Re: [Sheflug] Re: BlueYonder

[Alex Hudson <nospam [at] alexhudson.com>]

On 03 Mar 2001 13:00:26 +0000, Chris J/#6 wrote:
> I don't know US culture/law - I'm looking at it from a UK perspective ... I 
> can't think of anything prior to three or four or so years ago in 
> telecoms/entertainment (maybe with the exception of Sky analogue - I don't 
> know how they did their contracts) that did this sort of thing.
> 
> If anyone has a better idea though ... :)

Umm... telephones??? The telephone, when it first started and for the
next fifty-odd years, was always rented from the post office - you would
pay a monthly rental fee for the line equipment, as well as the service
itself. It wasn't until later that you could buy equipment to use on the
line also, and even then it has to be approved.

To be fair, there have always been a number of services which gave you
access to rented equipment. Even stuff like your electricity is using
rented equipment - your meter, for example, is unlikely to be your
property, I believe, same with gas and water (if you have a water
meter). I have to say, I also approve in many respects  - for example, a
lot of places of work don't allow you to connect anything but authorised
network cards to the local lan, which gets two thumbs up from me.
Electrical equipment is dangerous, remember, and even in the hands of
knowledgable users gets unnecessarily disrupted. I'm reminded of a time
when a number of Universities used to provide RS232 ports (before
ethernet :) to allow people to connect to the local compute servers.
These got regularly broken from people with papers clips (op-amps don't
like being driven to ground), and esp. with stuff like comms lines, the
danger is not only is the local equipment going to blow up, but the
remote equipment also. And to be honest, people who 'know' how things
work are often the worst for breaking them.

Cheers,

Alex.
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