Posts by Is it me?

Court OK's Assange Sweden extradition, given 7 days to appeal

Minor Point

Assange is protected by Human Rights laws in both Sweden and the UK that prevent him being extradited to any country that is likely to torture him or execute him. He could only be extradited to the USA if they gave an undertaking that neither of these would happen.

I suspect the same is also true of Australia.

This applies to him regardless of his citizenship.

I agree this guy just wants publicity, even if he is charged and found guilty, Sweden would deport him to Australia, not the USA.

One wonders how much of UK tax payers money this tosser is intending to waste. Most of his problems are of his own making, if he had stayed where he was in Sweden this would all be over by now.

Jacqui Smith 'shocked' to discover we're drowning in sea of porn

Sadly

It's not just Jacqui but all politicians, in that and many other respects, and as we move to a more and more presidential style of politics, the more we will get one persons vision of what we can and cannot see and do, and the less our political representatives will have minds of their own.

Be aware that Jacqui may have one view of the Nanny State, and Theresa has another, and that will always be true. When a politician rails against the Nanny State, it's only because it isn't theirs, be they Nick, David, or Milliband the younger.

JC

Sex offenders will get a review – after 15 years

Depends if you believe in rehabilitation and redemption.

Just because you have served 30+ does not mean you will ever do it again, or that you are a threat, seems only fair to me that for some offenders, you can appeal and be taken off, if you are not a threat to society.

Sadly it is also true that some offenders are not curable, or redeemable, but we should give those who are a chance.

We do for murderers and drug dealers for multiple crimes, why shouldn't we for one off sex offenders who have learnt their lessons.

IPCC chief: ANPR is 'a victim of its own success'

Problem is....

The easiest and cheapest way to use ANPR is to register only vehicles you have on a hit list, doing a forensic search requires you to store the hit data for a period of time, but how long, there are are 35 Million vehicles in the UK, and we pass around 10 ANPR cameras a day, so thats 350 Million ANPR records per day, give or take, probably 200 bytes per record, more if it includes a picture, say 350K, and suddenly you start to need a lot of storage.

Police hit delete on DNA profiles

Maybe not

It is a valid if controversial point, there are some benefits to taking DNA samples at birth, but personally I wouldn't try and sell it on a law and order basis. If you do that, you need to show that you have cause to want a DNA sample, it's a handy way of identifying unknown bodies and such, or as an anonymous research tool. You just have to protect it from misuse, and fishing, genetic markers are relatively unique, but if the sample size is large enough, you will get false positives, and as the Police are institutionally lazy, they would misuse it on the grounds Match = Guilty.

Personally, I think you should be able to choose to have your sample deleted or not, I'm quite happy with the idea that the government has my biometric data, and that it's available to the Police.

Mind you I'd be happier if the Police kept all their officers and employees biometric data in the same way they do in the US, rather than expect it of everyone else.

Coalition rejigs gov procurement to give SMEs an in

Don't bet the farm

On a government contract, they have a habit of going away. it's like any form of betting, don't make the bet unless you can afford to loose. Never expose your business to more liability than you can afford. Government can take you right up to contract signature and still cancel, and in fact even when there is a contract you can be left waiting for payment because a politician or department won't sign off a completed project until after the budget, an election, a reshuffle, a public enquiry.

It has been known for SMEs to go to the wall waiting for sign-off, so yes fine we can all read OJEUs, we can win them, but there's still dragons out there. The Minister can't possibly sign this off in the current .... climate, just wait for a quiet moment and we'll sign-off.

UK.gov's axing of school building plan 'unlawful'

Genius

You should stand for your Local Council and show them how to do it. Unless you happen to live in one of those districts where the council actually has the income to carry out all their statutory duties without skimping.

Oh wait there aren't any. Very easy to make this kind of suggestion if you don't understand Local Government finance, I suspect you'll find they spend it on maintaining other vital services, that other districts neglect.

Nominet asks what you think of police domain grab

Who else is there

Most serious criminal web sites don't actually ever appear on the web as we know it, and are seriously difficult to find.

