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Comment Will the real pirates please stand up (Score 1) 121

....and just how many Pirates to the expect to net over in Oz with this legislation? Will it really be any easier to prosecute them? Piracy is pretty well defined here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy Of particular interest is: Modern definitions of piracy include the following acts: Extortion That means extortion of any kind, including "legalised" extortion which this piece of cartel brought legislation attempts to enable, are acts of piracy. When will we have legislation to protect us from the real pirates?
EU

Submission + - EuroDonkey: Europeans discriminated buying online (eurodonkey.eu) 1

An anonymous reader writes: The Europeans have been complaining for a long time about their inability to buy certain products or use certain services — and when they do have the ability to buy something, it's usually a lot more expensive than other places.

EuroDonkey was made by 3 slashdot and reddit geeks to raise awareness of the issue and have people in multiple EU countries complain about this at the same time to their officials.

The initial message was lost by people, and after constructive criticism was raised by fellow slashdot and reddit nerds, the data was dumbed down and the founder created youtube videos explaining what it's all about. It is recommended all 3 segments are seen before opinions are given.. but since it's slashdot, you guys will probably just read the description.
tl;dr: A lot of europeans are being treated unfairly when buying things — mostly in the smaller countries.

EU

Submission + - Is the EU really a single market? 1

falconcy writes: What happens when 3 geeks get together and compare the prices of IT hardware across the EU? The results can be found at http://www.eurodonkey.eu/ It's not designed to look pretty.

For example, an iPad2 64G WiFi would take a week for a person on a minimum wage in Switzerland to buy it. Compare that to 33.34 weeks for a minimum salaried person in Bulgaria.

Comment iDirect (Score 3, Informative) 308

Forget BGAN, they charge on actual throughput and can be pretty expensive to operate. What you actually need is a SeaTel or similar tracking antenna - this will constantly keep you connected to the satellite as you are mobile, an iDirect http://www.idirect.net/ 3000 series or X3 modem (depends on the provider you use) and a subscription with one of the many providers of such services. The initial setup costs could be a bit pricey, so just look at the hardware cost as an investment. Your best bet is a provider with the ability to actually offer service over multiple satellites covering most of the globe. It can get a bit complicated when switching satellites so choose a company which specializes in Maritime VSAT services, they will be able to advise you on how best to do this.

Comment No more flash and we can move to 64 bit browsing (Score 1) 328

Getting rid of flash completely will finally allow 64 bit web browsers to take off. It's only the need for flash that has held back most users from going fully 64 bit. Sure, Adobe have an alpha 64 bit linux version of the flash plugin availabe for quite a while now, they just never seemed to port it to any other platform.

Comment Fitting in (Score 1) 938

A lot of it is about fitting in. My own son got a rough ride when we moved abroad and he didn't fit in, despite being fluent in the local language. He was different and he really had a rough ride. Some namby pamby child trick cyclist the school insisted he saw tried to tell me that he had low self esteem, which I knew was utter bullshit. I pulled him out of that school there and then despite threats of legal action etc and told them that if I as a parent had allowed my kid to be treated in that way, I'd rightfully be in serious trouble. After a term at home, he started in a new school and was one of the tougher kids, though he never used this to bully other kids. The experience of being bullied like this was a life lesson for him. A couple of years later some of the kids who had been bullying him saw him around and decided to have a go at him in the street, he beat the crap out of all three of them. He's never had a problem since then.

Comment Dumbing down of education (Score 1) 1343

I'm amazed at the number of graduates of English speaking universities who can't even string a simple sentence together. In my day, they wouldn't have passed GCE 'O' level English. Come to think of it, most of them wouldn't have survived in the days when you couldn't use a calculator for maths. Even these days I can still work it out in my head faster than many youngsters can with a calculator. Education has sure been dumbed down over the years.

Comment The Tech is in place, EU Law says it's legal (Score 1) 194

Why are the knee jerk politics in individual countries actually taking us backwards? According to EU legislation, the single market also applies to AudioVisual products http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/reg/tvwf/index_en.htm The single European market - one of the biggest achievements of European integration - applies to television broadcasts as much as anything else. Everybody wins broadcasters can attract larger audiences and viewers get a greater choice of channels Just as any of us is free to buy chocolate, wine or a new car in any EU country, we can also watch TV channels from all over Europe. As this is supposed to be written into member states national law by the 19th December 2009, how can the Italians actually justify their actions? They are denying people the right to download content which can be seen as legal in the light of this law. I think we can safely say that a lot of P2P activity involves TV Series that are not available outside the country of origin. For many of us, bitorrent is the only way we are able to keep up to date with TV programming from back home when living abroad. IPTV products such as the BBC iPlayer and ITV CatchUp are now in breach of EU law by limiting access to their service to the UK. P2P at least allows us to view the programming as per EU Legislation. It is oxymoronical that you have to break the law in order to be able view what is now technically legally available content.

Comment The BBC needs to act within EU Law (Score 1) 302

I think all of this is merely a smokescreen to delay the inevitable. A few days ago the deadline for the EU's "Broadcasting sans Frontiers" law to come into force passed by. The implications of this were that the technologies such as IPTV which actually allow users outside the physical borders of the country in question to receive TV broadcasts online could no longer be blocked within the EU. In simple language, the BBC iPlayer is now supposed to work anywhere in the EU and for the BBC to prevent users outside the UK from using it is now against EU Law. I wonder if this would actually legitimise getting TV programs via P2P as that is actually enabling the EU Law rather than preventing it. That said, a glance at the UK TV schedules for the coming days shows that we're not really missing anything.

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