all polls be required to disclose the exact question wording ?
Well, in the interests of scientific rigour, how about they disclose all the polls they also did that gave results they didn't like.
Kinda like getting a drug company to publish ALL trials, not just the successful ones ?
At the end of the day, it maybe makes more sense to just educate people to interpret what stuff like this means (and does not mean).
If only every kid left school understanding enough basic stats and human nature to
- draw conclusions from numbers
- know when a survey is obviously biased
- understand the concept of a group with a agenda
There's a famous catfood commercial in the UK.
"8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas" goes the strapline.
I spent my early childhood watching a cat get serially battered by a mouse.
And also there was this really unlucky Coyote...
My point is that kids over about 6 generally understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
I tend to worry that my kids will overhear the daytime radio news about Iraq and Afghanistan because they know that is real and I find it hard to explain to them why our allies just bombed a wedding.
If you want to know where a kid grows up thinking that you can shoot people who get in your way, take a look at the US police force and US foreign policy. Not Tom and Jerry.
I recall a interview where someone asked the Netflix chap something like
"Did you always know you'd go into movies via the internet or was it something that came along after you started with the postal service".
I think the answer was along the lines of
"We didn't call the company Postflix".
I used Netflix in the US and it rocked.
Here in the UK I started on Amazon that became Lovefilm.
I have flirted with hating LoveFilm's guts but on balance have decided they are improving so I'll give them a chance.
A pal of mine was switched from Amazon to Lovefilm and was rather taken aback when his first DVD arrived.
All LoveFilm movies have a code that is a few letters and a load of numbers.
He had ordered "Analyse This" and when it arrived it was in an envelope saying "LoveFilm" in large letters and a discreet code that said ANAL3485934 or something like that.
The mailman gave him a knowing wink and walked away.
I always thought that an address on suitcase when setting off on a foreign holiday was pretty dumb.
My pals twitter that "I've just booked a 3 week holiday in Canada in August" was pretty dumb, especially as he has quite a web presence as a raging tech geek (house full of expensive gadgets) and anyone who knows him online knows he works from home and has at some point given his home address as a business address.
But he would then have to be burgled by someone pretty local and tech savvy. It may be true that the typical old style burglar is not up to this.
But Burglar 2.0 is a different animal. He knows from your online review of the iPad that you probably have one, and that your planned backpacking in Nepal probably won't involve taking it with you. So he can drive to your house, take all your gadgets and not expect to be disturbed.
Compared to clumsy opportunist burglaries, these sort of crimes could be extremely lucrative. A well organised operator could fill their calendar with "appointments" a month in advance then route plan with a travelling salesman algorithm.
(My city's police now create "honeypot" houses, just like the bait cars of a few years ago. They do extremely well at catching people because passing burglars are very predictable as to which premises they will go for.
Tip
- have a burglar alarm
- have a dog
- lock the door when you're in
and you won't be burgled
Furthermore
- don't keep carkeys in the kitchen drawer or on the little table by the front door )
Simple example from personal experience this week.
I have a LoveFilm (formerly Amazon) DVD by post subscription.
Recently they told me that in addition to my "n" DVD's by post I get 4 hrs of free movies on demand per month. So I choose a 90 minute movie, watch it as many times as I like for 48 hrs, and it counts as 90 mins of my 4 hrs. Found a movie the kids loved and they watched it few times over the weekend.
Not a penny spent, but a new service discovered.
Then come this Friday, kids want a movie & pizza evening. My 4 hrs has been used up. But there are 1000's of movies to choose from and they are something like £2.50 pay on demand. And that 2.50 will get me 48 hrs of viewing (kids love to rewatch a movies they really like).
I have by now found out (for free) that the technology works, the interface is OK,and the quality adequate. And now I can have pretty much any movie at 5 seconds notice. No trip to the video store. No wishing I'd had it posted 4 days ago. Just choose movie and pay. Sorted.
They'll probably get plenty of my money in exchange for the sheer convenience. But it all started with the free "nothing to lose" tryout that came first.
