« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »
August 31, 2006
mmmm OK
So I've got 8 mbps broadband now (well 7.1 -according to the connected icon in my system tray). I've just tried to watch a teeny-tiny Realplayer movie clip from the BBC - and hey! Guess what! Realplayer is as crap as it ever was even on dial up. Useless piece of crap. Gah.
by groc at 09:53 PM | Comments (2)
August 29, 2006
the Ozzie ID card
They got one - before us.
(Remember how in the first round of trying to sell it to us - that it'd be an 'entitlement card'?)
Oh look - and it's been hacked already. Didn't see that coming, oh no - a total surprise.
Couldn't ever happen in the UK of course, not with our honest upright Government employees.
by groc at 08:44 AM | Comments (1)
August 27, 2006
the National ill-th Service
Seriously: I’m starting to wonder just what are people paying their National Health Insurance for. Opticians have long been privatised (if you’re on state benefits you can only get a free eye test and a money off voucher for glasses). Most Dentists have been going the same way -opting to go into providing cosmetic surgery for their wealthier patients rather than doing boring fillings and extractions and essential whatnot for the plebeian masses. In fact I don’t know of a single friend who has an NHS dentist anymore, myself included. We’re been left with no choice but to just to let our teeth rot. Great. There was a BBC documentary on a few months back on how a few people are finding it lots cheaper to travel abroad (and that is with the price of the return flights and hotel stay taken into consideration) to find a dentist for various treatments than pay the prices their own UK dentists are charging!
And now here in Worthing there was a march protesting the proposed closure of the local Accident and Emergency hospital just to save money. Then I read of a similar protest march in Cornwall. There have been others in other parts of the country too. So what the hell is going on?
Mmmm, now who’s bright idea was it to make individual Hospitals responsible for their own budgets? It wasn’t Thatcher was it?
by groc at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)
August 18, 2006
Was it even possible to go BOOOOM?
According to this article - well, no. Which is pretty much just as I, in my ill-informed cynical way suspected. *sighs* We're living in times where the lunatics have pretty well taken over the whole planet now.
by groc at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2006
When did common sense die?
Regarding the recently narrowly averted Airplane terrorist potential disaster…
How many terrorists have there ever been who have been women who’ve had their own babies along with them? Seriously though - how many?
So how absurd is it getting young mothers to taste their own babies milk in front of security staff in order to prove it’s not part of some sort of liquid explosive. Because surely if they were mad enough in the first place to be suicide bombers carrying their own children with them - then they’re going to mad enough to drink …whatever.
Of the terrorist attacks that there have been have - how many of those young men (clue 1) have been Caucasian? I’m not sure -but haven’t all of the al-Qaida supporters been Middle Eastern in origin? Of the twenty four (so far) arrests for this latest plot been of Pakistani origin? All of them young men, all of them Islamic fundamentalists (clue 2).
So what are security staff doing wasting their time stopping and searching 50 year old overweight middle-aged white women for instance? Unless of course the Security police have seen ‘Total Recall’ and on seeing the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger is through a mixture of CGI-effects and animatronics disguised as a portly middle-aged woman -thought ‘that could soooooo easily happen - must make a note of that’.
But then the whole thing does sound like the plot out of a bad James Bond film.
What we have here is - and I hate saying this little cliché: ‘political correctness gone mad’.
Of course I’m not saying the police should round up all the Middle Eastern and Asian looking types and put them into Internment camps - but they could show a little bit of common sense where it counts instead of wasting their resources on this blanket ‘absolutely totally every single last person is a potential terrorist’ crazy nonsense. Because as things stand the amount of disruption, delay and aggravation which it’s lead to - there just might as well been a bomb attack. Hell, things might have got back to normal a lot quicker if there had been.
And knowing how brilliant the intelligence has been of late - it wouldn’t surprise me if the terrorists haven’t figured out that they don’t even have to plant bombs any more. Just concoct an elaborate plot - gather a few chemicals together and a gun then leak the plans - and the security services will do all the hard work of disruption and aggravating the general public for them.
Zefrank: one two
Panic As Policy
Countdown to some MP claiming 'If only we had ID cards - they would've helped prevent all this' - begins now.
by groc at 06:15 AM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2006
ring-a-ding dong.
You mean people still ring in to vote? What's wrong with them? I suppose it must be part of the same urge that makes people waste perfectly good money buying bottled water.
Grace Dent has a rather more eloquent take on the same subject.
And Grace is back in? What? The woman is a complete sociopath, like Shabaz before her, she shouldn't paraded out on public display, sbe should undergoing intensive psychiatric therapy.
Oh I'm just appalled by the whole cynical tawdry thing - and I hate myself for watching it.
by groc at 07:01 AM | Comments (0)