Totalled

I've moved!

2009-07-22T20:03:00.002+01:00

I've moved this blog to the pretentiously named philtheone.com. All the stuff from here is on there! Follow me..

Freebie

2009-07-15T10:53:00.004+01:00

I've received a couple of emails about a short film called Blackpool: The Las Vegas of the North. Presumably a tongue-in-cheek title.

Anyway it's on today on VBS TV so it might be worth a look if you're interested.

Here's the blurb:

In January of this year, Vice editor Andy Capper and filmmaker Leo Leigh (son of director Mike Leigh, no less) spent a fortnight in the North West resort of Blackpool. In amongst the fish’n’chips and fruit machines they got to know the characters who make up the area, and uncovered the unique charm behind the seaside town.

Once Britain’s number one holiday destination, Blackpool has been growing old disgracefully. The refinement and grace has given way to a certain romantic grit, as pigeon fanciers, 80 year-old tattoo addicts and hotel talent shows mask the backstreet slums and high rise buildings characterise the area crippled by 90% unemployment.

“Blackpool: The Las Vegas Of The North” is an intimate snapshot of the people behind the local legends, showing there is more to this corner of Britain than blue comics, soft porn pedlars and immigrant strippers. And not a Big Dipper pun in sight...

The sky is the limit

2009-07-14T23:58:00.004+01:00

"Fly to Europe for only £9.99!"

You've probably seen these adverts on the television or in the newspapers, and indeed probably used one or more of the airlines as well. I certainly have.

But having today booked some flights to Spain I was going off the wall: firstly about the difference between the advertised price and the actual price and secondly the way they remove standard essentials from the flight and then charge you for them as an extra.

Get to the airport and check in and on these budget airlines you cannot reserve a seat like you used to be able to. They'll happily charge you for the privilege though.

Luggage is another example: you have to pay extra to take a suitcase. They say it's a saving for those that don't need to carry any luggage, but it's not. It's an increase in price for those that do.

Then there's the in-flight meal. Generally you got a light meal of some kind on any flight longer than an hour or so but now you have to buy it for a ridiculous price. This is something I don't particularly mind because aircraft meals are terrible but the price never went down because of it.

Ryanair announced that using the toilet will soon be a chargeable extra and further ahead they are intending to convert portions of their aircraft to standing room only so they can then charge you extra - for a seat!

The result is when you see advertising for different airlines you can never compare them at face value because they all drop various standard features and charge you extra for them.

Jet2 have been advertising flights to Spain for £9.99 on the TV all the time recently. They quoted me £160 return. They might as well have said the flights are free - except for all the extra stuff we add on.

And don't even think about bringing any extra luggage home....

Ruling the airwaves

2009-07-12T23:49:00.011+01:00

If you could get away with committing an offence knowing that from the point of view of the authorities someone else did it, would you?

I opened my netbook today and decided to search for wifi access points within the vicinity of my home and discovered a total of 14 unique networks including my own. I was surprised by this as I don't live in a particularly densely populated area.

My first impression from the list of network names was of slight bewilderment that some of them were named after either the operator or their house number and street. Free information.

Not especially useful to me really, but now that I knew some of their names I decided to see how far I could potentially go in order to become one of these people from the comfort of my chair.

Approaching this, I knew that many of the wireless routers supplied by ISPs are configured by default to use a weak security algorithm called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) rather than the much more secure Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

WEP was determined to be an insecure security algorithm in 2001 and was deprecated by the IEEE because it did not serve the purpose it was designed for - to secure your network. It can be cracked within a few minutes with freely available tools. In fact my own ISP, O2, supplied me with a router that was configured with WEP enabled by default, leaving my network wide open for anyone with a few minutes spare.

Knowing this, I decided to boot my netbook into Backtrack:a linux distribution focused on network auditing and security. It's a nice distribution and can be burned on to a USB stick or DVD for use as a "live" system. Opening kismet I discovered some more details about the wireless connections in my area.

I was interested in finding out whether they were using WEP or WPA. It's possible to brute force attack a WPA secured network but it could take longer than the universe will exist to crack. Anyway, within minutes I had retrieved the keys for all of the WEP secured wireless networks in my area. The Aircrack website details how to use the tools to do it if you're interested.

At this point I could bridge all of these networks and load up any of my favourite peer-to-peer software with lots of music, films and games shared and from the point of view of the BPI or any other organisation that attempts to monitor our internet usage it would be my neighbours who were doing it. As a result, they'd get the BPI threat letter and any resulting court action. Perfect!

It's surprising in these days of fraud, identity theft, ID cards and 24/7 surveillance that people have such a blase attitude towards protecting their own identity. I do however think it's bad sport for ISPs to supply hardware that is preconfigured in such a way that your home or small business network can be compromised by anyone that wants to use it.

Is it fair to assume that an ISP will supply hardware that is as secure as it can be upon installation? I think so. Consumers should not be expected to be knowledgeable about the technicalities of wireless encryption methods. Indeed, the consumer may not even have a wireless enabled computer yet their network would be wide open and they wouldn't even know.

I await the case whereby someone that didn't do anything wrong actually gets prosecuted based on what they are perceived to have been sharing. Who would be liable? The consumer or the ISP for supplying hardware that permitted anyone to use it?

Top of the Phorm

2009-07-10T12:33:00.006+01:00

Success! Shares in Phorm dived 40% yesterday when BT said it wouldn't be using their system (although they have not fully terminated their agreement with them).

Phorm is a company started by people that made money by infecting your computer with spyware that now offers a similar service that you can do nothing about. At the ISP level, they spy on your web usage and provide targetted advertising based on it.

Carphone Warehouse/Talktalk have also pulled out and the only remaining ISP with a commitment to Phorm is - you guessed it - Virgin Media.

Apparently Phorm are now focusing their business on Asia and have gained a foothold in South Korea. I suspect they are probably used to being spied on though.

ReCycle

2009-07-10T01:25:00.006+01:00

In 2008 Blackpool was officially named a Cycling Town. Apparently "The Cycling Towns programme aims to help Blackpool meet the challenge of the modern leisure market’s needs, by making cycling an essential part of its tourism offer."

It seems quite a tenuous link between tourism and cycling and I have yet to see a hen night cycling down the promenade, but I'll go with them since it's still a £6million work in progress to turn the town into this utopia of cycling.

The impression I gained from the name Cycling Town was that the town would be awash with people on two wheeled transport. It isn't: there aren't many cyclists at all in Blackpool at the moment. As a driver and motoring enthusiast I'm obviously happy about that given the general lack of respect for road rules that cyclists have, such as failure to signal properly, jumping red lights and riding on the pavement when it suits them, but as a taxpayer I'm questioning the allocation of funds. Where on earth has the money been spent?

Lets say for some bizarre reason I decided to get on my bike and cycle to the town centre to buy something. Once I got there, where could I put my bike? Off the top of my head I can't think of any bike shelters and bike parking areas like places such as Oxford have. The ridiculous thing is Oxford is not a Cycling City despite being flooded with students on bikes. This whole Cycling Town thing is starting to sound a bit gimmicky...

Cycling to work? For a kick off you would need somewhere to leave your bike at work and in addition to everything else carrying a suit in a bag to work isn't and never will be practical: it'd look terribly crumpled unless they decide to set up ironing and changing rooms there. Unlikely I feel. I also wouldn't want to run the risk of cycling down roads without proper provisions for cyclists such as cycle lanes. As a result I don't even think it would be possible to cycle to work.

I would seriously question the criteria by which a town is branded a Cycling Town. For a start, I'd expect a large percentage of roads to have cycle lanes either marked or constructed parallel to the roads. In Blackpool this is not the case. I don't want to have to cycle 50 miles out of my way in order to stay on a cycle lane for the duration of my journey. I would prefer for my journey to be at least equidistant to that in a car but preferably shorter.

I would prefer that Police officers enforce the law upon cyclists that abuse the pavement. Offenders can be issued a £30 fixed penalty, but the maximum if taken to court is £500.

When I was 16 and cycling on the pavement down Waterloo Road I was stopped by the Police and lectured about it being a danger to the public. The Police car proceeded to follow me as I cycled on the road and then in typical Police fashion decided to floor it past me and into the sunset (must have been their tea break then). Jollity aside, I'm not aware that the law on this has changed. People complain - rightly - about cars parking on the pavement and I find cyclists that use the pavement as a road to be no different.

The Promenade may well end up being a cyclist's paradise after all the current works are completed but it always has been as far as I can remember. Fundamentally since you can't cycle to work on the promenade and you can't cycle home on the promenade its value to locals is pleasure only.

For me I find the Cycling Town brand to be somewhat pointless, somewhat gimmicky and just another channel the Government can use to force councils into spending money on certain things. In this case the link is very weak and the money was allocated based on the resurfacing and in some places redesign of the Promenade.

Democracy - whats the point?

2009-07-04T11:22:00.001+01:00

I spoke to a mate of mine the other day and asked him who he voted for in the European elections a few weeks ago. "I don't vote" was his defiant response, as if it was his way of protesting that he believed it didn't make any difference who he voted for.

It's quite sad that in Great Britain only 50% of the population - plus or minus 10% - can be bothered to vote; be it European elections, local elections or even general elections. In the recent European elections it was approximately 40% and in the last general election it was approximately 60%.

Taking the general election as an example: over 20 million people didn't vote.

Why?

Disillusionment?
Protest?
Main parties all have the same policies?
Assumption that Labour would get a majority anyway?

Personally I believe, like my friend said, it's because people feel their vote doesn't really count. What difference will it make to them? Will their lives improve, degrade or stay the same? When the Government says it's pumping money into something, who notices? Who benefits?

I've been thinking about this over these past few weeks as the misdemeanours of various MPs have become apparent thanks to the Telegraph and it's struck me that in the UK we really don't have a proper democracy in the true sense that the people have the power.

Does every vote count in a general election? The answer is it doesn't, due to the First Past the Post system. Let me give a quick example.

In a constituency of 24,001 people, 12001 people vote Labour and 12000 vote Conservative. Labour wins, the Conservative votes are discarded. Now, assume that the first 12001 people that went to the ballot box all ticked Labour candidates. At this point, it really doesn't matter who the other 12000 people vote for because Labour has already won. Therefore it can be said that their votes did not count.

Yes, this can work to the advantage of any party and you could say where one party gains in one place another gains in another place, so it's swings and roundabouts. It's still not a truly democratic and fair system though, because it can be manipulated. If there are two constituencies next to each other whereby one is traditionally weak and one is strong in terms of a party's domination of the vote, parties can orchestrate some voters from the strong constituency to vote in the weak one.

For the past 12 years we've been in a position where Labour, who got only 3% more of the total vote share than the Conservatives in the 2005 general election, have had a huge majority in the House of Commons and therefore you can say that all the other parties and all the other votes were irrelevant.

The result of first past the post is that representation in the House of Commons does not reflect the actual vote. You could have come second or third in the overall vote share yet still end up dominating the House of Commons because you won more constituencies.

I don't believe it's a great system, I don't believe it promotes democracy and lately with Labour's domination in the House of Commons it has given the Prime Minister an almost presidential role, though Mr Brown is falling from this pedestal quite rapidly (if he ever really climbed on to it in the first place).

So what do we need to sort it out?

Michael Jackson coming back from the dead to sing us all into the sunlight?

Kim Jong Il to nuke us into oblivion?

The other popular alternative to first past the post is proportional representation which shares the seats in the House of Commons proportionally to the number of votes for each party.

This means that every vote counts so radical parties, racist parties, one-policy parties and lots of independents will get seats there, and the domination of the big two parties will be lessened.

It sounds good on paper, but in practise it means that anything passing through the House of Commons would be voted on by these minority parties and their votes could make or break the outcome.

Some say that's a good thing, and some don't. The Government is against it: they say it would be a pointless coalition of a large number of small parties that never got anything done. Whilst that might be correct, it would in my view still be more representative than the current system.

It's not something I believe will happen unless the voting figures drop even more than they have already. I do believe that when the Prime Minister calls the next election, we will see a rise in voting simply to get him out but it could easily go the other way.

There can't be many people that still won't vote Conservative "because Thatcher closed the mines", can there?

Am I bovvered?

2009-07-01T13:25:00.008+01:00

Everyone's got a website these days, haven't they? I once swore I'd never make a blog, but here we are.

Blackpool Council has not one, not two, but ten websites. Ten.

That might not be such a surprise to some; large companies have more than that in some cases. It was, however, a surprise to me, a lifelong resident, because I had only heard of one of them.

Here's a list:

Visit Blackpool
The official tourism website for Blackpool

Blackpool4Me
Has the amazing hook line, "where local people and communities create the site". This site allows local clubs and organisations to have a page on it. From the site, "Blackpool4Me is not your average website - it is loads better! It is a website of websites, in fact its the website of websites." Ok.

BSafe
Blackpool Community Safety and Drugs Partnership. Lots of pictures of Police officers on the street. Sightings of the loch ness monster are more common. "BSafe Blackpool is committed to reducing crime, disorder and substance misuse in the town, reassuring the public through a series of innovative projects and sophisticated intelligence." Not very good at it then, looking at the figures.

Blackpool Coastal Housing
An "Arms Length Management Organisation" created by Blackpool Council. They soon wont be arms length when they move into the town centre. Manages Council houses.

Blackpool Unlimited
An online portal supporting business in the town.

ReBlackpool
Site listing various projects relating to the regeneration of Blackpool.

Blackpool CPS
No, not Crown Prosecution Service, but Corporate Print Services.

Blackpool Build Up
A 3-year project run by Blackpool Borough Council and Blackpool and The Fylde College, aimed at training adults in construction skills.

R U Bothered
Aimed primarily at Blackpool's yoof with some forums and some information about yoof services.

BSFBlackpool
Building Schools for the Future. Where these schools are I do not know, but according to them it's a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Am I about to start slagging them off for having loads of sites? Surprisingly, no, I'm not. I will say, however, that despite some of them sporting web design company names at the bottom, none of them are particularly well designed and there is no house style, indicative of delegation to various Council departments to do their own thing.

The main issue I have really is the underpublication of these sites. I had a look on the R U Bothered site, as I had no idea what it would be but assumed it would have something that related to youth issues. There's a forum on there with 10 topics spanning around 18 months. Thats how under used it is, because nobody knows about it.

Had I wanted to start a business, would I have known about Blackpool Unlimited? No. Did I know what the Blackpool Build Up project was? No. Did I know that Blackpool was apparently building next generation schools? No.

Branson Pickle

2009-06-29T23:11:00.006+01:00

According to the Evening Gazette, Blackpool's "broadband connection" is about to become "one of the best in the country".

These opening words in the article left me a bit confused. Is journalist Nick Hyde telling us that Blackpool is so behind the times that it has only one broadband connection? Or maybe, just maybe, he is a lousy reporter that has been fed by Virgin Media's publicity machine and knows absolutely nothing about the subject he is writing about.

The latter, I think.

So lets digest the article. Mr Hyde is saying that people in Blackpool can now acquire "one of the best" connections in the country. Best in terms of what?

I can tell you now that Virgin Media is far from the best Internet Service Provider in the UK at the time of writing. My history with them is well documented on this blog: to summarise:

I've been a customer since the year dot
I was very happy to pay premium price with Telewest due to second to none reliability and completely unlimited connection.
Virgin took over and offered me a 20MBit package, then applied throttling across the board once I was locked in a 12 month contract.
Their Chief Executive declared that net neutrality is "a load of bollocks".
They proceeded to sign deals with music/film lobby groups to monitor internet usage.
They are more interested in sucking up to lobby groups and the Government than they are about their customers' privacy.

Anyhoo, according to the article in the Gazette we "have only been able to get broadband speeds of between 8Mbs and 20Mbs" in Blackpool. What the hell is a Mbs? A Major bullshit story? I'm sure we get more than 20Mbs in Blackpool from the Gazette alone if that is the case. Another sign that the author, Nick Hyde, is completely clueless about the subject and by this point his journalistic oesophagus was probably full of the advertising that Virgin had sent him.

Next we have a cracking technical case for Virgin being a "massive boost" for business.

Steve Pye, chairman of the Blackpool-based Federation of Small Businesses, said: "My connection at the moment is 8Mb and sometimes it can be a little slow and even crash." Time you switched from Virgin then Steve? Internet connections don't crash: computers do.

He follows on to say: "When you are part way through putting a deal together this ("crashing") is not a good thing." How is 50MBit going to help then? If your connection sucks, increasing the bandwidth will make no difference; you will just be paying more for a connection that still sucks.

I'll give him the benefit on that but it's still not all good with Virgin. Lets say the 50MBit was needed to conclude the deal: with Virgin Media's Stalinist throttling policies the deal could similarly be lost if the connection was used for for more than 30 minutes at full speed. This is because after that point Virgin Media has decided that you are in the top 5% of users and as a result your bandwidth is cut by 75% for the next five hours. It's automatic, there is no discretion and it will not be revoked. Bye bye deal.

I am absolutely baffled as to why our local newspaper is freely advertising Virgin Media and clearly the article writer has done very little of his own research. Given that it's not uncommon for the Gazette to publish Government policy and agenda as news, a part of me believes it's an active push for Virgin to be the preferred provider of broadband services because they are currently the only ISP to have caved in to the Government and the BPI.

Virgin's 50MBit rollout isn't even news. It has been available for ages and in fact I was offered it a few months back when I left them. The only reason to have it is if you have lots of money to waste on having the "fastest".

For normal web browsing and average iTunes use, you don't need it.

For heavy downloading, there are much better and significantly (5 or 6 times) cheaper products around.

Andy Murray Top 10

2009-06-29T22:24:00.003+01:00

I accept Andy Murray is a good tennis player, even though he may be about to be despatched from Wimbledon by some guy I have never heard of.

Regardless, here are my top 10 reasons to hate Andy Murray.

10. His fake American accent.

9. His annoying fist pumping.

8. His typical dour Scot personality.

7. The "Come on Tim" annoying middle class toffs that for some reason are waving Union Jacks at him.

6. He hates England.

5. "Murray Mount"

4. His clone like failed tennis player mother that groomed him because she was crap.

3. His gold digging girlfriend.

2. The fact that they are touting him as the winner of Wimbledon and it's only the third round. For the Scots, it's like England being touted as World Cup winners before a match has been played. And I know how much you hate that.

1. That if he does ever win any Grand Slam competitions, particularly Wimbledon, we'll never be allowed to forget it.

Skool iz kool

2009-06-28T23:22:00.005+01:00

The schools in my hometown of Blackpool apparently have the fifth highest truancy rate in the UK.

Not a good statistic. Blackpool also has below average figures for GCSE passes and it can be said that the product of schools in Blackpool are low quality.

In true Labour style, their implementation of an education system is out in force blaming someone else: the parents. In this case it is for taking kids out of school for holidays, and apparently they are thinking of locking up parents of truants. Hmm. Stopping parents going on holiday by sending them to a holiday camp. Not sure about that.

I'm baffled as to how - even if the parents took the child out of school for the entire holiday - a few weeks missed can cause grades to be so poor and cause truancy to be so high. Well, unless the parents are extremely rich and they are constantly going on holiday. Call me a snob if you want but rich parents tend to know better than that.

