I'm surprised the neither the article nor this discussion mentions the connection between pirate radio and drugs.
By the time I personally encountered pirate radio, in the 1990s, it was essentially run by drug gangs. The radio played music, to get listeners, and "advertised" to those listeners by promoting (also illegal, unlicensed) raves, which were a major distribution venue for the then-popular synthetic drugs, Acid and Ecstasy, and some less common synthetics. (Not pot).
At the turn of the millennium I was commercially involved in a government project to bring early wi-fi to a deprived council estate (US: federal housing project) as part of a regeneration exercise. The drug gangs aggressively defended their rooftop transmitters, and it required some negotiation to agree to share space: they were also concerned about radio interference!
It was these experiences that convinced me that the drugs trade is not a metaphor, it's the literal truth that it's a business like any other, with illegality being an (unpleasant, dangerous and damaging) detail of the trading environment not a fundamental category. Successful drug dealers become media barons and patrons of the arts, just like other business leaders.
Well, that seems the go-to verb in Slashdot headlines is "sue". Whether that's a comment on editorial decisions alone, or a comment on the state of the tech world, I don't know. A bit of both, I guess.
a worker at a company with more than 500 employees is guaranteed $13.50 an hour, while a worker at a company with fewer than 500 employees is guaranteed only $11 an hour -- these workers' exclusion from the study's results is an especially germane problem (note that low-wage workers in Seattle have had an incentive to switch from small firms to large firms since the minimum wage started rising).
Hold up a minute. If the smaller business is allowed to employ people at a lower minimum wage than the larger business (and remembering here we're talking in both cases about a wage above the unregulated market wage for that job) then the smaller business has gained a competitive advantage relative to the larger business, compared with the prior situation.
So you'd expect the larger businesses to be contracting, and the smaller businesses to be expanding.
If the study shows that the smaller businesses are actually contracting, that means the damage in absolute terms to those businesses is greater than the benefit from being able to steal a march on their larger competitors. But that doesn't mean they aren't winning some trade away from the larger businesses, just that it's not enough to fully cancel out the damaging effect.
Not covering the larger businesses is a limitation of the study. But far from proving - or even suggesting - that they've expanded by an equal or greater degree to the contraction by SMEs, actually we can guess that the contraction there is EVEN WORSE. (Note here that we're talking about contraction in employment: it's possible the larger corps limited the damage to their profits by contracting employment even more sharply, e.g. the robo-servers we see taking orders in McDonalds).
Bottom-line: OK, that study had limitations. What study doesn't? But don't be too quick to say that implies the opposite of the study's conclusions: it might be even worse than you think.
It seems pretty clear to me at this point that those with a right/conservative perspective generally consider "fact-checkers" like Politifact to be leftist partisans, while those with a left/liberal perspective overwhelmingly consider them objective and unbiased.
If only there were some way to tell who was right.
"The advantage to Amazon Cash is that, as soon as you checkout at the register, the funds are available in the customer's Amazon account. "
Well it's not cash then, it's credit.
If it were cash, having bought it at a store it would not be registered to your account until you do something to pay it in - and so you could transfer it to a third party and thence onwards into general circulation. If you can't do that, it's not cash, it's credit.
Speaking as an Echo owner, I've found that most of the apps I've found have been rubbish (translation: garbage). But that's not all that surprising: this is a completely new paradigm, on a par with WIMP. It's hardly surprising that i) developers haven't yet really discovered what works well, nor have users discovered and popularised them; and ii) the marketplace is flooded with junk, because it hasn't yet found a bedrock of solid, popular, useful stuff.
But it'll come. I keep my Echo in the kitchen, and setting a timer by voice is useful, if trivial. And I frequently use Spotify and TuneIn Radio to choose music. I have little doubt that more will come in time. I think that voice control confirming the invention-hype-disappointment-delivery-equilibrium curve, and after a lot of users got acquired it as a Christmas gift during the hype phase, we're now in disappointment.
