Quite seriously, I wonder if English Heritage would try to go after people who have photos that are older than English Heritage's tenure at Stonehenge. They didn't always fleece people to go there - once upon a time, you could just park your car where the hell you wanted and walk right up to the stones. If you got a photo back then, can you make money off it now without attracting their attention?
Since we're slashvertising, I had a bit of a play with Smartwater several years ago - it's actually very good stuff. Essentially, they've figured out a way to put a long unique code into UV reflective paste (which is pretty hard to clean off stuff - although not impossible, so it's best to put it in hard-to-reach places). You slap it onto anything you want to protect; the police can find it with simple UV, and can get the unique code by asking the Smartwater boffins to analyse it. It's used on money trucks, and claims to have a 100% prosecution rate (although I wonder if there's only been one prosecution or something). The Smartwater people keep your particular code unique for as long as you pay them rental of it. I wonder what they'd do if you buy some, use it, but then stop paying for it, yet some of your stuff gets nicked. I suspect they'll still tell the police who you are, but probably only after the current owner is consulted.
True - even BT realised this, and have been actively marketing their "premium" services which apparently don't suffer from "peak time slow downs" which plague their regular services, yet are curiously absent from many other ISPs.
I'm fairly sure the market is pretty inelastic - people just don't switch providers very often. Sky customers, as well as BT Vision and Virgin Media customers probably won't ever switch, because they get broadband "thrown in" with other services. Thus, the likes of Sky and BT are best placed to perform traffic shaping, knowing that a decent chunk of their customers won't ever leave. Even smaller ISPs are starting to do home phone line rental - it's all about bundling stuff together to reduce the elasticity. I'm not sure what TalkTalk thinks they have, mind you...?
Of course, your smaller ISP has to try a little harder - some of them have already got enough bandwidth to avoid "peak time slow downs", so have no need to do traffic shaping, and instead market themselves as being better performance than the bigger providers. It just depends if the services they buy from others are traffic shaped or not - obviously, we hope not, and given how competition rules are in the UK, that's a fairly likely outcome (although of course, not a guarantee).
I have to agree with you, including with my N900. Don't get me wrong, my N900 is good - I love that I can ssh into my company servers, but truthfully, I'm not using that sort of thing nearly as much as the phone, contacts and alarm clock. In my view, these three things meet the marketing spec sheet, but really aren't as good as they should be. I'd love to think I could just hack them, but they're not actually hackable, as they're part of the core phone OS.
Of course, if I can get hold of this face-rec app, then I'll show that off, rather than bitch about how the alarm clock doesn't have simple things like an option to not vibrate when the phone's on silent (it does fade up the alarm sound, but wakes me up long before that with the brrr... of the vibrate).
Murdoch wants a larger proportion of his revenue to come from subscriptions. He's got 40% of Sky, and is angling for the rest of it. Sky gets most of it's revenue from subscriptions, and then a variable wedge from advertising and pay-per-view. Murdoch wants the same from his news empire.
He might be an idiot, but he's not stupid. He knows he's got to get a small percentage of the original traffic to convert to subscriptions. He doesn't care - the print side of his business is dwindling, and he knows it. He's making a play for digital, and it's still way too early to figure out if he'll succeed. Sure, his site isn't going to get more hits than the Guardian, but it remains to be see who makes more money in a recession when advertising gets squeezed. You can guess the Guardian will get the same traffic, but get less revenue. Maybe, just maybe, Murdoch will get the same traffic and the same revenue.
Of course, personally, I think his plan is a bit flawed. However, as someone said in a previous post on this topic, he's about a million times richer than you or I, and he didn't get that way giving it away. My particular jury's still out on his plan, but I don't think it's looking all that good for him.
(Actually, one thing that really does surprise me is that you can't get old news for free off him. I mean, why not publish stuff from last week/last month or whatever, with a gazillion ads on it, to a google-friendly web site? You might as well get the fun out of it after the subscription has no value. Or not... I'm just not sure why)
Well, last time he did this, he got the industry in a tizz about it. He started by selling his album to a newspaper - they paid him hundreds of thousands of pounds for it, and then gave it away on the front of their paper (which cost less than a cup of coffee to buy - ie. a tiny amount compared to £10 CDs).
Meanwhile, whatever-his-name-is, the CEO of HMV came out and said stuff like "I can't believe the music industry would shoot itself in the foot like this", and said he would no longer stock any Prince music.