Parents do try to take their kids out of school towards the end of term time, just before the holidays in order to save quite a bit of cash on the holiday itself, because clearly holidays are expensive when all the kids are off school. Toward the end of term, exams are done, the curriculum is basically complete. Why does it matter if someone takes a week off?

I think the schools are looking for an easy way out by passing on the blame. Kids skip school because they are bored, because they think it's cool to skip school, and in Blackpool at least, there's no inspiration or aspiration driving through the system to bring people back.

I was taken out of school a few times and I don't think I came out any worse off for it but I didn't skip school at any other time because I didn't want to and because my peer group was not doing it.

It's simply not feasible to blame family holidays for poor grades, and it's not feasible to say that families in Blackpool go on more holidays in term time. It's a bizarre statistic not linked with anything.

The boss of "childrens services" in Blackpool, David Lund, states the obvious when he says there is "a clear link between pupils with high attendance and those achieving well in exams". Is there a clear link between authorised absence (holidays) and really poor grades?

At Palatine School, or Palatine Sports College as it is called now, one in five pupils were persistently absent in 2008. That means they were absent for more than 20% of the term time. And they're trying to attribute that to too many holidays?

Try looking closer to home.

Boring lessons
Low quality teachers
No classroom control or discipline
No out of school activities
Low quality parents

...

Total Recall

2009-06-28T20:26:00.003+01:00

Lately I am liking more and more the idea of being able to recall Members of Parliament, or in laymans terms, kick them out if we get sick of them.

It's how Arnie got in in California: a percentage didn't like the existing Governor and forced a new election, and he won.

This would be particularly useful right now with all these expenses related resignations, or rather steppings down. As you will know, all of those MPs that have been caught with their snouts in the trough are "stepping down at the next election", although they all say they were intending to step down and that the expenses scandal is nothing to do with it. Right.

They are hanging on because they will receive a £70,000 "readjustment" payment if they simply quit being an MP.

Had they gone now, they wouldn't get it. Had they been recallable, they would most certainly not get it, and I think there should be an option to recall their pension to spend it on something more useful.

Bore draw

2009-06-24T08:42:00.005+01:00

So Andy Murray has been slagging off British tennis because 9 of the 11 Brits went out of Wimbledon in the first round. He should have admitted that he was almost the tenth, having been taken to the wire by a no hoper.

It looks like Murray has the easiest draw ever seen, you know, almost as if they have set him up to win the competition. I don't think anyone outside the top 20 is actually in it.

I don't know why they don't just have him play Federer now. I was there last year and was hoping to watch Spanish ace Nadal wipe the floor with Murray. But Nadal destroyed him so fast that I ended up getting the womens semi finals which were just a Venus and Serena cruise.

British Hero

2009-06-23T21:02:00.004+01:00

Looks like Andy Murray won today, after scraping past Robert Kendrick who looked like he could have beaten him.

I was all ready for the Scottish Loser headlines as well.

Maybe Gordon Brown will do me a favour and make a speech.

Mother of the Free?

2009-06-16T22:11:00.003+01:00

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system that strives to regulate nearly every aspect of public and private life. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of state terrorism.

Sounds like the UK.

I'm voting Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Vive la Legislation

2009-06-16T20:50:00.009+01:00

Lord Steve Carter and Ben Bradshaw have revealed their plans for "Digital Britain".

Application of a £6 per year phone line tax to fund the 2MBit broadband expansion into rich suburbs.

ISPs are forced to hand over customer details on request to Ofcom which can be dished out to media conglomerates so they can monitor and sue you more easily.

All peer to peer is illegal, full stop and Ofcom is tasked with blocking it.

"Online piracy is wrong" and "unacceptable", and anyone caught "downloading illegally" will be shot at dawn.

Superb. Another double helping of spin complete with the bitter aftertaste of legislation. I thought this report was supposed to take us forward. Taxing everyone to pay for old copper wire technology to be rolled out whilst everyone else on the planet is rolling out fibre is a sure fire winner!

If you check out what Ben Bradshaw said in the Commons today, it's clear he was just reading his script and had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Bullshitting it about fibre rollout when it's not even on the radar and there is no incentive for any company to take a lead on it.

I was under the assumption this report might be a really important step in making Britain a digital leader. In fact, having read the report, all it proposes is a new tax and a few analyses. No doubt incorporating more and more reports from Lord Snooty, more taxes and even more legislation.

So, they intend to eradicate their perception of online piracy by providing Ofcom with powers to obtain your personal data from ISPs to give to third parties so they can sue you. Currently this cannot happen due to the Data Protection Act. I really am against this action, as I believe most ISPs are. It's just another step to policing the internet and is a burden they do not want.

We've had Feargal Sharkey on again, totally missing the point and pushing his own agenda to make himself more money from his single hit song. Yes, he is chief executive of British Music Rights: another self serving music lobby group that labels all music downloaders as thieves.

He obviously has no idea of reality when he talks about a small number of people not being happy about this. Nobody is happy about it, because its the music industry pressuring the Government to push legislation through to support their failed business model. We don't need these aging, overgrown, monolithic music companies any more given the other means of distribution for music.

Apparently piracy in the UK costs music companies £175 million. The Government has already handed banks hundreds of billions, so why doesn't he just subsidise the music industry like he does for manufacturing, farming, and so on.

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And If it stops moving, subsidise it." - Ronald Reagan

If you download music or movies, the BPI try and convince you that you are wrong, that you are the problem and that you are a criminal. You've no doubt seen the "Knock off Nigel" adverts and associated parodies: likening people that download a few tunes to someone that would rob their grandmother is just bizarre and laughable. It also implies that there's something wrong with doing things on the cheap: something I would vehemently disagree with.

The Government reckon that their measures will reduce "illegal downloading" by 80%, but there is no such thing as illegal downloading. It's like labelling people that buy fake brand name clothes as criminals. They're not. The crime is in the distribution: in the case of file sharing it's the making available of contents and not the downloading of it. For those that use peer to peer, the technology relies on sharing and most peer to peer clients enable sharing by default.

I am sick of people like Feargal Sharkey and BPI boss Geoff Taylor labelling internet users as criminals for downloading something that was available online. I am sick of the Government pandering to these industries. Unfortunately the Government and media lobbies are so far behind on all this, that by the time they legislate for Bittorrent, it'll be yesterday's technology anyway.

I also feel some sympathy for the many businesses that distribute their software and updates using Bittorrent, because they will have to go back to old style leased line technology to provide this to their customers if the Government decide to force ISPs to block it.

I personally believe that these draconian measures will simply benefit other more liberal countries with a more modern attitude to business. Should they ban and block Bittorrent, peer to peer users from the UK will purchase remote servers hosted there in order to operate peer to peer software under different legislation. They will then use a virtual private networking connection in order to download their content from it. In fact, this already happens and is something I certainly would consider if the UK Government bans peer to peer as it suggested in the Commons today.

They should take a look at the case of Comcast in the USA. They blocked Bittorrent and ended up being sued because of it. They lost and the FCC forced them to stop it.

Maybe some day once someone in power actually thinks for themselves and has a background in the subject (rather than getting all their opinions from a board of self serving quango sitters) they will make progressive legislation to improve everything for everyone. This smokescreen only benefits music companies. Everyone else gets taxed or sued.

Vive la Revolution?

2009-06-16T13:21:00.006+01:00

So, Lord Carter today will be announcing a £3billion "Digital Britain" project for delivering broadband internet to every home in the UK as well as plans for "combatting" piracy.

Their benchmark for bandwidth is 2Mbit which, yes, compared to dialup is fast but compared to all broadband connections in the UK at the moment is the slowest and is certainly not a speed that will provide good content delivery for much longer than a couple of years.

In some countries such as Sweden and South Korea, the norm is 100MBit with some homes able to have 1000MBit. Investment was placed in better, future proof technology and they are benefitting from the foresight of their Governments by having the means to deliver high speed data into almost any home.

In the UK we are stuck with DSL: if you can get a BT telephone line - which everywhere other than extreme rural cases can - the chances are you can easily get 2MBit already and have been able to for 4 or 5 years. Standard broadband speeds in the UK are between 8 and 20MBit depending on what you want to pay for. Yes, there are a few rural villages that consist of a few giant farmhouses, mansions and barn conversions that are so far away from urbanisation that they can only get dialup, but having seen some sob stories from these people about it my conclusion was that they probably have enough money to buy the entire internet.

So where's the story?

The story, I believe, is that the "broadband in every home" chunk of the forthcoming statement is a whitewash for the underlying business deal that I suspect has occurred between the music industry lobby groups and the Government in relation to the other part of the story.

Remember I said it would cost £3billion for the broadband project? Well, that money has not been allocated by the Government, which means somebody else is paying for it and I believe it's the music industry.

But what would be in it for the music industry? Simple really, the license to continue to bully people into believing that downloading a few tunes turns them into a criminal with the percieved backing of the Government and Police.

I would even go further and suggest that these internet connections that the Government is wanting to put into homes would come with a caveat - that the music industry can monitor them and can freely acquire personal details and surfing habits of users in order to build a case against them.

Currently this isn't possible, because ISPs are not allowed to disclose details of their customers due to the Data Protection Act. Most of them do not want to either. The only reason anyone would even want to pay for a premium 20 or 50 Megabit connection is to download movies, music and games and if ISPs decided to hound them about it, they'd either leave or cut their subscription to a cheaper one.

Richard Branson's Virgin Media is "leading the way" on this so called anti piracy jaunt. Given their love affair with the BPI I was not shocked to hear that they are now promising to disconnect people that they percieve to be downloading copyrighted content.

We already know that the BPI crawls torrent sites, tries to download complete files from people and then sends a threat to Virgin who pass it on to their customer. I have had one myself, and due to my own anger at that and Virgin Media's throttling policy I am now an O2 Broadband customer. I suspect this is how Virgin will continue to determine someone that is using their network for distribution of copyrighted content, but given their acceptance of spying services such as Phorm I would not be surpised if their statement that they will not spy on users is a complete lie.

In fact, Virgin said they wouldn't disconnect users for file sharing less than a year ago but a quick wave of the wallet from Universal and they have gone back on that promise.

Thankfully they are the only ISP as yet that is persecuting its users in this way and actually there are plenty of superior ISPs in terms of performance these days. When I phoned them to cancel I was told all other ISPs throttle like they do and they started offering TV packages and so on. I was leaving anyway.

As I said I am with O2 Broadband (also known as Bethere/Telefonica) now. I was told I'd get 13MBit down my phone line, and I get 13MBit so I am happy about that. I got about 14MBit with my 20MBit Virgin cable line. The big difference is that after 30 minutes of downloading on Virgin, they cut the bandwidth by 75% for the next five hours, completely nullifying the point of having a high speed "unlimited" connection.

Working it out, it appears that in any 5 and a half hour time bracket on Virgin Media, I was able to download about 10GB. 3GB in the first 30-40 mins and the rest across the next 5 hours. On O2 Broadband I can download 26GB in that time and the best bit is I'm paying four times less for it than I was for Virgin Media. Winner!

I hate Ruth Kelly

2009-05-21T18:17:00.005+01:00

Yeah, this snooty pompous Brown "babe" is on the expenses gravy train too.

She claimed thousands of pounds for damage to her second home caused by flooding.

If my house were flooded and damage ran into large sums of money, the first thing I would think is to contact my insurer about it.

But, like all MPs, Ms Kelly first thought "I'll claim it on expenses".

I also find it quite interesting how MPs from all parties are coming out in support of the change in the rules to permit Gurkhas to live in Britain. If they have all supported this for a long as they claim, why does it only happen when support for the Government is at an all time low? Answers on a postcard..

Serallan

2009-05-13T21:45:00.003+01:00

You're a twat

More bad news

2009-05-13T14:22:00.003+01:00

This week we have heard that a baby was orphaned after its parents both died after they jumped into a river to try and rescue their dogs. A sad story, but I am surprised that we've not had the standard Government kneejerk - ban rivers. Or dogs.

On North West Tonight there was a story about a child that had hanged himself, and his father blamed "high energy drinks" such as Red Bull, calling for a ban on all energy drinks. Again a sad story. His father stated that the child was "bouncing off walls" and always hyper. I'm not really sure what hanging yourself has to do with high energy drinks though. He also declined to say who was buying the child these drinks and why he didn't do anything to stop it.

Finally what's the best way of gaining permanent residence in the UK if you're a Gurkha? Die in Afghanistan. Sad but true.

They are all ripping us off

2009-05-11T16:14:00.006+01:00

So, finally the grand old tale of how much of our money the Members of Parliament are creaming off to feather their nests is exposed. After all, in a system that allows you to fund a second life on expenses it is not surprising to see all members taking part in it.

The News of the World came up with a cracking promotion this week; just collect tokens to enter a competition to "live like an MP" - food bills paid, mortgage paid, gas and electric paid, home improvements paid. The only downside was that they were only offering £75,000 - about half what an MP claims on expenses every year.

I find it quite funny that over the weekend a special hotline was set up for MPs to come clean about expenses that they feared would be exposed and pay them back before they were. It's a whole web of deceit, and certainly a very very long gravy train. Why is our entire so-called democratic system so institutionally dishonest?

The MPs that have been caught are all coming out now claiming that they never supported the system and how they believe it should be changed. That is mightily convenient. They didn't seem to think about that when they were milking it dry for things such as sit on lawnmowers, under soil heating for their tennis courts and trimming of foliage around their helipad.

One in particular that I despise is Barbara Follett, who apparently is the Tourism Minister (although I would hedge not for long). She happens to be married to a best selling author who himself earns around £15million per year from his books. She claimed £25,000 for security patrols at her second home because she "didn't feel safe".

Some of them are paying the money back but it is important to note that this is only happening because they got caught.

Blame, according to MPs, is planted firmly at the door of the Fees Office for approving claims made, however the Fees Office in turn blames the MPs for submitting claims for frivolous items and says it is not their job to decide whether something can be claimed for or not. Hardly the shock of the century, I know.

Both are at fault.

There is also group of MPs that switch their second home repeatedly around the multiple homes in their property empire in order to claim expenses on each one for renovations. It is a disgrace.

I for one cannot believe Hazel Blears is still an MP after her cynical switching of homes both for expenses purposes and tax avoidance purposes. If it were anyone else they would have been arrested for tax evasion, but since she is Member of Parliament she will no doubt get away with it scot free, disappearing to the back benches in a reshuffle.

The salary for being a MP is hardly paltry, yet I would not be surprised if in the case of most of them their salary goes directly into the bank, unspent. The ease with which some of these MPs are able to pay back tens of thousands of "misclaimed" expenses tells you that most of them have feathered their nest. Mind you, the fact that even unknowns have multimillion pound country retreats and live like aristocracy tells you that.

There was a classic interview on Sky News with former MP Lord Foulkes yesterday where his agenda was clearly to ignore the fact that MPs are lining their pockets and ignore the fact that the Speaker Michael Martin is also doing it and trying to block publication of further expenses claims, but instead assault the interviewer and tell them they don't offer as much value as an MP.

Foulkes is also Scottish and clearly he is friends with the Speaker as he spewed out some rehearsed nobody-to-somebody rhetoric about the Speaker being from Glasgow, where according to him not many people get to the "top". More like he is trying to appease the hard working people from Scotland because he knows they will be livid to see a so called hard Labour man from a Labour heartland living the life of riley at their expense and trying his utmost to prevent anyone finding out about it.

When Foulkes was interviewed on the BBC, he was told the presenter earned £92,000 which according to him is almost twice as much as an MP. He does sort of have a point there in that the BBC is also funded by taxpayers albeit by an optional tax. However, she is not stealing money to supplement her earnings whereas all MPs are. To say an MP earns £67,000 is not the whole story - that all gets banked, and their living costs and any luxuries are all claimed on expenses.

If I got a job in London, I'd have to move there and buy a place to live. If you're a MP, you get it all for free. In fact even if an MP already lives in London, they can and do still claim for another house. That in itself tells you that it's "worth it" for them to do so, if only for the giant profit that they will pocket when they sell it. And it should not be.

They should be provided with a flat in London and the second home allowance should be scrapped. All current second homes should be sold and the profit split in proportion between the public purse and the MP. Paying for food should be scrapped, and paying for any furniture or renovations should be scrapped. This would remove any second home switching in order to abuse the system for more gains.

Even Gordon Brown has made an apology about all this; but why now? He knew about it all along and indeed he was part of it. Same for David Cameron: apparently he went ballistic at some of his party for their expenses claims.

He will have known about it, so please "Dave", give up with the publicity stunts.

Spored

2008-09-07T14:18:00.005+01:00

The latest evolution/civilisation game from Will Wright is called Spore and it has been hyped as a game in which you can design everything yourself from scratch and evolve it through different stages.

You can, there's nothing untrue about that. Here's a quick summary.

The game starts in the cell stage and you are a small 2D creature in the ocean. As you eat plants your creature grows and you start picking up parts which you can add on to your creature, for example spikes, a different mouth or fins. Eventually you are able to add some legs to your creation and can leave the ocean for land.

The next stage is the creature stage where you evolve your creation some more in a generic 3D world by attacking/allying other creatures and picking up parts from skeletons on the floor. As you wipe out other species in the world your sentience increases, signified by a short cutscene showing a brain increasing in size.

You can "mate" with another of your race and this takes you to the creature creator where you can alter the appearance of your race as many times as you like. Once you complete this stage your creature is finalised and you move to the tribal stage.

This stage gives you a small settlement occupied by a chief and some other smaller units based on your creature. You can add some very limited clothing and armour to your race and more of this is unlocked as you conquer/ally other races. Like any resource management game you have to despatch your units to gather food either from bushes or fish from the sea, but thats all you can do.

As you conquer or ally other races you unlock a few extra buildings for your settlement, two of them allow you to equip weapons to your units and two of them allow you to equip musical instruments. The instruments are used during a minigame that starts when you want to ally a race. Wipe out or ally every race and the next stage starts.

The civilisation stage begins with the foundation of a city in a world populated by several factions of your race. You no longer control individual members of your race at this point. You design the town hall with the editor and you can then design a house, a factory and an entertainment building. Factories give -happiness and entertainment gives +happiness. You can also position turrets around your city but you cannot design these. The objective again is to ally or conquer the minimap using vehicles this time.

Depending on your activity in the previous stages your civilisation will be limited in vehicles. If you wiped out everything during your path to the civilisation stage, you will be able to construct military cars, boats and aircraft to conquer by force. If you made peace with everyone you will be able to construct religious vehicles to convert other factions to your own. If you did a mix of both you'll be able to make economic vehicles which are used for trading and permit you to buy out other cities.

The vehicle parts you use each have stats on them, so for example adding loads of wheels on to a car makes it go faster.

By controlling other factions that may be different in stance to your own - they might be military when you're economic - you can design and build vehicles of that type as well. Control the whole map and you move to the final stage - the space stage.

