But thank god we've got people like Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith running the country. Soon we'll have banned this sick filth, and the morally corrupt will be where they belong - behind bars!
Incidentally, we're about to build 5 new prisons. And to think some cynical people are pointing out that we're in a recession, but if someone who loses their job is sent to prison, they no longer show up on unemployment records. Nonsense! We're cleaning up the country!
You must be one of those hippies who keep on preaching about rights and liberty. Good job that soon we'll have a central database linked to your compulsory ID card and the GPS tracker in your car, at least then we'll be able to keep an eye on you and your subversive attitude.
But why would you, if you haven't got anything to hide? The only people who would do this must be terrorists, or users of prostitutes! We should lock you up to protect the children. What a shame we didn't get the 42 day detention-without-charge law passed - still, we can hold you for 28, it's better than nothing.
Never going to happen in the UK though - it's now a legal requirement that ISPs log all IPs. And all e-mail headers. And soon all web requests. And no doubt keyloggers shortly after that.
And a good thing too! Let's stop those damned terrorists, criminals, paedophiles and other sexual deviants! Living in the UK is awesome - just look how much our government cares about our well-being!
Clearly I have misunderestimated the complex skillset required to run the country in this day and age - and outed in such a public forum, my career is over before it has begun.
Still, you're more than welcome to a month in the Caribbean DC - the more the merrier. If you lack the necessary skills we can train you up, perhaps using a government-funded apprenticeship scheme. Think we're going to need a villa complex attached to the DC though, to house the workforce.
a) that's google, not a tiny local/specialist ISP already operating under tight margins
b) you're out by a massive factor; google will only the URL you clicked; not the headers for your click, headers for every resource on the resulting page, and the headers for every page you open from there.
For example, google 'slashdot', then click through to the front page. Google stores 1 piece of data for that click. Your ISP stores 35 (at time of writing).
Thank you for raising those points. And I can't be earning less than the people I'm paying, so I'd better up my daily rate too. £3000/day sounds reasonable.
Might be worth building a data centre in the Caribbean too. For remote backups, to ensure data integrity. Just off the beach, facing the sea, to take full advantage of the sea breezes to reduce cooling costs. Will need to spend at least 6 months a year out there maintaining the systems, so may as well add a small apartment to the data centre, to save on hotel bills. 7 bedrooms should be enough for me and my consultants, who would need to rotate in on a 4-weekly basis.
I should stand at the next election, I've clearly got the right attitude for government.
No no, it's fine - "The UK government has agreed to reimburse ISPs for the cost of retaining the data."
I run a small ISP for 5 users. I estimate that I will need 27 new servers to handle the data, and that it will take me 42 days to implement, at my standard rate of £1000/day plus expenses.
It will be a big project, so I will need to employ all of my friends and every member of my family to consult on the work, for the full duration of the project, at their standard rate of £500/day.
Where do I send the bill? I'll ask Jacqui Smith, I've heard she knows the address of the expenses department.
I'd normally be the last person to defend Apple, but to be fair to them it appears the only time a customer can claim a refund is when the developer doesn't release in time, or releases a broken product. Which makes it sound a bit more reasonable.
Exactly what I thought. Saying "Oh, we didn't do it with criminal intent, so it's not a crime" is like saying "Sorry officer, but I wasn't doing 150 MPH past that school with criminal intent, so it's not a crime", or "I walked into a bank, pointed a gun at the cashiers and told them to empty their vault in to the back of my truck. But I didn't do it with criminal intent, so it's not a crime."
There's a reason security researchers don't disable botnets by hijacking them and using them on themselves - not just is it illegal, but it risks further damage to the machine - damage which they would be liable for.
Whoever did this at the BBC may have done it with good intentions, but that is no defence in the eyes of the law. They showed incredibly poor judgement, and there should definitely be a police investigation.
Only then you have to find the time to set up management and billing systems etc, and then offer on-going decent end-user support. It sounds like that's not related to the original business plan in any way, and so the staff skillset is likely to have a few gaps.
For a business that's low on money, it seems absurd to spend even more money to get into a market that's already saturated with well-established competitors who are better at what they do than you will be.
Frankly the only thing that makes sense is to sell the servers, and put the money in a bank account to help cover staff wages in the future.
