You guys must be heavy drinkers...

[Robbo60]

Personally I think £3-4 a week is well worth it. Especially with i-player.

 

[NickWelford]

Can we just get something clear.
UK
Licence. Noun
License. Verb.

US
License. Anything.


Thank you.

 

[alex_heney]

Interesting phrase, "at the same time". There's a noticeable delay between analogue and digital reception of the same program. It's an unavoidable consequence of the compression and error detection/correction. Streaming over the web likewise.
Not that I'm endorsing licence dodging. You may think the law is wrong, but I don't believe that automatically gives you the right to ignore it.

The law does take account of that.

What the actual legislation says is (my bold):
" In this regulation, any reference to receiving a television programme service includes a reference to receiving by any means any programme included in that service, where that programme is received at the same time (or virtually the same time) as it is received by members of the public by virtue of its being broadcast or distributed as part of that service. "

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/692

 

[AJS2018]

..I saw on American news this morning (well, internet - I don't watch the overproduced rubbish on TV) that France's wine sector has been hit hard by Brexit.

Having spent many years living in the USA I couldn’t agree more about US tv news, but I’m even more sceptical about what I read on the internet. However you’ve right, France’s wine sector has been hit hard of late, some of it is due to Brexit but most of it is self inflicted, there is so many other countries producing great wine at a more reasonable price - of course the French disagree.

 

[alex_heney]

Absolute nonsense. It was PR and nothing else. If it did work then it would have only been possible in the very early days when hardly anyone had a TV, once every house has one the interference alone would be enough to make the evidence useless in court. Hundreds of thousands of prosecutions every year and you tell me they never once needed to use the "evidence" from a detector van. If it was so good and "paying for itself" then they would have been raking it in and showing to the whole country how good the vans were. Also if the vans worked, they wouldn't need to apply for those very tricky to get warrants would they? Use your common sense man, it's a scam, you were duped as were millions more, nothing to be ashamed of.

So you are saying that he, as somebody who actually used the equipment, was duped into believing it worked, because you, as somebody who knows nothing about it beyond what he has read on the internet don't think it worked.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

 

[Rorschach]

So you are saying that he, as somebody who actually used the equipment, was duped into believing it worked, because you, as somebody who knows nothing about it beyond what he has read on the internet don't think it worked.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

Did he say he used it? Did he confirm he worked for TV licensing and went around gathering evidence for prosecution?
No, he said there was equipment that could show a TV was on, well whoopdy do, I have instruments that show when TV is working, they are called eyes. I am sure that technology exists to scan the frequencies output by a running television, what did not happen is box vans going around scanning for Mrs Miggins in number 22 who is watching song's of praise in her kitchen without a licence. There is a reason that no prosecution has ever used detector van evidence, it doesn't exist.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Personally I think £3-4 a week is well worth it. Especially with i-player.

Which of course is totally irrelevant to the argument, which is whether it should be compulsory when you don't watch the BBC.

 

[PetePontoValentino]

No it didn't.

Is it possible to see whether a TV is on, certainly you can scan for the frequencies emitted. Is it possible to pinpoint a TV in use to a precision sufficient to secure a prosecution? Absolutely not, which is why a prosecution was never made using detector van evidence. It was a scare tactic, nothing more.

Not if the TV is made of wood (which would be the obvious link to this group)

 

[ComberSpud]

Absolute nonsense. It was PR and nothing else. If it did work then it would have only been possible in the very early days when hardly anyone had a TV, once every house has one the interference alone would be enough to make the evidence useless in court. Hundreds of thousands of prosecutions every year and you tell me they never once needed to use the "evidence" from a detector van. If it was so good and "paying for itself" then they would have been raking it in and showing to the whole country how good the vans were. Also if the vans worked, they wouldn't need to apply for those very tricky to get warrants would they? Use your common sense man, it's a scam, you were duped as were millions more, nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s not nonsense. I’m a former BBC engineer and the technology did work and was used extensively in the past. Let’s keep to facts rather than opinion. It was more effective as a deterrent, as that was simpler and cheaper than the legal route.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

The TVs in nice wooden cabinets used to be quite common among some of the low life I knew in the '70s - they had worked out that a TV in a cabinet was classed as a piece of furniture and the social security would pay for it. I knew one chap who was the Major Major Major Major of the unemployment world - he was so good at being unemployed he gave others lessons in it.

 

[Rorschach]

It’s not nonsense. I’m a former BBC engineer and the technology did work and was used extensively in the past. Let’s keep to facts rather than opinion. It was more effective as a deterrent, as that was simpler and cheaper than the legal route.

So good it was never needed. Like a nuclear deterrent then.

 

[MikeJhn]

Good Grief, its no wonder I only look at the "Tool Revues" section, must get in touch and get admin to stop sending me links.

 

[Jelly]

We had a few exchange students in mathematics who thought that it was completely unreasonable that you could have assignments that may prevent you from drinking for a week or two. They attempted to ignore the workload (sloshing around after dinner no matter what) and went back to England early.

Some of that is probably around cultural expectations as well.

As a British student I would probably have found an assignment which effectively stopped me from having a social life for two weeks to be unreasonable too! (I would have made sure it got done... Because you know, it's notionally why you're there, but would not have been impressed).

