Posts by Paul

Google to fund 'video Street View' for Central London

low productivity

Arsene Ghia is a very occasional contributor. More from this hack please!

G20 police demand ID as train staff ordered to spy on passengers

@ Great codename

Apparently they're saving Peterloo and My Lai for when Brown cancels the election and declares a state of emergency.

'Big Brother' - the price of self-driving cars

retro fitting? really?

I wouldn't mind watching them have a go on my +ve earthed Morris Minors with totally original wiring looms. They'd better bring a few dozen spares.

LG fu**ed off with swearing

More swearing please.

I want something that turns random adjectives into swear words please, with a dial that goes up to 11.

I might even bring myself to watch f*****g Barney.

Software generated attendance letter about dead pupil

strange...

This may be the first time this has happened with a dead pupil, but hundreds of pupils leave or change schools after enrolling in September. Has it not been brought to Capita's attention that schools are routinely sending letters to pupils who have left despite apparently being deleted from the schools live records?

Jacqui Smith pulls in another TV psych in violence probe

Misleading headline

Derek Accora for Home Sec.

LibDems want gov action on killer lorries of death

@autopilot? - note to self

That should be Clue. Look up. It's going to be left now isn't it?

autopilot?

OK, so you're driving a 30 ton artic navigating by satnav. You see a sign. "Low bridge Maximum height 3 metres". Do you

A) stop and find another way.

B) Carry on regardless.

C) You don't see the sign, or the cyclist or the smart car now wedged in your wheel arch.

Clue. Look left

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

Officer

I've just seen someone driving slowly in a black car taking pictures of EVERYTHING!

Nothing to hide nothing to fear.

Anyone exposing the contents of their bin to their neighbours clearly has "nothing to hide" and QED, cannot be a terrorist.

If the public are being asked to watch the people watching the cameras, what are the cameras for?

UK's child protection database delayed again

how many staff does it have?

I heard the chief exec of the ISA on woman's hour the best part of a year ago. I wondered at the time whether he was full pay, what with not having an organisation to run. Ho hum.

Ofcom insists on emergency roaming

edukashun edukashun edukashun

Look Ofcom, if people don't want it maybe you should take them at their word. It seems that in a world of consumer choice the unacceptable option is to choose nothing.

London stab murder rate entirely normal, says top stats prof

regression to the mean

nuff said.

Boffins finger reason for non-aligned cows

A scientific use for the ISS?

Given a very strong magnet and a large enough herd will they arrange themselves like iron filings in a giant school science experiment?

Doc-in-chief targets 'passive drinking' with price hike

Buy this £5 bottle of wine......

...and get 150 loyalty points.

duh

@ and by that logic... 15:02

If you are teetotal then , ceteris parabus, you will already be paying less tax/duty. If you can find data that shows that drinking/smoking/motoring generate less govt income than they consume I'd like to see it. For what it's worth, a major motivation of late C19 abstinence movements in Britain was to deny the govt its major source of revenue from the working classes, who many felt were paying a disproprtionately high percentage of their meagre income in stealth taxes. Just like now.

passive drinking my arse.

So if I'm shot several times in the head whilst minding my own business I'm a victim of passive lead poising am I?

National Express to 'ban' trainspotting

Brain ache

Why should the govt give a toss about fare dodgers- surely it is entirely lost revenue to the train company. What next, the govt gives football teams a grant to stop kids watching through the gaps in the fence?

Police law-interpretation: What next?

Constable Savage

Looks like we're back to "wearing a loud shirt in a built up area." Or perhaps it never went away.

UK 'bad' pics ban to stretch?

@Ummm...

"Wouldn't that mean that in order to 'detect', investigating police would have to 'commit'? Can I make a citizen's arrest, or does it only apply to the plebs? In which case, by extension would murder not be murder if the police did it?"

It only applies to us, like how they can film us but we can't film them. As for murder- ask a brazilian.

'Facebook for Kids' slammed by security researchers

Facebook for kids?

Isn't Facebook "Facebook for kids"?

Vista not so good actually.

