What is wrong with Braille street signs? May places have them, giving directions to blind folk, yes, in a place you can touch them. Damn good idea if you ask me. Lord knows how they find them though...
Why the hell not! They got most of their arms, training and funding from the west anyway. Maybe we can give them royalty points or repeat buyer discounts?
While I do agree with your points, there are a number of things you've overlooked.
Firstly, there is a wealth of mp3 and divx files everywhere. From your hard-drive, to optical media and on the web. Are the DMCA police going to search every single place a person could hide digital media, to make sure it's all removed?
Until they do that, there is nothing to stop me giving a friend a copy of an album or movie, if I wanted to. Drugs are illegal, yet it doesn't do much to stop the trafficing in them, and they are socially frowned apon. Most folk couldn't care less about piracy.
Also, there is a huge amount of non-DRM hardware out there. The DMCA police can pry my car mp3 player from my cold dead hands. Ditto every single PC and Linux disto in the world. Even if some manufacturers make DRM only PCs, there will always be one that doesn't. The US IT industry could be crippled by this, when the other countries step in to make up the consumer demand for non-DRM hardware, but it's your call, if you want to make one of the biggest business mistakes in history, go right ahead. Making the sales of such hardware illegal is also silly, online shopping and local businesses can not be policed to the point that no one is selling any non-DRM hardware. That's not even counting DIY-modifications to the kit.
The DMCA only applies in the USA, WinMX, for instance, doesn't have a US presence. I believe they are based in a European country that doesn't have piracy laws. You could never make enough trade deals and "force" every country in the world to adopt these laws. So, the p2p software will always be available.
So, the only way that the DMCA could stop p2p, would be if the ISPs start blocking it, e.g. by the port number. Then p2p will switch to random-port allocation and the ISPs will have to monitor the traffic, not just the protocols, at a much greater expense. Throw in encryption, tunneling and proxies, it's an impossible task.
I have to laugh when you see the media companies taking all the action to try to stop this. It's a losing battle and I feel that no one in their ranks is brave enough to step up and point out the failings in their policies.
Years ago, they said the internet would change the world. It will, and it's currently doing it right now. Any dinosaur that drags it's heals will soon find itself extinct. Darwin evolution applies to business as well. Thankfully.
They don't have all of the major artists on tap, but they have a lot of good music there from small/indie artists.
Isn't that a good thing?;-)
I had a nosey around there last night, they had something from most of the acts I listen to (downbeat/trip-hop), but then again, you won't find any Britany on my hard-drive...
Why on earth would you want to buy a mixed disk? You are paying for each song, why ruin them by overlaying another song at the start and end?
By all means, give us the ability to make good mixed disks at home, but surely you don't want your personal master recording unable to be put on any other disks or mixes you make because it has elements of other songs in it?
By the way, if you are into mixing, check out Stanton's Final Scratch. It's a linux distro that hooks up over usb to normal turntables. You use a couple of special vinyl disks with encoding on them, and it translates the position and speed of the disk onto the PC, which manipulates the mp3/wav/ogg in the same way. Apparently you can mix between digital and vinyl music transparently, using normal DJ skills.
I've not tried or seen this product, but it sounds pretty neat.
For a software product that is similar, check out Traktor. I have tried this products demo, and it's pretty cool. You need two soundcards to get the most out of it, otherwise you won't be able to preview the mix.
Note the Traktor does BPM calculation and automatic sync'ing (if desired), a travesty according to my DJ'ing friends. Final Scratch doesn't (AFAIK), it just lets you use digital media on a turntable. You need your own decks, mixer and DJ skills for this.
But it is still not a government organisation. It's not owned by the government. It can't be controlled by the government. I hardly see why it's "irrelevant", a government run station would be pro-government, the BBC is independant. Big difference.
Again, I fail to see what the problem in understanding it. Just because it's funded by taxation does not make it government controlled.
Personally, I think it's a great thing, folks from the US might not understand. TV without commercials. Think about it for a moment.
Take a show everyone knows, e.g. one of the new Star Trek series. On US TV, you get the intro segment, the opening credits and then an ad-break. This would not be accepted in this country, because the BBC, having no adverts, sets a baseline for the other stations to compete with. If the commercial channels were to change to the US commercial-break format, there would be an outcry. IMO, this is a very good thing.