What actually happened was HMV realised that the newspaper had just become the largest music outlet in the country. They realised that - shock horror! - people don't want to go to HMV's shabby shops to buy music any more. Whilst it wasn't available for download, it came pretty close, because you could buy it on just about every street corner - you didn't need to make a special trip into the local town/city to buy it. In the end, HMV started selling those newspapers just so they didn't look completely stupid. These days, HMV stores look more like games/posters and t-shirt shops than they do record shops.
Sadly though for all of us, Prince's first free album it wasn't very well received. It was "okay" in so much as it sounded like Prince, but it was completely devoid of any bangin' tunes. If you wanted a few extra tracks to play after dinner, it was fine, but if you wanted a proper listening experience, it fell right into the primordial goo of every other artist being pushed at the moment. Luckily for Prince and the newspaper, by the time anyone realised this, it was too late - they'd already bought the newspaper.
Honestly, if Prince wants to say the Internet is over, then fair play to him. His CD will be on P2P networks just as the first editions are hitting the breakfast tables of the country, but what does he care? He's getting paid regardless of how many copies get sold/copied/borrowed or whatever. The thing is, only a previously successful artist can do what he's doing, so it's not a scalable solution for the industry. He can say what he likes - it'll make no difference, except maybe to raise awareness of his latest production.
I agree - sure, they turned up empty handed, but you can bet they've learned a hell of a lot about these sorts of missions, and they've (probably) figured out how to do it right the next time. I expect the accumulated knowledge the world has about such things has grown considerably because of these guys.
The fact they got anything back to earth after all those failures demonstrates they know how to do some awesome engineering*. I wish I could convince some software folks to do some of that sort of thinking.
* Yes, having things fail may suggest they don't know how to do engineering, but failures and mistakes happen to everyone - the trick is to make it look like you always meant it to work that way;-)
One slight kink in the road is that usually the price depends on what you're going to do with it. For example, if you're looking for a 2" square jpeg for your website, then it's foolicense:$1, but if you also want to use it in your printed literature to a limited audience, then it's foolicense:$5. You want to use it in an academic text book? Small circulation, you say, well, okay, foolicense:$10. Oh, it's a mainstream novel, with a large circulation? Well, maybe foolicense:$500.
You get the idea.
As for point 2 - They are evil - Getty are indeed evil. I have no personal experience, but as I understand it, they use the same tactics on their photographers as the *AA use on their artists - basically, pay them as little as possible, ensure that no work they ever submit leaves their grasp, even if they have no intention of using it themselves, etc etc. Get in bed with Getty at your peril. That said, for the average-joe, getting a few dollars for a few downloads of a picture of your house probably isn't a bad thing. All the serious photographers will be doing something else though.
TFA isn't overly precise about what's going on. However, they do say that Warner is being sued for using their software without paying for it (ie. 'stealing' someone's 'IP', not giving back to the creators etc - basically the same stuff that the music industry says about file sharers). This looks the same as someone making a copy of Windows and using it without paying MS (or whatever).
Slightly confusingly, there's mention of patent infringement. This suggests that Warner went along to Medien and saw what they were up to. They then left, and made the exact same thing themselves and started using that. If this is what's actually happening, then it's a straight patent lawsuit, with Medien looking for license fees for Warner to use their ideas.
It may not be a software patent per-se - it is possible to patent some software in (at least some parts of) Europe - generally, it has to be something embedded - an "enabler" of a bigger invention, if you like. (You can't patent Windows in Europe, but you might be able to patent an intelligent flow valve with embedded PIC, for example).
Er, well, yes, you see it's about, oh she's locked me out, er, so yes, you see you can't, oh sorry I seem to have spilled, er, so as I was saying, yes, please could you pass me the, yes, it's all about how much, oh, this cloth is soaked, yes, it's about how much you can really, oh thank you, I'll just clean that up...
(etc).
In short, he's the ultimate politician: Talk lots, say nothing.
As for free wifi - well, one wonders how this is really going to work. When we say 'free', so we mean 'after obtrusive registration', or 'free when you buy xyz' or what? When I think of 'free wireless', I think of an open hotspot I just tune to and get on the Intarwebs immediately. I suspect this won't be quite as easy as that.
However, now I've been reminded open wifi is 'illegal', I'll go home and set one up immediately. I've even got a big aerial for maximum range and signal quality. I just need to work out QoS so I don't get flooded out of my own broadband connection.
