I live in Oxford and the cab drivers hate this idea. It's going to cost them at least £460 each at time when most of them are struggling to survive. They're also convinced its about snooping on them and have all raised privacy concerns. The council has refused to say who will have access to the tapes or what protections there will be.
Most Oxford cab drivers are Asian and few can afford to live in Oxford itself and so drive in from surrounding towns. There are hordes of them demonstrating at the town hall before every council meeting but the councillors don't seem to care - whether their lack of local vote is causing that or not, I don't know. Every cab driver I've spoken to believes someone in the council is 'receiving inducements' for this - no idea if its true!
Oxford City Council is hardcore Labour / militant and seems to regard large sections of the public as the enemy. Its elected by a bunch of leftist academics who have little idea or connection about the real world. Remember it was the last Labour government that tried to introduce ID cards, 90 days detention without charge and seems to have been complicit in torture. CCTV in taxis seems like a logical development!
No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion.
So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.
And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.
Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.
So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it 1/2 acre of soil and the whole young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7 1/2 not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head. This is quite true.
The problem with violent films and video games is that they do not contain real violence but a 'pornographic' imitation. In real violence the player would be bruised, mutilated or even killed and would see the ghastly effect that weapons have on the human body and people he / she cares about. I used to be in the British Army and I can promise you that real violence is deeply horrifying and frightening. It always involves the soldier / player getting injured in some way and is a great inoculation against violent urges and dreams. Even in a pub brawl you'll get hurt even if you 'win' often with broken knuckles or fingers and a lot of facial bruising. I vividly remember an SAS instructor in personal combat explaining that hand-to-hand fighting without a weapon seldom made sense particularly when you had more than one opponent or they were armed. His three steps in that case were: 1) Talk 2) Run 3) Faint
Video Games and Films sell fantasy violence just as advertising sells fantasy romance and glamour. We know that Advertising works highly effectively to sell products and alter behaviour. It works on all of us, however little we care to acknowledge it. Adolescent males often have brains that are tortured by testosterone and fantasies of masculine power, significance and violence. Violent Games indulge those fantasies which is why they are so successful and in many cases it is very likely they have the same 'advertising' effect and lower the social taboos against violence or aggressive behaviour. I have young children and even though I run a software company (not games), I keep them well away from violent games and films and spend as much time as possible trying to make sure they get exposure to outdoor sport, real contact with friends and doses of high-culture.
That really is a silly comment. We all realise that violence has complex causes and we'd all agree that there is never a straightforward single explanation of any killing or attack. That said advertising works and we are all affected by what we read and see around us. A constant background culture of violence, materialism and porn will create a different mood in society to a constant background of for instance, art, classical music and meditative exercises. Compare how you feel after a yoga class and after watching a violent film - there will be a difference, I promise.
In western society we pay too little attention to the subtle symbolic values of our actions and the powerful cumulative effect that our behaviour, TV, music etc has on signalling to those around us. Those signals accumulate and gradually change attitudes and taboos. You're right that there is no one-to-one relationship between violent games and real violence. The relationship is more complex and more subtle but no more powerful for that.
Politicians have picked up on widespread concern amongst the public - believe it or not, that is their function in a democratic society.
I drive a 16lb vehicle to work every day. Its called a bicycle - perhaps as a geek you might call it an HPV. I no way consider myself not "in my right mind". Just because large numbers of the inhabitants of London and apparently the entire population of the US think it makes sense to drive fuming hunks of steel around a city when in 90% of cases walking or cycling would be quicker, does not make it right.
The car has damaged and is damaging our civic society. Forget personal risk and think pollution, accidents, degraded streets, cities designed for machines not humans, social alienation and crime.
Wake up before you die - learn to live and get out of your damn car!
These car manufacturers are as ever, behind we chaps on 2 wheels. We've been running a Dawes Galaxy with embedded Debian (unstable) for years and it integrates brilliantly with Sheldon Brown's Geomagnetic Booster! ® to provide hours of stable open-source transport which is especially useful on a day like today when the London tube is on strike.
As ever with embedded systems, shoehorning all the code into the space available has been tough so we've fitted a specially adapted hub to the rear wheel and a windmill like fan on the rear sprocket to cool the Itanium 2 inner core. One advantage has been the thermic glow from this at nightime has reduced the need for rear-lights.
2 problems we're looking for volunteers to help with:
1) Seek-time latency on the hard-drive (also fitted to the rear sprocket and rotated by the chain) has been horrible and its been necessary to pedal really fast when playing mp3's
2) The kernel source is stored in the inner tubes / tyres and patching the source has been extremely haphazard with patches falling off, hissing air and rubber solution all over the place....
