That's simply because they've specifically chosen to make available data from the Ordnance Survey. You can get the same maps on your own non-commercial website free if you want them (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/web-services/os-openspace/api/index.html) or also see them on the OS website (http://www.getamap.ordnancesurveyleisure.co.uk/).
Ironically, the "getamap" website requires Microsoft Silverlight, whereas Bing doesn't.
What did all those businesses with Burroughs, Univac, CDC, Honeywell, Data General and DEC computers do when the companies stopped making them? In some cases successor companies kept them going with spares and maintenance for a while or offered some sort of upgrade path. But mostly it involved spending a lot of money porting software and data over to new architectures.
The reason those products disappeared is because of technology change - there wasn't a big enough market for mainframes when minicomputers emerged and there wasn't enough market for minicomputers when the PC emerged because the new buyers could jump to the latest technology without the legacy transition costs. That meant an additional cost burden for those who'd adopted the previous generation of technology as well as the ultimate end of their technology providers. That's how it is.
Guess what: Facebook will almost certainly ultimately go the same way as Data General. About the only long-established technology company that hasn't suffered a similar fate is IBM (and internally it's nothing like the same company it was in the 1960s). Something "better" will inevitably come along. Have you prepared your transition plan? Where is your backup?
The difference now is that nobody is paying Facebook monthly maintenance fees to give it some value during the transition window: when it goes, there's nothing to sustain it long enough for you to get data out that is valuable to you. The only hope you have is there is data worth sufficient to another company that they buy it and let you see it again.
Social networks have no commercial interest in allowing you to get your data out - if you can, you can conveniently give it to someone else and then its value is largely lost. You are the commodity - when you're gone, you're gone. Plan accordingly.
Indeed, and it is slated to be included in the next generation of the Freesat (UK free-to-air satellite) specs, along with MHEG for backwards compatibility.
If you remember Ceefax back in its original form when TVs would typically have 7 1Kbit RAM chips to store one single page of data, it could take a considerable age for the page you wanted to arrive - pages weren't transmitted sequentially, but popular pages were transmitted more frequently to improve their access time, at the cost of significant delays to other content.
It's only later incarnations of TVs that had much more memory and could cache pages (helped by the hinting of the coloured button cues) that made Ceefax acceptably responsive.
The same is true of the MHEG service that replaces Ceefax on (some) digital platforms - if the TV caches the carousels as they come past rather than awaiting their next transmission (and provided the TV has a reasonable CPU) it's actually quite quick. Early integrated TVs (and cheap STBs) don't have the memory or horsepower to do this.
The replacement service is much less comprehensive, though. This is partly because there's relatively little bandwidth allocated to the data channel (at least on Freeview), partly because the content has to be disseminated through incompatible platforms (Sky, for example, uses OpenTV rather than MHEG for "red button" services) which means the editorial process is a bit more complicated than it was for Ceefax - but mostly because far more comprehensive information is available via the Internet...
There's a real shitstorm brewing in the UK over mobile phone frequency allocations. There were originally two GSM networks (which are now O2 and Vodafone) operating in the 900MHz band on gifted spectrum. What became T-Mobile and Orange got spectrum at 1800MHz a bit later. There was a subsequent auction of bandwidth for 3G at 2100MHz which all four acquired along with new entrant Three. T-Mobile and Orange have now merged into Everything Everywhere and therefore have lots more spectrum than everyone else. However, it's the 900MHz band - together with spectrum around 800MHz which has been cleared of analogue TV - which is the real prize as it's propagation characteristics are much better, particularly within buildings.
The real issue going forward is going to be the equitable distribution of 800MHz and 900MHz for 4G use and since various subsets of all the networks are disadvantaged either by the status quo or any change to the status quo, every proposal so far has been met with threats of lawyers at dawn. More 1800MHz spectrum is second best.
This is one of those situations in which "let the market decide" is probably going to result in stalemate or a seriously suboptimal solution for the consumer.
