Unfortunately, something the **AA et al learned long ago is that FUD works. Hence why kids sharing music with their friends are "pirates", equated with what is still considered today to be one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit in international law. And if you believe the rubbish they put on the front of DVDs, these same pirates are also involved in all other kinds of international crimes, from selling drugs to trafficking in slaves.
It's thanks to FUD like this that we even HAVE DRM. So, if the only way to make Joe Public sit up and notice is to create similarly base analogies, then so be it. I still think that we're being moderate in comparison, after all DRM does take control of your content and can arbitrarily lock you out, so it has more in common with a virus than downloading data does with plundering vessels under force of arms on the open seas...
I think they're going to recreate the "magic" in London. I heard them asking for people under 5'7 with hairy feet to come along for hobbit auditions on the radio yesterday. 5'7 is a pretty big hobbit though, isn't it?
As far as I know, Google have never had a problem with de-listing any site that didn't want their content searching/caching (and I seem to remember back in the early days before search really took off, a lot of sites requested the spider didn't crawl them as it could kill their bandwidth pretty quickly).
Copyright owners do of course have the right to ask that their content not be listed (and failure to use a robots.txt shouldn't imply they're giving up that right), but I'd like to know if these sites just asked Google to delist them or if they immediately went running to the courts.
The newspaper have made it clear they do not want their content cached by Google. Now, you may or may not be aware of this, but it's not just Google news that does caching, the main search does it too. So, how is Google meant to link to the news site without caching any data? This is less an example of Google exercising some monopolistic strong arm tactics and more an example of how a news site getting greedy and not understanding the web can come back to bite them in the behind. It's less evil, and more ironic.
Or you could argue that a newspaper, an item meant to held spread information, should be a little less churlish about Google helping to spread information, and that giving them a little reality slap might be no bad thing at all...
You're assuming that these "safety requirements" are about making vehicles more safe to drive, and not about restricting the import market of European cars by making them more expensive in order to subsidise a flagging domestic auto-industry... (Okay, I don't know that this is what's happening, call it a paranoid hunch...)
Not to mention that I tend to buy about £40 worth of petrol all at once from the same place, so it's quick and easy for me to choose the cheapest of the three or four stations I pass on my drive home. If I was in the habit of buying £40 of shampoo at once, I'd probably shop around for the cheapest deal too. Am I going to sit and write a shopping list of items, go around half a dozen stores, mark off prices, then go around the stores again buying the cheapest item from each? Not happening.
On the other hand, it means we could potentially drown them under so much noise that they remove this silly restriction. I wouldn't exactly trust a music exec to have his finger on the pulse of the interweb.
I guess for the same reason that the **AA's want this stuff to begin with. Consumer awareness is at a point where people expect their players to last years. I've owned two video players in 20 years. I have two DVD players, but I only bought one (the other was a prize so I stuck it in the spare bedroom). I'd be surprised and a little disappointed if I had to replace my DVD player before DVD's started to be replaced by the next big media fad. If the manufacturers could find a way to ensure that I bought a new player every four or five years instead of every ten to twenty years, I'm sure they'd be very happy little bunnies...
Wiggum: Oh, sorry folks, gee, I really hate to spoil this little love-in, but Mr. Malloy broke the law. And when you break the law, you gotta go to jail.
Quimby: Uh, that reminds me... er... here's your monthly kickback.
Wiggum: You just - you couldn't have picked a worse time.
I can't tell if you're joking or not... The "video" tends to be made at a central location, rather than in the camera itself. So blowing it up doesn't stop the video being made, but it does mean you're out yet another camera and the cost of getting some guy to go fit a new one (in an area where he knows he's also got a good chance of being shot/blown up).
What loss of privacy? All of these cameras are in public places, so what privacy are they eliminating?
You still have some right to privacy even in public places. If a police officer told you to remove your clothes in public, you'd consider that a privacy invasion I'm sure. Likewise, even though you can be seen by anyone in public, knowing that your every movement is being tracked could be considered an invasion of your privacy...
