The problem is the legal tool, in many ways. By using a lot of money, they're effectively robbing the general public of the Public Domain. Much of what we're not allowed to use for free today would have been fine in our grandparent's days, and due to some recent rulings in the US about the definition of 'Limited Term', the content industry has effectively stolen our culture, and now agrees only to sell it back to us in perpetuity. Unsurprisingly, as the media industry is more and more reneging on its own side of the deal (limited term in spirit and human perception before passing it to public availability), people no longer really care about holding up their side of the deal. In today's age of near instant distribution and fast market saturation, increasing the time that somone needs to 'make their living from a work' is completely backwards. It should take less time. And does. So, back to the old adage of "do unto others as you'd have them do to you". They steal from the public, and now whine when people do the same to them? As an aside, no I don't indulge in Copyright Infringement. But I can understand why it's becoming more common (for a multitude of reasons from freeloading to ethical).
Replies to this general thread: 1) We don't have a King, we have a Queen as the ruling Monarch. 2) We are effectively a democratic republic with full parliament. This is all (in theory) at the pleasure of Her Majesty (thus we still have a Monarchy). 3) Strangely, our Monarch is a level headed person, who is one of England's best diplomats, and makes far better decisions than our elected bunch of yobs. 4) The pressure to get this ban in place has been posed before by the Elected Representatives, not the Monarch, so the reference to this being like the old class system is humorous. 5) Conservatives? It's a Labour government that have been pushing this. Yes, the titular Socialists. So, well done "the people's party" for savaging the people to play nice to the commercial sector with lots of cash to trough in.
Nope, repeat until people realise that the corporates have been stealing from them (theft of the public domain), and come to the conclusion that Copyright Law is now no longer a deal that the people are willing to enter into, and thus just take back by rampant piracy. At which point copyright laws are completely useless and unenforceable as you've just criminalised most of your population, which is pretty much a yardstick of a bad and unworkable law.
Interesting, and very long term view on it. Which puts the *IAA very firmly in the role of "Robber Barons" (after all, things are heading the way of a corporate feudalism, with a thin veneer of democracy put over the top; vote for who you want, but the corporations will tell them what to do). The thing that gets me most about the current fight on Copyright is that people who copy are accused of theft. Really, that is just "Copyright Infringement", as it deprives nobody of the original. Now, the *IAA continually lobby for increases in copyright period. This takes away content from the public domain, which we all own. As this is actually depriving people of what should be theirs (the time period in which content should belong to them), this is actually theft. State sponsored, but the effect is the same. It deprives everybody of their right to the content in a reasonable period of time. For those sparky lawyers and executives who rub their hands at the word "limited" in copyright, I'll happily set them on a trip on a wonderful mountain road, and let them know it's ok; The brakes have been tuned to stop the car in a "limited distance".
To the copyright cartels perhaps, for granting them copyright far in excess of a lifetime. To me, it's a simple case of theft. I, along with everyone else, have ownership of the Public Domain. A significant part of this has been stolen (in the true sense; what should have been public is now still grasped firmly by corporations). What I find to be truly incomprehensible is that copyright used to be 14 years + 14 extension, in the days that it would take 20 years to have your work travel the world (and probably a good 5-10 years to cover your homeland). This was deemed sufficient to cover the author, and still ensure they had to work and produce new content. These days, it takes days to cover most of the world. And the term of protection required is life plus 70 years (on average, say about 110 years). Face it, the lobby groups have stolen 80+ years of open culture from us. I'd like it back please.
Personally, I think the domain is way too confusing.. You have Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel.. Now you have Wikipedia, Wikipedia Art...
When I first saw the way that one worked, I shook my head, and said "You're joking, right?".. Alas, the answer was no. And the reason that it had been designed as a centralised system (well, ok, there's a 'failover' data centre or two) is (according to the designers) that you'll never lose the main and the redundant connections at the same time. I seriously hope that they're paying attention to this at the moment. The severing of very few, carefully chosen fibres could quite simply deny a lot of UK hospitals access to their medical records. And if all come on board, then you could deny nearly all hospitals access to the medical records. This, as can be imagined, would be rather a bad thing...
From what I know about the technology world, you have hit the nail on the head!
This isn't because there's a flaw in the structure; it's a flaw in the implementation. From my experience of the world of commerce, most managers aren't really managers. They may have 'business qualifications' and a long period of rising through the ranks of a company, but it doesn't make them managers.
A true manager exists to use the available resources in the best way to tackle a problem, and to do logistics support for those below them, along with providing an accurate picture of the state of their control as far as it fits in the bigger picture to those above.
What all too commonly happens in management is that the 'manager' decides that something will be done. Gets the message from those below (who are specialists) that this isn't possible, or at least is very stupid. The 'manager' simply says "I'm the boss. Do it. Look at my 'business qualifications', they say I can do this.".
