- Many pensioners to do their shopping online since removing funding to schemes where people would fetch shopping for them
- The internet has become essential for homework in some schools
- Tax returns are due to be filled in online only
- Home workers depend on the internet, many local goverment departments have been forced to cut costs of having so many facilities and hence force people to work from home this includes social workers, educational phsycologists, goverment IT workers and so forth.
Thanks to pbhj for the latter two in a reply to my post in response to the other article.
You're spot on, the internet isn't just a toy anymore, it's essential to many people's lives both current and future and in all the cases above, these situations where the internet is essential to some people have been created by the goverment. On one hand they're creating a situation whereby the internet is outright essential to people just as telephones, water, gas, electricity are and on the other they're suggesting it's something that should be cut off at the whim of the recording industry with absolutely no burden of proof.
Essentially, the potential damage a law like this could do to the day to day lives of the British people as well as the economy as a whole could be massive when you take into account that over 10% of the UK's population engage in file sharing and all for what? So mostly foreign (US) corporations can get their money from an out of date business model that they refuse to change to keep up with the times? Some pensioners unable to get their shopping, kids unable to compete in their education, people forced to quit or lose their jobs. Now we have the argument of course that people deserve what they get for file sharing from some, but that ignores the fact that people can lose internet if they're not even guilty as a result of bad investigation by the recording industry or hijacked wireless for example, hence why the ISPs want protection from such scenarios in the first place. Is it really worth it Gordon/David?
I've been through 2 360s and each time MS have turned it round into a positive experience for me, as the first time they told me to make a new free silver account and they'd credit the points to that account so I could rebuy and they did this within 3 days which is fine, whilst some may argue the console shouldn't die in the first place I got a there and then swap out from the retailer, furthermore I was given £30 worth of MS points for my troubles.
The second time it happened I got one of the new Falcon chipset 360s with HDMI which is a great thing for me in the first place as my monitor wont do 1080p over analog VGA so I finally got the option to run at 1080p with this new console. They also now have a set procedure for porting ownership of content to a new console and have done for a fair while whereby you merely submit your new console ID and a scan/fax of the replacement receipt from the retailer and they'll port the content ownership to the new system. Again, I was given a free 2100 points, not as much as last time but still something.
So the second time I got a sweet new V2 console and both times I got nice fresh new controllers and headsets which is a bonus as those type of things get a bit worn and tatty after a while anyway.
Should the system fail? Well of course not, but to suggest the process with dealing with faulty consoles is a big deal I think is a bit silly, having known 2 other people with RROD'd 360s who have also had similar experiences to me in that it's been quick and easy. Of course people have bad support experiences, personally I'd never purchase from Dell ever again as the result of such an experience but with bad support experiences on the net it's very easy to bend the truth a little, as I say what strikes me as odd is my last console was dealt with about 3 months ago and when I called support they were well aware of the issue and also the set procedure I mentioned they now have for dealing with DRM moves (rather than the previous aformentioned method of granting you points to rebuy on a new account to re-tie the games to a new console).
Besides, I'm not sure why this is news, the V2 consoles have been out ages now so the RROD whine is rather obsolete and I'm rather suprised to see last years whine making headlines again, aren't we supposed to be laughing at MS about how HD-DVD failed or something instead now?
Don't get me wrong, no DRM at all would be the best solution but let's face it, how many people would just copy games onto memory cards and pass round to their mates? Hell, you can even get memory card/360 hard drive to USB adapters so likely people would just grab them off bittorrent! I'm against DRM on a PC because it's a failed concept but on a console I see it as part of the package and in a way, one of the main tools consoles have for defeating cheating that is a major issue in online PC gaming.
I've got my old sidewinder pro force feedback stick still and I'd love to play some decent flightsim or spacesim with it again.
I tried looking for a decent "fun" jet combat flightsim again the other day and the choice is next to nothing nowadays whereas years ago there years to be tons - the Jayne's series, TFX/EF2000 etc. and prior to that my favourite of all time, Dogfight on the Atari ST.
Outside of flightsims mechwarrior worked well as did the X-Wing and Tie-Fighter series.
The real problem is lack of games, Microsoft Flight Sim seems to dominate, but I wasn't keen on it, I wanted a quick and dirty action flight sim!
Ironically, with Over G, Ace Combat 6, Blazing Angels I've found the 360 a better place for flight sims nowadays but I'd much rather be dogfighting with a joystick than a pair of thumbsticks!
Personally I'd love it if they called the UK one of the top copyright violators in the world. Unfortunately our goverment seems to think right now that copyright is more important than even the people that employ them - the general public.