Lapland New Forest website suffers 'unusual technical problems'

"It's You that Makes It Beautiful"

too many ugly people must have turned up

DVLA under scrutiny over penalty notice dating game

sorn really pisses me off.

2 morris minors in storage -why do I have to keep telling the morons that they are not taxed? They (should) know that anyway. Listen you DVLA cretins, not taxed = not road legal. I understand that FFS. If they're not taxed I'm not using them. If you find them on the road you can fine me or crush them or whatever. Have you got altzheimers or something? I've got my old fishing rod in the loft-haven't used it since I was a kid. Who do I get permission not to use that from?

I can see no reason, especially with the advent of ANPR, why Sorn exists at all, or at least why there is no option to Sorn indefinitely.

First self-inflicted identity donor cards to ship in late 2009

lunacy

Presumably anyone stupid enough to volunteer for one of these cards in late 2009 will be stupid enough not to realise that their pride and joy will likely be defunct within 6 months. I'm tempted to set up my own "ID card" service to part these cretins from their money.

"No sir, that's not an egg box, it's a state of the art fingerprint scanner disguised as an eggbox to fool the terrorists - see how it's wired directly into the computer- it's a secure hacker-proof link."

Mobiles help UK malls track shoppers' every move

@George Johnson

I have no mobile at all. Why don't we meet at gunwharf?

UK.gov torpedoes personal carbon credit plans

pick an IT project, any IT project.... a game for all the family

"Implementing personal carbon trading would involve significant costs. It would require IT and banking systems, payment infrastructure, and secondary markets... In addition to the implementation, there would be ongoing costs for administration, verification, auditing and enforcement... "

Replace "personal carbon trading" with, for example "the National Identity Scheme" and the statement remains true.

Why have Radiohead broken copyright activists' hearts?

air con?

"Or at least, you couldn't hum it without sounding like a faulty air conditioning unit."

Surely you mean buzzing like a fridge?

Mine's the one with the fake plastic tree in the pocket.

Mel Gibson to star in Edge of Darkness

Remake-why bother?

Why would anyone want to see Mel Gibson kiss a CGI rabbit?

Spy regs used against dogs, litterbugs

@ Mark: It's not all our fault (not mine anyway)

in 2005 Labour got 55% of seats with 35% of the popular vote and a piddling 22% of the total electorate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/constituencies/default.stm

or if you're really interested:

http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/ge05/results.htm

I believe Mugabe has it listed in his favorites

Women love chocolate more than password security

Thank you for your cooperation...

Now if you'll just put your index finger on this little pad to confirm your participation I'll give you the choccy bar.

UK child database is 'not fit for purpose'

re: Hoon

Didn't he also say something along the lines of "what are you asking me for, I'm only the Defences Secretary."?

Transcript disappears minister's 'hack-proof' ID register claim

@Paulc

They are at

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/

UK.gov password protects Aryan Governance Summit site

How much?

Did the original logo cost, and how much extra to remodel it in a couple of hours.

Army says farewell to UK's 'bugger-off' airbag drone

@ namtog

"Foreign" troops are also a safer bet if they need to be deployed against the indigenous population.

BAA grounds Heathrow T5 fingerprinting system

alterior motive

BAA bowing to the info commissioner. Possibly. Or maybe they realised this system would crash and burn in the first hour and needed a convenient excuse to back off.

Brown: Jack Bauer spook horde to tackle terrorism

@2000 terrorists

Never mind fancy stuff like trials. There have only been a couple of dozen Control Orders made. You remember- those things Tony Blair said we desperatley needed to deal with the threat of (at the time I think) around 400 of the buggers.

Facebook says occupied territories are Israel

a unique designation?

How about Occupied Territories?

Paris, because her territories are regularly occupied.

Net think tank: Phorm is illegal

caught by the cahones

So if I willingly consented to Phorm via my ISP but told them to F off on my website, everytime I visited my site they'd be committing an offence.