This, apparently, is the main meat of the game. You start out by designing a UFO using any of the parts you've accumulated so far plus a UFO subset of parts as well. Then the objective is to travel around the galaxy in your UFO expanding and conquering star systems and eventually the galaxy by colonizing planets and obliterating races.

Cool.

However there are lots of really unfortunate aspects of this game.

The thing that disappointed me the most is that the end game is the same for everyone. No matter what choices you made or parts you used on your race in the evolution and civilisation stages the end game is just a simplified boring space trade game where you trade "spice" for "sporebucks". None of the units you create feature in the end game at all. The race you created doesn't feature at all. The whole "create your own destiny" thing just does not apply.

During the space stage your colonies are constantly under attack by pirates and other races and since you have to go back and assist them every single time it means that you have no time to explore, terraform and colonise. Being able to explore other planets and find other races was attractive to me, however due to constant attacks on my colonies (usually 2 or 3 colonies at the same time) I just can't do it.

You only get one unit for the end game and whilst you can ask allies to loan you one or two ships to make a small fleet, they tend to die rather fast when confronted by an armada of enemy units.

It is possible to equip turrets on your colonies however they are completely ineffective and serve only to buy you a few seconds whilst you tediously click on each enemy to destroy it, then as soon as you clear the enemies and go back to what you were doing, you're under attack once again.

The only way I was able to counter the enemies was to ally a large civilisation and pay them to destroy my attackers' colonies with there enormous fleets of ships whilst I'm plodding about in my one ship.

This is about the size of my experience in the space stage of this game and I'm bored of it.

I expected the city building to be a bigger part of the game than it is, and I was disappointed to see that cities are a simple circle with around 10 fixed building nodes in it. There is zero freedom to create a city except to change the looks of the buildings which is pointless.

Creating the race initially is fun and the game leads you to believe the changes you make to your race will make a difference. I suppose they do at first, but in the end it just doesn't matter because you don't control individual units and dont see members of your race after the tribal stage.

Spore seems to take the worst aspects of the MMO and RTS genres and put them into a series of 5 boring mini games. If they released this game without a really cool editor and without Will Wright's name attached to it, it would have been a disaster.

Actress loves Coke shocker

2008-09-03T00:26:00.004+01:00

So Helen Mirren came out the other day and stated that she used to do lines of coke and loved it. Only a few months ago she was in the paper claiming she used to do LSD as well.

I wonder whether there are any illegal drugs she hasn't done.

Going for Gord

2008-08-27T16:31:00.006+01:00

So Gordon Brown is going to give all of the British Olympians a gong as a reward for winning medals at the Beijing Olympics.

I wonder if they'll take pride of place in their trophy cabinets; Olympic gold with Gordons Gong next to it. Awesome sauce.

It's a somewhat desperate publicity stunt and whilst there might be a feel good factor about people from this country winning on the world stage, at home we're still plunging into a financial crisis and I don't really think the constant bombardment of awards for these people is going to take people's minds off this. With Christmas around the corner, it'll only become more evident anyway.

Bottler Brown then made me laugh when he talked about pumping more billions of pounds into sport in schools. It seems a bit of a bizarre comment since for the last 11 years Labour have been systematically destroying sport in schools!

With non-competitive sports days where everyone wins and nobody loses in addition to the widespread approval of sell-offs of enormous amounts of school playing fields to housing developers, Labour has successfully killed any chance kids of lower middle and lower class backgrounds had of getting interested in Olympic sports. The closest most kids of today will get to an Olympic medal is an ASBO.

It's no surprise over 60% of the medallists went to public schools.

Royal Mail are retarded

2008-08-21T14:18:00.005+01:00

Why do the Royal Mail keep delivering stuff to the wrong house?

I live at number 42, yet they insist on delivering parcels to 24 which is for sale and has nobody in it. This is the third time in 2 months.

Fucking brain dead morons.

Rockstar stole my taxi

2008-08-06T12:46:00.014+01:00

In the media over the last couple of days there have been several commentators calling for Rockstar's latest Grand Theft Auto incarnation to be banned in the UK after it was banned in Thailand after someone murdered a taxi driver and claimed to have been influenced by it.

According to Captain Veerarit Pipatanasak of the Bangkok police, "he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game". Fair enough.

Following this, though, the standard comments appear from columnists, broadcasters and self serving do gooder groupies about how kids are being turned into mass murderers by games that feature realism in terms of driving, shooting or explosions.

Even if games are an influence on people, which I suppose in some ways they are, it's as if other forms of "acceptable" media such as books and television are not influential. I mean, those that shot JFK, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King all had copies of and were heavily influenced by The Catcher in the Rye. Is it banned? Nope. Is there an outcry about it? Nope. They even study it in school in the US.

Movies are full of explicit criminality these days. I suppose they always were. Even at a rating of 12A the latest Batman incarnation - The Dark Knight - features people having their cheeks sliced with a knife and someone having a pen smashed through the middle of their forehead within the first 20 minutes, as well as a far more influential villain in the Joker who makes it fun to blow up hospitals, burn people alive on bonfires, disguise innocents as terrorists to cause friendly fire deaths and induce fear with Catch 22 mind games where the outcome is death if you don't kill loads of other people.

Some say Heath Ledger died due to his role as the Joker which I find somewhat ironic. Without wishing to go into a critique on this film (which I thought was a good film), there were also plenty of incidents of grand theft auto and other crimes involving vehicles as well as weapons including a rocket launcher.

So why then has Grand Theft Auto 4 (a game rated as 18) been slammed constantly by people for being too violent and/or influential when The Dark Knight has just as much violence and is rated as only a 12A?

I believe part of it is down to the antisocial stereotype that comes with owning a games console. Nintendo have broken this stereotype somewhat with the Wii, but it's the only console that is seemingly exempt from it. Its just a shame almost all the games for it are crap.

Since video gaming became mainstream in the mid 1990's with the Commodore Amiga, Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, there has always been an older generation of people that didn't have video games as a kid and look down at gaming as being a strange solo activity. They have no concept of multiplayer games or gaining enjoyment from playing games that are remotely realistic. Apparently if it's cartoony then it's OK, though.

Well what did they do when they were kids? Play cops and robbers? Do knitting? I dont know but I find both of those strange activities. I suppose that works both ways.

But people of this distant generation seem to think that in order to play GTA 4 you have to have ambitions similar to the main character of the game. Not true. It's just a character around which the storyline is based. If the suggestion is that people want to get guns because of GTA 4 I would argue that people who are determined to get guns already have one.

Some people suggest that people buy GTA 4 because it teaches them how to steal cars but really this just shows their own lack of knowledge and acceptance of media scaremongering as fact. GTA 4 doesn't teach you how to commit real world car theft: it merely provides a means to get a new car. You press the yellow button on your Xbox 360 controller. It's hardly the same, is it? Gone in 60 Seconds probably teaches you more about it in the real world, but nobody ever mentions that.

Realistic video games are all about doing fun or crazy things you couldn't or wouldn't do in real life. It's about being part of the action rather than a spectator. For example in FIFA 2008 you can be a Premiership footballer. In Project Gotham you can drive fast and recklessly in cars of your dreams. In NBA Live 2008 you can be Kobe Bryant.

In GTA 4 you can be a common criminal involved in a battle of mafia-style families. You can steal a helicopter and fly freely around Liberty City, land it wherever you want, even jump out of it in mid air. You can drive a high performance car up a large number of ramps to complete crazy stunts such as barrel rolls. You can be a law enforcement officer and settle the most wanted list. You can even cruise round in a fire engine blasting the water hose at people if you want to.

The best thing is that unlike many games which are heavily scripted, GTA 4 isn't. The city is amazingly realistic and you have freedom to do whatever you want within the city. Whilst the storyline is finite, the game never ends until you get bored. Which is generally when you complete the storyline.

Rockstar have combined three popular genres with GTA. Driving and roleplay with a bit of first person shooter (FPS) in there as well. The driving aspect is modelled so that each vehicle drives individually and as you might expect it to drive in the real world. So a sports car is both fast and handles sharply whereas a large American style lowrider drives like a boat.

Some might suggest that those that have played GTA 4 would want to get in their car and run over a pavement of pedestrians. I obviously haven't done it (although some crazy Japanese guy did recently), but it is impossible to re-enact a GTA 4 pedestrian steamroller scenario in real life anyway. In GTA 4 you can mow down the entire centre of Liberty City (modelled on Times Square), suffer no damage to your car, attract no police attention and even if you do it's really easy to get away from them. In real life all you have to do is shine a laser pen at a police vehicle for 4 months behind bars.

Police chases are something that people love: look at the popularity of the Police, Camera, Action fly on the wall cop shows or indeed most action movies. But unless you're a criminal in real life, you probably wont ever be involved in one. Unlike movies though, where you only spectate whilst John Travolta is hammering it in his TVR Tuscan in Swordfish, you can be the one being chased in GTA 4 and it's up to your own driving skill and ingenuity to get away. Personally I think whilst I'm able to enact this in a video game I'm less likely to want to do it in real life.

Many people that have no interest in gaming often claim that video games are for kids but this is yet another completely unfounded statement based on nothing at all. I don't even agree that controversial console games such as GTA 4 are marketed to kids even though the media likes to tell us that they are. Ian Collins on talkSPORT commented that GTA 4 had cartoon-like packaging and therefore was marketed at children. Rubbish. It's just a style of art. He then admitted that he bought a Playstation "to play Space Invaders". Right.

A recent survey was done by Experion group to find out the facts about Xbox 360 and PS3 owners. It concluded that the average age of Xbox 360 owners is between 35-44 and of PS3 owners is over 44 years old.

I'm pretty sure software developers are aware of this demographic. Since GTA 4 is only out on these two consoles why would they market the games at kids? The answer is they wouldn't unless it was a game actually designed for kids.

People often overlook the fact that Rockstar really didnt need to advertise this game. Call it viral advertising or whatever but everyone knew it was coming out and it was much anticipated. This was proven by the fact that it outsold all movies ever with something like $500million of sales within the first week of release.

Maybe if those people in the media that have so much to say about games such as GTA 4 actually went and played it they would realise that it's nothing more than a realistic city with no limits. It's up to the player how they want to play it.

I feel the need..

2008-08-04T09:53:00.004+01:00

I've done a bit of motorway driving this last week and one thing that I had thought about in the past was even more apparent.

As I was in the overtaking lane, I noticed that actually 70% of the cars on the road in front of me were in the overtaking lane and there was the odd car in the middle lane going at exactly the speed limit and some trucks and other cars on the inside lane travelling at around 60-70mph.

The cars in the overtaking lane were doing around 90 miles per hour but these days most people do that. Would it not be more safe to simply increase the speed limit on motorways instead of funneling most of the traffic down one high speed lane?

After all, danger comes when there is a high difference in speed between the fastest and the slowest. If everyone drove at the same speed, be it 20 mph or 200 mph, then provided the cars were safe enough, the roads were in good condition and the drivers were competent there shouldn't be many crashes at all.

Personally I don't really think speed accounts for many incidents on motorways anyway. If you see the serious ones in the news, it often involves either a truck, an old lady driving the wrong way, a drunk or someone that falls asleep.

Torrentalitarianism

2008-07-28T13:30:00.012+01:00

Once again the upper echelons of big business appear to be pushing through their own agendas in the House of Commons. No, it's not cash for questions or cash for peerages this time.

No, following on from my last blog post, it's the British Phonographic Industry again with its cash for laws. This self appointed, self serving music industry lobby group has in the last week or so managed to - in conjunction with the Government - pressure Internet Service Providers into sending threatening letters to people accused of illegal file sharing.

Essentially the BPI will be the judge and jury. They will be trawling torrents, getting IP addresses, looking up which ISP that IP address is controlled by and then instructing the ISP to send a threatening letter, however they refuse to disclose their methods so who really knows whether any of the data they are basing their accusations on is accurate?

Obviously due to data protection laws, ISPs are not allowed to disclose any private details of their customers to the BPI but personally it would not shock me in the least if they were found to be being pressured by BPI lawyers into doing this.

The pressure is mounting: the Government are considering allowing the BPI to obtain personal details of ISP customers without having to go to Court to get a Court Order to do so. So much for privacy and justice when a group of racketeers can determine whether or not you are guilty of something they themselves are accusing you of.

The Government and BPI want ISP's to threaten to disconnect their customers but thus far no ISP has said they would be prepared to do this and Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse has said;

"I cannot foresee any circumstances in which we would voluntarily disconnect a customer's account on the basis of a third party alleging a wrongdoing. We believe that a fundamental part of our role as an ISP is to protect the rights of our users to use the Internet as they choose. We will fight any challenge to the sanctity of this relationship with every legal option available to us."

Well done Mr Dunstone!

ISPs are obviously affected by any possible legislation because if downloading music is driven underground and becomes difficult for the masses then people wont bother with the expensive premium high speed connections and would opt for the 1 or 2 megabit packages.

Multimurderer

John Hutton MP, the head of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and Culture Secretary Andy Burnham MP have also discussed the possibility of applying a tax on internet connections. The figure mentioned was approximately £30 per year and this tax would be channeled into the music business to make up for alleged 'lost revenue' due to downloading.

The self-serving culture of MPs is remarkably similar to the music industry and it's lobby groups. Indeed, it wont come as much of a surprise that Andy Burnham is one of the MPs that voted against reforming MPs expenses.

Their intention for the download tax is clearly to subsidise the music industry and probably cream off a little for the Government itself, however I think the delicious irony of this idea is that it would be the stake through the heart of the music, film and game industry.

Who would buy a game, or an album or DVD when it could just be downloaded legally provided you paid £30 a year to the Government? All online music stores such as iTunes would be history yet CD sales would probably do a little better since they would be the source for people to rip their digital copy and share it.

It seems to have been overlooked in everything I have read that the BPI is just a private organisation that only exists because of music industry profits (5% of music income goes to the BPI). Why should I pay to subsidise an archaic business model? Why should I fund an ailing industry that cannot be bothered to reform itself, instead using its incredible financial might and completely farcical claims to press the Government into creating new laws to protect it?

The music industry has this in-built - but completely absurd - philosophy that people that download an album or a song would have bought the song if the download wasn't available and as a result they feel they 'lost revenue'. Is that what used to happen before the internet and peer-to-peer boom?

Of course not. People simply recorded tracks from the radio or taped CDs/vinyls that were borrowed from friends. With DAB digital radio and multiple digital recording media you could record a decent copy of a popular track from any radio station that broadcasts DAB.

This backwards step would ultimately mean that those smaller alternative bands or producers that have been virally advertised via the sharing of music would never be popular since radio stations don't play that type of thing in general. Back to the old days of endless generic pop music and nothing else with a few moguls such as Pete Waterman sat at the top making millions from it.

Unfotunately with those in charge at the Government having no grasp of real scenarios and situations they take the bait of the BPI hook, line and sinker.

Safe and Legal

It's often mentioned by BPI and British Music Rights spokespeople that the music industry wishes to 'work with ISPs' to create a 'safe and legal' system for downloading music. What? What on earth has any of that got to do with ISPs? It's like demanding that electricity suppliers should work with home owners to improve the function of their dishwasher.

Did iTunes have to 'work with ISPs' in order to set itself up as the premier online source for legal music? No it didn't. Unlike these self serving music lobbies, iTunes didn't sit there accusing its demographic of being common criminals and instead set up a decent service. The only problem with it aside from relatively low quality (bitrate) of MP3 is Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

This draconian system was demanded by the big music industry companies and iTunes had to comply else it could not operate. DRM is an encryption system applied to media files which requires the supplier of the file (in this case iTunes) to supply the 'key' to decrypt the file to each playback device registered with them. As a result, Apple knows you can only play that track on the devices registered with them.

There are of course limitations on how many PC's, iPods and so on that you can register with Apple and furthermore you are restricted to only iTunes compatible MP3 players (which according to Wikipedia totals just 5 different devices: iPod, iPhone and 3 Motorola mobile phones).

Unfortunately for the music industry, DRM only hurts 'legal' users so does not solve any of the issues that it was implemented for. Those that use torrents or newsgroups for downloading music wont be affected, will get higher quality tracks as well as no DRM. And this, it seems, is a concept the music industry cannot - or does not want to - grasp.

Instead of looking at providing a really good music archive with almost any track ever made in it at a reasonable price in a common easy to manage format that works with any MP3/4 player with no strings attached, they choose to lean on the Government to pass legislation that will allow a private organisation (the BPI) to basically police the internet in the UK.

Proposed Draconian measures to restrict file sharing include filtering content, i.e. blocking access to sites determined to be related to copyright theft are in the pipeline. This is similar indeed to the Great Firewall of China which only allows the Chinese to see what their Government wants them to see.

Throttling of users is another thing on the agenda, but Virgin Media are doing this already whether you download legally or not.

Knock Off TV advertising

The copyright lobbies have been advertising on the television over the last couple of years with some laughable scenarios. One common theme is that by purchasing copied DVDs or music you are funding drug dealing, child trafficking, paedophiles and terrorism. Another is the comparison between downloading music and DVDs and stealing a car or stealing from your grandparents.

With the latest Knock Off Nigel advertisements they are attempting to encourage social stereotyping, so if you are someone that downloads copyrighted material from the internet then you are also someone that would steal cars and money from your family as well as steal money from work colleagues try to avoid buying rounds in the pub.

The latest advertisement shows a guy in an open office supposedly downloading films on to his laptop only to be mocked by his colleagues and some moustachio'd pied piper character and labelled a Knock Off Nigel.

But this is what makes me laugh: in reality, everyone would be placing their order for films rather than attempting to outcast the guy downloading them. Further to this, he wouldn't actually be downloading them from work anyway and wouldn't charge people for what he has downloaded either.

It just goes to show how devoid of reality both the Government and the private industry lobbies are. The scenarios they use in their propaganda are farcically exaggerated and ironically you could use Gordon Brown as the one that steals your grandmas pension, Gordon Brown as the one that funds terrorism, etc.

I guess he's a Knock Off Nigel then.

The falsehood that is Virgin Media

2008-07-07T21:25:00.007+01:00

I've been with Virgin Media, or Blueyonder as it was for about 7 or 8 years now. We got it installed when they first dug the road up past our house to put the cable lines down, and were mightily impressed with the blazing download speed of 52k/s (0.5 megabit). Who wouldn't be when the only alternative was dialup internet?

The price was £37 a month which was and still is a lot, but we were paying for the "best". The price is the same now, however the connection has been upgraded to 20 megabit which theoretically gives a maximum download speed of about 2000k/s. I was well impressed when last year I found that Blueyonder were upgrading my 10 megabit connection to 20 megabit for no additional cost.

The current fastest package offered by Virgin Media is still 20 megabit which is around the highest maximum downstream you can reasonably get in the UK. Their other packages are 2 megabit, 4 megabit and 10 megabit. They claim that they will soon offer 50 megabit connections. Cool.

Why am I completely pissed off with them then?

1. Virgin Media are involved with Phorm.

Phorm is a company that makes money from targetted advertising. Loads of companies do that. Every time you subscribe to printed or online media they ask you what other magazines you read so they can mailbomb you with advertising related to the subject of your favourites.