Mostly those that do are fraud related, pirate, or "Subversive". I doubt many of use would question the first, the second the majority would be ok with, but the last, well what is subversive, who defines that. The Police and Judiciary are notoriously conservative in their application of the law here, and will err on the side of extreme caution. To be fair, they only reflect the attitudes of the chattering classes, the red top readers, who are not stunningly liberal and represent the majority of our society. But who else would you want doing this, yes a court order, but outside of this you would be forced down the Quango route, and that would be staffed with, well guess.

PS I hadn't forgotten Sex, but then those sites could be categorised in the same way.

Anonymous pwns security firm that probed its membership

At least

We get to vote for our liars, and when you lot grow up, you'll understand what democracy and politics are all about, we can choose which lies to believe. We also have the advantage of an independent judiciary, not always the case, they can and do moderate politicians.

In the UK and US you can publicly and loudly dissent, you have a right to spout any rubbish you want too, and the rest of us can listen or not as we choose.

In a dictatorship or one party state, there is only one set of lies, and disagreement becomes the choice of the politician to chop your head off or not.

If you don't like the US or UK systems, you have the right to join a political party or form one of your own and change things, might take a while, but change a lot of things you can.

Look at the freedoms you have, and compare them to those in Egypt, Libya and Iran. Look at the corruption in the western world, and compare it to Africa, and the middle east, do you really think we are that bad.

CLAS and CISSP do not a techie make.

Nor a TDA, because offhand I don't know my TCP Port numbers, other than 1521. You probably wouldn't be surprised how often the blindingly obvious needs to be stated though.

Bold as brass metal thieves disrupt rail, comms, electric

More trains isn't the problem.

Railway lines run cable in nice concrete ducts alongside the tracks, with handy plastic tubes under the rails to make removal and replacement quick, easy and low cost. Thus a bunch of lads in High Viz jackets on the lineside can wip the cable out between trains.

In BR days drivers always knew where work gangs would be, but do you want to bet in todays fragmented system that they don't and gangs turn up unannounced to the train drivers.

Even if the driver does contact the signalling centre to report the gang, they would be off before BTP could get there, all trains have cab radio nowadays. The signalling centre knows instantly a signal develops a fault, so you can guess how long it takes a response to get to a site in the middle of nowhere. Signals are positioned for the convenience of trains, not road access.

Don't worry

The morons have and have suffered in consequence, and been mown down by trains as they nick signalling cable as well.

http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/man_electrocuted_in_burglary_1_214367

They also can't tell the difference between fibre and copper cable.

Mind you when the likes of EDF say they are worried thieves electrocuting themselves...

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/local/metal_thieves_risk_their_lives_1_626848?

well..

Depends which 25m

I think that modern SSI signalling systems are redundantly cabled, and indeed use fibre as well, but if you nick the 25m of cable from the control cabinets to the signal heads on a gantry, well it wouldn't matter how diverse your routing was. Also it would only take one signal head to go faulty on a main-line to cause an awful lot of disruption.

I believe Network Rail are dong as much as they can to replace copper with fibre over long distances, but it costs millions to to re-configure a signalling system, and check that it has all been re-installed correctly, remember Clapham.

Stroppy Belgian students in Ryanair mutiny

Must be a first..

The use of the word nice in conjunction with Ryanair.

Hmm....

not a fan of Secret Army then, or know about Eban-Emal.

EC consults on procurement law overhaul

Odds on a fix

Government procurement is monumentally expensive, with often hundreds of pages of documentation required for even a relatively small contract making bidding for contracts expensive and time consuming, and not particularly transparent even to the people involved on both sides of the bid.

A lot of the bureaucracy is a waste of space and could be done once, relatively quickly for any bidder, a tick list of do you comply with this or that piece of legislation or directive.