If they don't listen, then information doesn't flow, and if the information doesn't flow, the technology is likely to be incorrect (right answer, wrong question). In other words, they're not actually a 'manager', they're more a dictator.
I've worked in IT for a goodly time now (closing on for 20 years), and worked in environments where highly technical people have run the shop, ones where non techies run the show, and even run the show myself, and I personally think it all comes down to the management quality.
If someone in management listens, and is astute enough to be able to call deals, asks questions of the specialists and use that information to assemble the best resources to tackle the problem (even if it is the specialists who really dictate what the teams are), then things get done well irrespective of how well the manager understands the tech. If they can't provide the right kind of logistics, and work out the right way of putting the right people in the right place, then the tasks will fail.
It's not about how 'technical' the management chain is (I've seen some huge screwups because the management was highly technical, just didn't really understand the business well enough to co-ordinate the implementation of systems that actually did what the business needed, rather than doing what was technically a good system. Just practically wrong). It's how generally savvy the manager is. Sadly, there seem to be far fewer checks on how bright managers are than on their subordinates, which is where the true problems lie.
In this case, occam's razor says they wanted the game, but could not buy it... These stats were produced before the legitimate release date in all shops, so the purchase vs copied ratio is going to be very seriously skewed. Be interesting to see what they are a month or so post official release...
Abuse? What? Hello? Google aren't making any money from that neighbourhood.. The chap that organised the mob is nothing less than a new age luddite. Simply spouting off that "This is an affluent area, it'll only invite the burglars" is exactly what wasn't wanted. Now he'll have to yell at the Ordinace Survey maps to get the villiage off the map (as the map is showing the burglars exactly where this is), take down all the street signs, and hey, barricade the streets too. There are places very near me that make this 'affluent villiage' seem like a pauper's shanty town. And guess what. They didn't bat an eyelid about the Google shots (actually, they like having a good shot of the place they live, as long as it doesn't intrude into anything really private). If you're talking about respect, what about respecting someone's right to take a photograph of a public place? Or should all photographers now be denied the ability to take a snapshot? And by illegally assaulting someone to prevent this? That's the ultimate disrespect! The car didn't specifically go to a house to target it. The house was incidental (the same way a map doesn't specifically target your house and street; it's entirely incidental in the process). I've no idea how that came to be modified 'insightful', as it shows a complete lack of insight into the process that was underway, a complete lack of understanding of what respect is about, and a real lack of understanding of the way the world works. The guy who complained was, and most likely still is a complete jerk, who doesn't understand what the Google street view is about, what it's used for, and how likely it is to be used by thieves (hint: it won't be, as it doesn't show what's in the house, or all the side windows that may be open at the time, or the cycle of lights to say who's on holiday and who's in the house; it certainly doesn't show internal alarms). By putting the word 'affluent' into an article about an area, I'd hazard a guess that muggings, thefts and burglaries are now going to increase by an order of magnitude. What an idiot.
There are two real options. One is you attempt to use force, and then get gunned down in a blaze of stupidity by the military protecting the politicians, and be branded a terrorist yourself, and have your ideals associated with extremism, and thus debunked before sane debate can start. Secondly, you pen a note to the representatives of your government expressing, as eloquently as you can, exactly why you think it's a terrible idea what they're doing. Then you pen the media with the same. And if you have a few spare minutes, you pen something to their opponents, explaining why this is a massively bad idea, and, if they've not already spotted it, how they can get a lot of political mileage out of stating a few points in plan simple English to the general electorate. In short, I don't know if I've made a difference. However, I've tried the sanest route I can think of, and try to enlighten as many minds as I can. If I made no difference.. Then so be it. Not everybody's a hero, and not everybody gets to save the world. However, the more people that try, the greater the chance will be that one of the multitude actually manages to do it.
As a UK Citizen, yes I am, and yes I do write the letters to the MPs to complain.
The government we've had for the last 12 years, near enough, has overseen a huge erosion in the English Civil Liberties. Hell, it's architected them.
It's been expanding for as long as it's been in power, pushing politically correct agendas, and trying to tag and barcode the populace on the sly (but these days, it's not on the sly; they just tag on "to counter terrorism", and leave it at that).
And what really bugs me is that I lived through the 70s and 80s when the IRA were very active. Bombings weren't too uncommon, and we got through it as a populace. We were still free.
These days, there's been one real attack (and at the time, the UK was actually taking military action in the Middle East, as it is still doing), and the NuLabour overlords take that as affirmation that they can barcode, DNA tag, and record every single thing you do (attempts to monitor phone traffic, email, network, have mandatory trackers in your cars, they already have sensors in the waste bins you put your rubbish in to be collected by the bin men to record what you dispose of, CCTV that's used to spot people who take their kids to a school that they may not be in the official catchment area of, and other completely outrageous examples of totalitarianism that would have Orwell penning new chapters in 1984 over).
