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Vindolanda posted:The Oyster system in London works really well, but it's annoying that I can't use it on buses in Scotland - even though contactless readers are installed for OAP bus passes. On the back of this, here in the south east, train operators have been installing ITSO readers to start to "replace" the paper tickets. Cool, right? Wrong. Half the readers in the area are broken or defective because the turnstiles for them were installed years previously and never maintained, so you get the situation where the reader will cycle between "ITSO / Tickets" and "Please Wait" every few seconds. During the Please Wait phase, the reader is disabled and if you don't place your card on the pad at the right time, the system will shriek and just say "Seek Assistance". But that's assuming you can even buy a ticket from the machines in the first place. More often than not, you'll go through the entire transaction, selecting first and last station, providing payment, and right as you try and add the ticket to the card, it'll tell you "There has been a problem. You have not been charged" and you're boned. Oh, but you can use the website to purchase season tickets! Except until recently the site only worked correctly in IE8. During the purchasing attempt, when it came time to select where to load the ticket onto the card, the dropdown would not draw and you would be unable to progress. Let's talk about those tickets for a moment, whilst that's the whole thing. Say you want to purchase a Weekly ticket between Falmer and Lewes, two normal stations with readers. If you manage to buy it, you'll tap on, tap off and it'll all be fine. But, what about if you want to purchase a ticket between Brighton and Lewes. It's only three stations ahead of Falmer and the price increase is negligible and it would allow unlimited travel between the stations regardless of where you board. With a standard paper ticket, the barriers understand this. The brainless "conductors" understand this. The ITSO readers, do not. You cannot break your journey with a ITSO card, despite it being a valid action. At this point, it seems stupid to use the ITSO system. It doesn't work anywhere near as well as the paper system, the conductors rarely have a reader and some even threaten to have you ejected from the train since "you might be lying", but it does not stop the constant adverts touting it as "the best thing since tits themselves". ANGRY 
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Jul 20, 2013 17:23
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#TVLicencing chat. For years, a lot of people have raged about the whole TV Licence thing, since it all goes to the BBC, but you need one to watch any and all live TV broadcasts (including non BBC channels, and Cable & Satellite TV). You'll get occassional flareups when things like Jimmy Saville / Operation Yewtree kick up, where people complain it's being used to subsiside those sorts of actions, and there is even whole YouTube channels dedicated to "fighting" the enforcement agents who come round to your house and try and demand to verify that you don't have a TV set. Except, they are really really shady about the rules. In the 90's, they ran a whole slew of adverts about how they had super secret advanced technology that could detect a TV set from outside your house and that was enough to get you for thousands of pounds of fines and a criminal record. One of the adverts included a man who tried to loop a recording of a chicken in the Microwave to avoid the agent, before it cut to the man in the bath singing and this outed him as a bad person, and you got the scare tactics of fines and prison. Except: 1) That was never true, even if they could "detect" a TV, it wasn't legally enforceable on the magic finder box alone. 2) It's not a legal requirement to have a TV licence just because you have a TV. It's always been that you only need it to watch live television (including recording it). If it's been pre-recorded by someone else, you're watching a home movie or playing those new fangled video games consoles, then you are exempt. Even today the enforcement agents will try their hardest to convince you that you need said licence to just have one in your house. If you have the audacity to claim that you don't need it, they'll demand to enter your house and "verify" this, by checking your television isn't capable of receiving signal, but with Smart TV's having BBC iPlayer or the ITV Hub pre-installed, even if you don't have and aerial installed, it's trivial for any agent to fudge it one way or the other. In closing, I am not a fan of the current TV licencing legislation. I am wholly unsurprised about a brick or fireplace tax...
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Aug 28, 2019 08:18
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Imagined posted:Let's ask Jeremy Corbyn or any random Iraqi how objective and non-partisan the BBC is... One of my bigger issues is that fact that as a licence payer, I have no control over how my fee is used. I don't mean literally what department it goes to, but if I wanted more or less of one thing? Too loving bad, suck it up pleb. I fully realise that some people enjoyed older Top Gear with others being in love with the nature output, etc, but it still doesn't matter, the BBC just makes whatever the BBC wants and I'd have no control over output, even just a token vote that every holder would get. And yes, I find it hillarious how the BBC is supposed to be forced to be 100% neutral because of said fee, yet you get such incredible and open bias it's not funny. Don't get me wrong, I loved comedy like Red Dwarf, and also that BBC2 showed Star Trek on Wednesdays in the early 90's. A lot of content they made would never have been commissioned on ITV or Channel 4, but it doesn't detract from a lot of critical issues as I see them, with no way of the payers resolving or even working towards resolving them. Related and back on topic: Points of View, or other "right to reply" style shows.The BBC one used to be hosted by Anne Robinson, but with the rise of Twitter and the internet as a whole, it made specific shows for complaining about things programming or content pretty much redundant as whatever complaints would be reposted as an online news article the day after something trended, instead of waiting 4 weeks for a TV program to be made.
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Aug 28, 2019 19:47
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