Given that is is widely reported that US prisoners make 21% of all office furniture and 36% of all domestic appliance at labour rates between $0.5 and $1.25 per hour, I'd say that big business had a vested interest in getting people locked up. I'd also say that's an "event of injustice" which is widespread against the populace, given the American propensity for jailing such a large proportion of its citizens. I see no sign of the American people taking action, except to elect the politicians who promise to deliver more of it.
The consumer is liable for VAT (in the end), it's like sales tax. It's not a tax on the business, it's a tax on you. Amazon just collect it and pass it along.
There's a further loophole that has just been closed which allowed a number of large online retailers to ship low value items from outside the EU (but inside the UK...) without even having to collect VAT, but that didn't result in lower taxes on the business, it just meant lower prices which undercut physical retailers on the high street who had to charge VAT.
It still isn't clear how the Pi is going to perform for multimedia content - it will ship licensed only for H.264 acceleration AFAIK so if you've got any HD MPEG-2, for example, you may have some issues. Also, if you're planning "a good programming adventure" you'll probably be cross-compiling on a different architecture and then attempting to debug on an unfamiliar platform.
With something like an Atom/ION platform you can more conveniently do your software development on the target machine (even if you subsequently remove the unnecessary peripheral components when you're done - which you will never be....) and be reasonably assured of the video performance (of all the common graphics adapters, the Nvidia hardware probably has the longest history of mostly-complete video acceleration available to end-user developers).
On the other hand, it would be a great deal easier (and probably cheaper) to buy something like a WDTV-Live, particularly if you actually want to watch your content rather than just throw up a few frames and marvel at your handiwork.
There's no point attempting to tax corporations, particularly big international ones, on their profit - profits just get shifted around on the books to places like Luxembourg.
The only thing you can do reliably is tax turnover (obviously at a lower rate) which is much harder to make disappear. We already *do* tax proxies for turnover in the UK (such as the employer's "national insurance contribution" which is just a tax on labour costs) so it wouldn't actually be a radical change and would enable actual tax rates to go down for the majority of smaller companies when the big boys were paying their fair share.
The big whine usually goes up at this point: but what if poor Corporation X makes a loss? Well, none of the other costs of doing business for Corporation X go away at that point, so why should tax? And if Corporation X is making a loss big time, it's not going to be in business long whether it's paying tax or not.
And your average citizen gets taxed on their earnings, not the margin between their earnings and spending (you can't offset mortgage payments or pretty much anything else of significant value), so why should it be different for corporations?
This is all fine if you view the world simply as an algorithm and the people a statistic. The problem is that the people don't see it that way.
The effect of the price mechanism is to concentrate resources in the hands of the presently-wealthy and their view of an efficient use of resources is not necessarily the same as for people who might otherwise depend on those resources and yet have no access to them. If you're in that position, the solution is not economic, it's military: your only means of access to resources is to eliminate the competition or take over control of the supply.
And that's why governments get involved. And it's why the price mechanism isn't some sort of economic cure-all: there are externalised costs (such as defence) which the commodity price does not properly reflect and non-market events (such as an emerging economy deciding to displace the regime in Saudi Arabia) which may mean you're eliminated from the market, regardless of your willingness or ability to pay.
Resource competition leads to increasing prices first and then war after that. At which point, it's rather difficult to argue that resources are being used efficiently.
No it isn't. The summary relates to "stored communication data" - which is the stuff that ISPs are required to hold short of actual message content (email senders and recipients, URLs, dates and times of being online) - and not real time access to communications in progress. The article makes it clear that without a warrant:
"It would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited."
I think the summary "warrantless trawl of communications data" is, er, warranted since it means that fishing expeditions can be carried out for anyone visiting certain websites and graphs of communications between individuals can be constructed without any need to persuade a magistrate (a fairly low threshold) that the invasion of privacy is reasonable.
Indeed. They're really neediness networks designed for people who measure their self-worth in terms of the number of "friends" they are able to amass and then conveniently treat as a uniform herd of acolytes, agog to receive carefully-edited snippets of their alleged triumphs indiscrminately broadcast.
It's a lot easier to tell someone you've barely met, but wants to co-opt you, that you don't have an account than explain that you'd rather slit your wrists than bathe in the shit torrent pouring from their "social" orifice.