1. If you run an unencrypted 802.11 network, expect your data to get pwned.
Not so - sure, it's something like leaving your front door open while you go to work, but there still has to be an illegal act perpetrated against you for there to be an actual problem. Granted, you're not going to get much sympathy from the authorities if you don't lock your front door, but that's a different problem. Germany has said open wifi is illegal - which is pretty much like saying "lock your doors, because realistically there's not much we can do for you if you don't".
4. Why do we trust the German government (or any EU government, for that matter) with this data more than we trust Google?
Because the government is supposed to represent us, the people. Google represents no one but themselves. The track records of both isn't lost on me, but you get the point. Your suggestion of an independent audit is probably the most practically fair solution.
That said, I wouldn't want you or anyone else advertising (flashmob style or something) that I'd accidentally left my front door open. Likewise, I wouldn't want google telling you I have open wifi. I'm not sure if Google make this information public (yet), but they're collecting it for a reason, so one would be reasonable to assume they want to do something with it, which will probably release it to a wider audience than just google, if not to the entire world. This is where the privacy issue lies.
True - although we are (mostly) at liberty to buy the phone and contract separately. That makes ebay a viable phone shop, although in truth, it's probably still cheaper to get the subsidised phone+contract, if you take an 18 or 24 month contract and want to keep the phone that long. YMMV - every time I look at this sort of thing, it gets more complicated, and significantly different from the time before
Separate phone/contract makes sense for people that just phone/text - those sorts of phones are ten-a-penny, and the contracts are getting really cheap, and then of course, there's PAYG or the one month contracts, which a lot of people opt for if they have simple requirements.
Back to all things 4G... My Nokia N900 is 3G. The first time I consciously saw it actually say it was in 3G mode was in Canada. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything other than 2 or 2.5 here in the UK (where I have unlimited data). I'd argue that the data speeds I get are really pretty bad (ie. select web page bookmark, put phone in pocket, walk to the shops, have web page loaded, select next one, go into shops, etc). I have no idea if real 3G would be better (presumably it would), but 4G seems like an impossibility (at least for 02 here in London).
Still, that's not to say I'm not looking forward to some un-crippled 4G phones in the UK sometime soon;-)
Your router may also be able to tell you what it's view of the upstream/downstream speeds are (my Netgear does, so does a Linksys I have). If you don't have this, then any speed checks you do (for your broadband speed) should be with a wired connection.
If that speed is less than the speed your ISP claims you could get, then the advice you've already had is well worth checking. Additionally, the generally recommended advice is to unscrew the small panel from the front of your master phone socket. This will disconnect all of your house wiring, and will expose another socket (which should be directly connected to the phone line). Plug your microfilter into that, and your router into the filter, then see what speed you get (you should leave the router connected like that for a few hours, even as much as a day for it to properly 'tune in' with the exchange). Then it's time to try other microfilters, other routers, etc.
If after all that the speed is still much less than you're supposed to be getting, then you absolutely can call BT to investigate - their responsibility extends as far as the master socket (and no further), so if that master socket isn't working properly, they should fix it for you. They'll argue with you, and blame anyone they can think of, so be persistent.
I doubt gloating on my part helps you at all, but in Brixton, I get 14Mbps comfortably from a 20Mbps service. I use Freedom2Surf mind you, who utterly wiped the floor with BT and another ISP I have used. Since they've been sold they're still fine, although their future may be less certain than it once was.
I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but...
We now have much better technology, both for getting to space, and for science aboard a probe. For example, even something like the British Beagle 2 Mars mission cost a few million to make, and although it didn't end up returning much of use, it demonstrates how 'easy' such things are (or how hard things are, depending on your point of view, I suppose).
So I'm wondering, isn't it worth mankind's time to build a (say) £25M long-range probe, like the Voyagers, only designed for the purpose, and shoved into space in some get-there-fast manner?
I'm sure we can argue about the best use of a limited budget, and what constitutes the best science returned for the spend, for the rest of our lives, but a "cheap" probe sent out every few years to do something a bit random might well do wonders for us and our understanding of the Solar system, let alone the Universe as a whole. I wouldn't presume to say we should do such things at the expense of anything more major, but more to foster some 'experimentation' in space.
Just a decent email filtering solution would probably do what you want, and not look like you were making unilateral decisions. One place I used to work used MessageLabs, which used to report to me just how frequently people were about to receive something dangerous (which for a 20 people company was surprisingly frequently - and more surprising would be the sales people asking to have something taken out of quarantine because 'it might be useful' when it looked pretty obvious it was spam/scam/malware).
If you don't like the various vendors doing it for you, then you can do it yourself, but honestly, the quickest win would probably to out-source the work for now and move it in-house later on if you decide you want to.