But Phorm gleans its information in unethical ways: by making deals with ISPs to spy on your web usage. It then matches your surfing habits with its database of advertisers and funnels targetted advertisements to your browser, no doubt creaming commissions off at various stages in the process.

Apparently Phorm has entered into these "institutionalised spyware" deals with leading UK ISPs (BT, Virgin Media and Talk Talk). I guess they hope that when people realise that Phorm is associated with these large companies that customers believe they are in safe hands when they are clearly not if they care about online privacy.

Why should I be so cynical about this? Phorm could, after all, be honorable. Unfortunately for them Phorm has an unpleasant history. According to the wikipedia entry in it's previous incarnation as 121media it creating an advertising system called ContextPlus and at least one product based on this was labelled as spyware by a leading antivirus company. This product formed part of a further system called Apropos which, when installed (usually without you knowing) did exactly what Phorm plans to do with Virgin Media, BT, and Talk Talk - spied on internet usage and sent browsing habit details back to them.

Apropos was one of the old traditional types of spyware which used tricks to stop you uninstalling it. Funnily enough, the Virgin Media homepage has plenty of information to help protect users against this form of spyware yet by getting involved with Phorm they appear to be planning to actively solicit and institutionalise spying on their customers. It just goes to show how suddenly morals and ethics are forgotten when there's a chequebook being waved.

Fortunately for us at the moment, the Information Commissioner's Office has stated that Phorm would only be legal as an opt-in service.

2. Virgin Media sold me a 20 megabit connection
....but its only really 5 megabit.

When I first read that Virgin Media were going to start applying a 75% bandwidth throttle to "the top 5% of downloaders" I thought this would mean those that leave their connection hammering downloads day and night, racking up hundreds of gigabytes per month of data.

Virgin Media have tended to advertise their products around downloading more and more media, faster. Indeed my 20 megabit package is advertised as "supersonic". Not for one minute did I think I would be affected by connection throttling since I don't leave my PC on overnight downloading, and rarely download tons of files. But I am.

Problem is, Virgin Media dictates that if you use your connection at full speed for more than 25 minutes between 4pm and 9pm (unless you use the internet at antisocial times) then you are a heavy user.

If I wish to download say a couple of game demos from XBox Live in the evening I'll get around 1400k/s for half of the download and then after that it's game over and the connection speed is reduced by 75%. For the next 5 hours. This makes me a top 5% downloader according to Virgin Media, despite other users downloading thousands of gigabytes more data per month (albeit overnight).

Virgin Media's throttling hours cover almost the entire day. Home from work, go on the internet, download something or other to watch, or some tunes. Maybe let the kids play some games online on their PC's or whatever. Boom throttled: come back in 5 hours.

Sure, even under throttling you can still surf sites but if you're on a home network with a few people using it it soon gets slow, particularly if you want to download anything or watch Youtube.

In addition to being throttled, they also make the connection crap. Your ping times skyrocket and in a lot of cases web sites don't even appear due to packet loss. I guess this isn't intended but it certainly happens.

I think Virgin Media has labelled normal internet usage in 2008 as heavy usage in order to basically cream more profit from their customers. Their XL package is nothing more than a gimmick. In fact all of Virgin Media's broadband packages are gimmicks because you simply don't get what you expect to pay for. They are aware that people on these packages like to have freedom to download a lot of multimedia content: indeed that's how they publicise it.

Sure, they have covered themselves with lots of small print but the overall idea you get from their advertising campaigns is that it's brilliant for people that like to download. How can it be when relatively insignificant users such as myself are being capped on every day in a blue moon that they actually try to download anything of significance (i.e. a Linux ISO or some TV shows)?

How can it be allowed to advertise something as unlimited - which has a crystal clear definition - yet apply a usage restriction to it? That seems like a pretty fundamental contradiction to me. No company should be permitted to redefine the dictionary in order to create an advertising gimmick.

When you get 75% of your bandwidth removed after 25 minutes of full speed downloading within a 5 hour time bracket, are you even getting your money's worth when you could have two of Sky's "unlimited" 16 megabit ADSL package for less than what Virgin Media charge for 20 megabit?

According to Virgin Media, the 20 megabit connection has a higher cap threshold than their other 2, 4 and 10 megabit connections. I disagree. With the 20 megabit connection, you get throttled even faster than you do on their 2 megabit connection.

On 2 megabit, you get throttled after 41.6 minutes of full speed usage. On 20 megabit you get throttled after just 25 minutes! For the next 5 hours of course.

It may well be fairer if outside the peak hours of 4pm-9pm I could actually get the speed I am paying for without being throttled for 5 hours after every 25 mins of full speed downloading.

Not so fast! Amazingly, Virgin Media also applies a throttle between 10am and 3pm as well, so you can only be throttle-free in the middle of the night when obviously you're likely to be up and on the PC.

The Advertising Standards Authority has slapped their wrists a little but let them off the main issues, like alleged mis-selling. Virgin Media should absolutely not be permitted to advertise a 20 megabit product in its current state. They should clearly say that it's only 20 megabit for 25 minutes at peak rate and then you get 5 megabit. They should not be allowed to use the word unlimited. It's simple.

When it was Blueyonder the service was better, the reliability was.. well I never had to call them for 6 years.. so I guess that's pretty good. I wasn't capped either. Branson conglomerate comes in and it becomes shite! It compares almost exactly to his train network: old leased tilting trains that are marketed as cutting edge (despite most of Europe having them since 1990) and priced significantly higher than other forms of transport.

On the Virgin Media newsgroups some people think that having your connection speed cut by three quarters for most of the day is better than having a monthly bandwidth cap. I disagree. It might be better for people that leave their PC on downloading all day and all night, but with a monthly cap at least you know that you will get the advertised speed when you need it.

For people like me that don't leave their PC on downloading stuff all the time, knowing I CAN download that demo from XBox Live and that it won't take forever is better than sitting down at 7pm and waiting an hour and a half for it to download (by which time I'm bored of it already!).

3. Virgin Media are in bed with the BPI

Not much to say about this that isn't on the link but the BPI, or British Phonographic Industry, are pressuring ISPs to threaten users involved with copyrighted material.

Virgin Media is one of said ISPs that is actively doing this despite being the ISP that for years has based its marketing strategy on having the fastest connection and being able to download more and more multimedia.

Recently they mailed letters to some of their customers threatening them with disconnection if they were to continue. They claimed it was a mistake and that they wouldn't be cutting people off.

No smoke without fire I am afraid. Virgin Media are constantly linked with stories involving various copyright organisations and threatening to disclose information or disconnect people.

Ironically, Virgin Media carries a news feed packed with all the games, movies or music you could ever want and is free to download as a Virgin Media subscriber.

4. Virgin Media thinks net neutrality is bollocks
...and believes they are bigger and better than they actually are

Unsurprising really given the other tampering they do/plan to do with our connections, the CEO of Virgin Media has declared that he is happy to throttle content providers if they don't pay his company large sums of money.

Surely this simply means Virgin Media will lose customers unless the user classes the slowness of say BBC iPlayer as normal and just stops using it. I wonder if they will throttle Youtube. I know Virgin Media is a large company but they are minnows compared with Google.

I read also that they were starting to throttle Usenet usage. I guess it's not because of a bombardment of compliments about their service: more that they have noticed people switching off torrents due to "web sherrifs" and going to Usenet which in many cases is faster than BitTorrent and can't be policed by outside agencies. They may be able to monitor it, but they can't remove anything from it.

5. Virgin Media helplines are all premium rate
...and you always have to hold for more than 10 minutes

Speaks for itself really, unless it's a Virgin Media helpline in which case it only speaks to you after 10 minutes of hold music.

Congestion

2008-05-13T13:20:00.004+01:00

Why is it that all of the solutions these fucking morons in the Government and in local authorities can come up with to reduce congestion culminates in making the motorist pay money to them?

Why?

If I have to commute to my workplace and there is no viable alternative, then I have to use my car whether they charge me to drive it or not. It's not going to reduce congestion at all: rather make the local authorities more money to waste on frivolities.

These people need to understand that cost is never going to stop people driving, because there are simply no alternatives that are appealing enough, accessible enough or cheap enough.

Driving your car means you're in your own space with your own tunes on, your own air conditioning, your heated leather seats, and so on. It means you are in your car from your house to your destination and you don't have to keep changing forms of transport.

The only way they will get me or anyone else to walk to a bus stop and stand there freezing hoping it's not late, then sit crammed into rock hard seats with chewing gum on them behind plastic windows decorated with graffiti with the dull drone of a large diesel engine for aural accompaniment is to make cars simply unaffordable or make bus journeys take 50% of the time in a car. (And I didn't even mention that bus journeys these days cost the same and often more than the equivalent in a normal family car).

But they wont, because their evil schemes rely on people driving. If everyone suddenly decided to use public transport, it would be in crisis and furthermore they would have no income from motorists to pay for it. Since buses rely on the same roads as cars they will never be much faster. Bus lanes, yeah, but not many places have them and it's not much of a time saver anyway: buses don't take the direct route you'd take in your car since they have to go around the houses to pick up passengers.

There are also trains of course, but who has a train station that's near them? Trains are only practical for commuting between towns or into cities from suburbs. The shorter the journey by train, the less of a time saving it is compared to the car, since you have to go to your nearest train station and again hope it's not late or cancelled - plus your destination station probably isn't near where you actually want to go so you have to find other means of transport to complete your journey.

Train carriages are also just as bad as buses and in many cases worse when using local commuter trains. Personally I just hate having to sit next to tramps that smell of shit, or gangs of youths that go out of their way to make trouble. I don't have to suffer any of this in my car.

Trains are overwhelmingly expensive too.

If the Government wanted to take some positive steps, it needs to lose the ideology that taxing motorists reduces congestion and emissions: because it doesn't. It's one of those things where if they tell you it enough times you start to believe it despite their being no evidence to suggest that heavy taxes on cars works.

A bit like climate change.

The heat is on!

2008-04-01T23:41:00.004+01:00

Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin is today under intense fire because his wife has been claiming taxi expenses for get-togethers that may not have been related to official business.

Indeed, from what I have heard she had claimed over £4000 in taxi fares to basically pay for her mates to come round to their house for a piss up.

If this is true, Martin must go. His position would become untenable: particularly since he is supposed to be leading an enquiry into MPs bogus expenses claims.

However given that Martin is fighting tooth and nail to stop expenses breakdowns being revealed I think it's reasonable to suggest that there is no smoke without fire on this issue. After all, why else would he be so bothered about it..

It's the taking part that counts

2008-03-28T00:54:00.004Z

That idiot Dr Tanya Byron has been self publicising again: today she came out with yet more revelations about video game censorship.

She reckons that games should be labelled as films currently are, i.e. Universal, PG, 15, 18 and so on.

Wow. If she had a clue about the subject matter she would realise that most games are rated already, and no matter what age you place on a video game it won't stop kids from playing it just like it doesn't stop kids buying cigarettes under age, buying booze under age or renting/buying 18 rated films under age.

Does she really think kids are copying what they see in video games? Really? Does she really think first person shooter games are the cause of black gun culture, or that games such as Grand Theft Auto are the cause of youths taking vehicles without their owners consent?

Does she really think kids are not exposed to sex or violence before they are 15, or even 18? Most TV programmes after 9pm are packed with both but I don't see Byron bleating about this, probably because hey, she is getting paid by taxpayers to compile a report about the danger of the Internet and of video games to kids. So hey, lets not consider everything else outside the box eh Tanya?

I can't be arsed with bleeding heart do-gooder spongers like Byron that make a name for themselves by inciting hysteria within the ignorant masses. Gary Glitter is a bigger danger to kids than some coloured pixels on a computer monitor. Has she really nothing better to do than regurgitate this crap every other month on TV as though it's some ground-breaking discovery she has made?

England are shit

2008-03-26T22:10:00.003Z

Here are my scores, out of 10, for the England team tonight after their game against France.

David James: 0. Gave the penalty away, looked slower than Neil Ruddock and had an even more stupid beard than Neil Ruddock.

Ashley Cole: 0. Overrated money grabber, did nothing at all apart from whinge at the referee.

John Terry: 0. Too slow, miles off the pace and allowed Anelka to breeze past him for the penalty.

Rio Ferdinand: 0. Lazy. Didn't seem to care and looks like Bart Simpson. Except not yellow.

Wes Brown: 0. Scored against Liverpool at the weekend. Still looks bizarre.

Joe Cole: 0. Did nothing except look like someone had just smashed him in the face with a grand piano. I think he had one blocked shot from 40 yards.

David Beckham: 0. No pace and not 21 any more. Received the ball in good areas but stood there playing long balls to nobody. After 25 Hollywood passes that were easily intercepted, Capello took him off.

Owen Hargreaves: 0. Looked tired throughout the whole match. Made pointless runs to nowhere and generally did nothing.

Gareth Barry: 1. Seemed to try. Didn't give the ball away as much as the others and dared to trespass in the opposition half.

Wayne Rooney: 0. Had no shots. Gave the ball away a lot.

Steven Gerrard: 0. Had one shot into Row Z and looked like he was about to cry.

Subs:

Michael Owen: 0. Not sure if he got a touch of the ball. Slow off the mark to chase the one ball England managed to put in the box.

Peter Crouch: 1. Won some headers that went to nobody.

Stewart Downing: -300. If being a left winger is cutting inside and kicking the ball to the opposition goalkeeper, I can do it. Not England quality. Can't think of anything he has done to justify his place in the squad.

David Bentley: 5. Fouled Malouda and pushed the diving bastard to the deck.

Joleon Lescott: 0. How did Frankenstein get into the England team?

The Other Defender I Can't Remember: 0. Guilty by association.

Expenses... again

2008-03-26T13:10:00.004Z

They are at it again. This time the MP's are scrambling to block publication of second home expenditure - and they are spending our money to do it.

A group of MPs led by the Speaker of the House have decided to continue fighting against this publication by taking the issue to the high court. Apparently they were advised by lawyers that they didn't have a leg to stand on and almost everyone thought they would drop it but they haven't.

It seems to me inevitable that they will have to disclose this information. Firstly it's in the public interest and secondly its our bloody money. However the MPs have been bleating that they don't want their addresses published for fears of harassment.

Fine by me, just publish how much they are creaming off to pay for their marble kitchens and plasma televisions. I don't think anyone is bothered where they live.

Of course, we know the real reason they don't want this information in the public domain. The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson (the guy that looks like Judge Jules) summed it up pretty well when he talked about the possibility of several resignations if/when the figures are published.

Whilst MPs operate under a shroud of secrecy with regards to the amount of freebie money they are siphoning off for their own pockets, nobody will trust them.

Secrecy is only needed when there is something to hide.

Ultimate Speed Camera

2008-03-25T11:56:00.008Z

It's been shown many times that speed (or "safety" as they like to call them) cameras are not effective at reducing accidents and it's common knowledge that these cameras serve only to extract more money from the motorist by enforcing archaic speed limits.

You can understand it: it's free money for them. Sure, a bit of investment in the cameras, support and staffing but from then on it's ding 60 quid here, ding 95 quid here if they decide to take the driving course instead of the 3 penalty points on the licence. Easy.

Apparently they are going to start reducing speed limits on country roads which historically have been national speed limit (I think this is 60 mph on a single carriageway).

The problem I have with these cameras is that they were touted as being placed only in accident black spots - the implication being that they reduced injuries and fatalities caused by speeding motorists. I'm all for that if that is the reason.

The problem is that most of the ones I see are placed in places with no schools, no shops and no houses nearby and in many cases they slyly reduce the speed limit so people don't realise they are speeding and get themselves caught by a camera. For example on wide dual carriageways leading up to motorways.

What defines an accident black spot? This is a question I wrote in a letter to the local newspaper a few years ago in response to an article detailing the placement of a speed camera near my house. The residents of a house outside which the camera was placed understandably did not want the camera outside their home. My letter was published, however no responses were drawn from the moronic do-gooders at the 'Road Safety Partnership'.

I can think of loads of speed cameras nearby but these places are hardly black spots. I do know, though, that it was common to exceed the speed limit in these areas.

Taking another angle on it, if someone gets run over whose fault is it? In almost all cases the motorist ends up getting shafted, but lately almost all of the cyclists I have seen have had no lights on their bike. I have seen gangs of teenagers walking down the middle of the road deliberately to antagonise motorists. They tend to swagger along and move out of the way only at the last minute unless you stop, in which case they make abusive gestures at you.

I quite often see dogs that run out into the road on those extensible dog leads because the owner is on some different planet and doesn't restrict it. I always worry when I see parents walking along with kids that must be about 3 years old and they let the kid walk along the kerb without holding their hand. Are people that fucking stupid?

A motorist can be driving any speed and if someone be it child, or dog, or teenager runs into the road then it's quite likely that when colliding with a 1.5 ton lump of metal there will be injury whether the driver is driving at the speed limit or 3 miles per hour above it. But as always given all of the above examples the motorist ends up drawing the short straw.

There is also the factor of the drunk, uninsured, banned driver. It drives me mad that courts seem to think that banning a driver means they definitely wont be on the roads and there have been loads of cases where someone that is banned has got straight back behind the wheel and run someone over. No speed cameras or speed limits will ever change that.

Pressure groups like the Road Safety Partnership just love to blanket as many incidents as possible speed related because it feeds their own purpose and pays their wages: the reality is that crap drivers will always be crap drivers and idiots will always be idiots no matter the speed cameras, traffic calming measures, or whatever.

The best way to solve accident blackspots are to make them non-blackspots. Change the road design, add more saftey railings or pedestrian crossings. Encourage pedestrians to realise they have a responsibility for safety as well.

The Police must realise that people slow down for cameras and then speed up again provided the flow of traffic permits it. This is why they often position a mobile camera just after the fixed GATSO camera: to catch people speeding up again.

Speed cameras are unhelpful and frustrate motorists. The facts show clearly that they have made no impact on the number of fatalities on the road. In some cases, where they are hidden and may appear suddenly in the viewpoint of the driver causing him or her to slam the brakes on, it could be argued that they are dangerous too.

The ultimate form of speed camera would be one that could detect bad or erratic driving, drunk driving and so on however this probably wont ever be invented. The next best thing is to hit bad drivers hard with some jail time. This wont happen either.

I guess we are stuck with the draconian, unforgiving form of speed enforcement for now. I'm just surprised there aren't any vigilante groups going round spraying the lenses so they don't work!

Robin Banks

2008-03-13T15:17:00.007Z

Looks like the predictions about the budget were pretty accurate. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has rammed up tax on almost everything you could think of.

Petrol is up 2p per litre.
Beer is up 4p per pint.
Wine is up 15p per bottle.
Spirits are up 50p per bottle.

The moronic thing is how this is sold as being the "miracle cure" for binge drinking. Firstly it wont be, and secondly we know that it's not really the reason he's taxed it so hard. To provide some sort of comparison all you have to do is look at what has happened with banning of advertising of cigarettes as well as the enormous tax increases on them. Did it stop people smoking? Not really.