Combined to that, the BBC produces some damn fine stuff. Documentaries that don't aim for the lowest common denomenator, you know the "WOW! AMAZING" type of documentary that tries to make it exciting and explosive to keep the public interested. Instead, the quality of the BBC shows shine through, they are informative and entertaining in a completely different way. Compare the likes of "Walking with Dinosaurs" to the other documentary producting channels, especially the US ones. I know what style I'd rather watch. The BBC is a thinking-mans channel. It's not full of crappy brain-dead shows, except for the obligatory prime-time shows.
Each night there are at least 4 hours of educational shows on a wide range of subjects. These are aimed at school children, students or just anyone interested. They are set up to be recorded and played back, and play in the early hours of the morning. I'd like to see a commercial channel do anything like that...
And yes, the BBC can critisise & patronise other companies. Some of it's shows are at the forefront of consumer affairs. Once, a car show, Top Gear produced a damning review of a crap car. The director of the car manufacturer was heard to ask that all advertising be cut from the BBC from them, in essence to "punish" them. But as the BBC doesn't have advertising, it gives it the ability to say what the hell it likes. Consumer affairs programs are always limited when the company they are talking about also pays the network for commercial time.
Using the name "government television" makes it sound like "state TV", whether that is the intended meaning or not. State TV is pretty evil and anti-democratic. Take Italy for example, they have a state TV network. The current leader is a media demi-god and owns all the other channels. When you say government TV, that's what I think of. Not the BBC.
Perhaps what they're referring to is sites that encourage violence against abortion clinics and doctors, including publishing addresses and other details?
In which case they pretty much amount to terrorist sites...
They can't possibly be terrorists. You have to be an Arab to be a terrorist. If you are white, you get called militas, militants, activists or the DC sniper.
The BBC is not a government organisation. Why do some people have so much trouble getting this? It is a publically owned corperation.
The UK government has no control over the BBC. Any time that it tried to "suggest" they do something, they have had their fingers burnt.
For example, the satirical current-affairs comedy "Have I got News For You" once received a request from up high to not mention a particular politition. They spent the next next show completely focusing on the guy. If they were govenment controlled, that would not have been possible.
They aren't all that good for games and full-screen video, unless you play the media at the proper resolution to match the LCD display. If you want to improve performance by dropping the resolution, you get imprefect scaling because of the fixed-pitch display.
A CRT monitor has a much higher ultimate resolution (not usable resolution that you can set your video to) that can show e.g. 800x600 and 1024x786 with better accuracy and no artifical scaleing.
Re:Determining the right infrastructure...
on
Geek-Chic Power Houses
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
We ended up going cat-5 with pre-wiring and space for wireless access points in the attic and conduit in the walls to pull fiber (or something else) later when it becomes feasible.
There is always a place for cat-5, cheap and reliable. Even if you have wireless, hooking up two desktop PCs is a waste of RF bandwidth. If you are confident with a drill, go for it. In a few years, a home network might make a desireable selling point for a home.
Like the idea about running conduit, very forward thinking.
I've done similar. Redhat based firewall/NAT/samba box sharing 180 gig of storage (one half is a backup of the other to be truthful, highly recommended with hard-drive reliability these days) to every PC in the house. PC in living room is hooked up to a hi-fi, which also uses the tape-outs to pipe music to a couple of rooms. VHS RF-out also piped around the house, allowing DVD, video and cable to be viewed anywhere. Laptop in bedroom connected to midi stereo and wireless lan gives me independant music if I want.
With VNC, you can remote control your home jukebox from anywhere in the world, but I do prefer the couch. Total cost: Not much! The server is an old 200MHz box, that's all it takes. Wireless lan cost a bit, but it has other uses.
With the addition of a cable modem, streaming files anywhere in the world is great. I could be in work or a hotel miles from home with full access to my music collection. Bliss!
Then after you do this, remove the inter-gang violence from your numbers for both countries and compare. Report your findings.
What's your point? A death is still a death. Innocent or not. We have gangs here as well you know, very rarely does anyone get killed.
Law abiding citizens are affected. Crossfire I'm sure kills quite a few folk. The money spent policing to get the area to the point that decent people can walk safely must be a huge portion of the Police budget. Or the not-so-well-off person who has to queue at community hospitals where a large portion of their budget is spent healing gunshot wounds. Jeez, it's so common you even have an acronym for it, GSW.
While you are at it, let's talk about home invasions being several hundred percent more common in the UK since the ban on guns.
OK, let't talk about it. First, cite your source, it's completely new to me and I've never heard or seen any statistic that shows this sort of crime going up, especially to the extent of several hundred percent.