...or is is screamingly obvious to everyone that if I have something I want to throw out that will get me a fine, I'll put it in somebody else's garbage when oone is looking.
If someone wanted to fine me for the contents of my garbage can, I'd want the right to lock my can until the collectors arrive. And that would create such a mess it'd be counterproductive.
It would also encourage "fly tipping" (where people just throw rubbish out by the side of the road when no-one is around).
As someone I know says often CwH, RtR
- Connect with householders
- Give them a reason to recycle
Some UK local authorities make people wash the labels off metal food cans before recycling the cans. Apart from the fact this is environmentally insane (a central facility would do the same job using less power and water) it is such a demand on people's time they just don't bother.
My current local authority are fairly sane. They give out unlimited free green sacks and there's a list of things that you can put in them, no separating required. Anything NOT recyclable goes in the good old fashioned "Wheelie bin" (aka "other") but the idea is that the allowance for that (or collection frequency) is steadily shrinking. With a family of 5 it takes me 3 weeks to fill the "other" bin.
But there's a huge disparity between areas regarding garbage collection labour.
In Melbourne, Australia a garbage truck with a giant robot arm would screech up next to my kerb, grab the wheelie bin and tip it in the truck. A single driver did the whole neighbourhood. Here in the UK, the truck crawls along the street with 2-4 men on foot accompanying it.
You are confusing suing him for breach of contract (which they will probably do when the book is published and he has actually breached the contract) with trying to prevent the damage occurring in the first place (by preventing publication , which requires an injunction against the publisher, not against him).
Suing him after the fact is to some extent crying over spilt milk, and the only value in it is to warn future transgressors that such contracts will be enforced.
I expect they'll win the breach of contract case (open and shut) which will take the edge of his book earnings. But the publisher will still do fine. As one of the posters above noted, it seems as if Ben Collins is being used.
The main topic of discussion in UK is "should license payers' money have been spent trying to get the injunction ?". Or maybe "what advise did they take regarding how likely the injunction was to succeed ?".
Given the Streisand effect, this whole affair will only serve to heighten Christmas book sales. But then you could argue whether or not the Top Gear program will do well out of the book publicity in the long term.
-- Can you think of any instances of this kind of creative destruction where the new business model was not smaller in capitalization than the model it replaced? --
Duh !
You mean can I think of an area where a new technology came out that was as good as the existing technology but cost more so it won the day ??
Clearly, item for item, the new technology is probably cheaper.
But in many cases that widens the appeal & grows the overall market.
A modern digital camera might be cheaper than an old style camera, and we may spend less on buying film, but we spend definitly more on colour printing than we used to. And with so many cameras (on phones, for example) there are so many more images out there to print.
And I seem to recall reading here that overall the music business is growing. It's only from narrow viewpoint of the old style players that it seems to have shrunk.
So, you might ask, would Kodak be cutting their own throats to hasten the arrival of digital cameras ?
Yes, if that is all they ever sold. But if they grabbed a slice of the new larger pie that was coming next, probably not.
They are like the "door close" buttons in an elevator.
They do nothing, but they make you feel like you have done something, and hence make you feel slightly less powerless in this vast cruel world we live in.
Or maybe they are accidentally logged by google to build up a political profile of you that might one day be subpoena'd by a totalitarian regime looking for reasons to incarcerate you.
Not that long ago I recall that google was blocked because you could view banned web pages by looking at them via google's "english to english translator". The resulting URL looked nothing like the banned page and hence slipped through the filter.
BTW, my personal take on the google WIFI mapping is this
- If I post my private diary on the sidewalk outside my house and someone walks past and reads it, I have no grounds for accusing them of violating my privacy. As I understand it, google simply sniffed for unique mac addresses and in the case of unsecured networks some actual data came out in the process. What are the critics objecting to, that they sniffed out the data, or that they accidentally stored it ?
" I would think it would be a simple matter of checking MAC addresses from the router's log and going from there. I can't help but think it would be all but impossible to track somebody down if they weren't the next door neighbor. "
Nah, it's easy. Just ask you friendly neighborhood StreetView database if they have a physical location for a given Mac address. With a subpoena, of course, because they'd probably prefer to do no evil.