Next step is write kernel modules to drive Sheldon Brown's Bar-End Bayonetz to allow some much more aggressive Open Source advocacy, just as Cmdr Taco was requesting yesterday.
RMS is a big supporter of the Linucycle as we call it or the GNUcle as he prefers and is helping us in our efforts to integrate the Hurd kernel. An MS spokesman we contacted commented "This is just the sort of hippy s**t I'd expect from those Open Source guys...."
Er - I have lived and worked in central London for the last 15 years and I know how to use IE - in fact my product authentication is up to date (although I've kicked the habit). My wife still regularly uses a Windows box - me I'm one of those hippy linux dickheads that weaves in and out of the bandwidth.
Try riding a bicycle in central London and then you'd think it was a great idea. Think of it like this:
Car Drivers = Users of IE5 and IE 6
Car Manufacturers = The Borg
Cyclists and Pedestrians = Linux and FreeBSD hackers
Around 20 Linux hackers a year are turned into Jam by ignoramuses using IE 5 (the number of cyclists killled by chromed SUVs in London) and finally the government steps in to stop the slaughter with a new law called the DMCA which the MS users club scream is an invasion of privacy. Smug kernel hackers point out that as long as you use Linux 2 wheels no one can get you with the DMCA and all PC / CD use is free.
Cue a huge rise in the number of fat-bottomed housewives picking up copies of RedHat in Dixons and the world lives happily ever after.....
Let me tell you my experience of why Linux has worked on the desktop for me (and why I still don't think its ready for 80% of the population).
Like most of us I've been forced to use a ton of different O/S's at jobs (all investment banks) over the years. The one thing I could never tolerate was unreliability since I HAD to be sure that my trading model / spreadsheet was running when I needed it. As a result the best OS combination for me was Solaris on one box and OS/2 on another (until it was taken away by those bastards in IT) and replaced with the worst OS I have ever used Windows NT 3.51. OS/2 was great because it was super stable and allowed me to hack around as I wished. I didn't need a command line but I did need a good spreadsheet and and groupware (Notes) that I could configure to do what I wanted (I wasn't a programmer, just a tech aware trader). Solaris was great for massive derivative apps and market data but CDE stank as a desktop and I still don't understand how Sun could have not offered something better. The problem with Solaris was that the BOFH admins had locked everything down and we users could touch nothing.
Around that time I installed my first home copy of SuSE 6.2 and spent hours of utter torment trying to get X configured etc.. etc.. Horrible though it might have seemed I loved it suddenly I was in control (however chaotic and dangerous that control was). However I knew that the Sysadmins would never allow me to use it at work. "Freedom of choice for users = more work for Sysadmins" and they, like most people are lazy and want a quiet life. More importantly you need to be weird to want to work high-up in IT support for BIGCO. Success is measured by the size of your budget / empire / office / car not by installing low cost / no cost OSes. These guys want to spend trillions with Sun / MS otherwise how do they justify their big budgets and offices?
A couple of years ago I took a lifestyle choice and quit the megabucks slavery of Wall Street and set up my own software co. I learnt 80% of what I know about technology from wrestling with Linux and I use it now because I feel more free doing it. In the end it was a choice linked to what I wanted in life for myself and others. I now take my son to school before logging in to WindowMaker and clicking on the Konqueror appicon to read/. I got myself I life and I got Linux (and I'm a lot happier for it.......!)
Agreed that its a failure but the intelligent fridge idea will never happen. There are limits to what we can automate / should want to automate. The fridge and kitchen table are / should be at the heart of human culture. Food and meals are deeply bound up with human emotion, culture and ritual. Despite what Walmart might want you to believe our eating cannot and should not be automated.
Surely BSE and all the other horrifying food scares we've had in the last few years begin to demonstrate the limits?
Many of the greatest failures of the last few years have come from the "wouldn't it be great" school of brainless human systematisation. The problem with WAP / PDAs / Channel Broadcasts is that humans don't / don't yet want them. This is a good thing and should teach us geeks that our smart ideas don't scale like algebra does and that REAL PEOPLE MATTER!
You and a lot of other posters are completely missing the point. This story is not Apache vs IIS - its far more important. I've seen lots of others on/. saying that there's nothing innovative about.Net and whats all the fuss about? Well here's an example from my business about why it matters a helluva lot and why Ganesh has hit the nail on the head.
