This country is getting more restrictive and oppressive every day. The Labour government is intent on total control, "for our own good", "because they know best".

These laws will not remove kiddie pr0n, whether actual or cartoon, written or pictorial, from circulation. All it will do is move the supply of these things further into the hands of organised crime. Throughout history we have multiple examples of oppressions and "for the greater good" laws fueling crime as the populate in general still wanted the produce. Perhaps the best known of these is the USA's prohibition laws. Look how well they were obeyed, and how much crime they generated.

How stupid can a politician be to make a photograph of a legal act or a consensual act between adults, illegal? I know that the blithering idiots don't have any real work to do as the actual work of running this country is now done in Brussels (and that is their fault too) but the country would rather they sat on their backsides doing nothing (or their secretaries) rather than make up stupid and unenforceable laws the the country neither wants or needs. It is now time to make candidates for office take common sense exams. Those without any common sense i.e. the current bunch in parliament, should just be shot as an example to anyone else who wants to 'lead' the country.

These laws could only have been made in a country in which the "people" have no rights at all. It is no wonder that the Labour party wouldn't look at a UK constitution, that would have limited their powers and Labour know no limit to their power.

a number of the larger service stations have a pay at the exit routine. You cannot drive out of the entrance as that has a one way barrier. The exit also has a barrier in place to prevent anyone charging through. The verge also has a very high kerb, high enough to stop a 4x4 or similar vehicle.

These service stations only sold fuel and had plenty of space for queueing before & after the pumps so the throughput was fast enough to be convenient.

I was helping to chuck Phantoms of the front end of the Ark, we hooked the straps onto strong points on the fuselage.

Towing aircraft in a similar way would obliviate the 'excess stresses' on the nose wheel strut. Though, considering the stresses that the landing gear goes through I wonder whether the nose wheel would notice it.

The idea of having wheel motors which would actually be powerful enough to move a fully fuelled & loaded aircraft and light enough for the aircraft to actually take off, together with a power source sufficient to drive these motors, is laughable. Perhaps in 20 or 50 years the technology would be available, now - no.

Icon; 'cos that's what would happen if you tried to fly with wheel motors fitted.

to start sending large amounts of random data disguised as encrypted emails.

Just tune your radio onto static and feed that into your sound card input. lots of lovely random data. This is also good for creating 'one time pads' for truly encrypting data. Remember to transfer these by hand though.

never trust anyone with a beard. Even the men.

Isn't this device _hardware_ RAID? i.e. totally transparent to the OS. So no need for the Linux fraternity to beaver away writing drivers etc. Not unless you want to that is.

I have done a little reading of this act and I now disagree that it is clumsy and ill thought out. I think that it is actually quite cleaver and will full fill its purpose very well.

Providing that its purpose to to criminalise most of the population.

The police now have a ***huge*** blunt instrument to hang over your head.

PLOD - "Please tell us whatever we want to know, or would you like us to have a look round your house & computers and see what we can 'find'. You do know it's 5 years nick and then the sex offenders register for life don't you?"

Me / Anyone "Yes Lord Sir Master. Well first we..."

To think that this law is silly just allows you to walk blindly into slavery. If you think that the abuses of the RIPA have been bad, just wait until this thing gets going.

that the Campaign for Real Ale doesn't read this.

It'll take 4 or 5 pints of their local micro-breweries best foamy stuff to settle them down again.

Paris, 'Cos she knows about calming men down.

I've seen a few times is that express permission needs to be obtained from BOTH sides of the connection. Surely that means the user AND the website.

How is anyone going to get permission from all of the websites for Phorm type profiling to be legal in the UK?

As I see it, if my ISA introduces Phorm I merely need to visit a UK website (which expressly denies this permission) from a UK based PC using a UK based ISP, to make their entire system either illegal or unmanageable. What would be the monetary cost of checking whether a website gave *express permission* (not merely opted in by default) or *expressly denied* permission?

So, those El Reg readers who run websites, how about putting in a paragraph in your terms & conditions expressly denying the use of pages served by your website in any form of profiling?

I have already done this on my site, and am waiting for my ISP to introduce Phorm (or it's successor.)

He has started a discussion on this subject. His paper may be total tosh, I do not know. He has however raised some good points. How about a criminal war? I personally believe that the war in Iraq was based upon false information. Why are we not hunting down the people that provided these lies? Why aren't the politicians who started the war being tried to see if their actions were criminal?

