Posts by Ian

A-Level figures hint at physics recovery

In "the" field?

I'm not sure what field you're referring to with the following:

"What is the point in kids A-Level physics when physics graduates can't get work in the field (my brother who has an MPhys being a case in point)."

Physics doesn't fit into just one neat little field, it's used from everything from engineering to space exploration to games programming so it's hard to know what this mystical field you're talking about is.

As a mathematician and a computer scientist I see this a lot, many people go through school, a-levels, degrees and get their qualification in maths then ask what to do with it, being unable to find anything listed in the job paper saying "Mathematician" then then cry that maths is useless and was pointless studying. This is absolutely the wrong way to go about maths and physics, it's not like say, IT where you go get your IT degree and work in IT any old place, because IT is the same, you instead have to look first at the industry you wish to work in and then realise for yourself how math is applied there and then you can find the jobs.

Want to work in the fashion industry? They need mathematicians to carry out statistical studies as to how big a size medium should be to be able to fit the average person. Want to work in the finance sector? Plenty of math use there. How about the defence industry? Again, no shortage of requirements for people skilled in number theory to be used in encryption, or maths with mechanics to calculate how various subsystems in a product are going to work.

The fact is, not everything is handed for you on a plate when you follow the GCSE -> A-Level -> Degree drone-route, sometimes you actually have to figure out for yourself what you're doing with your life, with your qualifications and put some effort into pursuing it.

What irks me the most about it all is that some people are clever enough to complete a math/physics degree to a high level but too dumb to even know what they're actually going to do with it. What an absolutely horrible waste of what could otherwise be an intelligent person, perhaps alongside majors in physics we need to begin to add in some minor classes in motivation and common sense.

Total world Wii sales close in on Xbox 360 tally

Site is full of crap

The 360 broke the 10.4million barrier back in May, they've been consistently shipping just short of 200,000 units in the US every month since then and likely plenty in Europe with only Japan adding little to that figure.

I'd be intrigued to know what retailers VG Chartz uses for it's "extremely accurate" data, because according to it the 360 has actually had negative sales in the last 3 months in that they've quoted just below the 10.4mill figure that was hit at the end of May. More realistically though the 10.4mill was a rounding up from the 10.32mill they quote, however let's face it it's still rather idiotic to suggest the 360 has sold no units in the last 3 months when sales figures show it as shifting an extra .2mill each month since.

This isn't to shun the Wii of course, it really is closing in on the 360 tally - I don't think there's any question of that, but let's take it from other sites than VG Chartz shall we? Seeing as it seems to have a certain bias in that it's included recent sales for Sony and Nintendo, but refused to acknowledge any sales whatsoever of the 360 in the last 3 months I think we can safely ignore it. I'd assume this is why they use the disclaimer that their figures are gathered from most recently released stats OR retailers in that it's most recently released stats for Microsoft and retailers for the PS3 and Wii putting a rather large discrepancy in their figures and a large shadow over their technique.

Microsoft cuts Xbox 360 prices

MS doesn't care about Europe? er...

So you complain about MS' contempt for Europe but then tell us you'll instead buy a PS3 from the company that released their console here 5months later than the US, costs an even bigger proportional difference here than the US and that gave us the PS3 with ever more gimped backwards compatibility than the US?

As it stands the 360 costs far less than the PS3, has a far greater range of current and upcoming games and has a vastly better online service. Not to mention that there's more people playing on XBox live than there are PS3 owners altogether.

Complaining about MS hating Europe then jumping to Sony is laughable at best.

Sony faces case for 'Cell' patent infringement

Not a patent troll.

Patent trolls are companies that register/steal/buy patents with the sole intention of using them to sue, without actually having any product based on the patent.

This company does actually have real, tangible products which are indeed of the same architecture as the patents they own. If Sony (and it's cell friends) has actually infringed on this patent with the Cell processor then the company does have a legitimate claim because Sony is essentially profiting of a patented idea without paying the required fees to license the technology.

