are of similar frequency, trains, DLR, tram and riverboat services. Night busses mean bus services are 24 hour and make travel about the city quite easy.
Although Londoners love to bitch about the Tube and public transport in general, we've got it lucky compared to most places and it's the only feasable way to commute daily. It could be better but as a student i regularly use the tube and bus services. Although expensive don't forget that Londoners get a "London Allowance" ensuring they are actually paid more than other workers, along with the fact that London wages are generally higher.
I'd say it's more like a toolbox, where Windows provides you with a set of standardly used tools already included.
Linus is the toolbox, but you've got a huge store of screwdrivers and whatnot to choose from, with 5 different versions of the same screwdriver and a loads variations in size and shape.
It's nice to get a toolbox and get the same stuff as everyone else, rather than hunt for the 6/9th inch screwdriver amoungst the 61/90ths and the 58/90th versions.