threegee

Would Honda involve the quoted 6000 jobs? According to the FT Nissan was down to 3800 jobs at year-end from about 5000 a few years back. Take away the 800 redundancies last month (ignoring the 400 contract workers laid off) and that gives 3000. Add in the "as many workers again at suppliers" and you get to the 6000 quoted figure. Honda employs 4200 at Swindon according to a recent report, but is already closed until June 1st. So not only don't the figures square but it would be strange to announce a permanent closure at quite this time. If it is Nissan though then things must have got a lot worse in just a few weeks.

The most "wow" experience for me was at the NEC in Birmingham in the early '80s. I was there for serious things but Atari (well I think it was Atari) was showing an early console with a 3D space-ship sim shoot-em-up. I've no idea which model, or what the cart was, but after all the early 2D stuff it left a lasting impression.

Anyone known which it is they are talking about? You can't keep news like that under wraps, even without the Internet!

'Cos you hadn't signed in!

Ah those smoke-filled rooms! It was always thus. The UK problem is that the PM simply has too much power. There's no effective president as in other countries, to guard the constitution. And of course there's no proper constitution eitther, so the PM gradualy writes his own constitution over the years. In theory the monarch could say no, but doesn't because her/his position is so anacronistic as to be under constant threat of abolition from the (supposedly subservient) PM. Like so much else in UK public life it's all a complete sham. WYSIMDNWYG - What You See Is Most Definitely Not What You Get.

New Forum needs a(nother) moderator - please PM offers?

What I "got snotty about" was your picking words and reordering them inside inverted commas as if I'd written them that way - or even used them at all! No that's not a quote. It's the entire text of your misrepresentation of what I said. Quotes by their very nature are selective, and I did you the favour of cutting and pasting your entire first and last paragraphs unaltered. Either you still agree with what you wrote or you've changed your mind? Nothing to get upset about either way. But you are quite prepared: 1) to support them in this. 2) to attribute the best motives to what they are doing. I'm not prepared to do either. And my last post was to illustrate that neither are my views unreasonably paranoid, as you imply, or at variance with what insiders or former insiders are thinking. You put a lot of weight on those supposedly in-the-know rather than BB "ranters" - so quoting Stella Rimington is a valid point. None of this did I say, or even imply! What I said was "No other state in history has had the breadth and depth of controls that our UK government is in the process of imposing. Eat your heart out Joe Stalin, you've been outclassed by the Brits again!". I'm saying that the technology and surveillance methods being used, or being proposed, by this government would be the envy of those dictators. Thanks for the permission to proceed. Better get as many rants in as possible before the Gestapo comes knocking. Because, with acquiescence like yours, this nation is going to be a push-over at some future date.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7894763.stm The biggest step forward since sliced bread! Will save heaps of clutter, and mean charging can be provided in public places and transport. Will be used on lots of things besides phones. 5.7v would be nice. For older stuff a single simple adaptor might be worth carring around.

Ministers 'using fear of terror' Stella Rimington has often been critical of the government A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Dame Stella Rimington, 73, said people in Britain felt as if they were living "under a police state".

That's not a very efficient way to do it. Normally you'd use a graphics program (like Photopaint or Fireworks) to do this on your local machine. You could try uploading a picture to your a gallery you create here (using MyControls) then right clicking and saving the resulting resized images. There's a limit on the size of file you can upload though - somewhere around 2MB I think. You can make a gallery private or say which members you want to share it with. Plenty of free photo sharing sites on the web too, but beware of ones which charge to download full size images, you could find your own photos held to ransom if you mislay the originals. Also remember that a smaller file size and a smaller displayed size are not necessarily the same thing. You may want one the other or both. Encoded email attachments are a very inefficient way of sending data. If you've got more than a handful of photos, a slowish connection, or do this regularly look at peer to peer (P2P) file transfer programs.

Of course, how silly of me to forget?! Famous for cake decoration:- Ma-zappa'n

Well, the next 1000 didn't take so very long! BTW just got the glasses in an Elton John sale.

