I think the point is that he isn't that good, he's an insecure prima donna who knows how to bully people into thinking that he's a genius via crap, undocumented code.
You should eat more curry. Curry is awesome! It's one of our national dishes here in the UK - Chicken Tikka Masala was actually invented here and exported back to India!
Social housing was one of the great post-war achievements in this country. Thatcher wounded it with the right-to-buy (council tenants could buy their house cheaply) but this just added fuel to the housing boom in the late 80s / early 90s. Most people bought their house and then sold it on for a large profit leading to lots of private landlords with their own buy-to-let empires, many of whom let their houses become substandard - exactly the problem social housing was supposed to solve.
There's not a lot of free space in this country like there is in the USA so handing complete control of housing to private landlords isn't the best solution. The government has been blackmailing tenants into accepting privatisation of the remaining council owned estates by telling them they won't fund work to make their estates more modern (i.e. not look like slag heaps anymore) unless they vote to accept transfer of their property into private housing associations or part-privatised "arms-length management organisations".
Oh, and nobody say that private landlords will compete to provide the best housing in a free market. We had a hundred years of private landlords in this country and it was only through acts of parliament and the introduction of social housing that we got decent houses for normal people. The market consistently failed to provide.
Council housing used to be about providing cheap, decent accommodation for the workers of this country. Ever since Thatcher's programme of de-industrialisation, like her attack on the coal miners which was done for purely ideological reasons as she thought they were pro-soviet (Scargill is a Stalinist, admittedly), there haven't been decent jobs. That's why council houses in this country largely house people from families that have been on benefits for three generations or more.
Because not everyone arrives at exactly the same time, some people arrive up to fifteen minutes early (coffee & cigarette), some people arrive five or ten minutes early (coffee or cigarette) and some people arrive bang on time (me. First coffee is after an hour or two zoned out, Office Space style;) ). It's just because there's a surge of people in our building at exactly clocking off time; we love our work that much!
He didn't ask for it, it was just a nice thing done for him. I don't think he even cares about it because he spent those extra few minutes rolling a couple of cigarettes but who's going to say no to being let out early?
You're missing the point. You have choice about where you live but you don't have choice when it comes to disability. Something everyone agrees on in this country is that disability shouldn't be a disadvantage which obviously runs contrary to the physical fact that disability is a disadvantage; this means allowances have to be made for people with disabilities.
I think this idea pre-dates any sort of legislation and comes down to our sense of fair-play. The law is just there to make sure all employers keep to the same minimum standard because obviously employers who don't will have lower overheads.
Living too far away from you're job due to economic necessity is pretty rare outside of London in this country because our cities are so small but most people would agree that low-income workers who can't find housing near to their work in London should get either get more pay or have to work less hours for the same pay to compensate. That currently isn't the case and probably won't ever be because the housing market in this country is always in flux - too expensive can become affordable again in the space of a few years, imagine a bureaucracy trying to work in time-spans of less than a decade!
Veering even further OT: The real answer to that problem is more social housing which is something almost everyone in this country supports except for middle-class voters in key marginal constituencies. Episode four of the BBC4 documentary series Century of the Self alludes to this in its title, Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering.
That series and the rest of Adam Curtis' documentaries are very interesting viewing btw. Like Chomsky you (I know I) might not agree with all his conclusions but he manages to dig up very interesting information from his sources. Especially in Century of the Self and The Trap he presents arguments against emotionally manipulative propaganda in what is ostensibly the same format. It's quite ironic.
You can find all his docs online. A site that lets you hunt for a standard CD file format finds me a deluge from a demon...
Um, that is the law in the UK. He could technically have insisted on it under the Disability Discrimination Act but I doubt he even thought of it.
Firms in the UK have to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. This doesn't cost them anything directly because they can get a grant from an Access to Work advisor at the local job-centre. This isn't even a left wing law in this country as the DDA was passed by John Major's government in 1995 as it dovetails with the Tory idea that everyone should have the equal opportunity to work and succeed.
Whilst I disagree with certain aspects of affirmative action I think you'd have to be barmy to think men and women should legally be treated exactly the same. Men and women are different and the law should respect those differences.
Admittedly those differences are tied to (what should be) relatively minor things like women being generally smaller and needing more maternity leave than fathers need paternity leave due to having to actually carry to term and give birth but those differences do exist.