When the awful pictures of oil soaked seabirds start to arrive, HR will say that the oil (which belongs to BP) owns the copyright to it's photographic likeness, and sue to prevent publication in the papers.
But does BP actually own "escaped" oil ? Or only oil it captures straight from the well ?
This is a serious question - if someone else mounted a salvage operation that captured 5000 barrels a day before it hit the beach, who would own the oil ?
For me, visiting a public website in person (as it was intended to be used) is not a DoS. If I encourage people at a political rally to go and express their views on their elected representative's website, and the site crashes as a result, that is the website's problem.
But if I encourage people to hit the website 1000 times each (either manually or using a bot or other process, such as DDoS) then that is using the website in a way it was clearly not intended with intent to cause disruption.
Same goes for encouraging people to telephone a rep's office to express views. It could jam phone lines and make it impossible for the guy to work BUT if these are all legit calls and he is supposed to represent these people, that is his problem. If someone used an automated dialler and the guy got silence when he answered the phone, that would be disruptive intent.
For me it comes down to legitimate intent.
We recently had a situation in my hometown where they wanted to close a (very successful) school. It really came down to mass letter writing to the public bodies and they made it clear that although number of letters would play a part, multiple copies of the same letter would not count multiple times. That is to say, one person has to make the effort to write their own letter to count as one vote.
The example of 50000 people going to the auditorium is (for me) OK. These people individually made the effort to make their own views felt (unless they were paid to go). A DDoS is more like a school principle bringing several hundred children along to the talk (children who have no interest in the actual talk).
I think the original flashmob concept walked a fine line in this respect. Make 1000 people suddenly materialise on a particular street corner and it looks like a strange phenomenon. Do it right in front of a high traffic McDonalds at lunchtime and it seems like an attempt to disrupt business. But participants know where they are going and presumably choose to do this.
I don't wish to pay a larger fixed price because some users prefer to stream video (or even music) all day long.
I'd be quite happy to pay no fixed charge and an entirely usage based fee PROVIDED
- I could see at a glance online what my usage so far was including a trend throughout the month (which would help me to identify where I was wasting my bandwidth)
- there was the possibility of cheaper bandwidth in the off peak times of the day (whenever those are) which would spur innovation in the "scheduled download"
- everyone did it and it was genuine competitive market (thus ensuring it doesn't just put overall prices up)
My net connection really should be no different from my connection to the electricity. (When you see how much energy data centres use, profligate use of bandwidth rapidly seems like an ecological problem anyway).
And it would be good for the country generally if we learnt to do what didn't need to be done in real time at off peak times. It would spread the load and make way for the essential stuff.
If you look at something like BBC iPlayer (probably the single biggest bandwidth hog on UK home connections) it would make sense for them to offer a feature whereby you flag a show you'd like to have watched but couldn't, and it gets it onto your hard disk at some point in the next 24 hrs using low bandwidth connection. Then you watch it before it expires. Watching it live 2 days later at the peak of the evening bandwidth demand (when everyone else is doing the same) makes little sense.
The main argument AGAINST metering done properly is that rather than taking a look at something "just in case it is interesting" people will choose not to if they can see $$ ticking away on a free utility toolbar. (The same as having a real time display of electricity usage in their house teaches people to turn off unused lights).
People with a real time cost display might rapidly go off websites that showed video ads and needless amounts of rich content. If it was $0.01 to watch that 5 minute YouTube clip, would we feel differently about dancing hamsters ? Would using the company PC for private use become a more serious offence ? Would universities discourage dorm file sharing on financial grounds ? Would Skype go under as people saw the pennies ticking away ? Would teleconferencing collapse causing a return to cheap air travel ?
I doubt it. Mosty people cheerfully piss away electricity and that's always been metered.
So I'm hosting a birthday party of 8 year olds. Pizza, movie, sleepover. Trying to pick a movie they have not seen (ie not a modern one) that they'd like. Perhaps ET or Short Circuit, you know, stuff from when we were younger.