Next, you have to realise that there is no gun culture in the UK, there never has been. Handguns were banned after 60ish man shot and killed at least 20 very young children. The man in question was a permit-holding member of a gun club and was legally entitled to own his weapons. Public opinion led to the complete ban of handguns only, at which point the owners of the guns were obliged to hand them in, after being given the monetry equivalent value of the gun.
Guns have absolutly no bearing in home invasion statistics here. Because guns are so rare (in my years I have NEVER even seen a gun in this country), the likelyhood of a homeowner having a gun was so remote that criminals wouldn't even give it a second thought.
So, I fail to see how the banning of handguns had anything to do with any increase in house breaking.
i believe the system is either in place, or planned, to catch speeders by spotting that a car was on camera in London at 3pm and in Derby at 4.15, and working out that you`d have to speed to get from A to B in that time
That really scares me. It's only one tiny step away from a personal tracking system. All they would need to do is run a search on your number plate to find out where you were. If that ever happens, I'm getting personallised number plates that won't work with the optical character recognition.
with some sort of slashdot style karma system
Lot's of other things would also work well with the Slashdot karma system. Imagine if politics followed the same system, discussions in Parliment etc. It would be amazing and so much more productive, especially if the politions karma were to be printed on the ballot paper!
I believe that Bin Laden is extremely dead, lying under untold tons of rubble at Tora Bora.
If Tora Bora is in Afganistan (I don't know the region), then I doubt it. All the important terrorists got out of there long before the bombs started dropping. Do you think they just sat on their hands while the US was moving their forces? The Afgan war was really to get rid of the talliban, for whatever reason you see fit to believe...
There are also advantages in your enemies thinking you are dead. They stop looking for you etc, allowing you greater freedom.
Bush and pals likely know exactly whether he is dead or not. What gets released into public knowledge is always a subset of what goes on. For example (only because a saw a documentary on this last night) at the resolution of the Cuban missle crisis, Russia agreed to remove the forces if the US also withdrew it's nukes from Turkey. This was never reveled to the public, as far as everyone was aware, the US got the USSR to back down completely. Even Castro didn't know about this arrangement and he saw it as a defeat, when in essense the USSR got pretty much what it wanted: the equalisation of both sides first stike capability. It took 20 years for the truth to come out.
Perhaps 20 years from now, we'll be discussing what really happened on 9/11 and the war on terror.
Sure, agreed on most points. I only really cited that advert because it's a pet hate of mine. I understand that shock tactics sometimes work, but is it really recessary to cause so much depression by showing images like that to make your point?
With software, one could potentially pick up signs that someone is drunk
Wouldn't work; far too many false positives. If a driver swerves to avoid a child, something on the road, is distracted by their own passengers, lights a cigarette and so on, this system would be triggered. Image recognition and AI hasn't gotten to the point it could do this reliably and throw away the times where it wasn't the fault of the driver.
Also, the police would then have to stop a driver within a short time (what if they are sober, go home and have a drink?) to get a breathiser sample. You'd need an entire police force merely to track these people down, unless there is global location surveilence, which is a very scary road to go down...
Mind you, a system like this could be used to detect bad motorway driving, another pet hate of mine, as careless driving cause almost all motorway collisions. A system to monitor lane discipine and correct signalling would get my vote!
I've had no problems with NTL, been a happy customer for 5 years, analog then digital cable, dial-up then cable modem. However, you are correct on phoning them, they don't have enough staff manning the call center. The solution is to phone first thing in the morning. Early evening is a waste of time. Same with most call centres.
If so, then your worthiness will be decided based on information supplied by one of the two big Credit Reference Agencies (Experian and Equifax).
The level of information they store on you is scary. I really admire the data protection act, it acknowledges the fact that people store personal data, forces them to register the fact that they are doing it and most importantly allows you to see everything they have on you. Failing to disclose something is a serious offence.
The comedian/activist Mark Thomas did a show on the DPA. He has a history of holding campaigns against big business and as a part of this show, he requested that all of the companies he has "dealt" with in the past give him a copy of everything relating to him. That included memos telling staff what to say to him he he got in contact, and what not to say! Briliant system.
I recommend that everyone should get a copy of your credit report. Any company that provides credit has access to this and it's really disturbing what they store. I used to live with my parents and because of that, it had their personal bank details in it, including every loan/credit card they've had in the past 5 years.