I'm not a big fan of these corporate website blockers - however, logging where people go at the firewall can be useful - especially if you find a correlation between infections and the 'colourfulness' of the sites people visit. Of course, you need strong management to actually do something about it. I suspect that taking networks off the Internet is getting you some attention, so it's possible you may be able to direct that attention where it's deserved.
The thing that Irks me about this is that it says that somehow the UK is due for special treatment. This sort of attitude comes out of the US all the time (on the back of "we're the biggest economy"), but we Brits don't deserve special treatment because we're the same as everyone else - thinking of ourselves modestly is a British thing to do. Perhaps HH needs to sit the "Britishness test" we're subjecting wannabe residents to these days?;-)
The other thing that irks me is that if kids are getting pestered, they're perfectly at liberty to go sign up at another social network and get away from it. I realise they don't want to do that, but that's one of the harsh choices of life. Further more, there are already are plenty of routes to report abuse on Facebook, including the parent looking over your shoulder. Unfortunately, the "parent" in that sentence appears to be turning into "the government". I don't want much from Facebook, but I hope they prepare a nice pot of tea and then tell the UK government to "bloody well shut up" about this.
Let's be honest, very few UK governments last more than about 10 years before they get voted out in a hail of glory for the new guys. Even though I'm not in love with the alternative, they at least provide a bit of contrast (not as much as us Pirates, but hey, it's a start).
It's one thing to make a mistake, and entirely another to invoke the law to enforce a mistake. You're right, it's entirely possible the takedown was poorly written, but therein lies the problem with the takedown mechanism - there's no standard that it must reach before it can be served. Thus mistakes, honest or otherwise threaten people with very real, very wide-ranging and scary/expensive actions - completely in error. As such, as reasonable people, we expect anyone taking action as serious as a takedown would apply a good dose of due diligence. Sadly though, not everyone views takedowns as "serious action", and so perhaps aren't taking the care with them that perhaps they should.
In a village near me, a bunch of small stores got together and bought specially shaped bags for their particular products. The baker had 'loaf' shaped bags, the milkman had 'bottle bags' and the dry cleaners got new plastic covers in different lengths depending on the garment it was intended for. The group of stores were nice enough to make sure they got recycled plastic for their bags, and since they were collectively buying in bigger bulk, got a better price and decided to put a village "goes green" logo on their bags.
At first, it was great - you could go to the bakers, and get a conveniently shaped bag, safely in the knowledge it was made of fully recycled materials. When you bought milk, the bag fit the bottles, so they didn't roll about, and it also turned out you could carry both in the same hand without squashing the bread.
Of course, after a while, people tried to reuse the bags they'd been collecting. The problem came about when you went out to buy bread and collect your dry cleaning, only to find the dry cleaners shut, whilst remembering you actually needed milk for your cup of tea tomorrow morning. You'd end up getting yet another milk bag, when you really didn't need one, and carrying home and empty clothes bag.
Happily for you though, you were able to go to the store, buy goldfish food and take those goods away in your own backpack. You didn't need to buy/use the store brand shopping bags. It remains to be seen if the model the village near me is using catches on elsewhere, but I suspect actually, the backpack will win-out in the end.
Okay, so they reject the ones that arrive upside down.
How does the sender know this? Does the PTO send them a letter (or fax) saying "your request was rejected"? If so, how do they know who to send them to? Presumably they can't read it off the fax, because it's upside down. Does this mean they just don't acknowledge the faxes they reject?
I would generally say a fax is guaranteed message passing. If they're denying they received the fax because they couldn't read it, then wouldn't the sender's delivery receipt suggest otherwise. In other words, the sender couldn't reasonably know if they had received it or not. On the one hand, they have a delivery receipt that says "yes", on the other, they have no formal acknowledgement.
Perhaps this is a cunning plan to cut their workload...? "Oh sorry IBM, your faxes must have been upside down. We were wondering how come we had nothing much to do last month!".
Slashdot Mirror
Quite seriously, I wonder if English Heritage would try to go after people who have photos that are older than English Heritage's tenure at Stonehenge. They didn't always fleece people to go there - once upon a time, you could just park your car where the hell you wanted and walk right up to the stones. If you got a photo back then, can you make money off it now without attracting their attention?
