Posts by Rikkeh

Re: Will the free market come to the rescue?

There's an interesting question hanging in the air of what the cable providers will do once TV on demand becomes properly widespread (while on demand is no longer exclusively the domain of the early adopter, I don't see my parents or grandparents taking it up any time soon).

Right now, cable subscriptions provide a large, predictable and presumably high-margin slice of revenue. Especially compared to what on-demand costs. This is even true in the UK- NowTV gives you what you'd actually want from a Sky subscription, at a fraction of the cost and (so far) with no ads. Interestingly, it's done by Sky (presumably they're of the view that the service competes with piracy and Netflix/Amazon rather than cannibalising existing subscribers). In a rational universe, the vast majority of people with a decent broadband connection would be binning their dishes and £50 p.m. TV contracts for the cheaper service.

But if everyone does this, providers will have much less revenue to play with- and what they've got coming in now doesn't go into a Scrooge McDuck-style money bin. Weaning these organisations off the money fountain that Cable TV has been for the past few decades is going to be painful for them (even if the revenue lost is just being spent on inefficiencies right now). This looks like a motive for 1) throttling and 2) (when you can't throttle) replacing the revenue stream with a levy on Netflix.

I'm not condoning throttling (quite the opposite) but I can see why they'd want to do it.

Re: Good!

Not human rights from the European Convention on Human Rights, but fundamental rights and freedoms from the EU charter.

One's from the Council of Europe (not the EU) and is all that Human Rights stuff you're always reading about in the tabloids (hilariously, Russia is a signatory to the ECHR- some of the cases that get to Strasbourg from there are incredible).

The other is a similar charter that the EU has put together which contains all the ECHR rights but also some special rights of its own, which are a bit more up to date (while the ECHR is a post war creation the charter is from 2000). One of these rights is the right to data protection (really, Article 8 isn't a general privacy right, it's right to personal data protection). There's also a right to education and a right to science (this one is far more interesting when it's not explained).

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Re: Funny How Times Change Innit

This would be the same Lord Denning who refused to hear allegations of police brutality in court as they would undermine faith in the justice system if proven correct. And the same one who didn't want ethnic minorities to serve on juries.

Denning was a great champion of liberty and justice but only for those he saw as the right sort. I suspect that he would have been absolutely fine with the state coming down on a foreigner without an NUJ card.

It's also because the businesses have studied priracy and pirates' attitudes extensively and come to the conclusion that cracking down on downloaders themselves actually *decreases* legal sales, as the downloaders (unsurprisingly) react to it with hostility and know that their individual risk of getting caught is virtually zero.

Also, they're too busy going after the people who pirate *and* charge for their bootlegged content (whether through adverts or otherwise).

Yep, funnily enough, if you confiscate all of the wealth from a significant chunk of your population and default on your debts (when no one's lending to you anyway), you'll suddenly find yourself flush with cash.

And, if you drive an even larger chunk of your population out of work (they drove women out of work as well as people from races they didn't like) then your official unemployment figures will improve.

Two one off ways of creating sudden windfalls that make you look like a genius, provided no one's actually paying attention, but which are actually extremely destructive in the long term (like the Romans, their economic policy was so inefficient that they would have faced economic ruin had they not tried to steal more stuff from their neighbours).

Re: 76 officers in London have been investigated

Indeed- I'd also bet that the number of people actually abusing the PNC has probably gone *down* rather than up, as a result of it becoming more traceable and more of a priority.

Doesn't make it any less outrageous- indeed, the fact that so many are being caught for it suggests that it's ingrained in the culture.

Re: Held prisoner at work?

There's also the issue of oil rigs, mines and similar, where it's very difficult to allow the employee to leave safely, whether or not their shift is over.

There's a very old Court case (from the 1910s) where someone quit on the spot while at the bottom of a mine shaft (it was never revealed why he waited until he was hundreds of metres underground to decide that this wasn't the line of work for him). Essentially, he accused his employers of illegally detaining him until the end of the shift (which was the earliest time the lifts became free for people rather than coal). Long story short, he failed as there was a good enough reason to keep him down there for the day.

Re: This Morning

I was referring to Newsnight on the BBC (which didn't name McAlpine but gave enough info for him to be identified). I know This Morning is on ITV, had it been on the Beeb, there'd have been calls for the DG's head.