This move isn't designed to "convert anti-social-networking types", it's designed to increase the social pressure to conform with Google's masterplan. If the riposte to "I don't have an account" is "I can just set up a ghost account on your behalf", your only resort is to tell the absolute truth (something we generally try to avoid in truly social situations) or give in and get monetized.
Indeed, it seems significantly more responsible than the behaviour of the Nottingham constabulary who left an innocent man with a bill for fixing his front door:
The business world is becoming obsessed with the value that can be attached to knowing more about people's habits and using that knowledge to sell them stuff. There isn't infinite value in this stuff, though. The more you collect, the less value individual data points have. Ultimately, it will be self-defeating - when every competitor knows everything there is to know about their customer base, there's no point in knowing anything. At which point, I suppose, they take the final step in monetizing the data by selling it to the government.
Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner with responsbility for this area, was interviewed on BBC radio about this today and acknowledged that indeed they have concerns beyond Google and Facbook was mentioned specifically. However she also indicated that the advice she had sought (up to now it was mostly a French legal process) was that Google's new policy was in conflict with European law.
If there'd been any intention to "treat Google as an ATM", the commissioner would not have gone out of her way to warn Google in advance that actions it had not yet taken might possibly be illegal. Most companies are expected to work that out for themselves or face the consequences.
The issue of Internet jurisdiction really ought to have been sorted out by now. At present it's shoot first and ask questions later.
It's hard to make a case for any online business if the mere fact of its availability outside the country in which it is domiciled can render it (and its staff) potentially liable for criminal, privacy, libel, patent and other legal processes in countries where it may not even know it has customers - or indeed can have its service disrupted by actions against upstream providers with whom it has no contractual relationship. The Internet is as precarious as the Pony Express.
The US, in particular, seems particularly resistant to international discussion on any aspect of the Internet - witness the bizarre conspiracy theories spouting forth from FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell which prompted the wonderful headline in the New American "Obama Quiet as UN & Dictators Push to Control Internet" [http://thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/computers/10953-obama-quiet-as-un-a-dictators-push-to-control-internet].
Unfortunately, if there isn't some progress on the subject of jurisdiction we're going to have a series of discrete regional networks (US, Europe, China,...) and a distributed Great Firewall of Protectionism.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a new business idea, I'd suggest whittling might be fairly safe, provided you produce no rectangles with rounded corners.
It's unenforceable in the sense that most of it would almost certainly (if initially granted) fall foul of the Human Rights Act. It would be entirely disproportionate to stop people communicating with each other.
I'd imagine TfL would be able to get an ASBO against trespassing on the railway - it's an unbelievably stupid and dangerous thing to do especially in the confined tunnels of the London Underground - but they'd have a hard time making the rest of it stick.
Why would they even try? Well, I've worked (fortunately briefly) for TfL and I found them a very weird organisation with a very paternalistic attitude to both staff and passengers; I always felt an underlying sense that you might be hauled off to the Gulag if you failed to toe the party line and I'm not really surprised that they have overreacted in such a spectacular fashion.
Aldwych Station is, ironically, opened up to visitors fairly often so there's no particular difficulty in getting to see it. I went several years back and you can probably gauge some of the internal contradictions at TfL from the fact that we were encouraged to take photographs by the (enthusiastic and knowledgeable) engineer leading the tour but told not to make them publicly available as it would upset the marketing department that makes money out of selling images and result in future tours being cancelled. There has recently been controversy about a ban on DSLRs and Tripods at Aldwych Station (http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2130486/-tight-schedule-forced-ban-dslrs-london-transport-museum) which again might appear to be as much about preserving TfL's image rights as anything else.
So although there's a clear public safety issue in the original incident, I think this has much more to do with TfL wanting to let everyone know they're the boss. Which is an odd position for a publicly-owned and funded body to take.
In the old world of business, the service provider received something of direct value in exchange for the service and the customer could reasonably expect to end the contract and stop paying. In the new model, the customer has something of indirect value irreversibly taken away (privacy) there's no reasonable prospect of getting it back even if they do agree to give up the service at a later date. Privacy is like virginity - when it's gone, it's gone.