But even in Afghanistan they got close to him at Tora Bora, and there's a lot of info from the CIA and so forth suggesting they know his rough whereabouts.
From what I can tell the only things stopping them grabbing him are either that he's too well dug in to grab with support from Pakistani intelligence or that he's too deep in Pakistani territory to grab.
From what I understand, you can tell where nuclear materials came from using what's called the isotopic signature (although I don't know how feasible this is once they've been detonated), but I'd imagine they'd have a good idea of where the materials came from regardless and as such I'd imagine place of origin could become quite a target too. The only nations that may not become a target in that eventuality would be those with strike back capabilities like Britain, Russia and France, but certainly Pakistan, India, North Korea or even Iran would be fair game I'd presume. That of course ignores "The Sum of All Fears" scenario whereby the materials were US produced to start with!
I'm not convinced nuclear terrorism really is a threat, a nuclear strike on US soil would result in a nuclear response by the US and even people as nutty as Osama know that whilst they've been able to hide from conventional forces they can't hide from a nuclear retaliation.
Russia is heading further and further towards it's cold war state with it's assassination of Litvinenko on British soil, it's incursion into Japanese airspace, it's buzzing of US aircraft carrier in the pacific, silencing of opposition parties in election, threat to aim nuclear weapons at Europe and the Ukraine and so on and so forth. As such I'd argue that it's not unreasonable to keep up military equipment capable of dealing with a conventional enemy like Russia as the way things are going, Russia seems quite content with the idea of pushing for a new cold war.
Looking at the more serious problems with this proposed law, let me pose the following (true) scenarios to you.
I live in the UK as does my grandma. She used to have support from government funded community workers for her shopping, because she isn't mobile they used to collect a shopping list from her weekly and would then go out and get her shopping and bring it back for her. Unfortunately she lives 200 miles away so it's not something we're able to help her with from here. The goverment reduced funding to this scheme such that they no longer support it for her, and when she asked what she was supposed to do she was told they will give her computing tutorials and help with providing internet access for her so she could shop online and have the supermarkets deliver to her, this wasn't as good as the previous scheme but it works in a similar way now she has the hang of it.
So what happens if someone hijacks the wireless that came with her internet access that the goverment recommended and uses it for P2P getting her cut off? Is she supposed to just starve then or something? Another good example is homework, are kids without internet access meant to be at a disadvantage by being unable to perform decent research? I work in IT in the education sector and have recently encountered goverment proposals to get local-goverment supported IT kit and internet access to disadvantaged families so there appears to be a fair bit of evidence the goverment wants every kid to have net access when it comes to education.
The problem is the goverment here in the UK have recently done things that suggest the internet is an essential service like electricity, gas, water, telephone which is great because it can indeed serve as such an important service. After they've gone to such great lengths to recognise it's importance how can they possibly turn around now and suggest it's something that can just be taken away when kids futures and pensioners lives quite literally depend on it?
I'm not aware of any other crime in existence that would take away a service that is essential to both our children's future and our pensioners well being as a result of goverment proposed schemes.
I have e-mailed both Labour and the Conservatives about their anti-p2p stance.
Unfortunately they simply responded to tell me that p2p destroys the creative industries, is responsible for terrorism and organised crime and that it must be stopped at all costs.
Of course, this ignored every legitimate point I put across to them and when I replied back asking if they could instead answer my points and how they can justify their decision when my points are taken into account I simply didn't get a response.
Writing to people with counter-points whose minds are already made up seems rather futile no matter how many people tell them they're wrong. Of course, I wont be voting for either of these parties but still I'm convinced stronger action such as protests, civil disobedience of the laws and so forth are required. Hopefully some people will take it as far as hijacking wireless of prominent people such as MPs to get them cut off so they can experience the problems first hand.
It's not just the current Labour goverment. The Conservatives have made similar suggestions in the past also and are backing these current proposals.
I mention this because people need to be made aware that voting Conservatives in will change nothing, if we're going to solve this problem through elections people need to be looking for a party that really will make a difference - the Lib Dems or even the Greens!
That's around 10% of the UK's population - a pretty large amount!
I think that number is even an underestimate as I recall seeing a statement that over 6million people in the UK download movies via peer to peer back in 2004, if that statement was true back then I'd imagine that figure has increased, but is also even large again when you factor in peer to peer sharing of music and other content as well as just movies.
May I suggest you take a look at a map of the world?
Egypt doesn't have any coast that borders the persian gulf. It borders only the red sea and the Mediteranean, the cable cuts relating to Egypt were in the Mediteranean to the North.
If you don't even know the absolute basics of the region like that then how can you possibly believe you have enough knowledge to be convinced there is some kind of conspiracy going on?
