Thrifty, Anonymous Benefactor Backs Up BBC Websites Before They Go Dark 159
revealingheart writes "The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands. The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these 'lost' websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more than $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites."
Re:author makes no reasonable point (Score:4, Insightful)
Firstly, the privatisation began years ago under New Tories - the worst hit from a geeky PoV being selling of infrastructure to Siemens.
Secondly, the BBC isn't a public body in the sense that is, say, the British Army. The Army is funded by a general, compulsory taxes on income and other trade. The BBC is funded by a licence which you only need to pay if you choose to watch (possibly time-shifted) live broadcast television.
Thirdly, anyone who thinks that this round of government cost cutting is even slightly relevant to getting out of recession is an idiot. Money is wasted because government acts as an agent for private benefactors, in particular (i) units are sold off and services contracted back to well-back-scratched government officials at profit; (ii) money invested in private wars, trade and military, under the guise of "free trade" or defence of the realm. Much of our debt represents investment in banks from which (if we do things right) we stand to make huge profit once we've sold off again.
Finally, government debt per se is not bad - it acts as a mirror private wealth of creditors. What matters is whether debt is sustainable. The approach after WW2 to a record level of debt was to invest more to grow local technology, industry and services. The approach today is to burn all society's bridges for firewood. Thatcher executed round one, and Cameron prepares kindling for remaining edifices. Then there's nothing left, and Britain will have got exactly what she asked for.
Re:author makes no reasonable point (Score:5, Insightful)
A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them. The licence fee is a compulsory tax on anyone who watches broadcast TV, whether or not they consume or even care about BBC services. Now I'm not saying that I don't enjoy BBC output, or even that I necessarily resent paying the licence fee, but please don't try to use weasel words and pretend it's something it isn't. It might be a special purpose tax and the money it generates might be ring fenced, but it's a tax and the BBC is a public body.
Maybe it's different in the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
But in the USA you do something like that you end up in court.
"But your honor, I was only trying to help them."
"Your honor, he has no RIGHT to help us!"
But seriously it would be a great clause in the copyright scheme that if a copyrighted work is taken out of distribution it should automatically go public domain. Otherwise publishers can simply delete history like those old racist Warner Brothers videos they keep taking down from Youtube.
Re:author makes no reasonable point (Score:5, Insightful)
A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them.
You seem to be overly worried about whether something can be called a "tax" or not based on whether it's compulsory (I'd like to propose, then, that food purchases are taxes because they are compulsory for survival). Consider instead the allocation of funds.
Scrapping Trident is a valid cost-cutting measure when the government has decided that it's overspending on unnecessary shit during a recession: if you scrap Trident, you suddenly have a few 10s of billions more GBP to allocate other than against an imaginary enemy who is already being sufficiently resisted.
Even tax on fags and booze goes to central government. The extra taxation isn't allocated for health or policiing services for cancer patients and drunks.
But, as you say, BBC money is separately funded. If you shut down a few small BBC web sites, you achieve precisely nothing to help anyone. The money won't go to firing one civil service PPP management bureaucrat or tearing up one agency contract in favour of well-trained full time employees.
What is more, I regard the licence fee as the cost the viewer pays for (i) the content produced by the BBC; (ii) even if he chooses not to watch the BBC, the permission given by the people to private broadcasters to use parts of the e-m spectrum (and other artificial/natural monopolies) to broadcast stuff in their interests. The "cost" in this case is the right for the people to provide a counterpoint - something sorely lacking, in, say, the bastion of free press that is the USA.
The BBC is (ideally) the people's counterbalance to the freedom of the press belonging to the owners of the presses.
The BBC is hardly unbiased (Score:4, Insightful)
Theres a very noticable left wing bias at the BBC, especially on Radio 4. We need right wingers like murdoch to provide balance.
More than 3.99 to keep running (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a couple of points to make:
1. People shouldn't assume that this means that shutting the websites would have only saved £3.99 from the BBC budget. Given large orgs and the cost mulitpliers for internally supported servers, it could well be tens of thousands of pounds per year.
2. Instead of people like Ben Goldacre [badscience.net] boo-hooing and expecting the government (which the BBC is effectively an arm of) to save the sites, he could have shelled out the £4 and done it himself. Could it be that - GASP - sometimes governments aren't the best way to get things done? :-O
Re:left wing bias at the BBC (Score:4, Insightful)
BBC features have a bit of a bias, but the hard news is straight-up, objective journalism. Your claim that Murdoch, whose media have been proven to slant and misrepresent hard news, will provide "balance" us complete, utter bullshit.
Not the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
See: Devillier Donegan Enterprises.
An American company that saved the original Monty Python tapes from being wiped, IIRC.
Re:Thats not what I meant by balance (Score:2, Insightful)
That way, unfortunately, lies the error of false equivalence, if not worse. For example, the death toll of innocent civilians on either side of that dispute is so incredibly lopsided that to imply any correlation is grossly inaccurate.
And then there's the US practice of getting a scientist and a fundamentalist preacher to argue the merits of the Theory of Evolution. There is no "truth somewhere in the middle". There is a valid scientific theory, and there is primitive superstition.