You'd not be admitted to the country on the sole basis of being a blogger so I'm not sure why it would qualify as a special status once you'd crossed the border.
The cost to bidders of responding to government tenders is generally high - as, paradoxically, is the number of bidders. Organisations that habitually work on government contracts have somehow to recoup the amount of money they've spent on unsuccessful bids. Add that to the cost of writing the original call for tenders and evaluating all the bids that come in and the process is horrendously inefficient.
Knowing the limitations of the procurement process, you'd think governments would have a high threshold of necessity before procuring anything. But voters don't like governments that don't do much, however much they may complain that what they do is usually wrong.
It is, of course, the same picture in Europe. Governments aren't capable of delivering pain to their core supporters and therefore can't deliver rational solutions to the most serious problems they face.
The answer is to swap governments - the Dutch elect the Greek government and the Greeks elect the Dutch government, for example. The electorate is sufficiently detached to evaluate the choices more dispassionately, but have sufficient incentive to be diligent as they know if they really cock it up they'll be shafted in turn.
Look at the same issue from the point of view of an Indian or Chinese and they'd be asking what right you have to protect your income at their expense.
The utopian rhetoric of the "occupy" movements is just a cover for self interest - give *me* more money and take it from "them* where *them* is anyone who happens to be perceived to be better off at the present moment.
If this were genuinely a campaign for a more equitable distribution of resources (and had managed to explain precisely what it meant by those terms), it might have a bit more moral authority. If it were to be successful, there'd be even less money for still-mostly-comfortable westerners than there is now.
Equity doesn't stop at national boundaries - that's actually one of the benefits of globalism.
The "occupiers" are just as greedy as the people they're protesting against, their greed is just more easily sated.
Slashdot Mirror
That's simply because they've specifically chosen to make available data from the Ordnance Survey. You can get the same maps on your own non-commercial website free if you want them (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/web-services/os-openspace/api/index.html) or also see them on the OS website (http://www.getamap.ordnancesurveyleisure.co.uk/).
Ironically, the "getamap" website requires Microsoft Silverlight, whereas Bing doesn't.
What did all those businesses with Burroughs, Univac, CDC, Honeywell, Data General and DEC computers do when the companies stopped making them? In some cases successor companies kept them going with spares and maintenance for a while or offered some sort of upgrade path. But mostly it involved spending a lot of money porting software and data over to new architectures.
The reason those products disappeared is because of technology change - there wasn't a big enough market for mainframes when minicomputers emerged and there wasn't enough market for minicomputers when the PC emerged because the new buyers could jump to the latest technology without the legacy transition costs. That meant an additional cost burden for those who'd adopted the previous generation of technology as well as the ultimate end of their technology providers. That's how it is.
Guess what: Facebook will almost certainly ultimately go the same way as Data General. About the only long-established technology company that hasn't suffered a similar fate is IBM (and internally it's nothing like the same company it was in the 1960s). Something "better" will inevitably come along. Have you prepared your transition plan? Where is your backup?
The difference now is that nobody is paying Facebook monthly maintenance fees to give it some value during the transition window: when it goes, there's nothing to sustain it long enough for you to get data out that is valuable to you. The only hope you have is there is data worth sufficient to another company that they buy it and let you see it again.
Social networks have no commercial interest in allowing you to get your data out - if you can, you can conveniently give it to someone else and then its value is largely lost. You are the commodity - when you're gone, you're gone. Plan accordingly.
Indeed, and it is slated to be included in the next generation of the Freesat (UK free-to-air satellite) specs, along with MHEG for backwards compatibility.
If you remember Ceefax back in its original form when TVs would typically have 7 1Kbit RAM chips to store one single page of data, it could take a considerable age for the page you wanted to arrive - pages weren't transmitted sequentially, but popular pages were transmitted more frequently to improve their access time, at the cost of significant delays to other content.
It's only later incarnations of TVs that had much more memory and could cache pages (helped by the hinting of the coloured button cues) that made Ceefax acceptably responsive.
