links for 2008-07-18

It’s great! Shocker.

“[M]arket pro­vi­sion may now be such that the con­sumer mar­ket fail­ure argu­ments that sus­tained the old rationale for PSB, have been super­seded. We are left largely with the cit­izen­ship arguments.”

“One reason there are so many anonym­ously sourced news stor­ies in New York and Wash­ing­ton pub­lic­a­tions is because report­ers out­num­ber good sources by a wide margin…”

“[W]hile happy to put num­bers to the BBC’s pos­it­ive mar­ket impact, the PWC research­ers didn’t find time to quantify any of the poten­tial neg­at­ive mar­kets impacts res­ult­ing from the £3.5bn of pub­lic money spent by the BBC on deliv­er­ing said purposes.”

There are a very large num­ber of poten­tial tar­gets where pro­tec­tion is essen­tially a waste of resources and a much more lim­ited one where it may be effective.”

the Met­ro­pol­itan Police insist that (a) they’re not going to release data for crime map­ping (b) even if they did, they keep it amal­gam­ated on such a level that it wouldn’t be any use to anyone.

Gotta love this: “[F]ans are allowed to have an opin­ion of their own, but threat­en­ing or dis­respect­ing the writer just goes to show that the spe­cific reader is not only ill informed but immature.”