Actually, the register has a nice little snippet from our current overlords. I suspect they're ever so slightly slanting what was said, but hey, it says what a lot of us think anyway..
Oh, but knives don't kill people, people kill people.. With that in mind, the average government then goes on to hypothesize that the only way to reduce this is to tax people at about 99%. When nobody can actually afford to feed themselves properly, or do anything other than work themselves to exhaustion (if they're too poor to afford a home, so have to sleep at work when they pass out from exhaustion, so much the better), then knife crime will be abolished, and the world will be a better place. Honest.
Reselling games is recycling.. I usually just give 'em away to friends of mine who can't afford to get every game they want. They do the same to me sometimes. Just keeping the cycle going is a good thing. It's how the world's always worked, and humanity in general did ok out of it.
The current trend to force obsolescence/disposal is more than morally grey; it's pretty morally black.
In the case of TomTom, you mean the TomTom software application that starts up every time the device is connected? I see no problem with that. Also, there are windows drivers that let you mount EXT2 partitions as well.. So that could be included in the package for anything wanting to use EXT2.. I fail to see why everyone uses FAT, apart from that it's very simple to implement (giving a very small memory footprint requirement for embedded devices). If it gets to be an issue (patent threats, for example), then simple. Change your format to EXT2. Most, if not all embedded devices, such as cameras, GPS systems etc. have more than enough memory and processing power to handle EXT2.
For me, it comes down to the pricing. I like to be able to pass on the games I've enjoyed playing (but don't like so much I want to keep on my library shelves for later replay) to friends that don't have the disposable cash to keep buying games, but would like to. If I shell out £30+ for a game, I like the flexibility to do what the hell I want with it (in the strictures of legality). That includes passing it on, in the same way I do with books (which is how I keep my book shelves under control!). When the titles drop to £5-10, then it hits more the psychological "disposable" point. In that bracket, I don't care so much about being able to pass it on quite so much (it's still rather irritating, but the tradeoff for some reason becomes 'acceptable'. That 'moral grey area'). At that point, I'm tempted by the digital, highly tied and encumbered titles (as long as they don't screw with my local PC drivers). One of the recent things that really got my goat was the "Dawn of War 2" title that I grabbed as physical media, and STILL tied me into Steam (removing the ability to pass it on), and the continual nagging to get me to sign up to "Games for Windows Live", which I don't want to do, and won't to play a single player game (it nags EVERY TIME you load up and try to access your save game section, in single player mode!). The reason that the digital music segment of the market works so well, is that it is low cost. With difficulty these days obtaining singles (that kind of died out in the 90s), you were forced to obtain albums (at circa £12-15, later falling to about the £8-12 mark). With the advent of digital downloads at about £0.80 per track, you had the option to buy just what you wanted, at a price that marked the product as 'disposable' per item (though it may clock up to a collection that definitely isn't disposable in its entirity). The recent experiments on steam (cutting game price, and having sales increase by an order of magnitude or two) seem to bear this out.
No, most people in the UK do not want this, in any way, shape or form. The UK suffers from the "Silent Majority", where most people are just trying hard to get on with their lives, and make the world more livable. The voices that are always heard the loudest are from minority groups that scream very loud about their latest cause celebre, and this is actively encouraged by the current Government.. If you're in a majority group and speak loud, then you're tagged 'Oppressive' and derided; only if you've got some small group that can be exploited for political ends should you speak up.
You have to be joking if you think England is a right wing country! The media is soft Left (including the BBC, which is probably the largest media provider in the UK), the Government is Left, the general social setup is pretty left. Unless you stepped out of the 70s, missing the 80s, 90's and early 00's, there's pretty much no way you could miss the intensely left wing bias of the society at large. I don't get how you see the ID cards and so on being a symptom of the people preventing the government acting rationally? These are ALL government initiated "projects" that people in general have fought at every step of the way (yes, I signed up to No2ID, and in fact, it's more the "Left" leaning people that are happy with all the CCTV, databases and so on, as they fervently believe that as long as "it's for the greater good", it won't be abused. Hell, if it's being done by the Left, then by definition it can't be wrong as it's all "for the people").
Personally, I'd say the only thing keeping England sane at this point is the vast, silent majority that tries to keep the excesses of either Left or Right from overreacting to the latest political cause..
The problem being that you're paying $100 per month in perpetuity. Sometimes you get awarded capital to spend on things in a lump sum, whereas the ability to garner a revenue commitment could not necessarily be made. At the spend rates you mentioned, that's a basic server per year. Say the server is expected to last 5-8 years, that'll be an outlay of at least $6000-$9600+, with more to spend if you want to keep things running. That would cover the cost of a couple of generations worth of hardware, depending on how it was implemented. If there's no skill around (and definitely won't be), then by all means, the revenue based datacentre rental is a great move, but if there is skill around to perform a task, then you gain far greater flexibility by DIY.