Similarly, people overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run (which leads to the disappointment) but underestimate it in the long wrong. Voice will be no different.
I wonder what the people supporting this will say when the Trump-et crowd hounds someone out of their job for donating to the "racist, segregationist, pro-violence-on-cops Black Lives Matter hate group"?
You don't think that's a fair description of BLM? Try explaining your reasons to the baying mob.
No, these attacks on Luckey, Brendan Eich and so forth aren't censorship, exactly, but they are certainly intimidation, and an attempt to move certain political positions outside the realm of legitimate discussion. That's not something I welcome, and nor will the people doing it when they discover their opponents can do it to them as well.
Quite apart from all the rest, the claim that not taxing something (in this example, capital gains) counts as an "expenditure" really irritates me each time I see it. It proceeds from the assumption that all wealth belongs to the government, which has to decide how much to allow the governed to control and how much it can better allocate itself. In other words, it is fundamentally hostile to the concept of private property as a moral statement.
The story summary wrongly gives the impression that the US is forever interfering in ICANN's affairs. This is simply not true: while it does retain an oversight function, it has never used that to interfere in ICANN's operational matters. It does have ultimate oversight authority, and so is in theory the final recourse if ICANN should go off the rails. The question is, if the US gives that up, who gets the final say?
ICANN is a body that has power that Slashdotters should care about. It writes rules into the contracts it has with top level domain Registries, rules that individual domain registrants must obey. Mostly these rules are technical not policy, but that is changing. ICANN has long required domain registrants to submit to ICANN's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, which allows trademark owners to claim domains that are said to infringe their trademarks, even though the UDRP does not provide all the defences to trademark that ordinary law offers.
The UDRP is pretty much a settled part of ICANN's scope. But there are plenty of other interests (copyright owners, child protection campaigns, law enforcement groups from around the world) that would like ICANN to impose the rules they prefer on domain registrants too. And they're actively lobbying ICANN right now, have been for years.
Under US oversight, there was a principled commitment to the openness of the Internet, and the possibility of an ultimate recourse to Congress if these lobbyists capture ICANN. When that oversight disappears, it will be crucial to have enshrined in ICANN's constitution effective and enforceable means to constrain ICANN from scope creep. Arguments about that are what is delaying the removal of US oversight, with intellectual property lawyers and foreign governments fighting hard to give ICANN a broad Mission that allows it to implement their demands.
Extra bit depth is all very nice, but what I would really like from a new HDMI standard is faster, more stable syncing when switching resolutions and inputs. Any chance I'm more likely to see that with HDMI 2.0 devices than HDMI 1.3/1.4?
Or is this something caused by HDCP that HDMI can't fix?
Giving birth to you entitles your mother to lifetime tech support. That's just the way it is.
Feel free to guide them to a Mac or an iPad or a chrome book, or whatever both meets their needs and lessens this burden. But you need to be there for the if they need you, on this and other things too.
Surely it should be possible that a company arranges for people to get rides from private persons. Any other ruling from the Court would be dreadful. Whether Uber is really just helping people to find a driver (or a rider), or whether it is really holding itself out as a taxi service is another matter. Similarly, it is possible that Uber could use truly independent contractors; whether Uber's current arrangements with its drivers qualifies as an employment relationship is a separate question.
What we need from the Court is a clear explanation of what will distinguish an information service helping people to find each other from a taxi service. Then the lower court should apply those rules to Uber - and if Uber doesn't like the outcome, it will be free to alter itself so as to stay on the non-a-taxi-company side of the rules, just as it can alter its agreement with its drivers so as to avoid creating an employment relationship.
Despite advances, these figures show that FPS in 4K is still not ready for prime-time even on top-class cards.
When there are cards that can handle it, I'll think about upgrading my 1920x1200 monitor. Until then, I'll wait it out, and so can my aging graphics card.