The law should respect those differences because sometimes you need to treat people differently in order to treat them equally.
And just in case anyone thinks that's some Orwellian double-think consider this: A man where I work is allowed to leave five minutes early each day because he's in a wheelchair. If he didn't the three p.m. rush (early starts suck, early finishes ftw though!) would mean he'd be five minutes later leaving than everybody else which is thirty minutes a week. He didn't even ask for it, one of the bosses just noticed he was always last out and realised it was because it's impossible for him to navigate the corridors when they're full of people.
Why should he lose half an hour each week due to something he can't control? It's the little things like that which really make a difference.
Looking at the preview I realise this is wildly OT. Oh well!
I think the difference is that the police in this country will make every effort to send around large numbers of armed police to find and shoot you if you go around shooting (rich or middle class, they don't care about poor) people.
The problem is raising a generation of kids who think killing people is an acceptable activity.
This is true. Unless they're psychopaths, however, they'll grow up and deeply regret what they've done. There lies the hope that they'll at least pass that on to the next generation.
All that is well and good but I can't help but think that widespread adoption of guns in this country would be a very bad thing. The crackheads outside KFC in Brixton would just shoot people without a second thought.
Maybe it's different over there because the criminals already have guns and there is a culture of using them on the street but over here that's not the case. If the criminals thought all their potential marks were likely to be armed they'd just start shooting first, plus how do you draw your gun when you've got four armed crackheads surrounding you?
We perform functions related to disability benefits. Even the most hardcore libertarian minarchists I've spoken to concede that people with serious life-long disabilities (especially those born with them) should have a safety-net.
If our service were to fail then the government would have to step in. That's what you get when you politicians start doing stuff just to meet arbitrary promises though.
As an aside, can you believe the government tried to sell the office responsible for overseeing privatised contracts to Capita? Their own solicitors basically told them it was the dumbest thing ever because the conflict of interest was obvious.
Of course, the market isn't always the best option for many things, things that are obviously "public goods", as economists describe them, should clearly remain in the public sector. Unfortunately the government is privatising to sort out its finances in the short term and we're going to be paying the price for many years to come.
That episode of Brass Eye isn't illegal though. If it were it would never have been broadcast.
OT: Chris Morris is a hero of mine. He made a radio comedy show called "Blue Jam" for Radio 2 and at the end of the last episode of the first season he included a cut-up he made of the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech at Diana's funeral. It praised the death of Mother Teresa, made him say the royal family had AIDS and were gang-banging Trevor Rees-Jones.
It mysteriously faded out before finishing to be replaced with the start of the first episode to fill the rest of the slot. There are various explanations given ranging from him being told he wasn't allowed to broadcast it and swapping the tapes at the last minute anyway to him deliberately handing in his on-air masters at the last min so he had to be censored in real-time.
They still let him make two more glorious series though.
No judge in the land would actually sentence them for this. Assuming a jury actually found the reporter guilty (the judge would be forced to direct them to return a guilty verdict because this is clearly against the law - the jury can do wtf they want) then he'd get a tiny suspended sentence. I doubt the CPS would even want anything to do with it in the first place.
But in the example given no breaking occurred, the GP just posited a reporter walking through an open door which would be trespass.
It's not clear from TFA whether the BBC paid for the botnet or not. They may have just used their security experts' knowledge to break into the C&C channel of a small botnet.
No, WPA is a protocol that can be used instead of WEP. On PCs the encryption is generally handled by the CPU although no doubt there is WiFi hardware that can handle it onboard. The main problem with WPA{,2} adoption is old embedded devices (e.g. WiFi routers) that don't have the CPU power required for WPA. Certain devices like the Nintendo DS don't support WPA for the same reason although thankfully that's changing with the new DSi (although only for new DSi aware games).
Ditto. Vista's much derided UAC actually makes running Windows securely much easier too, it's actually the best part about Vista and I'm disappointed that MS is sacrificing security for ease of use in Win7. MS needs to stand firm against apps that bring up UAC prompts during normal operation whilst streamlining the UI to make the prompts more descriptive and eliminate multiple UAC prompts during certain operations.
To paraphrase, those who sacrifice security for ease of use deserve neither.
Because once you get past having enough money to survive the rest of your life, money just becomes a way of keeping score. I remember hearing Bernie Ecclestone saying it once in an interview and I've heard other very rich people express the same sentiment.