There again you could probably raise valid questions about how healthy "Social Life" and "going to the pub" being almost synonymous is... But that goes much wider than just students.

I'm sure if you go up the ladder from the low first tier schools into the ivies, there would be more serious English students who don't drink during the week.

I'm not sure that the caliber of students makes much of a difference either, from my friendships with a bunch of medical students, and experiences working on projects with both Oxford and Cambridge Uni's, the "top flight" students are just as bad if not worse... PhD students being particularly bad due to a combination of a work-hard play-hard mentality and being seasoned drinkers by that point.

My spouse went to England for a semester (East Anglia? I can't remember the exact name of the school) and mid-week evening drinking was much more common.

Living in a university city, Wednesday afternoons/evenings remains (or did until the last year) the biggest night of the week for student drinking...

Most university sports fixtures are scheduled on a Wednesday afternoon, and many courses without a major practical component have the afternoon free of teaching to allow for it, plus there's less town vs. gown bother and cheap drink deals from pubs and bars who know the club's will be out and want to drum up midweek trade.

 

[selectortone]

So good it was never needed. Like a nuclear deterrent then.

You're hilarious. You really think that the Post Office and the BBC maintained a group of engineers and a fleet of vans with expensive equipment that was regularly updated for continuously changing technology - 405 to 625 lines, colour, valve to transistor to solid state etc., etc - for over 50 years, that was ineffective? What were they for then? A vanity project? Quite an expensive one.

I'm done with this, so I'll let you have the last word, which seems to be the most important thing here (and to hell with actual facts from people with actual first hand experience}

 

[Droogs]

Just to inform people about the technology around the detector vans. In the late 80's i went to an Infosec demo, where they had equipment that was able to recreate the image on computer monitor from outside the building and without line of sight. It was apparently based upon known BBC equipment and had been manufactured not here in the west but was from a Stasi depot.

Now no idea if it was from detector vans but it certainly made the communications security arm of G6 a bit nervous about the adoption of digital tech in our embassies, i remember that much.

 

[Woody2Shoes]

As a youngster I used to be able to hear if a CRT screen was switched on anywhere in the house simply from the audible whistle produced by the line output transformer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformerSuch transformers also produce a very distinctive radio signal which is easy to triangulate with one or more directional antennas. Similar techniques were used in WW2 and later to identify the distinctive emissions from clandestine radio receivers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_RAFTER
I have no doubt that such equipment could have been used, and see no reason why it might not have been used, to find "unlicenced" users of TV sets.

 

[Rorschach]

You're hilarious. You really think that the Post Office and the BBC maintained a group of engineers and a fleet of vans with expensive equipment that was regularly updated for continuously changing technology - 405 to 625 lines, colour, valve to transistor to solid state etc., etc - for over 50 years, that was ineffective? What were they for then? A vanity project? Quite an expensive one.

I'm done with this, so I'll let you have the last word, which seems to be the most important thing here (and to hell with actual facts from people with actual first hand experience}

No I think they painted up a few vans and drove them around a bit when they were doing one of their regular shakedowns. Cheap and effective PR. I am sure at the beginning they tried things but once they realised any evidence they might get was useless in court they just drove around empty vans.

 

[artie]

You're hilarious. You really think that the Post Office and the BBC maintained a group of engineers and a fleet of vans with expensive equipment that was regularly updated for continuously changing technology - 405 to 625 lines, colour, valve to transistor to solid state etc., etc - for over 50 years, that was ineffective? What were they for then? A vanity project? Quite an expensive one.

I can relate one instance where they were effective.
I bought a new house in a new development in 1984 and binned every letter re tv licences.
In 87/88 can't quite remember, I was parked in town when I saw a tv detector van drive past.
I had a think to my self, decided I had saved myself a few quid and walked over to the post office and purchased a colour licence.

Back then her indoors and the kids watched non stop so arguably it was worth it.

Nowadays it wouldn't be used at all so I don't need a licence.

 

[D_W]

we have something over here called the stingray may parallel the vans. For a long time, the stingray was never used in court, and it still may not be, but despite the stupid name, the thing worked. You'd have to look it up online to find out exactly what it does, but it certainly lifts at least location and possibly other things from cell phones and supposedly with secret warrants (as if it wouldn't be done otherwise).

What the stingray does isn't provide evidence of something in court, it gives the police and feds the ability to collect information that nobody thinks they're able to collect and then use that to triangulate into a legitimate warrant.

What the police and feds absolutely didn't want was for this stingray device to be named in warrants so that it would become public knowledge, but it eventually got out.

(OK, I looked it up - the things bearing that name can do all kinds of BS, including mocking a cell point so that they can intercept a cell signal and then pass it along to another point - the user has no idea they're being sniffed).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker

 

[D_W]

My point wasn't well made above - aside from the vans saying they're detecting something, they may have been actually detecting common radiation or whatever other electronic signals were typically given off by a tube TV or solid state devices (I don't know much about electronic crap) to both get people to pay up out of fear upon appearance, and to find the next target for legitimate investigations.

If the truck doesn't show up being used in court, it's hard for someone to have legal standing to challenge it as an unreasonable search method.