But they are also prone to breaking from bad weather such as storms. So it would seem there's any number of possible causes for a cable to break, ship anchors are only one such reason.
According to this very PDF in shallow waters less than 100m less than 10% of cable breaks are the result of natural activity, whilst at depths over 1000m the faults are more often caused by natural hazards. It seems most faults are the result of anchoring and fishing - 70% worth but of course 30% of faults are still caused by natural hazards.
It's reasonable in this case that the two areas effected were hit with two separate incidents, one could reasonably be a trawler for example causing two cuts in the Persian gulf whilst some natural event could've caused the breaks near Egypt or vice versa.
When you get all the facts it really doesn't seem so unreasonable that this really is just coincidence and not some big conspiracy theory. I'll admit I was beginning to feel it was a pretty big coincidence, but only when I didn't have all the information and only when I was also being fed false information (i.e. the lies about Iran being cut off from the net). Now I've got more information I think it's pretty reasonable to believe there's no conspiracy here, particularly as there isn't a conspiracy theory regarding the situation yet that doesn't actually make sense when you look at the overall picture yet.
"Be that as it may, we have four cuts in the same vicinity affected the same countries, in the same week and there were no ships in the area. Ships are, of course, the major cause for accidental cable cuts."
Same vicinity? You mean two in the Mediteranean and two in the Persian Gulf? There were two sets of two cuts. Each set was quite far apart with the cuts in each set being very close to each other.
Do you have any evidence ships are the major cause of accidental cable cuts? I'm not saying you're wrong, but most people didn't realise cables get cut on average every 3 days so it seems a bit early to decide what the major cause is of it happening so frequently unless you're an expert on submarine cables? Could say tectonic or other geological changes not also be a factor?
It seems unlikely, I was under the impression they're not at the point yet where they make a profit on the existing systems, I'd imagine they'd at very least want to keep the current price with the cheaper hardware to recoup some of the cash lost on existing systems.
Introducing cheaper hardware whilst also lowering cost just means they'll continue to make a loss per console which doesn't seem too great an idea. Sony realised pretty quickly the main barrier to people buying the console was it's initial price and had to price drop pretty quickly, this only served to increase the loss they were making on the console initially with the hope of increasing userbase and eventually decreasing costs. I'm not sure whether they've managed to recoup the cash lost from the early days of the console even yet, that's something I imagine is their first priority before engaging in a price war with the other consoles as it's not as if the console is doing too badly right now even at it's current relatively high price.
I could be wrong though, the situation may have changed but I don't recall seeing anything saying otherwise yet and a quick search in Google doesn't seem to bring anything up suggesting that they have started making a profit from the console just yet.
Don't get me wrong, a price drop would be great especially by the point it'd happen the system would also have enough good games to make the console worth buying but I certainly wouldn't count on a cut just yet.
Perhaps I should start using the preview button! That was one of the most horribly nonsensical posts I've ever written.
The first paragraph should've said:
When enough standard torrent sites like this are shut down and enough people are affected people will instead start using encrypted, anonymous services which aren't so easy to shut down.
I'm sure there is plenty of mistakes in the rest of it but that initial sentence just outright didn't even make sense so I will now go and hang my head in shame.
When enough standard torrents like this are shut down and enough people are affected people will instead start using encrypted, anonymous services which aren't so hard to shut down.
Yes P2P as we know it now will likely end up being dealt a heavy blow, but then people will move on to something else. This simply isn't a war that can be won without cutting access to entire types of data stream at the ISP simultaneously destroying lots of valid business applications at the same time.
It's futile to try and fight this without also damaging citizens rights, legitimate business applications and combined hence the entire economy of that particular country.
There is indeed a lot of money being poured into fighting piracy, and enough for governments to accept the bribes and so forth right now however there is a tipping point at which the damage to citizens rights and the economy will make a particular goverment so unpopular they wont be able to take bribes from anyone. The cost of fighting the war on piracy will be so much higher than actually winning it would ever be so no, you're wrong, it's simply not a fight that can ever be win. It's very similar to Vietnam and Iraq - winning battles is easy with their resources, but winning the war is impossible without somehow winning over the hearts and minds of the people, that's something you can't ever achieve whilst simultaneously suing them and eroding their rights.
The recording/movie industries have shown they're incapable of changing their ways, as such they can never win this war.
Yeah, I was primarily agreeing with your sentiment on the issue;)
Another point that struck me is how would they extract the data from some monitoring device? If it uses any kind of wireless technology then surely other craft could intercept it and even pinpoint it's whereabouts using any signals it may transmit. If it is passed down the cable then is that really any less obvious than just snooping it at the cable ends?
