Helldivers 2 was exceptional for this in my experience - I met some great people from matchmaking, both when I was playing with IRL friends and solo. I know it’s only a video game but it truly felt like a proper bonding experience when you were trying to save the last of your team, or when you harmonised in such a way it just felt tactically perfect.
In my first job I raised JIRA-1337 and was pretty chuffed with myself, being on a team of young, nerdy gamer type folk. My manager not so much, they wanted to raise it (for a meme?) but I was doing actual work rather than watching numbers go up so that was quite satisfying when it was a genuine defect.
Anecdotal, but out of my family I’m the only man who doesn’t pay the licence fee, and the only person who hasn’t had a visit.
They’ve visited my mother, sister and one auntie that don’t pay - they all live alone and are the sole name on the bill.
I’ve heard from friends similar experiences too, single men and households with men on the electoral register don’t get visits, or very rarely if they do.
I had the pleasure of answering the door at my mothers to one of these people and believe there’s an issue with the way they choose who to investigate. It’s predatory.
Suspect more obvious factors are that men are far less likely to be home during the daytime when inspectors visit, and also more likely to admit they've had a TV for years or let the inspector in if he asks nicely...
(FWIW I'm had a visit shortly after I'd moved in with five other guys before, and avoided prosecution by simply asking how to pay...)
This is my theory. My relatives wouldn’t have a clue whether they were lying about being some official inspector and saying they’re allowed to inspect, and they would probably be scared of either an official looking, or bailiff looking person telling them this.
It’s not really a topic of conversation that I’d bring up, but I know many people who do pay it so you aren’t the only one.
I don’t because I don’t use anything that requires me to, not from a moral standpoint. The BBC has given me a lot of fantastic content over the years but I’ve just stopped consuming most television over the past 5 years or so.
I don't pay it because I don't watch television anymore, live or otherwise.
However I do find the overreach of claiming I need to pay the license if I watch any form of live broadcast is ridiculous. If I wanted to watch the occasional live stream of a football game online via Amazon Prime then I would need to pay the license fee.
People are prosecuted for this with zero evidence other than an ‘admission’, with the admission being as nebulous as ‘yeah the tv is on’.
How can you prove someone was watching TV in court? As far as I’m aware you can’t, but the court sides with Capita generally. Please don’t bring up the TV detecting vans as evidence.
No, I do too, and I’m happy to do so. I’ve always felt it’s a useful brake on over-commercialisation of other channels, although perhaps less effective now than it once was. I do enjoy quite a bit of the BBC’s output as well.
I feel there's a huge problem in this debate, which is that the people who don't like it are extremely vocal, and the people who do like it and quietly use and enjoy it without necessarily adoring it, perhaps like you, who I suspect are a majority, are just not really represented in the conversation, and the people who love it, like me, do not really have a central reference point from which to draw power from unlike the people who don't like it, who have the entire right-wing media crowing about it at every opportunity
You might be underrating my ardour on this as I've said my piece at greater length before.
I've always been in favour of (something like) the license fee to fund a non-commercial national public service broadcaster. Public service broadcasting is incredibly important otherwise it's all just commercial interests and you end up with the kind of nonsense you get in the TV landscape in the USA: low quality content, far too many ads, dominance of hyper-partisan "news", etc.
And if you look at what the BBC does - the TV channels, iPlayer, the national radio stations, local radio, news, the world service, the ground-breaking content they've created over the decades, and of course licensing/reselling content - it's incredibly impressive and, to me at any rate, represents incredibly good value for money as compared to other providers.
The TV license costs about the same as an annual Netflix subscription but the BBC is able to do so much more with that money than Netflix are. Doesn't even compare in my mind.
Not to mention the people who are extremely vocal about how horrible and woke it is for having too many minorities and that Mr Lineker also overlaps heavily with people who have watched it continuously for 50 years, wouldn't dream of switching over to newfangled channels like Channel 4 and don't know what an Amazon is...
I doubt Capita would have any fallout from an inquiry, it would be another headline for a day or two then get forgotten by the media. I’m all for it though, they should be held accountable, my first statement is purely cynicism from me.
depends who the government is really. I'd be cautiously optimistic that the current government would do something about it, ideally taking it out of the hands of a private company in the first place. this government is too nervous for that kind of thing, but I do think they could do something about it.
That’s got me thinking, who controls that? Do the BBC willingly employ Capita to enforce the licence, or are they mandated to enforce it in some way and Capita just so happen to be the vultures that were cheapest to hire?
I believe Apache is logging complete requests. For instance, in the case of clients sent to a honeypot, I see a log entry appear when I pick a honeypot script from the process listing and kill it. That could be hours after the client connected.
The timestamps logged are connection time not completion time. E.g. here is a pair of consecutive logs:
Always had time to support and mentor people with his incredible skills, would be online at 4am doing out of hours deployments with us, and inevitably get us out of the shit when something went wrong. I was frequently in awe of his technical capability and ability to come up with a solution for… anything!
On the human side, he was compassionate, deeply cared for his employees (and let us put our lives before work), and a genuinely fun, cool guy you wanted to know, wanted to get on a call with or play some games after work - I’m sat in the sun typing this while wearing a t-shirt he custom made for me.
I don’t think any large screen manufacturer would give a second thought to this, the average consumer will still want the 4K, HDR, flat screen that is wall mountable.
The market the CRTs would steal is practically non existent, surely. I’d love this in my house for retro gaming purposes, but I’d still have my LG C/Gx or Samsung N95x or whatever the newest, fanciest models are for movies and modern use cases.