I find "Gremlins" (gee, that takes me back). Imagine my surprise when I see that it has a 15 certificate.
So I start exploring just what modern film ratings look like.
Imagine my further surprise when I find that the Bourne Identity has as 12 certificate. Gremlins vs Bourne. Hmmm
1. Go to carphone warehouse in UK and buy a "pay as you go" handset. Mine was £15 including £10 talk time (yes, £5 for a handset, no contract) and it came with UK charger and also a USB charger that can be used to charge it up before you get to the UK. Talk time never expires, what you don't use this trip, save till next trip. Only a triband (no good in US) but hey, it's cheap.
2. When in UK, make all calls using this UK phone. But get a SkypeToGo number for calls out of UK (ie back to US)
3. For incoming calls, either leave a message on your US cell giving out the UK number, or leave a message saying "send me an SMS".
Data
4. Need data on your phone ? If you REALLY do, look for a UK PAYG data plan and a different UK handset. But if you can live with just getting your netbook onto a dataplan, get a PAYG "mobile broadband" from "3 telecom". £10 for 1GB which expires after 30 days, which works over most of Britain and plugs into USB. You might only get 1Mbit/s but you'll be connected with a cap on the spend.
If this seems like a lot of effort, then just go on paying $1000+ each trip instead.
On the post: Anti-Violence Video Game Group Conducts Study Getting Parents To Ask For Anti-Violent Video Game Law
all polls be required to disclose the exact question wording ?
Kinda like getting a drug company to publish ALL trials, not just the successful ones ?
At the end of the day, it maybe makes more sense to just educate people to interpret what stuff like this means (and does not mean).
If only every kid left school understanding enough basic stats and human nature to
- draw conclusions from numbers
- know when a survey is obviously biased
- understand the concept of a group with a agenda
There's a famous catfood commercial in the UK.
"8 out of 10 cats prefer Whiskas" goes the strapline.
Noone ever asks "to what ?".
On the post: Anti-Violence Video Game Group Conducts Study Getting Parents To Ask For Anti-Violent Video Game Law
Tom and Jerry anyone ?
And also there was this really unlucky Coyote...
My point is that kids over about 6 generally understand the difference between fantasy and reality.
I tend to worry that my kids will overhear the daytime radio news about Iraq and Afghanistan because they know that is real and I find it hard to explain to them why our allies just bombed a wedding.
If you want to know where a kid grows up thinking that you can shoot people who get in your way, take a look at the US police force and US foreign policy. Not Tom and Jerry.
On the post: Why Does Everyone Underestimate Netflix?
Amusing interview
"Did you always know you'd go into movies via the internet or was it something that came along after you started with the postal service".
I think the answer was along the lines of
"We didn't call the company Postflix".
I used Netflix in the US and it rocked.
Here in the UK I started on Amazon that became Lovefilm.
I have flirted with hating LoveFilm's guts but on balance have decided they are improving so I'll give them a chance.
A pal of mine was switched from Amazon to Lovefilm and was rather taken aback when his first DVD arrived.
All LoveFilm movies have a code that is a few letters and a load of numbers.
He had ordered "Analyse This" and when it arrived it was in an envelope saying "LoveFilm" in large letters and a discreet code that said ANAL3485934 or something like that.
The mailman gave him a knowing wink and walked away.
On the post: Police Claim Burglars Used Facebook To Target Empty Homes; Proof Lacking
This is new ?
My pals twitter that "I've just booked a 3 week holiday in Canada in August" was pretty dumb, especially as he has quite a web presence as a raging tech geek (house full of expensive gadgets) and anyone who knows him online knows he works from home and has at some point given his home address as a business address.
But he would then have to be burgled by someone pretty local and tech savvy. It may be true that the typical old style burglar is not up to this.
But Burglar 2.0 is a different animal. He knows from your online review of the iPad that you probably have one, and that your planned backpacking in Nepal probably won't involve taking it with you. So he can drive to your house, take all your gadgets and not expect to be disturbed.