Whilst I completely disagree with the whole patent system in the first place personally, I certainly can't find fault with Parallel's actions here because far from being a patent troll, they're actually using the patent system as it's intended to be used. They're putting forward a court case regarding a company that is profiting off a patent they own that pertains to hardware they produce. If Sony et al. knew that Cell infringed on this patent then the correct course of action would've been to either pay Parallel to license the patent or to pay Parallel to develop a Cell-type product for them based on this patent.

I know it's easy to cry patent troll when a company you've never heard of sues a big name company, but in this case it's far too early to be crying patent troll, at first looks this seems to actually be a legitimate claim. If you developed a technology first, patented it and then a company like Sony came along and copied it rather than licensing the technology off you or bought your existing product wouldn't you be rather annoyed?

When 'God Machines' go back to their maker

iPhone fastest selling phone in AT&T's history?

So what. It's hardly an achievement to sell this well when the US phone market is so utterly backwards. The US never had phones like the Nokia 7650, which was years ahead of it's time, 5 years ago it can do more than the iPhone does now and in some cases better. Granted it lacks the modern megapixels and storage space but those are to be expected, when a phone could run Doom perfectly including multiplayer via Bluetooth 5 years ago, something iPhone users could only dream of it really does show how backwards the iPhone and the US phone market are.

The iPhone has a great UI, erm well again, so what? My grandma can use a mobile phone and kids certainly don't struggle to use them you only have to go to a school of any age range to see kids quite happily using them, if these people are using them fine then what use is a new UI that if anything would force these people to relearn how to use their phone?

The iPhone is for the US market, it's arguable that there's some truth in the "dumb yanks" argument when suggesting a new UI is required to make phones useable as mobile uptake in Asia and Europe is certainly higher than anyone could hope for over the last 10 years. It really does seem the iPhone's success is based on America's stupidity thus far, again, where the achievement exactly?

'Mac worm' hacker in death threat farce

NASA use Macs?

If by NASA and so forth using Macs you mean the bright people at NASA then you couldn't be further from the truth. If however you mean the muppets in the design/advertising section, then maybe, but unlikely.

One of the fundamental rules when doing scientific or mathematical work is that you can't state something as being correct unless you have all the facts, closed source operating systems like MacOS X and Windows don't allow engineers, scientists, mathematicians and so forth to examine how the OS implements various features, can you really trust the OS to handle some mathematical function and so forth? Open source OS' like the Linuxs and BSDs are the OS' use by anyone in a serious role at a place like NASA, because you can prove the correctness of the fundamental parts of the OS from the source code and assure yourself that nothing has changed in the source using diff each time a patch is issued to the system in question. It's no use designing something, say perhaps a piece of machinery that's safety critical for astronauts in space that depends on say a certain mathematical function provided by the OS, proving that piece of code correct using mathematical induction under the assumption that the OS provided function works only to find that it doesn't work right for certain inputs when the astronauts are already up there. You need to be able to prove the correctness of the hardware implementation, the OS layer and your own code. The same rules apply to any computer-aided scientific research or any safety critical system anywhere. To suggest Macs are used by some of the world's most intelligent minds for their work, is, quite frankly, a lie.

Mac OS has a major problem and that's that it doesn't have the proprietary market share that Windows does and hence doesn't have even 1% of the applications or even games and it doesn't have the openness of the open source operating systems. It looks pretty, and it has the rebellious factor in that people can say "Hey look at me, I'm different!", many people will tell you how amazing the UI is, but when it comes to it's simply not all that. To cite an example, you hear the same argument with the iPhone, "Sure it has sod all apps but it's so easy to use!" Hate to say it, but if my 3yr old cousin and my 83 year old grandma can use existing mobile phone UIs then ease of use is clearly already at a level where it's not a barrier to entry for anyone whatsoever anyway. The only thing Apple's notebooks, desktops and phones have going for them is the style factor and the rebellious "I want to be different factor", there's really no practical reason to use MacOS at the end of the day because it doesn't do anything practical that other OS' don't do better, aesthetics do not make up for lack of practicality at the end of the day.

