Posts by Graham Marsden
4077 posts • joined Friday 19th January 2007 17:59 GMT
Page:
conspiracy?
No, not conspiracy, just ignorance on your part.
Try looking up "gilts" which are government backed bonds whereby the government borrows money from investors, pension funds etc in exchange for a guaranteed rate of interest and you'll get some idea of what actually makes up a big chunk of National Debt.
I am pleased to be able to say:
"who the hell is Justin Bieber?"
Followed by:
"That was rhetorical, I don't even care who Justin Bieber is!"
@TimNevins
Looking at the mascots, they seem to be tinfoil coated...
Posted in 3-million-km-long comet plunges into Sun
Disaster Area...
... did it better.
Ship, sun, BOOM!
But you haven't learned to read Snopes...
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Are you sure...
... they're not offering to wipe the windows over with a dirty sponge and a knackered squeegee and charge $10,000,000 for the "service"?
Ah, but electric fly-swatters...
... can be used for other purposes in the BDSM community.
Erm, allegedly... ;-)
Posted in Young Boozer seeks Alabama offie office
Clearly...
... El Reg are using the Acme Movable Yard Arm which can be set such that provided there is any sun in the sky, it will always be over the Yard Arm! :-)
So nobody can snoop on my searches...
... oh, except for Google, of course...
Posted in LibCons to reduce vetting and barring
Vanessa George...
... the woman who ran that nursery in Devon and who took pictures of the children under her charge had been fully vetted and thereby cleared as "safe to work with children".
So even with these ridiculously over-protective "something must be done" regulations, there are still going to be abuses, meanwhile anyone who wants to work with children is treated as a potential kiddie fiddler and any gossip, hearsay or false accusations can be used to bar them from that job.
That these crimes happen is not a fault with Civil Liberties, it's a problem with people and, despite the efforts of the last regime, passing laws to change people's behaviour does not work, nor will getting rid of those ludicrous laws put children (or anyone else) more at risk.
Throw the switch, Igor...!
... Yeth Marthter!
Posted in Clegg promises liberties restoration
@ElFatbob
Ask the Tories where they pinched their ideas from...
(PS And do the words "I agree with Nick" ring any bells?)
And yet...
... we had Alan Johnson, former Labour Home Secretary on TV trying to mock Nick Clegg's "Rampant hyperbole" and claiming that he was taking "a number of separate issues and puts them together and suggests we're in a surveillance society."
Perhaps Mr Johnson would like to reconsider those words...?
But...
... how do you hear the noise of the V8 over the massive bass bins in your chavved-up hatchback...?
just making them fit lights in the dark would be a start!
And the next time you're out on the road at night, count the number of vehicles driving illegally because they have only one working headlight or a brake light out...
@The First Dave
It goes both ways. I cycle a lot and forget bells, a bellowed "LOOK OUT" as an idiotic pedestrian steps off the pavement into my path without looking is a much more effective way of reminding them that *THEY* are required to use observation (and their brains) too.
PS I've never hit a pedestrian because I'm always watching out for them, even though they aren't looking out for me (SMIDSY...)
No shit...
... sherlock!!
And now we have Theresa May...
... telling the Police that they will have more opportunities to decide who gets charged for "minor crimes" instead of needing to check with prosecutors to see if there's actually a case to answer, let alone a chance of conviction.
I can't see this one going wrong at all...
Posted in Clegg promises liberties restoration
Bravo Nick Clegg!
I was worried that a coalition between the Tories and the Lib Dems would end up as a one-sided affair with all the power in the Blue camp, but this sort of thing shows that the Tories *are* actually willing to be reasonable in their exercise of coalition power.
BTW To anyone who wants to write to Tory MPs urging them to get rid of (amongst other things) the Extreme Porn legislation, just point out that there would have been more "No" votes in the House of Lords (possibly enough to defeat it) if it hadn't been for the fact, as one Tory Peer admitted to me: "We don't vote on Lib Dem amendments".
Well now it's not a Lib Dem amendment, so let's see them prove that they really care about Freedom of Expression and get rid of that damned stupid law!
Let's hear it for common sense!
Someone's running in fear of their life, so what do the Police do? Arrest him on a bunch of silly charges and let the guy threatening him go because it's going to be easier to charge the victim with crimes than make a case against the attacker...
Unbelievable.
The first stage in solving a problem...
... is being able to accurately define what the problem IS!
Back to the drawing board, guys.
Would someone be stupid enough...?
Ask Gary Glitter/ Paul Gadd. (Ok, it wasn't wallpaper, but it was still really stuipd to hand over a computer with a hard drive containing kiddy porn)
A mere abacus...
... mention it not.
- Signed Deep Thought
@Oh dear
Try reading that post again with your irony detector switched on...
Microsoft... rancid... spoiled...
... Fish... Barrel... BANG!
"a large amount of content has been deleted"
And we have *never* been at war with Eastasia!
Not so much Big Brother this time, but lots of Little Brothers trying to make themselves look good to the incoming administration by saying "What, support that repressive totalitarian legislation? Not us!"
"completely circumvent a broad array of safety-critical systems"
Didn't the BOFH do this a couple of weeks ago?
100 channels, including Showtime, MTV, and the Food Network.
So, critical, high quality output, then...?
