* Posts by spam

74 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2008

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Russian porn starlet brands DD jubs

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So now Chinese gold farmers really do get on your tits

Title....

Riders line up for world's first e-bike race

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How slow

When the Reg first commented on this I asked how slow they would have to go to make the battery last a lap.

Turns out the most optimistic teams think they might manage 90mph.

Hmm 90mph the same as Freddy Frith managed in 1937 and his bike could do more than one lap of the poor quality TT circuit at the time.

Way to go leccy tech matching the performance of a 70 year old Norton on 70 year old road surfaces.

Judge backs Halifax in Chip and PIN clone case

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@Fraser

Klutz - Customers did not need any protection from fraudulent use of cards the banks are liable for fraudulent use.

A chip is harder to clone (but no harder to steal) and so is more secure if it is actually used. A pin is not secure just more secure than a signature which no one looks at.

So fraud has been reduced the problem is the customer is much more likely to be held liable for the fraud that remains. C&P reduced fraud for the benefit of the banks at the expense of the customer.

I had a Halifax credit card. I would never make an ATM cash withdrawal with it so when they introduced C&P to protect myself from fraudulent use I asked them to set the daily cash withdrawal limit to zero. They refused, said it was impossible - that shows how much the Halifax care about fraud they can pass on to their customers. I got a (now sadly defunct) GE Money card, when I asked them to set the limit to zero they said sure no problem.

Boffins boil down witch-repelling brew

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Doesn't anyone see the irony here?

you have to practise witchcraft in order to repel witches?

Triangular buttons key to touchscreen typing success - inventor

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pointy and pointless

You poke a touchscreen keyboard you expect a key to be pressed, the one closest to where you poked.

What is this 'dead space'? Just an annoyance meaning you have to be more accurate than necessary.

If users guided by the graphics tend to consistently miss in the same direction then the sense areas can be offset from the graphics to compensate with no need to change the graphics.

What would be smart is for the device to learn how a user tends to miss and dynamically adjust the sensing area, real time calibration of the user. Not difficult to do and IMO too obvious to merit patent protection.

Blighty’s barmy for e-cars, poll discovers

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plain crazy

"are considering buying a vehicle powered solely by batteries at some point during the next five years"

I considered it and came to the conclusion I won't because they are all completely crap - does that make me crazy about e-cars?

Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply

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I doubt it is useful

The microscopic surface texture of material does affect the way it emits radiation so I can believe zapping tungsten with lasers improves visible light emission efficiency.

Trouble is tungsten filaments slowly evaporate (which is how they wear out) and the surface is obviously the first to go so I doubt the efficiency improvements will last for more than a few hours.

And yes CFLS are generally crap, the rapid loss of output with age quickly renders them less efficient than halogen lamps. Combined with slow warm up, poor light quality, dangerous failure modes, toxic chemicals and about half of all existing light fittings being unsuitable for them they are just not a universally good idea. Sadly that doesn't stop technically illiterate politicians forcing them on us.

Green GT rolls out sexy e-supercar

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lol

Lecy tech 24 hour racing - lol.

The thing might manage 6 laps on a battery charge, if it is competitive speed wise it will need to make a pit stop for battery replacement every 20 minutes.

Bates: Cops to defy courts over return of indecent material

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Common sense

"Common sense dictates to me that we shouldn't be returning indecent images to anyone"

The law and courts dictated to him that they shouldn't have taken them in the first place.

If there isn't *anyone* fit to possess indecent images then what makes him think he and his officers are?

The *data* on these discs is evidence and the defense and their expert computer witness (who fibbed about his qualifications making him about as honest as your average MP) have a right to examine them.

The raid and seizure of this data was a cynical and illegal attempt to disrupt the defense of the associated prosecutions. If Port doesn't return the evidence he should be prosecuted and he should be sacked either way.

ContactPoint goes live despite security fears

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That's one hell of a large MP expense account

Why oh why do these things cost so much to implement.

A database of personal and contact information is about as basic as they get - and it only takes a few ounces of sense to make things reasonably secure. ( not that I agree with the need of keeping a database of children at all in the first place though ).

Lets forgot about the database and just force taxpayers to flush most of their income down the toilet instead - at least loopaper is useful, and doesn't play with the safety and rights of our children.

Site schools world+dog in browsing history pilfering

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For the curious

Here's the list of sites it uses to check visited status against:

http://startpanic.com/db/db_en.txt

It can't detect sites that are not on this list.

Can you talk and drive?

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Too little too late

Anyone who devotes insufficient attention to driving is a dick. It doesn't matter what they divert their attention to.