Guess a fair bit of this comes down to whether it's possible to get at least $6k+ allocated to revenue spend over the next 5 years (at today's prices), of if it has to be capital.
Tour. There are many many musicians who make a pretty good living just by doing the live circuit. It's only in the last few decades that there's been a huge disconnect, and you get bands that expect to live by a few days in a recording studio.. Even with a bootleg, you just can't beat a live gig.
Loki, if I remember aright, were exclusively Linux in a time that Linux had less appeal than it does today. These guys are going cross platform, which removes the whole "all eggs, one basket" approach. They've made the money from the larger market, and they're now doing the right thing by opening up to the smaller ones. If more people took that extra last step, it could feasibly change the market. Half the problem at the moment is that the suits in the Big Games Makers are stating that nobody buys Linux games and it's not worth making any effort to port a game that way. IF WoG makes money (even if not huge amounts) compared to the cost of the port, it may act as a pointer to state that "not profitable" assumption is in fact a fallacy. In these increasingly cash strapped times, all profit is good money, even if it's a little.. Even if it's just above break even and keeps your guys working a little longer until the economies pick up again.
That kind of DRM overwrote system drivers for things like the CD ROM. This was the cause of much instability on the systems, and prevented other pieces of software (notably CD/DVD Writers) from working correctly in some cases. Also as they'd not gone through a laborious QA process, they also opened up security holes to the system that could be used to compromise it. Then there was the issue of backups. I'm a gamer from the 80s.. And back then, when I bought a game, if it was a good one, I'd back it up onto some other disk/tape. I'd then only use the backup copy to play from (leaving my pristine source in good condition). Now, you take a DVD, and software on it that says "This disk, and only this physical disk".. You can't back it up. When the physical media gets scratched or damaged in any way. Kiss goodbye to the software. Most of the software you buy is supposed to be 'Licensed'. In other words, you've paid to play one copy and only one copy. That is independant of the media you've bought. Unless it states otherwise, the should be a license in perpetuity. However, with the degredation of the DVD, your recourse is to buy a second license. Attempting to use any mechanism to ensure your right under license to use the software by any other mechanism brands you a pirate, or in the US, you fall foul of the DMCA.
DRM is bad. In an imperfect world like this, you expect a little 'bad' now and then. However, the stuff they're throwing at us these days in DRM is a LOT of bad.
Actually, it's not the cheapest route, as long as there's competition, or the prospect of competition. If you completely upset your client, and they have somewhere to go, then they'll go. If you upset enough people, then even more will go, as they'll anticipate that you'll do bad things and few will take their place (as you're known to be 'bad') from the available market of people looking for your product. Oh, and you'll also have to pay for the policing action that upsets your clients too.
Net effect, you have to pay for something that could feasibly vastly reduce your client base (net effect expensive and detrimental to your core business), rather than have another company go through the standard legal progression that applies to the rest of the world (net result, cheap to you, and a way to keep your client base feeling happier).
I see where you're coming from, but I don't see where 'cheap' comes from.
Ah, the wonderful "4 hour wait" in the Accident and Emergency departments.. Nice idea, in theory.. But the implementation is something along the lines of:
"Ok, this task that took you anywhere between 30 minutes and 6 to 8 hours, depending on how many people walk through the door (a random number, very roughly predictable in trends analysis, but often with huge discrepancies), will now definitely be done in 4 hours or less. No, we won't give you any more money to employ extra people to cope with the extra load. If fact, if you don't do as we say, we'll take some of your money away. Yes, I know you don't have the money to employ staff sufficient to do this, or have the beds available to admit enough people, but there you are. No, we don't know how you do it, that's your job. We've done ours in telling you to just do it".
Some places just honestly can't do that. It's not feasible.. I've seen some that now have ticketing systems, where you take a numbered ticket, and when they call the number, you get to go up and register at the desk. At that point, you're "officially waiting". Before that, you're just "in the queue to register to wait". Most places are better, but that's meant closing wards on some days, so there's an overflow to medical assessment, where you can throw the cases that aren't urgent but there aren't the staff to perform the basic treatment. The initial triage is a rush to get done. I know of doctors and nurses that have been pulled off their usual wards to help out in triage (so you end up with people not getting neuro/cardio treatment, so they can examine and patch up the drunkards who aim for a fight on friday and saturday nights).
The "Targets Culture" in the UK NHS is absolutely crippling it. And the biggest waste of money on it is working out a "legitimate workaround" so you can do what's possible with the staff you have, and not run headlong into getting fined huge amounts of money for breaching an arbitrary target that was not possible to meet in the first place.
Still, seems like he does have a touch of common sense!
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The problem is the legal tool, in many ways.
By using a lot of money, they're effectively robbing the general public of the Public Domain.