Speedy evolution saves blue moon butterflies

lol @ Danny

"BTW, evolution is a PHILOSOPHICAL science because it is not observable or repeatable, but based on a pre-suppositional belief system."

Did you actually read the article before commenting? The very article you're responding to is about an observable occurance of evolution or is the issue simply that you don't understand that evolution can be observed across multiple generations of a species? Thus far, this seems a plausible explanation for your ignorance of course, because you seem unable to grasp the simple fact that evolution is about small, gradual changes over time and incorrectly assume that somehow monkeys just instantly turned into humans and then go on to wonder why we don't observe this.

As to your second point, evolution is entirely repeatable in rapidly reproducing living beings, virii in a lab can be observed to evolve around certain drugs and/or chemicals and so forth introduced to combat them for example. We can't do this sort of thing with say, apes, for two reasons, the first being because they take so much longer to reproduce (years, even decades rather than seconds) and the second being that all the much lesser evolved species are already dead in so many cases. If you had a big enough sample population of blue moon butterflies, you could easily reproduce the evolution described by this article whereby those unable to survive against the parasite would die and only those immune to it would live leaving a species that is different in an albeit extremely small, but evolved way.

ASA slaps Vonage over price comparison ads

Typical clueless ASA

Whilst I'm not disagreeing with all the ASA's decisions in this case the one regarding the possibility of broadband causing a problem with regard to ISP fair use policies and the point regarding BT's line rental are complete crap.

With regards to fair use policies, if the ASA had in the first place dealt with ISPs unfair advertising their service as unmetred then customers would know that this could potentially be an issue. Whilst the ASA allows ISPs to lie through their teeth and sell their heavily metred services as unmetred then of course consumers may get confused when their VOIP setup causes them to end up throttled, again though how is this in any way Vonages fault? It's blatantly the ASA's horrific incompetence that's to blame here.

Vonage have pointed out that it's unfair that people have to pay line rental from BT rather than just broadband costs (of which BT get a share) if they want to use Vonage via VOIP as their phone provider instead of BT.

As a result I don't think Vonage's advert was unfair in this respect as it's not Vonages fault BT has such a monopoly that customers have to pay line rental but instead BT's fault with it's lobbying against Vonage's request to skip line rental for people not wanting BT's phone service but still wanting broadband - it's clearly BT at fault here!

Tories offer record industry cash for righteousness

RE: Good place to live

"Ironically enough, Germany ranks high on personal privacy and quality of life."

Unfortunately it's also has a pretty poor stance on individual freedoms though, various computer games have been banned through the years including rather major titles like Wolfenstein.

If you really want somewhere that takes privacy seriously, has a good quality of life AND supports personal freedoms you need to look towards Norway, Sweden or Canada.

'al-Qaeda' puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie

Move along; nothing to see here...

Indeed, nothing to see here, another rather poor post by The Register where they're yet again unable to see the difference between a random gas canister included car crash on the M1 maybe killing the driver and the potential for the much larger amount of people exiting a nightclub at once at closing time when it's detonated.

Even then, arguably a more important point again is missed with this article is that terrorism is about mass murder. This reason, mass murder, is the very reason these stories are given more notice than your average joyriding youth burning out the car afterwards. It's not just about the bombs themselves, whether failed or succeeded but about the fact there's people who come here (or in some cases are born here) with the aim of killing large groups of people at once, that's the crux of the problem. Do you also think we should not have reports about the likes of Fred West in our news because after all, more people die to the flu every year than mass murderers so it's not worth reporting right?

One final note is about the attempt to validate the credibility of the reporter by noting he served with bomb disposal... until 2004. This also validates that he's obviously pretty new to reporting, it begs the question why he feels qualified to question mainstream media reporters with years of experience in this case, yet it also clarifies why he's completely missed the point of said reports.