The same is true of the MHEG service that replaces Ceefax on (some) digital platforms - if the TV caches the carousels as they come past rather than awaiting their next transmission (and provided the TV has a reasonable CPU) it's actually quite quick. Early integrated TVs (and cheap STBs) don't have the memory or horsepower to do this.
The replacement service is much less comprehensive, though. This is partly because there's relatively little bandwidth allocated to the data channel (at least on Freeview), partly because the content has to be disseminated through incompatible platforms (Sky, for example, uses OpenTV rather than MHEG for "red button" services) which means the editorial process is a bit more complicated than it was for Ceefax - but mostly because far more comprehensive information is available via the Internet...
There's a real shitstorm brewing in the UK over mobile phone frequency allocations. There were originally two GSM networks (which are now O2 and Vodafone) operating in the 900MHz band on gifted spectrum. What became T-Mobile and Orange got spectrum at 1800MHz a bit later. There was a subsequent auction of bandwidth for 3G at 2100MHz which all four acquired along with new entrant Three. T-Mobile and Orange have now merged into Everything Everywhere and therefore have lots more spectrum than everyone else. However, it's the 900MHz band - together with spectrum around 800MHz which has been cleared of analogue TV - which is the real prize as it's propagation characteristics are much better, particularly within buildings.
The real issue going forward is going to be the equitable distribution of 800MHz and 900MHz for 4G use and since various subsets of all the networks are disadvantaged either by the status quo or any change to the status quo, every proposal so far has been met with threats of lawyers at dawn. More 1800MHz spectrum is second best.
This is one of those situations in which "let the market decide" is probably going to result in stalemate or a seriously suboptimal solution for the consumer.
Given that is is widely reported that US prisoners make 21% of all office furniture and 36% of all domestic appliance at labour rates between $0.5 and $1.25 per hour, I'd say that big business had a vested interest in getting people locked up. I'd also say that's an "event of injustice" which is widespread against the populace, given the American propensity for jailing such a large proportion of its citizens. I see no sign of the American people taking action, except to elect the politicians who promise to deliver more of it.
So, why should this be any different?
The consumer is liable for VAT (in the end), it's like sales tax. It's not a tax on the business, it's a tax on you. Amazon just collect it and pass it along.
There's a further loophole that has just been closed which allowed a number of large online retailers to ship low value items from outside the EU (but inside the UK...) without even having to collect VAT, but that didn't result in lower taxes on the business, it just meant lower prices which undercut physical retailers on the high street who had to charge VAT.
I'd agree, for a number of reasons.
It still isn't clear how the Pi is going to perform for multimedia content - it will ship licensed only for H.264 acceleration AFAIK so if you've got any HD MPEG-2, for example, you may have some issues. Also, if you're planning "a good programming adventure" you'll probably be cross-compiling on a different architecture and then attempting to debug on an unfamiliar platform.
With something like an Atom/ION platform you can more conveniently do your software development on the target machine (even if you subsequently remove the unnecessary peripheral components when you're done - which you will never be....) and be reasonably assured of the video performance (of all the common graphics adapters, the Nvidia hardware probably has the longest history of mostly-complete video acceleration available to end-user developers).
On the other hand, it would be a great deal easier (and probably cheaper) to buy something like a WDTV-Live, particularly if you actually want to watch your content rather than just throw up a few frames and marvel at your handiwork.
There's no point attempting to tax corporations, particularly big international ones, on their profit - profits just get shifted around on the books to places like Luxembourg.
The only thing you can do reliably is tax turnover (obviously at a lower rate) which is much harder to make disappear. We already *do* tax proxies for turnover in the UK (such as the employer's "national insurance contribution" which is just a tax on labour costs) so it wouldn't actually be a radical change and would enable actual tax rates to go down for the majority of smaller companies when the big boys were paying their fair share.
The big whine usually goes up at this point: but what if poor Corporation X makes a loss? Well, none of the other costs of doing business for Corporation X go away at that point, so why should tax? And if Corporation X is making a loss big time, it's not going to be in business long whether it's paying tax or not.
And your average citizen gets taxed on their earnings, not the margin between their earnings and spending (you can't offset mortgage payments or pretty much anything else of significant value), so why should it be different for corporations?