I expect someone like Buffett will have a hundred million or so stashed somewhere. He could loose everything else and still be able to live better than virtually almost anyone else in the world.
Well, here in the US, there are several sports where you use guns. Skeet, Trap, and competitive target practice (not sure if thats whats its called but I know it exists) that it would be logical to have a gun in a home in a city without the intent of shooting someone.
I'm not opposed to shooting for sport, in fact I think more shooting clubs would be better for this country as I think it'd teach respect for firearms.
I've never shot a gun but if there were a local shooting club I'd join it in a heartbeat.
We don't need mass ownership of firearms in this country. We certainly don't need lots of people carrying guns; guns make it too easy to kill people.
It's pointless trying to speculate how different situations would've played out if only there had been mass ownership of firearms. Hitler could've been turned into a martyr leading to an even worse Holocaust, Jewish self-defence may have lead to a civil war causing even deeper suspicion of Jews in the rest of Europe.
As it stands having a firearm is considered so dangerous, even by criminals, that they are generally kept locked up. Most criminals who have guns have them at home to stop other gangs from raiding them and stealing all their cash & drugs, only idiot wannabe gangster kids carry them and shoot each other on the streets and even in public shootings they keep it to themselves.
And you can't account for crazy people, no matter what you do they'll come up with some other crazy way to cause harm.
On this count you're dead wrong. "Can you see our bowler hats? We're not faceless bureaucrats!"
I worked for the DWP and we got privatised last Feb. I now do exactly the same job for the same T&Cs (because of TUPE, one thing I can actually thank Thatcher for!) but my firm is taking a profit for the work we do from the tax-payer. Brown promised to get rid of 100,000 civil servants and he did it - by transferring us to the private sector and letting them take a huge profit on contracts with virtually no penalties for failure. Plus the service we provide to the rest of the DWP has been reduced because loads of odd things we did on our site weren't in the new contract.
That's where all the money has gone, to shareholders of firms involved in the various privatisation scams.
A mate of mine got mugged whilst we were in Tallin, Estonia. I was so amazed that he got an email from the police asking for more information because they were investigating. They're investigating a mugging! And they're using email!
Of course the local police always seem to have time to harass the local kids for hanging around doing nothing. They know those aren't the kids causing trouble but if they go after those kids it means paperwork and they hate paperwork.
Unless it's raining. Then they'll arrest you over anything so they can do paperwork and drink tea indoors.
The police in this country are pathetic. I've actually met quite a few decent coppers but even they'll admit that the lazy / judgemental ones let the whole side down.
I once saw a copper pounce on on a girl at a demo as she was walking away from him in tears. She called him a "fucking bastard" because they'd arrested a friend of hers and she was obviously upset but even though she clearly wasn't going to cause further trouble this copper didn't like being insulted. Of course all the other police present had to pile in too because there were a lot of people about and like any gang, cops have gotta stick together.
The only purpose of a gun in a UK city is to shoot another human being. Knives and swords are used for all sorts of other things.
The ban on handguns was a mental response to a school shooting and unfairly punished shooting clubs, criminals still have guns. That doesn't mean we should allow people to carry guns around with them however, just as carrying knives is banned.
The ban on swords is just ridiculous though, that was due to a couple of heavily reported incidents of psychotic individuals going crazy with swords. Sword fighting is a dying sport in this country now thanks to that stupid ban. You should be allowed to carry your gun or sword to your club and back home again but banning it beyond that is perfectly sensible.
And yes, you could just carry your weapon at all times and claim that you're on your way to/from a dojo / shooting club but I think in general people who are serious about their sport are less likely to be criminals who use their weapons against other people, but that's just the culture here in the UK.
Oh... and my phone doesn't support SMS, either, as I refuse to get a cell phone that takes more than 10 sec from when I power it on 'til when I can make a call
What? Why would letting you use SMS increase your phone startup time? You are aware that SMS (in GSM at least) just uses spare time on the signalling path, i.e. the bit that carries the phone number when you dial, right? That's why SMS is almost pure profit as far as carriers are concerned, they only have to make sure their message service centre can handle the load.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox has a spell checker, right click in a text box and check "Check Spelling".
I depend on this feature so much that I've resorted to using Word followed by copy-and-paste on locked down corporate PCs that only have IE.
I think the point is that he isn't that good, he's an insecure prima donna who knows how to bully people into thinking that he's a genius via crap, undocumented code.