I know it's nice to play the underdog, be the guy with the alternative viewpoint to try and stand out and get some attention, but like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists all you in fact end up doing is looking rather paranoid and perhaps even somewhat crazy.

Two year old's IQ on a par with Hawking

Perfect circle? Wow.

Seeing as a perfect circle is a theoretical concept in maths only and something that is essentially impossible to create unless we were to find say, a particle was itself a perfect circle or a set of particles shaped so that combined they could form a perfect circle am I to assume this has been dumbed down for the article or is this so-called professor carrying out the test actually not all that clever?

If this kid truly did produce a perfect circle then I'd be more interested in the fact she has the ability to produce objects at will that are themselves the very fabric of existence. Perhaps it's god in disguise as a small child.

Manhunt 2 banned

The saddest part?

The BBC is STILL reporting that the original Manhunt was the cause of Stephen Pakeerah's murder despite the police pointing out that the copy of Manhunt recovered in the murder investigation was owned by Stephen Pakeerah himself - the murdered kid rather than the murderer. I have lodged formal complaints about their misreporting on this issue yet they ignore them.

Still, it was only yesterday we heard about the BBC's problem with institutionalised bias in it's reporting so that pretty much sums up the problem. The BBC is wholly incapable of putting across a fair and balanced report, often when it puts over the side of the argument it disagrees with it merely glosses over extremely important facts - in this case whilst they mentioned the police acknowledged that the game had nothing to do with the murder, the BBC has omitted the most important point above - that the murderer never actually owned Manhunt!

I'd argue the only reason a game like Manhunt 2 has really been banned is become of the fuss and lies the mainstream media like the BBC spread about the original Manhunt as opposed to it actually being so bad it needs to be banned. It's not as if there aren't other games out there that are soley about killing other human beings in various ways - Hitman springs to mind.

This kind of over the top censorship should be left to goverments like Iran and their ilk who are well known for it.

Apologies for the BBC part of the rant, but as the BBC themselves aren't willing to put up a discussion on the issue and ignore complaints sent to them then all we can really do is make the truth about the BBC's misreporting known elsewhere.

Sony claims more than a million PAL PS3s purchased

Misunderstanding the stats

Jon, you're falling for the exact same statistics trap I've already pointed out in mentioning Sony's predecessors and this is exactly the foolishness Sony is hoping for in spinning such stats! The first issue with your argument is the one I've already mentioned but that you didn't apply to this particular stat, the PS1 and PS2 had supply shortages much like the Wii and 360, whilst the PS3 had this problem for it's North America release it didn't have it for it's European (PAL) consoles and this is the console model they're talking about. Notice how there's no mention of the NTSC version of the console? That's because it was supply constrained like it's predecessors and like the competition. The fact is the PAL PS3 is probably the first ever console that's not had it's release sales restricted by supply due to Sony delaying the Euro release by 5 months and this is likely exactly why they did it so that they could easier milk the stats to make it appear to be not quite the utter failure it actually is overall so far.

The second point to note of course is that if a console didn't outsell it's predecessors it'd have to be doing extremely bad seeing as in the time since the PS1 and PS2's release there are literally hundreds of millions more gamers than there was back then meaning there's far more people to buy the consoles.

So to sum up, I haven't avoided the stat you mention, it just simply wasn't worth mentioning because it's an outright meaningless stat. It's like Microsoft pointing out Vista sales have been higher than previous versions of Windows - well yeah, because there's more PCs sold nowadays with Windows preinstalled than there was back then, that doesn't mean it's a success however because as with the PS3 - in the grand scheme of things overall take up is currently extremely slow.

600,000 units of Resistance?

Not particularly impressive at all. Gears of War reached 2million copies in 6 weeks.

The irony is, the reason Gears sales dwarf Resistance sales is the same reason Sony is able to make it sound like the PS3 is doing well when it's really not - availability. There were enough 360 users around to shift this many copies of Gears compared to not near as many PS3s out there to shift copies of Resistance.