A dick with a phone is still a dick when you take away their (hand held) phone. You can't legislate common sense into people, the legislation was stupid.

All you can do is try to educate. I don't think the game was very good but at least it is the right approach.

Jobs bloodbath at Brit, Danish wind turbine factories

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brilliant plan

We can pull ourselves out of the economic doldrums by finding new and more expensive ways to do what we already do (generate power, construct buildings, and transport ourselves and stuff from A to B).

I don't think so. You can only make money from green bollocks by selling it to overseas morons and as this article demonstrates we have very little capability in the green bollocks manufacturing sector.

Darling's £0.5bn offshore windfarm 'leccy-bill stealth levy

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idiotic projects like this?

Because they are technically illiterate idiots.

Sarah Boyack - Scottish Labour spokesperson for the environment for example.

Arguing the case for micro-generation technologies said..

"At the moment is it difficult to pin down exactly what performance rates people will actually get from micro-generation devices. That needs to be sorted".

The reason it is hard to 'pin down' exact performance rates is the performance is so crap that any supplier giving out exact performance information would never sell a micro-generation device. Her "needs to be sorted" quip demonstrates her stunning ignorance.

As far as I can tell the only viable micro-(non)generation schemes are heat pump systems extracting thermal energy from the ground. You don't hear much about these, probably because something stuck on your roof is a much better demonstration of your eco green tosserness than something buried in your garden.

It's US vs Europe as world e-car plug standard race nears end

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Hmm

240v 70A maximum - an energy transfer rate equivalent to less than 2l of petrol per hour. What is the relative efficiency of battery + electric motor combination compared to IC engines? x 3? Even so these charging stations are like petrol pumps with hypodermic needles instead of nozzles.

Just an indication of the true crapness of leccy tech.

And what's all the crap about phases? Batteries are DC, what is the point of lugging battery charging circuits around with the car when they could be built into charging stations? What other portable equipment plugs directly into AC mains for charging?

Public rejects Time Warner metered-bandwidth tests

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No free Lunches

ISPs need to make a profit. Bandwidth costs money.

All you can eat schemes result in half of subscribers being subsidised by the other half, and of course the ones that are being subsidised whine when charging schemes which remove their subsidy are suggested.

The more accurately ISPs can pass the actual cost of provision on to the individual customer getting it the fairer and on average cheaper the service will be.

This Time Warner scheme seems dumb, data related costs are mostly from the cost of provisioning for peak bandwidth. Bytes in a pipe which would otherwise be empty are essentially free, bytes in a pipe at peak times determine the size and cost of the pipe and/or speed the customer gets. A scheme which doesn't take this into account is as flawed as 'all you can eat'.

16 teams to field 24 e-bikes in 'zero-emission' TT race

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More Greenwash

Is this going to be on the full TT course? How many laps? It will be interesting to see how slow they have to go to make a battery last one lap.

The Quick - and the Dead in the Water

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Convenient timing

Police bring forward another high profile anti-terror operation just in time to divert media attention away from police thuggery at the G20 protests.... hmmm....

Will it amount to anything or will they just let them go after 28 days which is enough time for the media and public to have forgotten about it.?

IPS misses its ID cards for foreigners target

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stupid stupid stupid

A national identity card has no use other than to collect vast amounts of surveillance information from the innocent (and to make their day to day lives more painful in the process).

If you need a card for day to day life like getting on a bus or renting a video then a forgery or clone will do. I wager 99% of card identity 'checks' will not check biometric data and 90% of the remaining 1% will use biometric data from the card which isn't secure.

Secure identity confirmation can only come from biometric checks against data held in the database (which still won't be that clever because the database will be full of garbage) and you don't need a card to access your claimed identity on the database just a key which may as well be your name and date of birth.

The whole id card scheme is stupid stupid stupid. The database is something else. If you are going to have a database holding information on individuals (and we already have many) then biometric information confirming the association between the data and a physical body is perhaps not a bad thing (occasionally useful at least). The real issue is what goes into this national database and if you trust the state to hold, cross reference and trawl this information.

I sure as hell don't want to get phone calls from an NHS Indian call center telling me my grocery spend at Tescos has not contained the recommend minimum 30% of fruit and vegetables and we have booked an appointment with an NHS wellbeing officer to discuss the matter (and failure to attend may result in the refusal of future medical treatment). Politicians are complete twats, you give them the means and shit like this will happen.