But the bigger hurdle is the constant pressure to drive costs down, small contracts cost relatively more than large ones, and large government wide purchasing contracts will effectively lock out SMEs from government because they will not be able to offer the discounts or scope that multi-nationals can, and thus they become relegated to sub-contractors, which actually degrades their service. Be it building or IT, when a large framework, or outsourcing deal is struck, a lot of the services are provided by the third party providers, in fact often fourth or fifth party, who could obviously supply directly more cheaply, but just not at the scale government wants.

And it's not just government, big supermarkets, banks and other chains do the same, they negotiate a national deal, and push the local problems off to the outsourcer, they save on direct management costs, and senior management time, but probably not on costs.

The only way you can let smaller businesses into government contracting is by moving decision making on contracts back to lower, regional and local levels, and can you really see that happening.

Yes, by all means cut the paperwork, and lower the entry costs, but it won't do much good on its own.

I would guess the next step would be for an FM Outsourcer and an IT one to merge and then you could outsource everything to one player.

Perhaps if UK PLC had more management balls and capability and less focus on their bonus we might have a much better market.

Android bites big chunk out of Apple iPad market share

I do love percentages. they hide the truth.

Thing is, Android was always going to grab a share of the market, but how much of that was latent demand from people who didn't want an iPad, and were waiting.

If you have 100% of the Market and there's a new entrant, you have to loose market share, how is that News?

What would be more interesting is would be the rate growth in iPad sales with and without Android, and the rate of growth for the market, to see which is out performing the other in growth rate. Tricky, I know if yo only have Q4, but there's still far more useful data than market share alone.

Gov unveils plans to reduce employment tribunal claims

Fines for companies..

It is not companies that breach employee rights, it's people, fine the HR directors and managers personally for breaching employment law, not the company as a whole. Individuals discriminate, or make discriminatory decisions, so fine them, and don't allow them to insure it away.

UK tech retailers are rubbish

Be fair

Which has been doing it's job for years, and it does a very good one, just because us tech savvy reg readers know not to touch Currys, PC World and Comet with a barge pole, doesn't mean the average Which reader does. I seem to remember they do this survey every so often, probably in the vain hope things might get better, but the woods are still full of Bear s*i^.

Actually, I find John Lewis isn't too bad, and exponentially better than anyone else, and I like to have someone to shout at when I buy a new telly and doesn't work, who will actually do something.

Gov will spend £400k to destroy ID card data

What they will actually do.

When they say destroy the data, that's exactly what they mean. They will have to gather up all the back-up tapes and irrecoverably destroy them, erasure is not enough for the impact level that ID Card data would have been held at.

Then there's the disk drives that will have to be securely erased, and the removed from their SAN trays and put through a specialised shredding device.

It is also probable that there's a whole host of other data stores that would need to be destroyed, like server boot devices and so on.

You would be surprised how much data can be recovered from an erased disk, even if you have overwritten in n times.

That's why it'll cost so much.

Oh yes and we mustn't forget the stupidly convoluted contract, but I think IPS probably has a data destruction contract in place for its systems, or its IT service provider should have.

UK short 100K tech recruits this year

This is because....

The IT Industry now wants to make it's older experienced staff redundant as they are too expensive, and they can easily be replaced by cheaper and more profitable graduates.

Odd shoring isn't quite as cheap as it used to be, either, so they have to grow margins somehow.

Pity the Industry leaders don't know how to grow their businesses by adding value isn't it, probably too hard.

Watch for major redundancy programmes from a number of IT companies in the next three months.

Plastic Logic scores $700m from Russians

Kiss of Death

One wonders if the injection of Russian money into the company will then close more markets than it opens.

But good luck to them, if the UK won't invest in it's own innovative high tech, then we deserve what we get.

US Eye-o-Sauron border scan tower project finally axed

Outsource

Hire lots of South and Central American boarder guards to keep them out, keeps the head count costs low for Homeland Security, and the bribery costs low for the immigrants, see win, win.

O2 chops away at middle-aged spread

Earth to O2

Apart from having two shops in the Bluewater Shopping Centre, it would actually be nice, if you are going to have shops, that they can actually do any O2 transaction, not just flog you a new phone.

