Posts by Tawakalna

Colombian armed robber targets karate school

wasn't this in a James Bond film?

Man with the Golden Gun, I think?

Raygun 747 test will be delayed, hints Boeing

in other words...

"it doesn't work and never will, but we want to keep ripping off the taxpayer for those $50,000 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats for as long as possible. After all, we're protecting the American way-of-life!"

(that'd be graft, corruption, and a sick obsession with technology and death, then...)

Top judge: put everyone in UK on the DNA database

think you're ok because "you've got nothing to hide"? think again..

..anyone who believes that because they think they've got nothing to hide needs a very cold bucket of water throwing in their faces. My example will demonstrate why..

Student has a minor run as a teen with Police whilst on a night out 9underage drinking at 17, hardly a major crime) Never been arrested before, doesn't know the ropes, gets conned by coppers into providing DNA sample, no further action taken. Couple of years later, same student writes out some Christmas cards, posts them at nearby postbox which gets robbed by some scrote later that night. Coppers find the postbag dumped some days later, DNA check the post, find the students DNA on the gum, arrest him for stealing post - BECAUSE he's the only one they can identify! Charged, prosecuted, and worries for months because he's being fitted up.

Naturally it got thrown out in court by the judge as a case which should never have come to court, but not after months of fretting and stress and big legal bills that his folks had to cough up for. I could cite many many other examples but that's a simple one which demonstrates *exactly* why the Police should not be allowed to complusorily DNA sample everyone. They are too stupid and malicious to be trusted to use a DNA database properly and the CPS are too slavishly in thrall to DNA evidence, believing that it's infallible when actually it's very far from infallible.

"I've got nothing to hide" yeh right, wake up and smell the coffee, chum. Especially when the ID Card scheme makes everyone a criminal, and the cops want to take DNA samples from driving offences like speeding or going through a bus lane or parking on a double yellow line? Still why should I care what happens to dolts like you? Me and my Mrs are buggering off out of Police state UK in a few of years and we're never coming back.

Bank holiday transport farrago

but this is a disaster!

how will I find my way to B&Q and Homebase now without a satnav? dammit I'll just have to let the wife down now over all that decorating she wanted me to do this weekend.

'Microsoft' to compensate 419 victims

chicken feed..

who needs a measly US$100,000.00? I already own half of Central Africa, a diamond mine, a mountain of uranium, and £300 billion in cash and state bonds. Soon I will return to Umboto Gorge to liberate the oppressed Watutsi people!

That is, when i can scrape up the plane fare because my bank account is now mysteriously empty. Must be the Mrs, because I can't imagine that the Secretary of the former President-for-Life of Rumbabwe, Sweetums Abongo, would have misused the bank details that I sent her over Hotmail.

Uranus strikes a pose for Hubble's camera

stop being silly..

..as *everyone* knows, this planet is called *Bumhole* (pron. bum-ho-ley) although astronomers were debating whether it should be called *Ringpeace* or *Xphincter.*

US customs bust coke-smuggling 'submarine'

call that a submarine?

I was expecting one of the old U-Boats that took escaping Nazis to their comrades in S. America at the end of the war. Instead it's a bright blue coffin that looks like something our local council put up for the kids in the park. I bet it doesn't even have any torpedoes.

Gunplay fingered for internet slowdown

so?

On the 4th of July it's every American's right to blow up part of his country with recreational explosives. That should take even more of the interweb down!

Dwarf superglues todger to hoover

do the Shake-n-Vac..

..and put your manhood back!

No wonder the Shake-n-Vac woman always looks so happy! (and all these years I though it was valium...)

Good job it wasn't a Ewbank, can you imagine the damage the brushes would have done!

(incidentally I bet he didn't get a bad review from the Scotsman.)

Boeing touts feeble Hummer-mounted raygun

rain..

maybe all this laser-kill-tech malarkey is all well and good in the sunny skies over Area 51 (where the Lizard Overlords keep their main base for retro-engineered alien technology) but it's not going to be much good in a typical British downpour, is it?

So that'll mean that UK Gov PLC will no doubt be buying into yet another crackpot Yank scheme, wasting our billions on something that's misbegotten from the very outset.

Vauxhall recalls self-combusting Corsas

haha..

Corsas, pah! You'd never find any problems with a lovely French car like my Megane, absolutely reliable in every way...

..erm..

..why are all my lights flashing on and off, and the doors won't open?

Pirated Simpsons movie traced to phone

poor effort, Osama!

yet another sinister terrorist plot aimed at undermining our democratic freedoms to be ripped off by global corporations is deftly solved by the intrepid boys-in-blue! Take that, Osama and your cinematic minions and their rubbish illegal copies!

more to the point, how are they ever going to prove that this guy was responsible? if he deletes alleged video from phone, and there were no eye witnesses, all the rozzers will have is an IP address and if there's more than one person using that IP address, how can they prove that it was him?

ah sorry, it's back to the War_of_Terror again; the authorities don't actually "need" any actual evidence anymore, because he "could" be guilty; ergo in the logic of the War_of_Terror, the post 9/11 paradigm of prevention means that he must be presumed guilty, especially as video and software piracy funds terrorism, as has been quite properly noted already ;) Better 10 innocent men go to gaol than one guilty man go free! (hang on, didn't Hitler say that too?)