I didn't think I'd like Bad Company, so didn't pick it up until I saw it on offer at 40% RRP, but I loved it. It's the first game in 20 years that I actually laughed out loud while I was playing - both due to the humour of the comedy script, and the maniacal joy of flattening a town rather than fight house to house. And it went on for ages - compared to a lot of the other games I've payed top price for (CoD WaW, even GoW and Rainbow 6), I thought it was excellent value for money.
Mmm, that's a bit small. I'm thinking more of an A5 notebook; ~6"x8", 1" thick, 8" screen. More along the lines of a double-sized iphone with a slightly more powerful processor, and a slide-out keyboard you can touch-type on (like the Psion 5 had back in 1997). With a couple of SD slots. Running Ubuntu. Now that I'd buy.
I want a small tablet pc with a fold-out keyboard.
I'm waiting to see where netbooks go next; the natural progression is to add touch-screens and fold-away keyboards, and there were already some that had done this at CES this year.
If they can manage a similar price, I just can't see who would be prepared to spend $300 on a portable web browser when you could pay a bit more and get a full OS. Well, apart from the yes-men who worship Arrington just in the hope he'll give them a bit of publicity when they start up their twitter/pornotube mashup.
Running OS X as a guest would be perfect for a linux- or windows-based web developer who wants to test out how their client-side code runs on a mac.
Or for a mac software developer who wants to maintain multiple versions and configurations of OS X to test their software against.
Or for windows users who want to try out OS X on their existing expensive hardware, without having to lay waste to their existing installation, or fork out a sizeable chunk of money for more hardware.
It's actually very few forms of cancer that can be completely cured, which is why people working in medicine talk about cancer survival rates rather than the percentage cured. You're talking about the percentage of patients who survive the first 5 years after being diagnosed - after that, all bets are off.
It's quite heartbreaking to hear people talking about fighting their cancer and how it has been cured - when you have been treated successfully, your cancer goes into remittance, but chances are that it'll be back; usually the best you can hope for is that you've postponed the inevitable for a few more years. And when it does come back, it's often more aggressive and systemic than before; frequently to the point that all that can be done is treat the symptoms to ease the patient's passing.
Even though Jobs' form of cancer has an extremely good survival rate, he wasted time before getting treatment, increasing the opportunity for it to grow and metastasize. I'm not saying it will definitely come back, and no doubt his prognosis is better than many other forms of cancer - but it has been 4 and a half years since he was diagnosed, so shortly the published survival rates will mean very little.
We the public are not privy to his medical records, so all we can do is talk about odds - and the odds are rarely good when dealing with cancer. Although planning his funeral may be premature, talk of the future of the company is only fair, especially for a company that appears to owe so much of its success to just one man.
There's a difference between having to put a DVD into a dedicated gaming console (a minor inconvenience), and having a game install intrusive and potentially damaging software on your desktop machine, which you most likely also use for work, shopping, online banking etc. If a game breaks my console, I send it off to get it repaired and I don't get to shoot things for a bit; if a game breaks my PC, I have to spend the best part of a week rebuilding it and reinstalling all my other applications, while I struggle to get any work done.
Although I'd love it if every piece of software I bought had no DRM on it, I realise that's currently unrealistic, as software organisations feel the need to protect their products.
While the debate as to whether there is such a thing as good DRM will no doubt rattle on, Steam is a more sensible, practical form of DRM, and something that I can accept. It strikes a fairer balance between what they want and what I want - it lets me run games without having to put the CD in, and in return the game is locked to a specific account.
However, SecuROM is not fair in any way. It is potentially damaging, but provides no functionality other than to limit my machine's capabilities. I will not support software that uses SecuROM, and certainly not when it's already running on top of a perfectly adequate system such as Steam.
I already have it on the xbox 360, but was considering buying it again for the PC, for the mouse input, free multiplayer and modding capabilities, but this DRM's put me right off.
I'm not going to pirate it - I'm not that bothered - but they lost a sale. Guess the thing is, will they care? Even if the numbers are substantial, will they even notice? Or just put it down to piracy?
Slashdot Mirror
Using prostitutes is not illegal in the UK *yet*.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/men-targeted-for-buying-sex-with-slaves-1025039.html
But thank god we've got people like Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith running the country. Soon we'll have banned this sick filth, and the morally corrupt will be where they belong - behind bars!