Part of the problem is that at higher resolutions it becomes more important to use high graphics settings (high res textures, better lighting effects, further draw distance), not less. So if you're interested in 4K gaming, you'll want to do it with everything turned up to 11. The exception to this rule is anti-aliasing, which decreases in value the higher the resolution.
I am loath to join the general chorus of hate for Ubisoft and EA. Complaining about these companies being too focussed on commercial success and not enough of user-entertainment/"art" seems futile: they are, first and foremost, commercial companies.
Nonetheless, considering it strictly as a commercial proposition, should the senior executives of these companies not be worried that their brand has negative value?
When I see news of a game, knowing that it is going to be published by Ubisoft - or, to a lesser extent, by EA, makes me shy away. I am less likely to buy. I am less likely to follow the hype, for fear of being sucked in by it, because I expect to be disappointed. I am less likely to engage with their product or marketing in any way, because of the poor track record that they have establish, the negative brand value that they have created.
If they bought a small publishers, and published the very same game through that new label, I would be more likely to engage with and buy their product for that reason - as long as I was not aware that Ubisoft (or EA) lay behind it. Knowing that they are there, I expect to be disappointed.. That's negative brand value in action.
This is not just a gamer whinge. I would think that was a customer reaction that ought to concern senior commercial management, and shareholders in these companies.
There's an interesting analysis from copyright lawyer Innocenzo Genna that suggests this may not be such good news for the Internet as it seems at first glance.
The copyright-controlled activity that was under discussion was "communicating a copyright work to the public". The court decided that hyperlinking was communicating the work to the public, but ruled that it was still permitted by way of exception, because the work has already been communicated to the same public. According to Genna, this still brings hyperlinking within the sphere of copyright law, which is dangerous for the future. It would have been much better if the court had decided that linking is not "communicating the work", but just pointing to somewhere else where the work is communicated; this would have left much less scope for more restrictive rulings in other hyperlinking cases.
Part of the problem was one of precedence: many holders of domains under.co.uk,.org.uk and several other existing subdomains were happy with the idea of getting a shorter domain - but very unhappy with the thought that they might lose it to a competing domain owner with the same name in a different sub-domain - or even to a trademark holder with no exact equivalent at the moment.
Another part of the problem was Nominet's proposal for "security". In the name of building "trust and confidence in.uk" Nominet had proposed to extend itself from traditional registry options to scanning websites for malware, and using its power to suspend domains to enforce clean-up. Not surprisingly, this was controversial.
Note also that Nominet has said it might come back with some variant of these proposals later, perhaps extending its "security" scheme to all the existing.uk domains.
I've been reading since a friend referred me to an interesting rant site called Chips and Dips. I guess he must have found it on "What's new on the Internet" or something. So, to CmdrTaco and all the team that followed, a big Thank You for one of three sites I still check every day.
Let's set aside the quibbles, and for the sake of argument just roll with the notion that these writers are mere shills for the Oracle and Google, respectively (after all, that's the notion that clearly lies behind this ruling).
Isn't the right to speak anonymously protected by the First Amendment? Doesn't that protection extend to Oracle and Google too?
(I know corporate speech isn't as vigorously protected under the First Amendment, but it is still protected somewhat. And this speech isn't advertising (as with most limitations on corporate speech), it's closer to legal/political commentary).
Rated loads on some other devices: PC power supply: 800W Plasma TV: 420W Home cinema amp: 870W Stereo amp: 800W
I also have an electric oven (two actually), a washer-dryer and a dishwasher. It is by no means inconceivable that all these devices would be running simultaneously. And that's without counting the multiplicity of relatively low power devices, which will all add up.
In common with most British people I don't have air-con. The heating is gas powered, but for many people in apartments it will be electric.
Now I know a lot of people will cook with gas, and my entertainment system is more than many people may have (although I imagine it's not unusual amongst slashdotters). And of course this gear won't draw the full rated load in normal use. Nonetheless, it seems pretty clear that a 2kW supply certainly couldn't power my home. Am I so atypical?