Compared to clumsy opportunist burglaries, these sort of crimes could be extremely lucrative. A well organised operator could fill their calendar with "appointments" a month in advance then route plan with a travelling salesman algorithm.
(My city's police now create "honeypot" houses, just like the bait cars of a few years ago. They do extremely well at catching people because passing burglars are very predictable as to which premises they will go for.
Tip
- have a burglar alarm
- have a dog
- lock the door when you're in
and you won't be burgled
Furthermore
- don't keep carkeys in the kitchen drawer or on the little table by the front door )
But as I say, burglar 2.0 is different...
On the post: Evidence Shows You Can, In Fact, 'Compete' With 'Free'
Simple example from personal experience this week.
Recently they told me that in addition to my "n" DVD's by post I get 4 hrs of free movies on demand per month. So I choose a 90 minute movie, watch it as many times as I like for 48 hrs, and it counts as 90 mins of my 4 hrs. Found a movie the kids loved and they watched it few times over the weekend.
Not a penny spent, but a new service discovered.
Then come this Friday, kids want a movie & pizza evening. My 4 hrs has been used up. But there are 1000's of movies to choose from and they are something like £2.50 pay on demand. And that 2.50 will get me 48 hrs of viewing (kids love to rewatch a movies they really like).
I have by now found out (for free) that the technology works, the interface is OK,and the quality adequate. And now I can have pretty much any movie at 5 seconds notice. No trip to the video store. No wishing I'd had it posted 4 days ago. Just choose movie and pay. Sorted.
They'll probably get plenty of my money in exchange for the sheer convenience. But it all started with the free "nothing to lose" tryout that came first.
On the post: If Sarah Palin Has Someone Else Doing Her Facebooking, Is She A Criminal?
Re:
Are you saying Palin has a disability ?
I'd argue she does but it's a cognitive thing...
On the post: If Sarah Palin Has Someone Else Doing Her Facebooking, Is She A Criminal?
Re:
Are you saying Palin has a disability ?
I'd argue she does but it's a cognitive thing...
On the post: Big Brother In Your Garbage Cans
Is it just me...
If someone wanted to fine me for the contents of my garbage can, I'd want the right to lock my can until the collectors arrive. And that would create such a mess it'd be counterproductive.
It would also encourage "fly tipping" (where people just throw rubbish out by the side of the road when no-one is around).
As someone I know says often CwH, RtR
- Connect with householders
- Give them a reason to recycle
Some UK local authorities make people wash the labels off metal food cans before recycling the cans. Apart from the fact this is environmentally insane (a central facility would do the same job using less power and water) it is such a demand on people's time they just don't bother.
My current local authority are fairly sane. They give out unlimited free green sacks and there's a list of things that you can put in them, no separating required. Anything NOT recyclable goes in the good old fashioned "Wheelie bin" (aka "other") but the idea is that the allowance for that (or collection frequency) is steadily shrinking. With a family of 5 it takes me 3 weeks to fill the "other" bin.
But there's a huge disparity between areas regarding garbage collection labour.
In Melbourne, Australia a garbage truck with a giant robot arm would screech up next to my kerb, grab the wheelie bin and tip it in the truck. A single driver did the whole neighbourhood. Here in the UK, the truck crawls along the street with 2-4 men on foot accompanying it.
Maybe it's a union thing...
On the post: BBC Loses Its Attempt To Silence Top Gear Test Driver The Stig From Revealing His Identity
Re: Re: Confidentiality
Suing him after the fact is to some extent crying over spilt milk, and the only value in it is to warn future transgressors that such contracts will be enforced.
I expect they'll win the breach of contract case (open and shut) which will take the edge of his book earnings. But the publisher will still do fine. As one of the posters above noted, it seems as if Ben Collins is being used.
The main topic of discussion in UK is "should license payers' money have been spent trying to get the injunction ?". Or maybe "what advise did they take regarding how likely the injunction was to succeed ?".
Given the Streisand effect, this whole affair will only serve to heighten Christmas book sales. But then you could argue whether or not the Top Gear program will do well out of the book publicity in the long term.