B*&***! Where do you get them from? Apple aped features of the Linux FS3 file system in the (appropriately named) Cheetah. They made a clean break with old code in order to do this leaving their users stranded - as per usual. Linux users had Compiz before Aero and Aqua. When you can freely browse someone else's source code for ideas it's so easy. Compare: http://www.abadiadigital.com/noticia1778.html Even going back to MSDOS things like pipes and filters were cloned from Unix and Linux. The original MSDOS was a straight rip of CP/M and Windows 1.0 an inferior clone of DR GEM (in GEM the Windows could overlap, but BG instructed staff that this was unnecessary! ). Very little originality has ever come out of MS considering the vast sums they spend. And much of what Apple does is others originality dressed-up. I've even heard on the media recently that Apple "invented" the pocket MP3 player. What rot! I had a couple of pocket MP3 players long before Apple entered the market. P.S.: Not being familiar with Lindows I just checked and discovered it's a trademark owned by Microsoft! Seems like they paid a fancy sum for it! :

F. Zappa? Did he invent the TV remote? What offends me is his usual insistence on using those damn silly AAA's instead of cheaper and easier to find AA's, that you can sit on far longer before they need changing.

They are all converging because they are copying Linux - particularly Apple!

Rock solid on this Ubuntu Linux machine. May not have noticed the improvement quite so easily if I'd had to reboot. But on closing and re opening browser after the upgrade the improvement in rendering was quite spectacular. Maybe its just a Linux thing or maybe it's now making use of multi-threading better. Doing some tests with a laptop last year I found that Ubuntu was something approaching 20% faster on file downloads that Windows XP, using the same hardware and same download sources. So it looks like the Windows TCP/IP stack isn't what it could be.

I don't think we have! Interesting to hear the hackneyed old sound bite about not shouting fire in a crowded theatre trotted out again - gets them every time! But THINK, how many people are stampeded because someone gets up and shouts "fire!". It doesn't happen in the modern world because we've learned about crowd behaviour and fire precautions. It doesn't happen not because there's a law against it (and there should be about giving out patently misleading information - politicians please note). It doesn't happen because of people's innate common sense. If there was mileage for mischief in doing it don't you think a hell-bent terrorist or loony would be regularly doing it? The real reason for the UK's restrictions on freedom of speech is that there are issues which should be aired that those in power don't want to touch. The reasons are historical, fear of communism and the rise of the trade unions, etc. We've unlearned what we were taught in the playground: "Sticks and stones..." Being frightened of ideas is the end of freedom (an absolute concept in itself) of speech and true democracy. As in the case of our manipulative Dutch MP, suppressing - and particularly in being seen to suppress these ideas - only gives them more power. We've have heard next to nothing about this if he'd been allowed to travel to the Lords and answer questions on the film. But he figured he wouldn't be, and dummies in government obliged him with the publicity he couldn't have bought.

When you quote other people it's generally accepted practice not to write the contents of the quotation marks yourself. Not yesterday - a very real danger that this bunch of incompetents are delivering the country into the hands of totalitarians at some point in the future. Though I think that some elements of this government would happily ditch their pretensions and take power in such a regime. He was only going to the House of Lords under invite. What precisely is the potential threat to disorder there? Are their Lordships going to riot, burn down the commons, or restore the feudal system? The real reason for banning him is what has been termed by some senior figures as "appeasement". So allowing a vocal minority that does not share our common values and wishes to overthrow our democracy, to dictate to the British People. Make a few threats - kill free speech - wow, we're well on the way to that Muslim state already! Ah, right then. So what you're saying is that they need to threaten disorder and we won't be able to ban them? Could it be that it's only the billions of taxpayers money that's being spent spying on these extremists night and day that's keeping their subversive activities in check. We need to be told the true cost of this little multicultural society social experiment. The monetary cost as well as the cost to our hard fought for freedoms. Glad you agree that it's a slight chance. This is a grossly incompetent government, on a scale we've seldom seen before. Now where's my copy of that thoroughly researched dossier on WMD? You know, the one prepared by security experts and government advisers that's so "informed" that we can confidently start a war over! In any event it's not about making calls it's about standing up for principals. I don't even believe what the Home Secretary has done is legal under European law. Your faith in ANY government is misplaced. Something that will start to occur to you with a little more experience of how the world really works.

Or maybe not? Could having a Jewish Home Secretary now have something to do with the latest banning? Or would any such claim be racist in itself? Then again we probably have to accept what The Muslim Council of Britain claims: That horrible reactionary and unreasonable right-wing David Cameron prevailed over the loony "liberal" left desire to let him come back. BTW isn't The Muslim Council of Britain supposed to be sugar 'n' spice and all things nice where this "multicultural society" thing is concerned? How could they possibly want to hear from, and encourage, a Muslim extremist? Doesn't all add-up, does it?