I agree. You're trying to solve a commercial issue (and possible mistake) with a (poor) technical solution.
As you describe it, the original contract wanted the data destroyed at the end of the contract term. You've just had the contract *renewed*, which is another word for "extended". Why exactly would anyone want the data destroyed in mid-contract?
Your contact negotiators ought to have realised that the government didn't need you to destroy the data until the end of the new contract, and written that into the new contract, thereby over-riding the old one. More than saving you the money, it was one of your advantages as the incumbent contractor: compared with a competitor, you could perform the second contract term at lower cost simply because you could off-set the data destruction cost for which you were already contracted simply by writing into the new contract permission to defer that destruction! This would allow you to underbid any potential competitor - or if there is no likely competitor, writing deferral in would be a straight profit to you at no cost to the customer. That kind of win-win is *exactly* what your contract negotiators are paid to spot and capitalise on.
As poster above says, your contract office can still possibly rescue this by simply writing and asking for permission to not destroy the data until the end of the renewed contract term. All the same, missing this at contract negotiation time is something that should come up in somebody's annual performance assessment.
While ISPs have to hand over log details for free in criminal cases, they are free to charge in civil cases
Actually, ISPs routinely charge the cost of obtaining, processing and handing over log details when asked for it by law enforcement authorities under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, including when the data is needed for criminal investigations.
ISPs aren't allowed to make a profit from providing this data, whether for civil litigation or criminal investigations, just recover their costs. However ISPs' costs can be substantial: ISPs don't just spend time fishing out the records and handing them over, there are also significant overheads in training and systems to ensure this data is only handed over when it should be, to make sure the requesting authority is genuine and the ISP isn't being subjected to an imposter trying a social engineering attack, and so forth. Larger ISPs/telcos run dedicated units to cope with the high volumes of request from public authorities (in total, hundreds of thousands of RIPA requests are made each year, although most of these are for telephony data rather than Internet accounts).
For confirmation see Chapter Four of the relevant Code of Practice.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised the neither the article nor this discussion mentions the connection between pirate radio and drugs.
By the time I personally encountered pirate radio, in the 1990s, it was essentially run by drug gangs. The radio played music, to get listeners, and "advertised" to those listeners by promoting (also illegal, unlicensed) raves, which were a major distribution venue for the then-popular synthetic drugs, Acid and Ecstasy, and some less common synthetics. (Not pot).
At the turn of the millennium I was commercially involved in a government project to bring early wi-fi to a deprived council estate (US: federal housing project) as part of a regeneration exercise. The drug gangs aggressively defended their rooftop transmitters, and it required some negotiation to agree to share space: they were also concerned about radio interference!
It was these experiences that convinced me that the drugs trade is not a metaphor, it's the literal truth that it's a business like any other, with illegality being an (unpleasant, dangerous and damaging) detail of the trading environment not a fundamental category. Successful drug dealers become media barons and patrons of the arts, just like other business leaders.
Well, that seems the go-to verb in Slashdot headlines is "sue". Whether that's a comment on editorial decisions alone, or a comment on the state of the tech world, I don't know. A bit of both, I guess.
Hold up a minute. If the smaller business is allowed to employ people at a lower minimum wage than the larger business (and remembering here we're talking in both cases about a wage above the unregulated market wage for that job) then the smaller business has gained a competitive advantage relative to the larger business, compared with the prior situation.
So you'd expect the larger businesses to be contracting, and the smaller businesses to be expanding.
If the study shows that the smaller businesses are actually contracting, that means the damage in absolute terms to those businesses is greater than the benefit from being able to steal a march on their larger competitors. But that doesn't mean they aren't winning some trade away from the larger businesses, just that it's not enough to fully cancel out the damaging effect.
Not covering the larger businesses is a limitation of the study. But far from proving - or even suggesting - that they've expanded by an equal or greater degree to the contraction by SMEs, actually we can guess that the contraction there is EVEN WORSE. (Note here that we're talking about contraction in employment: it's possible the larger corps limited the damage to their profits by contracting employment even more sharply, e.g. the robo-servers we see taking orders in McDonalds).