Incidentally, we're about to build 5 new prisons. And to think some cynical people are pointing out that we're in a recession, but if someone who loses their job is sent to prison, they no longer show up on unemployment records. Nonsense! We're cleaning up the country!
You must be one of those hippies who keep on preaching about rights and liberty. Good job that soon we'll have a central database linked to your compulsory ID card and the GPS tracker in your car, at least then we'll be able to keep an eye on you and your subversive attitude.
But why would you, if you haven't got anything to hide? The only people who would do this must be terrorists, or users of prostitutes! We should lock you up to protect the children. What a shame we didn't get the 42 day detention-without-charge law passed - still, we can hold you for 28, it's better than nothing.
Never going to happen in the UK though - it's now a legal requirement that ISPs log all IPs. And all e-mail headers. And soon all web requests. And no doubt keyloggers shortly after that.
And a good thing too! Let's stop those damned terrorists, criminals, paedophiles and other sexual deviants! Living in the UK is awesome - just look how much our government cares about our well-being!
To be fair, it sounds like the majority of your time was spent configuring your connection, and once connected it was pretty fast.
I actually quite like iPlayer. Would get a lot more work done if it didn't exist though.
Thanks for that! Always good to see the loss of subtlety and sarcasm is not complete.
Clearly I have misunderestimated the complex skillset required to run the country in this day and age - and outed in such a public forum, my career is over before it has begun.
Still, you're more than welcome to a month in the Caribbean DC - the more the merrier. If you lack the necessary skills we can train you up, perhaps using a government-funded apprenticeship scheme. Think we're going to need a villa complex attached to the DC though, to house the workforce.
But:
a) that's google, not a tiny local/specialist ISP already operating under tight margins
b) you're out by a massive factor; google will only the URL you clicked; not the headers for your click, headers for every resource on the resulting page, and the headers for every page you open from there.
For example, google 'slashdot', then click through to the front page. Google stores 1 piece of data for that click. Your ISP stores 35 (at time of writing).
Thank you for raising those points. And I can't be earning less than the people I'm paying, so I'd better up my daily rate too. £3000/day sounds reasonable.
Might be worth building a data centre in the Caribbean too. For remote backups, to ensure data integrity. Just off the beach, facing the sea, to take full advantage of the sea breezes to reduce cooling costs. Will need to spend at least 6 months a year out there maintaining the systems, so may as well add a small apartment to the data centre, to save on hotel bills. 7 bedrooms should be enough for me and my consultants, who would need to rotate in on a 4-weekly basis.
I should stand at the next election, I've clearly got the right attitude for government.
No no, it's fine - "The UK government has agreed to reimburse ISPs for the cost of retaining the data."
I run a small ISP for 5 users. I estimate that I will need 27 new servers to handle the data, and that it will take me 42 days to implement, at my standard rate of £1000/day plus expenses.
It will be a big project, so I will need to employ all of my friends and every member of my family to consult on the work, for the full duration of the project, at their standard rate of £500/day.
Where do I send the bill? I'll ask Jacqui Smith, I've heard she knows the address of the expenses department.
I'd normally be the last person to defend Apple, but to be fair to them it appears the only time a customer can claim a refund is when the developer doesn't release in time, or releases a broken product. Which makes it sound a bit more reasonable.
Exactly what I thought. Saying "Oh, we didn't do it with criminal intent, so it's not a crime" is like saying "Sorry officer, but I wasn't doing 150 MPH past that school with criminal intent, so it's not a crime", or "I walked into a bank, pointed a gun at the cashiers and told them to empty their vault in to the back of my truck. But I didn't do it with criminal intent, so it's not a crime."
There's a reason security researchers don't disable botnets by hijacking them and using them on themselves - not just is it illegal, but it risks further damage to the machine - damage which they would be liable for.
Whoever did this at the BBC may have done it with good intentions, but that is no defence in the eyes of the law. They showed incredibly poor judgement, and there should definitely be a police investigation.
Only then you have to find the time to set up management and billing systems etc, and then offer on-going decent end-user support. It sounds like that's not related to the original business plan in any way, and so the staff skillset is likely to have a few gaps.
For a business that's low on money, it seems absurd to spend even more money to get into a market that's already saturated with well-established competitors who are better at what they do than you will be.
Frankly the only thing that makes sense is to sell the servers, and put the money in a bank account to help cover staff wages in the future.
