more is less?
Perhaps we could have official labels like the ones that tell you the official MPG of cars?
Oh. Yes. Tsk They're bullshit too......
61 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2007
With the UK police just about to start seriously abusing another new power, and remotely accessing your PC to go fishing for your evil anti-EU thoughts, child pron, or old album covers, the Brits, as One Might Say, are not really in a position to criticize the CCP.
Because the Chinese government has spent 2 decades teaching schoolkids and students excellent IT and English language, the Great Fire Wall is increasingly risible in China, All the bright Young Things here know exactly what is going on, because they just casually noodle their way around or through the GFW. But it's really odd what the GFW TRIES to stop. Sometimes there's no apparent rhyme nor reason. Yet nearly all the Pro-EU, Pro-Nu Labour, and Left wing political blogs get through, even when they mention Dem**racy. (Unless they're on Wormpress or Tripepad. Then they are automatically evil, and proper steps are taken.)
...and assured the people of UK that they had legislated, LEGISLATED, to prevent the imposition of University top up fees EVER, comes a denial that they intend to brown-nose the EU's Kommissioners, who are desperate to find ANY way of controlling the internet.
It is particularly important to get this control of the internet, and the enabling snooping activity, in place before the Irish are told to vote YES this time, or the whole Lisbon Process will (not actually) collapse and (not actually) create a crisis for the EU.
They're lying. It's not about kids, they know it, and they don't give a toss if that bit would "work" or not. It's because they want to block any content that is hostile to the government in Brussels, as well as their parish council in Westminster. Zanu Labour wants to block content because they regard dissidence from their own ideas as basically criminal, and the EU does because they know the internet stands in the way of simply abolishing democratic rights, as per the Irish "No" vote. They need content filtering before they try any ig new scams. The EU has already proposed licences for video uploads, which is bugger all to do with Jihadis, but because Youtube has been so effective in political campaigns.
Yes, Andy Burnham is a twat, but on this he's just a sacrificial twat; it's Brown and Barroso pulling the strings
>>>Two thirds of councils said misuse of badges was a major problem<<, Nope. They mean badges make it harder for them to extort fines. That's why they are so-o expensive on the black market. If councils would stop acting like venal tax collectors and have fair parking policies, the problem would evaporate.
The reason they dare not scrap the cards is because the EU has told them we must have them. Not as draconian as the scheme ZAnulabour wants, true. Our politicians are little more than parish counselors now, carrying out Brussels requirements.
They (and the mainstream media) are SCARED to admit that they have to do this under the EU laws they have signed up to. And I'm waiting for someone here to whine (a) if you've nothing to hide..." or (b) "We've had them in Spain for years and ..."
Because you don't KNOW what will become a crime, and what the home secretary can make one retrospectively. Buying glue without an ID perhaps. Wouldn't surprise me. It's a crime now to overfill your (EU requirement) wheelie bin and
Because it never ever was a CARD, it was always about a massive Stasi type population database that YOU have to pay to maintain up to date, or get fined for NOT keeping it up to date.
What better way could the be of reminding future generations just how much labour instinctively distrusts them, and of its centralising controlling dogmaa, and what finer way of giving the tories a stick to beat labour opposition for half a century? "We didn't want them, but the last lot of Labour b'stards so screwed up our laws that it's impossible to undo the scheme now"
(And of course, the real reason is that the EU wants them, admittedly nothing LIKE as intrusive as labour wants, but NO ONE admits that)
So when the screen says, "EU termination charge to accept this incoming call is 30p a minute, accept/decline?" we are all going to praise the EU aren't we? Yep. Are the t**ts in Brussels suicidal as well as stark staring bonkers? How to get unelected.
Oh, I forgot. we aren't allowed to unelect them, are we?
Like the terrorism laws it will be of Phi Alpha use for what the government PRETENDED it was for, and Not used for that at all, but will be used instead to stop people mocking Nu Labour politicians (beware, Bo Beau D'Or?) or even to close down public events they don't care for. It won't be possible to prevent anything (crooks don't obey the law, right?) , but it will be useful to stop us going about our business.
Rather like ID cards
The point of Chip and PIN was never to cut fraud, but to reduce card issuer payouts by shifting blame. The system was always hackable - it was hacked in Holland before the cards were introduced to UK - BY STUDENTS. So now the issuers claim fraud has fallen - whereas they are simply refusing payouts for frauds, because they changed the terms of card issue. Thats why in much of Europe, where unlike UK they never did buy the "safe as Chips" nonsense, they still ask for a passport and or a signature.
