Understanding Nothing

Anyone in the UK who watches TV has to pay a license fee every year. The money raised from this is used to fund the BBC. This is a matter of much controversy, made significantly worse by the tactics used by “TV Licensing” in trying to hunt down and executedeal with people who don’t pay. Tales of invasions of privacy, intimidation, and general all round nastiness abound online. This is not the place to rehash those, or even the concept that just because they declare that it’s their “standard practice” to turn up at your home and demand access to prove you’re not doing something illegal that you have to let them or that they have any right to do so whatsoever.

Instead I’m going to focus on one simple question that seems to have lots of people confused. More and more people are giving up on broadcast TV altogether, and buying or renting all their TV shows on DVD to watch. So, do they still need a licence?

TVL et al have been very successful in their misinformation campaigns here, as numerous people seem to think that the answer is “yes”.

The true answer is remarkably difficult to find, but is buried rather deeply on the BBC’s website in the section where they publish their responses to Freedom of Information queries. Of course these are published as PDFs to make it less likely anyone will stumble over the information, and, just to make it even more difficult, the PDFs are image scans, so Google etc can’t even index the underlying text.

So, as a public service, here are the steps to convincing yourself (or others) that you don’t need a license if you only use your TV to watch DVDs:

1. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/docs/responses_tvlicence.shtml
2. Find response SR2006000623 – TV Licence Requirements
3. Download the PDF
4. Read the answer to question 2: “Is a TV licence required for a television that is used for playing DVDs and videos (i.e. not for receiving or recording broadcasts)?” [you may also need the context of answer 1: "A licence is not needed simply because a television receiver is owned"]

Next week: How to deflect accusations of shady behaviour by doing everything under a name of an entity that doesn’t really exist in any legal form…

An interesting take on the latest crop of annual report by Motley Fool UK:

At work we keep trying to make the effort to look back after each project and learn from how it went. But we’ve never found a good way to structure this, and as a result we often don’t do it at all.

Johanna Rothman gives a
retrospective of a year of blogging, using a great set of questions from Norm Kerth:

1. What did I do well that I don’t want to forget?
2. What did I learn?
3. What should I do differently the next time?
4. What still puzzles me?
5. What do I need to discuss in greater detail?

So, earlier this evening I got email from someone I haven’t heard from in about 10 years, telling me that I was featured in last weekend’s Sunday Tribune alongside an article about BlackStar, in a “What I did after I made millions”(!) piece.

So, I dutifully trotted off to the Tribune website to see if I could find the article, only discover that they don’t place their articles online like any other sensible newspaper. Instead they’ve teamed up with NewsStand who promise to delivery print versions of newspapers to your desktop. It seemed that I could get Sunday’s edition for $2, so I decided to indulge my narcissism and give it a go.

The first hurdle to a potential customer was the notice that the minimum charge was $3.50. Making people spend money they don’t actually want to is a really, really bad thing, but the dollar is ludicrously weak, so I decided to persevere.

Then the next page tells me that actually the previous page was a lie. The minimum charge is $10 – but as a special offer to new customers they’ll let me only pay them $5. This actually defies comment.

However, the small print told me that I could claim back any unspent portion of my account at any time, so I figured I’d give them that $5. But first I had to download the software. Oh yes – they have proprietary software for viewing the newspapers! A whopping great download that took 6 minutes even on my spiffy ADSL (after I managed to get to actually start downloading – their JavaScript doesn’t work on Mozilla, of course).

Finally I could download Sunday’s paper. An even bigger download that took over 15 minutes. Thankfully I could start viewing it before it had finished.

This is where it gets really bad.

Their special software is really just an image viewer – every page is just a huge image that, even with the software at full-size, can only fit half a page onto my screen. I eventually worked out how to scale the pages down so I could see two pages at a time, but then I needed to zoom in eleven(!) times to make an article readable (which of course involves clicking on the magnifying glass in the toolbar, and then clicking again on the area of the paper you want to zoom in on).

They do have a search button, but my vanity search didn’t reveal any results. I figured this was because it hadn’t downloaded the whole issue yet, but even when that finished I still couldn’t find anything.

So I spent about 20 minutes painstakingly going through every page. Nada. After all that pain, I couldn’t find the article.

There was an ad though for Interface – a new 8 page IT supplement as part of today’s paper.

But of course that’s not included with the online edition – even though every other section seems to be.

*sigh*

Now for the fun of attempting to get a refund through their woefully confusing on-line support system.

Anyone have a copy of the real paper?