It's a straightforward tax on as many people as they could extract more cash from. The Government know it wont make any difference and that people will continue to drink so they liberally smatter some taxes across the board. If it meant people giving up drinking then the Government starts to lose taxes and everyone is aware how financially broke the UK is at the moment.

Let's face it - Labour already introduced 24 hour licensing, allowing bars, pubs and even supermarkets to sell alcohol at any time they like. So now we are all used to the late opening hours we get slapped with more tax? Am I too cynical?

If you couple into this budget the fact that all farm produce - particularly butter, milk and cheese - as well as loaves of bread have skyrocketed in price recently and so has gas, water and electricity you have to wonder where we are heading.

Yet more taxes were slapped on so-called gas guzzlers in the name of Climate Change (tm), despite the fact that the money goes nowhere except into the greedy MP's expenses pot. We're getting battered on every turn by so-called environment taxes so the climate should - if these Government funded boffins are to be believed - be changing to a perfect one because we are paying loads of money because of it. Isn't the case though.

These taxes might seem small but they soon add up. It annoys me also how the Chancellor defers some taxes so that they occur after a few months or next year, by which time we have forgotten about them. For example, he deferred the petrol increase until October, by which time we will probably be paying around £1.20 per litre anyway. It already costs me about 80 quid to fill up my gas guzzler...

Darling has also looked at forcing supermarkets to charge for plastic bags. I'm sure they would rather the Government forced them to do it rather than make an active decision. Small things like 10p for a plastic bag put customers off if they can go elsewhere and get bags for free, but is it going to save the planet? Absolutely not.

Remember the Chancellor is the same idiot that doled out £40billion to a bank to save it from going bust. I don't really see why I should be hammered for more tax because the Chancellor is clueless. It's a sad state when the Government can hand out such large amounts of public money to private firms affected by their management of the economy to save its own bacon.

I'm getting a bit fucking tired of England right now. I heard the other day that in Wales it's now free to park at a hospital. Arguably it should be free everywhere but it's not in England - its more expensive than parking in a town centre. Profiting from the sick.

Also in Wales if you need a prescription from a doctor, it's free. It's around £8 per item in England.

In Scotland, students pay no tuition fees to go to university. English students have to pay over £3000 per year.

What pisses me off is that the tax I pay goes to give freebies in Wales and Scotland, but what are they doing to give me any freebies? Nothing, I don't get anything.

Get me on an plane to Australia.

Drink on the brink

2008-03-08T01:08:00.008Z

My idea of binge drinking is going to a pub one or two days a week and drinking 8 or 9 alcoholic drinks. I don't know what the Government's idea of it is but today it's rumoured that in the upcoming budget there will be a tax hike on beer, wine and other common alcoholic drinks.

Of course, it's not a straightforward tax on these drinks. Its a tax that they claim will stop binge drinking which apparently is the root of all evil at the moment.

I entirely disagree with that. According to the Government, I am a binge drinker. So are everybody that I know. Other than being on the PC too much, I'm not antisocial. I don't commit crimes. I don't inflict myself on other people. I'm not a lout.

To be honest I can't think of the reason the Government has a bee in it's bonnet about binge drinking. It makes them a bucket load of tax revenue and increasing tax on alcohol will simply make the Government get more tax. A no-brainer really. Social drinkers like most people will continue to go to the pub on a Friday/Saturday night, and binge drinkers/alcoholics will not be affected.

They might suggest that a lot of crime is caused by alcohol fuelled thugs and they are probably right. But even after the tax increases I will still be able to walk into an off licence and walk out with a 3 litre bottle of strong cider for about £1.50. I don't think thugs are buying their alcohol in pubs, bars or nightclubs: you can get 6 litres of cider for the price of a bottle of beer in a nightclub.

A thug will be antisocial whether drunk or sober. Alcohol may cause the thug to go to extremes, but people don't suddenly become violent thugs because they have a couple of beers on a Friday night. They become violent thugs because they skipped school, probably have a single parent, have no prospects and have nothing to lose. I've said it before, but it's the Jeremy Kyle Generation.

I get the impression that the Government either has no idea what goes on, or they invent scenarios to which they refer to when ramming taxes up on things. Like petrol and other fuel and road taxes are being rammed up in the name of something that doesn't exist (climate change). Guns were banned after a lunatic shot up a school in Dunblane, causing gun clubs to be closed and all legal guns to be handed in. Illegal guns, of course, were not handed in and have become massively more common since and crimes involving guns have increased.

Local taxes have increased hugely to pay for services like the Police who don't seem to be arresting any real criminals any more, and to pay for rubbish collection which has gone from weekly to fortnightly and you now have to sort your own rubbish for recycling.

Taxing booze on the basis that thugs drink is just another farce. It simply means they will be even more angry and frustrated because their booze is more expensive.

So they will have to steal more to pay for it.

Quake!

2008-02-27T12:19:00.005Z

Was on my PC around 1am last night and suddenly the house started to wobble a little. It was quite windy outside so figured it may have been a strong gust. Then the wobbling got worse and everything in my room was rocking like crazy. After about 15 seconds it stopped.

Apparently there was an earth movement measuring up to 5.0 on the Richter scale with its epicentre near Hull. Hull was in ruins but there was almost no damage at all...

I'm not a plate tectonics expert, but I do know that the UK is not near the edge of a plate and so the world wasn't about to open up and suck us in.

Still, it's quite unusual for the UK to feel the earth move. I don't think there will be a tsunami but if there is, maybe it will help refloat the Riverdance.

Taxed to death

2008-02-19T11:28:00.010Z

Our justice system was yet again shown as a complete embarassment when 76 year old Richard Fitzmaurice was locked up for 34 days for refusing to pay his Council Tax. Mr Fitzmaurice owes West Norfolk Council about £1600.

In 2005, 73 year old Sylvia Hardy was jailed for 7 days for refusing to pay Devon County Council the sum of £63.71 which was owed on her Council Tax for the previous year.

First point to be made is that it is unbelievable that these people have been put in prison when extremely dangerous criminals and repeat offenders continue to get pathetic community sentences because "there isn't enough space in prison".

Personally I class violence against a person or against property as quite serious offences, but there are plenty of cases where vicious assaults or robberies are committed and the offender walks away with a week of gardening or scrubbing graffiti off walls as punishment. But for a minor offence like avoiding the Council Tax they can easily find a jail space for an old age pensioner? It's pretty crazy to me.

I guess this isn't really the main point. These two Council Tax crusaders have stated that the reason they wont pay is because it's an unfair tax. I think most people would agree with that but what can you do about it? Most people have a lot to lose and can't think about contesting it, but pensioners can: they are also the ones hit hardest by the Council Tax.

Council Tax is supposed to support local amenities, rubbish collection, transport, Police, and so on. The problem is that it's calculated in a completely unfair way: it's based on the value of your home.

Given huge increases in fuel and electricity bills its easy to see how pensioners are being hammered by this tax, because pensions are not increasing at the rate of Council Tax. If you're a pensioner on a normal state pension but you're living in your family home that has been passed down through the generations you will struggle to pay because your home may be worth a lot. How can councils justify increases of up to 20% per year when the old age pension increases by around 3%?

It's pretty simple to me - they can't justify it at all but they don't need to either. I can't actually think of any improvements our local council has made except to build a leisure centre near my house. The roads are awful, the traffic management is a joke and only assists frustration rather than congestion, there are roadworks everywhere all the time. To park in the town is an absolute rip off and streets are littered with parking meters and little Hitlers to slap tickets on cars.

As an aside, in the centre of Glasgow it costs £1.20 to park your car for 2 hours. In the centre of Wigan it's apparently 50 pence to park for 2 hours. Centre of Blackpool? £2.20. Rip off. You could understand it if it was worth it but it isn't. The buildings of the town are really, really poor and the selection of shops is pathetic. When you can go to the centre of a big city and pay less to park and have a nice modern and clean experience with lots of choices of shop, why would anyone want to come to old and dilapidated Blackpool?

A couple of years ago we had our rubbish bins collected every week and they would take whatever you left out. Now it's every two weeks, you have to have 4 different wheelie bins and seperate your rubbish into them for recycling and they wont collect the bins if they are over a certain weight. Furthermore they only take one bin per week.

This is the case amongst almost every council and must save them an absolute fortune considering they also profit from your waste now that you so kindly seperated it for recycling. Council tax time and boom, 8% increase.

There's more antisocial behaviour than ever before, amenities such as local swimming pools and gardens are being closed down due to "lack of money". Everywhere you look the council are cutting back. So where's all the Council Tax going?

Simple. Like MP's, Councillors are fuelling their space rockets with it and passing the bill on to members of the local area. Our local Council employs some people on £250,000 per year contracts to basically bullshit about nothing. We've had a million white elephants proposed such as "Storm City" which completely failed when it was first brought out in the Midlands, the Super Casino which wont ever happen plus endless Las Vegas style revamps which wont ever happen. Revamps of the bus station that wont happen, Pharaoh's Palace and international hotels along the sea front that wont ever happen. A world class conference centre which wont ever happen.

All these artists impressions to deceive the council tax payer that the council wants to improve. Unfortunately I look at the facts not the propaganda that hits the front page of the local newspaper (the Evening Gazette).

Absolutely loads of money was creamed off by the Councillors and their cronies beneath that Super Casino umbrella. They must have spent about £50,000 on free holidays to Las Vegas under the guise of factfinding. Casino "consultants" were employed on huge contracts to do the best part of nothing.

Money is leaking everywhere within Councils. Fylde council has been slammed for wasting over £600,000 on a waste disposal project because it's causing two local attractions as well as a swimming pool in a nearby suburb to face closure due to lack of money.

How can these muppets come up with this nonsense? Sure you save money by closing swimming pools, leisure centres, lakeside attractions, parks, gardens, and so on. But then you don't have any services. And Council Tax would still go up. Maybe closing the town hall down would work.

Our local town hall planned to waste almost £1million on a Lowry painting "for the people of Blackpool to enjoy". What a load of bollocks. They would stick it in the town hall where they can wank themselves silly over it. Whichever stupid twat came up with that idea should be fired on the spot. If they can afford that painting, they can afford to keep our services going.

They have even closed all the public toilets and a private company called Danfo has been contracted to provide them. You now have to pay to use the toilet because the Council wanted to save some money on staff. It's indirect taxation.

Council tax pays for all the misdemeanours of the local authorites in Britain and is utterly and completely unfair. It should be scrapped immediately. The much hated Poll Tax - a personal tax rather than one based on the value of your house - was far fairer.

I believe they should implement a local income tax for local services. I believe the Police should be paid out of national income tax. I certainly don't think councils should be able to waste all our Council Tax money and slap a bill for more on your doorstep every year. I think better controls and management of council spending is needed. More efficiency is needed to keep council spending down and give value for money.

Their jailing might be a sad reflection on our "justice" system but I don't feel sorry for the two Council Tax evaders, Sylvia and Richard. I believe their cause is just and that sooner or later the camel's back will break on this issue. MPs are starting to get rumbled with their hands in the coffers and it's time to start slamming Councillors for the same and bring shame upon this archaic tax.

These people were all voted in by you and I yet they continue to flaunt our trust by selfishly lining their own pockets or pursuing their own self-benefitting agendas. It doesn't even seem to be about Government or Local Government: you can see this by the crazy schemes they implement which don't benefit anyone whilst letting core services and building rot. Pandering to pressure groups and corporations instead of practising the will of the people.

My town, formerly the UK's premium tourist resort, is in freefall. But all the fat cats in the Council care about is making more money for themselves to waste.

Share the love

2008-02-12T18:24:00.000Z

There's a device known as the "Mosquito" which has been around for a while here. Essentially it is a high frequency sound emitter that only people under the age of 25 can hear due to hearing degradation as people get older. It's installed outside off licenses and known places where hoodies hang around and is used to disperse them. But now one council that used them has banned them because a hoodie decided to complain that it gave him a headache. How ridiculous.

Unsurprisingly various idiots have come out in the press bleating about human rights, including Shami Chakrabarti who always seems to get her opinion into the media despite being a nobody. They brought racism into it by talking about a device that only emitted high pitch sounds to black people. I don't know why, I guess there was some point there but I couldn't see it. It's always the same in this country, the vandals and hoodies that are antisocial and commit offences get all the support and the shopkeeper gets no protection.

Similarly, drugs-cheat Dwain Chambers today was included in the British World Indoor Athletics team despite UK Athletics saying they didn't want him in. Chambers was rumbled in 2003 for knowingly taking performance enchancing drugs and advocated drug use afterwards saying that you need to take drugs to win. It is frankly unbelievable that he is allowed to come back. However I do believe that a very large majority of athletes are on some kind of drugs.

I was reading some opinions about Chambers and one in particular made me laugh simply because of its complete irrelevance. An athletics follower named "Darren" commented on the Sky News website that those that are slamming Chambers for being a druggie shouldn't buy records from artists that use drugs and if they did they would be a hypocrite.

I don't know what planet "Darren" is on, but knowingly setting out to use banned drugs to cheat in competitive sport like Chambers could not be further apart from taking drugs for whatever pleasure these musicians get out of it.

Those kids that booted Gary Newlove to death got "life" sentences adding up to about 17 years in jail each. This means they will be out when they are 35 if they serve the full sentence (which they wont). Anywhere else they'd have got death.

One-legged former hardcore porn star Heather Mills is still trying to milk McCartney's millions it seems. They're in court again trying to thrash out a divorce settlement. Mills is a gold digging attention seeker. Anyone that saw her pathetic rant on national TV a few months back can see how false and two-faced she is. I read somewhere that she wouldn't accept £50 million but wanted £100 million. How is fifty million not enough?

Go away Galloway

2008-02-08T23:43:00.001Z

I'm getting a bit tired of George Galloway and his apparently goggled vision of Western life. For example, I'm listening to his radio show at the moment and someone e-mailed in commenting that Muslims should be brought more into British society rather than given reasons to exclude themselves from it. This was obviously in relation to the Sharia thing I have already commented on. I agree pretty much with this. If people want to live seperately I don't see why Britain should have its culture carved up to suit them.

Galloway replied putting down the e-mailer, asking whether Muslims should be forced to go to the pub on Friday nights, get drunk, then go outside and piss on the wall on their way home to beat up their wife.

I know he's spent loads of time in Glasgow but bloody hell is that what George believes is commonplace in British society? Is he really trying to suggest that normal Brits are ALL alcoholic antisocial wife beaters? He always cracks down when someone makes a sweeping comment about Muslims but he's quite happy to dish out the same crap against normal non-Muslim British people.

Another stupid one is the way he bleats that abortion is "the law" in this country and that if he were a Jewish doctor he could say he wouldn't do one because of religious beliefs. This seemed to be about all he could come up with to justify his view that Sharia should be implemented here. Problem is, abortion isn't the law here. Sure it's legal, but its a choice on a case by case basis. I don't see the link between the UK law permitting abortion and implementing Sharia for divorces, marriages and any other family cases. Apples and oranges.

I also don't understand why certain bits of Sharia can be picked and chosen either. Why's Glasgow George not supporting the criminal aspect too?

He is a self confessed anti-capitalist which I find hilarious given that he's profited from the very thing he hates. The show he presents on commercial radio station Talksport nets him £100,000 per year for one night per week. In addition he pockets the standard MP's wage of about £70,000 per year plus a further £100,000+ of expenses.

Hypocrite!

Bashing the Bishop

2008-02-08T15:06:00.001Z

Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams came out with yet another load of crap in a lecture the other day. He reckons that Islamic Sharia law should be implemented into UK law.

Is he completely out of his mind? I know it sometimes feels like it but you cannot have one law for one group of people and one law for everyone else.

If every different religion were allowed to implement its own laws, we might as well split Britain up into Little India, Little Pakistan, Little China, Little Saudi, Little Iran and so on. There might be a Little Britain somewhere, but it'd probably be banned.

We already suck up to Islam far more than we ever have for any other culture or belief. I don't mind allowing Muslims to do whatever their religion says provided it never affects me and is never inflicted upon me.

When immigrants from Asia were first encouraged to come to Britain fifty or sixty years ago it was under the condition that they 'acculturise'. Basically they had to accept and embrace British culture.

Didn't happen. In Britain today we have two seperate societies. We have the indigenous population that go about their lives as best they can and we have the Muslim society that aims to turn Britain into an Islamic state. They will never associate or mix with the normal Brits due to the nature of Islam. They do not want to associate with normal non-Muslim Brits. The Koran tells them to destroy us.

Islam is a very very extreme religion based on a core of fear and violence. It has no empathy, sympathy or forgiveness. Consider Gillian Gibbons that was jailed in Sudan because she allowed a pupil in the school she was teaching at to call his teddy bear Mohammed. I was not surprised to see that it took weeks to get her out and the idiot that leads Sudan would only negotiate with Muslims.

Appeasement of any religion makes me sick. At the moment it's Islam but it doesn't really matter which one. Sudan should have had trade embargos immediately and all aid withdrawn immediately. Why can't we have the conviction that Muslims do when they run into a supermarket and blow themselves sky high?

I personally think all religious fanatics should be booted out of Britain, including Rowan Williams and his ilk. Christianity and Islam have the same goal - they want the whole world to be the same religion. The difference is Christianity is far older than Islam and yes 800 years ago Christians were doing all the violent things the Muslims are doing now.

Britain is pretty much secular now. Church of England is dying out and due to all the negativity in the media about religion I believe most people that were born here are not interested in it. I'm not just talking about 'white people'. There are obviously exceptions including those with an Asian parentage that can't let go of Islam.

Im astounded how Williams can throw away all his beliefs, get on his knees and try to appease Muslims with this rubbish. Maybe he's doing it to remind people that he hasn't died yet, because lets face it - what else does this muppet do?

Whats next, I wonder. Will he be advocating honor killings and public stoning in accordance with Sharia?

Now he must resign.

Osama Mubarack

2008-02-06T13:52:00.001Z

Super Tuesday has come and gone but you still can't avoid the footage and stories about the US Democrat race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and this should calm down a bit today when it's effectively decided who gets the nomination. I'm not really bothered who gets it - they're both in support of the same things and both are candidates that will appeal to specific demographics.

Their last Democrat competitor, John Edwards, pulled out of the presidential election last Wednesday and I watched his departure speech. I hadn't seen him before but if you imagine a stereotypical American lawyer then John's your man. He also had an unusual accent. His speech was mostly political rhetoric but what he did say was that he hoped to remove poverty from the USA and both Clinton and Obama had pledged to make this one of their main policies.

I think he suffered because he was competing with "celebrity" candidates but was essentially the same as them politically. He didn't have the money or the fame to generate as much support, and although he beat Clinton by a fraction of a percent in the Iowa caucuses he got hammered everywhere else.

Obama obviously is aiming for the younger vote as well as the "black" vote as they distastefully call it. Apparently he's done quite well in the southern states which has surprised many people, but has not managed to win as many young voters as originally expected. I find the concept of black people voting for the black candidate because of skin colour pretty shallow and futhermore I believe Obama is part of a religion that has anti-white undertones which might cost him in the end.