I run a small software / dev house for the financial markets..Net / Sunone is going to change our world beyond recognition. 2 yrs down the road the big institutional investors will log on in the morning and pull financial web services apps straight onto their desktop from every investment bank on Wall Street. They will trade online with multiple counterparties, authenticate settle and analyse, all in one GUI. Why? Well because its EASIER, QUICKER and CHEAPER for them to do it that way. The traditional web / browser just won't hack it..Net is not about putting Word / Excel online - its about using XML to connect businesses. The problem that OSS has is that its has no framework for doing all this. Sure you can use Cocoon / Apache and a bunch of heavy scripting but unlike MS (and lets face it they've aways done well at this) there is no unified OSS development environment to do this stuff. The choice now is simple 1) SQL Server 2000 / IIS 5.0 +.Net or 2) Oracle 9I and J2EE. As a small company we're doing both but take it from me I'm not going to kill the company by sticking to PHP / Apache and tell clients they're idiots if they want the brave NEW WORLD.
Slashdotters need to wake up. "Something is happening out there, Really happening Reg!"
There's been a recent Government Survey in the UK which suggests that books(a good library) are far more important than any PCs in the school. Have a look here
As a parent I've recently been looking at schools in Central London and I've been amazed (and dismayed) that children as young as six are being taught how to use Excel and Word
If they were being taught Python or Latin Poetry at that age I could understand. The major problem with most programmers (and people!) I work with is a complete inability to think clearly. Can't see that Word skills will help fix this.
The UK doesn't have a constitution, which we've always regarded as being a huge strength. Instead its had a haphazard 'organic' collection of laws that protect the citizen from the state (the first being Magna Carta) and these have grown up over time. More recently the UK government has incorporated the European Declaration of human rights into UK law. See: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/law/hamlyn/echr.htm for a full explanation.
This is a huge change and although we hate the idea of anything forced on us by the European Superstate - its probably / possibly a good thing.
There is though a real problem with law and order in the UK (its now significantly more dangerous to wander around the streets of London than New York). I very much doubt that this database will do much to help and clearly has the risks that you've mentioned. The real problem with the police and the state is that they seem convinced that technology / cars / helicopters / webcams are the solution to every problem. The idea that the police should get off their butts and start walking / patrolling the streets is still an anathema. Why? Well, Constable buggins loves his warm, noisy powerful squad car with all its gadgets - makes him feel like a real man.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Oxford and the cab drivers hate this idea. It's going to cost them at least £460 each at time when most of them are struggling to survive. They're also convinced its about snooping on them and have all raised privacy concerns. The council has refused to say who will have access to the tapes or what protections there will be.
Most Oxford cab drivers are Asian and few can afford to live in Oxford itself and so drive in from surrounding towns. There are hordes of them demonstrating at the town hall before every council meeting but the councillors don't seem to care - whether their lack of local vote is causing that or not, I don't know. Every cab driver I've spoken to believes someone in the council is 'receiving inducements' for this - no idea if its true!
Oxford City Council is hardcore Labour / militant and seems to regard large sections of the public as the enemy. Its elected by a bunch of leftist academics who have little idea or connection about the real world. Remember it was the last Labour government that tried to introduce ID cards, 90 days detention without charge and seems to have been complicit in torture. CCTV in taxis seems like a logical development!
http://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/archive/2011/11/14/Oxford+news+(om_oxfordnews)/9361537.Taxi_CCTV_breaks__rights_to_privacy_/
Evelyn Waugh - Letter to His Wife - 31st May 1942
No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion.
So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.
And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.
Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.
So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it 1/2 acre of soil and the whole young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7 1/2 not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.
This is quite true.
The problem with violent films and video games is that they do not contain real violence but a 'pornographic' imitation. In real violence the player would be bruised, mutilated or even killed and would see the ghastly effect that weapons have on the human body and people he / she cares about. I used to be in the British Army and I can promise you that real violence is deeply horrifying and frightening. It always involves the soldier / player getting injured in some way and is a great inoculation against violent urges and dreams. Even in a pub brawl you'll get hurt even if you 'win' often with broken knuckles or fingers and a lot of facial bruising. I vividly remember an SAS instructor in personal combat explaining that hand-to-hand fighting without a weapon seldom made sense particularly when you had more than one opponent or they were armed. His three steps in that case were:
1) Talk
2) Run
3) Faint
Video Games and Films sell fantasy violence just as advertising sells fantasy romance and glamour. We know that Advertising works highly effectively to sell products and alter behaviour. It works on all of us, however little we care to acknowledge it. Adolescent males often have brains that are tortured by testosterone and fantasies of masculine power, significance and violence. Violent Games indulge those fantasies which is why they are so successful and in many cases it is very likely they have the same 'advertising' effect and lower the social taboos against violence or aggressive behaviour. I have young children and even though I run a software company (not games), I keep them well away from violent games and films and spend as much time as possible trying to make sure they get exposure to outdoor sport, real contact with friends and doses of high-culture.
