* Posts by david wilson

1300 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

david wilson

@gareth

>>the real issue here is not that people use BT at all its that you believe that because VM said your connection is worstened by people using it. (which is simply not true)"

It's interesting that you know what I believe, especially when I could hardly believe that, since I'm not a VM customer, and have never claimed to be.

*Personally*, I'd probably be better off if all the freetards (and the legitimate heavy users of P2P) all used VM non-ADSL services, since then they wouldn't be likely to interfere with my internet experience.

I just find the arguments put forward in favour of illegal P2P amusing, alongside the constant assertions that companies are breaking some rules by throttling connections, when all they're doing is what their contract allows them to do, and what economics basically requires them to do, and what most of the complainers are well aware that the companies are likely to do.

david wilson

@gareth

>>"In my experiance they are not "offers" they are a way for you to make an educated decision on wether or not you want to spend your money on something.."

I didn't say they were 'offers' (in the sense of 'special offer'), I was making the point that they were offered by the seller - that is, it's entirely up to them whether anyone (or you in particular) can or can't sample something.

It's unlikely someone can use test drives as a substitute for buying a car, or in-store samples as a substitute to buying an item to use at leisure, which is why people often don't mind providing those samples.

That's in stark contrast to people downloading music and movies against the wishes of the legal owners, and downloading at sufficient quality to have no incentive to actually pay for the legitimate thing.

There may indeed be some people who take the risk of sampling movies and music via BitTorrent and then immediately buy the things they like and delete the rest, but I suspect they are rather outnumbered by the people who don't bother to buy things once they have a copy of them, and then try to rationalise that by complaining about the prices they don't pay, or how overpaid an actor is.

david wilson

@gareth

>>"do you not ask for a refund or replacement if your steak is burnt to a crisp?"

Quite different situation there - assuming you'd eaten steak before, you know what you expected and asked for, and they failed to deliver.

>>"so do you buy a car without a test drive?"

>>"a game without a demo?"

>>"do you buy aftershave without trying it?"

That'd be the test drive/demo/sample the seller *offers*, I suppose?

I presume *you* don't just hotwire a car on the forecourt to drive around for a few days, or borrow a bottle of aftershave from the shop to see if you like it?

>>"[so do you buy] a cd without litening to it in the store or online?"

Actually, yes, almost always, and it works quite well for me.

I've listened to the odd online sample, but generally, personal recommendations, reading reviews, listening to friends' music, radio, 'related listening' links and just following hunches seems to do the job more than adequately.

>>"what about 14 day standard ( for everything) returns? is that not a try before you buy?"

I think you'll find that's a try *after* you buy.

That means people at least have to get off their backside to return something if they don't want to pay for it, and if they kept going back to a shop with returns, they'd probably start becoming less welcome.

In any case, a universal returns policy often doesn't work on things that can't be easily resold, otherwise everyone *else* has to end up paying more to cover the cost of the serial returners who can't make their mind up, or aren't adult enough to live with the consequences of their own choices.

david wilson

@Anonymous freetard

>>"I do admit i have in the past been a heavy user of P2P some legal some not..you honestly think £20 for a dvd is a fair price?"

It's not a question of *fair*, but of whether it's a price someone is prepared to pay.

For me, £20 generally is too high.

That's why I don't buy many DVDs at £20.

However, I don't download a pirated version either.

Chances are it'll eventually be on TV, or in a a discount bin, but by that time, I might well have lost interest anyway.

Especially if Brad Pitt was in it.

"It's not *fair*" just sounds *so* much like a whiny teenager with an overweening sense of entitlement.

david wilson

@Rodrigo Rollan

>>"You see, as many other posters indicated, you pay for a service that states you´ll have a given link speed and QOS. "

And which also generally states there are [possibly unspecified] fair use restrictions, and reserves the right of the provider to change the conditions with some amount of notice.

Unless they wrote an *extremely* bad contract, no service provider is under an obligation to provide a service to anyone indefinitely under some original conditions.

david wilson

@Peter Kay

>>"It's ok until it happens to you, isn't it? Perish the thought you ever want to do copious amounts of Internet radio, or legal streamed media including home movies to your aunty Doris in Australia. Your attitude that you don't care about heavy bandwidth users, regardless of the source, is a perfect example of 'I'm alright jack' and is argually more closed minded than the people on this thread who clearly are downloading vast amounts of illegal material."

Personally, if I want to transfer much more data than I do, I'll pay for a more heavyweight connection than I currently have, but I'd expect to pay roughly what it costs someone to provide that.

To the extent that it costs my ISP more for me to transfer more data, it seems reasonable for me to pay for that, or for there to be fair use limits even on an unlimited service (to avoid them just stopping having me as a customer when I start to cost them more money than I pay them).

david wilson

@AC

>>"Still, he [pau] can't be all that bright, if he's still using Virgin as an ISP."

So I take it that anyone complaining about what Virgin are going to do is either moaning about terms and conditions being announced in advance for a service provided by a company they don't use, or is a bit thick?

No *wonder* you're an AC.

david wilson

@steogede

>>"For example, how many BT customers paying £15/month for a 10GB capped 8MB/s service realise that they can only use the service at full speed for just under 3 hours per month? In one sense, they are paying £15/month for a 32Kbps service."

Presumably, few customers of a 10GB/month service are actually going to *care* that they could only use their [theoretical] 8MB line flat out for 3 hours, for the simple reason that they typically download less than 10GB/month, and to the extent that they may be aware of their usage, they are aware not from measuring time and download speed, but just from looking at a monthly total on the relevant ISP account page.

They're not *really* paying for a 32Kbps service any more than someone who's insured to drive 8000miles/year is only covered to drive at 1mph.

david wilson

@Cannot use bandwidth faster than your line limit.

>>"This is like going to your local pub, buying a pint at full price and only being allowed to have a sip out of it then having to pass it round to 10 other people who have also paid full price for a pint because the pub does not have enough beer and runs it's business on the idea that no-one actually wants to drink a whole pint even though they have paid for it."

Complaining about contention is more like going to your pub, buying a pint, and spending all night sitting on the toilet reading a paper.

And then complaining about the facilities the next night when the bog is occupied by someone else doing exactly the same thing.

If the pub is capable of dealing well enough with most normal people's behaviour, with little more than the occasional wait, but things get awkward when there are more than a couple of people like you, don't blame the pub and say "But there should be one toilet per customer!!" especially when you know full well that that's not how pubs work, and you've probably known that for years.

US WMD report: Dirty bombs, chem weapons are bunk

david wilson

@Chemical Weapons are Bunk?