I’ve been ranting all week about the latest radio advert from Invest Northern Ireland. They’ve been spending a lot of money over the last few months encouraging people to start their own businesses. Most of these are terrible, but the latest one irritates me more than the rest. The basic premise is that you shouldn’t keep putting things off – especially starting a business. If you leave it another year someone else may come up with your idea and then it’ll be too late.

When I used to be invited to give talks to people thinking of starting up their own business I used to encounter people who wouldn’t even tell the course organiser what their idea was for fear of it being stolen. I always told these people that if they expected to succeed purely on the strength of an idea they should just go home, because making a successful business was much more about the strength of the execution than the strength of the idea. For some reason this never seemed to go down well. And now I find that INI are promoting this nonsense in a major radio campaign!

Thus I was pleased today to see a link over on the xPlane blog to an article on this very topic:

In 1967, an angel investor, Fred Adler, received over 50 business plans for entrepreneurs who proposed to start microcomputer firms. Only one of the teams presenting this idea ever made it. Its name was Data General. But why did so many entrepreneurs pitching a plan to sell microcomputers either never receive funding or if they were funded, never succeed? They didn’t make it not because the idea was per se bad or didn’t have the potential to be a good opportunity. It was a great idea and enormous opportunity. Rather, it was because the other entrepreneurial teams were unable to execute.

The economic corollary, cleverly exploited by Billy Beane, was that players who walked more often were being systematically undervalued by the market and could be had more cheaply. Software development has an equivalent to the base on balls: a module that doesn’t have to be written new because it already exists and can be reused.

We know that the best coders are far more productive than the norm. Arguably, that variance might lie in the patience, discipline, and research skills required to recycle rather than to reinvent. If so, finding ways to measure and value these qualities could yield a pivotal advantage.

– Jon Udell

It is a true but little-known fact that more American citizens are killed by pigs each year than by sharks.

I believe this is also true of American businesses.

Business owners spend most of their time worrying about the sharks – those diabolical demon competitors though it is far more likely to be the pigs who kill the company.

The pigs are the employees who would rather lie in the mud and oink than jump through hoops for a customer. The pigs are the middle managers who are amore concerned with getting the most out of the company than with getting the most out of their staff. The pigs are the owners whose only thoughts are for short-term profits.

A healthy, pig-free company is one with a powerful sense of mission and purpose, a company with values that run deep enough to create a strong company culture.

–Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads, #42

“I went straight to the control tower and demanded to see the airport manager. In Somalia, it is the custom to pay a man double the market price if you accidentally kill his beast. I had the price of two goats in my hand before the plane had finished taxiing back to the terminal.”

“What luck!” I cried. “What did you do with the money?”

“I went to the market, of course, and bought two goats…”

– The Somaliland News [via Wesley]

I used to be a big fan of Harvard Coop. Any time I’d be in Boston, I’d end up spending quite a lot of it just sitting in the Coop reading. Each day I’d walk around, pick up a pile of maybe 8-10 books, find a comfortable seat, and gradually divide them into 3 piles – those that looked interesting on the shelf, but really aren’t; those that I’ll definitely buy; and those that I’m unsure about, or that I’m keen to read some of, but probably not to buy. And I’d usually end up buying 10-20 books on an average trip to Boston.

When I was in Boston again last summer, I noted with dismay that the comfortable seats on the middle floor had vanished. There were still the two in the basement, and a couch on the top floor, but the middle floor now just had the hard seats at tables, and those in the coffee shop area. Today I noted with even more dismay that the entire top floor is now also hard seats. The only comfortable seats remaining are the two in the basement. Which of course means that there’s virtually no chance of actually getting one. And as a result I spent much less time there than usual and only bought 2 books.

MIT Coop still has 4 comfortable seats by the window, so I can sit there and read OK. And the Borders downtown still has quite a few (although they’ve been rearranged in a very strange configuration). So these will now be getting more of my trade. (The Barnes and Noble downtown is terrible…)

I read somewhere once that Barnes and Noble were trying to position themselves as an alternative to the library, rather than other bookstores.
But I’m wondering if in general there’s a move away from the “our bookshop is really comfortable; come sit here all day and read our books” type of approach.

Our Debt Collection Service is fully computerised, fast and efficient … We believe that you, the customer, should be fully informed as to how we operate in order that you will have a better understanding of the progress of your case with us at any time … If you can get the same service cheaper anywhere else, we will match that price. We promise that if anyone offers the same service for a lower price, even by as much as one penny then we will match that price.

Some day all law firms will have to operate like this…