hasty stupid legislation

Banned mephedrone cleared of blame for two deaths | Society | The Guardian

That'll be the very same deaths that had the Labour Government rush through another piece of their infamous knee-jerk legislation, and had two people on their drug advisory group resign in disgust that their advice was being ignored.

Talking of legislation:
Look who's backed down on their promises to have the Digital Economy Act overturned and discussed properly?

ISPs told to start collecting filesharers' data next year... lovely.

uh-oh Nudity Scanners are heeeeeeeeeeereeeeee

Well,it's official - Gatwick now has it's first scanner installed.

One of it's apologists was on the local news proclaiming that each image will deleted as soon as it's been viewed. Oh really. How comforting. Not that we live in a world full of tiny cheap camphones - or where you can buy a pen off the internets that has a camera built into it - not to mention that these offices are likely to have CCTV cameras recording away 24/7. Whose recordings are kept for a very long time...

Pity it's going to take a picture of some celebrity leaked and a high profile court case before someone wakes up to taking into consideration the privacy and personal dignity of the rest of us.

Meanwhile here's some other related things to ponder over:
New airport X-ray body scanners could be harmful, scientists say. dvice.com

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Support for full-body scanners 'lower than reported'.

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I thought Rapiscan had to be a made up joke name - 'Rape-I-scan'. But what? It isn't!? Well, I'm sorry when you have a company choosing a name like that for it's self wholly ignorant of the controversy it's going to inevitably cause.

Anyhoo - they make the machines and of course they've set to make massive profits out of it. Just when the whole Airport industry is in trouble and making massive losses year after year... why not spend lots more money than strictly necessary. It's not as if it's going to put people off travelling by air now is it?

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We might have had our first celebrity print out already... Although Heathrow denies it can have happened.

(How difficult would it be to see these machines specs. if these machines do have a print-out facility? Because if they did - well, at some point that facility is going to be turned on and used isn't it? As sure as eggs are eggs.

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oh and before we go - just to remind you that the scanners aren't fit for purpose anyway. They don't even detect the very things that they're supposed to be protecting us from.

City of London security guards told to report 'suspicious' photographers

Unfortunately to many a security guard merely owning a camera and not using it to only take photos of someone smiling is suspicious behaviour - not bending over backward when some jumped up little Hitler asks what you're doing is suspicious behaviour, breathing is suspicious behaviour... what's that old 'Not the 9 o'clock news' sketch...

City of London security guards told to report 'suspicious' photographers

Facebook privacy

BBC News - Facebook downplays privacy crisis meeting

Yes i'm on Facebook - but only because a few other people I know are on it. Otherwise - I've never really got on with it - and never quite understood why it's so popular, partly because years ago I used to be on AOL and remember how awful that was. Facebook seems altogether too AOL to me. While I can see the valve of having the one place where all my other web stuff comes together - but then Facebook comes with too much other crap - like those dreary games.

I've never felt safe divulging too much personal information to the web either. That's a real internet-age thing. The social web thing - my arse.

How to delete your Facebook account - Telegraph

Mark Steel: Don't be fooled. This is Tory rule

But one issue apparently agreed upon by all the main parties is a government had to be found that would satisfy the markets. Because to solve the economic crisis caused by the people who run the markets, we must pick a government that doesn't upset the people who run the markets.

National ID cards scheme to be axed

Yay!

(Except that I'm so deeply sceptical of the Conservatives - I'll be waiting for them to sneakily reintroduce them under another name in another form.)


National ID cards scheme to be axed

The result perfectly expresses...

a result that so perfectly expresses the public's mounting mix of contempt, confusion, and sheer bloody-minded desire to see the political classes sit down to eat humble pie, stand up to get thwacked on the head with the remainder, and then shoved into a corner to be locked in a dark cupboard to sit in their own mess, Thursday's result was sheer comic genius.

The most obvious feature was that absolutely nobody won.

Armando Iannucci | The Independent

er... let me get this right...

The Conservatives get 36.1% of the votes - and 306 seats.

Labour get 29.0% of the votes - and 258 seats... (not too shabby considering)

and the Liberal Democrats get 23.0% of the votes and get... 57 seats!?!? WTF.

Hung

yay! we're hung. But what nancy-pancy scaredy-cats the electorate are for not voting more for the lib-dems. And no doubt the Tories will be stamping their feet and belly-aching that they're the largest party now and deserve to win 'boo-hoo'. But they need to be reminded this is the electoral system they've stuck by and refused to change - mainly because it's usually served them well - at the expense of the other parties over the decades...
Tonight's results might finally nudge them into agreeing our system is nuts and needs a change. Can't see that happening any time soon though.

I hate that we've got a system that's effectively an elected dictatorship - 15 years of Tory excesses - followed by 13 years of Labour excesses hasn't done the UK much good at all... they just manage to foul things up in their own way...