I take it your 'Al-Qaeda' in Iraq is actually 'Al-Qaeda in Iraq', the name used by some people in Iraq because it sounds scary, despite their not being obviously connected with Al-Qaeda (or at least, not before we turned up there).

I love your link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3070394/

ie 'Preliminary tests by a news organisation suggest there may have been ricin at a camp in Iraq.'

Well, I'm convinced by that - no need to hear about an official follow-up!

I love the way they reference the London 'ricin plot'. That was the one where within two days it was evident to the authorities that no traces of chemical or biological weapons had been found, yet they continued to misinform the public for their own purposes.

It's a good job no-one would dream of doing anything like that when it comes to Iraq, isn't it? That could get us into all kinds of trouble.

Designer pitches solar-powered AA battery

david wilson

Hmm.

I'd echo the earlier wonderings about capacity - it doesn't seem likely to be at all good compared to real AA cells.

Anyway, isn't it generally going to be much better from a materials and energy-saving point of view to have proper-sized grid-connected solar cells generating electricity whenever it's light, and then charge proper rechargeable cells from the mains?

Even somewhere off-grid, dividing the job of generating and storing power seems likely to have definite advantages for most people.

I could see *possible* applications, but they do seem pretty small niches, and they could already be covered by someone just carrying a regular small solar charger.

Oz men's mag recovers inflatable jubs

david wilson

To any cynics out there...

Of *course* they lost them, and then luckily found them just in time to send them out with their magazines after all the free publicity they generated.

Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers

david wilson

@Parax

>>"So your not posting regarding this article then?"

No, not if you think

"...just as I don't blame ISPs for invoking fair usage clauses and restricting the access of the heaviest users..."

has nothing to do with ISPs potentially throttling traffic of heavy users.

>>"Did we not establish that it costs the same for the hardware whether it was used or not."

You tried to use a seemingly inappropriate analogy, though it wasn't entirely clear precisely which part of the connection you were trying to apply it to.

It's clear that anywhere where there is contention, then less usage per user means more users can be accommodated for a given amount of bandwidth.

>>"'Limited Customers' are still customers they still use bandwidth, just because they are not 24/7 users doesn't mean there will be sufficent capacity at 7pm every evening."

Maybe not sufficient capacity for everyone to get maximum bandwidth, but then not everyone needs huge bandwidth if they're just doing a bit of browsing and email. For many people, somewhat slower *is* perfectly sufficient.

>>"It doesn't matter how much you use the problem is when you use it. if all 50 users on a 50:1 contention want to use at the same time the system fails irrespective of the total monthly amount, or what type of account they have."

Generally speaking, someone on a small limited plan is not only going to transfer less data than someone who needs an unlimited plan, but is also less likely to be trying to use their connection flat-out at any time of day. You can probably accommodate rather more of such people on a contended link before they see slowdown that affects them.

If the ISPs with 'unlimited' plans do have their own backhaul from the exchange, that seems to be a good thing all round, if it ends up with similar kinds of users sharing a given contended connection.

david wilson

Last Mile

>>"The problem lies in two places and both are firmly at the ISP's. The first problem is that the "last mile" link from ISPs to the customers site is shared between lots of other users in that area. Quite simply you can saturate the local last mile connection and affect lots of your neighbours. This is the same for DSL and Cable."

Is that really the 'Last Mile'?

I assumed the last mile was between the exchange and customer, where there's *no* contention.

I think you mean 'backhaul'.

>>"The whole idea of blaming another customer rather than the ISP who didn't spend enough on infrastructure is just plane wrong. Its like a restaurant selling an all you can eat lunch, running out of food half way through and pointing to the fat guy in the corner."

I think most of the noise comes from the equivalent of the fat guys complaining if the management quietly asks them not to eat many times what everyone else eats, or complaining when the restaurant doesn't want their custom anymore.

I think a better analogy would be going to a an all-you-can-eat restaurant and finding that everything *would* be fine, but there were a few fat guys hovering around the buffet troughing most of the food before anyone else could get to it.

I'm not sure anyone would *need* to point in that situation.

Eventually, either the fat guys have to go somewhere where they're paying the real cost of what they eat, or the restaurant stops doing all-you-can-eat, or puts a 'Don't take the piss' restriction on the deal.

I doubt even Be could manage to charge anything like their prices if all their customers were trying to use as much bandwidth as they could.

Which is probably why even *they* have an 'excessive use' clause in their fair and acceptable use conditions. After all, they'd be stupid not to have one.

david wilson

@Parax

>>"as opposed to - When you install a fibre, your installing hardware, and once its running, it doesn't cost the service provider any more if the laser blinks once or twice."

>>"Does it still sound strange?"

It still sounds like a bad comparison, because if I buy a router or a network cable for my own use, it doesn't impinge on anyone else if I use it 24/7 or not at all.

Where resources are being shared between multiple customers, it's a different situation.

>>"So why is it the users fault? inparticular say Bittorrnet users?"

I don't blame users for trying to maximise what they get from their ISP service, just as I don't blame ISPs for invoking fair usage clauses and restricting the access of the heaviest users.

I just wish people wouldn't go on about being misled long after the point when they're clearly not being misled any more, or saying "I have an unlimited deal [with fair usage small print] from ISP X, so that means I should be able to download continually at my full line speed" when they know perfectly well it doesn't mean that.

>> >>"most home broadband users aren't interested in and/or prepared to pay for unlimited uncontended access."

>>"Not Interested in? then why this article? They are interested when it doesn't work."

I respectfully draw your attention to the word 'most'.

>>"Yes you are correct, the limited plans are desigend for restricted use, although they all use at the peak time! somehow the capacity increases at peak? if not then the restriciton method is flawed/daft."

It's not *at all* daft if it costs the ISP less to have users who transfer less data.

Whether the ISP is itself charged per amount of data, or whether they have paid for a pipe of fixed bandwidth which they can use as much or as little of as they want, they can clearly support more small users than big ones for the same outlay on bandwidth.

>>"50:1 contention should never be sold unlimited! "

Maybe it should never *have* been sold unlimited.

The problem at the moment is that given enough people around who'd choose an "unlimited" package over a competing fixed-limit one, even if they end up using way less than the limit on the fixed plan, lots of companies might be reluctant to stop selling "unlimited" packages.

It rather needs a concerted push from Ofcom to get everyone to change at the same time, but that doesn't seem likely to happen - didn't they decide years ago that 'they thought unlimited' was OK to use as a description?

david wilson

@Parax

>>"When was the last time you bought a router based on the volume of data and not the speed of the network?