To me O2 is the devil I know, so far as I can tell the others are just as bad, or worse, and it's more hassle to shop around and chop and change than stay where you are, in fact I've had my mobile phone longer than I was married, a bit like banks really. (07802) man and boy.

Lawyers fear Assange faces death penalty in US

Just one small thing

You cannot be extradited from any EU to face the death penalty, or face any cruel and unusual punishment. Life without parole in an unpleasant federal prison, yes.

It is a pre-condition of the extradition process that the accused will not face the death penalty and probably enshrined in the extradition treaty.

Apple refuses frozen iPhone repair

Merchantable Quality or Something Like that.

If you sell a phone in a country where the temperature regularly drops below 0 during winter, as a consumer you would expect the product to function in normal weather conditions.

Sounds like Lenin Kristin Løvvik should check on iPhone failures in Canada, Northern US States, Finland, Sweden, Iceland etc.

And should also go for the people who sold it to her, because, one assumes they were in Norway, and should understand the Norwegian climate.

The idea of a mobile phone is that it is mobile, and pretty much any time any place any where.

Police reject Labour MP's call for Bristol-wide DNA test

And you think any other MP would be different?

Sorry, but the function of an MP is to get himself re-elected and score popularity points with his constituents, representing a constituency for what they actually need went out the window for most MPs a long time ago. Very few MPs understand reality.

Talking of DNA, why just Bristol, the M5 wasn't far away, what's to say it was someone living locally. Also, the larger your DNA sample, the less use it is, and the more likely a false positive. It's better always to narrow your field and then home in, than take a large sample and then use DNA as the killer blow, so to speak. Some groups have high commonality of alleles, so again that degrades blanket testing. If you test the whole of Bristol, what happens to all the other crimes that need testing, or that one high probability sample that gets taken and then lost in the morass of others. You also need to be sure that you have some of the perps DNA, and not just some passing punter from the local pub.

Yeah, the idea's nuts, but I can think of a few Lib Dems and Tories who would have made the same stupid suggestion, basically because they don't know any better.

ESA releases splendid new space-'scope pic of Andromeda

Unlikely to matter, even to our distant decendents

Assuming we leave this system anyway, but I'd always understood that on an individual star system level, they actually were not likely to collide with anything, may be alter their galactic orbit, but not a lot else.

To quote "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen" the likelihood of two solar systems in an obscure spiral are hitting each other are infinitesimally small.

Wouldn't want to hang out in the galactic cores though, whoops there goes another billion year old sun.

Called 999 recently? They've got your number

Come on guys think sensibly about this.

If you really want to know how the Police manage information there is a set of standards called MOPI, it's public information. You might also take a peek at BIP0008 which defines how evidential information has to be managed. If you provide information that convicts someone, that information must be held on file until there is no possibility of an appeal.

Not all information is held for twelve years, some less, some longer, that's just a default. When you call the non-emergency number, or 999, the details will be recorded just like calling a utility, on a CRM system. Some of that information may be passed on to the intelligence system, or other systems for actioning, just as you would expect. Because the Police are human beings, some of it gets misused or misfiled, deliberately or accidentally, just like any other organisations, but in the vast majority of cases it is managed correctly, and used correctly according to the processes the Police have in place, which again, may be wrong.

A lot of "detective work" is built up on pictures of events, which used to be done through a person called a collator who acted as the long term memory, now they also have intelligence systems which look at events reported by the public to determine patterns of criminal behaviour and so on, do you really want them to stop doing that. Remember that Tesco probably knows more about you that the Police do.

If you want to be anonymous, ring crime stoppers, they don't have to record your name, oh and 999really is for things that the Emergency Services can do something about now, if you see someone driving off in your car dial 999, if it's nicked from the station car park, it's not an emergency. Mind you it would help if there was a single non-emergency number, as how many of us actually know the non-emergency numbers for your areas, home, work....

Gov gone wild: Mad new pub glasses, bread freedom introduced

Me I prefer a Straight

That's actually the traditional beer glass, dimples arrived in 1948. 10 Sided glasses were the original jugs, but only form the 1920's, before that it was pewter.