The responsibility for a war and the actions that take place within a conflict should go *all* the way to the top.

because the battery in my battery powered speaking assistance device is flat.

I bet Paris doesn't need anything to help her control her legs.

The world was a little better with you in it. It is a little diminished with you gone.

RIP

so we have the potential for an environmentally friendly war.

Oh deep joy.

are not something that you pick from. They are what you adhere to or not. Simple really.

thinking of the children.

Someone's got to think of the children!

"I'm guessing the Jedi folk won't be trying to subjugate and control the masses in order to fuel their own personal megalomaniac tenancies."

Or we won't notice it if they are. Because these are not the megalomaniacs we're looking for.

"the typical EULA is a dozen pages long and written in impenetrable legalese"

You must, of course, remember that the EULA is written by lawyers, and like all good Land Sharks, they do exactly what they are paid for. The software companies have paid a lots of money to some very clever people for these EULAs. If the companies had wanted them to be readable, then they would be very plain and simple. They are complex and impenetrable because that is what the software companies want.

The more complex the EULA is, then the more it will cost to fight against it in court. So less people will be able to afford to fight these so called contracts.

Paris, because.

Just because alright!!

...but I can spell IT, so I'm probably over qualified aren't I?

Which is powered by three car batteries.

"Obviously the more evidence against the defendant, the more reasonable it is to expect him to corroborate with the inquiry."

Surely they mean

"Obviously the more evidence against the defendant, the less likely it is for him to corroborate with the inquiry."

Paris icon because [just because :) ]

...yet another unenforceable law.

Please won't someone take these absolute pillocks outside and give them the damn good slapping that they so richly deserve.

Possibly you forget that in the UK the site admin would be the victim of a crime and therefore be presumed to be guilty, be tasered (at least twice) then locked up for 42 days without being interviewed or seeing a solicitor or being offered a cup of tea immediately any complaint was made. All for abusing the 'rights' of the hacker.

This is British Justice we're talking about.

"Bourn also said the department's specific counter fraud activities cost £154m during 2006-07 and identified £106m of overpaid benefits. Although some of the department's initiatives lead to earlier interception of overpayments and may deter potential fraudsters, he said the department could do more to determine whether its activities are cost-effective."

Why didn't they just say "Scrap that department and save £48 million"?

A number of the commenter's here (and elsewhere) mention the cost and difficulty of cleaning up and decommisioning nuclear power plants.

The current alternative is to have to clean up the Earth. This might have to be done by another species as I'm not sure that Humans would be around in 100 years time IF the global warming warnings are correct.

Cleaning up the mess from nuclear plants will be difficult and dangerous, BUT the problem is fairly limited in scope and achievable.

Perhaps fusion reactors will be in use before the 50 / 80 years mentioned, perhaps not. We (the UK) were reported to have 300 years worth of coal (this was in the 1960s / 70s I'm not too sure how many centuries worth we have now.) But we cannot burn it due to the carbon discharge. Telling us all to use wind power is purely ridiculous. Even the UK has windless days. Are you going to tell a surgeon that he cannot operate because the weather forecast is clam and cloudy? So far nuclear power with stored hydroelectric power is almost the best option that we have.

As for the 'danger' from radioactive waste, it lasts 250,000 years you know', well there is more arsenic in the world than nuclear material. It is easier to get hold of and it lasts FOREVER!

Use the alien 'cos there is precious little intelligence down here so ET has GOT to come and save us.

I read that quote twice.

Now my brains gone on strike.

"If you want to choose the motherboard, memory configuration, drive spec, video card, OS and perhaps go for a better mouse than the standard off the shelf system, then for heaven's sake, build your own! Or go to a small place where each computer is hand built to exactly the spec you want."

I tried to do that. I went to all of my local computer shops and gave them a spec (for a powerful machine), warning that I expected the cost to be about £2.5K. I gave each of these shops my email address to send their quotes. NONE of them gave a quote, not one of them emailed at all. My machine was bust so I went to PC World and bought an Advent of similar spec to that given to the local places. I also bought a top of the line ATI video card and a 17" flat LCD monitor (this was 3 years ago). The whole lot came to less than £2.0K

Thing haven't changed singe I joined up in '67.

The ONLY time that the forces will get what they NEED to fulfill the politicians dreams of glory, is when (not if) the self same politicians are physically in danger from enemy action. Then watch the slimy buggers spend the defense budget.

I didn't know Simon did documentaries.

When did you visit my work place Simon?

