* Posts by Equitas

249 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2009

Page:

Paypal freezes Cryptome

Equitas

Where are there realistic alternatives?

to ebay and PayPal?

The bottom line is that expensive though ebay is, it meets a need which is otherwise largely unmet. Shopping for replacement china of an obsolete pattern produced only one source outwith ebay but dozens within it.

Likewise with PayPal. The banks have goofed it big time. There is no other simple way of transferring money across the world for relatively small transactions. Even where the seller has a merchant account to accept credit cards, that doesn't necessarily mean they can accept credit cards from other countries and in any case the loading on international transactions has made credit cards a lot less attractive in more recent years.

We use ebay and PayPal because they're the best there are in certain areas of the market -- even though they're desperately flawed. Amazon have some areas in which they offer a better deal -- the opportunity's there for others if they want to take it.

Microsoft claims 90m sales of Windows 7

Equitas
Thumb Down

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

The fact is that most XP users chose not to upgrade to Vista. And that includes me.

Sure, I've bought three laptops and a desktop that have had Vista on them as OEM installations. And all of them are still running Vista. I don't like it, but I don't hate it. It doesn't do anything for me that XP doesn't do.

Business and individuals who have gone without upgrading to Vista are likely to use 7 or its eventual successor only when they see a need to use it or when it comes on new hardware.

The worm has turned. The writing is on the wall for automatic upgrading, and that's not before time.

Russian Olympic boss walks plank

Equitas

Is it any surprise?

Gone are the days when Soviet athletes were treated as national heroes and that could be their sole occupation.

And gone too are the days when anabolic steroids could be administered ad lib with a view to increasing performance to the extent that many or most of the female competitors were not only rendered sterile but suffered irreversible sexual changes to such an extent that their gender identity was in some instances questioned even by themselves.

What we're seeing now is the sort of Olympic performance which is produced by a large nation in a state of internal turmoil. The performance is no disgrace -- indeed as a much more honest performance in present circumstances it's creditable.

PayPal India hits reboot with bank withdrawals

Equitas
Thumb Down

Plenty of Experience

When is going to dawn on the Indian authorities that the worst possible advert for Indian business is the fact that everyone now has experience of dealing with Indian call centres?

Who in their right mind would want to do business in India?

US Navy SEALs' new airlock minisub - made in Blighty

Equitas

American know-how?

Interesting that Ari 1 should refer to

"a complete lack of understanding to the fact that if electrics are not properly sealed but should be used in any weather they tend to stop working if water gets into the circuits.

And opening the box up, drying it out and then filling it with grease is not a solution, it's a stop-gap measure at best."

A number of years ago one of my sons went from the UK to New Jersey as a student to work for the summer vacation as a fairground ride operator. He very quickly got offered a job as a sparky because none of the American sparkies seemed to understand what was necessary to keep the equipment operating when subjected to salt spray and blown sand. And so desperate was the owner of the operation that not only did the said son have a job for his subsequent summer vacations, but they tried very hard to get him to work there permanently as head of maintenance.

Equitas
Thumb Down

Lucas Electrics?

Hmm ...... probably as bad as they're reputed to be.

On the other hand, the all-time worst electrics I ever had were on the last car I had in North America -- a Pontiac on which the ignition died every time it saw a puddle. And that was the same car on which the old-fashioned dipswitch (still on the floor, c 1978) failed and I was told I really should clean my feet before using it ! And no wonder the Pontiac brand is being brought to an end -- the last one I hired was in late 2007 -- brand new, but the boot light kept dropping out of position. As cheap and nasty as I've seen on anything, and that was on a high-spec model..

And the second-most annoying vehicle electrically -- just to spread the blame around a bit -- was the previous car, a Plymouth Fury III where no-one seemed able to make the horn work. It turned out that a limited number had been turned out with the horn relay incorporated in an undocumented fashion in the same sealed box as another relay.

Compared to those, LandRover electrics (and yes, I've had a few of those and there are three currently in the household) have been rather less problematic electrically.

Dell's order status website wobbles at knees

Equitas
Thumb Down

Dell troubles

I bought five Dells in the past year. Nothing wrong with any of the machines, and the netbook is really excellent. Price and build quality on all of them was fine.