I've seen Clinton a couple of times on TV over the last few days and she just looks old and nasty, like a witch. Everything she said was boring rhetoric. Obviously she will get a chunk of people voting for her just because she's female which I believe is pretty pathetic. She'll pick up more voters because some will believe it's like voting for Bill again (when it's not). I personally can't stand her patronising speeches. She seems to be ahead of Obama slightly in the current Super Tuesday results.

America is a weird place. You have the big prosperous cities that everyone knows. In the south you have poverty and deep rooted racism. It's quite a contrast: as if parts of the great US of A are living centuries in the past both technologically and culturally.

It seems, though, that the politicians are finally pledging to do something about it assuming they have the courage to back up their rhetoric. As I have mentioned already, Edwards got Obama and Clinton to pledge support to his campaign to remove poverty from America. A pretty honourable campaign but sad that it does indeed exist.

In the British media there has been very little mention of the Republican candidates because of the domination of the celebrity Democrat candidates. I'd heard of someone called McLean but that was all. John McCain is his name and today he's announced himself as the frontrunner, ahead of both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee by quite a distance.

I heard a speech from Mitt Romney yesterday and I thought it was very good. He accepted there was a serious problem with their economy: more serious than they realise. He pledged a return to the times of Ronald Reagan whilst putting McCain down as too liberal. As soon as he mentioned controlling illegal immigration the crowd went wild. There were religious undertones in some of the stuff he said and the fact that he is a Mormon effectively rules him out. I can't be bothered with people that want to ram their religion down your throat. I don't think anyone wants another bible basher like George W Bush in control of American's nuclear arsenal anyway.

Names are important: I don't think anyone with the name Mitt can become President. The only Republican with a remotely powerful name is John McCain but his problem is he's so old and his speeches are honest but weak. He drones on and never gets animated, I guess because he reads word-for-word from a script. He seems like a relatively normal guy though and isn't spewing out religious clap-trap. There is an air of Iain Duncan Smith about him: perhaps because both are ex-military and have axes to grind regarding that. IDS was hopeless and I think McCain would be. The Yanks seem to like him but unfortunately for him anyone can see that he has no chance whatsoever when it comes to the crunch against Obama or Clinton. Mind you, Hillary is a bit of a rubbish name as well.

America probably needs a Labour (Democrat) based President now that it's economy is fucked, but that means taxes will go up. The Republicans (Bush) tend to do stupid things like reduce taxes on wealthy people which makes no sense in the crisis that the Yanks' economy is in. People are already complaining about their lives becoming more expensive - they only need to look at the UK for an example of Labour's Robin Hood taxation - taxing anyone with a job to pay for the lifestyle of those that don't.

Out of Clinton, Obama and McCain I don't really know who I'd go for. McCain would naturally be my choice if I were going based on alignment, as he's the furthest right. However like many have said he's liberal on a lot of issues and he has voted in agreement with the Democrats on a lot of issues. I don't like Clinton just because she seems like an old witch.

I guess that leaves Osama. The one thing he has going for him is that he is young and you'd think he would be more in touch with current generations. There are many issues which I don't really think any of the others would ever have been exposed to and ever be able to form an opinion that isn't based on a viewpoint of a biased, corporation-funded "advisor", such as issues of modern technology, intellectual property, copyright law and so on. However I suppose it's not a perfect world and most Governments are run by big business now. Freedom, choice and creativity are things of the past - the only thing of relevance these days is money.

An example of this is that you have to be a very rich American to run for President. How is this remotely fair or balanced? Apparently Mitt Romney has sunk $40 million of his own money into the Presidential campaign he has no chance of winning. Obama is apparently making $1 million per day from donations to his campaign. It's big bucks. The whole concept of representation in Government is flawed in almost all so-called democracies around the world and everything seems to revolve around money and money alone.

These Yanks that are voting frantically now think they have a say in how their country moves forward and develops over the coming years. But do they?

Jekyll and Hyde

2008-02-05T22:46:00.000Z

I regularly read the blogs on TorrentFreak as a source of amusement and amazement and one particular blog cracked me up.

In the UK there is an organisation called FAST - the Federation Against Software Theft. They started out as a non-profit organisation in the mid to late 1980's when piracy of Commodore Amiga and Atari ST games began to kick off. Most people involved with the whole Amiga/Atari culture had heard of FAST.

At the time "warez" (a name synonymous with any kind of cracked software) were distributed via bulletin boards (BBSs). These were basically a piece of terminal software - often Amiexpress or "/X" - running on a computer at someone's house or office that people could connect to remotely via their dialup modems, which at the time were 14400 bps maximum.

BBSs tended to have an upload to download ratio of around 10 to 1, so for every megabyte you uploaded you could download ten (a megabyte was a lot - I had a 60 megabyte hard drive in my Amiga at the time!). The more elite "0-day" boards used to have lower ratios because the games on there were newer.

Anyway, FAST managed to close a few minor BBSs down and busted a few car boot sales and thats all I really heard about them until a couple of years ago when they started to phone me up at work.

I took the call from this guy and after he had introduced himself the first question he asked was, "have you heard of The Federation before?". I said, "What?". At that point I realised he had actually called them The Federation and started to laugh and just said, "oh right, yeah I have".

His next line was that he wanted to send an agent to meet with me at my office. A fucking agent. I agreed since I thought it would be a bit of a laugh to see what these dicks were really like. I obviously was aware that there must be some financial motivation behind them sending someone to see me, but figured it would just be threats of fines based on a fallacy that "a company like yours in this area" got busted with a few unlicensed copies of Windows from years ago that they didn't use and had to pay some fairytale amount of money to FAST.

We arranged the meeting for 9.30 in the morning, but their agent didn't show up until 10.15. Since the meeting was with my boss and he had a meeting at 10.45, the FAST guy was a bit disappointed to be told he had half an hour maximum.

First questions was what server OS are you using, to which I told him Linux. You should have seen his face. It was like someone had just robbed his family heirlooms. Think of all those MS licenses I could have had, but don't! He was then desperate to jump into his well rehearsed routine about how FAST campaigns for legislative changes to benefit software developers and so on. I knew all this, but what I didn't know and came to realise was that FAST also wants to sell you stuff. How can this be when they are non-profit?

Simple. They created a commercial arm, they called it FAST Limited and all their representatives, er sorry, agents, talk as if they are from the investigative part when they aren't. The cold callers are not from the Federation Against Software Theft at all, they are from FAST Limited that wants to sell you services you don't need by threatening you with investigations from it's sister organisation. I didn't know any of this until afterwards - the salesman certainly didn't tell me that he wasn't from the investigative non-profit FAST. Maybe he worked for both companies.

So what are they selling? Unsurprisingly, they want to audit your software so that you can get a FAST certification that you're not a pirate. It costs a very large amount of money for them to do this and the salesman probably gets a rather nice slice of the cake. The upside for you is that you wont have harassment from the real FAST if you sign up with them.

I find it absolutely appalling that they operate in this way. It's like paying a protection racket:

"If you pay Da Big Boss, you get no problems from Da Cops. Nobody fucks with 'The Federation', capiche?"

Guilty until proven innocent

FAST started phoning me again relatively recently and one of their messages they left was quite amusing. After the guy had left his name and number, he said "it's very important that you get back to us as soon as possible". Dot dot dot. Or what. Are "The Federation" going to bust me? I didn't bother ringing him back. After a couple of weeks they stopped harassing me.

It's quite important to remember that the investigative arm of FAST has absolutely no power whatsoever anyway.. They are paid for by software houses to attempt to disrupt piracy. They are similar in some ways to the TV licensing heavies employed by Capita that come round trying to talk their way into your house to get evidence that you have a television. They apply pressure, they tell you a story of a situation remarkably similar to your own followed by talk of huge fines and try to convince you that you have to let them inspect your premises.

If you crack and let them in, they gather evidence against you and attempt to milk whatever money they can out of you because they can cream commission from it.

Love Shack, baby!

If you check the blog from TorrentFreak you can see the laughable propaganda FAST are spewing out now. The director of FAST, John Lovelock, claims to have developed the "CCTV of the Internet" which as mentioned in the blog will simply be a BitTorrent client with extra logging. Operation Tracker plans on busting companies that are allowing their staff to use BitTorrent.

I just love these names they use that imply that they are the secret service and are watching your every move when they aren't.

You have to wonder where he's going with this. So he gets his BitTorrent client and manages to find your IP seeding. I am guessing that they can't charge you with anything unless they are able to prove that they downloaded, say, an entire game from your IP address. I guess they would have to download a few hundred for it to be worth them trying to prosecute you. No wonder he says Operation Tracker isn't going to produce instant results. Note that it's the Federation Against Software Theft - not against music theft or movie theft or book theft so get them torrents with all the latest tunes pumping at work because FAST isn't bothered about that.

What I find pretty pathetic about this is that I could be sat in Microsofts offices in London with my USB 1000GB drive plugged into a PC. I could download hundreds of gigabytes of warez using an unrestricted news feed such as Giganews in conjunction with a newsgroup search site such as Newzbin, yet the teenager sharing one or two files she downloaded from The Pirate Bay gets the knock on the door not me. Easy targets are what keep these organisations like FAST alive.

Back in the day were they busting the source of so-called stolen software? No, they were busting the guy that downloaded a few games for his own pleasure and decided to make a couple of extra quid at the car boot sale. FAST seems to be a sad joke compared to the likes of the all powerful but unsubstanstial IFPI.

But it's a futile exercise anyway. Everything that can be copied is copied. Sure some people might make a small amount of profit by selling copied stuff but does FAST have any impact on global software piracy?

About as much as this.

Praise the lawd

2008-02-05T13:48:00.001Z

Suicide bombers back in the news again. Yesterday Israel suffered two bombings killing one person and wounding six others. Hamas has claimed "credit" for them, enforcing the apparent truth that they don't want peace in the region.

In Iraq last week there were two bombings in Baghdad where two mentally disabled women were strapped up with explosive vests and sent into two busy markets. They were blown up remotely. Pretty appalling.

It seems a bit crazy over there. One minute they are having these peace talks and George W Bush is pictured shaking hands with the two warring factions with that smug grin on his face, and next they are sending martyrs to their death by remote control.

This isn't a normal war and isn't based on the factors that might cause another war, for example conquering for land or profit. During the World Wars, British people didn't hate the German people and German people didn't hate us. Hitler admitted that he admired the British people. He only invaded us because he wanted to control our land.

You could say he hated Jews so much that he sent thousands to their death - but you can look at it another way. There was a method to his madness: he felt Jews were inferior to the "Aryan" - tall, blonde, heterosexual, Teutonic - indigenous German population and he didn't want Jewish people to breed with his Aryans. It's a bullshit reason but at least he had a reason.

No, before the tears start to flow I don't agree with it and I'm not a Neo-Nazi, but compare this with the problems in the Middle East now. These people hate each other. They don't know why they hate each other but they just do. Is it possible to create peace between two factions that hate each other so much? I don't think it is.

You have to wonder what the thought process was when Hezbollah decided to launch some rockets into Israel from the borders of Lebanon. The Hezbollah leader waking up one day and thinking, "I know, I'll procure some rockets and fire them into Israel, because that will, by some random act of God, turn Lebanon into an Islamic state then I will have served the purpose of my organisation"?

Who knows. But it's safe to say that one reason they did it was because they hate whomever the rockets may kill or injure. I don't blame Israel for sending their army in: anyone else would have done the same and even in this world of constant politically correct Muslim appeasement it was pretty ridiculous how they got lambasted for it. Maybe some of them drew cartoons of Mohammed.

One point that was raised to me was that these splinter groups such as Hezbollah or Hamas don't exist through their own conviction. Their simple foot soldiers are fighting for their group and because the group is against Israel, so are the people on the ground. They don't know what the bigger picture is. They don't know what the ultimate aim is. They just know they they must destroy those that their group calls enemies. Hezbollah for example wants an Islamic government within Lebanon. But why?

Many, if not all terror groups are motivated by the agendas of other governments and wealthy businesspeople. Just as Syria is funding Hamas, the USA is funding Israel. It suits them to have constant violence in the area. Iran is quite happy for groups to attack Israel because it's an indirect attack on the USA. It also turns heads away from activity within Iran. The United States is happy for the media to be talking about Iran and it's nuclear weapons or suicide boat stunts because it means less is said about Iraq. Add into the mix the fact that most of the countries in the middle east have a decent percentage of fanatical Muslims that want to exterminate the Western world and you have one hell of a melting pot.

If you consider the problems we're having with both localised and global Islamic terrorism you have to ask yourself, "is this ever going to go away?". I don't think it is. Will they ever accept people as they themselves have been accepted in many Western countries? I don't really think so: their utopia is a world of fanatical Muslims.

You can't make peace when the ultimate aspiration of one side is the destruction and eradication of the other. You can't negotiate with those that are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to achieve their aspiration. There will always be fanatical Muslims and they will always wish death upon the infidels.

In the UK at the moment there are some bodies trying to bring about Sharia Law. Apparently in some cities there are Muslim groups that actually have their own - entirely illegal I might add - Sharia courts. As a tolerant Western society we permit this, but you have to think ahead. Have we really cracked down on this attempt to impose Islamic culture upon our own? Not really, and it seems to be accelerating steadily.

We could all always just give in, do an Yvonne Ridley and live unhappily ever after under Sharia law. Yvonne is a former tabloid journalist that suffered Stockholm syndrome. After the Taliban captured her she converted to Islam and as a result was released and is now a fanatical Islamist propaganda tool. Even some Muslims have laughed at her charade - she flouts certain laws in the Koran such as drinking coffee (which is a stimulant) but is a staunch defender of the burqa. She seems to publicise the fanatical ideology that Muslims are perfect and everyone else is wrong. Think for yourself, please, Yvonne.

How much pressure from these Islamist cultures and ideologies can the Western zeitgeist take? Will the camel's back ever be broken?

I do sometimes wonder at what stage we are at in this society. J Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project to the invention and production of devices that can annihilate civilisation. To achieve the ultimate goal of fanatical Islam, what would it take? How many of these would they need to get? I think one would do it. In the centre of New York. Then bring on the Nuclear holocaust. There is no winner. Islam loses. Western capitalist culture loses. We all lose.

As Oppenheimer himself famously said, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds".

Con your way, Derek

2008-01-29T18:29:00.001Z

Derek Conway has today been suspended by the Conservatives after getting caught funding his son with his expenses: your money.

Good. But there are still plenty of others that need to go. Like these greedy bastards (sourced from Sky News/Bloomberg):

£185,421: Shahid Malik, Labour MP for Dewsbury
£178,116: Liam Byrne, Labour MP for Hodge Hill
£173,691: Joan Ryan, Labour MP for Enfield North
£172,733: Dan Norris, Labour MP for Wansdyke
£172,327: Tim Farron, Lib Dem MP for Westmorland & Lonsdale

I'm not surprised they are trying to become exempt from the Freedom of Information Act so they can conceal their expenses. It's mad that they can even consider this: expenses should be transparent and honest but as we all know it's anything but. They seem to want to keep it as muddy as possible so nobody can track how much public money they are siphoning off to fund their families' champagne lifestyle.

Check this one out: last year Barry Gardiner, the environment minister, claimed mileage equivalent to driving his own car to Delhi and back. He has an official government car and is a London MP. Unreal.

David McLetchie, the Scottish Tory leader, could not account for why he had claimed £5000 in "personal" taxi fares. He resigned, but only because he was caught.

This is what these bastards get (from timesonline.co.uk):

Staffing allowance

£84,081 To pay for employees’ pay, pensions and perks

Additional costs allowance

£21,634 To cover mortgage interest for a second property, utility bills, grocery bills, council tax and insurance

Incidental expenses allowance

£20,000 To pay for office and surgery costs. MPs can also pick up £250 every month in petty cash from this allowance

Travel expenses

No maximum(!)

The Capitalist Nightmare

I don't blame them for taking everything they can within the rules. Why not? You'd be a fool not to. We are not in a society where morals matter any more, it's the capitalist pinnacle, or rather the capitalist nightmare. Things admired just because they are expensive. People respected based on earnings and status. Greed and wealth above all else.

Why do young girls all want to be Posh Spice? Is it because she's talented and intelligent? No, it's because she wears expensive clothes, has an expensive lifestyle and is married to someone talked about more because of the money they earn than the sporting talent they have.

Why is Tony Blair being talked about lately? Is it because of his role as a United Nations ambassador? Is it because of the things he has done in his career as a MP and Prime Minister? No, it's because he's now being paid half a million per year by JP Morgan and probably a similar amount by Zurich for basically doing nothing and bullshitting about the global hysteria that is "climate change".

His wife's no different. All we know about her is that she's unattractive and gets paid £300,000 per year defending asylum seekers.

Anyway the rules for MPs expenses must be changed.

Currently they state that employees must be: “employed to meet a genuine need in supporting you, the member, in performing your parliamentary duties; [be] able and (if necessary) qualified to do the job; [and] actually doing the job.”

I've decided that MPs should simply be banned from employing their own family. It's quite clearly wrong that MPs can turn their expenses allowance into their own household income, in many cases doubling their money. It stinks.

Take the housewife that would otherwise be doing nothing; perhaps she answers the phone once in a while? Here's £40,000 a year plus pension and perks for your trouble, love.

Unqualified son studying geography full time at uni? £40,000 over 3 years, son. Shame on you Conway.

MPs are set apart from everyone else. They are in it to win it and take as much cash as possible and do as little as possible for it. There are too many examples of greed and arrogance to deny it so there needs to be a crackdown and anyone caught siphoning money unnecessarily should be out.

The UK is bordering on the Italian style Government where as soon as someone gets on the gravy train so do their whole family. Corruption city. The British Government used to have an integrity that it has now lost with scandal after scandal of outright arrogance and in some cases criminality - whether found guilty or not it does not matter.

Once the smoke starts to billow, it no longer matters whether there is a fire. If you think about Blair and the cash for honours for example, does anyone actually think it didn't happen?

All aboard the gravy train

2008-01-28T16:43:00.001Z

I was really glad to see Peter Hain (right) fall on his sword the other day. I'd been clamouring for him to be booted out by Gordon since the story that he'd not declared over £100,000 in donations hit the news. At the time Bottler Brown didn't have the guts to get rid of him but once the Police stepped in and started the investigation there was only one possible outcome: especially when it was discovered that over half of it had come channeled through the dodgy "Progressive Policy Forum" think tank.

Not that long ago Harriet Harman was also rumbled for accepting donations via a third party, as was Hilary Benn. Both should have gone. Now we hear that Wendy Alexander and Alan Johnson are being investigated for yet more undeclared donations. Johnson's on the ropes a bit at the moment but I think he might just be able to hang on. His line is that he knew nothing about it, thought it was a genuine donation and is blaming the Electoral Commission for making admin errors. One wonders who will be next. Personally I find this hilarious because this is only happening due to reforms brought in by His Holiness the Right Reverend Tony Blair.

Even if Johnson goes, theres nothing to suggest he wont be back. Same with Hain. Handy Mandy went for undeclared loans from Geoffrey Robinson and he'd already been sacked and brought back once!

