Strangely Perfect

Guidelines for a Better World Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.  Perhaps I should re-phrase this as: The Rules of Law and International Diplomacy are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made It’s a strange world out there.  Two recent political events [...]

I got a phishing spam this morning from Nigeria! Typical 419 that I usually see: Nothing unusual in that, you say – the Nigerian 419 scam has been going on for years!  It even has it’s own scambusters (see references later) and the actual advanced fee fraud is usually just called a 419 scam because [...]

Solicitors who took millions from miners lose appeal Finally, after yet another year of time has passed, the crooked (they called themselves ‘entrepreneurial’) solicitors have had their case against being struck off the solicitors’ roll quashed. See this BBC story Doubtless, all the poor widows who got a few hundred quid compensation for watching their [...]

I remember an old  Tommy Cooper gag that went something like this; I went to the doctor and said,  “Doctor, doctor.  It hurts when I do this”  (Cooper raises his knee upwards to demonstrate) The doctor said, “Well don’t do it, then“ The point is that it’s exactly like our prolific consumption of carbon-based fuels, [...]

Too Little, Too Late, Gordon Brown This morning, PM Gordon Brown told Andrew Marr that he wants to ‘clean up’ parliament. He wants a ‘code of conduct’ for MPs to follow. The thing is, there’s already a code of conduct – it’s called the law! All we,  ‘the people’ want, is to have reasonable laws [...]

Introduction Simple. Live in County Durham, UK Don’t pass the driving test Drive a car, unsupervised, with your partner and her 6-year old child as passengers! Find a cyclist while driving around Make sure the cyclist is not wearing a helmet Knock over the cyclist with your illegally driven and thus un-insured car Make sure [...]

Fizzy Oceans Spell Doom As an almost instananeous follow up (the interconnectedness of all things?) to my recent disappointment about the launch failure of the OCO satellite, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph etc  have all been reporting some recent climate work from Plymouth. An Italian Bay There’s now so much CO2 being absorbed by the oceans [...]

a.k.a.   How Internet Sites strip out Content for Their Own Purposes These are called feed harvesters or content scrapers amongst other terms and exist solely to copy other people’s content for the purpose of serving adverts, charging folks for getting good hit rates, hosting malware… etc I came across one while checking a Google [...]

Our weirdly bipolar government, will spring a few surprises today for most people.  (The realisation that bi-polar disorder affects organisations as well as individuals fully explains their behaviour and thus, holds no surprises for me, any more ). Coloured comments added later on Wednesday, 3rd Dec 2008. Predictably, even though a few thousand gambling bankers [...]