You should eat more curry. Curry is awesome! It's one of our national dishes here in the UK - Chicken Tikka Masala was actually invented here and exported back to India!
Social housing was one of the great post-war achievements in this country. Thatcher wounded it with the right-to-buy (council tenants could buy their house cheaply) but this just added fuel to the housing boom in the late 80s / early 90s. Most people bought their house and then sold it on for a large profit leading to lots of private landlords with their own buy-to-let empires, many of whom let their houses become substandard - exactly the problem social housing was supposed to solve.
There's not a lot of free space in this country like there is in the USA so handing complete control of housing to private landlords isn't the best solution. The government has been blackmailing tenants into accepting privatisation of the remaining council owned estates by telling them they won't fund work to make their estates more modern (i.e. not look like slag heaps anymore) unless they vote to accept transfer of their property into private housing associations or part-privatised "arms-length management organisations".
Oh, and nobody say that private landlords will compete to provide the best housing in a free market. We had a hundred years of private landlords in this country and it was only through acts of parliament and the introduction of social housing that we got decent houses for normal people. The market consistently failed to provide.
Council housing used to be about providing cheap, decent accommodation for the workers of this country. Ever since Thatcher's programme of de-industrialisation, like her attack on the coal miners which was done for purely ideological reasons as she thought they were pro-soviet (Scargill is a Stalinist, admittedly), there haven't been decent jobs. That's why council houses in this country largely house people from families that have been on benefits for three generations or more.
So yea, completely different to the USA :)
Because not everyone arrives at exactly the same time, some people arrive up to fifteen minutes early (coffee & cigarette), some people arrive five or ten minutes early (coffee or cigarette) and some people arrive bang on time (me. First coffee is after an hour or two zoned out, Office Space style ;) ). It's just because there's a surge of people in our building at exactly clocking off time; we love our work that much!
He didn't ask for it, it was just a nice thing done for him. I don't think he even cares about it because he spent those extra few minutes rolling a couple of cigarettes but who's going to say no to being let out early?
Is it your tea bag? I know I'd kill anyone who tried to take away my cuppa!
You're missing the point. You have choice about where you live but you don't have choice when it comes to disability. Something everyone agrees on in this country is that disability shouldn't be a disadvantage which obviously runs contrary to the physical fact that disability is a disadvantage; this means allowances have to be made for people with disabilities.
I think this idea pre-dates any sort of legislation and comes down to our sense of fair-play. The law is just there to make sure all employers keep to the same minimum standard because obviously employers who don't will have lower overheads.
Living too far away from you're job due to economic necessity is pretty rare outside of London in this country because our cities are so small but most people would agree that low-income workers who can't find housing near to their work in London should get either get more pay or have to work less hours for the same pay to compensate. That currently isn't the case and probably won't ever be because the housing market in this country is always in flux - too expensive can become affordable again in the space of a few years, imagine a bureaucracy trying to work in time-spans of less than a decade!
Veering even further OT: The real answer to that problem is more social housing which is something almost everyone in this country supports except for middle-class voters in key marginal constituencies. Episode four of the BBC4 documentary series Century of the Self alludes to this in its title, Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering.
That series and the rest of Adam Curtis' documentaries are very interesting viewing btw. Like Chomsky you (I know I) might not agree with all his conclusions but he manages to dig up very interesting information from his sources. Especially in Century of the Self and The Trap he presents arguments against emotionally manipulative propaganda in what is ostensibly the same format. It's quite ironic.
You can find all his docs online. A site that lets you hunt for a standard CD file format finds me a deluge from a demon...
Um, that is the law in the UK. He could technically have insisted on it under the Disability Discrimination Act but I doubt he even thought of it.
Firms in the UK have to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. This doesn't cost them anything directly because they can get a grant from an Access to Work advisor at the local job-centre. This isn't even a left wing law in this country as the DDA was passed by John Major's government in 1995 as it dovetails with the Tory idea that everyone should have the equal opportunity to work and succeed.
Is the link to the current strip intentional? Usually people link straight to the strip they're referencing.
http://xkcd.com/180/
HTH
Whilst I disagree with certain aspects of affirmative action I think you'd have to be barmy to think men and women should legally be treated exactly the same. Men and women are different and the law should respect those differences.