There are two copies of the Electoral Roll. One is allowed to be sold (yes, sold!) to companies and you can opt out of it. The other lists everyone and is available at libraries etc. but you can only see it, not get a copy.
The BBC has a history of being rather more critical of the government of the day than the privately owned outlets
I'm beginning to think this is turning...the BBC has been very much for the "War on (black) Terror" and "Attack Iraq" campaigns. The reporting of the the "terrorists" echos far too closely the official party line too much for my liking; there appears to be very little critism despite obvious falacies in many of the policies i.e. Saddams "Terrorist" links (or complete lack thereof)
Many people have observed that it appears that the BBC is dumbing down and becoming more tabloid-like. I'm in agreement with them.
As for the cameras, there is statistically more crime in London than New York...we need them!
Cameras and statistics don't go well together. If you increace camera coverage, you increase the amount of recorded crime, because you are recording more. If the stats go down, the chances are the crime has moved elsewhere.
What's that famous quote...? Lie, damn lies and statistics.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
What is wrong with Braille street signs? May places have them, giving directions to blind folk, yes, in a place you can touch them. Damn good idea if you ask me. Lord knows how they find them though...
Why the hell not! They got most of their arms, training and funding from the west anyway. Maybe we can give them royalty points or repeat buyer discounts?
Well, it will get watched if there is a sniper driving about killing people. Then they catch the guy before he kills double-digits.
I can vouch for that!
Firstly, there is a wealth of mp3 and divx files everywhere. From your hard-drive, to optical media and on the web. Are the DMCA police going to search every single place a person could hide digital media, to make sure it's all removed?
Until they do that, there is nothing to stop me giving a friend a copy of an album or movie, if I wanted to. Drugs are illegal, yet it doesn't do much to stop the trafficing in them, and they are socially frowned apon. Most folk couldn't care less about piracy.
Also, there is a huge amount of non-DRM hardware out there. The DMCA police can pry my car mp3 player from my cold dead hands. Ditto every single PC and Linux disto in the world. Even if some manufacturers make DRM only PCs, there will always be one that doesn't. The US IT industry could be crippled by this, when the other countries step in to make up the consumer demand for non-DRM hardware, but it's your call, if you want to make one of the biggest business mistakes in history, go right ahead. Making the sales of such hardware illegal is also silly, online shopping and local businesses can not be policed to the point that no one is selling any non-DRM hardware. That's not even counting DIY-modifications to the kit.
The DMCA only applies in the USA, WinMX, for instance, doesn't have a US presence. I believe they are based in a European country that doesn't have piracy laws. You could never make enough trade deals and "force" every country in the world to adopt these laws. So, the p2p software will always be available.
So, the only way that the DMCA could stop p2p, would be if the ISPs start blocking it, e.g. by the port number. Then p2p will switch to random-port allocation and the ISPs will have to monitor the traffic, not just the protocols, at a much greater expense. Throw in encryption, tunneling and proxies, it's an impossible task.
I have to laugh when you see the media companies taking all the action to try to stop this. It's a losing battle and I feel that no one in their ranks is brave enough to step up and point out the failings in their policies.
Years ago, they said the internet would change the world. It will, and it's currently doing it right now. Any dinosaur that drags it's heals will soon find itself extinct. Darwin evolution applies to business as well. Thankfully.
Isn't that a good thing? ;-)
I had a nosey around there last night, they had something from most of the acts I listen to (downbeat/trip-hop), but then again, you won't find any Britany on my hard-drive...
By all means, give us the ability to make good mixed disks at home, but surely you don't want your personal master recording unable to be put on any other disks or mixes you make because it has elements of other songs in it?
By the way, if you are into mixing, check out Stanton's Final Scratch. It's a linux distro that hooks up over usb to normal turntables. You use a couple of special vinyl disks with encoding on them, and it translates the position and speed of the disk onto the PC, which manipulates the mp3/wav/ogg in the same way. Apparently you can mix between digital and vinyl music transparently, using normal DJ skills.
I've not tried or seen this product, but it sounds pretty neat.
For a software product that is similar, check out Traktor. I have tried this products demo, and it's pretty cool. You need two soundcards to get the most out of it, otherwise you won't be able to preview the mix.
Note the Traktor does BPM calculation and automatic sync'ing (if desired), a travesty according to my DJ'ing friends. Final Scratch doesn't (AFAIK), it just lets you use digital media on a turntable. You need your own decks, mixer and DJ skills for this.
Again, I fail to see what the problem in understanding it. Just because it's funded by taxation does not make it government controlled.