Supermarket Sweep

The Harman and Benn cases are unusual. Well they're the same case really. David Abrahams - a very rich property developer - had been pumping money to them for 4 years using false identities. This of course is entirely against the rules and Peter Watts, the general secretary of Labour, admitted that he knew what was going on but told everyone it was OK. So he bit the bullet.

Abrahams wanted to build a business park on a stretch of Green Belt land near Durham and had applied for permission. He made donations to Labour using the identities of the "directors" of the development. The Government had initially objected to Abrahams' plans but then, all of a sudden, the objections were retracted. It has quite an unpleasant smell about it and a cynic may suggest that Abrahams was attempting to influence decision making without anyone knowing who he was. If this is the case the Government are just as guilty in being influenced by cash. Who's surprised about that though?

We've had cash for honours which put a black cloud above the Labour party after several rich businesspeople that gave secret loans to Labour were nominated for honours. Nobody was surprised to see the Police draw a blank, even though they went through the high profile drama of questioning Tony Blair three times. I suppose this was some attempt to convince people that they were actually investigating an alleged crime!

I've heard politicians bleating on about how the system needs to be changed because so many are being caught by it. No. Whats the point in having rules if you're going to change them when people start getting caught breaking them? If politicians cant be bothered to abide by them then they should lose their jobs and be locked up like anyone else would be for money laundering and fraud. Dave Cameron has already castigated them for arrogance which is quite right. One or two forgetful ministers might be overlooked but when they are queueing up to be investigated by the Police I think what Dave said is absolutely true.

Labour have irreparably harmed the public trust in Government. I know, sleaze was a factor in the Conservatives losing office in 1997 (so were all the Conservative policies that Labour stole) but Labour has really taken sleaze and outright corruption to a new level where only those with no more lives left get booted out. You work in a bank, you launder money, you're out of a job and landed in court. You work in the Government and you can easily spin and squirm your way out of it.

This aside many Members of Parliament are simply cash siphoning non-entities that exist only to profit from you. The myth that MPs are local people that are fighting for your rights is exactly that - a myth. I remember in the mid 1990's when my brother used to be involved with the local Conservatives and I somehow ended up meeting our MP at the time which was Harold Elletson. Elletson was incredibly posh, wasn't from our area at all and quite honestly I would have had no idea who he was. I'd never even heard his name before. He was typical ivory tower material. The stereotypical Tory Boy from Harry Enfield & Chums.

Since the Tories were voted out and kept appointing hopeless leaders (apart from Hague) he jumped ship to become a bleeding heart Liberal Democrat and sits on one of those pointless committees these days. He is clearly mad because he went from a party with not many policies to a party with loads of unworkable "taxation nation" ones. On second thoughts, someone that can get paid £70,000 for doing nothing must have some grey matter between their ears.

I've not made a point here yet, I know. Well the point is that Mr Elletson may well have been their MP but nobody knew, nobody cared and he didn't really seem to do much. He took his massive amount of cash per year, probably siphoned a large chunk of expenses and sailed away into the sunset. Lovely.

I've just Googled Mr Elletson and it shows that his successor in 1997 was Joan Humble of Labour. I didn't know this. I don't know how to contact her. I don't know what she stands for. Of course, Mrs Humble is not even from this area and being a Yorkshirewoman will probably be supplying information to Government on how best to extract further tax from us Lancastrians to give to former mining villages in Yorkshire. Such is my cynicism but I make no apologies for it.

Democracy: Power to the Pillocks

It baffles me that people are suckered in to the belief that politicians do things for them or that MPs listen to local peoples' hopes and concerns and try to push them through with a passion. This isn't the case. How can it be the case? As I have already mentioned, MPs are rarely from the local area: they are professionals. If there's a place with no MP or candidate, they go and try their luck. They cry some crocodile tears about local issues, get their face in the newspaper and then disappear. Nothing ever happens that can be attributed to the MP, they are forgotten about and sit there on a pile of money until the next election. Best job ever.

Rt. Rev "Teflon" Tony won such a landslide because he managed to convince people that they were voting for him and not some former coal miner on an anti-Thatcher crusade. An undeniably good move. Check out their 1997 manifesto cover on the left: You're not voting for Prezza you're voting for me!

I've watched Prime Ministers Questions and the House of Commons is packed with mostly disinterested morons. The questions and answers are all pre-set and everyone is reading from a script including Bottler Brown. One Labour MP asked a question and had to keep pausing as she struggled to read her little sheet of notepaper - it must have been an issue that she was really passionate about then! Or maybe she was one of the true Old Labourites that can empathise with the Jeremy Kyle generation: flunked school, can't read and wants the state to provide everything by taking money from those that have a job.

On normal days the House of Commons is empty apart from one person speaking and a couple of half asleep overweight people listening and occasionally grunting a question. What are the MPs doing to justify the enormous salaries and pensions they get? Why are they allowed to pay their own family with their massive expenses budget?

Money for Nothing and your Pension for Free

The Conservative MP Derek Conway was today hammered for using his expenses money to pay his son just under £12,000 a year as well as dishing out bonuses of a few thousand despite his son being on a full-time university course. He's also paying his wife £40,000 per year from his expenses. She must be some office assistant. Conway should have been booted out immediately for this.

Some might suggest this is typical behaviour and I would tend to agree: there there is a history of MPs with their hands in the till reported in the press. We have already seen Scottish MEPs being probed for claiming full rent on property they have sub-let as well as MPs being rapped for paying relations to "work" for them when the work is in doubt. Even the infamous IDS (former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith) resigned due to allegations that he was paying his wife a salary for no apparent reason. He was eventually found to have done nothing wrong.

This is a bit of a running theme with politicians, but no smoke without fire I say!

I believe it's 100% wrong that MPs can pay members of their family excessive salaries for menial jobs such as secretarial work, especially since we know that they will do far less work than someone employed by a company to do the same work. There should be limits on what is allowed for certain jobs, or alternatively there should be someone that can make judgements on claims for expenses. There probably is, but unsurprisingly I have no idea who it is or what claims they have ever quashed. Probably none.

Labour have been a source of far more sleaze than John Major's Conservatives were in the 1990's and I think the unrequieted devotion by some to Labour is dissipating - especially now that the Rt. Rev Blair has left and in the true spirit of Labour has taken a £500,000 per year position at JP Morgan in the USA as well as another position as some eco warrior with Zurich group.

The taxes, more taxes and even more taxes ethos brought in by New Labour has caused many staunch Labour voters to lose their affinity with Labour and look for alternatives. This is another article for another day, but I think many people would agree that given the conduct of the representatives of the Government there must be some concern as to their real motives when handling the taxes we work so hard to pay.

Strictly Career Reincarnation

2008-01-20T18:57:00.000Z

Pretty much everyone agrees that television is crap nowadays. The BBC takes more money than ever from us using the archaic TV license but all they ever produce is more and more far fetched storylines in Eastenders and crap programmes featuring holier-than-thou bender John Barrowman.

Meanwhile Channel 4 and ITV have been raking it in with these annoying phone in competitions: the ones they got caught using to rip viewers off. Following Pop Idol and discounting Big Brother, X Factor was the leader in the phone voting shows and is actually enjoyable to watch due to the fact that usually one or two of them can sing and obviously Simon Cowell's trademark patronising put-downs that have earned him significantly more money than discovering Curiosity Killed the Cat.

You can almost let them off the fact that X Factor is a pointless charade to milk money from the general public by selecting contestants not based on their vocal quality but to ensure that most types of viewer are catered for and can find someone they like and will vote for throughout the series. I'd do it. But Louis Walsh always spews that it's a talent competition and I completely disagree with that.

Look at the judges. Simon Cowell apart, you have Louis Walsh who manufactured two boy bands. And that's it. Sharon Osbourne that did what exactly? Married a rocker and got pissed a lot? Finally you have the eye candy that is Danni Minogue. But how can she give an opinion on anything closely relating to talent?

Take the last X Factor which Leon Jackson won. Personally I thought Niki and Beverley were better than him and I thought the final was a farce because it was decided more on social status than on vocal talent and so-called X Factor. The fact is, Rhydian looked a bit weird, was not given songs that his voice worked well with and is a middle class, rugger-playing public schoolboy. Furthermore when it came to the last half an hour or so of voting, Dermot O'Leary bleated that there was only 2% between the two singers: at which point a sob story video clip was played where Jackson was saying how he lives in a council house and was doing it all to give his mum a better life. Cue tears and sympathy votes resulting in Jacko winning it and banking the million quid recording deal.

ITV also sports I'm a Tosspot, get me a Career now and again starring overpaid Geordie duo PJ & Duncan, of "Watch us wreck the mic.. psyche!" fame as the presenters. To be fair they are decent hosts and make an incredibly boring show of unknown Z-listers slightly more interesting. For those that don't know, Tosspot is a show where ITV digs up Z-list celebrities (most of whom you haven't heard of), pays them 80 grand each and puts them in a camp in the Australian outback.

They do various stupid tasks such as eating live insects or riding a motorbike across a small plank of wood that crosses a ravine to earn bonuses which are mainly booze and fags. It's basically like Big Brother except it doesn't go on for as long, it's in the jungle and it has less attractive contestants.

The first winner of Tosspot was Tony Blackburn, the radio broadcaster whose only previous television outings had been cameos on Noel's House Party. Since then his career has ballooned. He now presents competitions on GMTV and recently did a collaboration with The Wurzels.

The BBC have jumped on the phone-voting bandwagon with How do you Solve a Problem like Maria? where viewers voted for the lead in Lloyd Webber's production of The Sound of Music; Any Dream Will Do where viewers voted for the lead in Lloyd Webber's production of Joseph and soon to be Oliver - where viewers will - you guessed it - vote for the lead in Lloyd Webber's upcoming production. Unsurprisingly the Beeb have also used Barrowman extensively in these as well.

This brings me to the latest "surreality" show on ITV. Well, the latest permutation of the generic phone voting format. Dancing on Ice.

Usually on I'm a Tosspot you have heard of some of the celebrities but for this Strictly Come Dancing spinoff ITV have delved even deeper into the mire of jobless Z-listers and have come up with... Greg Rusedski! He makes Peter Crouch look like Justin Timberlake and his dancing partner sounds like she's just inhaled an entire helium balloon.

Add on world famous superstars such as Linda Lusardi: famous for getting her tits out in the paper 32 years ago and being a panelist on Win, Lose or Draw in the mid 1990's and Suzanne Shaw, known from being in the failed manufactured band Hear'Say that sold 3 covers and split up you have a cracking line up. I could go on. All these non-entities are topped off by the constant presence of Jayne Torvill & Chris Dean; the former looking like she's just been taken out of an oven pre-set at 350 degrees.

The show is hosted by the former Childrens' BBC presenter Philip Schofield whose contrasting grey hair, perma-tan and fixed dark-eyed stare makes you think twice about switching off in case he comes after you. I used to watch Phil when he did Going Live and the broom cupboard with Gordon the Gopher but he's a bizarrely scary caricature now.

How far are these TV companies going to dig into that Z-list to fill the ranks of their latest reality show? Why don't they get people that we know, rather than bit-part actors or sports people whose careers are over? Why is it always people that want to launch or relaunch their career? Why is it made out to be a talent contest, when in the end it really doesn't matter who wins because they all get paid a fortune and unlike the singing shows they don't then go on to be world class ice skaters or dancers. Why are they even called reality shows when they are about as far from it as Pluto is to the Sun.

One of the reasons I like X Factor is that I feel like I know the judges. Walsh. Manager of West Life. Cowell. Twat. Osbourne. Plastic piss artist. Dead easy, right? But on these dancing shows they pack the judging panel with yet more unknowns. They have some old bloke called Len that always gives high scores to the female contestants. Then there's the token "oh la la" French bloke that comes out with superlatives. Token Aussie that is a bastard and votes everyone down "because thats what he does". A wannabe Simon Cowell but with more aggression than articulation. The rest of the judges are even more unknown than the contestants. Bonza!

But still the lemmings continue to find people to support in generation after regurgitated generation of these shows and the television companies continue to make millions from the phone voting every week. Perhaps I am too cynical, but when I see these shows such as Britain Hasn't Got Any Talent Except for a Fat Opera Singer it makes me want to cry both at the exploitation of the public and the desperation of the contestants.

ITV has another so-called talent show running at the moment called The One and Only. The format is predictable: farm up some nobodies from the cabaret circuit, think of a sizeable carrot to make the show seem "important" (in this case it's a contract doing a show in Las Vegas) and then exploit their lack of talent for several weeks, making millions from phone voting in the process. Complete this package with an uninspiring judging panel comprising of David and Carrie Grant as well as camp Graham "I've done loads of drugs" Norton presenting it.

That summary may sound a little harsh, but the furniture are the least of the show's worries. ITV bosses should look at the so-called talent on display and really wonder whether they should have axed this show before it began. First of all only one of the contestants can even remotely sing, and thats the Tom Jones one but he can't dance and he looks like his beard has been drawn on with a wax crayon. My mother told me I should watch it because the Britney Spears is really good. So I did, and she was terrible. Apparently she's a copper. Exciting.

At least on X Factor they tell the contestants when they sing out of tune or can't dance but on The One and Only the Grants try not to put the contestants down. Sorry but thats just dull. I can't actually imagine any of the contestants being any good in Las Vegas. I'm sure there are plenty of Tom Jones and Frank Sinatra acts in Vegas without ITV tossing another one in there that on a talent scale of 1 to 10 has about -25.

What is it going to take for the public to say enough is enough? The shows will only stop when people stop voting, but it drives me mad that instead of making original funny or interesting programmes they spew out more and more of these phone voting shows. But Britain has a well-known culture of loving the underdog and supporting their chosen act until the end: being voted out or winning. Furthermore I believe a huge chunk of the audience of these shows wishes they were doing it.

The depths of standards that people will reduce themselves to in order to hopefully gain fame and fortune are quite, quite low. I went into work last weekend and I saw the queues for the Britain Hasn't Got Any Talent auditions they were recording: there were thousands of people queueing round the block from the Winter Gardens. They were all wielding their little scripts of whatever they were going to perform for judges Simon Cowell (he gets around doesn't he?), Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan.

As a slight interjection, what has Amanda Holden done that qualifies her as a judge on a talent contest? She's only famous for posing in lads' mags and divorcing Les Dennis. She must be getting on a bit now too.

Anyway what made me laugh most about these people, though, was that it was absolutely hammering it down with rain and these mugs were stood there with almost no chance of being the star they so desire to be. When I walked back to my car I had quite a poignant view. On one hand, along the street there were the thousands of hopefuls. On the other, about 30 metres away from them in a car park below mine and hidden away down an alley was Simon Cowell's £300,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom.

So near, yet so far.

The Government is making us stupid

2008-01-17T10:27:00.001Z

I remember when Tony Blair came in to power in the UK and one of his main policies used to be improving the "three R's": Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic in schools.

Several years and countless billions later we continue to hear reports that the education system is failing the kids. Furthermore you can see this yourself. In this area at least, kids are not exactly known for intellectual prowess and you can tell. They talk like someone has just smashed them in the face with a cricket bat. Which they probably have.

We have a growing "gang" culture powered by these disillusioned teenagers - and some of them are only just teenagers. Of course, these are not gangs compared to the likes of the Yardie gangs in London or those similar gun wielding gangs in Liverpool. Simply gangs that commit minor offences which makes them feel better about themselves. Underage drinking, intimidation, vandalism, verbal and sometimes physical assault. Happy slapping. Even murder: consider the case of Gary Newlove that was battered to death outside his home by three teenagers in Warrington after he went to stop them kicking his wife's car. (The Police should take a proactive stance with these kids and lock them up before they do something like this. Force them to be educated.)

Anyway. Don't get me wrong here, most of this stuff happened when I was a teenager too. The difference is that only the "hard" kids - usually the ones that were thick - used to do it, and there weren't that many of them. When I used to buy alcohol underage, I didn't buy it to fuel me up for a fight or to brick someones car. I just went back to someones house and got trollied. Now a far larger number seem to do it: they are aggressive and do things that are against what is acceptable seemingly for the sake of doing so. It's got to a stage where an Antisocial Behaviour Order (ASBO) is like a diploma and gives respect on the street.

All this brings me to my point, which is Gordon Brown yet again trying to eradicate private schools by removing their charitable status (and resulting tax breaks). There is always this myth that private schools are available only for the very rich.

I went to a private school, as did several of my junior school friends and none of our parents are anything like what you would call rich (Labour ministers have a far higher income than my parents ever did). Private schools offer bursaries to help those that cannot afford the fees. The main thing is that they can choose who they accept: they don't accept rough kids that have no interest in learning. If they find a kid thats desperate to get the best education but cant afford it, they help them.

At that time you could do just as well at other normal comprehensive schools although there is no doubt that the quality and experience of the teaching staff was very high at the school I went to; and the discipline was too.

Fast forward 10 years or so and it's a whole different zeitgeist. You can see how things have changed. Pupils at comprehensive schools just don't want to know. Many of them are what I would class as thick, or no-hopers. I accept that the education system has a part to play in that. Basically I believe the education system in this country has become a joke: key exams are easier than ever to pass, many of the teaching staff are inexperienced; core subjects are dumbed down in favour of easy subjects like media. All this despite Gordon Brown and previously Tony Blair pumping billions of pounds into the system, buying the latest IT suites, latest science labs, books etc.

Consider the private sector and you can see that many of them are scrapping the GCSE and A level and opting for the internationally recognised International Baccalaureate. Compare this to the normal education system where exams are trivialised more and more each year and you can see why there is a problem.

In a comprehensive, teachers do not have the powers to control a class that those in private schools do. Any parent will tell you that once a child gets away with doing something they shouldn't they will keep doing it so it's no wonder classes in these schools are often disrupted by pupils. It's no wonder kids are antisocial when they are outside school because they can get away with it.

Society has removed all means of discipline. You can't smack your kids any more, you can't punish them. The Police never crack down on gang culture like they claim to and certainly don't enforce curfews and no-loitering zones. Many of those that go to comprehensive schools only have single mother to look after them. No father figure. I certainly used to be afraid of upsetting my dad but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I guess when you're a child in a single parent situation you go either completely off the rails and become a reprobate or you set off climbing the ladder to greatness. Not many climb the ladder.

As I said earlier, one of the common complaints from those perpetual benefits claimants that want to send their kids to the best private schools but cant afford it is that only super rich families can afford to send their kids there. Labour often spout about it too but the irony is that almost all Members of Parliament are products of private schools and send their kids to private schools.

What does Gordon Brown think will happen if the charitable status is removed from private schools? Prices will obviously go up. Meaning that Gordon will be the instigator of something he hates: exclusivity. You see, if this happens it really will only be the super rich that can afford these schools, and certainly some will have to close or reduce in size. For what benefit? Is this miraculously going to improve Gordon's awful education system?

No it's not. Private schools are an example that privatization works. Removing them removes choice for a select number and removes the top schools because people on benefits with kids that have been expelled from school already can't send their kids there. It removes the example of high quality education that Britain is known for around the world. What's next after Eton and Rugby have gone, demolish Oxford and Cambridge?

It is an example of Labour removing yet another choice. Soon there wont be any left.