(one page print version: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/361783/putting-the-squeeze-on-the-broadband-copper-robbers/print)
Since we're slashvertising, I had a bit of a play with Smartwater several years ago - it's actually very good stuff. Essentially, they've figured out a way to put a long unique code into UV reflective paste (which is pretty hard to clean off stuff - although not impossible, so it's best to put it in hard-to-reach places). You slap it onto anything you want to protect; the police can find it with simple UV, and can get the unique code by asking the Smartwater boffins to analyse it. It's used on money trucks, and claims to have a 100% prosecution rate (although I wonder if there's only been one prosecution or something). The Smartwater people keep your particular code unique for as long as you pay them rental of it. I wonder what they'd do if you buy some, use it, but then stop paying for it, yet some of your stuff gets nicked. I suspect they'll still tell the police who you are, but probably only after the current owner is consulted.
nuts.kp
True - even BT realised this, and have been actively marketing their "premium" services which apparently don't suffer from "peak time slow downs" which plague their regular services, yet are curiously absent from many other ISPs.
I'm fairly sure the market is pretty inelastic - people just don't switch providers very often. Sky customers, as well as BT Vision and Virgin Media customers probably won't ever switch, because they get broadband "thrown in" with other services. Thus, the likes of Sky and BT are best placed to perform traffic shaping, knowing that a decent chunk of their customers won't ever leave. Even smaller ISPs are starting to do home phone line rental - it's all about bundling stuff together to reduce the elasticity. I'm not sure what TalkTalk thinks they have, mind you...?
Of course, your smaller ISP has to try a little harder - some of them have already got enough bandwidth to avoid "peak time slow downs", so have no need to do traffic shaping, and instead market themselves as being better performance than the bigger providers. It just depends if the services they buy from others are traffic shaped or not - obviously, we hope not, and given how competition rules are in the UK, that's a fairly likely outcome (although of course, not a guarantee).
I have to agree with you, including with my N900. Don't get me wrong, my N900 is good - I love that I can ssh into my company servers, but truthfully, I'm not using that sort of thing nearly as much as the phone, contacts and alarm clock. In my view, these three things meet the marketing spec sheet, but really aren't as good as they should be. I'd love to think I could just hack them, but they're not actually hackable, as they're part of the core phone OS.
Of course, if I can get hold of this face-rec app, then I'll show that off, rather than bitch about how the alarm clock doesn't have simple things like an option to not vibrate when the phone's on silent (it does fade up the alarm sound, but wakes me up long before that with the brrr... of the vibrate).
Murdoch wants a larger proportion of his revenue to come from subscriptions. He's got 40% of Sky, and is angling for the rest of it. Sky gets most of it's revenue from subscriptions, and then a variable wedge from advertising and pay-per-view. Murdoch wants the same from his news empire.
He might be an idiot, but he's not stupid. He knows he's got to get a small percentage of the original traffic to convert to subscriptions. He doesn't care - the print side of his business is dwindling, and he knows it. He's making a play for digital, and it's still way too early to figure out if he'll succeed. Sure, his site isn't going to get more hits than the Guardian, but it remains to be see who makes more money in a recession when advertising gets squeezed. You can guess the Guardian will get the same traffic, but get less revenue. Maybe, just maybe, Murdoch will get the same traffic and the same revenue.
Of course, personally, I think his plan is a bit flawed. However, as someone said in a previous post on this topic, he's about a million times richer than you or I, and he didn't get that way giving it away. My particular jury's still out on his plan, but I don't think it's looking all that good for him.
(Actually, one thing that really does surprise me is that you can't get old news for free off him. I mean, why not publish stuff from last week/last month or whatever, with a gazillion ads on it, to a google-friendly web site? You might as well get the fun out of it after the subscription has no value. Or not... I'm just not sure why)
Well, last time he did this, he got the industry in a tizz about it. He started by selling his album to a newspaper - they paid him hundreds of thousands of pounds for it, and then gave it away on the front of their paper (which cost less than a cup of coffee to buy - ie. a tiny amount compared to £10 CDs).
Meanwhile, whatever-his-name-is, the CEO of HMV came out and said stuff like "I can't believe the music industry would shoot itself in the foot like this", and said he would no longer stock any Prince music.
What actually happened was HMV realised that the newspaper had just become the largest music outlet in the country. They realised that - shock horror! - people don't want to go to HMV's shabby shops to buy music any more. Whilst it wasn't available for download, it came pretty close, because you could buy it on just about every street corner - you didn't need to make a special trip into the local town/city to buy it. In the end, HMV started selling those newspapers just so they didn't look completely stupid. These days, HMV stores look more like games/posters and t-shirt shops than they do record shops.