Personally, I think it's a great thing, folks from the US might not understand. TV without commercials. Think about it for a moment.
Take a show everyone knows, e.g. one of the new Star Trek series. On US TV, you get the intro segment, the opening credits and then an ad-break. This would not be accepted in this country, because the BBC, having no adverts, sets a baseline for the other stations to compete with. If the commercial channels were to change to the US commercial-break format, there would be an outcry. IMO, this is a very good thing.
Combined to that, the BBC produces some damn fine stuff. Documentaries that don't aim for the lowest common denomenator, you know the "WOW! AMAZING" type of documentary that tries to make it exciting and explosive to keep the public interested. Instead, the quality of the BBC shows shine through, they are informative and entertaining in a completely different way. Compare the likes of "Walking with Dinosaurs" to the other documentary producting channels, especially the US ones. I know what style I'd rather watch. The BBC is a thinking-mans channel. It's not full of crappy brain-dead shows, except for the obligatory prime-time shows.
Each night there are at least 4 hours of educational shows on a wide range of subjects. These are aimed at school children, students or just anyone interested. They are set up to be recorded and played back, and play in the early hours of the morning. I'd like to see a commercial channel do anything like that...
And yes, the BBC can critisise & patronise other companies. Some of it's shows are at the forefront of consumer affairs. Once, a car show, Top Gear produced a damning review of a crap car. The director of the car manufacturer was heard to ask that all advertising be cut from the BBC from them, in essence to "punish" them. But as the BBC doesn't have advertising, it gives it the ability to say what the hell it likes. Consumer affairs programs are always limited when the company they are talking about also pays the network for commercial time.
Using the name "government television" makes it sound like "state TV", whether that is the intended meaning or not. State TV is pretty evil and anti-democratic. Take Italy for example, they have a state TV network. The current leader is a media demi-god and owns all the other channels. When you say government TV, that's what I think of. Not the BBC.
In which case they pretty much amount to terrorist sites...
They can't possibly be terrorists. You have to be an Arab to be a terrorist. If you are white, you get called militas, militants, activists or the DC sniper.
The BBC is not a government organisation. Why do some people have so much trouble getting this? It is a publically owned corperation.
The UK government has no control over the BBC. Any time that it tried to "suggest" they do something, they have had their fingers burnt.
For example, the satirical current-affairs comedy "Have I got News For You" once received a request from up high to not mention a particular politition. They spent the next next show completely focusing on the guy. If they were govenment controlled, that would not have been possible.
A CRT monitor has a much higher ultimate resolution (not usable resolution that you can set your video to) that can show e.g. 800x600 and 1024x786 with better accuracy and no artifical scaleing.
There is always a place for cat-5, cheap and reliable. Even if you have wireless, hooking up two desktop PCs is a waste of RF bandwidth. If you are confident with a drill, go for it. In a few years, a home network might make a desireable selling point for a home.
Like the idea about running conduit, very forward thinking.
With VNC, you can remote control your home jukebox from anywhere in the world, but I do prefer the couch. Total cost: Not much! The server is an old 200MHz box, that's all it takes. Wireless lan cost a bit, but it has other uses.
With the addition of a cable modem, streaming files anywhere in the world is great. I could be in work or a hotel miles from home with full access to my music collection. Bliss!
Yay, partially tested games! What fun!
lol, I just got that joke after reading it 10 times! Clever...
You don't need a proxy server to do that! All you need to do is snoop the wire for destination port 80 traffic. It's pretty easy to do...
What's your point? A death is still a death. Innocent or not. We have gangs here as well you know, very rarely does anyone get killed.
Law abiding citizens are affected. Crossfire I'm sure kills quite a few folk. The money spent policing to get the area to the point that decent people can walk safely must be a huge portion of the Police budget. Or the not-so-well-off person who has to queue at community hospitals where a large portion of their budget is spent healing gunshot wounds. Jeez, it's so common you even have an acronym for it, GSW.
While you are at it, let's talk about home invasions being several hundred percent more common in the UK since the ban on guns.
OK, let't talk about it. First, cite your source, it's completely new to me and I've never heard or seen any statistic that shows this sort of crime going up, especially to the extent of several hundred percent.
Next, you have to realise that there is no gun culture in the UK, there never has been. Handguns were banned after 60ish man shot and killed at least 20 very young children. The man in question was a permit-holding member of a gun club and was legally entitled to own his weapons. Public opinion led to the complete ban of handguns only, at which point the owners of the guns were obliged to hand them in, after being given the monetry equivalent value of the gun.