As far as the order status business was concerned, it was absolute nonsense, at least one of them showing that it hadn't been built when it was sitting in my hands.

The really negative part of the experience, however, was, as usual, the Indian call centre. It may be cheap for Dell accountants, but it must lose them countless customers. By way of contrast, Vistaprint manage to maintain an excellent call centre in, IIRC, the Philippines: the staff speak a reasonably conventional version of English, they're willing to listen to the customer first, they know what they're talking about and they answer the questions and solve the problems quickly and efficiently -- at least they have done so on the occasions I've called them. That's what we want from call centre staff. It doesn't matter where they're located if they can do the job. Dell's call centre staff haven't done the job on the occasions I've had the misfortune to speak to them and that obviously militates against placing orders with Dell.

US school comes out fighting over webcam spy claim

Equitas
FAIL

School curriculum

The school curriculum didn't include grammar, did it?

Industry groups leap to Chip and PIN's defence

Equitas

Not so useless

Had a couple of false internet transactions on my Citicard a couple of years ago. Someone paid a London congestion charge and bought a bike from a Southampton store and had it delivered to Bedford. Citicard, in spite of many phone calls to India, were totally useless -- repudiated the claim because it was more than three months before I discovered it. Bedofrd police weren't interested and refused to do anything, even although they had the address to which the bike had been delivered. However the Regulator demanded repayment of the money and I got an extra £50 for the inconvenience.

Airport scanners face double exposure

Equitas

Confusion

So "Not Scared" says it "shows a man's dangly bits." Grave confusion, then, when a woman with a procidentia goes through the scanner.

MEPs to US: Hands off our bank accounts

Equitas

Americans

But the more data they have, the less chance there is of their being able to do anything meaningful with it. The chances of Americans being able to harvest and utilise any significant amount of useful information are vanishingly small.

OpenOffice is the new David Hasselhoff

Equitas

Who uses what?

I've got the current version of MS Office on the computer I use for work. I bought it. I've got the current version of Open Office on the same machine. And I've got the current version of WordPerfect on the same machine. I bought it.

The relevant question is not one of what I have on my computer, but rather which of these programs or suites I actually use.

If it were merely a question of producing simple letters or documents, the Open Office would be just fine. Most of my work, however, involves very complex, heavily-formatted documents which will be edited many times. For such documents, WordPerfect is the only one of the three which I have found able to handle the work simply and reliably.

I've had more than forty years' experience in computer-based word-processing, dating from the days of the MT/ST tape-based systems of the late 1960s. I've seen programs come and go. I've used a great many of them. For the work I do, the current version of WordPerfect is the best I've found thus far.

Equitas
FAIL

Spell-check

"It is SO much more intuative, but because MS got it wrong to begin with, and because people are stupid and unwilling to just try stuff, they moan about it."

I hope the spell-checker is good -- and intuitive :-)

Equitas

Still buy WordPerfect?

Yes, and if you do much serious word-processing you'll use it. I have the latest versions of MS Office and Open Office on my machine, but 99% of my work is done on WordPerfect, from choice.

The latest versions are particularly nifty in their ability to read pdf documents straight in -- even locked or text-as-graphic ones are taken straight in by seamless OCR.

Editing and re-editing heavily-formatted documents in MS Word is a nightmare. In WordPerfect it's simple.

I've been using computer-based word-processing since 1969 and seen quite a few programs come and go. The only one I liked as much as the current WordPerfect was WordStar.

Heathrow 777 crash: Ice to blame

Equitas

Problem not insoluble

'The "unusually cold environment" during flight BA038 was "a region of particularly cold air, with ambient temperatures as low as -76°C, in the area between the Urals and Eastern Scandinavia"'

Maintaining the entire fuel system at a temperature which will enable safe and reliable operation is hardly a difficult technical problem.

Equitas

Travel Prepared

Rule 1: Never put as hold baggage what you're not prepared to live without

Rule 2: Never stow in a locker what you're not prepared to leave the plane without

Rule 3: Travel suitably dressed. Personally I don't travel long-distance in a plane other than wearing a 511 shirt with deep concealed pockets which are perfectly roomy enough to contain wallet, passport, camera etc. Also relatively secure.