God appears in eggplant slice

Americans..

Don't you just love them? From now on I will devote my life to fabricating, sorry - *discovering* (yes that's it) divinely-inspired fruit and vegetables and household bric-a-brac that I can provide to our less-discriminating transatlantic cousins at a fair market price for their edification and the validation of their devout (if sometimes rather unseemly) faith. For this I shall have my piety rewarded by the transfer to my various Paypal accounts of significant quantities of electronic dollars, which when converted into a sensible medium of exchange (Sterling) shall prove once again that industriousness is next to godliness, at least for people who put "In God We Trust" on their currency.

I have a tea stain on my desk that looks just like the Holy Spirit in Piero della Francesca's "Baptism of Christ" and our local Cathedral is where baby Jesus lived (I'm going to Hell, aren't I?)

Shooting stars to dazzle in September...

but is that really what they are?

don't believe them, Natasha! Those are really Lizard orbital vehicles from the Mother Ship near Saturn, where the wormhole to Zeta Reticuli is located. Humans of course do not *really* go into space, that's a very dangerous thing to do re: crystalline spheres, turtles etc.

Meteor showers are actually Lizard vessels sowing our atmosphere with a mix of infectious diseases, toxic substances, and mind-altering drugs so as to kill off the human population, convert the atmosphere to a suitable methane/carbon-dioxide mix similar to Zeta Reticuli, the Lizard homeworld, and to wipe the minds of any indigineous human who stumbles across their evil plan to dominate the Earth, or at least make them look like fools and liars to other humans.

..what was I saying?

Telecel Zimbabwe to lose its licence

Rumbabwe..

de problem is dat you in de Vest you don' unnerstan' de term "genocide" in de African sense! (Rt. Hon. President-for-Life Robert Wellington Ebagum, on the alleged atrocities of the Rumbabwean Army's notorious 5th Brigade.)

He used to be such a nice little man, that President Ebagum. I can remember when he used to live down our street and would be off at 7:30 every morning in his snappy suits and shiny suits, always a smile with those big white teeth of his. who'd have thought he'd turn out to be such a bad 'un? (mind you he never paid me back that ten-bob note i lent him on Coronation Day, he said he was getting some bunting but we never saw him again after that)

Sprint helps fuel parental panic

what a stupid argument (above)

well now Mr or Mrs or Miss Anonymous poster, I'm a parent of two yet I don't go into a panic about "sex-offenders" under every hedge or round every corner, nor do I assume that everyone on the sex-offenders register is a "kiddy-fiddler" - and it just so happens that I think this sort of alarmist action is dangerous and counter-productive. As a matter of fact I think that the Sex Offenders Register in both the US and the UK is a disaster, but at least in the UK access is limited to the Authorities and not available to every self-appointed gun-totin' pointy-hat wearing vigilante redneck.

Having this sort of information available to a public that's legally entitled to buy guns and ammo over the counter is just asking for trouble. Imagine being shot by some good ol' boy who's fileld himself with dutch courage down at his local C&W club because a copper caught you having a pee in the open and beat a confession out of you that you're really a perve.

SCO 'disappointed' as shares plunge 70 per cent

but will they pay the money back?

much as I'm delighted by this ruling and the rapidly accelerating demise of M$-biatch Sco, I wonder if the poor souls who were blackmailed into stumping up for Sco licences will get their money back?

And then there's the legal fees etc for companies who thought they'd be sued in the @ss by scummy Sco/M$ - hmmm I sense a counter-claim in the offing when I get into work tomorrow! :)

bai-bai Sco, may you rot in silicon hell, you lying, blackmailing set of Micro$oft weasels!

Securo-prof claims to invent new, much deadlier dirty bomb

irresponsible scaremongering nonsense..

..but in the times of the Politics of Fear, our erstwhile masters have to do something to maintain their authority and control, and the scaremongering becomes more extreme, more bizarre; but when the most attention and authority is given to those with the darkest visions, to the point where we end up in the crazy situation that because one can imagine a thing it becomes a reality.

don't forget that all these security experts, politicos, coppers etc have to justify their positions and huge salaries. No doubt some Pakistani youth club will now be raided by a TAU operation because they have a flourescent clock that contains radium that "could" be used in a terrorist plot! bit like my kid's Crayola crayons got confiscated by security at Stanstead because it "could" have been a terrorist plot to blow up the Easyjet flight to Malaga. The poor little mite couldn't even finish his "Where's Osama?" colouring book...

American sent to the slammer for faking Windows certificates

..a question..

if it was a fake disc but with a genuine COA, would that be legit? After all it's the COA that's the important part, the media is irrelevant surely?

