Posts by Steve

RE: Our right to reply!

"One of the main reasons for newscounter is how hard it is to find two sides of a media story online."

Presumably you mean to find -only- two sides, it's usually fairly easy to find about a gazillion different points of view on any given news story, even from outlets using the same wire services, take the Google News listing for the story involving Cannabis research from Tuesday May 01 2007. News outlets headlines for the story ramge from "Cannabis chemical curbs psychotic symptoms, study finds" in the Grauniad, through "Brain scans pinpoint cannabis mental health risk" fro Reuters, to "Even a small amount of cannabis 'triggers psychotic episodes' warn doctors" from tabloid tat purveyor The Daily Mail. Full spectrum available here http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ncl=1115888940 there are certainly more than two sides of that story being widely reported.

"I reckon it takes about 3 times longer to find a response than an allegation."

Have you thought of simply using Google's Blog Search facility ? Oh wait, that wouldn't further your ends of making money and spreading your agenda, would it ?

What is your agenda, by the way ?

Baphomet

Looks more like Baphomet, or possibly the Goat of Mendez to me, though sitings of both of these are equally apocalyptic in tone.

and also, but not really.

" ... the apparently undebated programme to link up the nation's speed cameras and other number-plate recognition cameras in such a way as to monitor, effectively in real-time, the location of every car on the road, speeding or not. This provides a level of detail on the movement of citizens that is very close to that which would be provided by implanting GPS chips in people. "

Oh, do calm down Ross, that simply isn't true. For instance, in the last week I have travelled around my region quite extensively, but have only made two journeys involving motor cars, both of these have been in taxis. I spent the rest of my travel time on a bicycle or on public transport, or, shock horror, on foot. Walking, remember that ? Under these circumstances it's quite possible for the ordinary citizen to travel freely without being identified or tracked (future use of ID cards to peform all financial transactions notwithstanding, obviously).

Or consider, a car with two or more insured drivers, containing a number of passengers. Knowing the location of the vehicle in this case can not give you the identity of the driver to better than 50% accuracy, (less if you allow for the case where drivers are uninsured) let alone that of the passengers. It's important to remember that what is being tracked by ANPR systems, hideously intrusive as they may well be, is not the individual, but the vehicle.

Loose the vehicle, lose the problem.

I think the ICO is right, we *are* waking up in a surveilance society, and as usual, the Great British middle classes have been woken from their comfortably apathetic slumber by the potential for government interference in the one thing which they deem to be their inalienable, god given, right. The right to drive filthy great motorcars all over the place without anyone bothering them about trivial matters like speed limits, road construction costs, pollution, deaths, etc, etc.

Failt based = idiocy, oh yes.

Faith implies the concious withdrawal of rational thought, this is pretty much the definition of idiocy, or perhaps insanity, depending what kind of doctor you ask.

At least, that's what I used to think, before I was touched by His Noodly Appendage :-)

WTF is the Christian problem with gambling anyway ? Was it not Jesus himself who invented bingo ?

OTOH if the "faith based" administration is so dogmatically correct, where do they get off ignoring the commandments about stealing, killing, and so on ?

Muppets

I see no SUN banner, perhaps because I have my web browser configured properly, pshaw !

America, f**k yeah !

"Boycott China, and the Chinese government will either permit freedom of expression, or suffer a massive revolt of their own people - who will replace the current regime with another, hopefully less-repressive, one."

And therein lies the rub, boycott China and say goodbye to cheap consumer goods, hello to massive inflation and general economic collapse. This is particularly true for the US, but many other countries (the UK for one) owe their current economic stability to the availablilty of cheap Chinese imports (or so the economic talking heads tell me anyway).

The rest of the world's governments simply can't afford not to do business with China, because if they did they would be presiding over a massive economic slump, at which point they would all lose their seats and be replaced at the next set of elections.

It's far to late now for the rest of the world to start complaining about China's human rights record when we are so dependent on trading with them, and it's frankly laughable for the US, with it's mass surveilance of it's own citizens, suspension of human (and constitutional) rights, illegal detention and torture of foreign nationals, etc, to be complaining to anyone else about how they conduct their affairs in this respect.

Hypocrisy simply isn't a strong enough word.

WTF ?

"It said that illegal broadcasts can cause havoc with emergency service communication systems "

If that were the case, then surely I would be able to pick up emergency services on my FM radio, which I can't, and haven't been ableto since I ued to listen to the rozzers on my airband set in the eighties.

A quick flick through the memory banks on my AOR scanner show no current emergency services frequencies in the FM broadcast bands, but then since MASC and subsequently TETRA were introduced I haven't played with it half so much, so maybe I missed something ?

Tasty !

Kill it, Cook it, Eat it.

Problem solved, evidence conveniently eaten. Just don't wear your new badger skin hat to a PETA meeting, and all is well.

So interfering with the sett is illegal ? Wait till the badgers come outside, then !

Well DUH!

Good riddance to absolute tosh. Aren't the Web 2.0 crowd the same people that used to bang on about the wonderfulness of the web being an unregulated frontier, or some such nonsense.

Funny how they change their tune as soon as someone upsets their tender feelings or disagrees with them.

The fact that you can moderate any comment posted to your own blog seems to have escaped them entirely.

God knows how these whiney hype artists would cope in an unregulated usenet group, where threats of violence and even death are commonplace as less articulate posters melt down and begin to froth at the keyboard. Usually these are regarded as the source of much hilarity.

If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the Kitchen 2.0 (tm)

I laughed so hard...

... a little bit of wee came out :-)

Google/Doubleclick is surely an unholy alliance, and probably worthy of some regulatory attention, but to hear MS complain about anti competitive practice is just so damn surreal that I had to check that wasn't an April Fool that I had missed.

US crusaders? Yuh huh.

Well, anonymous poster, what else would you call it when a frothing zealot declares war on an ideology ?

From where I'm sitting, any news outlet that stops short of outright saying "Bush is a warmongering f***tard." is pretty well balanced and restrained. But then, I don't watch Fox "News", and I don't know what a "liberal media" is either.