What makes you think this would preserve your life? At best it will help to indentify your killer. As someone who also lives in Coventry, I wouldn't use the underpasses no matter what, even if it means it takes me longer to get where I want to go. Far safer to stay in well lit, well populated areas than to take the risk that some random crackhead knows (or cares) that he's being filmed.
To be fair, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. Verbally abusing someone is only a technical assault under the law if they had reason to believe that they were under threat of physical violence. I also believe (though it's been a while since I studied this, so I may be wrong), that there is a requirement that the threat be of imminent violence. So someone saying they're going to break into your house tonight and kill you in your sleep wouldn't be assault, someone threatening to hit you right now - IF you had reason to believe they meant it - could be assault.
For the most part, you are totally correct, people should be thick skinned enough to take some verbal abuse. There are obvious exceptions, if you're old and incapable of defending yourself then it's easier to prove a case of abuse against a gang of youngsters shouting you down outside your house. Likewise a lone, single woman walking home in the dark may find it easier to prove assault by a gang of youths threatening to rape her. These are common sense exceptions and I think most people would agree they're necessary to protect people who are more vulnerable or find themselves in a vulnerable position.
Having said that, we do seem to have an atmosphere of fear at the moment. Gangs of youths loiter about the streets abusing people for no good reason, and the press plays on the fact that citizens are powerless to do anything and the police are ineffective. Maybe if a few more people spoke up and put these youths in their place things would change, but who wants to be the first to try when you're pretty much singling yourself out for a spate of verbal abuse and vandalism against your property?
It seems like this would be a reason to drop region-locking. After all, it must cost them to implement this and to repackage every game to a specific market. If they could just pop a UK power lead into a US/Japan console and ship it to the UK that would save them money, and sure they might lose some revenue on initial games sales if they were priced cheaper, but they'd probably gain sales that they're currently losing to the pre-owned game market (if I could buy a brand new game for £30 instead of £50, I'd be less tempted to pick up a used game for £25 and run the risk of scratched disks, damaged packing, etc). But then, IANAE (economist), I guess they know what they're doing, but it never helps to publicly announce just how much you intend to screw your customers...
It's a pretty big issue if you play a lot of import games. It's now illegal over here in the UK to sell mod chips (not sure if it's illegal to buy them from overseas and fit them yourself, but that's probably beyond most users' technical ability anyway). Importing is probably a bigger issue in Europe than the US, since the releases usually go Japan > US > Europe, we're often left waiting a hell of a long time for our gaming fixes (along with the knowledge that we're only waiting so they can charge us 50% more than the rest of the world pays).
It wouldn't have been surprising if they'd said nothing. The fact that they promised region-free and are now withdrawing the statement will bring about a lot of negative publicity that they could have saved themselves by not lying to the public in the first place. It also casts doubt on their other statements.
Nobody is berating Sony/MS for region locking, but then they never claimed that they'd do anything else. Nintendo, on the other hand, seemed to be doing pretty well in the media wars, and now they've gone and shot themselves in the foot. How many tech blogs/news sites today will be complaining about Nintendo? Quite a few I imagine. Will the bad publicity end up costing them more than having a non-locked system? Well that's their judgment call and I guess they've made it...
99/100 people don't know what region coding is. Of the 1/100 people that do know, 1/10 care, and 1/10 of those care enough to not buy a region coded player.
In that case, 99/100 people aren't trying to buy imported games anyway - so why do these companies feel the need to go to the additional expense of implementing region locking and piss off the people who do care? Even if your figures are correct and only 1/10 of the people who care will refuse to buy the console because of this, there is a strong chance that the other 9/10 will attempt to get their console chipped to play games from any region (if they care and they can fix it, it stands to reason they will try).
It's a small step from there to just using pirated games, then they tell their friends how to get free games and in the long run it costs them a lot more. Why not just be region free, save the expense of implementing locking and keep that final 1% happy?
