15 Laws, 11 Minutes
Posted: Wed 21 October, 2009 Filed under: Driving, News, Thoughts Leave a comment »Even by my standards, this particular story of a driver in Switzerland who broke 15 laws in 11 minutes is pretty impressive.
The list included :
- overtaking an unmarked police car in heavy rain at 100mph
- speeding
- driving on the hard shoulder
- running a set of red lights
- failing to stop for police.
And after all that, he also (unsurprisingly, I suppose) also failed a drugs test.
I suppose if you’re going to do it, you might as well it properly.
Misheard
Posted: Tue 20 October, 2009 Filed under: Driving, News, Thoughts Leave a comment »Sometimes, mishearing a story on the news can make it so much more interesting.
Today while driving to work I was sure – twice, no less – that I’d heard a story about the Buddhist National Party using photos of the military in its advertising.
Turns out, it was actually the British National Party who were doing so.
But still, the Buddhist National Party? I’d vote for ’em.
Mail and Moir
Posted: Mon 19 October, 2009 Filed under: Cynicism, Media, News, Thoughts 1 Comment »While we were away over the weekend, I kind of missed the furore about Jan Moir’s Daily Mail column about the death of Stephen Gately in which she spreads more rumours and bigoted claptrap than I’d wish to read.
What surprised me more though was the number of complaints about this article. (At the time of writing this, the PCC has received more than 21,000 complaints) Yes, it’s an offensive, bigoted piece and breaches three conditions of the PCC code of conduct – and let’s not forget that Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, is also the chief honcho at the Press Complaints Committee. Oh, the irony. But really, when did anyone expect anything but hate-filled, bigoted writing from that shit-stain rag which camoflages it’s vitriol and hatred as ‘news’?
As Deeply Flawed But Trying wrote far better than I can, the Daily Mail has a long and vicious history of being a nasty hate-filled rag of bigotry and loathing. Hell, most of the time it doesn’t even like its own readers, let alone the rest of the nation/world. Charlie Brooker (as usual) had his own well-written point of view on it too.
I’m glad to see the Daily Mail being complained about at epic levels – but it should’ve happened years ago. I’d love to see the Daily Mail sued for inciting racial hatred, religious hatred, and homophobia. It’s a divisive, nasty, vindictive rag, and should incur the wrath of balanced people every day – not just for one ill-written article on one day.
Scareware and AntiVirus
Posted: Mon 19 October, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »Today the BBC has been carrying the story about “Millions” being taken in by scareware scams, where pop-up ads on web pages tell people they’ve got a virus and to download ‘this antivirus software’ to fix it. At best the ‘antivirus software’ is useless, and the person’s credit-card number is sold for use in credit-card fraud. At worst, the “anti-virus” actually contains viruses (virii?) and trojans that make the computer less secure, rather than more.
Now of course there are lots of idots out there who will fall for this kind of thing. But to my mind, it’s not just those people’s faults – both PC Manufacturers and ISPs need to take some of the responsibility too.
It doesn’t take a lot to get decent anti-virus software. Go to Grisoft, and get the free AVG anti-virus software (free for personal use) and job done. There’s plenty of others too – Kaspersky, Avast, so on, so forth.
But people still have to know about these, rather than using the clusterfuck shitpieces like Norton, McAfee that come with most PCs and that people never use – or just assume that it’s installed, so Everything’s OK. Not knowing that they need to subscribe, and make sure it’s updated regularly (for which read daily, rather than monthly)
So why don’t the ISPs supply a free antivirus like AVG, Avast or Kaspersky on the CD you invariably get? Why don’t PC builders install a free anti-virus with the PC rather than the paid-for POS software? (Of course, we know that PC Builders like Dell etc. must get some whacking kickback fee for providing paid-for software, which is the reason)
If computers were provided with free anti-virus that didn’t require any further financial investment or effort from Joe Everyday-User, there’d be a lot less problems of this sort.
Body Scanning
Posted: Mon 19 October, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Media, Thoughts, Travel, Weirdness 2 Comments »In another breakthrough for idiocy, I see that the ‘see through’ scanner being tested at Manchester Airport has raised a problem that no-one appears to have thought of before now.
This scanner goes through clothes, and shows what has been termed (incorrectly) an ‘X-ray image’, which is more of an MRI body-scan, as I understand it. What it does is show (in black/white ‘ghost’ form) an image of the naked body.
And lo, they’ve suddenly thought “Oh shit, what happens when young people go through the scanner? It means we can see underage bodies…” so they’ve now stopped doing the scans on all under-18s.
Absolute brilliance – in all the hype, not one person in the media (or in the project itself) has said “Hang on, what about this scenario?”.
Strikebreaking
Posted: Sun 18 October, 2009 Filed under: Business, Stupidity, Thoughts 2 Comments »As I’ve said before, I don’t understand the point of strikes, as they do more to ruin the future of the business than anything else would. The current one, of course, is the upcoming Royal Mail strike which I’ve also written some thoughts about before.
It’s come out in the news today that Royal Mail plan to employ some 30,000 temps to work while the strike is going on, and thus keep the business going. And I’ve got to say, I think that’s the right message to send. The people who’ve been talking about going on strike say it’s “to keep their jobs” – when all it’s really going to do is drive more people away from using Royal Mail, and will thus screw their jobs in the long-term anyway.
In my opinion, this move by Royal Mail is a statement of “You’re not going to kill our business. We’ll keep going” and it shows that going on strike might just cost the union workers their jobs anyway.