PayPal suspends India service

Equitas
Thumb Down

Who's to Blame?

Paypal is a mess -- but who's to blame?

The banks have let us down badly -- still no simple, cheap way of transferring money over the internet. Even credit cards have largely been ruled out as an economic means of international transactions due to high currency charges and many US businesses not accepting credit cards from outwith the USA.

The regulatory authorities have let us down badly as well -- when things involving PayPal go wrong it seems you can lose when you're buying and lose when you're selling.

Banks are abolishing cheques -- but have no idea what's to replace them by way of payment mechanisms for (for example) businesses and charities which at present use double-signed cheques. Is there not a case for the government and the regulatory authorities to step in and require implementation of a simple, cheap method of payment which can be done over the internet?

Draconian new electoral laws for South Australia?

Equitas

Toytown Parliament

Let's not get too carried away.

We're talking about a tiny "parliament" in a state with a tiny population of 1.6 million, 1.2 million of whom live in Adelaide and there isn't another town of even 25,000 people in the whole state. Any other city in the world is many hours' drive away. Although the state is physically large, in many ways, it's like a tiny, isolated country. The so-called "House of Assembly" has only got 47 members and of these some 28 are Australian Labour Party. We're talking toytown politics.

Most consumers reuse banking passwords on other sites

Equitas
FAIL

Bank security?

Surely banks aren't interested in security?

I get phoned at irregular intervals by both the Bank of Scotland and Egg, demanding from me security information. Incredibly, the calls are actually genuine but the callers always seem put-out when I refuse to divulge information on the ground that they may be phishing.

My usernames and passwords for sundry assorted purposes must run into several thousand. There is no way on earth I could remember that number. Recycling and/or writing them down is a necessity.

In any case, having the correct username and password for a business banking account did me no good the other night -- having left myself with only cryptic clues as to the said username and current password I could not get into the system and assumed that my clues were inadequate to prompt me appropriately. To cut a long story short, the "problem" was that because I hadn't used it for a few weeks the bank had disabled my "security token" digital code generator. The problem was with them, not with me. Now, exactly what nefarious actions I could have got up to with those particular accounts is an interesting question as they were all "View Only."

It's time banks and others got in touch with the real world. In the past ten years I've been defrauded on a credit card transaction once (Supplier had supplied goods to an address other than that of the cardholder, Citibank denied liability, but Financial Ombudsman ruled against Citibank who then paid up), but have to deal with four different instances of banks and other financial institutions paying the entire contents of accounts to persons other than the legitimate depositor or their authorised representative. In two of those instances the banks refused even to reveal to whom the money was paid.

Security should start at home. Clearly banks and other financial institutions have yet to learn that first lesson.

Security must be workable for the end user. It seems that they haven't learned that lesson either.

UK moob jobs rocket 80 per cent

Equitas
Paris Hilton

Equality

Surely equality demands that the number of moob jobs done should equal the number of boob jobs done? :-)

Man sets mice on musophobic ex-missus

Equitas
Thumb Up

Creative!

Creative!

Bloated Office 2010 kicks dirt in face of old computers

Equitas

Neither dude nor dud

"Are you sure your wife isn't a dude?"

Quite sure -- she's had nine kids :-), so she's definitely a functional woman. She's not a dud either. However, IMHO is not functional but IS a DUD.

Equitas

Pointless -- but maybe a good thing in another sense

Another pointless new version -- and perhaps a little more resistance to automatic upgrading. The worm will turn eventually, as even MS almost discovered with Vista.

Equitas

Clients on pdf

"f you do decide to export to PDF, just download one of the many free PDF virtual printers and get on with it, no need to dick around with 'one machine licensed with acrobat'."

I think the point that was being made in the post you were addressing was that the clients might SEND a PDF file which would then need to be read.

The inability of Word to read in pdf files directly is a real failing -- WordPerfect has been able for some time to read in pdf files. The current version will automatically apply OCR where the text has been printed as a graphic or the file is locked.