Guns have absolutly no bearing in home invasion statistics here. Because guns are so rare (in my years I have NEVER even seen a gun in this country), the likelyhood of a homeowner having a gun was so remote that criminals wouldn't even give it a second thought.
So, I fail to see how the banning of handguns had anything to do with any increase in house breaking.
That really scares me. It's only one tiny step away from a personal tracking system. All they would need to do is run a search on your number plate to find out where you were. If that ever happens, I'm getting personallised number plates that won't work with the optical character recognition.
with some sort of slashdot style karma system
Lot's of other things would also work well with the Slashdot karma system. Imagine if politics followed the same system, discussions in Parliment etc. It would be amazing and so much more productive, especially if the politions karma were to be printed on the ballot paper!
If Tora Bora is in Afganistan (I don't know the region), then I doubt it. All the important terrorists got out of there long before the bombs started dropping. Do you think they just sat on their hands while the US was moving their forces? The Afgan war was really to get rid of the talliban, for whatever reason you see fit to believe...
There are also advantages in your enemies thinking you are dead. They stop looking for you etc, allowing you greater freedom.
Bush and pals likely know exactly whether he is dead or not. What gets released into public knowledge is always a subset of what goes on. For example (only because a saw a documentary on this last night) at the resolution of the Cuban missle crisis, Russia agreed to remove the forces if the US also withdrew it's nukes from Turkey. This was never reveled to the public, as far as everyone was aware, the US got the USSR to back down completely. Even Castro didn't know about this arrangement and he saw it as a defeat, when in essense the USSR got pretty much what it wanted: the equalisation of both sides first stike capability. It took 20 years for the truth to come out.
Perhaps 20 years from now, we'll be discussing what really happened on 9/11 and the war on terror.
With software, one could potentially pick up signs that someone is drunk
Wouldn't work; far too many false positives. If a driver swerves to avoid a child, something on the road, is distracted by their own passengers, lights a cigarette and so on, this system would be triggered. Image recognition and AI hasn't gotten to the point it could do this reliably and throw away the times where it wasn't the fault of the driver.
Also, the police would then have to stop a driver within a short time (what if they are sober, go home and have a drink?) to get a breathiser sample. You'd need an entire police force merely to track these people down, unless there is global location surveilence, which is a very scary road to go down...
Mind you, a system like this could be used to detect bad motorway driving, another pet hate of mine, as careless driving cause almost all motorway collisions. A system to monitor lane discipine and correct signalling would get my vote!
I've had no problems with NTL, been a happy customer for 5 years, analog then digital cable, dial-up then cable modem. However, you are correct on phoning them, they don't have enough staff manning the call center. The solution is to phone first thing in the morning. Early evening is a waste of time. Same with most call centres.
The level of information they store on you is scary. I really admire the data protection act, it acknowledges the fact that people store personal data, forces them to register the fact that they are doing it and most importantly allows you to see everything they have on you. Failing to disclose something is a serious offence.
The comedian/activist Mark Thomas did a show on the DPA. He has a history of holding campaigns against big business and as a part of this show, he requested that all of the companies he has "dealt" with in the past give him a copy of everything relating to him. That included memos telling staff what to say to him he he got in contact, and what not to say! Briliant system.
I recommend that everyone should get a copy of your credit report. Any company that provides credit has access to this and it's really disturbing what they store. I used to live with my parents and because of that, it had their personal bank details in it, including every loan/credit card they've had in the past 5 years.
Say goodbye to privacy!
There are two copies of the Electoral Roll. One is allowed to be sold (yes, sold!) to companies and you can opt out of it. The other lists everyone and is available at libraries etc. but you can only see it, not get a copy.
I'm beginning to think this is turning...the BBC has been very much for the "War on (black) Terror" and "Attack Iraq" campaigns. The reporting of the the "terrorists" echos far too closely the official party line too much for my liking; there appears to be very little critism despite obvious falacies in many of the policies i.e. Saddams "Terrorist" links (or complete lack thereof)
Many people have observed that it appears that the BBC is dumbing down and becoming more tabloid-like. I'm in agreement with them.
Cameras and statistics don't go well together. If you increace camera coverage, you increase the amount of recorded crime, because you are recording more. If the stats go down, the chances are the crime has moved elsewhere.
What's that famous quote...? Lie, damn lies and statistics. ;-)