Strange argument there - when you buy a router, you're buying hardware, and once you've bought it, it doesn't cost the manufacturer any more if you use it all day, or for an hour a month.

>>"my guess is you never did! as its a silly metric with an infinite resouce such as data. With limited resources such as water, gas or electricity yes charge by the unit, but where the resource is unlimited it can only be defined by the capacity (speed) of the network not the amount of resource available"

The 'resource' you're paying for is use of [clearly physically limited] bandwidth. You're not paying anything for 'data', but for the transportation of data from one place to another.

>>"hence an ISP needs to have simultaneous capacity(speed) avaiable to provide however much data to all of its customers when they want it."

Most ISPs quite evidently *don't* need to have anything like that capacity, and it's pretty obvious that most home broadband users aren't interested in and/or prepared to pay for unlimited uncontended access.

For a start, there are all the people already on bandwidth-limited plans.

Then there are the people who have 'unlimited' plans, but aren't anywhere near making full use of them.

Then there are the people on unlimited plans who appreciate they aren't really unlimited, but try to get as much as they can without getting throttled, and who wouldn't likely pay more in order to get a truly unlimited service.

Then there are people on services that don't have a download cap, but which *still* rely on not everyone trying to use all their theoretical bandwidth all day, or all at the same time.

david wilson

@Wokstation

>>"If I pay for my road-tax, is there a limit to how many times I can drive up the motorway?"

I think if you'll find that if you spent all your time driving, road tax would be a small fraction of the tax you actually ended up paying in order to drive, so it's probably not a great analogy.

If you had to buy electricity at excess cost from your ISP to run your modem/router on, and even for an average user, that excess cost was much more per month than their connection charge, you'd have a better analogy.

In that situation, I don't think the ISP would care how much time you spent online.

david wilson

@Unlimited Usage = Unspecified Usage

>>"I guess what people are complaining about is just terminology; by calling it "unlimited usage" people have an expectation that they've paid for 24x7 multiplied by their theoretical connection speed, and anything less is a rip-off."

The thing is, it seems to be effectively the same people moaning over and over about ISPs being misleading, as if they aren't capable of modifying their expectations in the light of experience.

What are they, bleeding goldfish?

ISPs maybe *shouldn't* sell unlimited packages unless they are completely unlimited

Regulators *may* be useless, when it really should be them changing the allowed terminology.

However, the one thing that hardly any Reg readers can honestly complain about is being surprised that 'unlimited' != 'really unlimited'.

Even if someone has paid for 'unlimited', once they've realised that's not what they're going to get, if they keep paying for it, they can't really keep complaining, since they *know* it's not what they're going to get.

If something says "Great new taste!!" on the packet, and I buy it and think it tastes like shit, I don't keep buying it *and* keep complaining the labelling is misleading me.

Plod pioneers painless data collection

david wilson

@Sillyfellow

>>"but i wonder if.. when your name is entered for 'any' reason then when the data is uploaded, it gets added to the persons file in the new 'your-life-in-a-box' id database."

if you want to be paranoid, then you'd have to assume that whenever people's names are recorded *now*, because they fail the breath test, or they're involved in an accident, those names are *already* uploaded onto Big Brother's database, and rather sooner than sometime in the next month.

If you want to be paranoid, you'd additionally have to assume that whenever police stop a vehicle, they'd likely have already checked out the number plate (seeing if it's taxed/insured, stolen, registered to a known criminal, etc), and *that* check would have been recorded, so you'd be on Big Brother's database before you even get pulled over, assuming you're driving your own vehicle.

This new machine seems to change nothing.

Gov beta test for grid-friendly, carbon-saving smart fridges

david wilson

£2 per bill

Would seem to make sense given the figures, if the bills are quarterly ones.

New terror guidelines on photography

david wilson

@Winkypop

>>"Hitler and Stalin... would have creamed their fascist jeans if they had ever had this much power!"

*Sure* they would.

*They* just couldn't stop people taking pictures of anything they wanted.

If only they'd had some kind of police force, or maybe even some 'secret police', they might have been able to actually repress a few citizens.

Good job *they* never thought of doing anything like that.

Winky, exactly *which* breakfast cereal box did you learn your 20th century history from?

Not a large pack, I guess.

Nuke-nobbler raygun 747 in first full-power blast

david wilson

Radar target? (@AC 11:36)

Why would an infrared mirror be any better as a radar target than a regular metal missile casing?

Would radar running on centimetre/millimetre wavelengths care whether a surface is reflective and polished at IR wavelengths?

david wilson

Nice picture!

Who does their artwork - people moonlighting from doing pamphlet covers for the Jehovah's Witnesses?

Boss frogmarches bound employee to cop shop

david wilson

@Spezzer

>>"one minute the fuzz want us to shop em next minute theyre arresting us - what a bunch of dozy tossers!"

That only happens if in that minute you choose to act like a vigilante.

It does look like that the people most keen to jump to conclusions about what the police will or won't do are the people most keen to do something dumb to make their predictions come true.

I suppose that's *one* way to end up being right, but it doesn't seem like the smartest way.

david wilson

@Thomas Baker

>>"So quit it with your "They didn't know for sure he was guilty and blah..." - that describes pretty much every arrest in Britain."

However, marching someone through the streets with a sign round their neck happens in hardly any arrest in Britain. That's the whole point of the case.

>>"As a few people above have pointed out: What will these guys do next time? They'll just beat the snot out of a caught crim."

Then they'd *really* be up shit creek, especially if the crime involved isn't violent or particularly serious.

Where would *you* draw the line for a crime being large enough for a punishment beating that could easily result in disability or death?

Employee sneaking £50 from the till?

A bit of pilfering from the stationery cupboard?

Would it matter if there was just a belief someone was guilty, rather than proof?

The kind of person who'd happily beat the snot out of a nonviolent criminal seems likely to be the kind of person who'd be rather flexible when it comes to assessing necessary evidence.

>>"And even if they did come out, they'd find a way of punishing me more than the crim,"

Yeah - I've lost count of the times when someone calls 999 to report an intruder, and the police turn up and arrest the householder for doing nothing.

It happens so often that the liberal media from the Telegraph right through to the Mail have all decided not to bother reporting it any more.

Your platform analogy rather shows your level of thinking.

If you really can't see the numerous clear dividing lines between asking someone not to smoke and kicking the shit out of someone, you're exactly the type of person who shouldn't try taking the law into your own hands.

david wilson

@Sillyfellow

>>"the boss probably did this because he knew that if he just reported the crime, nothing would be done about it. at all. an officer would never have actually been assigned to the case."

