Before I gave up on it altogether, I bought Byte begrudgingly, exclusively for Jerry Pournelle's column. I guess I had decided he was worth the cover price - higher for being abroad, and the US advertising was irrelevant to me.
1) Start monetized blogs. 2) Copypasta some anti-Israel content. 3) Refer your blogs to giyus.org for listing on Megaphone. 4) Enjoy 15,000+ page impressions per day.
I received a bill for £10,115 in February this year from T-Mobile UK. I travel extensively for my work, and have regularly hit my "credit cap", which I believe is around the £600 mark. This normally entails paying the bill two or three times a month over the phone to keep outbound service (and GPRS - when I am switched to incoming only, my service is restricted to GSM, so mail stops coming to my BlackBerry).
I have had bills of £2000-£3000/month before, but this was astronomical and wholly unexpected. It turns out that it was almost all data usage (about £350/day), and it was the GPS application on my BlackBerry (8800) downloading map data on the fly. The BlackBerry GPS app and Google Maps do not cache maps on your handheld, and will run in the background if merely "exited" as opposed to "closed", so beware!
My response was to ask why my "credit cap" hadn't kicked in, and the explanation offered was that partner networks do not provide daily updates on roaming data use, instead providing weekly or monthly totals - i.e. T-Mobile didn't know how much I had run up until the end of the month. I stated my position clearly - that I would not pay, I would attend a court if they attempted to force me to pay, I would not retain a lawyer and the entirety of my defence would be: "They want £10,000 for one months service".
I explained that I would, if pushed, demonstrate that these were disproportionate charges, and the repercussions of bringing such a case against me could be severe. I displayed my intent by emailing recordings of my conversations with customer reps to Jim Hyde, the MD of T-Mobile UK, which included such gems as "Well you are entitled to a discount on data within the EU, but that obviously doesn't include Brussels." We settled for £3,500.
I then made it my business to find a contract which includes unlimited international data. Not one of the UK networks will offer this in a consumer tariff, and in the end it was only O2 who said to me: "Oh you can add that as a "Bolt-On" to any business contract for £20/month. No other company offers anything like unlimited roaming data, and I was shocked at how cheap it was to do. It has slashed my bills by literally thousands of pounds, to say nothing of the savings on hotel and airport internet.
As an aside, O2 is the UK partner network for the iPhone - but there is no iPhone "business" tariff that will allow you to bolt on international roaming as I have done with the BlackBerry. Not too troubling until they provide above-board tethering anyway.
And as a final note, will somebody please sort out the £ sign when posting from the AJAX box!
The Virgin Media installer (previously known as NTL, pka Cable & Wireless) registers your MAC address.
Run the installer from a Windows box once, and then clone the MAC address of the machine into your router. I did this a couple of years ago, and when upgrading my routers firmware, I have to spoof the MAC to get back online (tech support will tell you to run the installer again).
Of course, if you run the installer from behind your router, it will pick up your routers MAC address and associate that with your account, but:
In light of UK data retention policies, and the likes of Phorm, I am glad that the NIC it corresponds to is at the bottom of a landfill somewhere.
Please excuse the rant, one of my disparate jobs is that I am Dizzee Rascal's production manager.
For those of you who aren't familiar with him, he is a UK hip-hop star whose most recent release is presently at No.1 in the singles charts, where it has been since its release at the beginning of the month. We entered the charts on download sales alone (physical unit sales are dead). It is fair to assume that a trend in retail purchases of media will be shadowed by a similar trend in illegal downloading of the same media. It is accurate to say that, so far this month, more people in the UK are buying Dizzee's record than any other. Therefore I can infer that there are a significant number of illegal downloads of the song taking place - it's not unreasonable to suggest perhaps more than any other chart single.
Dizzee is a self-made artist by anyone's definition. He has not had major label backing at any point in his career and this release is on his own label (Dirtee Stank Recordings).
He is creating wealth, jobs, tax revenue and all the other things beloved of the government when making speeches about "small British businesses". He is also the most visible UK artist in the hip-hop genre, traditionally highly US-centric, raising the profile of British music around the world.
How much would we see of this "immunity to prosecution" levy?
NOT ONE PENNY.
That's right, the proposed measures would do nothing for a British citizen, running a British business (no fancy off-shored tax evasion here), with the Number 1 record in the UK this summer. We're not part of the cabal whom these measures would benefit. Why should anyone trust a major label to do the right thing by the artists when they've been screwing them for 93.5% of their revenue for years. I believe we have demonstrated that a label is not required to build an artist from scratch - this is not Radiohead or NIN turning on their labels and capitalising on pre-existing brand awareness - Dizzee came from nowhere, and if you have heard of him it is because he works so damn hard.