Not advisable. This happened to some guy I worked with (to be honest, he probably deserved it), the outcome was he filed an assault complaint against the whistleblower. I left the company before I heard the outcome, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn the courts went against the whistler.
I doubt this very much unless they're selling something very expensive and on a big commission. I've worked in a couple of call centres (admittedly one was tech support, though we were still supposed to generate leads from the calls).
The technical one had a maximum average call time of just under ten minutes (we were expected to handle 40 calls per day). Bearing in mind some of these calls were pretty involved and one or two calls might take an hour each but you're still meant to hit your target of 40. The other call centre was pure sales, working for most of the big banks, and the average call time there was expected to be 3 minutes.
These things generally have a very quick turnaround, no way would I have been allowed to wait on the line listening to dead air for ten minutes, let alone an hour or 7. We'd have been called up on that in a shot. Not only would you know that you could have made a couple of sales in that 10 minute wait, you'd also have it very much in your mind that it's screwing your call stats for the day and you're going to get talked down to by your line manager/fired (if it happens too often).
The problem with walking off and leaving them hanging is that, in theory it hurts the company because they're paying for a connection and sometimes time for doing nothing, but the person in between the company and you is thinking about their own back and won't let it happen. I can only imagine someone would hang on this long if a) they're new in the job and have yet to be bawled out over call times; or b) like I said, they're selling something very expensive with a huge commission and you've virtually promised them a sale ("I'm definitely going to buy, let me just go find my credit card."), but even then it's hard to imagine they'd hang on more than 10 minutes. More likely they'd move onto the next call, and because you didn't properly terminate the call you'll go back in the call queue and likely receive another call within a week (if you'd said you weren't interested you'd probably go back in the database to call in 6 months, I can't comment on the do not call list as we don't have that over here, just the telephone preference service which you have to manually add yourself to but is meant to automatically cover all companies).
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, something the **AA et al learned long ago is that FUD works. Hence why kids sharing music with their friends are "pirates", equated with what is still considered today to be one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit in international law. And if you believe the rubbish they put on the front of DVDs, these same pirates are also involved in all other kinds of international crimes, from selling drugs to trafficking in slaves.
It's thanks to FUD like this that we even HAVE DRM. So, if the only way to make Joe Public sit up and notice is to create similarly base analogies, then so be it. I still think that we're being moderate in comparison, after all DRM does take control of your content and can arbitrarily lock you out, so it has more in common with a virus than downloading data does with plundering vessels under force of arms on the open seas...
I think they're going to recreate the "magic" in London. I heard them asking for people under 5'7 with hairy feet to come along for hobbit auditions on the radio yesterday. 5'7 is a pretty big hobbit though, isn't it?
Or maybe he really has been polishing this for 30 years and has just been giving the ravenous fanatics their fix in the meantime. Well, we can hope...
As far as I know, Google have never had a problem with de-listing any site that didn't want their content searching/caching (and I seem to remember back in the early days before search really took off, a lot of sites requested the spider didn't crawl them as it could kill their bandwidth pretty quickly).
Copyright owners do of course have the right to ask that their content not be listed (and failure to use a robots.txt shouldn't imply they're giving up that right), but I'd like to know if these sites just asked Google to delist them or if they immediately went running to the courts.
The newspaper have made it clear they do not want their content cached by Google. Now, you may or may not be aware of this, but it's not just Google news that does caching, the main search does it too. So, how is Google meant to link to the news site without caching any data? This is less an example of Google exercising some monopolistic strong arm tactics and more an example of how a news site getting greedy and not understanding the web can come back to bite them in the behind. It's less evil, and more ironic.
Hercule Poirot. "Ah, ze little grey cells, Hastings..."
Or you could argue that a newspaper, an item meant to held spread information, should be a little less churlish about Google helping to spread information, and that giving them a little reality slap might be no bad thing at all...
You're assuming that these "safety requirements" are about making vehicles more safe to drive, and not about restricting the import market of European cars by making them more expensive in order to subsidise a flagging domestic auto-industry... (Okay, I don't know that this is what's happening, call it a paranoid hunch...)