But each to their own.

Standard sizes are designed to protect us drinkers from short measures, which is why pub glasses are stamped or have measure lines, is Willets doing away with those as well, so we actually never know how much is in a glass.

ACPO exec wants 'ugly mugs' database to protect sex workers

Oh good just what they need

Another database disjointed information, surely people who mistreat ladies of negotiable virtue are also likely to commit other types of abuse. Besides that it would be easier just to add a new type to an existing database rather than waste money on building new databases.

Still if they do, I doubt much of it will be going Capita's way. I'd back Sungard or Northgate.

English Defence League membership list stolen

Now there is a picture I didn't need

A thug dressed by Gok Wan.

Boeing wins MoD logistics deal

Low Key

This procurement will have started way before the general election, as will others, and there would be a major issue with some of the existing contracts if you didn't go ahead.

Procurement rules limit the length of contracts, and for how long you can extend them, once that extension expires the incumbents are free to charge what they like, and they will, on the grounds they have nothing to loose.

Beats me why the government don't just fess up to this and get on with it.

Oh, and if they had started renegotiations for smaller new contracts, they would have taken a good 18 months to complete, increased costs hugely, potentially incurred penalties on the cancelled bid, and still left the incumbents in a we'll charge what we like until we are shot if they failed the PQQ stage.

Large contracts take a long time to negotiate, between one and two years to ensure fair play and best value.

Atos Origin buys Siemens IT wing in €850m deal

@AC

You mean you have only just noticed that governance effort exceeds actual doing the job by a huge extent these days, admittedly that's a bit over the top, but then 80% governance isn't unusual.

I'd love someone to do a survey of how cost effective governance in IT actually is, but then we do have to have every bean counted, every requirement met, and to be able to prove we have delivered value for money, can't trust the professional.

Trust me I'm a professional, got the TOGAF certificate to prove it. Sorry what is an architecture.

How GCHQ keeps tabs on FOI requestors

Hang on

Did I miss something, but the author didn't actually say what it was GCHQ did, if all they asked him for was his contact details, then what's the problem, lots of organisations like to know to whom they are sending information.

And what's wrong with GCHQ checking up a little, after all there might just be a terrorist dumb enough to give valid contact details.

Sorry but I really don't see the point of this story, Ok, there are still classified documents around that probably shouldn't be, but what do you expect the process to be for releasing a document, FOI request for marked document, check marking, no way, check person, end process, you really don't expect the people who process FOIs to go much further than that do you, they can't read the document first, just to see if it's marked correctly.

And take a step back here, and look at the process you would expect a national security organisation to go through when asked for information, to protect you, and them.

The FOI is not a mandatory declassification process.

FBI 'planted backdoor' in OpenBSD

A New open Source Paradigm

Minister : How can we subvert open source software?

Sir Humphrey : Well minister we have a bunch of very bright programmers in eh-hem, who can write some complex software with back doors we can exploit.

Minister : But won't the community catch on?

Sir Humphrey : No Minister, they trust their community, we just have to make sure any peer review is done by one of ours.

Minister : Bring it on.

Sorry, but some government department somewhere will have worked this one out.

IBM gloats over HP, Oracle takeouts

And that...

You can always get a better deal migrating to another supplier.

Facebook royal rant bishop suspended

Come back the Bishop of Durham

An old Bishop of Durham, said, before he was bishop, that is, is reputed to have said "there is no god", which did prevent him ascending.

If you belong to a club it's a good idea to at least ad-hear to the rules in public. The idea of a Republican Anglican is a bit strange, when one of the things about the church is that it has the monarch as its head, but it is a broad church, perhaps he is an antidisestablishmentarianist, which I believe is acceptable.

Martha pushes online government as DirectGov CEO pushes off

Remember eGig and GITS

Shifting as many government services to online as possible, and then making them the default for accessing services is a bad idea. Yes OK administratively it saves money, but should we really be trying to make government deliver at the lowest cost possible.

