Posts by Mark

joined up government

Give it a year or two, and they'll be crossing this with the ID card, CCTV and the latest round of terrorism legislation and employing the odd cut price outsourced hacker. Then, lo and behold, before the metaphorical digital ink is dry on your lovingly crafted "Labour are w****rs" blog post, your blog will be back "on message" and you'll be presented with a fixed penalty notice for anti-social behaviour/terrorism (or perhaps a hellfire missile if you diss Gordon too personally) conveniently delivered by modified Predator drone as you're heading off to Tesco's. Or perhaps they'll ban any protest blogs within X number of IPs from the Downing st website.

Or perhaps I should get out more.

Errrm

"Bet his mum is dead proud"

Possibly not at this precise moment.

Pencil and paper anyone?

I cant really see whats wrong with the old method TBH. Its probably harder to defraud on a large scale, leaves a paper trail and is simple enough even the most retarded voter to comprehend. Even allowing for paying (in the UK) council staff to tally the papers, its still probably cheaper than the overpriced electronic "solutions". In the elections I've seen at first hand in an area with an electorate of about 100,000, I've never seen more than a few dozen 'debatable' spoiled papers to be squabbled about between the parties.

In the UK, the fraud is more likely to relate to the registering of non-existent people or dead/overseas relatives than it is to ballot stuffing, marking papers or dubious counts.

Helped?

Rather than being helped out of their self created hole, the management should be tarred and feathered, placed in a "greedy shits Big brother" house (a closed down hospital ward would do nicely) where ex-patients could vote each week on which one is to be fed to a herd of starving wild pigs. That'll learn 'em.

Childish! But! Fun!

The! Exclamation! Marks! Must! Stay!

A must have for ASBO-land

So that'll make Nokia handsets the must have accessory of choice for the muggers of London's happy slappin' capital, Newham.

Proving the lie of "unlimited"

If anything useful comes out of this it might just be to wake up that silent majority of (pre BBC iPlayer) "low users" so beloved of the ISPs. A good number of these will turn into bandwidth monsters overnight, quickly discover the real weaknesses of the ISP they previously thought they had no reason to moan about. Tiscali and the rest only get away with the deceitful advertising and poor service they deliver because most don't stretch their connections enough to notice the inadequacies.

TTMC = Joan Bakewell??

Shurely shome mishtake!! Helen Mirren is the only true claimant to that crown.

Jesus with a sea view

If you can get 750 quid for a stain on your garage floor, imagine what the miraculous jesus image on Brighton's West Pier must be worth, coming, as it does, complete with a crown of thorns, a cracking sea view, good access to local amenities and the best gay hotspots Sussex has to offer.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wildgoosechase/516568943/

Truly delusional

"I don't believe real value can be created by dishonesty, manipulation and lack of integrity"

Presumably a lesson learned by deploying these extensively against Plusnet customers and watching it all go into meltdown last year. Standards are so low in the UK not least because of the Straffords of the world.

Ofcom ride to the rescue?

The ISPs will really be losing sleep over that...

What about the other 50 percent?

Strikes me it would be way more profitable to get out the half of the population that can't be arsed to vote than relying on the honesty of the half that can.

Bloodsuckers

"Even Thatcher would never have let this sort of thing happen."

That statement really is a sign of the times. If patientline had been around in the eighties, there'd have been a whole tabloid entirely devoted to the moral outrage generated (OK, not from the Murdoch stable) and an endless stream of Spitting Image skits.

Perhaps patientline can pull themselves back from the brink by taking over the national blood bank and flogging it at market rates to the highest bidder; they certainly have substantial experience of working at those depths of immorality.

Blame Blair

On the basis that teachers in general view any government comment or initiative as a personal attack on them and their abilities. Blair (like most in goverment, it seems) is famously IT illiterate at a personal level, yet relentlessly pushed the internet as a cure all for any educational ill, without any actual working knowledge of what it might offer. Government says "black", teachers instinctively say "white".

Who's next?