Not to mention that I tend to buy about £40 worth of petrol all at once from the same place, so it's quick and easy for me to choose the cheapest of the three or four stations I pass on my drive home. If I was in the habit of buying £40 of shampoo at once, I'd probably shop around for the cheapest deal too. Am I going to sit and write a shopping list of items, go around half a dozen stores, mark off prices, then go around the stores again buying the cheapest item from each? Not happening.
And if so, how long until someone writes a little app to automagically skip the first 30 seconds of a video by default :D
On the other hand, it means we could potentially drown them under so much noise that they remove this silly restriction. I wouldn't exactly trust a music exec to have his finger on the pulse of the interweb.
Universal have taken a different approach, they feel that if no-one hears the music then no-one will pirate it.
Which is a refreshing change from making content which is so bad that nobody wants to pirate it.
I guess for the same reason that the **AA's want this stuff to begin with. Consumer awareness is at a point where people expect their players to last years. I've owned two video players in 20 years. I have two DVD players, but I only bought one (the other was a prize so I stuck it in the spare bedroom). I'd be surprised and a little disappointed if I had to replace my DVD player before DVD's started to be replaced by the next big media fad. If the manufacturers could find a way to ensure that I bought a new player every four or five years instead of every ten to twenty years, I'm sure they'd be very happy little bunnies...
It makes me wonder what the criteria for a successful test might be? A reduction in crime and anti-social behaviour... or a lack of public outcry...
Wiggum: Oh, sorry folks, gee, I really hate to spoil this little love-in, but Mr. Malloy broke the law. And when you break the law, you gotta go to jail.
Quimby: Uh, that reminds me... er... here's your monthly kickback.
Wiggum: You just - you couldn't have picked a worse time.
I can't tell if you're joking or not... The "video" tends to be made at a central location, rather than in the camera itself. So blowing it up doesn't stop the video being made, but it does mean you're out yet another camera and the cost of getting some guy to go fit a new one (in an area where he knows he's also got a good chance of being shot/blown up).
What loss of privacy? All of these cameras are in public places, so what privacy are they eliminating?
You still have some right to privacy even in public places. If a police officer told you to remove your clothes in public, you'd consider that a privacy invasion I'm sure. Likewise, even though you can be seen by anyone in public, knowing that your every movement is being tracked could be considered an invasion of your privacy...
What makes you think this would preserve your life? At best it will help to indentify your killer. As someone who also lives in Coventry, I wouldn't use the underpasses no matter what, even if it means it takes me longer to get where I want to go. Far safer to stay in well lit, well populated areas than to take the risk that some random crackhead knows (or cares) that he's being filmed.
To be fair, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. Verbally abusing someone is only a technical assault under the law if they had reason to believe that they were under threat of physical violence. I also believe (though it's been a while since I studied this, so I may be wrong), that there is a requirement that the threat be of imminent violence. So someone saying they're going to break into your house tonight and kill you in your sleep wouldn't be assault, someone threatening to hit you right now - IF you had reason to believe they meant it - could be assault.
For the most part, you are totally correct, people should be thick skinned enough to take some verbal abuse. There are obvious exceptions, if you're old and incapable of defending yourself then it's easier to prove a case of abuse against a gang of youngsters shouting you down outside your house. Likewise a lone, single woman walking home in the dark may find it easier to prove assault by a gang of youths threatening to rape her. These are common sense exceptions and I think most people would agree they're necessary to protect people who are more vulnerable or find themselves in a vulnerable position.
Having said that, we do seem to have an atmosphere of fear at the moment. Gangs of youths loiter about the streets abusing people for no good reason, and the press plays on the fact that citizens are powerless to do anything and the police are ineffective. Maybe if a few more people spoke up and put these youths in their place things would change, but who wants to be the first to try when you're pretty much singling yourself out for a spate of verbal abuse and vandalism against your property?