MPs battle to save great British pub

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To support the British pub as a vital part of social life in local communities

Vital part my arse. Politicians are destroying what little society we have left. They don't want a society where people are collectively responsible for getting on with and manage their own lives they want a nation of powerless individuals taxed up to the eyeballs and entirely dependent on the state which controls every aspect of their lives. They crave the power and importance of being in control of a monstrous state responsible for everything.

How police busted UK's biggest cybercrime case

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7 - 14 officers over 2 years

All fine work, but I wonder how much manpower and resources would have been devoted to a murder or rape investigation. Seems the justice system always puts extra effort (and usually longer prison sentances) into solving cases where there's money involved.

Advertising watchdog okays 'gaming equals early grave' ad

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Lies

The ASA has always found telling lies in support of a politically correct agenda is acceptable.

Jaguar-Land Rover to develop F1-style energy recovery tech

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KERS system could result in fuel efficiency being increased by between 20 and 30%

KERS recovers energy which would otherwise end up as heat in my car brakes.

When I think of the size, air flow around, and temperatures of my car engine and radiator and exhaust system and compare it with the size, air flow and temperatures (barley warm a lot of the time) of my brake discs I am expected to believe 20 to 30% of the energy my car uses ends up in the brakes?

I don't think so, not even close. For most cars and most usage I doubt a KERS system would recover enough energy to justify lugging around the extra weight never mind the cost.

Buses on start/stop town routes? Maybe, just.

KERS in F1 is just greenwash to fool the stupid.

Obese cost London fire brigade £300k

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Shock figure

128 calls 292992 quid. It really costs 2289 quid to lift an obese person out of a chair or bath?

That's the real shock figure.

Small ISPs reject call to filter out child abuse sites

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protects average web users with no interest in such material from accidental exposure

And why would I need to be protected?

Because they decided that someone who "has no interest in such material" still deserves to be locked up for 6 months and have the rest of their lives blighted should they inadvertently 'possess' some.

Since no one is allowed to see such material how is anyone supposed to know they possess some? Scorpion album cover? Who would have thought it.

Dunno why they don't just bring back throwing people into ponds, if they float they are peedyfiles, if they drown they were OK but better safe than sorry eh?

KTM: electric dirt-bike out next year

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it would be great to get the vast majority of bikes on to electricity

Why would it be great? Where do you think electricity comes from?

I'll bet the majority of electricity for these bike will be coming from petrol generators sitting in the field next to the track they are riding around.

I don't believe the 40 minutes either.

Oh and while I am here quoting a torque figure alone is meaningless.

Boffins to unveil gesture-controlled 3D TV

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Rigth

So we are going to be standing in front of TVs flailing about like windmills?

Voice recognition and control would be more usable and useful but facing the same kind of problems doesn't work like this system won't work.

Having a fundamentally stupid idea is one thing, why companies spend money developing and demonstrating fundamentally stupid ideas is beyond me.

Phorm: BT system 'most definitely' online by end of 2009

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I used to hold BT in awe

Can I have some of what he was smoking?

BT have consistently abused their monopoly position as much as they were able, charging as much as possible for as little as possible and were happy to keep Britain's information superhighway looking more like an expensive muddy track for as long as they possibly could.

I have hated them with every ounce of my body for decades.

That they are at the forefront of a scheme to make money by abusing their customers came as no surprise to me. I will be surprised if they are not running some kind of Phorm by the end of the year disguised with some anti-peedyfile veneer and given a name like safesurf, or websafe, or some other newspeak bollocks.

MP wants Welsh text on ID cards

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A moron on so many levels

Wants ID cards and wants them to have welsh - sheesh

Tazzari specs up UK-friendly electric runabout

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Pull the other one

Why not buy a second hand milk float? Same performance, much more space for the shopping and about 15,000 quid cheaper.

Intel plucks power from TV signals

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pointless

Not everyone lives 4km away from a (presumably large) TV transmitter. Very little useful electronic equipment can be practically connected to an aerial located to give an unobstructed path to a TV transmitter (if there is one).

An AA cell will power that equipment for around 11.5 years except it or the equipment will probably rust away before it runs out, but then so would the aerial. Is the aerial and energy harvesting electronics going to cost less than an AA cell? I don't think so.

F1 chiefs ready post-prang battery safety scheme

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@Anonymous Coward

Of course KERS makes no sense the same as 90% of environmental measures are nonsensical gesturing.

F1 flies teams and equipment and fans around the globe emitting thousands of tons of CO2 but all is forgiven because they are trying to develop technology which will save a couple of kg CO2 emissions during a race. F1 KERS equipment won't come anywhere near saving even 1% of the CO2 emissions created by its development.