The reason the PS3 has sold so quick is because there were more than enough, perhaps too many units available meaning everyone that wanted one could get one, Sony's sales figures however are dwarfed by the Wii's sales figures despite the Wii not being able to claim as many sales in the same time period - this is because whilst more people wanted a Wii, getting hold of one was the problem. If Nintendo had 5 million Wii's available in launch week I'd place a good bet they'd have sold 5 million Wii's and blitzed this figure Sony is abusing to suggest it's doing well, the real test is what happens over a longer period of time - as has been seen in the US, impressive initial sales of the PS3 prove nothing if no one actually wants one after the initial rush is over.

There's also the question of abusing the time period used Sony keeps claiming they have the fastest selling console of all time with the PS3 claiming they sold 200,000 in 2 weeks or whatever as they did previously, but they only use the 2 week figure because it suited them - the PS3 launch was a disaster, relatively few people queued for their PS3, if we used a time measurement of say the first 24hrs of release then both the Wii and 360 once again absolutely blitzed PS3 sales. It's like the age old saying, statistics can be used to prove anything - you just have to use favourable units of measurement.

Sony sold 1 million PAL consoles in this time because they had 2 million consoles to sell, the real question is whether they can shift more over the coming months - if the console was as popular as they claim I'd question why they haven't shifted all 2 million units they've had available in this time period and why there is 1 million more just waiting to be purchased when the Wii is still selling out as soon as is stocked! If Sony has sold 1 million PS3s, what does it really matter if those 1 million were the only ones that actually really wanted the console?

Sony needs action if they really want the PS3 to be a success trying to place a spin on their failures only serves to annoy users like me because it sounds as if they think we're really that stupid as to believe their spin. Sony needs to drop the price of the PS3 heavily (something I'm not sure is possible with their operating losses) and also needs a much bigger library of exclusives before I'll be buying one. Call me back when it's priced under the more affordable £300 mark.

Britons are workaholics, survey says

Er, no.

"Working Time Regulations: Calling Time on Working Time, claimed that three-quarters of long-hours workers do so out of choice."

No, I think hardly anyone "chooses" to work such long hours, they just feel they have to. More companies than ever are getting rid of overtime pay now also, so it's not really as if people are doing it for the money now. It's a case of feeling that if they don't do these hours they'll get sacked, it's all very well saying there's no negative comeback allowed if you opt out of the maximum working hour agreement, but we all know that for example, when it comes to promotion time, someone that does opt-out is going to be disadvantaged against someone that doesn't, even if no one officially says so.

There is never any need for someone to work more than 48hrs, all that suggests is that a company is understaffed, that is, trying to do the job on the cheap by pushing the burden of their lack of will to invest in more staff onto the existing workers.

UK gov skills shortage jeopardising IT projects

I've seen it first hand...

The problem isn't so much just that senior managers are incompetent, but that the people higher again that appoint these senior managers are incompetent. The sad truth is that incompetence breeds incompetence.

The people at the top tend to be the wasters who have spent their life in these jobs and inherited them not through skill or ability but over time, of course however as they employ people equally incompetent even after they fade away their successor share the same incompetence gene.

Essentially therefore the problem isn't so much about IT, but senior management in government departments in general, it's not like business where a bad CEO/Manager would kill the business off, government departments are nigh on unkillable, there's just no accountability so the problem persists and continues.

The only way we're going to resolve this problem is start from the top, rebuild the management structures from the highest level possible, employing people, not because candidate X is 50+ and has 40 yrs experience working for some council or whatever but replacing them with people who are dynamic, if someone's been in roughly the same job or at least at the same place for 40 years they have no more than about 3 yrs experience IMO because they learn about their work enviroment in those first 3 yrs and their knowledge remains static from there on. We need people who have jumped between various businesses, or even god-forbid, someone young and dynamic with an up to date point of view, not someone who's knowledge has been left to stagnate working for the local council or whatever for 40yrs and hence gets given the job as a reward for his "loyal" (lazy) service.