It seems like this would be a reason to drop region-locking. After all, it must cost them to implement this and to repackage every game to a specific market. If they could just pop a UK power lead into a US/Japan console and ship it to the UK that would save them money, and sure they might lose some revenue on initial games sales if they were priced cheaper, but they'd probably gain sales that they're currently losing to the pre-owned game market (if I could buy a brand new game for £30 instead of £50, I'd be less tempted to pick up a used game for £25 and run the risk of scratched disks, damaged packing, etc). But then, IANAE (economist), I guess they know what they're doing, but it never helps to publicly announce just how much you intend to screw your customers...
It's a pretty big issue if you play a lot of import games. It's now illegal over here in the UK to sell mod chips (not sure if it's illegal to buy them from overseas and fit them yourself, but that's probably beyond most users' technical ability anyway). Importing is probably a bigger issue in Europe than the US, since the releases usually go Japan > US > Europe, we're often left waiting a hell of a long time for our gaming fixes (along with the knowledge that we're only waiting so they can charge us 50% more than the rest of the world pays).
It wouldn't have been surprising if they'd said nothing. The fact that they promised region-free and are now withdrawing the statement will bring about a lot of negative publicity that they could have saved themselves by not lying to the public in the first place. It also casts doubt on their other statements.
Nobody is berating Sony/MS for region locking, but then they never claimed that they'd do anything else. Nintendo, on the other hand, seemed to be doing pretty well in the media wars, and now they've gone and shot themselves in the foot. How many tech blogs/news sites today will be complaining about Nintendo? Quite a few I imagine. Will the bad publicity end up costing them more than having a non-locked system? Well that's their judgment call and I guess they've made it...
In that case, 99/100 people aren't trying to buy imported games anyway - so why do these companies feel the need to go to the additional expense of implementing region locking and piss off the people who do care? Even if your figures are correct and only 1/10 of the people who care will refuse to buy the console because of this, there is a strong chance that the other 9/10 will attempt to get their console chipped to play games from any region (if they care and they can fix it, it stands to reason they will try).
It's a small step from there to just using pirated games, then they tell their friends how to get free games and in the long run it costs them a lot more. Why not just be region free, save the expense of implementing locking and keep that final 1% happy?
Not advisable. This happened to some guy I worked with (to be honest, he probably deserved it), the outcome was he filed an assault complaint against the whistleblower. I left the company before I heard the outcome, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn the courts went against the whistler.
I doubt this very much unless they're selling something very expensive and on a big commission. I've worked in a couple of call centres (admittedly one was tech support, though we were still supposed to generate leads from the calls).
The technical one had a maximum average call time of just under ten minutes (we were expected to handle 40 calls per day). Bearing in mind some of these calls were pretty involved and one or two calls might take an hour each but you're still meant to hit your target of 40. The other call centre was pure sales, working for most of the big banks, and the average call time there was expected to be 3 minutes.
These things generally have a very quick turnaround, no way would I have been allowed to wait on the line listening to dead air for ten minutes, let alone an hour or 7. We'd have been called up on that in a shot. Not only would you know that you could have made a couple of sales in that 10 minute wait, you'd also have it very much in your mind that it's screwing your call stats for the day and you're going to get talked down to by your line manager/fired (if it happens too often).
The problem with walking off and leaving them hanging is that, in theory it hurts the company because they're paying for a connection and sometimes time for doing nothing, but the person in between the company and you is thinking about their own back and won't let it happen. I can only imagine someone would hang on this long if a) they're new in the job and have yet to be bawled out over call times; or b) like I said, they're selling something very expensive with a huge commission and you've virtually promised them a sale ("I'm definitely going to buy, let me just go find my credit card."), but even then it's hard to imagine they'd hang on more than 10 minutes. More likely they'd move onto the next call, and because you didn't properly terminate the call you'll go back in the call queue and likely receive another call within a week (if you'd said you weren't interested you'd probably go back in the database to call in 6 months, I can't comment on the do not call list as we don't have that over here, just the telephone preference service which you have to manually add yourself to but is meant to automatically cover all companies).