241–250 of 337 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume none of the Shazam-alikes can make any sense of it?
Yeah, they don't recognise it - or at least Shazam doesn't.
I think SoundHound was the original I used, I think Google's will do the same.
He also collects and displays all the previous letters he's got from the BBC: http://www.bbctvlicence.com/ They get increasingly threatening and aggressive. I'd guess that the OCR code scanning is to confirm that he's read the letter and adjust the hostility in the next letter appropriately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Sweden there was this whole thing where you apparently had to pay even if you only owned a laptop.
In France you pay the copyright infringement tax on every hard drive / SSD / storage you purchase. But it’s still forbidden to pirate movies.
The most baffling thing here is how the hell did the author get the organisation to respond , on topic, multiple times? In my experience conversing with various entities that are supposed to provide customer support, absolutely anything outside of an extremely narrow set of vetted topics with prepared answers and especially anything technical gets ignored and receives an irrelevant response at best.
Because it's government. People in government jobs often sit around half the day doing nothing because they have so much spare time. Case in point: me, right now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only an offense if you watch live TV [1]. They could have just lumped it in with your taxes, like they do in many other countries with state TV, but this approach in theory lets you opt out, even if they like to check up on you all too regularly. I suppose one downside of the BBC approach is tax is usually proportional to your income, while the TV license fee is not, and in fact you need to pay it even if you ha…
What happened to the vans with antennae that scanned for operating TVs (there’s an IF oscillator in there I guess) to find unlicensed receivers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In France you pay the copyright infringement tax on every hard drive / SSD / storage you purchase. But it’s still forbidden to pirate movies.
It is not "copyright infringement" tax. It's called a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy and it's a rather common thing, at least in all of Europe.
A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
The most baffling thing here is how the hell did the author get the organisation to respond , on topic, multiple times? In my experience conversing with various entities that are supposed to provide customer support, absolutely anything outside of an extremely narrow set of vetted topics with prepared answers and especially anything technical gets ignored and receives an irrelevant response at best.
A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
It’s not just a U.K. thing. Many European countries have something similar, although it might be called something else. It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#
Likeliest situation is all their stationary destined for send outs have the line; and in situations where the line serves no purpose it does no harm to leave it: so there is little use in having additional process around completely blank stock.
They could have told him that though if it's the case, and the mystery would be solved. But there obviously wasn't any desire (or more charitably - time) on their end to really look into the reasoning or even understand the question. ---- Edit: I will share what I think is a nice a little counterpoint story here, from a business that is clearly still interested in understanding. I sent Lego an email a while ago: I'm…