There are monsters out there!

2008-01-12T13:47:00.002Z

I'm getting a bit tired of seeing stuff in the media about paedophiles. Don't get me wrong, I think it's appalling what they do and that they should bring in the death penalty for these people but the hype and scaremongering that goes with it drives me mad - because people believe it.

The media would have you believe that round every corner a paedophile was waiting in the bushes wanking over your kids and was going to kidnap them and commit appalling acts on them later. It's bollocks. In the grand scheme of UK PLC paedophilia is relatively insignificant in number and the authorities know where they all are anyway, except the odd one of course.

But I do belive that the media hype inspires senseless mob culture as well as causing some kids to be effectively locked away like prized posessions by overprotective parents. I remember reading one story in the newspaper a while ago where a woman had her windows smashed and her car daubed in paint with "PAEDO". She was a paediatrician.

More recently in the local news a development of a 4-story high block of flats was mentioned and local residents were kicking off about it. It's a development that has been on and off for about 2 years now due to various complaints and so on. But this time they are complaining that someone that buys one of these flats might be a paedophile and might want to take photos of children in the nursery that is across the road. A seemingly desperate attempt to stop the development given that it's basically complete now.

I browsed the website of the newspaper in question to read that several comments had been made on there following the story. The first five or six were jovial: one querying whether the next move would be to build 30 foot high walls around every school as a preventative measure and another being that they should step it up more and build domes in case paedophiles fly over in helicopters.

At the end, though, one woman was totally in agreement that the development of flats should be stopped because a prospective owner might actually be a paedophile. Even more bizarrely she went on to say that paedophiles come from all backgrounds and aren't a specific category of person therefore any of the buyers of these flats could be one. She is right of course, but what are the chances? You can't live your life thinking that everyone is a paedophile, murderer, or any other criminal. She kept quoting "there are monsters round every corner" and saying "don't you watch the news?!" I do watch the news, and paedophilia certainly isn't the pandemic she would have you believe. The media has her convinced though.

The mind boggles.

Fake guns, pointless laws

2008-01-10T13:08:00.001Z

Today the home secretary Jacqui Smith announced a new law banning deactivated firearms. She said,

"Tackling gun crime is key to making people feel safer and more secure in their communities. We already have the tightest controls in Europe but there is more we can do to remove the threat of gun crime."

In this nanny state we have the tightest controls on just about everything, Jacqui. So why is it that according to the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College since 1997 (when legally owned guns were banned in the UK) gun crime figures have gone up year on year? Don't tell me it's because of fake guns.

It's no coincidence that more guns from Eastern Europe are entering the UK just as more people from Eastern Europe are. It's no coincidence that about half of the gun crime in the UK happens in London. Bizarrely, over 50% of gun crime is actually air guns. I thought these were banned?

It doesn't take a genius to see that making legally owned firearms illegal makes no difference to crime, unless you actually think that criminals used to obtain a firearms license before committing armed robbery. Looking at the figures they don't and at least now they don't have to either.

And what of these deactivated firearms that people like to collect, for example old guns from World Wars. Now they are banned, what difference is it going to make? Are all the criminals that use them going to hand them in? Me no think so.

"The police tell me these pre-1995 weapons are turning up more and more in gun related crime and I want to address these concerns to effectively eliminate the threat from our streets."

Oh really? You mean like the last gun law effectively eliminated real gun crime? Wait a minute...

Call me Brave

2008-01-08T18:53:00.001Z

So Dave Cameron has been in the news today with his latest suggestion for tackling perpetual benefits claimants and that is to make them all do community work in order to get their wages (benefits). He is right that the benefits system needs a reform, however I am not sure this almost communist idea is the one that will do it.

Apparently benefits cost the UK £100 billion per year which seems like a lot, although I'm not really surprised when for those that are on benefits there is no incentive to try to get a job.

Benefits are the gold paving on the streets that many people crave. Get on benefits and you get all your dental and optometric care for free, you get a free house, a free car (in many cases as its cheaper than paying bus & taxi fares), free money and you can sit on your arse all day watching Judge Judy on Sky. If you aren't on about £20,000 you are probably better off on benefits when you consider all the free stuff you get.

Why would you get a job on minimum wage and be worse off than having no job? It doesn't make sense to me, and evidently not to those on benefits as they don't apply for jobs either. Indeed, a large percentage of those that apply for jobs in this area are Polish immigrants - it's the indigenous lazy Brits that are the ones claiming. People on benefits create jobs though - I daren't think how many civil servants are employed to administer the benefits system. In addition people on benefits create jobs for patronising wrong-righting, crime-fighting (maybe) talkshow hosts like Jeremy Kyle.

You have to bear in mind that people are on benefits either because they can't be arsed to get a job; they can't work due to disability; they have 5 million children by 3 million different partners or because they have criminal records, no qualifications and are on drugs.

They took an example of a mid twenties chav on the BBC News this evening and asked him what he thought of Dave's great new idea. He said he thought people on benefits already did community work and that many are on benefits because they can't get a job. He was obviously on drugs.

I have trouble being sympathetic to people like him because he ruined his own life by getting a criminal record and by skipping school. The result being a youth with no aspirations and no qualifications that is a drain on society. The kind of person that probably aspires to go to prison in order to get a better life. Making him do community work for his benefits wont solve the root cause of this guy's problems, wont make him any more appealing to an employer and wont make him any less of a drain on society. He will still be an unqualified convict.

I guess Dave is thinking that if those on benefits that are doing the community work they might think "hey! I could be doing the same amount of work in a proper job and get paid more!" Unfortunately when you get a job you lose all the stuff you were getting for free as well.

Dave also said he plans to punish people that refuse to work. How? He's not going to let them starve or kick them out of their council houses, so whats the plan? Send them to jail? It costs the state 40 grand a year to jail a single person but in this age of crazed judges that dish out completely bizarre sentences such as giving people that are a danger to society a community sentence and jailing an old lady for not paying her Council Tax I would not be surprised if jail was the threat.

I'm sure many on benefits would be glad to go there.

Brown and Out

2008-01-08T00:47:00.001Z

There's a brand new Labour reform on the agenda this week, publicised by pensions thief Gordon Brown today. Apparently doctors are going to monitor people that have certain hereditary illnesses in their family to catch any warning signs that they may also be affected by these conditions.

Shame they've been doing it for ages isn't it? It seems the story of Labour is to keep reinventing old policies simply by claiming they are new.

Globally boring

2008-01-07T13:57:00.001Z

Just seen an interview on Sky with the Director of Friends of the Earth. Can't remember his name but he had grey hair and black eyebrows and reminded me of Alistair Darling.

He actually said something that I agree with, and that is that IF Government wants people to care about global warming they need to make people feel like the small things they do affect the bigger picture rather than issuing negative warnings that the world is going to explode in 2025 unless everyone recycles their empty cans of baked beans and pays more council tax.

It's a strange one. What is global warming? It could either be a genuine climatic condition that the world is affected by. Or it could be propaganda on a grand scale that lures us into believing we're all going to die unless we pay the Government loads more tax on stuff we can't live without, like fuel.

This Friends of the Earth bloke on Sky was ranting on about the world being less congested, fuel being cheaper, more jobs, bigger houses, less poverty, cure for cancer and so on IF and only if we use energy saving bulbs, switch our lights off when we leave the room religiously and continue to get down on our knees and pay the ridiculous so-called green taxes that the hypocritical Government ministers keep slapping us in the face with.

You see, I don't really think the UK Government is interested in global warming in the environmental sense. Of course, there's no doubt they love the guilt tax they can keep applying to life's pleasures in the name of it but other countries have provided incentives to be greener. In Germany for example their Government introduced incentives for people to get solar panels in 2000. They have the world's largest solar farm in Germany. I don't see our Government subsidising solar or any renewable energy for that matter. I don't see our Government doing anything about the crisis they claim to be imminent other than making money from it.

What difference does me paying 200 quid or 300 quid for my car tax make? None whatsoever other than to fund Gordon Brown's wasteful public spending plans that reform all the things Labour manifested to reform when they were voted in in 1997. Does it even pay to build new roads? No. Does it pay to improve bus travel or rail travel or subsidise their use? No.

Even so-called eco friendly fuels such as LPG are not cheap enough for people to want to spend thousands to convert their cars, devaluing them in the process. Where's the incentive?

They have the right idea in London. Making people pay £8 per day to drive into the city probably pushes car travel up to similar prices as rail travel. It's a shame it's gone that way rather than rail prices coming down.

I laughed at what an environmentalist on Sky News said when questioned as to his views about the opinion that global warming was a load of rubbish. He claimed that it must be true because all the world leaders support it.

How many of them have a clue about science?

6 billion quid

2008-01-07T11:36:00.001Z

Just before New Years we were surprised by a gift of a trip to London to see Lloyd Webber's perennial money spinner, Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat featuring Lee Mead - winner of the BBC's talent show "I'm out of my depth on this show - Get me out of here!". Everything was paid for: the travel, the accommodation, the show and as it happened most of the booze too.

The arrangements were to travel down to London by train which on previous journeys has taken less than three hours between Preston and Euston. However, there were some major engineering works around Rugby which essentially cut off the entire West Coast Mainline from London. At one of the busiest times for families travelling.

Fortunately the person that arranged this trip - my brother - had the foresight to visit the station to reserve seats on the train and at that point he was told the train he had booked was not going to be running because of these engineering works and that there were two alternate routes: one involving three changes and the other involving four. Both options were scheduled to take around double the travel time. We opted for the route via Manchester and Sheffield, arriving at St Pancras "International" station: the newly modernised Eurostar terminal.

Not so bad is it, a couple of changes on the way and a bit of a delay so why moan about it? Well, given that the main direct train route from Glasgow through to London had been closed it meant the trains were busier. Much busier.

Every train we boarded was packed to the rafters. Well actually no, not strictly true. The first one from Blackpool to Preston wasn't quite as bad but most seats were taken. This train had seen better days - in about 1950. The seats were like those from old 1980's buses - benches crammed together and made from really cheap velvety stuff that was flattened and torn. The windows all had "Kev 4 Sharon 2006" type messages etched into them. The train also had the heating turned up so much it was like sitting in a blast furnace full of the likes of people you might find on Jeremy Kyle.

Fortunately this train was just 30 minutes and we boarded a slightly more modern - and evidently more popular - train at Preston. The aisles were full of luggage and people standing up that had not reserved seats. In fact on every train we boarded our reserved seats had sullen faced, half asleep students slumped in them so we had to go through the drama of shifting them and their luggage out of our seats to take a standing position whilst already crammed in by standing passengers.

Eventually we got into our seats and the train got moving. The train was equipped with a buffet car but forget the 15 minute battle through people and suitcases packing the aisles. Even if you needed the toilet it was the same battle. Arriving at Manchester we hoped the train through to Sheffield would be quieter but it was busier. Upon arriving at Sheffield, the door areas between the carriages of the train were full of people sitting on the floor with tons of luggage totally blocking entry and exit and being reluctant to move out of the way when people wanted to disembark the train.

The train from Sheffield to London was not too bad once we had kicked people out of our reserved seats again. The buffet car and toilets were still inaccessible due to people standing though. So after about 6 hours we arrived at St. Pancras.

The return journey was worse. We had to travel from Paddington to Reading, Reading to Birmingham and then Birmingham to Preston. The train from Paddington to Reading was busy, but this was nothing compared to the Birmingham train. It was literally full with people and luggage occupying every square foot of floor space. Quite claustrophobic and very hot as a result. The train manager came on the intercom explaining that whilst she realised that it was approaching New Year and that the West Coast Mainline had been cut off, her train only had 4 carriages today and she was really sorry. Awesome.

Now, I accept that engineering works have to be done but honestly why do it over Christmas and New Year when people are travelling long distances and are stressed enough already without needing to have their travel arrangements completely messed up by train operators. Further to this you really have to look at the cost of these trains. Our tickets cost £70 return each. They were standard seats so I think it's fair to assume that people in general would have been paying a similar price per mile. They are not now though - the rail networks have rammed the prices up another 10% since. It's funny though - because the trains were so busy the ticket inspector was not able to traverse the train. Therefore anyone could have travelled for free.

When you book a ticket for a train that does not guarantee you a seat like it would if you were travelling by air. Personally I find this appalling given the price of a ticket. It's free to go to a station and reserve a seat but why should you have to? Even if all the seats are reserved they will still let you on, but my view is that if you have to stand for the duration of your train journey then it should cost you nothing. What I experienced during the two days of travelling made me think of those TV images you see of absolutely packed trains in India.

You would have thought by now there would be allocated seating, TV screens in the back of seats and trolly dolly service like you get on a plane. But all you get on the most modern trains are some lousy headphone jack somewhere that plays boring music selections in low quality. You can always listen to the MP3's that the gang of chavs sat opposite you are blasting out of their mobile phones: it's better quality. Even modern coaches have a couple of TV screens, but trains dont? Barmy.

We could have done our journey in the car and saved around 2 hours each way and over £200 and the Government wonders why people are so reluctant to leave their cars for public transport. I read somewhere that they spend 6 billion quid a year on the train tracks, but do trains ever get any faster? Richard Branson has leased some new "Pendolino" tilting trains that look more modern on the outside than on the inside and have shaved a bit of time off Preston to London but I don't hear much else happening that's new, innovative, time saving or cost effective. OK there's that new section of track that opened for the Eurostar: apparently it saves 15 minutes on a trip to Paris from London and cost 10 billion quid. I'm just baffled that all our tracks are not of this quality, then we can knock time off all our journeys and make rail viable.

In general the busy routes are still too busy, the ticket prices are far overpriced and the gas-guzzling world-destroying car is massively more cost effective, more refined and in many cases faster. Gordon and his bunch of out of touch idiots in the Government must realise sooner or later why people love to stay in their cars:

People don't want to sit next to smelly abusive chavs.
People want their journey to be in their own hands, not that of an anonymous rail operator that does not give a toss.
People want to sit in comfortable, well maintained seats that can be adjusted rather than rock hard upright fabric seats that are often damaged and ridden with chewing gum.
People like high quality entertainment, not tinny repetitive crap.
People don't like having to stare into the back of a seat for hours on end listening to other peoples conversations either between each other or on a mobile phone.

And most of all - people don't like paying shit loads of money for slow, dirty, overcrowded crap. And that's what the rail service in the UK is. Other countries are testing futuristic 350MPH Maglev trains, but we are only just getting round to upgrading our track for trains technology that was designed in the 1970's.

Cop out

2008-01-06T21:54:00.001Z

I drove over to Leeds this weekend to visit Mike. On previous visits I have travelled on the A59 from Preston through past Skipton, through Ilkley and into the north of Leeds which is where Mike lives. It's a nice run through rural areas which can sometimes get busy around Ilkley but usually it's not too much of a slowdown. However this weekend I decided to go on the M62 for a change.

Making good progress on the quiet motorways I was travelling slightly above the speed limit but not excessively so - and certainly not dangerously. Having had one crash 10 years ago I gave up the aggressive boy racer thing as soon as I saw how much my insurance premium went up!

When I joined the M62 there were a few packs of cars which I passed. All of them were exceeding the speed limit, and I was not doing more than about 90MPH for the few seconds it took to pass them. Following this I slotted into the middle lane and cruised at around 80MPH which was about the same speed as all the other traffic behind me. The road ahead was clear, the weather was fine, there were no unusual circumstances. It's nothing I haven't done a million times before.

But one thing was different. On previous journeys on the motorway I have been in an inconspicuous dark metallic green Ford Escort 1.6. A nice car that served me well for 7 years. This time I was in my bright orange Nissan 350Z. And this time a Police X5 BMW came hammering it up in my mirrors. His lights were not flashing but I had spotted him in my mirrors very early as he accelerated past all the cars that I had just passed. I had obviously heard all the stories about Police picking on certain cars for whatever reasons and it was in the back of my mind that I was about to be stopped by this guy. I'd also heard all the stories about BMW drivers! After swerving in behind me he proceeded to tailgate me for about half a mile whilst I'm sat there - still doing around 80MPH - expecting the blues and twos to come on and the resulting patronising castration for driving "dangerously" in a straight line at 80MPH and the accompanying penalty points.

Still behind me, the Police cruiser moved into the inside lane and I thought perhaps that was the end of it. But then suddenly and without signalling he proceeded to cut across all three lanes into the overtaking lane, accelerate past me and cut right in front of me. Then he slammed his brakes on.

Prior to the arrival of this Police vehicle the traffic was moving smoothly and progressively. As any motorway driver will know, as soon as a Police vehicle or a speed camera is spotted by someone the anchors come slamming on to bring everyone to bang on the speed limit. I didn't do that. I don't think slamming brakes on at high speed is a safe thing to do unless there is no other option. As a result the Police decided to cause me to do it by cutting me up and hitting the brakes.

I appreciate that I didn't get any punishment for exceeding the speed limit from this so the officer in question must have had one or two caring bones in his body but did this officer think that he was promoting safe driving by cutting me up and then hitting the brakes at 80MPH?

Did he really believe that targetting the relatively young driver with the performance car that was not driving erratically, not swerving and not tailgating anyone but committing the apparently heinous crime of driving 10MPH above the speed limit would really make a difference to anything, ever, except my insurance premiums? I prefer to drive with the flow of traffic rather than to be a blockage that causes people to have to brake or make maneuvres. If everyone drove at the same speed there would be far less accidents. Indeed, the Police obviously agree with that to a degree after slapping that old lady with a driving ban last week for driving at 10mph on the motorway she turned on to by mistake.

I just don't see why the Police have the right to drive at such high speeds when patrolling: furthermore I don't see why they do it. People already hate the Police. You would think they would want to improve their reputation (in fairness the guy that harassed me did this slightly by not stopping me, but spoiled it by driving like an idiot and trying to cause a crash). There is an inherent hesitation when it comes to the Police nowadays as there have been so many incidents of ridiculous inflexible traffic law enforcement, sneaky speed cameras placed not in accident spots but in money making spots and so on. This can even be extended to other forms of Police enforcement or lack of: victims of crime being prosecuted for retaliating against intruders or attackers, or the fact that the Police never come quickly for real crime that really matters to people such as burglary - unless you tell them you have killed the burglar and within 5 minutes the helicopter is above your house.

But back to motoring, having experienced what I did yesterday I can see why so many people die each year due to either their vehicle or their person being hit by Police vehicles doing stupid maneuvres at ridiculous speeds. Yet what do we see in the media an awful lot lately? Police wasting thousands of pounds of resources chasing up joyriders that film themselves speeding on Youtube to issue them with a pathetic slap on the wrists and penalty points that mean nothing to people that drive with no license or insurance anyway - if you aren't going to jail them then what's the point? Police drivers going to court for driving over 150MPH and getting off. Chief Constables getting caught on speed cameras and getting off. They always bleat about being trained to drive fast and therefore there's less risk but what level of skill does it take to drive at 80MPH in a relatively straight line with no obstacles? None more than to drive at 70MPH.

Why is it so difficult for the Police to realise that Gordon Brown and his tax loving Government are more than capable of persecuting motorists without their assistance?