But those sensible decisions don't extend to excluding those who don't accept that everyone should have a right to a differing view, and demand that their culture should subvert our culture in our country? I think monsta is on about double standards. If this guy is highlighting those double standards then it's his fault and not ours? He's simply a foreign troublemaker then? What a gift to the far right from the loony "liberal" left! Seems to me it's the so-called liberals who sold us this "multicultural society" that are at the root cause of the trouble. They ignored all warnings, and shouted down, and unreasonably branded as racist people like Enoch Powell who warned what would come to pass.

Just had an auto-update on this machine to Firefox 3.0.6 and immediately notice its now much faster rendering web pages. Any other Firefox users getting the same impression?

If ever blame was due it's here. He can't dodge it on the usual grounds that it was an inherited problem. Unlike Norway he's p'd the whole of the North Sea oil bonanza away; likewise with the privatisation reciepts, gold reserves, taxation from the millennium boom (mainly his boom because he let both private and public spending get way out of control), and the influx of foreign money to the City of London. He's pretended (more likely deluded himself) that the good times were in fact bad times and that he could ballance the books over an ever lengthening (in his mind) "economic cycle". BTW this begs the question that if he really believed he'd abolished "boom and bust", how come there was a traditional economic cycle anyway? I mentioned his qualifications in the context of Pete saying he hadn't any. The point is that there aren't (and can never be) any academic qualifications for this type of job. Something those four senior bankers could have pointed out when asked about theirs at yesterdays show-trial! I'm not sure this is true at all. They are willing participants in the same game, and I don't hear too much unspeakable truth propounding. They are in a better position to call the system than ordinary electors and they don't. They could have use their local government power-base far more effectively. I haven't forgotten the Lib-Lab pack when they kept a former deeply unpopular and screwing-up Labour Party in office well beyond their sell by date. That blew any pretensions to want to break the mold in my eyes. Hey, get with the game! The rules are there only as guidelines as to what you can get away with. They are there to bend as far as your power and influence will allow (not far in the case of Joe Ordinary). In former times you, and everyone else, just knew when you'd been compromised. Fair didn't come into it; you quietly resigned with a minimum of fuss. Today everyone gets a second (and third) chance on stage. Mandy even makes a career of this in itself.

Well, yes, that thought had crossed my mind, and it would surely focus his/hers! If we kept the existing system of the party in power selecting the PM then what would happen is that they'd ensure that their leader had one of the safest seats - just as now. But, as Malcolm has raised before, the present system is a sham in that people generally vote for the person and this people's choice often gets subverted. Just look at Tony's recent promise to "serve a full term". I think that the real problem is that we don't have a proper head of state like other countries. The monarch dare not interfere in politics unless things are really desperate, and even then she/he holds back. The result is that the PM becomes far too powerful, and it's up to his own party to remove him/her when they are not up to the job. These are often the very people who are in his/her power of hire and fire, so the result is secret plots and public pretence. All-in-all a shockingly bad system that no sane person could have invented!

There's a fair bit of evidence that the BNP (or elements of the BNP) have been behind the recent strikes in league with the far left. This isn't at all strange as they are both anti-libertarian and after a centrally run economy. The differences are only in inconsequential details and semantics. It's always a very few people that make things happen, no more so than in our present emasculated UK democracy. And dismissing then both as tiny minorities who will never get power is a dangerous thing to do. As Mr Hoon and others show, when time get really tough all sorts of people you'd have considered moderates start to show their true colours and amazing alliances develop. The veneer of democracy is very thin in the UK. No one knows this more than the present incumbents who are **** scared of the possibilities of civil unrest if/when the economic situation gets worse. We've been in headless chicken syndrome for many months now, and the sad truth is that Gordon Brown is an extremely weak minded and gutless PM, in (sort of) control of a party of career politicians who couldn't run a proverbial in a brewery! But there are people (even in his own party) who will step in to fill the power vacuum when things self-destruct, and you shouldn't take anything they say at face value. They will also use any hook on power that is available to them, and stretch it past any supposed limit to retain power. Don't dismiss the possibilities of a totalitarian government in the UK it's very real. Look back to the posts on the Northern Rock crisis here. Would you have believed then that this prefaced the meltdown of the entire banking system? My own pessimism on the matter turned out to be more than justified. The point is that things are far more interdependent and than anyone can possibly imagine (look at how the First World War started). That goes for the threads on this board too, so here I will stop lest I start on about the state of the economy and the chances of a major depression.

No monsta, you'll undoubtedly be labeled as malleable material and will be presented with a nice shiny uniform. Until someone discovers that you attended that BNP meeting, and your file (they've probably got one on you already) gets dusted-off! Then as a dissident you'll need to be "re-educated" I'm afraid.