Why would a first class graduate ever settle for the £22k....?

The only way would be if he/she felt like a valued employee, had a share of the equity and/or got something else that working for your own startup traditionally is supposed to offer over working for a big company.

Suspect that many of the real life Lord Bongs might have different ideas on how to treat the people who merely "implement" their "vision".

Re: Nice work!

Has El Reg determined whose shirts he wears?

Re: Not just Apple

Purchases of assets in a single transaction or linked transactions totally over €15,000 trigger anti-money laundering rules (as you can launder your dirty cash through buying up shiny things and then selling them on eBay etc). Once that happens, you have to check up on who the customer is.

I suspect that someone at apple (and your charm company) has overreacted to the theoretical risk that someone might buy an iPhone every day for a month without the company noticing and decided to go overboard and check *everyone*.

Sadly, whoever has made this decision has calculated that they'll suffer less for inconveniencing everyone and grabbing their personal data unnecessarily than they will in the unlikely event they get done for failing to prevent money laundering.

I suspect that they're merely humouring each Home Secretary each time this comes up, safe in the knowledge that each minister won't last long enough in the job to chase them up on it.

Could've been worse, Theresa May could well have demanded Batman's sonar phones from the Dark Knight.

Re: Argos catalogue is a great example of something that should be archived

IMHO, it's the most mundane stuff (at the time) that tends to be the most interesting now. The BFI projected some films of London streets 100 years ago a few years back at Trafalgar Square. The way the streets have changed and not changed (tram tracks, horse drawn buses and signalmen on every corner have vanished without trace, other things remain virtually unchanged), was absolutely fascinating.

It was also something that people at the time tended not to bother filming because they considered it so ordinary and so the footage is extremely rare. There was an El Reg article a few days ago about how we don't have the very first version of the very first website (although still an impressive effort retrieving what they've found given the circumstances) and have to make do with a later iteration. I guess we just don't appreciate history while it's current.

Re: the one thing that we are doing right now, which is to go global.

To be fair to Netflix, they're trying- when they made House of Cards, it was released everywhere at the same time. I suspect that the need for DRM comes more from whoever has the right to license the content in a particular territory, not on Netflix's need to compete with a genie that's already out of the bottle. Streaming providers have probably got to go to at least a token bit of effort to demonstrate to the licensor that their website does more than seed the perfect torrent.

Yes, that is a question. Given El Reg's (rightly) pointing out that not charging for content has been hugely damaging for newspapers going online, is it 1) experiencing the same* and 2) is it planning on charging for its news content?

*Probably none of my business, right?

Re: Rikkeh

Should probably start by saying that I appreciate you taking the time to do a substantive reply and go "off badge" to do so.

The Civil Procedure Rules (the laws governing how litigation in the English Court is conducted) already have a provision that hammers people for costs where they unreasonably refuse to engage in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). In many cases tried in this country, judges will pause claims for weeks and send the parties out to try and solve their dispute through mediation or another form of ADR, sometimes without either of the parties really wanting that.

My point is that laws just like the Royal Charter being proposed have been here for years and the sky hasn't fallen in (nor have the UK press complained about them nearly as vigourously). The point I made in my previous comments is that (barring crazy amendments- but one runs that risk with every bit of legislation every day) nothing will be unlawful that wasn't unlawful before.

You're just being pushed into ADR, in the same way that UK litigants generally are pushed into ADR every day, how is that a change to how you will operate day to day? The costs consequences I talk about above aren't the same as exemplary damages admittedly, but that's more a feature of who wrote the law, rather than the law's effect (and, I suspect that if the lawyers in parliament get a good grip on the Bill, costs consequences will replace exemplary damages).

I (and I don't think I'm alone here) think the press is blowing the issue out of all proportion because it doesn't want to be regulated, regardless of the actual merits of arguments for or against that regulation. This is causing them to reach for old school "freedom of the press" and "stalinist" dog whistles that look ridiculous when (as many others have pointed out) broadcast journalism has done amazing work in a much more tightly regulated environment.

Re: *splutter* How much??

Indeed. Whatever happened to the pricey and cheerful "budget" range of macbook whites? A comparative snip at £700!

Beat me to it- you'd never be able to do it solely off GPS, as unnotified roadworks, obstacles in the road and (snigger) apple maps would mean that knowing where you are on the planet would only get you so far with where on the road you should be.