Writing to pdf is indeed simple, as you indicate. For myself I think the pittance that is asked for pdfFactory PRO is well worth it -- although I have the full Acrobat program and of course WordPerfect publishes to PDF.

Equitas
Thumb Down

Crazy?

"Try taking that approach if you're in business. Word 2007 documents not come out properly in open office etc? Open office documents look like sh*t in Word? You'd be considered a joke if you weren't using office. Sad, but true."

Circulating documents in Word is madness if they're anything other than simple text. And probably if they are. Just had a mag editor who insists on sending docs out in Word for review complain to me that his particular version of Word can't read by comments except by devious means and certainly can't display them on screen. And MS certainly haven't got the numbering and bullet point system in Word sorted out. It's not the tool for collaborative work at all. Whether it's the best tool for anything is a moot point. I certainly don't use it to originate documents myself and avoid editing Word documents completely. I'm afraid Open Office doesn't suit my way of working either. I'm a WordPerfect guy. Not a WordPerfect fanatic, but a WordPerfect guy because it has the features I need, does the job I need it to in a straightforward way and doesn't get tied up in knots when a document is extensively edited.What's more, the ability to read in any pdf file into an editable document at the mere click of a button is a genuinely useful trick.

The Equality Bill: Hidden agenda?

Equitas
Thumb Down

WASP KILLER

Does "equal opportunity" not simply mean that white white heterosexual males must always be discriminated against?

Catholics slam PETA nude adopt-a-mutt poster

Equitas
FAIL

Own goal

Come on, that's a cross, rather than a crucifix! However an organisation which attempts to use a Christian symbol in a quasi-blasphemous way clearly does NOT want or deserve support from Christians

UK2 email migration still not finished

Equitas

So precisely what's wrong?

Precisely what's not happening? For how many people is it not happening? Doesn't seem to be affecting any of my domains for which email is being forwarded?

If this is IMAP and people are really foolish enough to rely on emails left on someone else's server as anything other than a backup, they have only themselves to blame if historic emails are lost.

Bouncing emails instead of forwarding them is a different story, but clearly not affecting everyone.

Quality service? Sadly, the record is that many firms offer good service for a few years and then go belly up or are taken over for other reasons. Others are like UK2 -- currently available at a reasonable price. Nothing guaranteed. You get what you pay for with UK2. With most other companies it seems you pay more but you either don't get what you pay for for very long or you don't get what you pay for at all.

Anyone in business presumably has enough sense to own their own domain, in which case, if it's a .uk address, they have the option of lifting it from the current host and placing it elsewhere, even if the current host is un-coperative or unresponsive. Nominet -- amazingly -- comes out brilliantly in such a situatiion; extremely helpful and acts for a purely nominal fee. It's a strong argument for having a .uk domain rather than a top-level one.

UK2's email still borked

Equitas

Baring all?

If high prices guaranteed reliablity I'd happily paid them. However, I've had one full-price ISP go belly-up this year already and indeed had to switch one address to hosting at UK2 as a result.

As far as I can see, the sundry assorted addresses I have at UK2 are all operating -- though none of them has more there than a forwarding table.

Technical support, once all-but-non-existent at UK2 does at least now exist. If they can just get suitable staff, the concept of TS baring all could be an interesting feature.

US boffins hail lab-grown rabbit todger

Equitas

Desirable

Now every woman's going to want one!

UK Supremes question vetting scheme

Equitas
FAIL

Individual with a Record

I answer that description.

Falsely accused and with a record held by Police, Social Work, NHS, Local Education Authority and who knows what other bodies.

The fact that I was innocent has no effect on the record. The fact that an Acting Senior Social Worker is, following the "matter" "no longer employed by the Local Authority" ( last seen working as an assistant to a double-glazing fitter) has no effect on the record. The fact that two paediatricians have now left the country has no effect on the record. The fact that a school nurse has been redeployed to another area has no effect on the record. The fact that two of the three teachers in hte school in question are no longer there has no effect on the record. The fact that a wpc has been removed to other duties has no effect on the record.