IT provides a route to shift processing offshore, something being considered much more actively, even in areas that would never have remotely been considered before. Do you really need you tax forms processed in the UK, couldn't someone inn the far east do it just as well.....

The one size fits all mentality just does not work with human beings, we are all different, and in fact the more you try to press that agenda, the more people are likely to slip between the cracks.

If our only interaction with the state for day to day activities becomes online, then the opportunities for fraud increase, it's a lot easier to lie to a computer than to a human, thus fraud detection becomes an issue, and we go to having most of our personal interactions with the state being intrusive checks for us doing something wrong, and officials calling only because they want to accuse us of something. Anything beneficial would be done through a computer, or a call centre, with little or no ability to sit face to face with an official.

As the state withdraws from human contact, humans will withdraw from the state. The point of eGiF and GITS was to ensure the citizen could choose how it interacted with the state, not for the state to choose for them. It is true to say that dictatorships tend to be cheaper to run than democracies, democracy is expensive. Whilst I would hesitate to suggest that moving to a primarily e-access model will turn us into a dictatorship, it might well make us feel like we live in one. We might elect politicians, but their ability to change the way government does things will become more and more restrictive. It takes a lot longer to change the way a computer system works, than the way a civil servant does, and computer systems can only deal with exceptions they are programmed to know about, humans can make allowances.

By all means make everything available through a single ePortal, and processable by systems, but don't take away human beings who live and breath the same society we do, government must always have a human face to the citizen, not just MP and their ilk.

Maude: Gov contracts 'made my eyes water'

I look forward to.....

Francis Maud reading an IT contract and understanding it, they run to thousands of pages, so I can't see any minister reading any of them. They would be hard pushed to understand the IT detail.

I also can't see all government contracts going on to the Internet, most government systems are GPMS at RESTRICTED and above, so the technical details and composition of the systems are not for public consumption for some very good reasons.

Mind you the quality of the requirements, and the answers given, might give a few laughs, I hope the Register is preparing a crack team of jouno's to paw through all these contracts.

So far as being in the List X club goes, it's not difficult to join, just expensive, how to get list X accreditation is available to all, not all contracts require it, and most small niche players come in under a Prime contractor, who helps them.

I doubt Fujitsu and SERCO are good examples of the in club though, neither is doing that well with government IT at present.

Government procurement is fair, to the point of stupidity, it costs a fortune most of the time to bid, even for frameworks, and it's stunningly easy to be excluded for a trivial mistake, as quite a few SI's have found out over the years, getting themselves locked out of frameworks like Catalyst.

New RAF transport plane is 'Euro-w*nking makework project'

So it's...

Ok for the US to outrageously subsidise its plane manufacturers to build military aircraft and corner a market but not us Europeans, we should just shut up and support the US economy.

Google charges feds $25 a head for user surveillance

Probably not all 'murkins

I'd say there will be a few Mexicans, Columbian, Jamaicans, and just about any other nationality you can think of likely to be engaged in illegal activities impacting the US.

So probably not that many really.

Dell profits rise 144%

A billion flys can't be wrong.

Dell, a prime example of you get what you pay for, only bought by bean counters, I don't know a self respecting techie who would touch them.

Our support and ops guys hate them, because you never know what they have in them.

Oracle whacked by DoJ complaint

Not surprising

They probably think because it's Ok for software it's Ok for hardware.

Interesting though, I wonder how they will treat the likes of Accenture, HP, IBM, CAP, Logica, Steria and so on who host Sun kit on behalf of their customers, and tent to negotiate the best deal with third party maintenance contractors for their whole estate for kit out of warranty.

I suspect double standards will apply, I can't see your average government department of multi-national going for it either, certainly haven't tried it on us yet. Mind you we are going to be buying quite a lot of Oracle product.

Oh, AC those of us who have been in the game a while remember what happens to companies who do this kind of thing, it never lasts long, before competitive pressure dictates another course, and maintaining a healthy vendor mix, helps ones negotiating position, and saves unnecessary migration costs you'll probably never recover. So if you are using lots of Sun/Solaris, thanks, you'll make it easier for us to negotiate a good deal.