On the post: Why Waiting Until A New Business Model Is Proven Doesn't Work
Re: Creative Destruction
Duh !
You mean can I think of an area where a new technology came out that was as good as the existing technology but cost more so it won the day ??
Clearly, item for item, the new technology is probably cheaper.
But in many cases that widens the appeal & grows the overall market.
A modern digital camera might be cheaper than an old style camera, and we may spend less on buying film, but we spend definitly more on colour printing than we used to. And with so many cameras (on phones, for example) there are so many more images out there to print.
And I seem to recall reading here that overall the music business is growing. It's only from narrow viewpoint of the old style players that it seems to have shrunk.
So, you might ask, would Kodak be cutting their own throats to hasten the arrival of digital cameras ?
Yes, if that is all they ever sold. But if they grabbed a slice of the new larger pie that was coming next, probably not.
On the post: After Hundreds Of 'Empire State Of Mind' Parodies... Why Does EMI Suddenly Take One Down?
Re: Re: That's Odd...
The spoof writers wanted to release it as a charity single and the writers objected.
On the post: Oracle's First Big Move With Sun? Use Sun's Patents To Sue Google
Re: Totally crap-tastic!
-- I took to C# like a fish to water, though. --
WTF ? C# is almost identical to Java, a carbon copy.
-- Being designed by the creator of Turbo-Pascal, I found it to be very intelligently designed and easy to understand. --
Odd use of grammar here. You were designed by the creator of Turbo-Pascal ? Didn't your parents have a say ?
Or did you mean C# was designed by the creator of Turbo Pascal ? ("designed" in this case meaning "plagiarised".
On the post: Would You Confuse This Couch With Humphrey Bogart?
Slashdot style buttons
They are like the "door close" buttons in an elevator.
They do nothing, but they make you feel like you have done something, and hence make you feel slightly less powerless in this vast cruel world we live in.
Or maybe they are accidentally logged by google to build up a political profile of you that might one day be subpoena'd by a totalitarian regime looking for reasons to incarcerate you.
Either way, enjoy...
On the post: Schools & Governments Blocking Google Because It Won't Let Them Spy On Users
Maybe I'm missing something here but...
Not that long ago I recall that google was blocked because you could view banned web pages by looking at them via google's "english to english translator". The resulting URL looked nothing like the banned page and hence slipped through the filter.
BTW, my personal take on the google WIFI mapping is this
- If I post my private diary on the sidewalk outside my house and someone walks past and reads it, I have no grounds for accusing them of violating my privacy. As I understand it, google simply sniffed for unique mac addresses and in the case of unsecured networks some actual data came out in the process. What are the critics objecting to, that they sniffed out the data, or that they accidentally stored it ?
On the post: Man Charged With Using Open WiFi To Send Death Threats To VP Biden
Doesn't have to be the next door neighbour
Nah, it's easy. Just ask you friendly neighborhood StreetView database if they have a physical location for a given Mac address. With a subpoena, of course, because they'd probably prefer to do no evil.
On the post: BP Hires Former RIAA Boss For PR Work
Wait for the seabird pictures
But does BP actually own "escaped" oil ? Or only oil it captures straight from the well ?
This is a serious question - if someone else mounted a salvage operation that captured 5000 barrels a day before it hit the beach, who would own the oil ?
On the post: Is Telling People To Visit A Certain Website A Denial Of Service Attack?
Is it about intent ?
But if I encourage people to hit the website 1000 times each (either manually or using a bot or other process, such as DDoS) then that is using the website in a way it was clearly not intended with intent to cause disruption.
Same goes for encouraging people to telephone a rep's office to express views. It could jam phone lines and make it impossible for the guy to work BUT if these are all legit calls and he is supposed to represent these people, that is his problem. If someone used an automated dialler and the guy got silence when he answered the phone, that would be disruptive intent.
For me it comes down to legitimate intent.
We recently had a situation in my hometown where they wanted to close a (very successful) school. It really came down to mass letter writing to the public bodies and they made it clear that although number of letters would play a part, multiple copies of the same letter would not count multiple times. That is to say, one person has to make the effort to write their own letter to count as one vote.
