Fear the Embarrassing Bodies webcam Some of my colleagues get writer's block. I suffer from reader's block. I may have a mild form of dyslexia or it may be due to having a very short attention ... you know, whatever. Today, I am unable to reach the end of the following sentence without forgetting how it started. You have a go... A multi-tiered, hybrid approach …
thinks that the best way to get a reliable diagnosis of a medical problem is to wave the relevant parts at a webcam for transmission on live TV rather than just making an appintment to go and see their friendly local GP? For all its faults, the NHS is still pretty good at diagnosing the cause of swollen testicles, and it saves the rest of us having nightmares while channel hopping.
Someone that's afraid of the answers their GP will give them. Someone that can't sleep for worrying about what's happening to them. Someone dreading being told they might have the Big C.
An appointment over a webcam makes the process seem more detached, like it's happening to someone else. If it results in a "crazed saddo" getting the answers they desperately need and maybe giving them the courage and motivation they need to get further treatment, the process is worthwhile.
Embarassing Bodies is not a fucking freakshow. That illness you're laughing your ass off about? That's a real person that's having it happen to them *right now*. My job would be a lot easier if people stopped taking the piss out of the patients I see.
I would almost agree with you if it didn't pick the you know 'Embarrassing' illnesses. Clue is in the title. If it was non stop I have a lump on my neck/leg etc then their ratings would be poor. Strangely lumps on boobs or Balls seem very popular, scratchy fanny seems to feature as well.
Its exploitation TV, I feel sorry for your customers but theirs are Jeremy Kyle & Big brother wannabes getting their bits out so we can have vicarious thrill / giggle.
Paris because I'm sure she would get her kit off for publicity
A multi-tiered, hybrid approach that differentiates between infrastructure and service-level competition can drive an optimum balance between national economic interests, free-market economics and a healthy telecommunications industry, that is able to provide affordable leading edge ICT services so necessary for economies going forward.
That's a full house on my bullshit buzzword bingo card...
After careful consideration and buzzword elimination, here's what I translated out of that sentence:
The people who maintain the cables and poles should be a separate bunch to the ones who sell services delivered over those cables and poles. The ownership of the cables and poles should be retained by the government, while the service delivery should be provided by private enterprise. This way a balance can be maintained between government control of the wires and the ability of the free market to make a buck.
A multi-tiered, hybrid approach that differentiates between infrastructure and service-level competition can drive an optimum balance between national economic interests, free-market economics and a healthy telecommunications industry, that is able to provide affordable leading edge...
What do I get for a full card?
... owe me a tablet, shirt, and trousers as I have shot red wine (an unassuming Barolo, 2001) out my nose whilst perusing your latest effort. Well done sir.
However, returning to the original question (I am NOT easily distracted, although I am easily amused), clearly God intended high speed Internet for the viewing of pr0n, although no doubt some misguided folk see it as a business opportunity. One example is the outsourcing of niche services, i.e. conversion of large photos (bit maps) to smaller ones with minimal degradation, a service of interest to the constabulary. Many such niches in the Internet ecosystem can be envisioned, leading either to a fragmentation of the Web, or a diversification, depending on your penchant for glasses half full or half empty.
I've frequently been annoyed by people who say that they can't imagine needing faster broadband because Netflix doesn't take any more than 6 Mbps. (Well, it now takes 12 Mbps in 3D Super HD, and it's bound to only go up.) So, the market is mostly made up of slow connections, and the major ISPs can point to low adoption as proving low demand instead of ridiculously high prices.
But the real crime is the lack of upload. Cisco had a very pretty networked webcam that flopped hard, mostly because Cisco sucks at the consumer market, but also because it required 1.5 Mbps upload for the 720p version and 3.5 Mbps for 1080p. Nobody on DSL has that kind of upload speed.
Not to mention all the other ideas that have to be shelved because speeds are just too low.
I suspect with this telly programme, they're using Skype, which only serves to take a mediocre image and mangle it into some kind of mushy 8 bit representation of a gonad.
They should move to Google Hangouts (pun co-incidental) which seems to do a much better job of actually getting a stable, decent audio and video feed from one place to another. Or Vidyo which from testing works great on the piss-thin DSL links provided by the UK's "favorite" telco.
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