@Chris
8.1 seconds in a V8 Jag? You should try putting petrol in it and starting the engine
38 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
"57% of notices to Google demanding that it remove links from its search engine database were sent by competitors to the company linked to."
In other words, (as I understand it) 57% of the takedown notices were to have *competitors* stuff removed.
If you write a nice book and get Google to link to it and I write a worse book on the same subject and want it to get better ratings, I could send a takedown notice to Google to get them to remove *your* book, so mine has less competition.
Dave.
The saving grace of the Spanish system is its complete and utter inefficiency.
They can take whatever data they like, as soon as they put it down they can't find it again without having to get up and walk to a filing cabinet (which isn't in anybodies job description), and as for the idea of the central database actually working for more than half an hour a month, well, the less said the better.
So far I haven't had problems with the no-id card bit, most people happily accept a driving license as valid ID, so I don't need to drag the passport around.
Dave.
No it fucking isn't.
Street value is the price that they would get for the gear on the street. Not the price that legit copies of the originals fetch in the shops. As the simple sums done by other posters show, this latter price is the one that was used to get to 1m.
Hear, hear on El reg doing some thinking occasionally and not just cutting and pasting police press releases.
(Another) Dave.
What planet do you come from?
HR, marketing and the Accountants are always the last to get fired. any fule kno that. The first to go are the lowest layer: the ones who do the real work. That last to go is the chief accounting git, (s)he has to hand the keys to the Administrators when the whole thing goes under.
Dave
The problem is not the business model you adopt. The problem is the natural propensity of people to thieve, to get something for nothing. If there were a flat tax, an AMC, people would still find a way of dodging it: just ask the BBC. and as for the voluntary thing, well, we have one. they're called shops, and everybody is free to go in and buy music. There is also an online version: iTunes, and others whose names I can't remember. The voluntary business model is there (it's crap, but it would improve if more people started showing interest), but no one uses it 'cos the free model works very well. At the moment, for those prepared to do a little more work, it works much, much better than the voluntary model, AND it doesn't have DRM. Win-Win for the freetards.
The "free" model does have its costs: mainly in time. time taken to find the torrent, check it out, weed out the dross and the unwanted dog/duck pr0n or whatever.
The voluntary model will have to compensate for this extra effort the freetards make. i.e people will have to be prepared to pay for the convenience offered by the online shops.
As for the AMC. Well, the license model works for the BBC which is one entity. It takes the cash and spends it. it doesn't try and calculate/guess which actor/producer/cameraman deserves the most cash, it spends it where it sees fit on making telly. (whether you like it or not, and whether they spend it well is outside the scope of this comment). The agencies which nowadays collect the cash and divvy it up amongst artists according to some criteria of who has earned most are all very well for a small part of the revenue. It's just a bonus or something, each year (or whatever) the artist gets a few quid for having their song played a few times on radio one. Most of their cash will come from performing/record and tshirt sales and so on. If a larger part of their cash depended on the divvying-up algorithm, there would be little incentive to work extra hard: everyone would know exactly how much cash was available in total, and more or less how it would be spread around. We would simply get talentless gits who could game the new system better than anyone else.
I do think that most people would prefer a physical object to a downloaded one. If that physical object were sufficiently cheap, say a couple/few quid for a CD, then most of the people who download music would simply buy the stuff, and rip it for their iPods and so on, keeping the original as a backup. And so the online stores should go the same way: say a couple of quid for a lossless, DRMless encoding of an album complete with cover art and so on for those who want it, then I think more people would sign up. It would HAVE to be cheap, though. It would have to be easy to use, have lots of choice and bandwidth, etc.,.
Unfortunately I don't have a better option to offer :(
Dave
I don't really know any ex-pats at all. There is one English woman I know, vaguely, but I haven't seen her in a year or so.
Ex-pats who only hang around with other ex-pats are, as Sarah says, unbearably smug gits.
I only keep on mentioning emigrating in these threads to piss you all off a little more.
Dave
I got out 17 years ago. Spain is still reasonably OK, and the girls are indeed prettier (and the beer cheaper (though catching up)). Too much sun though, and we don't really get enough snow and rain here in Valencia. Still, you can't have everything, can you?.
I really don't know what you are all waiting for.
No, I'm a british citizen living happily in Spain for the last 15 years.
Sun (but not too much). Cheap (though not so cheap as a few years ago) beer and a govt which is so overloaded with functionaries that very little gets done.
Just the way I like it.
I don't understand why there is anybody left in the UK at all.
Dave.
The king was imposed by Franco and the army as a condition to their accepting a "democracy" rather than their having a fight over Franco's successor.
It is widely believed that the king was involved in the coup d'etat and then turned on his mates and shopped them when he got cold feet about the whole thing.
Most Spaniards I know would happily exchange him for Paris Hilton* 'cos she at least has her own cash and wouldn't need to sponge off the Spanish tax-payer so much**.
Dave.
* Apparently obligatory reference
** Though I doubt that that would stop her. (See Liz II for more information).
My contract states that, as well as my employer owning anything and everything that I do at work - not entirely unreasonable, I suppose - they also have first refusal over everything I do on my own time which is related to my work, or which uses the tools and/or software that my employer creates and/or provides. The contract also states that everything I do for a period of I forget how many years after I leave the company is also subject to this first refusal clause.
I have no idea about the enforceability of these clauses.
I've just installed it on a Spanish version of XP professional. I didn't read the manual so I started to try to import my bookmarks using Bookmarks->Show all bookmarks and instantly got the "...Safari... caused a problem... ...would you like to save a dump file" message.
Uninstall is the next step I think.