Sent to my MP today:

Dear Julian Brazier,

My apologies for taking up yet more of your time, however our
Government seem to be leaving me little choice but to do so. I wish to
draw your attention to a story breaking in the Daily Telegraph today
(Saturday 14th March, 2009) regarding so called “e-borders”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4987415/All-travel-plans-to-be-tracked-by-Government.html

This would seem to be, if accurate (and I can find no cited references
to active or pending legislation), a HUGE step into the surveillance
culture which campaigns such as NO2ID are opposing and trying to publicise.

I don’t know if it is “too late” to do anything about this but, even if
it is, I would ask why this is necessary (to fight international
terrorism?!) and how it will help… surely the checking of persons on
“watch lists” can be done without the need for such a tracking database
of the general public at point of entry/exit.

What will be next? Will travelling outside your county (or perhaps into
London on a “sensitive” day) require written permission from a
bureaucrat before you’re allowed on a train?

This yet another appalling regime being apparently pushed in sideways
hoping law abiding citizens will roll-over and take it without any
question. I don’t have anything to hide about my whereabouts, but I
find the whole idea of registering my movements with an agency and
having that retained for a decade disgusting.

Once again, I’m sorry to have taken up your time but this is an issue
which is often overlooked and needs more attention.

Yours sincerely,
Me

He’s usually quite good about replying to emails so I will await the response…

I may be in a minority, but although my screen may be 1024×768, that
is not the resolution at which my applications run. I often (nee all
the time) have many applications open at once and the most efficient
way to know what’s going on in all of them is to have them layered and
*not* filling the whole screen.

The old 600 wide layout was perfect for this and was a design concept
I would reccomend to others too. The new design, however, doesn’t
actually provide any more space for actual content but, instead, makes
the navigation bars around the edge much “bigger” (that is wider and
fatter). This means I need to scroll off the side to see some of the
sidebar content (which annoys me greatly on any page — sideways
scrolling should never be required).

Furthermore, what were considered headings further down the page under
“AROUND THE UK NOW”, the section headings used to be bold and are no
longer. This makes it much harder to skim down for what you’re looking
for.

I am aware that people far cleverer than I have had a hand in creating
this new design, however it is, in my opinion, a step too far into the
“Web 2.0″ idiom. The site was, previously, clean, concise and easy to
navigate for all. That is no longer the case, I fear.

Having recently moved into an area where the nearest supermarket is a
Morrisons, I have been using the store more frequently than before and
have noticed the following “niggles” with the way the store is
managed.

The store feels “cluttered”. At the ends of most of the aisles, there
are extra shelves which constrict the ends of each aisle by about 40%
making the apertures less than one trolley width. Also, in the same
area, the main central thoroughfare is considerably thinner than it
could be because of a vast array of extra product locations (products
that are, often, otherwise available in other parts of the store)
again, constricting the available space by 20-40%.

Secondly, the small (3′ square) metal containers strewn throughout the
store, as if by random, containing products often not in the slightest
related to the aisle in which they are found just get in the way.

Many thanks for your time in reading this. Please let me know if you
have any comments on the above.

This is the bounce:

MailMarshal has stopped the following message:

Message: B475052fc0000.000000000001.0001.mml
From: foo@mafoo.org.uk
To: postmaster@morrisonsplc.co.uk
Subject: My point of view

because the email address – postmaster@morrisonsplc.co.uk – does not exist.

What were they doing out and in a position to do something like that without parental guidance/observation?

The age of criminal responsibility should be at such an age as to when children are out and about apparently with enough nouse to know right from wrong. This may be different from child to child, but it should be up to the parents to decide if their child is ready to face the big wide world and is responsible enough a young-adult to do so. If they are not up to this yet, then maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to get in to such a situation.

I note how the BBC article makes absolutely no reference to the parents and the children’s upbringing — did they miss out on some vital moral lessons? Were they just being kids and playing around without realising that throwing stones at other people is wrong? If so, why did they think this?

It makes me quite sad, actually

If we do raise the age of criminal responsibility, on whom would fall the responsibility for the father who was killed by these boys? No one? The parents? I don’t know.