Even if he *suspected* that, there was still nothing to stop him at least trying the police. No imminent danger of violence. No urgency.

Instead, he did something that was likely to make the police less interested in pursuing the original crime than they might otherwise have been.

david wilson

@Tom

>>"It sounds to me like he only took it upon himself to be the Police - he just effectively arrested him and took him to the Police station,"

AFAIK, the police aren't allowed to march *suspects* through the street with signs round their necks, and citizens generally have less right to do things to people and get away with it than the police.

Since it was deeply predictable that police would at least have to investigate any complaint from the suspect, it's clear that there was no way the manager was saving them work, but was, at best, wasting some of their time, and doing so in a way that had at least a possibility of reducing the punishment the suspect eventually received.

I'd imagine one significant reason for the police frowning on actions such as this is that there's always a chance that some passing citizen decides to have a go at the suspect. With a more serious crime, it wouldn't be at all hard for a situation to get out of control, and that would all ultimately fall at the feet of the person who decided they'd rather go out of their way to not bother calling the police.

One of the main reasons for having a justice system in the first place is to try and avoid people taking the law into their own hands, not least because the people most eager to do that are often the ones most likely to overdo it.

Sky mulls PVR software rollback

david wilson
Go

@Not just DIY Sky+ boxes

>>"t is not just the DIY modded boxes that have been affected, those which have the original disk as supplied by Sky have also been affected."

>>"In typical Sky fashion, they have ignored the full facts and acknowledge only what they perceive to be the issue."

Funny, I thought that in the quoted statement they actually said:

>>"..it appears that in the vast majority of cases the boxes concerned have had their hard disk drive changed for a non-standard component."

Which I took to mean that they were acknowledging that some unmodded boxes *were* affected.

Maybe only a fraction of unmodded boxes were affected.

Maybe modders are more likely to notice, and complain early and often.

Maybe Sky *were* putting a bit of anti-mod spin on the real figures.

And as for the conspiracy angle, it's hard to see what would be the point of breaking modded boxes. Even if secrecy was guaranteed (unlikely) Pace and Sky would seem likely to lose a fair bit and gain nothing obvious.

Axl Rose may have undermined own case over Dr Pepper stunt

david wilson

Prune-flavoured?

The one time I was unfortunate enough to try it, it seemed more like someone had dissolved essence of synthetic marzipan in cheap cola.

British pilots ramp up opposition to ID cards

david wilson

@Mark

>>"No, you don't need to re-create the fingerprints. All you need are fingerprints that have the same hash value."

If you re-read the relevant post, you'll see that the context of what I was talking about was Chris C's concerns about being framed by someone recreating his fingerprints from stored information and planting them at a crime scene.

For that, you'd need more than prints which generate comparable numbers in a scanner, unless the crime scene was one where the perp happened to stop to scan their fingerprints in a convenient scanner.

>>"John Prescott had much more liquidity than the pensioners. He was supposed to be one of the people making these laws and so should be held to them even more stringently. And being in a position of power, failure should have been more severe."

Again you seem to be entirely missing the point, and trying to compare chalk and cheese.

On the one hand, you have people who are making a stand, with the intention of ultimately going to prison to make their point and gain publicity.

On the other hand, you have a situation where it is claimed there was a misunderstanding, and there was at least legitimate *room* for misunderstanding - payments were handled by officials, council tax payments carried on as they had with the previous (Conservative) resident when in fact they shouldn't have done, etc.

I suppose Prescott may just be one of those deeply unusual people who would assume, if they were paying a slice of their salary to the government in order to live in a government residence, that if there were Council Tax for them to pay, at some point, a bill would arrive with their name on it.

It would be hard to make a convincing case that Prescott was actually trying to get out of paying anything, so it seems to make no sense to compare his case to one where people are, even with possibly the best intentions, openly and repeatedly refusing to pay a tax in full knowledge of the consequences.

Whether Prescott had more money than someone else might be relevant as an exaggerating factor if the situations were effectively the same, but they're evidently nothing like the same, except to someone who's determined to ignore the numerous obvious differences in order to persist with a dumb comparison they really want to make.

david wilson

@Chris C

Really, the more paranoid worries do seem to risk diverting attention away from more realistic concerns - who's going to have access to information about where an individual has been and what they've done, what protections would there be for vulnerable people, how much is the system going to cost, how late/overbudget is it going to be, etc

david wilson

@Chris C

>>"Don't you see the problem here? "The System" says you're logged in in the States and in the UK. Which is the real you, and how do you prove it? YOU know you're you. But how do you PROVE that you're you?"

Well, unless someone has *changed* my picture in the system, I look like me, I know much more personal information about me, I know hundreds of normal trustworthy people who can testify as to who I am. I have the keys to my residence and registered vehicle, the codes to my bank accounts, etc.

On the other hand, the person pretending to be me is stuffed, if the system identifies the duplication quickly enough for them to be caught, and it's unlikely to be worth their while trying to bluff their way out of the situation

It doesn't seem like a setup where there's actually much mileage in impersonating someone.

>>"As for people being able to frame you for a crime nowadays, yes, it can happen now. But do we really need to make it easier? If somebody wants my fingerprints, they need to be physically close to me at some point. Once my fingerprints go into a government computer system, they're accessible everywhere in the world. And then I get picked up for a crime in Seattle when I've never even ventured further than New York (or, for the UK readers, you'd get picked up for a crime in Scotland when you've never ventured outside Ireland). Someone like me, who's self-employed and lives alone, doesn't have the pleasure of an alibi 24/7, so I have no way to prove that I wasn't in Seattle."

First, you're assuming that fake fingerprints can be recreated from the stored data which would pass the most stringent examination (which is by no means certain).

Secondly, if someone's trying to frame you for a crime, they need to be fairly confident that you won't have an alibi (ie you won't use your ID card, you won't phone anyone, meet anyone, etc)

Doing that without keeping you under surveillance would be hard, and someone who was bothered enough to put you under surveillance could likely already collect sufficient evidence to frame you.

A *distant* framing seems even harder to pull off, since someone would need to know that you were lacking any kind of alibi for a substantial period of time, and hope that a complete lack of record of you travelling to the crime scene wouldn't be seen as a problem.

If anything, the quicker a fingerprint match can be done after a crime, the easier it should be for someone to provide an alibi, since even people they met briefly are likely to be more confident about times, etc. If someone was going to frame me, I'd rather the police were knocking on my door the next day than 6 months later when the people framing me give them a tip-off.

And as I said, if someone hates me enough to go to that trouble, they can already frame me or have me harmed or killed. Biometric ID cards don''t seem likely to make a significant difference in how easy it is to frame someone.