Much of what we're not allowed to use for free today would have been fine in our grandparent's days, and due to some recent rulings in the US about the definition of 'Limited Term', the content industry has effectively stolen our culture, and now agrees only to sell it back to us in perpetuity.
Unsurprisingly, as the media industry is more and more reneging on its own side of the deal (limited term in spirit and human perception before passing it to public availability), people no longer really care about holding up their side of the deal.
In today's age of near instant distribution and fast market saturation, increasing the time that somone needs to 'make their living from a work' is completely backwards. It should take less time. And does.
So, back to the old adage of "do unto others as you'd have them do to you". They steal from the public, and now whine when people do the same to them?
As an aside, no I don't indulge in Copyright Infringement. But I can understand why it's becoming more common (for a multitude of reasons from freeloading to ethical).
Replies to this general thread:
1) We don't have a King, we have a Queen as the ruling Monarch.
2) We are effectively a democratic republic with full parliament. This is all (in theory) at the pleasure of Her Majesty (thus we still have a Monarchy).
3) Strangely, our Monarch is a level headed person, who is one of England's best diplomats, and makes far better decisions than our elected bunch of yobs.
4) The pressure to get this ban in place has been posed before by the Elected Representatives, not the Monarch, so the reference to this being like the old class system is humorous.
5) Conservatives? It's a Labour government that have been pushing this. Yes, the titular Socialists. So, well done "the people's party" for savaging the people to play nice to the commercial sector with lots of cash to trough in.
Repeat until they have all the money.
Nope, repeat until people realise that the corporates have been stealing from them (theft of the public domain), and come to the conclusion that Copyright Law is now no longer a deal that the people are willing to enter into, and thus just take back by rampant piracy. At which point copyright laws are completely useless and unenforceable as you've just criminalised most of your population, which is pretty much a yardstick of a bad and unworkable law.
Interesting, and very long term view on it.
Which puts the *IAA very firmly in the role of "Robber Barons" (after all, things are heading the way of a corporate feudalism, with a thin veneer of democracy put over the top; vote for who you want, but the corporations will tell them what to do).
The thing that gets me most about the current fight on Copyright is that people who copy are accused of theft. Really, that is just "Copyright Infringement", as it deprives nobody of the original. Now, the *IAA continually lobby for increases in copyright period. This takes away content from the public domain, which we all own.
As this is actually depriving people of what should be theirs (the time period in which content should belong to them), this is actually theft. State sponsored, but the effect is the same. It deprives everybody of their right to the content in a reasonable period of time.
For those sparky lawyers and executives who rub their hands at the word "limited" in copyright, I'll happily set them on a trip on a wonderful mountain road, and let them know it's ok; The brakes have been tuned to stop the car in a "limited distance".
To the copyright cartels perhaps, for granting them copyright far in excess of a lifetime.
To me, it's a simple case of theft. I, along with everyone else, have ownership of the Public Domain. A significant part of this has been stolen (in the true sense; what should have been public is now still grasped firmly by corporations).
What I find to be truly incomprehensible is that copyright used to be 14 years + 14 extension, in the days that it would take 20 years to have your work travel the world (and probably a good 5-10 years to cover your homeland). This was deemed sufficient to cover the author, and still ensure they had to work and produce new content.
These days, it takes days to cover most of the world. And the term of protection required is life plus 70 years (on average, say about 110 years). Face it, the lobby groups have stolen 80+ years of open culture from us. I'd like it back please.
Personally, I think the domain is way too confusing..
You have Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel..
Now you have Wikipedia, Wikipedia Art...
What's the difference?
When I first saw the way that one worked, I shook my head, and said "You're joking, right?"..
Alas, the answer was no. And the reason that it had been designed as a centralised system (well, ok, there's a 'failover' data centre or two) is (according to the designers) that you'll never lose the main and the redundant connections at the same time.
I seriously hope that they're paying attention to this at the moment. The severing of very few, carefully chosen fibres could quite simply deny a lot of UK hospitals access to their medical records. And if all come on board, then you could deny nearly all hospitals access to the medical records.
This, as can be imagined, would be rather a bad thing...
From what I know about the technology world, you have hit the nail on the head!
This isn't because there's a flaw in the structure; it's a flaw in the implementation. From my experience of the world of commerce, most managers aren't really managers. They may have 'business qualifications' and a long period of rising through the ranks of a company, but it doesn't make them managers.
A true manager exists to use the available resources in the best way to tackle a problem, and to do logistics support for those below them, along with providing an accurate picture of the state of their control as far as it fits in the bigger picture to those above.
What all too commonly happens in management is that the 'manager' decides that something will be done. Gets the message from those below (who are specialists) that this isn't possible, or at least is very stupid. The 'manager' simply says "I'm the boss. Do it. Look at my 'business qualifications', they say I can do this.".
If they don't listen, then information doesn't flow, and if the information doesn't flow, the technology is likely to be incorrect (right answer, wrong question). In other words, they're not actually a 'manager', they're more a dictator.