The example of 50000 people going to the auditorium is (for me) OK. These people individually made the effort to make their own views felt (unless they were paid to go). A DDoS is more like a school principle bringing several hundred children along to the talk (children who have no interest in the actual talk).
I think the original flashmob concept walked a fine line in this respect. Make 1000 people suddenly materialise on a particular street corner and it looks like a strange phenomenon. Do it right in front of a high traffic McDonalds at lunchtime and it seems like an attempt to disrupt business. But participants know where they are going and presumably choose to do this.
On the post: T-Mobile, Leap Move Take A Different Tack On Mobile Broadband
I'm all for usage based plans
I'd be quite happy to pay no fixed charge and an entirely usage based fee PROVIDED
- I could see at a glance online what my usage so far was including a trend throughout the month (which would help me to identify where I was wasting my bandwidth)
- there was the possibility of cheaper bandwidth in the off peak times of the day (whenever those are) which would spur innovation in the "scheduled download"
- everyone did it and it was genuine competitive market (thus ensuring it doesn't just put overall prices up)
My net connection really should be no different from my connection to the electricity. (When you see how much energy data centres use, profligate use of bandwidth rapidly seems like an ecological problem anyway).
And it would be good for the country generally if we learnt to do what didn't need to be done in real time at off peak times. It would spread the load and make way for the essential stuff.
If you look at something like BBC iPlayer (probably the single biggest bandwidth hog on UK home connections) it would make sense for them to offer a feature whereby you flag a show you'd like to have watched but couldn't, and it gets it onto your hard disk at some point in the next 24 hrs using low bandwidth connection. Then you watch it before it expires. Watching it live 2 days later at the peak of the evening bandwidth demand (when everyone else is doing the same) makes little sense.
The main argument AGAINST metering done properly is that rather than taking a look at something "just in case it is interesting" people will choose not to if they can see $$ ticking away on a free utility toolbar. (The same as having a real time display of electricity usage in their house teaches people to turn off unused lights).
People with a real time cost display might rapidly go off websites that showed video ads and needless amounts of rich content. If it was $0.01 to watch that 5 minute YouTube clip, would we feel differently about dancing hamsters ? Would using the company PC for private use become a more serious offence ? Would universities discourage dorm file sharing on financial grounds ? Would Skype go under as people saw the pennies ticking away ? Would teleconferencing collapse causing a return to cheap air travel ?
I doubt it. Mosty people cheerfully piss away electricity and that's always been metered.
On the post: Who Needs Parenting When Your ISP Uses The British Film Classification System?
The classification system has become surreal
I find "Gremlins" (gee, that takes me back). Imagine my surprise when I see that it has a 15 certificate.
So I start exploring just what modern film ratings look like.
Imagine my further surprise when I find that the Bourne Identity has as 12 certificate. Gremlins vs Bourne. Hmmm
Go figure..
On the post: Confused Users Keep Racking Up Ridiculous 3G Bills, Wireless Carriers Keep Helping Them
Re: How to roam in UK when travelling from US
1. Go to carphone warehouse in UK and buy a "pay as you go" handset. Mine was £15 including £10 talk time (yes, £5 for a handset, no contract) and it came with UK charger and also a USB charger that can be used to charge it up before you get to the UK. Talk time never expires, what you don't use this trip, save till next trip. Only a triband (no good in US) but hey, it's cheap.
2. When in UK, make all calls using this UK phone. But get a SkypeToGo number for calls out of UK (ie back to US)
3. For incoming calls, either leave a message on your US cell giving out the UK number, or leave a message saying "send me an SMS".
Data
4. Need data on your phone ? If you REALLY do, look for a UK PAYG data plan and a different UK handset. But if you can live with just getting your netbook onto a dataplan, get a PAYG "mobile broadband" from "3 telecom". £10 for 1GB which expires after 30 days, which works over most of Britain and plugs into USB. You might only get 1Mbit/s but you'll be connected with a cap on the spend.
If this seems like a lot of effort, then just go on paying $1000+ each trip instead.
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