Latest update...
"Photographer stopped under anti-terror laws may sue police"
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23832604-photographer-stopped-under-anti-terror-laws-may-sue-police.do
Posted in The Cameregg plan: Who got what?
Made a Scottish family homeless:
If they get into massive debt and can't pay it off, is it any wonder that the People (who actually own the property) decide to evict them....?
Posted in The Cameregg plan: Who got what?
Civil Liberties +1
I agree, the list looks like a very good attempt to roll back many of the repressive laws that Labour brought in.
I just hope that they don't start weaselling and saying "well, we'd like to get rid of this law, but it's so useful..."
Are you sure it's not...
... the giant Space Amoeba from TOS Trek's episode "The Immunity Syndrome"?
But will it be real change or more of the same old same-old?
So, Cameron and Clegg have done a deal, now the question is will we get the reforms (not just voting, but political behaviour and on civil liberties to name a couple) that we actually need...?
@Chris W
Is that *really* the best argument against PR you can come up with? A vague, hypothetical situation loaded with hyperbole just to validate your argument that FPTP is "far better" than your misconceptions of how PR would operate in this country?
Oh deary me.
"Which makes you wonder...
"... why a service like this wasn't offered long ago"
Err, you mean like Secunia?
http://secunia.com/
@Chris W
If you'd actually bother to do some research, you'd understand that the ATV+ or STV system being proposed for this country is *NOTHING* like the system in use in Israel.
Still, why let the facts get in the way of a good rant?
"full-sized, stealthy robot warplanes"
May I be the first to welcome...
... why are those dogs barking?
Or perhaps...
... nobody else really gave a monkey's...!
@Sillyfellow
See http://www.takebackparliament.com/ for more details.
Over 1000 people turned up to urge Nick Clegg not to compromise in his talks with the Tories but to stick to his guns in order to get a fair system of PR instead of an unfair system of FPTP.
Who do we vote for?
The job of an MP is supposedly to represent the views of their constitutents to Parliament.
Unfortunately what we actually get is someone who, most likely, does what the Party Whip tells them to do and then says to their constituents "This is what the Party Leadership says, like it or lump it".
Posted in Jimbo Wales exiles 'porn' from Wikiland
Jimmy is acting in his traditional role as a thought leader
I think you mean "Thought Police"...
Posted in Election losers? Our clapped-out parties
Not clapped out Parties, but clapped out Party system.
The problem is not with the parties per se, but the Party System itself.
For the last three decades we've been told that "Strong Government" basically means that the MPs toe the Party Line and do what their leadership tells them to, with varying amounts of arm twisting from the Whips office.
Apart from introducing a system like STV where whoever is MP for a constituency actually *has* a majority of the votes, the Whip system should be abolished so all votes are *free* votes such that MPs can represent the views of their constituents to Parliament, rather than telling their consituents that this is how it is because the party leaders say so, like it or lump it.
This would mean that, especially now, no longer would a big party be able to force through any legislation it wants because there can't be sufficient opposition even if everyone else voted against it and the power will no longer be in the hands of politicians "doing deals in shady back rooms" (nor on the decks of someone's private yacht...)
It's a funny system...
... which means that a party that gets almost a quarter of the votes gets less than ten percent of the seats in Parliamen!
Only politicians with a vested interest in staying in power despite getting less than 40% of the votes could justify keeping such a system.
all party committee of inquiry on political and electoral reform"
In other words, let's kick it into the long grass with a committee which will be loaded with members who will argue and dither and prevaricate and do their damndest to ensure that it never gets *anywhere*...
If that's the best that Cameron can come up with, he doesn't deserve to govern.
Ding dong...
... the Wicked Witch is Dead!
Insufficient staff, inadequate preparedness...
There was a queue at my local Polling Station and a bit of checking with the stopwatch function on my wristwatch found that the staff were taking between 40 seconds and a minute to deal with *each* voter ie to go through the process of them getting to the desk, handing over the Polling Card (add extra time if they'd forgotten it), find the name on the register, rule it out, tear off two voting slips and write down the numbers before the person could make actually go and make their mark.
It's clear that when the queues started to form, there was insufficient preparedness on the part of officials to speed up the process by, for example, drafting in extra staff or allowing the Polling Stations to stay open longer (some places, eg Lewisham, did stay open, others closed on the dot of 10pm because "that's the law") and that's not something we should be expected to put up with.
Nothing more is needed.
No, you don't need anything more, but that slows down the whole process for everyone else (as mentioned in another post elsewhere, staff were taking between 40 seconds and one minute to deal with each voter, the extra time depending on if they had their polling card or not).
Oh and I accidentally upvoted that post instead of hitting "reply"...
@Gerhard Mack
PR in the form of Single Transferrable Vote is quite as good as you think, in all those close races where the winning majority was less than the number of votes cast for other candidates, instead of all those other votes being thrown away, those voters' second choice candidate get the votes until someone gets a proper majority.
It works well in places like the Republic of Ireland and Denmark, it could work here too if people would let it.
"it seems perhaps a little odd...
"... that NASA bothered to carry out today's test at all."
Not at all.
If they'd built the thing, it would have been odd (if not stupid) not to test the thing since even if it isn't going to be used *right now* it provides valuable data and proof of concept which may be usable in the future.