So yes, I think you are being paranoid about that aspect of ID cards.

>>"Remember, "identity" is nothing more than bits in a computer. So far we've only looked at it from the perspective of the database getting cracked and people's data being exposed. What about the far more serious problem of the database getting cracked and data being changed? Suddenly your ID card doesn't match the database. In fact, your data can't be found anywhere in the database. Therefore, you must be a terrorist."

So you're assuming that someone can make changes to the database (which is likely stored in multiple locations) without the dates of those changes being recorded.

Even if that's possible, the very first time that it's noticed (as when someone with a whole host of people who can vouch for their identity gets stopped for using has a non-forged card that matches them but doesn't match the database), various alarm bells would start ringing, and a 'stop!' would be issued for the person matching the changed data, who won't be able to prove they are who they say they are when they're detained.

And don't forget, the authorities don't need to be *convinced* the real person is who they and their witnesses say they are, they only need to think there's a possibility that some change may have happened to the database to justify flagging the database identity as suspicious while they wait for the backups of the database to be checked to see if/when changes were made.

It's basically the same situation as if someone's using duplicate ID - unless they know the person they're impersonating isn't going to screw things up by using their own ID, they're likely to get detected sooner rather than later. The best defence against successful impersonation is to use ID frequently.

In any case, if a suspected terrorist has their fingerprints, etc on a watch-list, unless they can wipe their own data from the system, if their prints are scanned, they could still get matched to their real identity. If they had the ability to wipe their own data from the system, maybe they'd have the ability to remove the 'suspected terrorist' label and just use their own ID without problems, and not need to bother impersonating anyone.

For a terrorist, it's going to be much easier to recruit and use people who don't have a record, and who can use their own, valid ID, so that's what they'll probably do.

In other words, having ID cards doesn't seem likely to make their job easier, since their way round ID cards is the same as their current way round having people stopped via normal passport checks - use people without a record.

The main difference would seem to be that once a suspect's details were flagged on the system, it would be harder for them to pretend to be someone else by just getting a new passport, since their biometrics would keep matching their old identity as well.

david wilson

@re: not again please / AC

FFS, they're not talking about euthanising the pilots, just giving them an ID card

Many European countries seem to have ID (either voluntary or compulsory to carry), and seem to somehow manage to avoid the urge to go round stuffing their citizens into the nearest oven.

What's so special about the UK?

david wilson

@Mark

>>"Remember John Presscott got done for missing out on his council tax payments but because he wasn't a pensioner, he remained unarrested."

I rather thought that the handful of pensioners who do get arrested generally *could* pay, but persistently choose to refuse to pay to make a (possibly quite valid) point.

A point which rather requires that they are arrested.

Indeed, some seem quite cheesed-off when someone pays their bill and they get released.

I thought with Prescott, the situation was rather different. The tax was paid by the Government when it should have been paid by him, and [supposedly], when he found out, he paid the government back even though technically he didn't have to.

david wilson

@Chris C

>>"First, I'm not convinced that every single person in the world does have unique fingerprints, and (if I"m wrong on that point), I'm certainly not convinced that the various biometric capture devices capture fingerprints in a way that will guarantee no false-positives. Claiming that fingerprints are unique is one thing; taking 32 points of a fingerprint and claiming that those 32 points are unique is something else entirely, especially when you consider 32 points is 2^32 which is 4,294,967,296. Unfortunately, we have more than that number of people on the planet. So if a fingerprint reader only uses a 32-bit hash, it is guaranteed to have at least one false-positive."

is it *really* only a case of a single 32-bit hash value?

I thought with fingerprints (at least done manually) it was a case of marking the location of significant features (junctions, etc), and then using those locations to compare prints - seeing if the same features appeared in basically the same relative positions. That seems like a fair amount of data if distances are stored with accuracy.

Indeed, it seems like smart cards storage for fingerprints is typically in the range of hundreds to thousands of bytes.

http://www.biometrie-online.net/dossiers/generalites/Smart_Cards_Biometric_FAQ.pdf

reckons 300-1200bytes

http://www.smartcard.co.uk/articles/finger_on_the_pulse_of_identity.htm

"typical template rates are currently 4-20Kb for face recognition, 2-4 Kb for fingerprint..."

etc.

Possibly there's some way to use a small hash for speeding up *searches*, but not for the actual *comparison*.

>>"My second problem is the abuse of this. When you have a database of everyone's biometric data, it becomes trivial to make replicas of that data and plant it at the scene of a crime, thereby implicating someone who's innocent (but their fingerprints are all over the place, so they're obviously lying). And given our governments' (US and UK) attention to security and their ability to secure their computer systems against attackers..."

Of course, it's not like it's possible to frame anyone *now*, by planting an item with fingerprints or DNA on at a crime scene, or tampering with evidence before forensic analysis.

If someone wanted to frame me, even *if* they could recreate a passable fingerprint from the stored data, they'd still need to put me under human surveillance to make sure I wasn't establishing a fantastic alibi for myself with my ID card at the time of the crime.

Someone who was prepared to do that could probably get enough evidence to frame me now if they really wanted, unless I'm going to burn all the tissues I blow my nose on, rather than having them end up in the garbage, and wipe clean all the glasses I drink from in the pub, to avoid the possibility of someone picking one up and taking it away to plant somewhere with my prints/saliva on.

Basically, if someone *really* wanted to frame someone, they already could.

However, most criminals who want to hurt someone just do it directly, or pay someone else to do it. They don't sit in a swivel chair stroking a cat and plotting overly elaborate revenges.

>>"And the third problem, which we always come back to, is that YOU CANNOT REPLACE YOUR BIOMETRIC DATA!! Once your data is compromised (not if, but when), there is literally no way to change it. That's it, game over. Sure, you can use acid to burn off your fingerprints and possibly etch a new design into your iris, but you're never going to change your DNA."

But if the biometric data is only used to identify a *person*, it's rather harder to duplicate, at least when checking the biometrics is done anywhere that's staffed. Someone actually has to wear fake fingerprints, or fake-iris contact lenses or suchlike (could a fake iris even work, since it wouldn't change shape properly as the pupil altered size in response to light?)

In fact, for all the serious downsides, in a highly connected techno-Big Brother state, one problem for an identity fraudster is the risk of them trying to be you in one place while you're busy being you somewhere else. The more often you use an ID card, the riskier it is for someone to try and use a copy of it.

Even a rather dumb system should be able to spot impossible multiple uses and trigger an alert.