The only real non-obvious way would be to visit the device physically or near enough if it just transmits short range signals but as I mentioned previously I'd imagine if there was any truth in navy snooping the first thing on some Russian sub commanders agenda would like be "go see what's down there" right now.
I don't see how the existing conspiracy theory of "They cut the cable so they could install monitoring equipment" possibly makes sense.
Here's the scenario: 1) Cable is cut 2) Monitoring equipment is attached to cable 3) Cable company comes along, rejoins cable, notices odd monitoring device attached
Am I missing something here, is this not a fundamental flaw to the plan the fact that any kind of monitoring equipment on a cut would be immediately noticed? Or is it the US navy that will be fixing the cable also? That doesn't seem particularly likely.
I'm sure there's far less blatantly obvious ways to monitor data travelling along the cables as you say and any equipment on the cable would appear rather prone to be found. I mean, let's face it the Russians and Chinese also have subs and equipment perfectly capable of checking the cable so unless we're going to add them into the plot and make a mega conspiracy theory, monitoring being the reason for the cuts makes next to no sense at all.
If there is a conspiracy theory here then disruption has to be the goal, monitoring just simply doesn't make sense for the reasons above. I think it's more likely to be that some asshole has figured out he can chop cables with his anchor and has also managed to find where the cables are exactly if it's not simply sheer coincidence related to some change in shipping lanes and anchoring areas.
Police need proof of a crime before they can request an exemption to acquire data that would otherwise be protected under the data protection act.
Not that it matters because both Labour and Conservatives are in the pockets of the music industry so they'll probably just ignore this ruling and I can't see any other party getting in.
Venezuela is hardly known for it's love of privacy and freedom either, whilst it may hate the US it's also arguably even more hostile towards privacy and human rights.
It might be good for holding material that infringes US copyrights as that is something that harms the US but for privacy, you need a nation that actually cares about privacy.
A few European nations seem the best bet right now like Sweden and Switzerland. Alternatively, look for rather backwards nations that have internet access but whose goverments haven't quite got the hang of the internet just yet and hence haven't written laws that allow law enforcement and so forth to go round doing whatever the hell they want on it. I'm not sure what the Eastern European nations are like but they may be a good bet, perhaps try countries like Latvia? Slovakia? Romania? Some small island nations like Antigua may be pretty decent also.
Unfortunately, just because a nation is hostile to the US it doesn't mean it's automatically friendly towards privacy and human rights.
"An undecided buyer would have to be pretty brave to bet on HD-DVD at this point."
Why is that? You can get an HD-DVD player now with 7 films for the same price as 7 bluray films without a player here in the UK. The Bluray player costs an extra £250 on top so that's a pretty big difference for now. Even if HD-DVDs stop being produced you've still got 7 high def films and a nice upscaling DVD player.
Even if HD-DVD is dead, the current deal on Toshiba's low end player is hard to argue against because you don't actually lose anything by going for the offer, but you gain arguably the cheapest entry option into true HD content.
It's one of those things you can buy if you're interested in high def and win or lose, it doesn't really matter. Even when the system eventually dies if HD-DVD is gone then you'll have still got a nice life out of it and the free DVDs will be cheap enough to re-buy in another format for a couple of £ or so if you liked them enough. It'll probably also be enough to keep you going until Bluray drives become more reasonably priced even if you rent movies.
Essentially the current cost of Toshiba's HD-DVD drive and the free HD-DVDs can act as a no-risk bridge for those wanting high-def content but not being willing to buy a Bluray drive right now.
I think you're right it is a worrying obsession, I really like cactus and succulents too but imagine my excitement when as a cactus and carnivorous plant lover I found out that Euphorbia, a type of cactus-like succulent that can ooze a toxic sap like substance that can cause human skin to blister. It's like the next best thing to a carnivorous cactus!
Just search for "Nepenthes mouse" on Google images, plenty of times have mice fallen victim to other types of nepenthes in people's greenhouses, that should give you a rough idea!
But how resilient to changing trends is the spec? On one hand if these tags are set in stone they risk eventually becoming obsolete, if they're more dynamic it's obviously quite a nightmare to support and I'm not sure it'd then even really be classed as a standard so presumably the first option is being taken?
Also in terms of other accessibility issues, is anything being done to improve that for multimedia content? Is there any support for the video or audio tag having an alt attribute to point to timestamped subtitle plain text files for example?