Everyone on this forum recognises the naivety of any claim to end file-sharing. In fact this kind of agreement is more likely to "stamp-out" our successful business. If I authorise our fans to seed torrents of show bootlegs, or recruit them to promote up-coming artists from the label by sharing album previews on P2P networks, am I placing them at risk of punitive measures from their ISPs, or potential criminal prosecution? Perhaps the only safe thing to do is leave USB sticks in club toilets. No doubt soon this will also be targeted by labels as a promotion channel outside their control that can lead to independent artists mucking with projected chart positions. Yes, we kept McFly off the top spot this week. Yes, somebody may lose their job over it - that's the way major labels work when you don't meet expectations. No, I'm not sorry.
We learned our lesson years ago, after being flown first class to Argentina, being put up in 5-Star hotels with a few days each side of the show to see the country, going on stage in front of 30,000 people who knew the words to all the songs, and coming home with money in our pockets.
We don't have distribution in Argentina. We have never sold a copy of any of Dizzee's albums in Argentina, as the records aren't available (excusing imports, which we don't see the markup on).
That's a lot of downloads. I suppose we should display our gratitude by suing the Argentinians.
Of course, we don't spend our time suing anyone - we spend it uploading everything to YouTube, to save you from having to share it yourselves!
How about a RedScrambler? Or a Cryptophone Sagem's Vectrotel doesn't seem to be available anymore (if it ever shipped at all). Nokia's E Series support secure telephony and are the most common choice for Israelis abroad.
My company does exactly this, and it is a conscious decision. Anyone that tries to tell us that we "can't" do business like this needs to join the free world. And to be blunt, it is really only a PR nightmare for American companies.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good post. The GP won the internet.
Funnily enough, one of the most technically competent lawyers the BBC has in this field is a hot blonde!
Seriouspost.
No, I think it was Jonny Ive from England.
Before I gave up on it altogether, I bought Byte begrudgingly, exclusively for Jerry Pournelle's column.
I guess I had decided he was worth the cover price - higher for being abroad, and the US advertising was irrelevant to me.
I wouldn't live in a country that had such a thing..
1) Start monetized blogs.
2) Copypasta some anti-Israel content.
3) Refer your blogs to giyus.org for listing on Megaphone.
4) Enjoy 15,000+ page impressions per day.
Slight niggle.
OpenDX is based on IBM Data Explorer. MayaVi is one of many front-ends for VTK.
It'll be Seimens. You heard it here first.
We burn faggots around here.
I received a bill for £10,115 in February this year from T-Mobile UK.
I travel extensively for my work, and have regularly hit my "credit cap", which I believe is around the £600 mark. This normally entails paying the bill two or three times a month over the phone to keep outbound service (and GPRS - when I am switched to incoming only, my service is restricted to GSM, so mail stops coming to my BlackBerry).
I have had bills of £2000-£3000/month before, but this was astronomical and wholly unexpected. It turns out that it was almost all data usage (about £350/day), and it was the GPS application on my BlackBerry (8800) downloading map data on the fly. The BlackBerry GPS app and Google Maps do not cache maps on your handheld, and will run in the background if merely "exited" as opposed to "closed", so beware!
My response was to ask why my "credit cap" hadn't kicked in, and the explanation offered was that partner networks do not provide daily updates on roaming data use, instead providing weekly or monthly totals - i.e. T-Mobile didn't know how much I had run up until the end of the month.
I stated my position clearly - that I would not pay, I would attend a court if they attempted to force me to pay, I would not retain a lawyer and the entirety of my defence would be: "They want £10,000 for one months service".
I explained that I would, if pushed, demonstrate that these were disproportionate charges, and the repercussions of bringing such a case against me could be severe.
I displayed my intent by emailing recordings of my conversations with customer reps to Jim Hyde, the MD of T-Mobile UK, which included such gems as "Well you are entitled to a discount on data within the EU, but that obviously doesn't include Brussels."
We settled for £3,500.
I then made it my business to find a contract which includes unlimited international data.
Not one of the UK networks will offer this in a consumer tariff, and in the end it was only O2 who said to me: "Oh you can add that as a "Bolt-On" to any business contract for £20/month.
No other company offers anything like unlimited roaming data, and I was shocked at how cheap it was to do. It has slashed my bills by literally thousands of pounds, to say nothing of the savings on hotel and airport internet.
As an aside, O2 is the UK partner network for the iPhone - but there is no iPhone "business" tariff that will allow you to bolt on international roaming as I have done with the BlackBerry. Not too troubling until they provide above-board tethering anyway.