DAB: A very British failure

@Ken Hagan

I use one of those MP3 player FM transmitters to send "listen again" streams from my computer to an FM radio. Also good for listening to digital only stations on freeview. It's probably not what the architects of the new digital age had in mind though.

'Boil a frog' ID card rollout to continue until 2012

@Slaine

I should have added "whilst keeping your thumb poised over the airhole"

Down with this sort of thing

I'm pretty sure the scheme was sold as self-funding so how can the govt save a billion?

According to Hilllier "less than 100 people" will have access to the biometric database. She was not entirely clear about what that actually meant, but involving signficant numbers of competing private sector companies in enrolment(who will then have access to full datasets) seems to me to be a very weak link as far as ensuring the integrity of the process is concerned.

When I was a student in the early 90s I got a student loan using my university enrolment card and I opened a bank account by walking into a bank and saying, "I'd like a student account please". All that was required was a name and address.

These things are only more difficult because the govt has deliberately made them so. Pushing my head underwater, then giving me the option of buying an overpriced snorkel isn't doing me any favours.

Road charging, the sequel - Kelly unveils 'wired m-way' plans

My favourite (only) overtaking lorries story

About 2:30pm on a Friday, A34 just south of Oxford.

I'm doing 60 with all the good cars haring past in the outside lane, I overtake 2 wagons, the rear one pulling out as I pass him. After about 5 minutes its all gone spookily quiet and I have at least a mile of dual carriageway to my self. Everything in front of me had vanished and I could just see the two wagons still trying to out-drag each other in my mirrors. Oh happy days.

Has your shifty foreign neighbour got 16 mobes?

Further advice to concerned citizenry

Thousands of people eat food.

What if someone in a shop seems suspicious?

Terrorists need food. They often buy a lot of food in one go, more than one person could possibly eat in a day, to stockpile and to share with their “family” in advance of an attack, and they often pay anonymously in cash. If you’re suspicious of the amount of food someone has, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take.

Thousands of people have friends.

What if one of them seems odd?

Terrorists use friends to help blend in to society and to make it look as if they’re normal and cool and popular. But they’re not. If you see someone with an odd friend, or with more friends than you, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take.

Data pimping: surveillance expert raises illegal wiretap worries

The story writes itself.

@Pie Man

Your boyfriend can have this copy for nothing:

THE SPY IN YOUR LAPTOP!

UKs major internet companies want to sell your private data to pornographers

“My 10 year old daughter was researching battery farms and up popped a great big cock”, shreiked a distraught mum.

A spokesman for the PM said, "Once he was made made aware of the facts he began to look nervous, but regained his composure to say that it is 'totally unacceptable' that a private company had thought about this before the Home Office."

Paris, because it's happened to her.

US gov now says Eye-o-Sauron™ border masts are crap

@um: Why Boeing?

Maybe for the same reason that Lockheed Martin is bidding to run the 2011 UK census.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/census-alert/

Don't you?

Beat the cyclops

Make like Odysseus and tie yourself under a sheep.

Elonex £99 Eee PC rival to arrive in June

photoshopped?

It looks like a tide mark to me.

The mac because I like em dirty.

Minister defends National ID Register security

Please present your ID card before boarding the 08:50 from Oxford to Reading

"If you look at what has happened in the past we had a passport which was used for external verification of identity, national insurance number which was used internally, and now 80% of British citizens have a passport and we actually really should see an identity card like a passport "in-country" if you like that entitles people, well it doesn't, we're not using it as an entitlement card but it gives people easier access to certain services".

Meg Hillier MP

Careful Meg, you don't want to let the cat out of the bag.

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/VideoPlayer.aspx?meetingId=1201

01:42:30 in

Just checking the internal passport's in the pocket - I'm off to the shops.

Geordie cops arrest two for Wi-Fi squatting

Take the less out of wireless

If I were to trail wires from my router into my neighbours houses and into the street, and then complain to the police that neighbours and strangers were connecting to my broadband, I'm sure I'd not get any sympathy from them, prosecutors or judges. That seems the most appropriate analogy for the pre-wireless Computer Misuse Act 1990.