That really is a silly comment. We all realise that violence has complex causes and we'd all agree that there is never a straightforward single explanation of any killing or attack. That said advertising works and we are all affected by what we read and see around us. A constant background culture of violence, materialism and porn will create a different mood in society to a constant background of for instance, art, classical music and meditative exercises. Compare how you feel after a yoga class and after watching a violent film - there will be a difference, I promise.
In western society we pay too little attention to the subtle symbolic values of our actions and the powerful cumulative effect that our behaviour, TV, music etc has on signalling to those around us. Those signals accumulate and gradually change attitudes and taboos. You're right that there is no one-to-one relationship between violent games and real violence. The relationship is more complex and more subtle but no more powerful for that.
Politicians have picked up on widespread concern amongst the public - believe it or not, that is their function in a democratic society.
And if true means the owner of these piranhas may be in BIG BIG trouble with our Goldfish overlords:
1 47807051976
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1273523
Your thinking is crystal clear and wrong.
I drive a 16lb vehicle to work every day. Its called a bicycle - perhaps as a geek you might call it an HPV. I no way consider myself not "in my right mind". Just because large numbers of the inhabitants of London and apparently the entire population of the US think it makes sense to drive fuming hunks of steel around a city when in 90% of cases walking or cycling would be quicker, does not make it right.
The car has damaged and is damaging our civic society. Forget personal risk and think pollution, accidents, degraded streets, cities designed for machines not humans, social alienation and crime.
Wake up before you die - learn to live and get out of your damn car!
These car manufacturers are as ever, behind we chaps on 2 wheels. We've been running a Dawes Galaxy with embedded Debian (unstable) for years and it integrates brilliantly with Sheldon Brown's Geomagnetic Booster! ® to provide hours of stable open-source transport which is especially useful on a day like today when the London tube is on strike.
As ever with embedded systems, shoehorning all the code into the space available has been tough so we've fitted a specially adapted hub to the rear wheel and a windmill like fan on the rear sprocket to cool the Itanium 2 inner core. One advantage has been the thermic glow from this at nightime has reduced the need for rear-lights.
2 problems we're looking for volunteers to help with:
1) Seek-time latency on the hard-drive (also fitted to the rear sprocket and rotated by the chain) has been horrible and its been necessary to pedal really fast when playing mp3's
2) The kernel source is stored in the inner tubes / tyres and patching the source has been extremely haphazard with patches falling off, hissing air and rubber solution all over the place....
Next step is write kernel modules to drive Sheldon Brown's Bar-End Bayonetz to allow some much more aggressive Open Source advocacy, just as Cmdr Taco was requesting yesterday.
RMS is a big supporter of the Linucycle as we call it or the GNUcle as he prefers and is helping us in our efforts to integrate the Hurd kernel. An MS spokesman we contacted commented "This is just the sort of hippy s**t I'd expect from those Open Source guys...."
Er - I have lived and worked in central London for the last 15 years and I know how to use IE - in fact my product authentication is up to date (although I've kicked the habit). My wife still regularly uses a Windows box - me I'm one of those hippy linux dickheads that weaves in and out of the bandwidth.
Try riding a bicycle in central London and then you'd think it was a great idea. Think of it like this:
Car Drivers = Users of IE5 and IE 6Car Manufacturers = The Borg
Cyclists and Pedestrians = Linux and FreeBSD hackers
Around 20 Linux hackers a year are turned into Jam by ignoramuses using IE 5 (the number of cyclists killled by chromed SUVs in London) and finally the government steps in to stop the slaughter with a new law called the DMCA which the MS users club scream is an invasion of privacy. Smug kernel hackers point out that as long as you use Linux 2 wheels no one can get you with the DMCA and all PC / CD use is free.
Cue a huge rise in the number of fat-bottomed housewives picking up copies of RedHat in Dixons and the world lives happily ever after.....
Like most of us I've been forced to use a ton of different O/S's at jobs (all investment banks) over the years. The one thing I could never tolerate was unreliability since I HAD to be sure that my trading model / spreadsheet was running when I needed it. As a result the best OS combination for me was Solaris on one box and OS/2 on another (until it was taken away by those bastards in IT) and replaced with the worst OS I have ever used Windows NT 3.51. OS/2 was great because it was super stable and allowed me to hack around as I wished. I didn't need a command line but I did need a good spreadsheet and and groupware (Notes) that I could configure to do what I wanted (I wasn't a programmer, just a tech aware trader). Solaris was great for massive derivative apps and market data but CDE stank as a desktop and I still don't understand how Sun could have not offered something better. The problem with Solaris was that the BOFH admins had locked everything down and we users could touch nothing.