If someone has my fingerprints, they'd have to be rather dumb to, for example, use them to make fake prints and board a flight, since even if they weren't caught out trying to fake their way past a scanner, what would happen if I decided to use my ID here when I'm already logged in The System as being on my way to the States?

david wilson

@Luther Blissett

>>"But religion is deprecated in Whacky Jacqui's circle of materialists"

That'll be this Jacqui Smith?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2001690.ece

"Miss Smith has congratulated the Church of England on the increasing number of Church Schools"

Of course, maybe she's just sucking-up, but she doesn't exactly seem like secularism's dream girl.

And WTF does materialism or religion have to do with ID cards anyway (except, that is, for the people whacked -out enough to take Revelation seriously)?

BNP races to get membership list off the net

david wilson

@Frederick Karno

>>"On a historical note : The Nazi party in Germany were actually socialist but then again i have never been able to tell the difference between Nazi ,Fascist and Communist the outcome for joe public was just the same......"

I think one difference is that Communists generally try to have the state take businesses over even in peacetime.

Though once they got full control, a fair amount of their time in power was in a war situation, where businesses in *any* country tend to be told what to make, in Nazi Germany, it was still private businesses making the products, and Adolf's rise to power was funded to a large extent by big business.

david wilson

@AC

>>"And it's good to see that in reality there are hardly any BNP idiots in Scotland."

Is that really surprising?

Such idiots as do exist North of the border will just be a slightly different kind of idiot.

Nationalists in Scotland (and people who just want to blame someone else for any problems) are likely to draw their boundaries rather closer, and probably won't join an organisation with 'British' in the title.

BNP membership list leaks online

david wilson

@Rasczak

>>"There are a lot of job application forms these days that ask for what you believe your ethnic origin to be. This is usually claimed to be to ensure that diversity is recognised. My take is if you don't know the ethnic origin you cannot be biased by it so why the need to ask other than so as to appear politically correct"

I'd have thought the main reason offered for the information being on a form would be so that statistics could be produced on the successes or otherwise of people in various groups.

It always looks better if someone can give figures if asked about the success rates of various groups, rather than just saying "No idea".

Whether someone puts an ethnic origin on a form or not, chances are that it'll be fairly obvious at interview, at least when it comes to the people most likely to be discriminated against.

Not having the box on the form isn't that likely to help anyone get a job.

Also, if anyone is doing pre-interview screening and wanted to prune out at least some non-Caucasians, they could make a fair stab just by looking at people's names. It's probably not unknown for that to happen to some extent without people even thinking about it.

david wilson

@Rasczak

>>"Think about how you would feel if you were one of those who applied, the jobs were given to the 50 best from each group just to keep quotas right, you were the 51st best person in your group and you were better suited to the job than the best person from the other group."

That's a fairly extreme situation, where out of 200 applicants, not one of the women were in the top 50.

Practically speaking, when there's bulk recruitment going on, it's generally not for jobs requiring much prior experience, and it's not easy to get any kind of accurate ranking of likely performance, since the chances are that everyone employed will be learning the job for some time, and it's hard to predict how different people will learn.

For that situation, one of the best methods seems to be to set some basic threshold of aptitude, and if more people pass than you have jobs for, recruit from various groups of applicants in proportion to how many people pass that threshold. That way, the odds of anyone who passed the threshold getting a job would be the same whatever group they were in, and whoever is doing the selection within a group doesn't have to worry about accusations of bias.

david wilson

@Pure hypocricy

>>"Incidently, no one here has called for an outing of illegal organisations - funny that."

Assuming an illegal organisation had a membership list, if it was illegal to be a member, why would anyone bother 'outing' them, rather than just handing the list over to the police?

Auntie Beeb's amazing, evolving, ID card stories

david wilson

CCTV == human equivalent of ANPR???

Despite what various ACs might want to think, recognising a face is rather harder than recognising a number plate

That's true even if you have a decent-quality image, and looking at the CCTV images that are released when the police are actually looking for someone, it's fairly safe to say that the large bulk of existing CCTV images wouldn't be much use.

I assume that none of the people who want to think Big Brother is watching them carry a mobile phone or use a credit card?

Police poison speed debate with fuzzy figures

david wilson

@Steve

>>David Wilson, do you work for the DfT?"

Nope.

Not now, or in the past, or for any related organisation, camera partnership, etc, or in any paid or otherwise job anything to do with transport or road safety (or climate change, for that matter), or via any more tenuous connection you could dream up.

>>"Granted there must be many ‘David Wilsons’ in the world, but the numerous coincidences makes it is very difficult to believe this is merely an amazing fluke !!"

No doubt you'll continue to believe whatever you want.

However, hardly an 'amazing fluke'. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that for someone looking for an anonymous name slightly less obvious than 'John Smith', it'd be hard to do much better.

And IIRC, the only things I read and linked to were things that came up very early on Google with whatever obvious search terms I threw in.

>>"Furthermore, I was genuinely taken aback with your unusual level of knowledge of the Four Year Report - this amount of knowledge would be very much appropriate for a DfT road accident statistics manager."

That's deeply flattering, though I'm not sure how it squares with what I said last week.

Had I actually been any kind of expert, even with only a fraction of my faculties working (as is currently the case, only more so), I'd hardly have asked what the difference between the two tables was, would I?

Equally, if I was some DfT statistician sneaking out to do some background supporting of work I was involved in, how likely would I be to use my own name?

All I did was skim the report and look at the table you pointed my to, and then look a bit more at a few sections. If I could do that in the state I was in, I imagine most Register readers could do at least as well.

Finally, if I was a senior DfT statistician, don't you think I'd know what the speeding conviction / accident risk correlation was, and be able to produce it if it was useful, or have not mentioned it in the first place if it wasn't?

>>"Jeepers creepers! Are you being serious? You are the only person I know who has interpreted such claims in such a nonsensical manner (and I’ve argued this with a lot of people). For you to make such an interpretation would require the assumption that all such reduction claims are factoring RTTM, and always were even before any RTTM study had been done, let alone quantified; that is of course just silly!"

Steve, Steve, Steve.

Just stop and look at what I was effectively saying:

The average person, not caring or thinking or even *knowing* about RTTM, trends, etc, if told that fixed cameras cut accidents at their sites by X% might well be expected to think of that as "X% compared to if there hadn't been a camera there"

That's an entirely natural, intuitive approach - that to measure the effectiveness of doing something, it's best to compare it to not doing that thing, over the same time period.

If no-one you've talked to has ever suggested that to you before, you really should try arguing weith some more challenging people.

Or just stop and wonder what table H8 was *for*.