Pirate Bay founders host paedophilia site

...and once again The Reg lies to put down the Pirate Bay

Last time it was the accusation of links to right wing extremist nazi's or whatever The Reg tried to infer, when the reality was that it was just funding from someone with right wing political beliefs (which isn't necessarily wrong).

Now The Reg is pulling the old paedophile stunt to try and infer The Pirate Bay hosts child porn images and supports child abuse.

We know what's next don't we - give it a month and The Register will be telling us The Pirate Bay runs, funds and supports Al Qaeda, terrorism is about the only thing The Register hasn't yet accused The Pirate Bay of.

The only news I'm really interested in hearing about The Pirate Bay from The Register now really is what did TPB do to make whoever at The Register is writing this crap cry so hard about them?

El Reg 'buys' acre of Brazilian rainforest

The sad thing is...

Someone like Bill Gates could buy every single acre they have for sale here without even really noticing a dent in his personal wealth. Even at £100 per acre he could buy up the 1million acres for £100million. With the exchange rate that's around $200million dollars. His net worth is currently around $53billion, so essentially he could pay for the lot with what, just under 0.4% of his net worth?

Of course that's not to say we should depend on the likes of Bill, but to point out that there's a lot of rich people who could personally, single handedly make a dent in the problem without even making a noticeable dent in their finances.

Frankly, I think more than $1billion is an obscene amount of money for anyone. It's just a shame there's no cap like this on max net worth so that the remaining money was forced into charity! Still, at least Bill has the Bill and Melissa foundation which is more than many billionaires.

BT declares ceasefire in broadband speed wars

@Paul

"to need so much speed? I never do, not even using a WII and online PC gaming and the internet at the same time."

Well, the Wii doesn't have any real online capability, so I'm not really sure how that's in any way relevant to the discussion.

Compare this to a more internet oriented console like the XBox 360 and you'll see why, when I can download demos of games that can be 1gb+ in size, right now I have little choice due to articial bandwidth limitations but to leave my XBox on overnight, ignoring the fact of course that this is a horrific waste of power in a day and age where we're supposed to be cutting the amount of time we leave machines on, this is hardly a situation that we should be expected to deal with in todays world of large-media where there are plenty of solutions to the problem.

There are plenty of other examples of legal use and requirements for high bandwidth, so to suggest piracy is the only true use is completely and utterly ignorant and shows lack of understand of the internet both as it is now and more prominently, the internet as it's growing and as it will be within the next 5 years. Things like downloadable movies (legal) will become far more common place.

Of course then there's the non-home user side of fix, if I need to grab a Linux ISO to build a Linux box, having to wait until tommorrow is simply unacceptable, I may well need that updated ISO today - even for home users this can be an issue, not all of us have every day of the week free like ISPs seem to assume, when some of us need to do something, we sometimes need to do it now, not tommorrow when we've promised to take the kids to the cinema or whatever. What if our Linux laptops mess up and we find the need for us to fix our laptop the day before we go on holiday be it for work or business by downloading the ISO as we no longer have the CD or need an updated version? Frankly we're stuffed, this isn't an unrealistic scenario as I've been a victim of it. Moving back more to the business side, what about companies using VPNs? Sometimes you need to be able to shift large amounts of data between your home and your company, particularly if your company is based in a different country and you're doing contract work for example!

If you're going to accuse people of needing high speed broadband only because they are illegal filesharers you should at least research your claims first to make sure they actually have some grounding, unfortunately you couldn't be more wrong and again it just shows how utterly ignorant of the need for high speed broadband in various legimitate scenarios you actually are.

How could BT possibly know whether consumers want speed...

...when they haven't yet given customers speed. It's all very well upgrading to a theoretical maximum of 8mbps, but when most people don't get above 6mbps and a plethora are still lucky to get more than 2mbps coupled with the fact these connection speeds are further limited by bandwidth throttling employed by ISPs it's no wonder consumers claim speed makes no difference, because, well their "8mbps" line performs no better than their old 512kbps line due to the amount of artificial limitations in place!