Slashdot Mirror
The follow scenarios exist:
- Many pensioners to do their shopping online since removing funding to schemes where people would fetch shopping for them
- The internet has become essential for homework in some schools
- Tax returns are due to be filled in online only
- Home workers depend on the internet, many local goverment departments have been forced to cut costs of having so many facilities and hence force people to work from home this includes social workers, educational phsycologists, goverment IT workers and so forth.
Thanks to pbhj for the latter two in a reply to my post in response to the other article.
You're spot on, the internet isn't just a toy anymore, it's essential to many people's lives both current and future and in all the cases above, these situations where the internet is essential to some people have been created by the goverment. On one hand they're creating a situation whereby the internet is outright essential to people just as telephones, water, gas, electricity are and on the other they're suggesting it's something that should be cut off at the whim of the recording industry with absolutely no burden of proof.
Essentially, the potential damage a law like this could do to the day to day lives of the British people as well as the economy as a whole could be massive when you take into account that over 10% of the UK's population engage in file sharing and all for what? So mostly foreign (US) corporations can get their money from an out of date business model that they refuse to change to keep up with the times? Some pensioners unable to get their shopping, kids unable to compete in their education, people forced to quit or lose their jobs. Now we have the argument of course that people deserve what they get for file sharing from some, but that ignores the fact that people can lose internet if they're not even guilty as a result of bad investigation by the recording industry or hijacked wireless for example, hence why the ISPs want protection from such scenarios in the first place. Is it really worth it Gordon/David?
I've been through 2 360s and each time MS have turned it round into a positive experience for me, as the first time they told me to make a new free silver account and they'd credit the points to that account so I could rebuy and they did this within 3 days which is fine, whilst some may argue the console shouldn't die in the first place I got a there and then swap out from the retailer, furthermore I was given £30 worth of MS points for my troubles.
The second time it happened I got one of the new Falcon chipset 360s with HDMI which is a great thing for me in the first place as my monitor wont do 1080p over analog VGA so I finally got the option to run at 1080p with this new console. They also now have a set procedure for porting ownership of content to a new console and have done for a fair while whereby you merely submit your new console ID and a scan/fax of the replacement receipt from the retailer and they'll port the content ownership to the new system. Again, I was given a free 2100 points, not as much as last time but still something.
So the second time I got a sweet new V2 console and both times I got nice fresh new controllers and headsets which is a bonus as those type of things get a bit worn and tatty after a while anyway.
Should the system fail? Well of course not, but to suggest the process with dealing with faulty consoles is a big deal I think is a bit silly, having known 2 other people with RROD'd 360s who have also had similar experiences to me in that it's been quick and easy. Of course people have bad support experiences, personally I'd never purchase from Dell ever again as the result of such an experience but with bad support experiences on the net it's very easy to bend the truth a little, as I say what strikes me as odd is my last console was dealt with about 3 months ago and when I called support they were well aware of the issue and also the set procedure I mentioned they now have for dealing with DRM moves (rather than the previous aformentioned method of granting you points to rebuy on a new account to re-tie the games to a new console).
Besides, I'm not sure why this is news, the V2 consoles have been out ages now so the RROD whine is rather obsolete and I'm rather suprised to see last years whine making headlines again, aren't we supposed to be laughing at MS about how HD-DVD failed or something instead now?
Don't get me wrong, no DRM at all would be the best solution but let's face it, how many people would just copy games onto memory cards and pass round to their mates? Hell, you can even get memory card/360 hard drive to USB adapters so likely people would just grab them off bittorrent! I'm against DRM on a PC because it's a failed concept but on a console I see it as part of the package and in a way, one of the main tools consoles have for defeating cheating that is a major issue in online PC gaming.
I've got my old sidewinder pro force feedback stick still and I'd love to play some decent flightsim or spacesim with it again.
I tried looking for a decent "fun" jet combat flightsim again the other day and the choice is next to nothing nowadays whereas years ago there years to be tons - the Jayne's series, TFX/EF2000 etc. and prior to that my favourite of all time, Dogfight on the Atari ST.
Outside of flightsims mechwarrior worked well as did the X-Wing and Tie-Fighter series.
The real problem is lack of games, Microsoft Flight Sim seems to dominate, but I wasn't keen on it, I wanted a quick and dirty action flight sim!
Ironically, with Over G, Ace Combat 6, Blazing Angels I've found the 360 a better place for flight sims nowadays but I'd much rather be dogfighting with a joystick than a pair of thumbsticks!
Isn't this something Canada should be proud of?
Personally I'd love it if they called the UK one of the top copyright violators in the world. Unfortunately our goverment seems to think right now that copyright is more important than even the people that employ them - the general public.
But even in Afghanistan they got close to him at Tora Bora, and there's a lot of info from the CIA and so forth suggesting they know his rough whereabouts.