Bottom-line: OK, that study had limitations. What study doesn't? But don't be too quick to say that implies the opposite of the study's conclusions: it might be even worse than you think.
It seems pretty clear to me at this point that those with a right/conservative perspective generally consider "fact-checkers" like Politifact to be leftist partisans, while those with a left/liberal perspective overwhelmingly consider them objective and unbiased.
If only there were some way to tell who was right.
Well it's not cash then, it's credit.
If it were cash, having bought it at a store it would not be registered to your account until you do something to pay it in - and so you could transfer it to a third party and thence onwards into general circulation. If you can't do that, it's not cash, it's credit.
1. What throughput / flowrate can you achieve, per unit of area?
2. How do you clear clogging?
Speaking as an Echo owner, I've found that most of the apps I've found have been rubbish (translation: garbage). But that's not all that surprising: this is a completely new paradigm, on a par with WIMP. It's hardly surprising that
i) developers haven't yet really discovered what works well, nor have users discovered and popularised them; and
ii) the marketplace is flooded with junk, because it hasn't yet found a bedrock of solid, popular, useful stuff.
But it'll come. I keep my Echo in the kitchen, and setting a timer by voice is useful, if trivial. And I frequently use Spotify and TuneIn Radio to choose music.
I have little doubt that more will come in time. I think that voice control confirming the invention-hype-disappointment-delivery-equilibrium curve, and after a lot of users got acquired it as a Christmas gift during the hype phase, we're now in disappointment.
Similarly, people overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run (which leads to the disappointment) but underestimate it in the long wrong. Voice will be no different.
I wonder what the people supporting this will say when the Trump-et crowd hounds someone out of their job for donating to the "racist, segregationist, pro-violence-on-cops Black Lives Matter hate group"?
You don't think that's a fair description of BLM? Try explaining your reasons to the baying mob.
No, these attacks on Luckey, Brendan Eich and so forth aren't censorship, exactly, but they are certainly intimidation, and an attempt to move certain political positions outside the realm of legitimate discussion. That's not something I welcome, and nor will the people doing it when they discover their opponents can do it to them as well.
Quite apart from all the rest, the claim that not taxing something (in this example, capital gains) counts as an "expenditure" really irritates me each time I see it. It proceeds from the assumption that all wealth belongs to the government, which has to decide how much to allow the governed to control and how much it can better allocate itself. In other words, it is fundamentally hostile to the concept of private property as a moral statement.
The story summary wrongly gives the impression that the US is forever interfering in ICANN's affairs. This is simply not true: while it does retain an oversight function, it has never used that to interfere in ICANN's operational matters. It does have ultimate oversight authority, and so is in theory the final recourse if ICANN should go off the rails. The question is, if the US gives that up, who gets the final say?
ICANN is a body that has power that Slashdotters should care about. It writes rules into the contracts it has with top level domain Registries, rules that individual domain registrants must obey. Mostly these rules are technical not policy, but that is changing. ICANN has long required domain registrants to submit to ICANN's Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, which allows trademark owners to claim domains that are said to infringe their trademarks, even though the UDRP does not provide all the defences to trademark that ordinary law offers.
The UDRP is pretty much a settled part of ICANN's scope. But there are plenty of other interests (copyright owners, child protection campaigns, law enforcement groups from around the world) that would like ICANN to impose the rules they prefer on domain registrants too. And they're actively lobbying ICANN right now, have been for years.
Under US oversight, there was a principled commitment to the openness of the Internet, and the possibility of an ultimate recourse to Congress if these lobbyists capture ICANN. When that oversight disappears, it will be crucial to have enshrined in ICANN's constitution effective and enforceable means to constrain ICANN from scope creep. Arguments about that are what is delaying the removal of US oversight, with intellectual property lawyers and foreign governments fighting hard to give ICANN a broad Mission that allows it to implement their demands.
