Loz

The answer to that is yes, providing it's done properly and safely - and only when necessary. To use your joy-riding analogy - the police are, as a general rule, not allowed to break the law. To chase at above the speed limit they have to get the OK. Maybe parking wardens should be the same - they should have to ask someone in authority each and every time they want to park illegally?

Is it? No one that I've noticed is asking for all parking wardens to be disbanded, just a more common sense approach taken. Wardens are a necessity, else they'd be chaos. Personally, I think the solution is simple. If a ticket is found to be invalid, the council pays you the amount of the fine. You'd see a bit more common-sense applied pretty sharpish. And you'd still have wardens on the streets controlling parking. Everyone's a winner.

Anyone thought of getting the Beeb News or similar involved?

The problem is that the job of parking wardens used to be to manage parking. As part of this job they had the sanction of writing you a ticket. They could use their initiative to move people along or ticket them. Nowadays, with outsourcing, the job of parking wardens is to write tickets. Managing parking is no longer part of the remit. If they have the choice of tapping on a car window and informing the driver they should move or slapping a ticket on the windscreen, then we all know what the choice would be. Did anyone see the BBC show a couple of months ago when the followed a bright-eyed and bushy tailed fellow, new from overseas who was proud of his new job as a parking warden for, I think, Westminster? He started by being friendly with the public and being as helpful as possible. Of course, this meant his ticket writing numbers were down on what was expected and management leant on him. By the end of the programme he was a tired-looking shadow of his former self and had joint the ranks of the hide-behind-corners brigade. He was no longer proud of his job. Sad.

Cue the clown costume jokes...

This is why I take the bus (and change at E&C if the tube needed). A little longer time, but much lower blood pressure.

I know, I know....

woof, are you trying to imply that Mr One-Post Sawfer isn't a new ED resident who wants to talk football, but a chancer that is only here to promote his website? Such cynicism...!

*Bob* - dressed as a giant banana? Are you a member of The Wiggles or something? :))

OutOfFocus Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Loz Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > I'm more concerned that a private company gets > to > > use public police for their own revenue > > protection. I want the British Transport > Police > > (or the general Police if they were there) > > protecting the public, not a company's income. > > So the Police shouldn't get involved in bank > robberies - only protecting the assets of a > private company. Of course they should - that's attending a crime, not protecting an income stream. Do we have police guarding Sainsbury's making sure that everyone has paid? No. Do they attend Sainsbury's if a crime has taken place? Yes. Here, no crime has yet taken place. If a ticket inspector is assaulted, the police should be involved - that is the correct use of them. But having them manning each and every mobile ticket inspection 'just in case' and acting as the train operating company's heavies is not. No other private company gets to use the police force in this way.

I'm more concerned that a private company gets to use public police for their own revenue protection. I want the British Transport Police (or the general Police if they were there) protecting the public, not a company's income.

Ardbeg - my favourite. If he likes the peaty, smoky Islay style this is a beauty. I have quite a liking for Talisker from the Isle of Skye, too. Sainsbury's sell both of them. Both are just under ?30.

His gaff - he makes the rules. If the good residents of ED don't like it, they can create their own. Seems like they do rather like it around here, though.

Nope. I'm just a greedy bugger that'll take 10% of anything that's going. A bit like a record company, only cheaper.

Only if I get my 10%...

Inadvertently, I think reggie has stumble onto an important point. When file sharing first began to manifest itself, the record companies responded with their own, legal, downloading offerings. At the time, you could pick up most CDs for about 9 quid or less if you shopped around. So what did the record companies do? Crippled the songs with DRM and offered them at about 12 or 13 pounds an album. Lesser product, higher price. This especially annoyed the consumer as they realised that the businesses had lower costs - no pressing, no album covers, no transport, no distribution. So reggie's ?1M download is an obvious extension of this - offering something at a price far inflated from actual worth, in a vain bid at maintaining control. Marvellous piece of satire. Did you mean it?

Sod that - any decent hills worth getting the snowboard out for?!?! B)

Tower Bridge For Sale. $1M or near offer.

But, reggie, you don't have the control you think. It's essentially the same as saying, "I've found a way to keep my children completely safe. I lock them in the cellar 24/7". Musicians rarely just like to play to themselves - they like to show their talents off to the world. Due to your aversion to the downloading set, you are now prevented from showing that song off to the world - so you have, in essence, lost control. You've placed a price upon your song and the world has rejected it. The world is no worse off, but you now have a song no one will hear. You've taken your bat and ball and gone home, so now no one gets to play. Including you.

Well, they have to keep warm somehow...

I'd get on to the James Barber thread if I were you. He's pretty good at getting crap like this looked into.

Music sharing has been around for years (else those dual cassette machines had a market that I never knew about). Nowadays it has gone global and very, very easy. The old music business model is now, therefore, broken. Actual CDs still have value, but paid-for downloads will either have to be DRM crippled (and therefore of lower value) or non-DRM'd and therefore shareable. DRM annoys people. People (i.e. consumers) are finding out that the track you paid full price for is only playable on one machine and if that breaks, you've lost your cash. People (consumers) hate the fact that the DVD they bought in the US won't play at home. Even DRM is fairly useless in the long term - the techies are always one step ahead, DMCA type laws or otherwise. The logical conclusion is that artists in the future will have to to find a new business model. Probably it will be to treat releases as advertising for their live shows, rather than an income stream, with some revenue from CD's and services like YouTube and Spotify. Pandora has already opened the box, and that is your only Hope.

I heard there was three possible options: Underground, Overground or Wombling-free...

Mockney Piers, Have you tried the bellwire removal trick? It more than doubled my speed to about 5.5Mb, which is pretty good since my provider only thinks I should be getting about 4Mb. Instructions here. No responsibility taken if you mess you wiring up. I had all six wires connected - you only need wires 2 and 5. Test your router in the master socket to see if it is worth doing - I noticed an immediate and significant increase in speed. Note down what colour wire goes where before removing and remove - don't cut - the wires. Loz

I'm not an online gamer, but I have played with networks. Ping speed is less a speed issue, but more what they call latency. This is usually made worse by either pure distance from you to the server you are talking to or, more usually, by the number of 'hops' (i.e. number of routers you pass through to transmit your request around the world). Network traffic peak times will also have an effect - I suspect he's not been happy over the last few days with everyone staying/working from home. A 'ping' message is a very small test message. So, upping your broadband speed would probably have little to no effect on your ping speed. Besides, 20Mb cable is pretty good. The only real things he can change are to find a more local server to connect to or, failing that, a different server. Each server will have different ping times (unless the problem is at your end). You could change provider (assuming Virgin is the problem), but that may leave you better/worse/the same. Is he wirelessly connected to your router, or hardwired? Wireless may cause some latency, especially if you have a lot of neighbours with wireless broadband. Apart from trying that, I doubt there is a lot he can do. If he wants to see a bit more info that just ping speed, try the 'tracert' command from the windows command line. You can see how many hops a route takes and which hops are taking the longest time. You may not get a full trace, as some routers/firewalls block the traceroute packets for security reasons.