Sue the Host?

I hope Fitwatch decide to try and sue the host for acting illegally.

Also if the police don't now try to get every other site that has posted the information closed down it will prove that they were just looking for an excuse to his this site rather than just acting on the evidence of this one post.

Evening Standard

One of our videos got picked up by the Evening Standard today

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23894808-outraged-resident-bags-a-couple-of-parking-cctv-spy-cars.do

Title

These rides started off as a Saturday event and have now expanded to any day people are free. We had a single rider out on Monday who must have saved motorists over £1000 in fines.

There is now a Twitter feed that we update with locations as we find them and people can let us know where the cameras are easily. http://twitter.com/NoToMob

We are also starting to expand operations outside Westminster due to the fact that the Westminster cars have developed a habit of running back to base when we turn up.

Real Life

At the end of the day, don't post anything on the web that you wouldn't do face to face or don't have the bottle to admit to posting to family and work collegues.

If he'd done the same things to these people in person he would also have been locked up, so doing it on the web is no defence.

Really?

I thought there was an incident a few years back when the powergrids went screwy due to one part going BANG?

Stupid

With incidents like this becoming more common is it any suprise that the Head of the MET wants to make it harder to sue the police?

The idiot that reported this and the cop that threatened to fine him for it both need to get a life.

He should have kept the hedge and refused the fine, then the police would have to drop it or get the CPS to prosecute, which would have been a case worth seeing in the Magistrates court.

Getting There

I know a few people that have been eyeing the iPad and/or an eBook reader, and keep telling them not to buy anything yet as there is so much stuff coming onto the market in the next month or so.

So far from what I've seen the Archos 70 Internet Tablet looks to be the best hope for price/performance/abilities http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_70it/specs.html

Capacitive Screen - yes

Recent OS - yes (Android 2.2)

Fast CPU - yes (1 GHz)

Good Storage - yes (8GB flash or 250GB HD), also micro SD slot

WiFi & Bluetooth - yes

Battery - 10 hrs surfing (will probably be 7 in truth though)

Also has built in webcam.

Just need to see what their service will be like and actually get hands on time messing with one now.

Limited Phones

According to the HTC Sense site it only works on a couple of their very new phones and not most of their range.

Throttled

I don't have too much of a problem with throttling during peak hours, I just wish I could get more than a 1.5mb down max on my BT line.

Also any company expecting you to stay within a download limit for a month should supply you with software that will allow you to monitor the stats on your line from their system.

Real Target

I expect the real target will be Wikileaks and so called extremist websites (basically anything considered unamerican)

Don't Use It

I stopped using the site ages ago due to the number of virus and trojan warnings/infections. Not had any problems since I avoided it.

Nice Idea but ...

... this law won't be used to get rid of odd existing laws, instead they will use tha facility to create a whole new set of strange local laws to nick you for.

Release Now?

Why not just release the damn things now with 2.1 or 2.2 and try to get some market share before they have to spend the next 5 years chasing Apple. As long as the OS can be patched to version 3 when it's released there should be no problem.

I know people that are looking for these now and if the delays keep going they will just end up buying an iPad before the end of the year.

Title

But isn't the Red Dwarf quote going to become true soon with people ratting on their neighbours for claiming too much Benefits in order to win cash rewards?

Eek Broadband

Availability for the DD10 0TA area on the Inverbervie exchange

Exchange Your local BT Exchange (Inverbervie) is ADSL broadband enabled

Line Your line should be capable of supporting download speeds up to 512kbps (around 10 times faster than dial-up)

Your line will be fully tested when you place a broadband order

Postcode-only checks are not 100% accurate

Oh well that scuppers that idea then.

Police Stop

I want it.

I would love to see the cops on SKY trying to raid that place using their puny enforcer.

V2 Rights Sheet

The only problem with that 'cheat sheet' is that it's so damn long-winded, you are probably just better off printing out the MET police webpage.

True Story

I'm more inclined to believe the people suing in this case because the money they are asking for isn't like the normal sue-hungry idiots that sue for $15+million for a stubbed toe.

PR Hybrid

The system I'd like to see would double the size of the current constituances so we'd have half the MPs, and continue to run these posts using the current voting system. So that would be 325 local MPs.

Then run the other 325 MPs via a pure PR system. The MPs from the list could still be assigned constituances to look by their party, so some areas would have more than one MP people could go to for help.

This way you could still vote for a 'local MP' but you could also vote for a National Party that you prefer, often not the same when you have a good local MP. It would also give the more popular parties a chance to still get a pure majority in Parliment.

I would also add the prison population as a single constituancy with one MP to solve the problem with them not being able to vote.

Voting

I was one of the people working at this election in a London Borough.

We were open from 7am until 10pm, and the Polling Stations are all very local to the registered address of the voter so public transport is not required. Add to this the fact that if you were disabbled you can almost bet that one of the local parties would have been willing to give you a lift if they thouht you might vote for them there is no excuse not to get there on time. The staff were there from 6:15am until about 10:30pm and unable to leave the station or take any proper breaks unless things got quiet.

At our location we had about 5k people on the voter lists, this list was then split into three parts. So after the postal votes etc each station probably had about 1500 people to look after. We had papers for about 1200 people at each station, we could have got more if we needed them but it's very unlikely. Everyone wants us to stop wasting money and printing papers for every voter would mean an extra 30-40% of paper being paid for and wasted.

People have to go to the particular station and be marked off their list to ensure that they only vote once, so there is no way we could just add extra staff once we had started. Most of the day we had 30-40 people delt with each hour, at our peak 6-8pm we were dealing with 100 per hour (I logged the number every hour), and queues were stretching out the door but we were working as fast as possible. the voter cards made our life much easier because we could use the number to go straight to the place on the register instead of having to look it up via street name, house number and name.