From what I can tell the only things stopping them grabbing him are either that he's too well dug in to grab with support from Pakistani intelligence or that he's too deep in Pakistani territory to grab.
From what I understand, you can tell where nuclear materials came from using what's called the isotopic signature (although I don't know how feasible this is once they've been detonated), but I'd imagine they'd have a good idea of where the materials came from regardless and as such I'd imagine place of origin could become quite a target too. The only nations that may not become a target in that eventuality would be those with strike back capabilities like Britain, Russia and France, but certainly Pakistan, India, North Korea or even Iran would be fair game I'd presume. That of course ignores "The Sum of All Fears" scenario whereby the materials were US produced to start with!
I'm not convinced nuclear terrorism really is a threat, a nuclear strike on US soil would result in a nuclear response by the US and even people as nutty as Osama know that whilst they've been able to hide from conventional forces they can't hide from a nuclear retaliation.
Russia is heading further and further towards it's cold war state with it's assassination of Litvinenko on British soil, it's incursion into Japanese airspace, it's buzzing of US aircraft carrier in the pacific, silencing of opposition parties in election, threat to aim nuclear weapons at Europe and the Ukraine and so on and so forth. As such I'd argue that it's not unreasonable to keep up military equipment capable of dealing with a conventional enemy like Russia as the way things are going, Russia seems quite content with the idea of pushing for a new cold war.
Looking at the more serious problems with this proposed law, let me pose the following (true) scenarios to you.
I live in the UK as does my grandma. She used to have support from government funded community workers for her shopping, because she isn't mobile they used to collect a shopping list from her weekly and would then go out and get her shopping and bring it back for her. Unfortunately she lives 200 miles away so it's not something we're able to help her with from here. The goverment reduced funding to this scheme such that they no longer support it for her, and when she asked what she was supposed to do she was told they will give her computing tutorials and help with providing internet access for her so she could shop online and have the supermarkets deliver to her, this wasn't as good as the previous scheme but it works in a similar way now she has the hang of it.
So what happens if someone hijacks the wireless that came with her internet access that the goverment recommended and uses it for P2P getting her cut off? Is she supposed to just starve then or something? Another good example is homework, are kids without internet access meant to be at a disadvantage by being unable to perform decent research? I work in IT in the education sector and have recently encountered goverment proposals to get local-goverment supported IT kit and internet access to disadvantaged families so there appears to be a fair bit of evidence the goverment wants every kid to have net access when it comes to education.
The problem is the goverment here in the UK have recently done things that suggest the internet is an essential service like electricity, gas, water, telephone which is great because it can indeed serve as such an important service. After they've gone to such great lengths to recognise it's importance how can they possibly turn around now and suggest it's something that can just be taken away when kids futures and pensioners lives quite literally depend on it?
I'm not aware of any other crime in existence that would take away a service that is essential to both our children's future and our pensioners well being as a result of goverment proposed schemes.
I have e-mailed both Labour and the Conservatives about their anti-p2p stance.
Unfortunately they simply responded to tell me that p2p destroys the creative industries, is responsible for terrorism and organised crime and that it must be stopped at all costs.
Of course, this ignored every legitimate point I put across to them and when I replied back asking if they could instead answer my points and how they can justify their decision when my points are taken into account I simply didn't get a response.
Writing to people with counter-points whose minds are already made up seems rather futile no matter how many people tell them they're wrong. Of course, I wont be voting for either of these parties but still I'm convinced stronger action such as protests, civil disobedience of the laws and so forth are required. Hopefully some people will take it as far as hijacking wireless of prominent people such as MPs to get them cut off so they can experience the problems first hand.
It's not just the current Labour goverment. The Conservatives have made similar suggestions in the past also and are backing these current proposals.
I mention this because people need to be made aware that voting Conservatives in will change nothing, if we're going to solve this problem through elections people need to be looking for a party that really will make a difference - the Lib Dems or even the Greens!
That's around 10% of the UK's population - a pretty large amount!
I think that number is even an underestimate as I recall seeing a statement that over 6million people in the UK download movies via peer to peer back in 2004, if that statement was true back then I'd imagine that figure has increased, but is also even large again when you factor in peer to peer sharing of music and other content as well as just movies.
I wouldn't pay anyone much to be able to make "Lord of teh Rings" either, "Lord of the Rings" however I may pay a fair bit more for :p
May I suggest you take a look at a map of the world?
Egypt doesn't have any coast that borders the persian gulf. It borders only the red sea and the Mediteranean, the cable cuts relating to Egypt were in the Mediteranean to the North.