Ah, the Templars. They transferred their lineage to the order of St John, more fully "Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta" and are still about, and recognised by the UN as well. The smallest sovreignity in the world (6000 square meters) they have diplomatic relations with many countries, observer status at the UN and EU, and can issue passports like the UN and the Red Cross can.
I seem to remember reading in El Reg that if you go through UK passport control with a broken chip they will have to admit you anyway, because it isn't required by international agreement that biometric passports are mandatory? Apparently the UK passport people will "advise" you your chip is kaput, and "suggest" you shell out 90 quid for a new one. And if I need a passport renewal when I am in Ulan Bator, will it even HAVE a chip?
We stopped believing or trusting the Police around about May 2 1997........ what happened then I wonder?
On a brighter note, at least we don't live in a state like this: “Fascism is typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic.”
oops.
Kelvin is going to lose in Howden - have you ever BEEN there? Even the cows are blue. I dipute the claim that everyone is behind Gordy on this one anyway. Radio and TV panel shows and phone ins over the last year or so have indicated that the public are NOT behind the prolonged banging up of people Gordy just doesn't really like much. The Sun misjudged their readers in the last election by supporting Zanu Labour, and now is looking to show its readers it cares about them. A bit late now - without the Sun they probably wouldn't have had Gordy, House price drops, Massive VED hikes, the fall of the pound, and the EU constitution.
If they have done so well, how come my roaming cost me 174 quid* in ten days last Christmas? Cos the networks just move the profits. Like now europe has no "exchange rates" (The fab Euro, y'see?) so the card firms and banks just charge "interbank costs". As usual, the EU know sweet phi alpha about how these things work.
(*MY wifi phone is brill - except it doesn't work if there isn't a signal to surf - where I was when I got the business stuff to deal with.)
As usual, they miss the point. A person who can only afford a ten quid game isn't likely to be in the market for it at 60 quid. It would stay in the shop. So the "equivalent value" is tosh - it's making the totally false assumption that every pirate copy sold is a genuine copy not sold. Any evidence for this? I think the evidence is all the other way.
This is of course all garbage. Just as aircraft bombers now know that the best way to get explosives on a plane is to put them in your silly plastic bag and wave them at a security guard, who will ignore them. Downside risk - you get caught and get life in jail, but hey, you were planning DEATH anyway, so where's the problem? So the true file hider will just work with the system, and put the data in plain old word files deep on a disk labeled "Archived documents 2000 - 5", kept with a hundred similar CDs of any old random files, or do the really SMART thing - move it all onto ..... wait for it ..... paper.
No mate, it's a family firm, wholly owned by the Sauds, and all the citizens are mere employees. Their "legal" system (they don't have "justice") is exactly what the boss decrees it to be, and their laws are the rules the boss makes up.
And like all tough choices, we don't HAVE to buy their oil, but we're scared of the consequences.
I have been shafted several times by US buyers who didn't understand pounds were not dollars, or that there was a big pond in between us, or that a carpet is a heavy heavy item. These people then left negative about ME - in one case pursued me for non delivery on an item they refused to pay for. We SHOULD be able to leave negative f/b - there is a process for canceling it if it is untrue. This was a bad decision.
I'd feel a bit more sympathy for the industry if it didn't want to apply US and EU pricing to the rest of the world, who can't pay them. And I'd feel more sympathy for PB if it didn't keep promising stuff it can't deliver. It must KNOW a lot of the links are deceased, dead, no longer with us, not live, gone to the great drive in the sky?
Short question, shorter answer - "It's not"
It's fueled by our government's obsession with gathering data, and the craven agreements with the US over sending anything from the inner leg measurements to the family allotment grid reference to the US every time we get on a plane that goes into atmosphere the US uses too.
to really reduce crime would be to put CCTV cameras in police stations and broadcast outside the pictures of cops doing nothing very much except sending out camera speed tickets, filling in forms to prosecute homeowners who've been burgled, assembling evidence against the victims of crime, or working out new ways NOT to go after burglars, muggers and hoods.
>>One can only imagine the outcry at airports if Californians were forced to endure a unique set of bizarre screening rituals.<<
What, MORE? At LAX there is already tests of queue toleration, being shouted at thresholds, rudeness tests, crap food endurance, dirty terminal syndrome, shoe inspection, bag poking, body scanning, and the intensive "Why the F*** were you here anyway ?" oral examination.