If al Qaeda announce a virtual Jihad on Sadville's 'immoral' inhabitants, SL really will have a full and comprehensive selection of nutters on display. Maybe virtual petrol will explode with a little more vigour than the real thing, unencumbered by the laws of physics.

UK for sure

As the home to Europes most shallow, gullible and rip-off insensitive consumers, the UK is surely guaranteed the status of 'major' by Apple.

Commercial dispute?

The wheels might come off Ofcom's spineless and rather myopic stance if every other operator starts jumping on this particular bandwagon. I don't fancy having to subscribe to half a dozen providers just to be sure I can call everyone in my address book.

A boost for the opposition

I can see the takeup for linux on an upward curve when they switch this on.

In America today...

Brown really is the new black.

Exception to the rule

This must surely be the exception that proves the rule that all publicity is good publicity.

A real triumph for stupidity.

Swivel-eyed nutters

The bits about "sir" in the article reminded me of Ollie North in the Iran Contra hearings, where "sir" seemed to be every second word. Where on earth do they get these people? They seem to be pre-manufactured robots made to a rather low-tech template with only very limited spec. If he'd said "resistance is useless" I wouldn't have been surprised.

There are few enough reasons these days to view UK citizenship as a badge of honour. Scheuer is evidently one of them.

Democracy at work?

More depressing than the response from the govt is that people actually seem to have expected better from the masters of hot air. Like so many touchy-feely "hey we're all in it together" new labour initiatives, this is just another facile way of stopping people asking for any real say in how we're governed. A bit like a kids toy mobile phone; it looks the part, makes the right noises, but provides nothing more than entertainment.

The cost of amateur pyrotechnics

Great article, and a fine antidote to the "be very afraid" stuff doing the rounds elsewhere. I have to confess, I had to laugh at the reports of the Glasgow airport attack, not least as the cop in the video clip appeared to be grinning as he pinned the partially roasted Comedy Terrorist to the floor.

But one thing occurs to me; perhaps the visual bang IS enough to achieve some of the aims. The thing that ultimately brought the UK government to "talk to terrorists" was money; the threat to the City in terms of disruption of business and spiralling insurance costs that began to threaten London's viability as a global financial centre. This, more than loss of life, led to the eventual negotiations.

One of the IRA's most cost-effective campaigns was a cheap-and-cheerful firebombing campaign on the tube, in the early nineties I think. A few fag packet sized devices under seats on the Tube - few of which ever went off - caused massive disruption, and a lot of checking under seats of the entire tube fleet, with seals placed on checked seats. No death, little damage, plenty of panic and plenty of cost.

A quick look at the video of Glasgow airport and Haymarket looks much the same. Large numbers of well paid cops doing fingertip searches over a wide area. The cost of forensics, organising what will surely be an expensive prosecution and trial with attendant security cost. Interruption to business and serious long term disruption to air travel all hit the national wallet hard. Look at the effect of last summers "binary bomb" non-starter which didnt get beyond a bit of beardy male bonding and a few wild and implausible ideas - result; months of serious airport chaos.

Maybe handing the job to a bunch of amateur jihadis wasn't such a bad idea. They may end up with porridge instead of virgins, but the shoddy results still cost UK PLC a fortune, and it frees up the more competent bombers for more demanding work in Iraq etc.

Brilliant

Perhaps this will be Gordon Brown's first big immigration scandal. At least they'll know where to repatriate them to.

Richly deserved

Rarely have a set of poor financial results given me such pleasure, and I look forward to the final death rattle from a firm that really is the unacceptable face of capitalism.

Pot, kettle etc

After being transferred, against my protestations, to Tiscali's dreadful LLU network by Plusnet last year, I can have every sympathy with those being screwed by TT, but none whatever with the PN comms teams holier-than-thou blog posting on this. Shrill and sanctimonious doesn't begin to describe the tone. And this from the same team that so bullishly told us Tiscali'd victims that we could like transfer to another network provider or leave.

Talktalk may be acting immorally (at least), but they are only one in a long line of ISPs with zero regard for consumers, encouraged not least by the policy vacuum that is Ofcom.