Around that time I installed my first home copy of SuSE 6.2 and spent hours of utter torment trying to get X configured etc.. etc.. Horrible though it might have seemed I loved it suddenly I was in control (however chaotic and dangerous that control was). However I knew that the Sysadmins would never allow me to use it at work. "Freedom of choice for users = more work for Sysadmins" and they, like most people are lazy and want a quiet life. More importantly you need to be weird to want to work high-up in IT support for BIGCO. Success is measured by the size of your budget / empire / office / car not by installing low cost / no cost OSes. These guys want to spend trillions with Sun / MS otherwise how do they justify their big budgets and offices?
A couple of years ago I took a lifestyle choice and quit the megabucks slavery of Wall Street and set up my own software co. I learnt 80% of what I know about technology from wrestling with Linux and I use it now because I feel more free doing it. In the end it was a choice linked to what I wanted in life for myself and others. I now take my son to school before logging in to WindowMaker and clicking on the Konqueror appicon to read /. I got myself I life and I got Linux (and I'm a lot happier for it.......!)
Agreed that its a failure but the intelligent fridge idea will never happen. There are limits to what we can automate / should want to automate. The fridge and kitchen table are / should be at the heart of human culture. Food and meals are deeply bound up with human emotion, culture and ritual. Despite what Walmart might want you to believe our eating cannot and should not be automated.
Surely BSE and all the other horrifying food scares we've had in the last few years begin to demonstrate the limits?
Many of the greatest failures of the last few years have come from the "wouldn't it be great" school of brainless human systematisation. The problem with WAP / PDAs / Channel Broadcasts is that humans don't / don't yet want them. This is a good thing and should teach us geeks that our smart ideas don't scale like algebra does and that REAL PEOPLE MATTER!
You and a lot of other posters are completely missing the point. This story is not Apache vs IIS - its far more important. I've seen lots of others on /. saying that there's nothing innovative about .Net and whats all the fuss about? Well here's an example from my business about why it matters a helluva lot and why Ganesh has hit the nail on the head.
I run a small software / dev house for the financial markets. .Net / Sunone is going to change our world beyond recognition. 2 yrs down the road the big institutional investors will log on in the morning and pull financial web services apps straight onto their desktop from every investment bank on Wall Street. They will trade online with multiple counterparties, authenticate settle and analyse, all in one GUI. Why? Well because its EASIER, QUICKER and CHEAPER for them to do it that way. The traditional web / browser just won't hack it. .Net is not about putting Word / Excel online - its about using XML to connect businesses. The problem that OSS has is that its has no framework for doing all this. Sure you can use Cocoon / Apache and a bunch of heavy scripting but unlike MS (and lets face it they've aways done well at this) there is no unified OSS development environment to do this stuff. The choice now is simple 1) SQL Server 2000 / IIS 5.0 + .Net or 2) Oracle 9I and J2EE. As a small company we're doing both but take it from me I'm not going to kill the company by sticking to PHP / Apache and tell clients they're idiots if they want the brave NEW WORLD.
Slashdotters need to wake up. "Something is happening out there, Really happening Reg!"
There's been a recent Government Survey in the UK which suggests that books(a good library) are far more important than any PCs in the school. Have a look here
As a parent I've recently been looking at schools in Central London and I've been amazed (and dismayed) that children as young as six are being taught how to use Excel and Word
If they were being taught Python or Latin Poetry at that age I could understand. The major problem with most programmers (and people!) I work with is a complete inability to think clearly. Can't see that Word skills will help fix this.
The UK doesn't have a constitution, which we've always regarded as being a huge strength. Instead its had a haphazard 'organic' collection of laws that protect the citizen from the state (the first being Magna Carta) and these have grown up over time. More recently the UK government has incorporated the European Declaration of human rights into UK law. See: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/law/hamlyn/echr.htm for a full explanation. This is a huge change and although we hate the idea of anything forced on us by the European Superstate - its probably / possibly a good thing. There is though a real problem with law and order in the UK (its now significantly more dangerous to wander around the streets of London than New York). I very much doubt that this database will do much to help and clearly has the risks that you've mentioned. The real problem with the police and the state is that they seem convinced that technology / cars / helicopters / webcams are the solution to every problem. The idea that the police should get off their butts and start walking / patrolling the streets is still an anathema. Why? Well, Constable buggins loves his warm, noisy powerful squad car with all its gadgets - makes him feel like a real man.