Bernie doesn't care what it does to the racing it there to impress the stupid (politicians especially I expect). The racing is already expensive and boring but people still watch, Bernie would be happier if they were racing transit vans because they have more space for advertising....

Saving ISPs and the music biz: Is it even worth it?

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The problem

Digital music is a complete and utter rip off. I just went to play.com.

To download Lady GAGA The Fame - £8.99.

To buy the physical CD, and have them post it to you - £7.99.

The cost of reproduction and distribution of digital music is essentially zero, as demonstrated by the P2P networks reproducing and distributing digital music by the terabyte for the cost of an internet connection which people would have anyway.

What makes the music business think people are prepared to pay a premium for something which costs them substantially less to produce? They think people won't notice or perhaps enjoy getting shafted by them? Do they really think people are going spend £13,000 to fill an ipod?

When downloaded tracks are priced at around the 4p they are really worth P2P will fade away and there will still be money to be made by those smart enough to take advantage of the huge cost savings the internet offers.

I'm a sceptic now, says ex-NASA climate boss

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Pah

CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas vastly less significant than water vapor. CO2 can only absorb (and re-radiate back towards the earth) a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum so its effect as a greenhouse gas is strictly limited. Man is responsible for a small proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The only way AGWist can predict doom and point the finger at CO2 and man is by assuming there is a 'forcing' effect. Increasing temperature will increase the amount of (vastly more significant) water vapor in the atmosphere and produce significantly more warming. Their theory and models are based on the earth's climate system having a significant positive feedback effect.

As an engineer I consider this to be a completely ridiculous proposition. I have never ever observed a system with significant overall positive feedback which was not either driven hard in one direction or the other till it hit some other limiting condition or oscillating between limiting conditions. AGWist are asking me to believe the earth's climate system is like a pin balancing on it's point for thousands of years and that suddenly in few decades a small increase in CO2 concentration due to man is going to knock it over.

The reality is the climate system has a significant overall negative feedback effect because without one we would be hard against one or the other end stops or bouncing between them. I would guess at cloud cover is most likely source of this negative feedback. Scientists understand very little about cloud formation, they can't possibly accurately model it.

The earth's climate system does have another overall positive feedback effect, the one that causes it to oscillate between moderate temperatures and ice ages. If man is causing a bit of warming which will delay the next ice age then it is all to the good Fretting about drowning polar bears (which aren't drowning anyway) is going to seem pretty silly when you are trying to survive living on top of a 2km deep glacier.

O2 and Be customers suffer network congestion

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same old same old

ISPs providing good unrestricted performance get customers (especially heavy usage customers) flocking to them until they no longer provide good unrestricted performance.

UK gov to issue child boozing guidelines

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heavy-handed nonsense like passing laws

The "heavy-handed nonsense like passing laws" comes in a couple of years when they discover people are ignoring the guidelines.

The official guidelines which are just numbers plucked out of thin air become standards by which the ignorant will judge you.

Look at the utter crap talked about recommended daily salt intake which makes the salt in this years Christmas dinner headline news. Pressure groups spawn from them like CASH (www.actiononsalt.org.uk) who "aim to counter these claims with the wealth of scientific evidence" but fail because there isn't any. Look at the council issuing salt shakers with less holes to local chip shops.

These guidelines will no doubt spawn a CAAK (Consensus Action on Alcohol & Kiddies) pressure group.

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

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Unhappy

All you can eat

Boy am I sick of seeing 'all you can eat' offers from suppliers who start fiddling with the size of your plate and cutlery as soon as it looks like you might eat too much.....

Charge for bandwidth - so simple, so fair.

Customs warns of killer consoles

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£9bn a year

"HMRC reckons the trade in counterfeit goods costs the UK economy £9bn a year"

Which means UK punters must be saving £9bn a year and that is a bad thing?

'Faith-based' investment firm fingers holiday's most sinful games

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Top recommended game for Christmas?

Didn't they also use their review criteria to find the top game for christian stockings this christmas?

1. Wacka-gay - You take the hands of a Vicar, have to thwack the heads of any gay and lesbian folk who pop their heads up through the a set of holes within a certain time limit.

Aren't there laws against this kind of thing now?

DVLA under scrutiny over penalty notice dating game

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SORN you couldn't make it up

SORN a scheme to make it a crime to not regularly inform the government that you are not going to commit some other crime....

Adobe, profs working on web time-machine app

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Difficulties

Unfortunately this won't be as easy as it might have been 4 or 5 years ago.