If you don't even know the absolute basics of the region like that then how can you possibly believe you have enough knowledge to be convinced there is some kind of conspiracy going on?
It would appear even shark and fish bites can break the cables:
http://www.iscpc.org/publications/About_Cables_in_PDF_Format.pdf
But they are also prone to breaking from bad weather such as storms. So it would seem there's any number of possible causes for a cable to break, ship anchors are only one such reason.
According to this very PDF in shallow waters less than 100m less than 10% of cable breaks are the result of natural activity, whilst at depths over 1000m the faults are more often caused by natural hazards. It seems most faults are the result of anchoring and fishing - 70% worth but of course 30% of faults are still caused by natural hazards.
It's reasonable in this case that the two areas effected were hit with two separate incidents, one could reasonably be a trawler for example causing two cuts in the Persian gulf whilst some natural event could've caused the breaks near Egypt or vice versa.
When you get all the facts it really doesn't seem so unreasonable that this really is just coincidence and not some big conspiracy theory. I'll admit I was beginning to feel it was a pretty big coincidence, but only when I didn't have all the information and only when I was also being fed false information (i.e. the lies about Iran being cut off from the net). Now I've got more information I think it's pretty reasonable to believe there's no conspiracy here, particularly as there isn't a conspiracy theory regarding the situation yet that doesn't actually make sense when you look at the overall picture yet.
"Be that as it may, we have four cuts in the same vicinity affected the same countries, in the same week and there were no ships in the area. Ships are, of course, the major cause for accidental cable cuts."
Same vicinity? You mean two in the Mediteranean and two in the Persian Gulf? There were two sets of two cuts. Each set was quite far apart with the cuts in each set being very close to each other.
Do you have any evidence ships are the major cause of accidental cable cuts? I'm not saying you're wrong, but most people didn't realise cables get cut on average every 3 days so it seems a bit early to decide what the major cause is of it happening so frequently unless you're an expert on submarine cables? Could say tectonic or other geological changes not also be a factor?
It seems unlikely, I was under the impression they're not at the point yet where they make a profit on the existing systems, I'd imagine they'd at very least want to keep the current price with the cheaper hardware to recoup some of the cash lost on existing systems.
Introducing cheaper hardware whilst also lowering cost just means they'll continue to make a loss per console which doesn't seem too great an idea. Sony realised pretty quickly the main barrier to people buying the console was it's initial price and had to price drop pretty quickly, this only served to increase the loss they were making on the console initially with the hope of increasing userbase and eventually decreasing costs. I'm not sure whether they've managed to recoup the cash lost from the early days of the console even yet, that's something I imagine is their first priority before engaging in a price war with the other consoles as it's not as if the console is doing too badly right now even at it's current relatively high price.
I could be wrong though, the situation may have changed but I don't recall seeing anything saying otherwise yet and a quick search in Google doesn't seem to bring anything up suggesting that they have started making a profit from the console just yet.
Don't get me wrong, a price drop would be great especially by the point it'd happen the system would also have enough good games to make the console worth buying but I certainly wouldn't count on a cut just yet.
Perhaps I should start using the preview button! That was one of the most horribly nonsensical posts I've ever written.
The first paragraph should've said:
When enough standard torrent sites like this are shut down and enough people are affected people will instead start using encrypted, anonymous services which aren't so easy to shut down.
I'm sure there is plenty of mistakes in the rest of it but that initial sentence just outright didn't even make sense so I will now go and hang my head in shame.
When enough standard torrents like this are shut down and enough people are affected people will instead start using encrypted, anonymous services which aren't so hard to shut down.
Yes P2P as we know it now will likely end up being dealt a heavy blow, but then people will move on to something else. This simply isn't a war that can be won without cutting access to entire types of data stream at the ISP simultaneously destroying lots of valid business applications at the same time.
It's futile to try and fight this without also damaging citizens rights, legitimate business applications and combined hence the entire economy of that particular country.
There is indeed a lot of money being poured into fighting piracy, and enough for governments to accept the bribes and so forth right now however there is a tipping point at which the damage to citizens rights and the economy will make a particular goverment so unpopular they wont be able to take bribes from anyone. The cost of fighting the war on piracy will be so much higher than actually winning it would ever be so no, you're wrong, it's simply not a fight that can ever be win. It's very similar to Vietnam and Iraq - winning battles is easy with their resources, but winning the war is impossible without somehow winning over the hearts and minds of the people, that's something you can't ever achieve whilst simultaneously suing them and eroding their rights.
The recording/movie industries have shown they're incapable of changing their ways, as such they can never win this war.