Brits say 'no, no, no' to 3D TV

How much do you really watch TV

For me 3d TV would irritate the S*&t out of me, I wear glasses, so would either have to have special glasses made, or wear two pairs/clip-ons. I also don't actually watch TV all the time either, I do stuff, check the mail, make a meal, work. So unless I can do that whilst wearing silly specs, why would I want one.

Mind you I do know some couch potato who really do treat the TV like a cinema, so they will probably be the 1%, the other 5% are probably people who just want to say they have one and can't admit it was a crap idea to go out and buy one.

I'll buy 3D when it's holographic, and you don't need special additives. I can see why gamers would want it though, never managed to make coffee whilst playing doom, yes I still do play it now and then.

Oracle sues partner after multiple break-ins

The way these things go....

You have to question the wisdom of a company who doesn't protect a warehouse full of high value kit, one assumes that $ millions must have been through it, and that the value of the stolen items a drop in the ocean, because if it wasn't then someone knew when they were there.

You can see that Oracle contracted Multis, who probably contracted the warehouse, I doubt they own it, unless it's on their site, even then they might not own the building fabric and site, that might well belong to a property company, who contract out management to a facilities company, who contract out security to a security company, and then contract out building work to an installer.

So it might actually be the facilities company who have failed, but the contractual flow down ensures you have to sue Multis who can then charge the .... oh well you get the idea.

Ultimately, I'll bet the lawyers make more out of this than Oracle will. And you think business is efficient, outsourcing takes inefficiencies to a whole new level. You want how much to change a light bulb...

US may disable all in-car mobile phones

Luckily

I don't think I'm a good drive, and daily I see thousands that are worse on the M25.

Interesting how many people keep making the same points over and over, rather than anyone actually get the point, or think how you might do it.

A vehicle is a Faraday cage, so it isn't too difficult to jam signal devices inside the car, whilst allowing those that are part of the car, On-Star, Sat Nav and Integral Mobile Phones. Some train coaches and theatres in the UK used to jam mobiles, some might still do so, without any effect outside the area being jammed.

It is not beyond the wit of motor manufacturers to provide a mobile phone compartment and a standard connector for all phones so that you mobile can be embedded in the car, nor the phone manufacturers to make the phones. Whilst on the move the phone would be attached to the car and subject only to voice or steering wheel control, you wouldn't be able to text, or fiddle with the phone, but so what. Yes your phone options are limited, but how much do you really need to talk on the phone when driving.

And passengers not being able to phone, so what, talk to the driver, watch the world go by and enjoy the scenery, what do you think we used to do before mobile phones.

I ignore my mobile when driving, because it is a distraction, not long after the introduction of mobiles, I was nearly killed by an executive chatting on his brand new mobile doing in excess of 70mph and completely missing the fact he was approaching a longabout, (very long and narrow roundabout). I've also seen someone textin whilst driving through the Blackwall tunnel in London, steering with his knees, my though was thank god I'm in a Land Rover and you're in a Nova (think Geo). We all do stupid things when driving, but we could do with out any more, and we should take opportunities to limit the ones we have already.

Police-baiting website Fitwatch returns

I don't know what country you were in, not the UK

Because the story is just not possible.

A. You had a witness, who one assumes wasn't arrested, so could actually refute the argument

B. You have to be charged to be summonsed to court, both of which require you to be informed of the charge.

C. If the police really did that then your Solicitor would be able to drive a coach and horses through the case, and you have an amazing case for compensation, contact the IPCC now.

or alternately.......

Blogger faces terror charges for 'naming MPs'

Just for the record

The way MP & Lords vote and what they say is publicly available on the Hansard web site, just remember they don't vote, they Divide.

Head of UK.gov IT quits

I suspect

He read the writing on the wall for highly paid civil service posts, and has his exit plan up to date.

There's quite a few talented CIO's in government who can do the job just as well for half the dosh, and no I'm not one of them.

At least he's better value than a couple I could mention.