Admittedly those differences are tied to (what should be) relatively minor things like women being generally smaller and needing more maternity leave than fathers need paternity leave due to having to actually carry to term and give birth but those differences do exist.
The law should respect those differences because sometimes you need to treat people differently in order to treat them equally.
And just in case anyone thinks that's some Orwellian double-think consider this: A man where I work is allowed to leave five minutes early each day because he's in a wheelchair. If he didn't the three p.m. rush (early starts suck, early finishes ftw though!) would mean he'd be five minutes later leaving than everybody else which is thirty minutes a week. He didn't even ask for it, one of the bosses just noticed he was always last out and realised it was because it's impossible for him to navigate the corridors when they're full of people.
Why should he lose half an hour each week due to something he can't control? It's the little things like that which really make a difference.
Looking at the preview I realise this is wildly OT. Oh well!
I think the difference is that the police in this country will make every effort to send around large numbers of armed police to find and shoot you if you go around shooting (rich or middle class, they don't care about poor) people.
The problem is raising a generation of kids who think killing people is an acceptable activity.
This is true. Unless they're psychopaths, however, they'll grow up and deeply regret what they've done. There lies the hope that they'll at least pass that on to the next generation.
They could've paid me that and I'd have pretended to be a botnet! I could've sent a few thousand spams in a few hours!
All that is well and good but I can't help but think that widespread adoption of guns in this country would be a very bad thing. The crackheads outside KFC in Brixton would just shoot people without a second thought.
Maybe it's different over there because the criminals already have guns and there is a culture of using them on the street but over here that's not the case. If the criminals thought all their potential marks were likely to be armed they'd just start shooting first, plus how do you draw your gun when you've got four armed crackheads surrounding you?
We perform functions related to disability benefits. Even the most hardcore libertarian minarchists I've spoken to concede that people with serious life-long disabilities (especially those born with them) should have a safety-net.
If our service were to fail then the government would have to step in. That's what you get when you politicians start doing stuff just to meet arbitrary promises though.
As an aside, can you believe the government tried to sell the office responsible for overseeing privatised contracts to Capita? Their own solicitors basically told them it was the dumbest thing ever because the conflict of interest was obvious.
Of course, the market isn't always the best option for many things, things that are obviously "public goods", as economists describe them, should clearly remain in the public sector. Unfortunately the government is privatising to sort out its finances in the short term and we're going to be paying the price for many years to come.
That episode of Brass Eye isn't illegal though. If it were it would never have been broadcast.
OT: Chris Morris is a hero of mine. He made a radio comedy show called "Blue Jam" for Radio 2 and at the end of the last episode of the first season he included a cut-up he made of the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech at Diana's funeral. It praised the death of Mother Teresa, made him say the royal family had AIDS and were gang-banging Trevor Rees-Jones.
It mysteriously faded out before finishing to be replaced with the start of the first episode to fill the rest of the slot. There are various explanations given ranging from him being told he wasn't allowed to broadcast it and swapping the tapes at the last minute anyway to him deliberately handing in his on-air masters at the last min so he had to be censored in real-time.
They still let him make two more glorious series though.
No judge in the land would actually sentence them for this. Assuming a jury actually found the reporter guilty (the judge would be forced to direct them to return a guilty verdict because this is clearly against the law - the jury can do wtf they want) then he'd get a tiny suspended sentence. I doubt the CPS would even want anything to do with it in the first place.
But in the example given no breaking occurred, the GP just posited a reporter walking through an open door which would be trespass.
It's not clear from TFA whether the BBC paid for the botnet or not. They may have just used their security experts' knowledge to break into the C&C channel of a small botnet.
No, WPA is a protocol that can be used instead of WEP. On PCs the encryption is generally handled by the CPU although no doubt there is WiFi hardware that can handle it onboard. The main problem with WPA{,2} adoption is old embedded devices (e.g. WiFi routers) that don't have the CPU power required for WPA. Certain devices like the Nintendo DS don't support WPA for the same reason although thankfully that's changing with the new DSi (although only for new DSi aware games).
Ditto. Vista's much derided UAC actually makes running Windows securely much easier too, it's actually the best part about Vista and I'm disappointed that MS is sacrificing security for ease of use in Win7. MS needs to stand firm against apps that bring up UAC prompts during normal operation whilst streamlining the UI to make the prompts more descriptive and eliminate multiple UAC prompts during certain operations.