Sadly though for all of us, Prince's first free album it wasn't very well received. It was "okay" in so much as it sounded like Prince, but it was completely devoid of any bangin' tunes. If you wanted a few extra tracks to play after dinner, it was fine, but if you wanted a proper listening experience, it fell right into the primordial goo of every other artist being pushed at the moment. Luckily for Prince and the newspaper, by the time anyone realised this, it was too late - they'd already bought the newspaper.
Honestly, if Prince wants to say the Internet is over, then fair play to him. His CD will be on P2P networks just as the first editions are hitting the breakfast tables of the country, but what does he care? He's getting paid regardless of how many copies get sold/copied/borrowed or whatever. The thing is, only a previously successful artist can do what he's doing, so it's not a scalable solution for the industry. He can say what he likes - it'll make no difference, except maybe to raise awareness of his latest production.
I agree - sure, they turned up empty handed, but you can bet they've learned a hell of a lot about these sorts of missions, and they've (probably) figured out how to do it right the next time. I expect the accumulated knowledge the world has about such things has grown considerably because of these guys.
The fact they got anything back to earth after all those failures demonstrates they know how to do some awesome engineering*. I wish I could convince some software folks to do some of that sort of thinking.
* Yes, having things fail may suggest they don't know how to do engineering, but failures and mistakes happen to everyone - the trick is to make it look like you always meant it to work that way ;-)
One slight kink in the road is that usually the price depends on what you're going to do with it. For example, if you're looking for a 2" square jpeg for your website, then it's foolicense:$1, but if you also want to use it in your printed literature to a limited audience, then it's foolicense:$5. You want to use it in an academic text book? Small circulation, you say, well, okay, foolicense:$10. Oh, it's a mainstream novel, with a large circulation? Well, maybe foolicense:$500.
You get the idea.
As for point 2 - They are evil - Getty are indeed evil. I have no personal experience, but as I understand it, they use the same tactics on their photographers as the *AA use on their artists - basically, pay them as little as possible, ensure that no work they ever submit leaves their grasp, even if they have no intention of using it themselves, etc etc. Get in bed with Getty at your peril. That said, for the average-joe, getting a few dollars for a few downloads of a picture of your house probably isn't a bad thing. All the serious photographers will be doing something else though.
They should have asked for it in Iranian Reals...
Hello, we'd like 15,041,999,992,332,288 in your terrorist Iranian Reals
(source)
TFA isn't overly precise about what's going on. However, they do say that Warner is being sued for using their software without paying for it (ie. 'stealing' someone's 'IP', not giving back to the creators etc - basically the same stuff that the music industry says about file sharers). This looks the same as someone making a copy of Windows and using it without paying MS (or whatever).
Slightly confusingly, there's mention of patent infringement. This suggests that Warner went along to Medien and saw what they were up to. They then left, and made the exact same thing themselves and started using that. If this is what's actually happening, then it's a straight patent lawsuit, with Medien looking for license fees for Warner to use their ideas.
It may not be a software patent per-se - it is possible to patent some software in (at least some parts of) Europe - generally, it has to be something embedded - an "enabler" of a bigger invention, if you like. (You can't patent Windows in Europe, but you might be able to patent an intelligent flow valve with embedded PIC, for example).
Boris 'waxing lyrical' goes something like this:
Er, well, yes, you see it's about, oh she's locked me out, er, so yes, you see you can't, oh sorry I seem to have spilled, er, so as I was saying, yes, please could you pass me the, yes, it's all about how much, oh, this cloth is soaked, yes, it's about how much you can really, oh thank you, I'll just clean that up...
(etc).
In short, he's the ultimate politician: Talk lots, say nothing.
As for free wifi - well, one wonders how this is really going to work. When we say 'free', so we mean 'after obtrusive registration', or 'free when you buy xyz' or what? When I think of 'free wireless', I think of an open hotspot I just tune to and get on the Intarwebs immediately. I suspect this won't be quite as easy as that.
However, now I've been reminded open wifi is 'illegal', I'll go home and set one up immediately. I've even got a big aerial for maximum range and signal quality. I just need to work out QoS so I don't get flooded out of my own broadband connection.
1. If you run an unencrypted 802.11 network, expect your data to get pwned.
Not so - sure, it's something like leaving your front door open while you go to work, but there still has to be an illegal act perpetrated against you for there to be an actual problem. Granted, you're not going to get much sympathy from the authorities if you don't lock your front door, but that's a different problem. Germany has said open wifi is illegal - which is pretty much like saying "lock your doors, because realistically there's not much we can do for you if you don't".