I've worked in IT for a goodly time now (closing on for 20 years), and worked in environments where highly technical people have run the shop, ones where non techies run the show, and even run the show myself, and I personally think it all comes down to the management quality.
If someone in management listens, and is astute enough to be able to call deals, asks questions of the specialists and use that information to assemble the best resources to tackle the problem (even if it is the specialists who really dictate what the teams are), then things get done well irrespective of how well the manager understands the tech. If they can't provide the right kind of logistics, and work out the right way of putting the right people in the right place, then the tasks will fail.
It's not about how 'technical' the management chain is (I've seen some huge screwups because the management was highly technical, just didn't really understand the business well enough to co-ordinate the implementation of systems that actually did what the business needed, rather than doing what was technically a good system. Just practically wrong). It's how generally savvy the manager is. Sadly, there seem to be far fewer checks on how bright managers are than on their subordinates, which is where the true problems lie.
In this case, occam's razor says they wanted the game, but could not buy it... These stats were produced before the legitimate release date in all shops, so the purchase vs copied ratio is going to be very seriously skewed. Be interesting to see what they are a month or so post official release...
Abuse? What? Hello?
Google aren't making any money from that neighbourhood.. The chap that organised the mob is nothing less than a new age luddite.
Simply spouting off that "This is an affluent area, it'll only invite the burglars" is exactly what wasn't wanted.
Now he'll have to yell at the Ordinace Survey maps to get the villiage off the map (as the map is showing the burglars exactly where this is), take down all the street signs, and hey, barricade the streets too.
There are places very near me that make this 'affluent villiage' seem like a pauper's shanty town. And guess what. They didn't bat an eyelid about the Google shots (actually, they like having a good shot of the place they live, as long as it doesn't intrude into anything really private).
If you're talking about respect, what about respecting someone's right to take a photograph of a public place? Or should all photographers now be denied the ability to take a snapshot? And by illegally assaulting someone to prevent this? That's the ultimate disrespect!
The car didn't specifically go to a house to target it. The house was incidental (the same way a map doesn't specifically target your house and street; it's entirely incidental in the process).
I've no idea how that came to be modified 'insightful', as it shows a complete lack of insight into the process that was underway, a complete lack of understanding of what respect is about, and a real lack of understanding of the way the world works.
The guy who complained was, and most likely still is a complete jerk, who doesn't understand what the Google street view is about, what it's used for, and how likely it is to be used by thieves (hint: it won't be, as it doesn't show what's in the house, or all the side windows that may be open at the time, or the cycle of lights to say who's on holiday and who's in the house; it certainly doesn't show internal alarms).
By putting the word 'affluent' into an article about an area, I'd hazard a guess that muggings, thefts and burglaries are now going to increase by an order of magnitude. What an idiot.
Its a thing and it's a thing (off the top of my head). Totally different meaning
There are two real options.
One is you attempt to use force, and then get gunned down in a blaze of stupidity by the military protecting the politicians, and be branded a terrorist yourself, and have your ideals associated with extremism, and thus debunked before sane debate can start.
Secondly, you pen a note to the representatives of your government expressing, as eloquently as you can, exactly why you think it's a terrible idea what they're doing.
Then you pen the media with the same.
And if you have a few spare minutes, you pen something to their opponents, explaining why this is a massively bad idea, and, if they've not already spotted it, how they can get a lot of political mileage out of stating a few points in plan simple English to the general electorate.
In short, I don't know if I've made a difference. However, I've tried the sanest route I can think of, and try to enlighten as many minds as I can.
If I made no difference.. Then so be it. Not everybody's a hero, and not everybody gets to save the world. However, the more people that try, the greater the chance will be that one of the multitude actually manages to do it.
As a UK Citizen, yes I am, and yes I do write the letters to the MPs to complain. The government we've had for the last 12 years, near enough, has overseen a huge erosion in the English Civil Liberties. Hell, it's architected them. It's been expanding for as long as it's been in power, pushing politically correct agendas, and trying to tag and barcode the populace on the sly (but these days, it's not on the sly; they just tag on "to counter terrorism", and leave it at that). And what really bugs me is that I lived through the 70s and 80s when the IRA were very active. Bombings weren't too uncommon, and we got through it as a populace. We were still free.
These days, there's been one real attack (and at the time, the UK was actually taking military action in the Middle East, as it is still doing), and the NuLabour overlords take that as affirmation that they can barcode, DNA tag, and record every single thing you do (attempts to monitor phone traffic, email, network, have mandatory trackers in your cars, they already have sensors in the waste bins you put your rubbish in to be collected by the bin men to record what you dispose of, CCTV that's used to spot people who take their kids to a school that they may not be in the official catchment area of, and other completely outrageous examples of totalitarianism that would have Orwell penning new chapters in 1984 over).