We didn't have to turn anyone away for being late, but most elections we end up with someone that seems to want to see how fine they can cut it and still vote. The rules we were working to were if you have a Ballot Paper at 10pm you can vote but we will not issue any papers after 10pm.

I've seen a lot of posts/comments all over the place sugesting the use of computers for doing the lists so people can vote anywhere they like. The problem with this is that most of the voting is done for a particular Ward so the papers would need to be kept together in that ward for counting etc. If you moved the whole thing to an electronic system I think we'd have even more problems than we do now and more claims of tampering with the systems.

The great thing about the current UK way of voting is that there is a true paper trail that can be looked over later to see what happened and we don't require electricity to set a station up. If the only location available is a portacabin we can use that, there have also been ocassions where the start of the poll has been run from the back of a car due to keyholders not turning up.

The UK system might not be perfect but it's robust and for the most part it works well.

Couple More Thoughts

Weekend Voting

This has been looked at before including the 14hr voting window. A big problem with this is the fact that a lot of our Polling Stations are in church buildings that are often in use at the weekends, or would cost a lot more to hire.

Postal Votes

You can hang onto your Postal Vote and hand it in on the day of the vote but (in London) it needs to go to the station that you would normally vote at(due to ward boundaries) or the Town Hall. Also if you loose your Postal Vote you can normally get a replacement on the day from your local Town Hall.

On Order

Spoke to T-mobile last week, they had run out of stock, and getting rid of them as fast as they come in. Mines on order now...

Xperia X10

It will be interesting to see this phone when compared to the Sony that should be out any day now. That's the only thing delaying my move to a smartphone now.

Online Songs

I have never bought a downloadable song from anywhere and probably never will unless things change a lot.

I buy the CD and then rip it to whatever format I want.

Reasoning

1. Normally cheaper or close to same cost.

2. If I have a hard drive failure I can re-rip or use a backup.

3. I get to choose how much definition I loose.

4. I control what machines I can put it on.

They are Catholics

So forgive the reg, don't wine about it.

Good Idea

The whole thing looks like generally a good idea.

Waste of Money?

It's only a waste of money if you loose, they must know they have no chance to win.

Bin Days

Looks like they hit my street on bin day as well, they probably do that because some areas have parking restriction on the days that the bins are emptied, so they get a better view of the houses.

I also notice that the pictures seem to be at least two years on in my area, before I changed the car and before we got the recycling bins.

Real Degrees

We should be funding people that do 'real' degrees like sciences etc, as long as they are doing the course and getting decent grades.

We should be encouraging people to do subjects like nursing/teaching by giving them an interest free student loan that is automatically paid of over 15 years of working in the public sector at no charge to them. If they go to work in the private sector they should have to pay back the fees.

But if you want to do things like French Lit. or Media Studies etc you should be paying for it yourself.

The 50% target was a stupid idea, we'd be better with a lower taget for Uni of people that will actually get something real from it, and start funding more apprenticeships for people that aren't suited for Uni.

Ball Bearings

How long before some nut decides to load this up with steel balls or marbles?

No more Ubi

I was thinking of getting the new version of Settlers when it comes out, not now.

And they won't even guarantee that they will un-DRM any game that is being removed from their servers.

Outlook

I still use Outlook 2000 on an old XP machine for my emails. During the day I can access them via GoogleMail and POP3.

All my mail is auto sorted into folders as it comes in so I can ignore the mailshots until I want to look at them. Never had any problems with it.

Bye Bye Google ?

"The intention is also for the injunction to only be possible for sites where there is a substantial proportion of infringing material that is either hosted by that particular site or is accessed through the particular site in question."

Won't this mean that they could start blocking all the search engines due to that fact that they are often a very good way to find links to the sites that host warez or P2P links?

no clue

The sooner the scientific community reaches a consensus and admit they really don't have a clue what's going on and start working with an open mind, the better.

The whole Global Warming/Cooling argument is a waste. We just don't have the knowledge to work out what the climate is doing yet, keep studying it though.

Nearly everyone agrees that:

1 Energy efficiency is a good thing.

2 Pollution is a bad thing.

If they just worked on these two things the chances are they would cut down on the CO2 levels and other crap in the atmosphere with a lot less resistance from most people.

No Contracts?

I'm still on the free off-peak and weekend contracts and happy with it.

BBC Article

Very convienient bit of timing for the police : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8414254.stm

And the suspects aren't in the UK anymore so they can't sue the police for liable either.

US Only

So where's the UK supplier?

Too Expensive

When are they going to learn?

These things need to be around the £50 price point so sell them in great numbers. £150 for a WiFi radio is just too much.

I'm still running a Logik IR100 which I paid £40 for, which works well. I would buy a couple more if I could get them but all these companies want too much for them

Eye-Spy Police

We need some one to set up a website (outside the UK probably) and then run a competition to see who can photograph the most police cars/officers and upload them to the site.

The prizes can be along the lines of a t-shirt with "I photographed NNN police and all I got was this t-shirt'.

MCN could even run the next one during the next bike demo in North Wales, that would really get on the nerves of the police.

Won't Touch DAB

There is no way I will by a DAB radio whilst they are still using 10-year old codecs for the signals and the radios cost so much. I was given a PSION Wavefinder a while back and it was fun to mess with but you needed a PC to be running so might as well just use an online service.

I currently use one of the Logik wi-fi radios and it does all I need.

The only way DAB will get any cheaper is if the whole of the EU adopts the same system to help push the unit prices down.