It would have been stopped almost immediately if (a) it wasn't an EU issue but a national one, but (2) the EU now controls the VAT tax regime so governments are powerless, and (c) the EU can't agree on ANYTHING easily, and (iii) it's a stupid French tax anyway, (0) sales tax was much easier and less prone to fraud, (IX) anyway the EU is no paragon, as its books haven't been signed off as correct and fraud free for yonks, and (D) The EU runs us all now so we are completely screwed.
Darling's taxes are nothing to do with climate change, they are to do with the dire state of the UK economy. The cash won't get spent on the environmental issues he rumpets, any more than roqad tax gets spent on roads. it'll get spent on wars and ID cards, And keeping Labour MPs' snouts in the trough. But while we're about it, the VED bands don't make sense. As all the CO2 a car emits is based on the Carbon it puts in as fuel (the Oxygen being in the air already) then a car that does 36 mpg (MINE, right?) simply CANNOT produce as much CO2 per kilometer as a car that does 20 MPG. Like the fabled Chelsea tractor. But to the tax people, they both produce the same CO2 per Km. Ed Balls.They don't. Ergo it's about cash, not carbon.
I signed up for Hulu when i was visiting LA, and even there half the channels were blocked. Here in PRC it is phi alpha use.
I really need online TV here to supplement a daily diet of CNN and HBO, but Joost is a pain in the ah - so. The content is dire (I mean COME ON, three week old excerpts from BBC 2 Newsnight??) and the access mechanism is deadly, I always seem to start whenever and however I access it, with a fat bird on a couch doing a chat show. Then the skiers......
The only half useful online TV comes from labpixies on my google homepage, and irfull screen definiition is rubbish, but at least I can get UK ITV channels, subject, natch, to international copyright.....
I am still struggling to get the Best of ITV video on my lappy too - all ideas etc. etc.
If they aren't online via the internet, how do a hundred thousand identity checking terminals from all over the country, schools, banks, hospitals public and private, post offices, town halls, airports, (and the world in our Embassies abroad) interrogate the database for identity checking?
Come on, it's no use telling the politicians it's no use and won't work, because they know that already. They dare not admit how wrong they are. LIke the EU constitution referendum, if they were to concede the argument then they'd lose, and probably have to call an election. So they stagger drunkenly on, trapped by their own folly.
Oh, and in PRC you do have the right to complain, just not too loudly, and not on the internet too obviously. You should hear the guys in my local luncherie on the subject of the powers that be.
For heavens sake, we all KNOW it's nothing to do with security, as the real danger lies with people who WOULD HAVE CARDS, and because visitors won't have them anyway. It is simply a nu labour big willie contest, and replaces any real policies for improving the economy or tackling more serious issues. Rememeber that Labour burned up all its half-good people up in their first parliament, used the second raters next, and is now run by the failures. Time they went away.
Airport security is only there to annoy us and enable the b**gers in Brussels to pretend that they do some good. In EMA I was queiing to get through when the shifts changed, and they just stopped checking our shoes and belts. In malaga they scanned my backpack, when I got home to UK I discovered two half used bottle of water in it. I recently walked through Schipol and noticed that at some gates they were scaning computers sepaately, some weren't, some were havong shoes off, some weren't, some were having belts off, some weren't, and in all cases just waving your transparent bag of assorted tubes of unguents at the checkers meant that they would be ignored. It is all total bo**ocks. In Amsterdam they also use it to boost airport profits, by pouring away sealed bottles of duty free coming in on flights from elsewhere, and straight facedly telling you you should have bought it at the Schipol Df shop.
Wow! Choose one group (teachers) that have so much data on them and so many security checks already that they really don't NEED ID cards, and another group you want to alienate just before they are old enough to vote. Neither of whom are likely to be benefit cheats, terrorists, or illegals, all the reasons given for the card. Brilliant. This government must be getting utterly desperate.
Once the new Lisbon constitutional ooops "reform" Treaty, on which Gordon Brown is so very keen, has been ratified there will be no way to stop the EU funding Galileo even if it has to rob all the other budgets and shove it through on majority voting. UK is stuffed on this, it knows there is no point in Galileo, but can't stop picking up the bills. This is because under Brown's beloved constitutional oops "reform" treaty, the EU will at be legally authorised to run its own space policy, instead of using the ESA. This white elephant, redundant before it is launched, will be an immensely expensive, and inevitably mis-managed, EU funding disaster, and the UK will be far and away the biggest payer, as we always seem to be with the EU.