It seems to be affecting all branches of science - http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4832
This is all fine if you view the world simply as an algorithm and the people a statistic. The problem is that the people don't see it that way.
The effect of the price mechanism is to concentrate resources in the hands of the presently-wealthy and their view of an efficient use of resources is not necessarily the same as for people who might otherwise depend on those resources and yet have no access to them. If you're in that position, the solution is not economic, it's military: your only means of access to resources is to eliminate the competition or take over control of the supply.
And that's why governments get involved. And it's why the price mechanism isn't some sort of economic cure-all: there are externalised costs (such as defence) which the commodity price does not properly reflect and non-market events (such as an emerging economy deciding to displace the regime in Saudi Arabia) which may mean you're eliminated from the market, regardless of your willingness or ability to pay.
Resource competition leads to increasing prices first and then war after that. At which point, it's rather difficult to argue that resources are being used efficiently.
No it isn't. The summary relates to "stored communication data" - which is the stuff that ISPs are required to hold short of actual message content (email senders and recipients, URLs, dates and times of being online) - and not real time access to communications in progress. The article makes it clear that without a warrant:
"It would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited."
I think the summary "warrantless trawl of communications data" is, er, warranted since it means that fishing expeditions can be carried out for anyone visiting certain websites and graphs of communications between individuals can be constructed without any need to persuade a magistrate (a fairly low threshold) that the invasion of privacy is reasonable.
Indeed. They're really neediness networks designed for people who measure their self-worth in terms of the number of "friends" they are able to amass and then conveniently treat as a uniform herd of acolytes, agog to receive carefully-edited snippets of their alleged triumphs indiscrminately broadcast.
It's a lot easier to tell someone you've barely met, but wants to co-opt you, that you don't have an account than explain that you'd rather slit your wrists than bathe in the shit torrent pouring from their "social" orifice.
This move isn't designed to "convert anti-social-networking types", it's designed to increase the social pressure to conform with Google's masterplan. If the riposte to "I don't have an account" is "I can just set up a ghost account on your behalf", your only resort is to tell the absolute truth (something we generally try to avoid in truly social situations) or give in and get monetized.
Indeed, it seems significantly more responsible than the behaviour of the Nottingham constabulary who left an innocent man with a bill for fixing his front door:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9108550/Police-break-into-wrong-house-after-iPhone-mistake.html
The business world is becoming obsessed with the value that can be attached to knowing more about people's habits and using that knowledge to sell them stuff. There isn't infinite value in this stuff, though. The more you collect, the less value individual data points have. Ultimately, it will be self-defeating - when every competitor knows everything there is to know about their customer base, there's no point in knowing anything. At which point, I suppose, they take the final step in monetizing the data by selling it to the government.
Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner with responsbility for this area, was interviewed on BBC radio about this today and acknowledged that indeed they have concerns beyond Google and Facbook was mentioned specifically. However she also indicated that the advice she had sought (up to now it was mostly a French legal process) was that Google's new policy was in conflict with European law.
If there'd been any intention to "treat Google as an ATM", the commissioner would not have gone out of her way to warn Google in advance that actions it had not yet taken might possibly be illegal. Most companies are expected to work that out for themselves or face the consequences.
The issue of Internet jurisdiction really ought to have been sorted out by now. At present it's shoot first and ask questions later.
It's hard to make a case for any online business if the mere fact of its availability outside the country in which it is domiciled can render it (and its staff) potentially liable for criminal, privacy, libel, patent and other legal processes in countries where it may not even know it has customers - or indeed can have its service disrupted by actions against upstream providers with whom it has no contractual relationship. The Internet is as precarious as the Pony Express.
The US, in particular, seems particularly resistant to international discussion on any aspect of the Internet - witness the bizarre conspiracy theories spouting forth from FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell which prompted the wonderful headline in the New American "Obama Quiet as UN & Dictators Push to Control Internet" [http://thenewamerican.com/tech-mainmenu-30/computers/10953-obama-quiet-as-un-a-dictators-push-to-control-internet].