I think I'll wait for the spin-off videogame. I'm a fan of city-builders.
Extra bit depth is all very nice, but what I would really like from a new HDMI standard is faster, more stable syncing when switching resolutions and inputs. Any chance I'm more likely to see that with HDMI 2.0 devices than HDMI 1.3/1.4?
Or is this something caused by HDCP that HDMI can't fix?
Giving birth to you entitles your mother to lifetime tech support. That's just the way it is.
Feel free to guide them to a Mac or an iPad or a chrome book, or whatever both meets their needs and lessens this burden. But you need to be there for the if they need you, on this and other things too.
This should depend greatly on the factual record.
Surely it should be possible that a company arranges for people to get rides from private persons. Any other ruling from the Court would be dreadful. Whether Uber is really just helping people to find a driver (or a rider), or whether it is really holding itself out as a taxi service is another matter. Similarly, it is possible that Uber could use truly independent contractors; whether Uber's current arrangements with its drivers qualifies as an employment relationship is a separate question.
What we need from the Court is a clear explanation of what will distinguish an information service helping people to find each other from a taxi service. Then the lower court should apply those rules to Uber - and if Uber doesn't like the outcome, it will be free to alter itself so as to stay on the non-a-taxi-company side of the rules, just as it can alter its agreement with its drivers so as to avoid creating an employment relationship.
Despite advances, these figures show that FPS in 4K is still not ready for prime-time even on top-class cards.
When there are cards that can handle it, I'll think about upgrading my 1920x1200 monitor. Until then, I'll wait it out, and so can my aging graphics card.
Part of the problem is that at higher resolutions it becomes more important to use high graphics settings (high res textures, better lighting effects, further draw distance), not less. So if you're interested in 4K gaming, you'll want to do it with everything turned up to 11. The exception to this rule is anti-aliasing, which decreases in value the higher the resolution.
I am loath to join the general chorus of hate for Ubisoft and EA. Complaining about these companies being too focussed on commercial success and not enough of user-entertainment/"art" seems futile: they are, first and foremost, commercial companies.
Nonetheless, considering it strictly as a commercial proposition, should the senior executives of these companies not be worried that their brand has negative value?
When I see news of a game, knowing that it is going to be published by Ubisoft - or, to a lesser extent, by EA, makes me shy away. I am less likely to buy. I am less likely to follow the hype, for fear of being sucked in by it, because I expect to be disappointed. I am less likely to engage with their product or marketing in any way, because of the poor track record that they have establish, the negative brand value that they have created.
If they bought a small publishers, and published the very same game through that new label, I would be more likely to engage with and buy their product for that reason - as long as I was not aware that Ubisoft (or EA) lay behind it. Knowing that they are there, I expect to be disappointed.. That's negative brand value in action.
This is not just a gamer whinge. I would think that was a customer reaction that ought to concern senior commercial management, and shareholders in these companies.
Sounds like they're copying the law here in the UK. Which for a five-eyes country isn't that surprising.
There's an interesting analysis from copyright lawyer Innocenzo Genna that suggests this may not be such good news for the Internet as it seems at first glance.
The copyright-controlled activity that was under discussion was "communicating a copyright work to the public". The court decided that hyperlinking was communicating the work to the public, but ruled that it was still permitted by way of exception, because the work has already been communicated to the same public. According to Genna, this still brings hyperlinking within the sphere of copyright law, which is dangerous for the future. It would have been much better if the court had decided that linking is not "communicating the work", but just pointing to somewhere else where the work is communicated; this would have left much less scope for more restrictive rulings in other hyperlinking cases.
Part of the problem was one of precedence: many holders of domains under .co.uk, .org.uk and several other existing subdomains were happy with the idea of getting a shorter domain - but very unhappy with the thought that they might lose it to a competing domain owner with the same name in a different sub-domain - or even to a trademark holder with no exact equivalent at the moment.
