Posts by mh. 58 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2007
but wouldn't it be better to find out why people are committing crimes and addressing those reasons, rather than coming up with dodgy gimmicks such as coloured underwear and substandard food? Might be a bit more complex and expensive than getting criminals to wear silly hats, but having people not being mugged or robbed in the first place is better than humiliating muggers or robbers.
I've got books that go back almost as far as the 1920s, mostly old recipe books. I can read them, pass them on, copy them or whatever even though the publishers long went out of business. They'll probably also be out of copyright because they are so old. The BBC Domesday project is the classic example of how technology can become obsolete, and that was only just over 20 years ago. The problem with ebooks is that you can't read them if the hardware isn't available or it uses DRM with an expired certificate. There's also the problem of the hardware breaking down. A hard disk can last about 5 years or so. CDs have only been around for just over 25 so it's difficult to say how long they'll last. Paper or parchment can easily last for hundreds of years and still be read provided someone knows how to decode the squiggles that make up writing.
Pretty much everyone who wants a mobile phone already has one. Obviously you will get some stolen to be sold abroad, some stolen because they're in someone's handbag, and some pinched from kids by other kids. However the market for dodgy phones has collapsed. You can buy a basic pay & go phone with £10 airtime for less than £20 (the Motorola F3 Blue, as recommended at http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/29/review_motorola_motofone_f3/). This is new, comes from a shop and has a warranty (and obviously isn't stolen).
The same happened with knocked off computer memory. When SIMMs cost £30 or more per MB (just before Windows 95 was released) there was quite a lot of money to be made with corporate machines having up to 64 MB. However the collapse in price meant that it just wasn't worth it any more. You can now buy a 1 GB DIMM for less than £20, which is equivalent to 1 MB costing less than 2p.
Sometimes it's just basic economics that cuts crime, not yet another initiative from the Home Office.
Supposing they do gather all this information (backed up by the National Database and the ANPR system). Assuming the system works correctly, there's going to be a lot of close matches and false (positive or negative) matches. Essentially they're building a real life version of those Where's Wally books. Not wise for an outfit that can't even find weapons of mass destruction in a mostly deserted country.
At the moment the system is mainly being used against "bad" people such as chavs or terrorists who generally can't get the best lawyers. However a better lawyer could bring the courts (or tribunals) to a halt by demanding that the prosecution can prove that the person in the dock really is the person appearing on some rather fuzzy film that may have been tampered with. This would mean some poor soul having to sit down and watch possibly hundreds of hours of footage. It might be possible to do this for a couple of major cases, but it wouldn't work too well if every shoplifter up before the magistrates' courts demanded this to happen with their case.
I think one of the main problems is that the govt wants to show how hi-tech they are, and certain consultancy firms (see the announcement about suppliers for the national database published today) don't want to disappoint them. The ministers making the decisions don't generally have much experience of IT project management (do any of them have qualifications in things like PRINCE2 or ITIL?) or even using a computer above more than a bit of basic email or word processing. The systems are inherently flawed and can never work, but the politicians don't really understand what they're asking for (take Blunkett and his biometrics for example) and the technical information tends to be filtered through sales and marketing people who tend to gloss over the shortcomings.
In 1908 Thomas Edison set up the Motion Picture Patents Company along with Eastman Kodak and a number of other studios. Its main purpose was to protect its members' patents and interests, usually with batteries of lawyers. By 1915 all its patents were cancelled, and in 1917 it was declared an illegal monopoly and shut down. Sounds like some people don't learn from history.
Hollywood could also do with remembering where its money comes from. Gerald Ratner learnt to his cost what happens if you annoy your customers, and the failed DIVX disk format (not the video codec) shows that the consumer doesn't always swallow what the industry would like them to have.
The physical product is faulty. It's like buying a book that hasn't been bound properly and the pages fall out, or a cassette with a broken tape. The content doesn't matter and the licence is irrelevant. You're entitled to a full refund from the retailer under sale of goods legislation. If you bought online or by mail order, the retailer is also obliged to pay the cost of postage under distance selling regulations (page 27 of http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/business_leaflets/general/oft698.pdf).
What they then do with the faulty games is their problem.
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