"completely circumvent a broad array of safety-critical systems"
Didn't the BOFH do this a couple of weeks ago?
6899 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2007
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".
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"...
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...)
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.
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.
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.
"... 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.
Ignoring the ridiculous Tabloidesque anti-Lib Dem rhetoric that sounds more like something from the Murdoch Press, would Lewis Page care to tell us *who* is likely to try to lob an ICBM at the UK and *which* cities (and their millions of civilians) we are going to oblitterate in our "nation wrecking" retaliation?
In case it has escaped his notice, the Cold War has ended, so it's very unlikely that any country that actually has the ability to launch an ICBM strike on the UK *would* do so and the so-called "rogue states" like Iran or North Korea know damn well that don't have enough bombs to stop the rest of the world dropping on them like a ton of bricks if they did start lobbing nukes around.
A more likely scenario might be to put a nuke (or a dirty bomb) on a boat and sail it up the Thames, but then who do we lob a missile at in payback?
As for Space Travel, I'm all for it, but perhaps we'd better fix the big hole in the bottom of the boat before we start re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic...
There is a system used by (I think) some banks in Denmark where the customer is given a 9x9 grid (like an empty Sudoku board) with different colours in the individual squares.
You write your PIN in a way that you will be able to remember, eg the four corners reading clockwise or the four blue squares across the bottom row or the rightmost four squares on the middle row etc, then fill in all the other squares with the numbers 1-9.
This hides your number in plain sight because only you know which four squares are the real ones.
Banks could print these grids out for pennies and save everyone a lot of hassle.
... is that you are being suckered by the Police who are the ones conflating separate issues.
They want you to think that "oh, he had indecent images of children, so that justifies them misusing other laws and stretching them way beyond any legitimate bounds simply to give them a better chance of getting a conviction".
They are trying to create an association in people's minds between child porn and "extreme writings" such that they're allowed to act as the Thought Police and get laws banning anything they don't like, even when there is *NO* evidence of harm at all.
As for "freedom of speech is a good issue to right about, but only when it involves consenting adults", what about non-consenting adults? What about all those people who are killed, raped and so on in many books and films? They clearly don't consent, so should any such writings be made illegal...?
Despite the failure of the attempt by Baroness O'Caithan to introduce an "Extreme Writings" provision into English Law, it seems that Kent Police are trying to bring one in by default by suggesting that an online chat counts as "publishing"!
Of course they will probably decide to claim that this is a "loophole" in existing legislation and we'll then see some politician who's heading for defeat jump onto the bandwagon to help generate some positive headlines because "well, it's For The Children, isn't it?" and anyone who disagrees is obviously not "Thinking of the Children!"
What's next? Banning Viktor Nabakov's "Lolita"??
If that were actually the situation, they might have a case, but in these days of 24 hour rolling news, instead what we have is "publish or broadcast first and *then* check to see if the facts are correct" because the important thing is being "first with the story" even if it isn't accurate...
In other words, as many people have been saying all along, Labour have bulled ahead with this project so that, having spent huge amounts of public money, they can claim that anyone trying to cancel the project will be "wasting" that dosh.
Well, no, Mr Johnson, it is *YOU* who have wasted that money, it is *YOU* who have pissed it away on an unworkable control-freak project that has been doomed to failure from the start, don't start trying to put the blame on others now.
Take a look at http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/ and see which of the policy sets there appeals most to your views.
(NB I'd strongly recommend clicking on the "Show more policy points from this set" because there are some nasty ones hidden below the "headline" policies")