Below is the petition text, I encourage you to read and, if you so wish, sign your name here.

Digital Rights Managment (DRM) is a technology by which content distributors can dictate what consumers can do with their content to the extent that, for example, the PC that you own at home hides things from you, refuses to do something because it thinks you’re trying to “tamper” with it, and potentially notifies the content distributor of this action.

Currently, Microsoft Windows Vista is pushing this technology on users with various hardware manufacturers complicit in it including Intel, ATI, NVidia, S3 and Matrox.

This petition asks parliament to make it illegal for software to actively disallow and subvert the operators intention even if it “thinks” that it “might” be illegal — hardware is owned by the consumer and should remain such in the same way as cars do not disallow a driver to break the 70mph speed limit on UK roads.

From the little I’ve read, the powers vested in the FBI allow the law enforcement personnel in the Democratic Republic of the Free Peoples of the United States of America [1] to, with the oversight of the independent judiciary, can activate on your broadband provider, mobile carrier, university network account a wire tap allowing them to log all communication you make or receive including email, phone conversations (VoIP included), what websites you visit. This officially scares me.

I sincerely hope that, should this get implemented in the United Kingdom, then it gets tested in court against the Human Rights Act and stricken from the statute book like it would deserve. There is no way that this sort of activity is the way a democratic country should treat its citizens who are, after all, innocent until proven guilty [2].

As for readers in the DRotFPoUSA, I suggest you find out how to use PGP for all your email find out what ssh and something like TOR can do for you if only to show them that those who need to get around such privacy infractions are quite capable of doing so with little/no effort.

This does assume that the FBI don’t have backdoors in the SSL/PGP/TOR system already…

Notes

1. Well, you have the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea… is it any of that? There’s a relevant line from Yes, Minister! talking about laws they don’t want to implement along the lines of “Always dispense with the tricky issues in the title”
2. That’s how it is supposed to work, anyway

Please participate in this and get some of the rediculous laws that have been passed recently by government taken back off the statute books.

Some of the laws you may wish to consider are:

• Terrorism Act 2000
• Sections 132-135 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005
• Identity Cards Act 2006

This got me thinking about whether or not it would be the sort of thing I would want to do. I don’t really know much about it other than the right to anonymity of donors has been removed so donor-conceived offspring are able to trace their biological parents (although said parents) have no legal rights or obligations regarding them.

Having read the documents on the HFEA website, I am quite encouraged to find out more but would welcome any comments from people. If you don’t want to make public statements, please email me.

Most of this time, I’ve had my eyes on a Canon 350D with some combination of lenses. [1]

What I’m after is a low-end, but extensible DSLR which I can experiment with, have fun with and, hopefully, take some nice pictures. I have borrowed a number of FD lenses from my dad which I’d like to be able to use (there are converters around), at least to start with.

I currently own a Fujifilm 2850Z which I’ve had for just over 4 years now and, although it’s a great camera, it’s showing its age [2]. I’m going to keep it, if anything, for Sarah

I suppose what I’m asking is: Any advice?

Footnotes

1. Probably either the kit Canon 18-55,55-200 lenses or the Sigma equivilant.
2. 3 cyan pixles, only 2 mega-pixels…

Both of these cases have involved a highly trained officer driving a new car on an M class road at night very fast (in excess of 150mph).

Road traffic groups today condemned the absolute discharge of PCD Mark Milton from the West Mercia force who received a conviction for dangerous driving while accustomising himself with a new vehicle. They have suggested it would have been more appropriate for him to have used a race track to do such testing.

I have every sympathy for the officers in question here. They have limited time to get to know new cars, are very highly trained in safe, fast driving, and may be called upon later that night to, for example, chase a stolen car down a motorway. If we do not support our officers in doing their jobs, how are we able to complain when they can’t do them?

I read that the police force in question are going to appeal the judgement. I hope that, although the officer may have broken the letter of the law, the judges overseeing the appeal will understand the difficult situations that we put our police officers in and overturn the guilty verdict or are we to further tie the hands of the people who protect us?