The proliferation of Ajax makes caching old versions of content difficult/next to impossible - in another couple of years this initiative may be just as broken as Internet Archive

Thrust SSC team to build 1000 mph 'Bloodhound' car

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Unhappy

lol

"will inspire schoolchildren to embark on careers in science and engineering".

Teachers will probably use it as an example of a wicked waste of natural resources and task children with estimating how many polar bears will be killed by the carbon emissions of this project.

Spy chiefs plot £12bn IT spree for comms überdatabase

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Politicians!

Funny, no problem pissing away 12 billion quid soothing the ego of politicians who think we will thank them for the protection against non-existent threats this system will offer.

Elsewhere today I read europe has managed to find (in comparison) a few peanuts (63 million euro) to fritter away on fusion reactor research.

Hmm locking up a few raghead camel jockeys that visit the wrong websites or striving for a new clean plentiful power source for the world - which would you like your taxes spent on?

Amazon patents 'customer review incentives'

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US Patent 10232442 for leaving El Reg comments

This continual patent spamming has no end - how long will it be before the simple act of breathing is in breach of the Amazon patent portfolio ( or similar global mega-corporation )

EU slaughterhouses may get animal welfare officers

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level playing field for operators - right

It is the same old EU level playing field for member states crap. Can't be having a member state gaining a competitive advantage by cheap treatment of animals. All states must be equally burdened by regulation be it welfare officers for slaughter houses or how much rubbish they are allowed to put in holes in their ground.

Having torn down borders to allow free trade we must ensure all member states are equally uncompetitive so free trade is more or less pointless.

The EU - a marvelous invention providing an enormous trough for politicians and their servants which allowed uncompetitive states to continue to be uncompetitive.

World of Warcraft upkeep costs only $200m

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Regardless of the exact figures...

Blizzard are raking it in and every man and his dog has been developing online subscription games trying to take a slice of that cake.

Why people are apparently happy to pay so much is beyond me, they pay for the game to start with and when you look at how much bandwidth, storage and CPU power from other internet services you can get for the same 'rental' it is obviously a ripoff.

Vehicle spy-cam data to be held for five years

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A call for grass roots level system-bucking

Quite a few times now I have seen the pigs camped up on main roads with their ANPR van on a session of money gathering from people who might have made a mistake, and who's actions probably haven't hurt anyone.

The main road from Redditch into Birmingham seems to be one of their favourite spots, just about where the arrow is on this map:

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=403190&y=277070&z=4&sv=403190,277070&st=4&ar=Y

The pigs park their van on the grass on the right of the road (I must remember to go and dump the contents of a box of nails on that grass), where they can hide the van in a dip and it can't be seen by a driver until the last minute. I've seen them on the A38 just north of Wychbold too. To me, based on where I have seen the police doing their mobile ANPR from a van they appear to be trying to cover major routes across the country that aren't the motorways: Basically the m'ways are covered by ANPR and people know it, therefore those who don't want to be tracked will be avoiding the motorways.... best get the cameras watching the major trunk roads too, and mobile ANPRing the best they can manage at the moment.

My call for grass roots action is that if we are all going to be treated as if we are guilty by the government, then we should behave as if we are guilty. It is very obvious when you are approaching somewhere where the pigs are doing mobile ANPR, as there will be many bikes or cars hiding in gateways as you approach, and you may see a car or two that has been pulled over.

As it is so easy to spot the pigs doing this, when you see the ANPR van, just turn your car around and find an alternate route (usually as simple as a quick trip around the block, then carry on the way you were going). If even a small number of people start doing this, it will make the mobile ANPR searches infeasible to manage, as it will take up far too much police time dealing with system-buckers.... the police will no-doubt go tearing after people who turn their cars around when the driver sees the ANPR van. The police's arguments will boil down to "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear". Anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows what BS that is, and should be able to point that out to the police. Protest isn't illegal yet, nor is turning your car around.

UK launches major road signage review

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up-to-date travel news

I am amazed that we don't have enough money for road building or basic repairs but expensive hi-tech signs which can tell us in real-time how crap our roads are pop up all over the place.

I can only assume there are some serious backhanders or political funding coming from those profiting from manufacture and installation of this stuff.

Child abusers adopt blackmail tactics

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What a surprise

Pigs lift their snouts from the trough for a moment to hype the threat that keeps it filled.

Yes, there was a viable liquid bomb plot

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But what's the aim of the game here?

The aim of the game is to convince the public that we are all in grave danger of terrorist attack. That our lives depend on giving up our liberties. That our lives depend on the government and security services and that the billions of our money spent fighting terror is justified.

The terrorists already won, they won on 9/11, our governments have damaged us more that terrorist ever could.

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