Unfortunately, if there isn't some progress on the subject of jurisdiction we're going to have a series of discrete regional networks (US, Europe, China, ...) and a distributed Great Firewall of Protectionism.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a new business idea, I'd suggest whittling might be fairly safe, provided you produce no rectangles with rounded corners.
It's unenforceable in the sense that most of it would almost certainly (if initially granted) fall foul of the Human Rights Act. It would be entirely disproportionate to stop people communicating with each other.
I'd imagine TfL would be able to get an ASBO against trespassing on the railway - it's an unbelievably stupid and dangerous thing to do especially in the confined tunnels of the London Underground - but they'd have a hard time making the rest of it stick.
Why would they even try? Well, I've worked (fortunately briefly) for TfL and I found them a very weird organisation with a very paternalistic attitude to both staff and passengers; I always felt an underlying sense that you might be hauled off to the Gulag if you failed to toe the party line and I'm not really surprised that they have overreacted in such a spectacular fashion.
Aldwych Station is, ironically, opened up to visitors fairly often so there's no particular difficulty in getting to see it. I went several years back and you can probably gauge some of the internal contradictions at TfL from the fact that we were encouraged to take photographs by the (enthusiastic and knowledgeable) engineer leading the tour but told not to make them publicly available as it would upset the marketing department that makes money out of selling images and result in future tours being cancelled. There has recently been controversy about a ban on DSLRs and Tripods at Aldwych Station (http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2130486/-tight-schedule-forced-ban-dslrs-london-transport-museum) which again might appear to be as much about preserving TfL's image rights as anything else.
So although there's a clear public safety issue in the original incident, I think this has much more to do with TfL wanting to let everyone know they're the boss. Which is an odd position for a publicly-owned and funded body to take.
In the old world of business, the service provider received something of direct value in exchange for the service and the customer could reasonably expect to end the contract and stop paying. In the new model, the customer has something of indirect value irreversibly taken away (privacy) there's no reasonable prospect of getting it back even if they do agree to give up the service at a later date. Privacy is like virginity - when it's gone, it's gone.
If they don't want it confused with AppleTV, they should probably call it the Xbox 1080.
They already do, at least as far as foreign reporters are concerned:
http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1276.html
You'd not be admitted to the country on the sole basis of being a blogger so I'm not sure why it would qualify as a special status once you'd crossed the border.
A man writing a blog writes a blog entry about how he writes his blog and gets his blog entry posted on other blogs.
Is this the publishing equivalent of the CDO?
It isn't just government overhead either.
The cost to bidders of responding to government tenders is generally high - as, paradoxically, is the number of bidders. Organisations that habitually work on government contracts have somehow to recoup the amount of money they've spent on unsuccessful bids. Add that to the cost of writing the original call for tenders and evaluating all the bids that come in and the process is horrendously inefficient.
Knowing the limitations of the procurement process, you'd think governments would have a high threshold of necessity before procuring anything. But voters don't like governments that don't do much, however much they may complain that what they do is usually wrong.
It is, of course, the same picture in Europe. Governments aren't capable of delivering pain to their core supporters and therefore can't deliver rational solutions to the most serious problems they face.
The answer is to swap governments - the Dutch elect the Greek government and the Greeks elect the Dutch government, for example. The electorate is sufficiently detached to evaluate the choices more dispassionately, but have sufficient incentive to be diligent as they know if they really cock it up they'll be shafted in turn.
Anyone want to draw lots?
Look at the same issue from the point of view of an Indian or Chinese and they'd be asking what right you have to protect your income at their expense.
The utopian rhetoric of the "occupy" movements is just a cover for self interest - give *me* more money and take it from "them* where *them* is anyone who happens to be perceived to be better off at the present moment.
If this were genuinely a campaign for a more equitable distribution of resources (and had managed to explain precisely what it meant by those terms), it might have a bit more moral authority. If it were to be successful, there'd be even less money for still-mostly-comfortable westerners than there is now.
Equity doesn't stop at national boundaries - that's actually one of the benefits of globalism.
The "occupiers" are just as greedy as the people they're protesting against, their greed is just more easily sated.