4. Why do we trust the German government (or any EU government, for that matter) with this data more than we trust Google?
Because the government is supposed to represent us, the people. Google represents no one but themselves. The track records of both isn't lost on me, but you get the point. Your suggestion of an independent audit is probably the most practically fair solution.
That said, I wouldn't want you or anyone else advertising (flashmob style or something) that I'd accidentally left my front door open. Likewise, I wouldn't want google telling you I have open wifi. I'm not sure if Google make this information public (yet), but they're collecting it for a reason, so one would be reasonable to assume they want to do something with it, which will probably release it to a wider audience than just google, if not to the entire world. This is where the privacy issue lies.
True - although we are (mostly) at liberty to buy the phone and contract separately. That makes ebay a viable phone shop, although in truth, it's probably still cheaper to get the subsidised phone+contract, if you take an 18 or 24 month contract and want to keep the phone that long. YMMV - every time I look at this sort of thing, it gets more complicated, and significantly different from the time before
Separate phone/contract makes sense for people that just phone/text - those sorts of phones are ten-a-penny, and the contracts are getting really cheap, and then of course, there's PAYG or the one month contracts, which a lot of people opt for if they have simple requirements.
Back to all things 4G... My Nokia N900 is 3G. The first time I consciously saw it actually say it was in 3G mode was in Canada. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything other than 2 or 2.5 here in the UK (where I have unlimited data). I'd argue that the data speeds I get are really pretty bad (ie. select web page bookmark, put phone in pocket, walk to the shops, have web page loaded, select next one, go into shops, etc). I have no idea if real 3G would be better (presumably it would), but 4G seems like an impossibility (at least for 02 here in London).
Still, that's not to say I'm not looking forward to some un-crippled 4G phones in the UK sometime soon ;-)
Your router may also be able to tell you what it's view of the upstream/downstream speeds are (my Netgear does, so does a Linksys I have). If you don't have this, then any speed checks you do (for your broadband speed) should be with a wired connection.
If that speed is less than the speed your ISP claims you could get, then the advice you've already had is well worth checking. Additionally, the generally recommended advice is to unscrew the small panel from the front of your master phone socket. This will disconnect all of your house wiring, and will expose another socket (which should be directly connected to the phone line). Plug your microfilter into that, and your router into the filter, then see what speed you get (you should leave the router connected like that for a few hours, even as much as a day for it to properly 'tune in' with the exchange). Then it's time to try other microfilters, other routers, etc.
If after all that the speed is still much less than you're supposed to be getting, then you absolutely can call BT to investigate - their responsibility extends as far as the master socket (and no further), so if that master socket isn't working properly, they should fix it for you. They'll argue with you, and blame anyone they can think of, so be persistent.
I doubt gloating on my part helps you at all, but in Brixton, I get 14Mbps comfortably from a 20Mbps service. I use Freedom2Surf mind you, who utterly wiped the floor with BT and another ISP I have used. Since they've been sold they're still fine, although their future may be less certain than it once was.
They did initially look at calling it the HP Source. Someone already had a very similar name though ;-)
I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but...
We now have much better technology, both for getting to space, and for science aboard a probe. For example, even something like the British Beagle 2 Mars mission cost a few million to make, and although it didn't end up returning much of use, it demonstrates how 'easy' such things are (or how hard things are, depending on your point of view, I suppose).
So I'm wondering, isn't it worth mankind's time to build a (say) £25M long-range probe, like the Voyagers, only designed for the purpose, and shoved into space in some get-there-fast manner?
I'm sure we can argue about the best use of a limited budget, and what constitutes the best science returned for the spend, for the rest of our lives, but a "cheap" probe sent out every few years to do something a bit random might well do wonders for us and our understanding of the Solar system, let alone the Universe as a whole. I wouldn't presume to say we should do such things at the expense of anything more major, but more to foster some 'experimentation' in space.
Just a thought... TFI Friday :-)
Oh no, please don't let that happen. I almost cried when I saw the White House blowing up. I'm not sure I can take any more scares like that.
Just a decent email filtering solution would probably do what you want, and not look like you were making unilateral decisions. One place I used to work used MessageLabs, which used to report to me just how frequently people were about to receive something dangerous (which for a 20 people company was surprisingly frequently - and more surprising would be the sales people asking to have something taken out of quarantine because 'it might be useful' when it looked pretty obvious it was spam/scam/malware).