I didn't think I'd like Bad Company, so didn't pick it up until I saw it on offer at 40% RRP, but I loved it. It's the first game in 20 years that I actually laughed out loud while I was playing - both due to the humour of the comedy script, and the maniacal joy of flattening a town rather than fight house to house. And it went on for ages - compared to a lot of the other games I've payed top price for (CoD WaW, even GoW and Rainbow 6), I thought it was excellent value for money.
Bad Company 2 is definitely a "to buy" for me.
Copying information? Piracy!
Mmm, that's a bit small. I'm thinking more of an A5 notebook; ~6"x8", 1" thick, 8" screen. More along the lines of a double-sized iphone with a slightly more powerful processor, and a slide-out keyboard you can touch-type on (like the Psion 5 had back in 1997). With a couple of SD slots. Running Ubuntu. Now that I'd buy.
I want a small tablet pc with a fold-out keyboard.
I'm waiting to see where netbooks go next; the natural progression is to add touch-screens and fold-away keyboards, and there were already some that had done this at CES this year.
If they can manage a similar price, I just can't see who would be prepared to spend $300 on a portable web browser when you could pay a bit more and get a full OS. Well, apart from the yes-men who worship Arrington just in the hope he'll give them a bit of publicity when they start up their twitter/pornotube mashup.
Running OS X as a guest would be perfect for a linux- or windows-based web developer who wants to test out how their client-side code runs on a mac.
Or for a mac software developer who wants to maintain multiple versions and configurations of OS X to test their software against.
Or for windows users who want to try out OS X on their existing expensive hardware, without having to lay waste to their existing installation, or fork out a sizeable chunk of money for more hardware.
Err, that should have been remission, not remittance. Been writing too many invoices.
It's actually very few forms of cancer that can be completely cured, which is why people working in medicine talk about cancer survival rates rather than the percentage cured. You're talking about the percentage of patients who survive the first 5 years after being diagnosed - after that, all bets are off.
It's quite heartbreaking to hear people talking about fighting their cancer and how it has been cured - when you have been treated successfully, your cancer goes into remittance, but chances are that it'll be back; usually the best you can hope for is that you've postponed the inevitable for a few more years. And when it does come back, it's often more aggressive and systemic than before; frequently to the point that all that can be done is treat the symptoms to ease the patient's passing.
Even though Jobs' form of cancer has an extremely good survival rate, he wasted time before getting treatment, increasing the opportunity for it to grow and metastasize. I'm not saying it will definitely come back, and no doubt his prognosis is better than many other forms of cancer - but it has been 4 and a half years since he was diagnosed, so shortly the published survival rates will mean very little.
We the public are not privy to his medical records, so all we can do is talk about odds - and the odds are rarely good when dealing with cancer. Although planning his funeral may be premature, talk of the future of the company is only fair, especially for a company that appears to owe so much of its success to just one man.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.
I thought I was the only one.
You're all ignoring the fact he said he didn't want to pay for remote storage. RTFQ.
Note I said "this DRM", not "all DRM".
There's a difference between having to put a DVD into a dedicated gaming console (a minor inconvenience), and having a game install intrusive and potentially damaging software on your desktop machine, which you most likely also use for work, shopping, online banking etc. If a game breaks my console, I send it off to get it repaired and I don't get to shoot things for a bit; if a game breaks my PC, I have to spend the best part of a week rebuilding it and reinstalling all my other applications, while I struggle to get any work done.
Although I'd love it if every piece of software I bought had no DRM on it, I realise that's currently unrealistic, as software organisations feel the need to protect their products.
While the debate as to whether there is such a thing as good DRM will no doubt rattle on, Steam is a more sensible, practical form of DRM, and something that I can accept. It strikes a fairer balance between what they want and what I want - it lets me run games without having to put the CD in, and in return the game is locked to a specific account.
However, SecuROM is not fair in any way. It is potentially damaging, but provides no functionality other than to limit my machine's capabilities. I will not support software that uses SecuROM, and certainly not when it's already running on top of a perfectly adequate system such as Steam.
I already have it on the xbox 360, but was considering buying it again for the PC, for the mouse input, free multiplayer and modding capabilities, but this DRM's put me right off.
I'm not going to pirate it - I'm not that bothered - but they lost a sale. Guess the thing is, will they care? Even if the numbers are substantial, will they even notice? Or just put it down to piracy?