Spored

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

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

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

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

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..

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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".