The fact is that when it comes to "Child Protection" matters once a "concern" has been laundered by a "professional" it acquires the status of fact and the individual about whom the "concern" has been expressed is deemed guilty. Whether or not the individual is successfully nailed by the system at the time does not affect that the fact that he or she is deemed guilty. Some groups are largely exempt from this risk -- those within the Child "Protection" system. So teachers, social workers, police officers and doctors are at much less likely to be classed as abusers because they are part of the system and therefore allegations against them are much less likely to be passed on at all.

Canada laid bare on Street View

Equitas
Paris Hilton

Canada laid bare

"Was it just me that expected some NSFW pics in an article entitled "Canada laid bare..."

Oh come on! It's Canada we're talking about. All those hirsute amazons could hardly be described as "bare" :-)

(Paris, because she's considerably barer than the average Canadian female)

Equitas
Badgers

Picture interval?

Is the interval between the pictures the same as elsewhere? The jumps between frames seem rather large.

And even if we set aside Nunavut and NWT, what's happened to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, PE I and Newfloundland & Labrador? One would have thought that they would at least have had a look at the Provincial and Territorial capital cities.

However, at least it's a start. And at least I can see that Vancouver has at long last started marking the bus stops in a reasonably intelligible manner.

Is there any published timeframe for release of other areas of the UK or elsewhere?

(Badgers -- because we need to badger them to get on with the job :-) )

Nation's parents prepare to be vetted

Equitas
Thumb Down

Neat

"It is not just the vetting act, it is 90% of the system which has been allowed to simplify their operation through "Guilty until proven innocent". H&S in schools, LEA, Ofsted, Social services - you name it. Every single one of them has gotten themselves at least 3-4 nice "levers" to use against any "unrepentant" middle class citizen which refuses to fall in-line. Nearly all of them established during Vladimir Ilich Blair and Joseph Vissarionovich Brown's rule."

"Guilty until proven innocent" sums it up. And in the "Child Protection" racket the same individuals can be accusers, investigators, prosecution, judge, jury and executive agency!

Teachers, school nurses, school doctors, GPs, social workers and police officers all score brownie points when they express a "concern" at their joint meetings for such purposes. And once the "concern" has been taken up by another body within the cartel it becomes a "professional opinion" when passed on by them to a third body. And "professional opinions" have the same status as "fact." Neat, isn't it?

US commission urges broadband socialism

Equitas

Broadband in the US?

A lot of areas are waiting for decent telephone services and the remote possibility of mobile phone coverage. Thirty years ago there were plenty of homes with no electricity and magneto telephones with party lines with up to 99 parties on the same line Two turns of the handle for the tens digit, one turn for the units digit, three turns for CO (Exchange, or Operator, to the rest of us). Today the situation's better -- but not by much :-(. Out in the sticks in the US has a distinctly third-world feel about it. Other rural America is something like 30 years behind urban America. It's certainly very different from what you see on TV!

OMG US states to ban txting + driving

Equitas

No cellphones, no need for legislation

"How do US states not already have a law like this?"

Have you had a look at the coverage maps for a great many US states? And the reality is FAR worse than the highly-over-optimistic coverage maps would suggest.

iPod nano busted for upskirting

Equitas

Things looking up?

What exactly he expected to see is an interesting question -- it seems a great deal of trouble for nothing worth looking at.

Brooke Shields pic exposes real/online rift

Equitas

Mad, mad, mad.

What possessed Brooke Shields' mother to have such photos taken is an interesting question -- it clearly can't have been an innocent record of childhood. On the other hand, was it her mother's drive that was the architect of Brooke Shields' subsequent acting success?

However, having said that, if it hadn't been for this most recent ban, how many people would have seen the pictures? Declaring them illegal has caused millions to view them who would otherwise never have even heard of them. Does that say something about the extent to which the "guardians of public morals" are in touch with the real world.

What those putative guardians of public morality have done in taking such a public action is likely to have a counter-productive effect.

I'm not sure that the fact that her exact age is of central importance -- what's relevant is that she was manifestly pre-pubertal. The overwhelming majority of the adult population are heterosexual and not have no paedophilic leanings. This sort of fuss is likely to have the effect of stirring up a prurient curiosity about paedophilia.