To paraphrase, those who sacrifice security for ease of use deserve neither.
Because once you get past having enough money to survive the rest of your life, money just becomes a way of keeping score. I remember hearing Bernie Ecclestone saying it once in an interview and I've heard other very rich people express the same sentiment.
I expect someone like Buffett will have a hundred million or so stashed somewhere. He could loose everything else and still be able to live better than virtually almost anyone else in the world.
Well, here in the US, there are several sports where you use guns. Skeet, Trap, and competitive target practice (not sure if thats whats its called but I know it exists) that it would be logical to have a gun in a home in a city without the intent of shooting someone.
I'm not opposed to shooting for sport, in fact I think more shooting clubs would be better for this country as I think it'd teach respect for firearms.
I've never shot a gun but if there were a local shooting club I'd join it in a heartbeat.
We don't need mass ownership of firearms in this country. We certainly don't need lots of people carrying guns; guns make it too easy to kill people.
It's pointless trying to speculate how different situations would've played out if only there had been mass ownership of firearms. Hitler could've been turned into a martyr leading to an even worse Holocaust, Jewish self-defence may have lead to a civil war causing even deeper suspicion of Jews in the rest of Europe.
As it stands having a firearm is considered so dangerous, even by criminals, that they are generally kept locked up. Most criminals who have guns have them at home to stop other gangs from raiding them and stealing all their cash & drugs, only idiot wannabe gangster kids carry them and shoot each other on the streets and even in public shootings they keep it to themselves.
And you can't account for crazy people, no matter what you do they'll come up with some other crazy way to cause harm.
On this count you're dead wrong. "Can you see our bowler hats? We're not faceless bureaucrats!"
I worked for the DWP and we got privatised last Feb. I now do exactly the same job for the same T&Cs (because of TUPE, one thing I can actually thank Thatcher for!) but my firm is taking a profit for the work we do from the tax-payer. Brown promised to get rid of 100,000 civil servants and he did it - by transferring us to the private sector and letting them take a huge profit on contracts with virtually no penalties for failure. Plus the service we provide to the rest of the DWP has been reduced because loads of odd things we did on our site weren't in the new contract.
That's where all the money has gone, to shareholders of firms involved in the various privatisation scams.
This is so true.
A mate of mine got mugged whilst we were in Tallin, Estonia. I was so amazed that he got an email from the police asking for more information because they were investigating. They're investigating a mugging! And they're using email!
Of course the local police always seem to have time to harass the local kids for hanging around doing nothing. They know those aren't the kids causing trouble but if they go after those kids it means paperwork and they hate paperwork.
Unless it's raining. Then they'll arrest you over anything so they can do paperwork and drink tea indoors.
The police in this country are pathetic. I've actually met quite a few decent coppers but even they'll admit that the lazy / judgemental ones let the whole side down.
I once saw a copper pounce on on a girl at a demo as she was walking away from him in tears. She called him a "fucking bastard" because they'd arrested a friend of hers and she was obviously upset but even though she clearly wasn't going to cause further trouble this copper didn't like being insulted. Of course all the other police present had to pile in too because there were a lot of people about and like any gang, cops have gotta stick together.
The only purpose of a gun in a UK city is to shoot another human being. Knives and swords are used for all sorts of other things.
The ban on handguns was a mental response to a school shooting and unfairly punished shooting clubs, criminals still have guns. That doesn't mean we should allow people to carry guns around with them however, just as carrying knives is banned.
The ban on swords is just ridiculous though, that was due to a couple of heavily reported incidents of psychotic individuals going crazy with swords. Sword fighting is a dying sport in this country now thanks to that stupid ban. You should be allowed to carry your gun or sword to your club and back home again but banning it beyond that is perfectly sensible.
And yes, you could just carry your weapon at all times and claim that you're on your way to/from a dojo / shooting club but I think in general people who are serious about their sport are less likely to be criminals who use their weapons against other people, but that's just the culture here in the UK.
Oh ... and my phone doesn't support SMS, either, as I refuse to get a cell phone that takes more than 10 sec from when I power it on 'til when I can make a call
What? Why would letting you use SMS increase your phone startup time? You are aware that SMS (in GSM at least) just uses spare time on the signalling path, i.e. the bit that carries the phone number when you dial, right? That's why SMS is almost pure profit as far as carriers are concerned, they only have to make sure their message service centre can handle the load.