Yeah, I was primarily agreeing with your sentiment on the issue ;)
Another point that struck me is how would they extract the data from some monitoring device? If it uses any kind of wireless technology then surely other craft could intercept it and even pinpoint it's whereabouts using any signals it may transmit. If it is passed down the cable then is that really any less obvious than just snooping it at the cable ends?
The only real non-obvious way would be to visit the device physically or near enough if it just transmits short range signals but as I mentioned previously I'd imagine if there was any truth in navy snooping the first thing on some Russian sub commanders agenda would like be "go see what's down there" right now.
I don't see how the existing conspiracy theory of "They cut the cable so they could install monitoring equipment" possibly makes sense.
Here's the scenario:
1) Cable is cut
2) Monitoring equipment is attached to cable
3) Cable company comes along, rejoins cable, notices odd monitoring device attached
Am I missing something here, is this not a fundamental flaw to the plan the fact that any kind of monitoring equipment on a cut would be immediately noticed? Or is it the US navy that will be fixing the cable also? That doesn't seem particularly likely.
I'm sure there's far less blatantly obvious ways to monitor data travelling along the cables as you say and any equipment on the cable would appear rather prone to be found. I mean, let's face it the Russians and Chinese also have subs and equipment perfectly capable of checking the cable so unless we're going to add them into the plot and make a mega conspiracy theory, monitoring being the reason for the cuts makes next to no sense at all.
If there is a conspiracy theory here then disruption has to be the goal, monitoring just simply doesn't make sense for the reasons above. I think it's more likely to be that some asshole has figured out he can chop cables with his anchor and has also managed to find where the cables are exactly if it's not simply sheer coincidence related to some change in shipping lanes and anchoring areas.
Police need proof of a crime before they can request an exemption to acquire data that would otherwise be protected under the data protection act.
Not that it matters because both Labour and Conservatives are in the pockets of the music industry so they'll probably just ignore this ruling and I can't see any other party getting in.
Venezuela is hardly known for it's love of privacy and freedom either, whilst it may hate the US it's also arguably even more hostile towards privacy and human rights.
It might be good for holding material that infringes US copyrights as that is something that harms the US but for privacy, you need a nation that actually cares about privacy.
A few European nations seem the best bet right now like Sweden and Switzerland. Alternatively, look for rather backwards nations that have internet access but whose goverments haven't quite got the hang of the internet just yet and hence haven't written laws that allow law enforcement and so forth to go round doing whatever the hell they want on it. I'm not sure what the Eastern European nations are like but they may be a good bet, perhaps try countries like Latvia? Slovakia? Romania? Some small island nations like Antigua may be pretty decent also.
Unfortunately, just because a nation is hostile to the US it doesn't mean it's automatically friendly towards privacy and human rights.
"An undecided buyer would have to be pretty brave to bet on HD-DVD at this point."
Why is that? You can get an HD-DVD player now with 7 films for the same price as 7 bluray films without a player here in the UK. The Bluray player costs an extra £250 on top so that's a pretty big difference for now. Even if HD-DVDs stop being produced you've still got 7 high def films and a nice upscaling DVD player.
Even if HD-DVD is dead, the current deal on Toshiba's low end player is hard to argue against because you don't actually lose anything by going for the offer, but you gain arguably the cheapest entry option into true HD content.
It's one of those things you can buy if you're interested in high def and win or lose, it doesn't really matter. Even when the system eventually dies if HD-DVD is gone then you'll have still got a nice life out of it and the free DVDs will be cheap enough to re-buy in another format for a couple of £ or so if you liked them enough. It'll probably also be enough to keep you going until Bluray drives become more reasonably priced even if you rent movies.
Essentially the current cost of Toshiba's HD-DVD drive and the free HD-DVDs can act as a no-risk bridge for those wanting high-def content but not being willing to buy a Bluray drive right now.
I think you're right it is a worrying obsession, I really like cactus and succulents too but imagine my excitement when as a cactus and carnivorous plant lover I found out that Euphorbia, a type of cactus-like succulent that can ooze a toxic sap like substance that can cause human skin to blister. It's like the next best thing to a carnivorous cactus!
Just search for "Nepenthes mouse" on Google images, plenty of times have mice fallen victim to other types of nepenthes in people's greenhouses, that should give you a rough idea!
But how resilient to changing trends is the spec? On one hand if these tags are set in stone they risk eventually becoming obsolete, if they're more dynamic it's obviously quite a nightmare to support and I'm not sure it'd then even really be classed as a standard so presumably the first option is being taken?
Also in terms of other accessibility issues, is anything being done to improve that for multimedia content? Is there any support for the video or audio tag having an alt attribute to point to timestamped subtitle plain text files for example?