Incidentally I noticed during the Vista launch that our local PC-World (where in the world?) despite sensibly locking all the Vista boxes in a cabinet, had left the COAs face up and on display. I imagine that a few discreet mobile 'phone camera shots provided a wealth of Vista COA codes for the black market (although i can imagine that the end users were rather disappointed with the over-hyped o/s itself.)

Buffalo's USB HDDs get bigger, faster

Firewire..

if it's for Mac it'll be Firewire - 800Mbps, twice as fast as USB2.0

CeBIT reinvents itself for 2008

oh no not again!

years ago I used to enjoy going to CeBit; now it's just several days of unremitting hell that I seem to be unable to get out of.

Chilean scientists crack lost lake mystery

but what about the vanishing lake?

does nobody care that a whole lake can mysteriously vanish? remember it all started with cows and then drunken American rednecks and single mothers in trailer parks, now whole bodies of water disappear. Did no-one watch "V"?

Loopy quantums reveal successive universes

cyclic universe after all?

despite the new theory, the concept of a recurring universe expanding then contracting then expanding again isn't a new one, is it? I wryly await the refutation of this by another set of cosmologists/astrophysicists who will claim that it's either the Big Bang or the Steady State, not cyclic!

Beavis and Butthead in London jihad

hear hear!

absolutely wonderful, glad to see that there are still folk who haven't been taken in by the supposed "terrorist threat" on every street corner.

As we all should know, the local Al-Quaeda branches can't fit under every bush on the street because of the hundreds of paedophiles already lurking there!

somewhat more seriously, this ludicrous incident is already being touted by the media-spinners as having "an international dimension" (R4 17:56 this evening) No doubt this will mean that one of the supposed "terrorists" had a holiday in Tunisia once or that he buys ready-made cous-cous from Al-Tescaw. Mind you my 10yr old still can't take a carton of Kia-Ora or his Crayola Jumbo crayons on our charter flight to Torremolinos because he might be part of a sinister terrorist plot to undermine our freedoms......

UK could get privileged access to American kill-tech

pots, kettles, and a right old nerve..

to wit, that Joint Strike Fighter thing; where do Americans think the staggeringly brilliant VTOL technology was invented? clue:-not in America!

it's yet another example of the increasingly one-sided nature of the so-called "special relationship" - we provide the fruits of our original and world-beating research, for who else has ever developed a successful jet VTOL technology, which gets us taken on board the JSF project as a supposed "equal" partner because our American "allies" can't figure it out for themselves, but when we quite properly expect some quid pro quo for our trust and generosity in the form of "stealth" technology, we get stonewalled (until an unholy fuss got kicked up)

We gave the US atomic research technology too in the 1940s and did we get any of that back? No, we had to build our own.

What if we'd pulled out of the JSF project? the poor old Amurricuns would have super-stealthy planes that couldn't fly. Maybe you Yanks might start appreciating us a bit more in future, and all the things we do for you?

Brown asks cops for gadget wish list

Title

..or perhaps this technology might help to supply the much needed evidence that is often strangely missing such as when Brazilian men supposedly "leap" underground barriers whilst ostensibly wearing "bulky jackets" - or firm up the wonderful intelligence that let to the shooting of (yet) another innocent man in the Forest Gate raid?

it seems to me that the issue with too much reliance on technology is that the people who we entrust with its operation aren't always the most capable or honest, are they? Giving coppers all the PDAs or whatever else they want is irrelevant if they keep shooting the wrong people!

ah but thats the post Sept 11th/July 7th "paradigm of prevention" isn't it? paradox more like - it doesn't matter whether a crime has occurred or is likely to occur, any action is permissible if something "could" happen no matter how unlikely that eventuality is, and when the cops make their mistakes, all we get are insincere excuses as to how brave they were (to shoot an unarmed and unsuspecting innocent man in the head several times)

oh I know the answer! just lock everyone who "could" commit a crime up in extended protective detention (suitably reviewed by a tame magistrate) and there won't be any crimes committed anymore, in fact the cops could clear a few up by fitting some of these detainees up, well they're in for "terrorism" or whatever else could be thougt up, might as well make sure that they don't go without some sort of charge (and thus can be kept in detention even longer!)

Or Noo Labour could make some new crimes up, such as "breathing" "walking" "speaking" - esp as expressing any opinion (other than Blair/Brown approved) without earshot of Parliament is now illegal.

You'll excuse me if I'm rather cynical about giving the Police yet more dangerous kit and greater powers, since they haven't yet proven that they can use what they've already got responsibly.

Fancy an earful? Click here for tech support

is many many good support!

happy yes is good support Rufus guy, using Windows XP operating system, please be rebooting your pc, no we are sorry you are using wrong operating system please be referring to your supplier. happy day your expressway, good wish!

Sun may never set on British Empire's pint

rosy-glow of nostalgia..

..with any luck, I might wake up tomorrow and find that it's pre-decimalisation again and the whole metric experience has been nothing but a very bad dream. I can run down to the corner shop with my sixpence and buy my Pippin comic, some ha'penny chews and a Curly-Wurly and still have change for the matinée at the local picture house..

bah, everything was better before metricification! I blame Ted Heath and the Common Market..