Posts by Usually Right or Wrong

Double whammy

So Glasgow tax payers are told to bend over and take an ICO £150K shafting and whilst they are bent over, open their mouths and take a bank account fraud shafting as well. Lucky devils.

Bring it on

With small induction loops, I am sure we could all charge our mobile phones and iThingies for free, well at least until we got run over by a tram.

Ordered and will wait

Just ordered using the HUP and included Visio and Project, at the price, it is daft not to if offered and you use office at home, which I do. I will wait though and see what SP1 or the next update brings, usually these fix major issues and address UI criticisms if MS are going to address these. Also ordered Win 8 Pro which is on offer until end Jan, again, will hold off until I can confirm all my software will work. This is probably my cheapest upgrade ever, but happy with Office 2010 and Win 7, so will let others dive in and will learn from them before upgrading.

I reckon Ciaus Petronius would recognise the grief of software upgrades, ribbons and menus, even in 66AD, "We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising: and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation."

Beer, because that is what Fridays were invented for.

But it has rounded corners!

It's a rectangle with rounded corners, won't that get then into trouble with patent lawyers?

Don't forget the CPEs

Gave up my membership years ago when the downturn meant that the £2000+ courses required to get your quotas of CPEs became thinner on the ground. You could top them up with endless vendor meetings, but eventually even the vendors gave up when you bought nothing. You were only allowed to read one book a year.

Being CISSP gave me a certificate and ... and somewhere to register my CPEs.

And when the cable breaks?

Private landowners will also be told that fibre can be laid under or above their land, with the government doing away with "the bureaucratic burden of long-running negotiations"

Lawnmowers, spades etc. and the whole neighbourhood goes dark? Who would be responsible for repair? Who will keep chopping cables because they resent being told it is going on their land whether they like it or not?

It is simply a case of

dropping it the wrong way, so not Apple's fault.

Simples solution init

'concerns about a huge backlog of 276,000 immigration cases, which it says is "larger than the population of Newcastle upon Tyne".'

Just send all the people in Newcastle upon Tyne on a long holiday, move the backlog immigration cases there with a bit of overspill, then you know where they are. Oh, and probably build a big wall in case, and encourage all the people in Gateshead to 'complain' (what happened to allegation?) about all the people now in Newcastle upon Type and they will up the complaint accuracy rate and know where to find all the people who complained to give them feedback. Then the UKBA would have some good stats to report for a change.

Or maybe just give up the idea of a hearsay database that can ruin peoples lives. The sad thing is that given the choice, UKBA would probably opt for my first option.

Gosh, the NHS has gone all modern

Teleconferencing, what an innovation, they will move onto email soon I bet.

Is it me or did that article portray Whittington NHS trust as being about 20 years behind the curve, which I doubt they really are?

Loved the cross charging though, the thought of virtual taxpayers money moving around is so similar to virtual company money moving around and is great for creating bean counter jobs.

Now let me think...

I want to groom children and get web cam pictures of them in the nude, where should I go? Oh look, there is a virtual reality site full of children called Habbo Hotel!

How do they expect to keep predators off the site? Also, how do they expect to effectively moderate all conversations. In all the articles I have read about Habbo, not once did they say that they would refer recognised grooming or sexual coercion to the police for investigation, which may act as some deterrent.

Also, I have not seen any indication that an avatar can be explicitly tied to a particular individual. They did state that this incident has had a terrible impact on their business though, which shows where their real priority lies.

I was wondering when...

"It is a vital tool for the police to catch criminals and to protect children."

...the children would come into it. Would love to see the stats of how many children were unprotected before the legislation and how many extra are protected when it comes into force. Probably many are unprotected and then most will be protected, which will prove the legislation's effectiveness in the face of the ever increasing paedophile onslaught.

Considering the expected increase in data requests, the ISPs would be better off creating a standard API and publishing this, available on request if you can prove that you are a 'public authorities' sort of person. Would save all the hassle of having to hack in and post the data.

Good for Blighty as well

When they step up the censorship here, Google can implement the same technology so that we can work out what is being blocked, because the government sure as hell won't tell us.

a privacy impact assessment...