Give people unlimited, unmetered, full 8mbps and they'll start to realise how much better it is and they'll you'll get a truer picture - that consumers DO want more speed.

Digg buried by users in piracy face-down

I think it's clear whose side El Reg is on.

There's two problems with The Register's coverage of this article, the first being that they are inferring the only reason you'd need the AACS key is for piracy by labelling people pushing for freedom of it's existence as the piracy crowd.

The second issue is The Registers suggestion that posting this would breach UK copyright law, citing the relevant portion of our laws - the problem is that The Register is making the implication that the string in question necessarily even has anything to do with AACS at all. I could post the string and tell everyone it's my password, if The Register then censored it they themselves would be the ones responsible for then making the link with AACS and would themselves be responsible, if however The Register just left it there as something like:

"My password is: <insert key here>"

Then there is nothing to say that this is an infringing string at all, the key point of this whole debate is that you can't copyright a string, because that string could be used by millions of people for millions of things. To bring up an analogy, let's think about knives, the big cake knife sort, if it's used for cutting cakes then it's perfectly legal, if you then take it outside and walk round the high street with it, the police would be allowed to confiscate it.

It's all a question of purpose and intent, the point of the Digg users is that it should be possible to take down a site for posting it, particularly if that site obfuscates the purpose of that key, as there is no evidence then that it's anything to do with AACS - only speculation. If we're to allow censorship of something that might be used for something else although we can't tell for sure because it's obfuscated then perhaps I should send a DMCA take down notice to The Register, for a home movie I made that's protected by a special DRM I made myself that uses an encryption key of "Digg buried by users in piracy face-down", as The Register knows that this is the key for my DRM now, because it's posted here in the comments and as they have my DRM key as a title of one of their articles then is it not exactly the same thing? Should The Register therefore not now rename the article or cease operating because they're knowingly posting something that can be used to infringe on my IP?

ISPA to members: play fair on fair use

Doesn't matter what the ASA and OFCOM think

As the title says, it doesn't matter what the ASA and OFCOM think, what ISPs are doing has no legal standing. On the contrary, I and I know others have successfully taken their ISP to the small claims court when we've been bottlenecked for breaching unpublished barriers.

Demon Internet imposed a a bandwidth cap a few months ago but refused to publicly state what it was. When I got a letter saying I'd be limited to 128kbps speeds for a full month for imposing a 60gb cap I put in a small claims court challenge online. I claimed for 1 months subscription, sign-up costs to a new ISP, 1 months loss of online gaming subscriptions (XBox live and World of Warcraft), loss of business due to the fact I was unable to realistically perform my web design business on the connection (they say 128kbps, but it's more like dialup 4k/s downloads etc.). Demon settled for a few hundred quid - they know they don't have a case.

I suggest more and more people do this, perhaps when it starts costing the ISPs more to rip us off than they gain from ripping us off they'll start listening.

All that said however, don't be fooled by Plus.Net's supposed transparency either, it is Plus.Net I have moved to since dropping Demon and although they claim (or claimed on the now obsolete package I signed up to) that bandwidth limitations were between 4pm and midnight, they were in fact up until 2am, because P2P was still restricted further between Midnight and 2am.

Essentially, there isn't an ISP out there at the moment that hasn't jumped on the screw the customer, increase the profits bandwagon. It's sad that UK internet access has actually deteriorated over the past few years, we went from metred dialup to unmetred dialup, to unmetred broadband, to capped broadband and some ISPs are rapidly heading towards metred/capped broadband.

There's something very wrong when everyone could only get 512kbps - 2mbps for a few years, completely uncapped, yet suddenly we've all moved to 8mbps and the bandwidth caps are so low it means we can only download 1/20th what we could previously in a month when we were all limited to around 512kbps - this suggests that ISP bandwidth capacity has actually gone down, despite speed going up. The worst part is that some ISPs, like Plus.Net are even throttling us on the speed front too, so not only can't we download as much, we can't even download it as fast as we used to!