And as a final note, will somebody please sort out the £ sign when posting from the AJAX box!
Absolutely disgusting misuse of moderation.
Mod parent up if you're American.
This latent racism is sure to be funny if you are..
Also including selecting a white case. No red though.
All I know is, most of the Brazilian girls I've ever encountered were seriously hot.
A truism, if ever I saw one, just like:
Most of the Brazilian girls I've ever encountered were after my money.
The Virgin Media installer (previously known as NTL, pka Cable & Wireless) registers your MAC address.
Run the installer from a Windows box once, and then clone the MAC address of the machine into your router.
I did this a couple of years ago, and when upgrading my routers firmware, I have to spoof the MAC to get back online (tech support will tell you to run the installer again).
Of course, if you run the installer from behind your router, it will pick up your routers MAC address and associate that with your account, but:
In light of UK data retention policies, and the likes of Phorm, I am glad that the NIC it corresponds to is at the bottom of a landfill somewhere.
Please excuse the rant, one of my disparate jobs is that I am Dizzee Rascal's production manager.
For those of you who aren't familiar with him, he is a UK hip-hop star whose most recent release is presently at No.1 in the singles charts, where it has been since its release at the beginning of the month. We entered the charts on download sales alone (physical unit sales are dead). It is fair to assume that a trend in retail purchases of media will be shadowed by a similar trend in illegal downloading of the same media. It is accurate to say that, so far this month, more people in the UK are buying Dizzee's record than any other. Therefore I can infer that there are a significant number of illegal downloads of the song taking place - it's not unreasonable to suggest perhaps more than any other chart single.
Dizzee is a self-made artist by anyone's definition. He has not had major label backing at any point in his career and this release is on his own label (Dirtee Stank Recordings).
He is creating wealth, jobs, tax revenue and all the other things beloved of the government when making speeches about "small British businesses".
He is also the most visible UK artist in the hip-hop genre, traditionally highly US-centric, raising the profile of British music around the world.
How much would we see of this "immunity to prosecution" levy?
NOT ONE PENNY.
That's right, the proposed measures would do nothing for a British citizen, running a British business (no fancy off-shored tax evasion here), with the Number 1 record in the UK this summer. We're not part of the cabal whom these measures would benefit. Why should anyone trust a major label to do the right thing by the artists when they've been screwing them for 93.5% of their revenue for years. I believe we have demonstrated that a label is not required to build an artist from scratch - this is not Radiohead or NIN turning on their labels and capitalising on pre-existing brand awareness - Dizzee came from nowhere, and if you have heard of him it is because he works so damn hard.
Everyone on this forum recognises the naivety of any claim to end file-sharing. In fact this kind of agreement is more likely to "stamp-out" our successful business.
If I authorise our fans to seed torrents of show bootlegs, or recruit them to promote up-coming artists from the label by sharing album previews on P2P networks, am I placing them at risk of punitive measures from their ISPs, or potential criminal prosecution? Perhaps the only safe thing to do is leave USB sticks in club toilets.
No doubt soon this will also be targeted by labels as a promotion channel outside their control that can lead to independent artists mucking with projected chart positions.
Yes, we kept McFly off the top spot this week. Yes, somebody may lose their job over it - that's the way major labels work when you don't meet expectations. No, I'm not sorry.
We learned our lesson years ago, after being flown first class to Argentina, being put up in 5-Star hotels with a few days each side of the show to see the country, going on stage in front of 30,000 people who knew the words to all the songs, and coming home with money in our pockets.
We don't have distribution in Argentina.
We have never sold a copy of any of Dizzee's albums in Argentina, as the records aren't available (excusing imports, which we don't see the markup on).
That's a lot of downloads.
I suppose we should display our gratitude by suing the Argentinians.
Of course, we don't spend our time suing anyone - we spend it uploading everything to YouTube, to save you from having to share it yourselves!
This is the first top-posting I have ever seen on slashdot.
Well done!
How about a RedScrambler?
Or a Cryptophone
Sagem's Vectrotel doesn't seem to be available anymore (if it ever shipped at all).
Nokia's E Series support secure telephony and are the most common choice for Israelis abroad.
On slashdot it is clear that he means pounds sterling.
As opposed to Romanian or Vietnamese pounds:
£
+1 Lawnmower analogy
2 miles East of the Centre.
Yes, but in Korea only old people watch TV.
About the same time the Google cookie is out of beta.
You can't spell superior.
Or use line breaks.
My company does exactly this, and it is a conscious decision.
Anyone that tries to tell us that we "can't" do business like this needs to join the free world.
And to be blunt, it is really only a PR nightmare for American companies.