Another part of the problem was Nominet's proposal for "security". In the name of building "trust and confidence in .uk" Nominet had proposed to extend itself from traditional registry options to scanning websites for malware, and using its power to suspend domains to enforce clean-up. Not surprisingly, this was controversial.
Note also that Nominet has said it might come back with some variant of these proposals later, perhaps extending its "security" scheme to all the existing .uk domains.
I've been reading since a friend referred me to an interesting rant site called Chips and Dips. I guess he must have found it on "What's new on the Internet" or something. So, to CmdrTaco and all the team that followed, a big Thank You for one of three sites I still check every day.
Let's set aside the quibbles, and for the sake of argument just roll with the notion that these writers are mere shills for the Oracle and Google, respectively (after all, that's the notion that clearly lies behind this ruling).
Isn't the right to speak anonymously protected by the First Amendment? Doesn't that protection extend to Oracle and Google too?
(I know corporate speech isn't as vigorously protected under the First Amendment, but it is still protected somewhat. And this speech isn't advertising (as with most limitations on corporate speech), it's closer to legal/political commentary).
I would be most interested to see this in SCOTUS.
2kW is an "average home"? Seriously?
My induction cooktop has a rated load of 11kW!
Rated loads on some other devices:
PC power supply: 800W
Plasma TV: 420W
Home cinema amp: 870W
Stereo amp: 800W
I also have an electric oven (two actually), a washer-dryer and a dishwasher. It is by no means inconceivable that all these devices would be running simultaneously. And that's without counting the multiplicity of relatively low power devices, which will all add up.
In common with most British people I don't have air-con. The heating is gas powered, but for many people in apartments it will be electric.
Now I know a lot of people will cook with gas, and my entertainment system is more than many people may have (although I imagine it's not unusual amongst slashdotters). And of course this gear won't draw the full rated load in normal use. Nonetheless, it seems pretty clear that a 2kW supply certainly couldn't power my home. Am I so atypical?
I agree. You're trying to solve a commercial issue (and possible mistake) with a (poor) technical solution.
As you describe it, the original contract wanted the data destroyed at the end of the contract term. You've just had the contract *renewed*, which is another word for "extended". Why exactly would anyone want the data destroyed in mid-contract?
Your contact negotiators ought to have realised that the government didn't need you to destroy the data until the end of the new contract, and written that into the new contract, thereby over-riding the old one. More than saving you the money, it was one of your advantages as the incumbent contractor: compared with a competitor, you could perform the second contract term at lower cost simply because you could off-set the data destruction cost for which you were already contracted simply by writing into the new contract permission to defer that destruction! This would allow you to underbid any potential competitor - or if there is no likely competitor, writing deferral in would be a straight profit to you at no cost to the customer. That kind of win-win is *exactly* what your contract negotiators are paid to spot and capitalise on.
As poster above says, your contract office can still possibly rescue this by simply writing and asking for permission to not destroy the data until the end of the renewed contract term. All the same, missing this at contract negotiation time is something that should come up in somebody's annual performance assessment.
Wipe the contents of the user location database? We need an app for that!
OP said
Actually, ISPs routinely charge the cost of obtaining, processing and handing over log details when asked for it by law enforcement authorities under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, including when the data is needed for criminal investigations.
ISPs aren't allowed to make a profit from providing this data, whether for civil litigation or criminal investigations, just recover their costs. However ISPs' costs can be substantial: ISPs don't just spend time fishing out the records and handing them over, there are also significant overheads in training and systems to ensure this data is only handed over when it should be, to make sure the requesting authority is genuine and the ISP isn't being subjected to an imposter trying a social engineering attack, and so forth. Larger ISPs/telcos run dedicated units to cope with the high volumes of request from public authorities (in total, hundreds of thousands of RIPA requests are made each year, although most of these are for telephony data rather than Internet accounts).
For confirmation see Chapter Four of the relevant Code of Practice.