Talking DAB and the future of radio

Equitas
FAIL

Killing off the radio audience?

DAB? You're joking. Can't get reasonable FM in some parts of the house without an amplified aerial. There are still in the UK thousands of miles of A roads where there's no usable radio signal of any sort. Adding another useless non-standard (no dab+) system to the broadcasting setup unless it has 100% coverage will ensure one thing -- people abandoning listening to the radio as transmissions on existing systems are shut down.

Coverage statistics are nonsense, too. It's irrelevant to me what % of the population have coverage -- if I'm driving through a sparsely-populated (or non-populated) area I still want coverage and if I'm on an A road I should be able to expect it, even if there's no-one lives there full-time.

Internet radio isn't all it's cracked up to be, either. Can't get a decent sampling rate on Radio 4 at all -- unusable.

Dell XPS support takes a catnap

Equitas

Applie support?

AC writes "perhaps next time you should buy the most reliable and best supported of personal computers, aka Apple Macintosh...go figure." No factory-approved services within 150 miles of me :-(

Brown apologises for 'appalling' treatment of Turing

Equitas
Thumb Down

Hmmm...........

Let's work through this:

Turing tried to make use of the law of the day in relation to a burglary by his male lover

Turing's relationship with his lover, illegal in terms of the law of the day, thus became evident to the police.

Turing was prosecuted in terms of the law of the day and his security clearance revoked

I may not like the law of today -- but I can't ignore it. I may think that urination in a public place shouldn't be an offence -- but I know that if I do it, I may be arrested.

Turing knowingly broke the law and then tried to use the law to support him against, as it happens, his lover. Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.

A brilliant man, but a flawed personality and wide open to blackmail.

As for Gordon Brown's "apology" -- a piece of nonsense designed to appeal to those of a particular sexual orientation.

T-Orange: How it's going to work

Equitas
Thumb Down

Geographical Coverage?

Since neither of them have coverage of any sort in many of the areas I travel in, neither are of any use to me anyway.

Bank of America demands thumbprint from armless bloke

Equitas
Thumb Down

The obvious one

So why didn't he press the prosthetic thumb or thumbs on to the pad?

UK population to abandon Midlands

Equitas
FAIL

Heading for the hills of Scotland?

They'll be well clear of any coverage on the Orange network, then :-)

Breathe Networks administrator to hold creditors' meeting

Equitas
Stop

Better regulation necessary

There really is a case for much better regulation of ISPs.

Zetnet had a remarkably loyal customer base -- many of them customers since the mid-1990s and happy to pay somewhat over the odds for a very personal service from kind, helpful staff who were personal friends of many of the customers.

Following the rather-forced takeover by Breathe, Breathe apparently brought in outside "consultants" to migrate Zetnet clients on to the Breathe system. Suffice it to say that

(i) the said "consultants" stopped the email of most Zetnet customers in the last days of June

(ii) the said "consultants" entirely marginalised the few remaining Zetnet staff

(iii) the said "consultants" didn't (and it appears don't) have a clue about the proprietary Zimacs software still used by many Zetnet customers and probably used by almost all of the long-standing Zetnet customers at some point in time

(iv) POP3 email of many customers was being mistakenly directed into the proprietary Zimacs software, whence it could not be extracted for weeks by conventional methods and still can't be reliably extracted by conventional methods

(v) It became all but impossible to make contact with Technical Support which was switched to a (very) premium rate number which gave an "unobtainable" tone, a recorded message telling callers that they were busy, or kept callers on hold indefinitely. Emails and faxes, in the main, went unanswered

(vi) Many people still have about a month's worth of email missing

(vii) It's hardly surprising that the Breathe servers are overloaded, because they're not releasing the email to Zimacs reliably.