Or just admit that your '5:1 exaggeration' is itself rather a twisting of reality, and abandon it - you can't honestly claim the moral high ground compared to people jumping on the most positive looking number if you're doing the same thing in the other direction.

It doesn't matter that the average person knows nothing about RTTM, trends, etc, because they'll just think that whoever worked out the numbers *had* somehow been able to work out what the accident rate would have been if cameras hadn't been there, which does rather seem to be what was done for table H8.

>>"I won't be surprised if you don't even try to reply before this forum closes."

I'm sorry to disappoint you (again).

I just thought it was extending a courtesy to point out I would be away for some days, and that I might not be in a position to reply to anything you subsequently wrote.

Obviously, you chose to read that, and then write in such a way that if I didn't reply, you could come away feeling like you'd scored another point.

I'm surprised you feel you need such small victories.

However, I'll give you another bite at the cherry, if it means so much to you.

I'm still feeling like crap, you seem determined to take a thickly extreme view of pretty much everything I write, and I doubt I can be *bothered* to reply to anything else you come up with

Feel free to make what smug capital you want out of that.

I honestly couldn't give a flying ****, especially as there's probably no-one reading this now apart from me and you.

david wilson

@Steve

With the whole 85th percentile thing, I think there's room for confusion, thinking that there's some magical 'optimum speed' for a road is the speed the 85th percentile driver would drive at.

Even if a driver driving at the 85th percentile speed on an unregulated road has the least accidents, that can easily be substantially due to their relative position in the speed distribution, rather than their absolute speed.

They're less likely to be hit from behind than a slow driver. They don't have the danger of being the fastest vehicle on the road. They're probably not in a slow or awkward vehicle. They're probably not a desperately nervous driver, etc

All those factors still apply even when there is a limit, and a naturally safe driver could easily choose to drive at a 'safe' position in the new speed distribution. The distribution shape will change due to the effect of the speed limit, but there will still be some speeds that are/feel safer than others, likely slower than before, and one would hope that those speeds are generally unlikely to attract a ticket.

Someone who felt impelled to carry on at the speed they would do if there wasn't a limit even when other drivers slowed down *and* who wasn't capable of noticing cameras seems a fairly unlikely candidate for 'best driver on the road'.

>>"Table H7 gives the absolute drops (percentage changes in FSCs); H8 gives relative portions of the drops (relative to what would have been expected had the camera not been installed); for example, for a 50% reduction of KSI at a site, a 10% absolute drop would translate to a 20% portion of the drop. Now that you understand, you can now answer my question."

Thanks for clearing that up - I've got as bit of a flu brain at the moment.

Actually, I honestly think many people would probably look on the H8 figures as more intuitively useful.

If you're talking percentages, it makes much more sense to calculate the value of a camera relative to what [you estimate] would have happened if it hadn't been there, rather than relative to the past, and that approach gives fixed cameras a 23.5% reduction in FSCs and mobile cameras 17.6%

But even taking the figures from H7, it's clear that there's a great difference between fixed and mobile cameras. Looking at fixed cameras, the difference between corrected and uncorrected figures is a factor of under 3, and looking at the mobiles, it's about a factor of 6.

In fact, if you're really looking at *public perception*, if someone announced the accident rate at fixed camera sites fell by 45% (from H7), and didn't make any clarification, I think most people would think of that as 'compared to if nothing had been done'. For that person, the 23.5% figure (from H8) would best fit what they were thinking.

It would still mean that there was an exaggeration, which isn't good, but one of just under 2:1 rather than over 5:1.

For mobile cameras, the equivalent factor would be just over 3:1

So, no, I don't think the many people *are* being misled by a factor of more than 5 about effectiveness, even when uncorrected figures are stated or subsequently reported without clarification. However, that's not to say smaller exaggerations or misreportings are good.

And as I said, *I don't know* what other people base their decisions on, except they're likely not the same things with the same weightings that I'd choose.

It's perfectly possible for someone to read the whole report and conclude that cameras are worth having, and presumably at least some people at the camera partnerships will have done that. For someone not set against cameras on principle, the report doesn't seem particularly likely to change their mind.

Anyway, I'm now off for a few days, and comments may well have closed by the time I get back.

david wilson

@Steve

>>"You seem to be incorrectly asserting that I assume that everyone will always ignore the limit."

Because that's precisely what you were doing, by saying that if a limit was set such that the limit+threshold was at all below the speed some people would drive if there wasn't a limit, those people would end up with speeding convictions.

Now, it's obvious that people already driving below a limit aren't likely to get caught by it, but of the people who would drive faster than the limit on an unrestricted road, I'd wonder if the 'safe' drivers might be rather more likely to drop their speed a fraction and avoid speeding convictions than the fastest 'dangerous' drivers would be to drop their speed a lot.

If there was someone who would normally drive at 75mph on an unrestricted road, surely it wouldn't be at all hard to drop to ~68 when a 60 limit came in? In fact, if a person got wound up to the point of distraction by not being able to go precisely as fast as they wanted, I'd wonder how likely it would be that they're actually one of the safe drivers, rather than one of the larger number of drivers who *think* they're safe.

However annoying it may be for the 'safe' driver, the limits are actually there for the benefit of everyone, not just to annoy them.

As I said, what seems to be a safe speed for the best drivers to drive at *might* be a useful starting point when considering limits, since it does at least indicate silly speeds for an empty road, though it doesn't really require some kind of survey of speed distributions to find that out, just a few sensible drivers to drive on the road when it's empty.

However, if the limit is there for safety reasons, it's the effect of various limits on the people likely to have accidents which seem much more relevant.

I assume there'd be a significant divide between single and multiple-carriageway roads in terms of what effect limits have on accidents, possibly to the extent that they need treating entirely differently, with figures from one not much applicable to the other?

>>"Do you really think the pro-camera lobby would have been so vocal in their support for cameras if their effectiveness were reported as “speed cameras reduce casualties by less than 10%"

I don't know what motivates other people - some may believe the most optimistic figures, some may think *any* reduction in casualties is worth the cost, some may be fixated on speed to the extent that they think it's the only thing worth bothering about, some may have some personal history that influences their judgement, some may have some other personal interest.

>>"Do you agree that the claims of speed camera effectiveness is greatly exaggerated?

(exaggerated by at least a factor of 5) [please read the Four Year Report if need be]"

It's certainly true that some people pick up on and promote the larger figures, though how much of that is down to people bending the truth for their own ends, and how much down to journalists snatching the first figure they hear, and then people regurgitating what they read, I wouldn't know.

Looking at tables H7 and H8, It's not immediately obvious why the figures in them for the scheme effect are so different - if the EB method in H8 works and the RTM effects in H7 are calculated correctly, the figures would possibly be closer.