Actually, the register has a nice little snippet from our current overlords. I suspect they're ever so slightly slanting what was said, but hey, it says what a lot of us think anyway..
Oh, but knives don't kill people, people kill people..
With that in mind, the average government then goes on to hypothesize that the only way to reduce this is to tax people at about 99%.
When nobody can actually afford to feed themselves properly, or do anything other than work themselves to exhaustion (if they're too poor to afford a home, so have to sleep at work when they pass out from exhaustion, so much the better), then knife crime will be abolished, and the world will be a better place.
Honest.
Reselling games is recycling.. I usually just give 'em away to friends of mine who can't afford to get every game they want. They do the same to me sometimes. Just keeping the cycle going is a good thing. It's how the world's always worked, and humanity in general did ok out of it. The current trend to force obsolescence/disposal is more than morally grey; it's pretty morally black.
It's already legal (and always was). Only the stopping of people doing this is on the rather grey moral ground.
In the case of TomTom, you mean the TomTom software application that starts up every time the device is connected?
I see no problem with that.
Also, there are windows drivers that let you mount EXT2 partitions as well.. So that could be included in the package for anything wanting to use EXT2..
I fail to see why everyone uses FAT, apart from that it's very simple to implement (giving a very small memory footprint requirement for embedded devices). If it gets to be an issue (patent threats, for example), then simple. Change your format to EXT2.
Most, if not all embedded devices, such as cameras, GPS systems etc. have more than enough memory and processing power to handle EXT2.
For me, it comes down to the pricing.
I like to be able to pass on the games I've enjoyed playing (but don't like so much I want to keep on my library shelves for later replay) to friends that don't have the disposable cash to keep buying games, but would like to.
If I shell out £30+ for a game, I like the flexibility to do what the hell I want with it (in the strictures of legality). That includes passing it on, in the same way I do with books (which is how I keep my book shelves under control!).
When the titles drop to £5-10, then it hits more the psychological "disposable" point. In that bracket, I don't care so much about being able to pass it on quite so much (it's still rather irritating, but the tradeoff for some reason becomes 'acceptable'. That 'moral grey area'). At that point, I'm tempted by the digital, highly tied and encumbered titles (as long as they don't screw with my local PC drivers).
One of the recent things that really got my goat was the "Dawn of War 2" title that I grabbed as physical media, and STILL tied me into Steam (removing the ability to pass it on), and the continual nagging to get me to sign up to "Games for Windows Live", which I don't want to do, and won't to play a single player game (it nags EVERY TIME you load up and try to access your save game section, in single player mode!).
The reason that the digital music segment of the market works so well, is that it is low cost. With difficulty these days obtaining singles (that kind of died out in the 90s), you were forced to obtain albums (at circa £12-15, later falling to about the £8-12 mark). With the advent of digital downloads at about £0.80 per track, you had the option to buy just what you wanted, at a price that marked the product as 'disposable' per item (though it may clock up to a collection that definitely isn't disposable in its entirity).
The recent experiments on steam (cutting game price, and having sales increase by an order of magnitude or two) seem to bear this out.
No, most people in the UK do not want this, in any way, shape or form.
The UK suffers from the "Silent Majority", where most people are just trying hard to get on with their lives, and make the world more livable. The voices that are always heard the loudest are from minority groups that scream very loud about their latest cause celebre, and this is actively encouraged by the current Government.. If you're in a majority group and speak loud, then you're tagged 'Oppressive' and derided; only if you've got some small group that can be exploited for political ends should you speak up.
You have to be joking if you think England is a right wing country! The media is soft Left (including the BBC, which is probably the largest media provider in the UK), the Government is Left, the general social setup is pretty left. Unless you stepped out of the 70s, missing the 80s, 90's and early 00's, there's pretty much no way you could miss the intensely left wing bias of the society at large.
I don't get how you see the ID cards and so on being a symptom of the people preventing the government acting rationally? These are ALL government initiated "projects" that people in general have fought at every step of the way (yes, I signed up to No2ID, and in fact, it's more the "Left" leaning people that are happy with all the CCTV, databases and so on, as they fervently believe that as long as "it's for the greater good", it won't be abused. Hell, if it's being done by the Left, then by definition it can't be wrong as it's all "for the people").
Personally, I'd say the only thing keeping England sane at this point is the vast, silent majority that tries to keep the excesses of either Left or Right from overreacting to the latest political cause..
The problem being that you're paying $100 per month in perpetuity. Sometimes you get awarded capital to spend on things in a lump sum, whereas the ability to garner a revenue commitment could not necessarily be made.
At the spend rates you mentioned, that's a basic server per year. Say the server is expected to last 5-8 years, that'll be an outlay of at least $6000-$9600+, with more to spend if you want to keep things running.
That would cover the cost of a couple of generations worth of hardware, depending on how it was implemented.