If you don't like the various vendors doing it for you, then you can do it yourself, but honestly, the quickest win would probably to out-source the work for now and move it in-house later on if you decide you want to.
I'm not a big fan of these corporate website blockers - however, logging where people go at the firewall can be useful - especially if you find a correlation between infections and the 'colourfulness' of the sites people visit. Of course, you need strong management to actually do something about it. I suspect that taking networks off the Internet is getting you some attention, so it's possible you may be able to direct that attention where it's deserved.
A more important question though, is how on earth do you last two months with only a 4 pack of toilet paper?
That's all part of his cunning plan to make sure he's as unattractive for "special attention" as possible ;-)
The thing that Irks me about this is that it says that somehow the UK is due for special treatment. This sort of attitude comes out of the US all the time (on the back of "we're the biggest economy"), but we Brits don't deserve special treatment because we're the same as everyone else - thinking of ourselves modestly is a British thing to do. Perhaps HH needs to sit the "Britishness test" we're subjecting wannabe residents to these days? ;-)
The other thing that irks me is that if kids are getting pestered, they're perfectly at liberty to go sign up at another social network and get away from it. I realise they don't want to do that, but that's one of the harsh choices of life. Further more, there are already are plenty of routes to report abuse on Facebook, including the parent looking over your shoulder. Unfortunately, the "parent" in that sentence appears to be turning into "the government". I don't want much from Facebook, but I hope they prepare a nice pot of tea and then tell the UK government to "bloody well shut up" about this.
Let's be honest, very few UK governments last more than about 10 years before they get voted out in a hail of glory for the new guys. Even though I'm not in love with the alternative, they at least provide a bit of contrast (not as much as us Pirates, but hey, it's a start).
1985: Windows 1.0
2010: Windows 7
1 release every 3.5 years? At that sort of rate you'd think they'd be completely bug free ;-)
PS. Article is in 3 pages that will take you about 3.5 years to read, and another 3.5 regretting.
It's one thing to make a mistake, and entirely another to invoke the law to enforce a mistake. You're right, it's entirely possible the takedown was poorly written, but therein lies the problem with the takedown mechanism - there's no standard that it must reach before it can be served. Thus mistakes, honest or otherwise threaten people with very real, very wide-ranging and scary/expensive actions - completely in error. As such, as reasonable people, we expect anyone taking action as serious as a takedown would apply a good dose of due diligence. Sadly though, not everyone views takedowns as "serious action", and so perhaps aren't taking the care with them that perhaps they should.
In a village near me, a bunch of small stores got together and bought specially shaped bags for their particular products. The baker had 'loaf' shaped bags, the milkman had 'bottle bags' and the dry cleaners got new plastic covers in different lengths depending on the garment it was intended for. The group of stores were nice enough to make sure they got recycled plastic for their bags, and since they were collectively buying in bigger bulk, got a better price and decided to put a village "goes green" logo on their bags.
At first, it was great - you could go to the bakers, and get a conveniently shaped bag, safely in the knowledge it was made of fully recycled materials. When you bought milk, the bag fit the bottles, so they didn't roll about, and it also turned out you could carry both in the same hand without squashing the bread.
Of course, after a while, people tried to reuse the bags they'd been collecting. The problem came about when you went out to buy bread and collect your dry cleaning, only to find the dry cleaners shut, whilst remembering you actually needed milk for your cup of tea tomorrow morning. You'd end up getting yet another milk bag, when you really didn't need one, and carrying home and empty clothes bag.
Happily for you though, you were able to go to the store, buy goldfish food and take those goods away in your own backpack. You didn't need to buy/use the store brand shopping bags. It remains to be seen if the model the village near me is using catches on elsewhere, but I suspect actually, the backpack will win-out in the end.
PS. Glad to hear your fish is better now ;-)
Okay, so they reject the ones that arrive upside down.
How does the sender know this? Does the PTO send them a letter (or fax) saying "your request was rejected"? If so, how do they know who to send them to? Presumably they can't read it off the fax, because it's upside down. Does this mean they just don't acknowledge the faxes they reject?
I would generally say a fax is guaranteed message passing. If they're denying they received the fax because they couldn't read it, then wouldn't the sender's delivery receipt suggest otherwise. In other words, the sender couldn't reasonably know if they had received it or not. On the one hand, they have a delivery receipt that says "yes", on the other, they have no formal acknowledgement.
Perhaps this is a cunning plan to cut their workload...? "Oh sorry IBM, your faxes must have been upside down. We were wondering how come we had nothing much to do last month!".