Possibly that's down to the EB method not being perfect, or to RTM being overestimated (as discussed on page 58)

Is the FSC reduction for both fixed and mobiles really around 10%, or around 19%, or somewhere else? Without knowing that, it'd be hard to say whether there was a factor of five, or less than three.

Also, bear in mind those figures were from a subset of cameras, in urban areas, and typically 30mph roads. How much of a guide that is to cameras generally, I wouldn't pretend to know.

Results on faster roads could be better or worse, possibly by a large margin, not least since the types and severities of accidents on faster roads are likely to be rather different from those on urban roads.

>>"do you agree that if the claims of speed camera effectiveness were not exaggerated, we could instead have had a different, and perhaps a more effective, road safety policy?"

I agree that we could do better than we are doing, but we could have done better than we did before we had any cameras.

Just as some people might use cameras as an excuse to not do anything else (perceiving that there's not widespread public demand for doing anything that costs significant money?), other people might blame cameras for everything that isn't happening, as if all cameras disappearing overnight would return us to some golden age where all the right things were done.

david wilson

@Steve

>>"No such assumption is made or necessary; in fact I disagree with your statement – we can see that most drivers do indeed slow down when limits are ratcheted down. Likewise, we can expect drivers to go faster if a limit, which has been set too low, is removed."

But you're completely missing the point I was making about being illogical.

You said that on an unrestricted road, the drivers around the 85th percentile had least accidents, and you also claimed that if speed limits were introduced that were lower than the speed those drivers would drive at on an unrestricted road, they'd end up with a disproportionate number of speeding convictions, but that would only be true if they completely ignored the limits, which they wouldn't do.

>>"Also, it could be that they would have more accidents if they were forced outside their envelope of natural behaviour, resulting with frustration and elevated risk unpredictability and hence poor manoeuvres."

That's certainly possible. I'm sure there are potential confounding factors in all directions.

However, the only point I was trying to make is that it isn't that there's some magical optimum 'safest' speed for a road that can be divined by looking at how people drive when there's no limit.

In fact, if a limit is being set on safety grounds, it's the effect that different possible limits might have on the *overall* accident rate that should be important in selecting the limit, and it may be that the speed the safest drivers would otherwise drive at isn't the best guide, even if it might be a useful starting point.

david wilson

@Mark

>>"That only serves to prove my point doesn’t it! Public demand, or whatever else is driving the priorities, has been wrong-footed by the fanciful claims coming from the PR staff of the partnerships. Even public demand would have been significantly different if the effectiveness of cameras were not wildly overstated."

I think there's a bigger picture. When it comes to policing, traffic policing has never been much of a vote winner. I doubt that speed cameras have changed that to any great extent, it's more a case of priorities for policing being set based on [perceived] public concerns that have nothing to do with speed cameras *or* traffic police.

It'd make more sense to blame the government for trying to pander too much to public/media opinion, and not doing what governments should do, which is try and look at things sensibly and do some things that are right even if they're not obvious vote-winners.

I'd suspect that many of the papers with a definite dislike of speed cameras would be the same ones arguing for more attention to non-traffic areas of policing, and if the issue of traffic police numbers was raised, might not have much of an opinion, unless they saw the issue as one which they could pick up briefly to attack the government with.

The real problem seems to be that there are so many people arguing against cameras basically because they want to drive however they feel like driving that that does tend to swamp out more reasoned arguments of people actually concerned about road safety.

>>"Oh please, they don’t need to conspire. Once one does it, all will have to follow suit in order to compete; hence the one that did it first will initially rake it in but then will eventually lose out when the customer base re-disperses when the others match. See the fuel price wars for example! This is really obvious business practice."

Whether or not that could happen, it still doesn't affect the basic question of whether people with speeding convictions are more or less likely than the average driver to be in a serious accident.

That's what I'd be interested to know, *however* the figures fall.

>>"We know the safest drivers are those who would choose to drive at the 85th percentile speed (without a limit in place); "

>>"Hence it follows that setting limits to anything less than 80th percentile speeds would see the safest drivers with disproportionately higher than average convictions. I’m sure we can all think of many enforced roads which fall into that category."

Taking your figures as read, that's still completely illogical.

It assumes that if you had an unrestricted road and put a limit on it, whatever the limit was, everyone would drive exactly as they had done before, when in fact a great many people wouldn't, even without the prospect of likely enforcement.

Take your safe driver, and put them back on the same road after a limit is in place, and tell them that the limit doesn't apply to them, and see if their new speed is the same as before. Unless the road is empty, or a dual carriageway with little traffic, they'd probably end up driving slower even without the threat of prosecution, simply from the speed of the other traffic, since the distribution of everyone else's speed will affect what speeds seem safe.

Even in the unrestricted example, it's obviously not that the 85th percentile speed is *the* safest speed *for the road*, but that the people who choose to drive at that speed when the road is unrestricted tend to have least accidents.

It could still be that even on the unrestricted road, they'd have less accidents if *they* drove slower, because they happen to be a generally better driver (or in an easier-to-control vehicle) than the people who would naturally choose a slower speed.

david wilson

@Mark

>>"No, your forward speed can be overlooked because

>>"a) You're distracted.

>>b) Unless you check, the difference in 25mph and 35mph is most noticeable when other traffic is going at one speed or the other

But you were talking about your speed being dictated by people *following* you, to the extent you might not have much idea what speed you were going at.

Looking at other traffic isn't *that* much of a guide unless you know what speed they're going at

david wilson

@Steve

>>"No. A decision has to have been made not to provide them; hence the real issue is the factors that were driving the decision not to provide them, factors such as perceived effectiveness of other measures."

If the drop is, as it would seem to be, down to a lack or prioritising traffic policing over other types of policing, that seems rather more likely to be down to priorities being set at what the government perceives as being driven by public demand, or at least newspaper interest - such as violent crime, etc

>>"No. The insurance companies are businesses; they do what they can to maximise profits. They’ll use any excuse to rack up premiums, such as ‘speed kills’."

So they're all conspiring together and deciding premiums in a way unrelated to the actuarial risk, with no-one tempted to break ranks and mop up some easy business?

There either is a positive correlation between having speeding convictions and an increased risk of future accident or there isn't.

Either way, it'd be interesting to know what the figures really are.

Beeb cans TOTP Xmas special

david wilson

@Les Matthew

I *think* he's the guy with the whiny voice who was on Have I Got News For You once and managed to be less funny than the average non-comic guest, though he did seem to laugh at his own 'jokes' quite a bit, probably to cover the silence.