I was going to get into my bunker in Iowa, but the doors blocked by a great big hard disk.

Anyone lost a hard disk in Iowa?

Anyone?

"But a spokeswoman for the department said there were several sets of procedures within the department."

Yes -

There was one in the Directors safe.

The Confidential Documents office had one in its safe.

The Assistant Undersecretary had one in his safe.

As did the Undersecretary in his safe.

The Permanent Secretaries Political Adviser had one. She doesn't have a safe, but she doesn't work in the same building as they do (or the same city actually) so that doesn't matter.

The Security Office also had one, but they lost theirs. The Security Office are looking into the loss.

they had better watch out.

Any alien life form doing a 'First Contact' in this neck of the (interstellar) woods should know that the Prime Directive is laughed at by most of humanity.

So ravening alien hordes when we find you, and we will, then we'll all have a single enemy to concentrate upon. And we're GOOD at war, VERY GOOD!

is not just that someone may fake your biometric data to pretend to be you.

It is that someone *will* generate fake IDs for sale. So down to the pub and buy 3 or 4 fake ID's go on the benefit after all you can *prove* who you are (four times). Terrorists and criminals will come into the country and become 'legal' in moments.

They *will* swap their biometric data for yours. The one day you will get a knock on your door (at 4 o'clock in the morning, with a BIG door buster) and Mr Plod will be asking you about the look from the latest bullion robbery, 'cos *your* biometric data was all over the place. OK so this will get sorted out, eventually, but now who are YOU; officially?

The DBAs operations staff and input clerks (low grade 'civil servants' of course) will be *persuaded* to do the changes, if they like walking that is.

The more information that is in the system the more the SYSTEM will be trusted and the less that YOU will be trusted.

What about Furlongs per Fortnight? Why have you decided to let these extremely useful Imperial measurements die out?

are the clowns who want us to trust them with a national ID database. Fsckwits!

You get milk from nursing animals right?

Therefore to get rats/dogs/rabbits milk the rat/dog/rabbit has just had to have given birth right?

So what are we going to do with the massive population explosion of rats, dogs, rabbits etc?

Kill them at birth? Read the book, seen the film, now eat the stew?

Look like the food faddies haven't thought this one through properly. But since when did that stop any sort of fanatic?

Bloody idiots.

"information provided with a product or a contract is so lengthy or confusing we simply disregard it." That's what it is supposed to do. If we could actually read & understand this rubbish we would probably not touch the product with a barge pole.

"This information is expensive to provide, costing business over £1.5bn a year and simply confuses consumers." Companies spend a lot of money on these words. Do you actually think that they COULDN'T get an easy to read version if they WANTED one? 'They' have spent their money and, so far, seem happy with the results.

I find it incredible that, in this day & age, people still think that businesses are their friends. Business is there to make money. they do that by getting the most money out of the customer as possible while giving the customer as little as possible. If the customer could successfully get an item repaired without 3 to 4 months of arguing and solicitors letters or if the customer could successfully sue when the babies bottle warmer boiled the milk, then Businesses profits would drop a little and that would never do.

So we have contracts that only another solicitor could read (whats wrong? it's written in English isn't it?) and we have warning signs that are totally stupid (on a pack of peanuts - Warning, may contain nuts).

We do NOT need simpler contracts and product labels, we need a structured law which lays down the fundamental sale of goods contract between producer & customer. We do not need more warnings (Do not try to stop this chainsaw with your genitals) or more paragraphs on the contract.

There is not need to extend the without charge period. In fact that stupid piece of legislation can be repealed without reducing our safety at all. Existing legislation already covers everything that the ACPO say they want.

They just have to appear before a judge / magistrate and give the reasoning behind wanting to keep Mr / Ms Jihadi locked up without charge for another week.

No THAT is what scares them!

"put millions of snowy-shouldered people out of their misery" Bit harsh just for having dandruff isn't it?

Tagged Wheelie Bins. What you, and your neighbors should have done on receiving the bins is 1) Don't mark them with your house number. 2) EVERY bin day, you and two neighbors swap bins at random. Your neighbors (including the two you swapped with) do the same. Very soon NO ONE knows who has which bin and what was in it.

There sorted.

No, the first time Parker had an audience when he opened the safe, so he gave them a show. Value for money sort of thing, not much of that about now-a-days. The second time he needed to get the safe open quickly so he just opened it with no messing about.

I know, I am VERY sad. But Thunderbirds was a very good show.