Plod, local council etc. (insert as required); will this impact our privacy? No, right ho then, collect as much as you can and anyone who wants the information can have it.

Here we have

Lewis Page flying yet again in the face of a multi billion $ industry and expecting to be taken seriously.

Doesn't he realise that the new ice is warmer than the old ice and warmer ice spread out further than colder ice is warmer so the earth's warming must be accelerating at an alarming rate and the global warming budget must be doubled immediately and the time targets halved and doubters would be burned at the stake if they promise not to give off greenhouse gasses during the burning.

I'm fed up with all the hype and giving governments excuses to tax us for eating hot (global warming because they had to be heated) pasties.

Censorship and snooping...

Both are very desirable for governments, and in that respect UK plc is way behind the trail blazers like China, Iran and Australia.

We all know that parents are no longer responsible for their children, they are someone else's problem and better be looked after properly or someone else gets sued.

Even adults are no longer responsible for themselves, as an adult recently setting themselves on fire at the behest of the government so clearly demonstrates.

So there are clear indicators that the government must take responsibility for what we are allowed to see on the Internet, and they get a nice little potential sex offenders register as well.

All well and good...

"...but sign us up for a pair of vibrating pants when Nokia gets round to making them, just for testing, of course"

but don't forget to take them off before an MRI scan, even minor burns down there would be eye watering.

Seems to be misconception

Social networks are all about being sociable, that is telling everyone (that will listen) about yourself and your 314,143 and 1/4 friends, only you haven't the time so the apps do it for you.

Whoever thought that placing your personal information in the public domain was a private matter seems to have got their wires crossed and has no idea how the services they use are paid for.

What is all the fuss about

Goodness me, these are their duly elected repressors^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H representatives honour bound to protect these people, and this is exactly what they are doing, protecting the people from being bombarded with stuff that they should not be allowed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H have to see. All governments do this, Pakistan are just behind the curve and need to catch up.

Just out of interest...

Does anyone know where this version calls home? Some site affiliated to the FBI, CIA, NSA, or is it the normal call to China. Just interested, it would be a good way to gather a list of Anonymous names (or at least supporter names).

Do nothing, pass on the fine

Responding with the report would be "prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs" when people learned that Ealing council will just pass the fine on through council tax and carry on as before.

Or maybe they did investigate and improve security, then missed an opportunity to reassure the public.

Of course, the ICO also published the get-out, as "The ICO decided that the council had correctly applied the ‘prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs’ exemption", so all FOI's of this nature will be responded to according to the ICO's advice; public interest be damned.

I've sort of lost the plot as to why we have an ICO, or is it because the EU say we must have one, because all organisations handling personal information must register a Data Protection Officer and without an ICO there would be nowhere to register? Other than turning oxygen into green house gasses, do they perform any other function?

It's a normal function of gubment

This is just nationalisation. In the current climate, gubments are normally selling off their silver to raise cash, (airwaves seem to be the latest silver), so nice to see one on an acquisition spree, though I didn't read they were actually spending money.

Now, if they could just extend this to music and films and bring back the guillotine, we would have an end to media piracy, in France at least. Three strikes and we really cut your internet connection.

The flights started yesterday

So the dedicated followers need to get their sleeping bags out pronto and start sleeping outside the stores or the image of the iPad 3 as the most desirable object on the planet will be tarnished.

Paris, because if I was asked to pick a most desirable object....

The likelihood of weather is...

"In particular, we are keen to see broadcasters make greater use of probabilistic information in their weather forecasts,"

In Scotland there is 150% chance of weather, that is 50% chance of rain in Glasgow, 50% chance of snow in the Cairngorms and 50% chance of sunshine in Aberdeen, or none of this may happen, so that would be 0% chance of weather.

In England, the super-super-computer just said 42 and suggested that we release lots of white mice to see if they can get someone to work it out.

Not realy

"an annoying little lawsuit into a major problem for Cupertino" it is just that the price went up.

If Apple want to play games, then the purchase in in Taiwan was a purchase in China, that's the official line, so are Proview denying that their Taiwan office is just another branch in China.

Some potential fun in this one, for us observing from the sidelines anyway.

But...

It is a well known fact that all foreigners from the same country look the same to us, so it will just let them all pass through if one registers?