If there's no skill around (and definitely won't be), then by all means, the revenue based datacentre rental is a great move, but if there is skill around to perform a task, then you gain far greater flexibility by DIY.
Guess a fair bit of this comes down to whether it's possible to get at least $6k+ allocated to revenue spend over the next 5 years (at today's prices), of if it has to be capital.
Tour. There are many many musicians who make a pretty good living just by doing the live circuit.
It's only in the last few decades that there's been a huge disconnect, and you get bands that expect to live by a few days in a recording studio..
Even with a bootleg, you just can't beat a live gig.
Loki, if I remember aright, were exclusively Linux in a time that Linux had less appeal than it does today.
These guys are going cross platform, which removes the whole "all eggs, one basket" approach. They've made the money from the larger market, and they're now doing the right thing by opening up to the smaller ones. If more people took that extra last step, it could feasibly change the market.
Half the problem at the moment is that the suits in the Big Games Makers are stating that nobody buys Linux games and it's not worth making any effort to port a game that way. IF WoG makes money (even if not huge amounts) compared to the cost of the port, it may act as a pointer to state that "not profitable" assumption is in fact a fallacy.
In these increasingly cash strapped times, all profit is good money, even if it's a little.. Even if it's just above break even and keeps your guys working a little longer until the economies pick up again.
That kind of DRM overwrote system drivers for things like the CD ROM. This was the cause of much instability on the systems, and prevented other pieces of software (notably CD/DVD Writers) from working correctly in some cases.
Also as they'd not gone through a laborious QA process, they also opened up security holes to the system that could be used to compromise it.
Then there was the issue of backups. I'm a gamer from the 80s.. And back then, when I bought a game, if it was a good one, I'd back it up onto some other disk/tape. I'd then only use the backup copy to play from (leaving my pristine source in good condition).
Now, you take a DVD, and software on it that says "This disk, and only this physical disk".. You can't back it up. When the physical media gets scratched or damaged in any way. Kiss goodbye to the software.
Most of the software you buy is supposed to be 'Licensed'. In other words, you've paid to play one copy and only one copy. That is independant of the media you've bought. Unless it states otherwise, the should be a license in perpetuity.
However, with the degredation of the DVD, your recourse is to buy a second license. Attempting to use any mechanism to ensure your right under license to use the software by any other mechanism brands you a pirate, or in the US, you fall foul of the DMCA.
DRM is bad. In an imperfect world like this, you expect a little 'bad' now and then. However, the stuff they're throwing at us these days in DRM is a LOT of bad.
Actually, it's not the cheapest route, as long as there's competition, or the prospect of competition.
If you completely upset your client, and they have somewhere to go, then they'll go.
If you upset enough people, then even more will go, as they'll anticipate that you'll do bad things and few will take their place (as you're known to be 'bad') from the available market of people looking for your product.
Oh, and you'll also have to pay for the policing action that upsets your clients too.
Net effect, you have to pay for something that could feasibly vastly reduce your client base (net effect expensive and detrimental to your core business), rather than have another company go through the standard legal progression that applies to the rest of the world (net result, cheap to you, and a way to keep your client base feeling happier).
I see where you're coming from, but I don't see where 'cheap' comes from.
Ah, the wonderful "4 hour wait" in the Accident and Emergency departments..
Nice idea, in theory.. But the implementation is something along the lines of:
"Ok, this task that took you anywhere between 30 minutes and 6 to 8 hours, depending on how many people walk through the door (a random number, very roughly predictable in trends analysis, but often with huge discrepancies), will now definitely be done in 4 hours or less. No, we won't give you any more money to employ extra people to cope with the extra load. If fact, if you don't do as we say, we'll take some of your money away. Yes, I know you don't have the money to employ staff sufficient to do this, or have the beds available to admit enough people, but there you are. No, we don't know how you do it, that's your job. We've done ours in telling you to just do it".
Some places just honestly can't do that. It's not feasible.. I've seen some that now have ticketing systems, where you take a numbered ticket, and when they call the number, you get to go up and register at the desk. At that point, you're "officially waiting". Before that, you're just "in the queue to register to wait".
Most places are better, but that's meant closing wards on some days, so there's an overflow to medical assessment, where you can throw the cases that aren't urgent but there aren't the staff to perform the basic treatment. The initial triage is a rush to get done. I know of doctors and nurses that have been pulled off their usual wards to help out in triage (so you end up with people not getting neuro/cardio treatment, so they can examine and patch up the drunkards who aim for a fight on friday and saturday nights).
The "Targets Culture" in the UK NHS is absolutely crippling it. And the biggest waste of money on it is working out a "legitimate workaround" so you can do what's possible with the staff you have, and not run headlong into getting fined huge amounts of money for breaching an arbitrary target that was not possible to meet in the first place.
Still, seems like he does have a touch of common sense!