I'm less badly affected than most:

(i) my website stayed up, unlike those of many others

(ii) I was able to use Nominet to reclaim a domain hosted at Zetnet: full marks to Nominet -- all I paid them was the nominal fee of £11.50 including tax. They couldn't have been more helpful and that's worth recording. And all I lost on that particular matter was the cost of a year's hosting paid in advance to Zetnet

(iii) Thanks to the community spirit of Zetnet customers, a kludge to provide a reliable way of sending email and receiving news using Zimacs and another Zetnet server was revealed and likewise a method of downloading and decoding mail from the Zetnet servers using ftp was also revealed

(iv) Eventually, thanks, afaik, to the persuasive efforts of one of the old Zetnet staff who I managed to contact early one morning, it appears that the "consultants" did manage to restore my POP3 email which is now being forwarded reliably to an address outside Zetnet

(v) I wasn't relying on Zetnet for my internet connection anyway, so I didn't lose my internet connection

I'm sorry for the handful of Zetnet staff still employed by Breathe -- nobody doubts they'd do whatever they could if they were allowed to. But the only people to come out of this with any credibility are Nominet. I really can't fault them at all

What use are OFCOM if they can't step in to deal with a mess like this? And surely there's a measure of control needed over such a situation? And shouldn't we know the identity of these "consultants" who've made such a monumental mess of the lives of so many people?

73% of Brits too shagged for a shag

Equitas

Surprising?

Not physically fit? Sadistic PE teachers with a less-than-healthy interest in their pupils certainly don't help on that count.

Eating unhealthily? A lot of the males in the country have never seen the inside of a Home Ec classroom and most of those who have had home Ec Classes have been on the receiving end of sexist Home Ec teachers bitterly resentful about having to teach males.

Too tired for sex? We do work longer hours than most nations, but surely it's politically-correct to regard heterosexual activity as somewhat deviant?

Cops and ISP in paedophile data mix up

Equitas
Black Helicopters

It's really very simple

The whole "Child Protection" system in the UK works on the principle of "guilty until proved innocent" and it involves a spy network far broader than is generally understood. Teachers, doctors, social workers, police are all part of the system and once a "concern" is voiced by any party and passed on by a "designated agency" it then acquires the status of "fact." Indeed, when it comes to child "protection", to a large extent the same individuals can act as accusers, prosecution, judge, jury and executive agency.

The victim in this instance now has a record which cannot be erased from the files of the police, social work, presumably his local GP and presumably will show up with the CRB one way or another. As far as "the authorities" are concerned it's a case of "we didn't manage to prove his guilt this time, but we'll get him next time."

Take it from one who's been through it. Take it from one who's been through the mill.

However, my score to date is

* one (former) acting senior social worker now working as a labourer to a double-glazing fitter

* two consultant paediatricians now skipped the country for Australia

* one police officer (female) removed from child protection duties and transferred elsewhere

* one school nurse transferred to other duties elsewhere

* one head teacher removed to another school

Sadly, total failure with

* one lying GP (GMC has said in writing (!) that it's OK for a GP to lie in child protection matters)

* one lying Chief Constable still in office

* one lying Assistant Chief Constable still in office

Breathe Networks out, Breathe Internet in

Equitas
FAIL

The truth?

So why have customers still been told absolutely nothing of this?

Customers of Breathe-owned Zetnet have lost conventional access to email and usenet since late June. POP3 email of many has been switched to the proprietary Zimacs and if it were not for the ingenuity of some customers who worked out how to collect (and decode) the email by ftp they'd probably still be without it.

The only reason for any customer to stay with Breathe is to preserve existing advertised email addresses and website addresses. Unless their existing email and website addresses are preserved they'll all be off.

Is it really beyond the technical competence of Breathe to send a notice to all customers? Or even to post it in Zetnet's "Message of the Day?"

Why should customers of whatever incarnation of Breathe believe anything that is being said by the "new" management?

Stop ID cards, says Scottish minister

Equitas

Licensed to kill?

Gerhardt wrote

"2) Let's suppose you have another system of checking you are, that requires you to have:

- a bank statement with your address on it

- your driver's license"

Well, I did pass a driving test in North America some time around 1976 or 1977 so I do have a somewhat out-of-date driver's license somewhere or other. Will that do? At least it has a photo on it (no resemblance to my current appearance, of course) which is more than my UK one does. Of course as a very frequent countersignatory of passport applications etc. etc., I very rarely see a passport photo which looks remotely like the applicant.

Page: