threegee

I'm sure this story would have been reported in exactly the same way if a black muslim woman had come to Britain, gained work as a teacher, and broken our existing laws regarding inciting racial hatred.

Sorry, but that just doesn't hack it. Not by any stretch of the imagination can this teacher be said to be inciting racial hatred. It's all about religion not race, and there's no form of hatred involved - period!

OK, so you want to draw comparisons: A Muslim could carry a banner up Front Street saying that Christ was the Satan, we were all going to burn in hell, and he'd be lucky if anyone paid the slightest bit of attention. He could call his dog (hopefully female) The Virgin Mary; his cat Moses; his house The Ark of the Covenant; name his hens after the Apostles, and it would be lucky to make the local rag of a dull news-free day.

Let's stop being apologists for sheer lunatics. Once again this illustrates that "The Multi-cultural Society" is an absurdity dreamed up by some overprivileged, brain-dead, lefties who never did an proper day's work (hello Mr Anthony Wedgwood-Ben). Such a barmy idea has never worked in any society in the whole of history, and if taken any further will do for ours!

Britain alway has accepted foreigners, foreign ideas, and borrowed from foreign cultures. But it has done it on it's own terms, and its inhabitants have never before been told how they must think! We've know instinctively how to behave decently towards other races and cultures. Its about time it was spelt out to immigrants that you come here to fully integrate - and that includes our standards of religious tollerance - or you don't come at all!

do i detect a hint of sarcasm???

Pretentious? Moi?!

Wikipedia.org doesn't seem to know anything about this derivation. I think perhaps you should add it to make sure it isn't lost to future generations. Yes, you can add things yourself - that's how it has grown so phenomenally.

Cross-checking I see that they're already spot-on on Netty!

this is changed by copying over "favicon.ico" via FTP

Well there you go; you learn something new every single day Fourgee!

I think maybe he was fooled by "white v on a blue back ground" Mr D. Which to me indicates monsta is talking about nav_m.gif.

Anyway, I say bring back the old Market Cross favicon - except, I'm told it's not compatible with modern browsers; so how about a 21st century scalable version?

Surely it's the mining connection. The Klondike gold rush happend just before the turn of the centurary. Most miners from wherever must have contemplated becoming involved, and many of them actually did.

I've mining on both sides of my parents families. On my mother's side, her parents did follow the call of gold. But later, to a more mature industry, and not quite that far West.

Anyway, amongst mining communities The Klondike would have become a euphemism for for somewhere way-out; somewhere you only ventured to at your peril. Hence Klondike, Cramlington.

In such dangerous occupations a sense of humour wasn't optional, it was an essential survival mechanism.

4 weeks and counting until jesus was stuck on a cross!...

No - as someone has already hinted - I think you've got your crosses and cribs a tad crissed there Monsta!

It's a celebration of the birth of a saviour, tacked onto an ancient pagan ceremony to bring the sun back!

Debateable which one of those is more pointless in the North East!

Now completed.

Thanks go to Fourgee for his time - appreciated!

do you own shares in NR like?

Already answered that; pay attention in the back row!

The answer is no. And, I don't like - like!

Lots of moms and pops in our area probably still do though - under the impression that it was as safe as Barings and The Bank of England. I've been saying that is was being run by a bunch of incompetents for the last twenty five odd years. Unfortunately no one seemed to be listening!

The greatly anticipated Branson masterplan surfaces. In short: the existing shareholders pitch in £650M of good money after bad. Virgin tips in £250M (roughly equal to what NR is bleeding every single day just at the moment), and somehow manages to end up with 55% of the equity!

Get this one past the censors and RB will soon be able to put his train set back in the box, and retire to the Bahamas. Even be able to afford his very own island!

Is if finnished??

Sorry - rescheduled for Wednesday due to backup problems.

Got a good one now, but too late to start today.

OK Team Bedlington is ready to upgrade. Board will need to be turned off for an hour or two shortly.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

The real joke is that the data isn't encrypted. Nor have they said exactly what they mean by password protected - all in the "public interest" of course!

The Revenue has also reportedly "lost" no less than 42 laptops in the last year containing sensitive data!

On top of this we've recently had a chief constable resign over (amongst other things) his own "private use" of the police national computer. But the fact is that all these are only the instances that get reported - they're the tip of the iceberg of public body data leaks.

If anyone thinks that any public body can be trusted with their ID card data they're not living in the real world. ID cards would be a total waste of billions of pounds that are badly needed elsewhere. They wouldn't save anyone's time except criminal's, and be just something else to lose!

And the buck - once again - stops at Mr Alastair Darling!

Accident-prone just ain't the word for it. He'd better find someone else to blame sharpish, or Malcolm is right and it's the 'r' word!

Looks like this might cost Darling his job.........but if we have only seen 20% of the fallout of bad lending where is the 80%?

No, he'll blunder on. In 21st century UK politics (or public service) being responsible for the murder of an innocent person, or blowing half the national reserves, isn't a "resignable" offence! Try explaining the Profumo Scandal to the current generation.

What will cost him his job is his advice to Brown not to go to the Country when he had a chance. GB might just have made it past history's rather short unelected/never-elected Prime Minister roster, but the imminent collapse in house prices will do for them both. He's had an exceptionally long run on Maggie's coat tails as chancellor, so can't complain. Or if he does it can only be to Tony, and I somehow don't think Tony will be listening!

On NR it's a matter of "gearing" and "firesales" and "confidence" and "contagion" and "loss-of-goodwill". In high finance one and one don't ever make two. It's not essentialy due to bad lending, but to overtrading and poor managment. It's also due to the fact that many anticipate a collapse in the housing market - which sort of makes one inevitable.

I would like to see director share sales for the beginning of the year!

Easily done, they're all here:

http://moneyextra.uk-wire.com/cgi-bin/inde...3&words=NRK

But you credit them with too much intelligence; the last three I checked out are all buys at seven or eight pounds!

Anyone pondering buying these shares should consider that even below a pound they are not any sort of investment, they're a pure gamble. I don't believe that any investment pro would touch them with a bargepole.

 i am truelly shocked! cardboard boxes, corrugated iron! whats a b.soc is that a new invention for cold bees?

and yes i do have the capacity to count! and at least i come on and post one liners!  

oh sorry this has three let me delete some thing!

No, that would be a bee sock. Soc. is the standard abbreviation for society.

Note the full stop. Punctuation is sometimes very important.

Curiously, Building Societies are the subject of this thread. Or rather one particular B.Soc. that converted into a bank.

As you seem to hate banks it would be very interesting to hear exactly why? And even more interesting if you could propose something that would be better.

mmmm the joy! do you read the ftse and dow jones nasdaq etc and get excited!

Yes, I follow the FTSE, and sometimes the dow, but seldom the NASDAQ.

It's a dull job but someone has to do it. Rather like there's always someone needed to post dull and boring one-liners - lamenting the fact that no one else is posting dull and boring one-liners.

Someday you might need to go to a B.Soc. to buy a house too. You can't rely on endless supplies of cardboard boxes and second-hand corrugated iron sheet - the world is rapidly running out of these. And there are people who need these vital materials more than you. You've just got to watch the news to discover this. You do watch the news?

p.s. Note that that is six whole lines - seven if you include this!

...this is a private company and as such should suffer the same fate as any other private companies which flounder....

...if the BOE might get some cash back, eventually!

Absolutely! And, to whoever suggested that the people queueing for their money were being dumb: no lesser person than the Governor of the BoE has gone on record as saying they were doing the only rational thing in the circumstances.

It's has been estimated that NR now owes the BoE £2Bn in interest payments. So my earlier suggestion that the shareholders are wiped out looks to be nearer the mark than the rash Mr Freddie Shepherd. And, that wipe-out will undoubtedly include your charitable foundation's 74,333,500 shares Ms Fiona Ellis! Another confident statement maybe? Or are we going to see some resignations there too?

A complete !*!@#-up by Alastair Darling. He appears to have committed almost half the national reserves to propping up a small badly-managed outfit that only counts for about 2.5% of the UK's banking, and which could easily have been let fail. The depositors would have had some protection, and the mortgages would have been sold on by the liquidator. That's no more than NR was doing anyway!

So... we are now left wondering what will happen if one of the majors fails. The BoE simply doesn't have enough of OUR money to throw at that sort of exercise. No wonder that - after a long period of stability - the pound is falling against the euro.

The lesson for other building societies is stick to your roots; that is, loaning local mom'n'pop money back to local mom'n'pops. It's a low-risk business that serves a social purpose. Of course to do this you need to have piddling little street offices in piddling little towns. Offices in the sky won't hack it in low finance. High finance is high risk - risks which you often can't see coming, or when you can it's just too late.

i'm only a troll..............

But a troll that has *finally* found his Caps Lock key nevertheless!

What problems are they? I'm not aware of any... except that I had to add a new image to my gallery to make it appear on the main gallery page again.

Video uploads don't work, just for starters. Bedlington in Motion - isn't!

In the next week or maybe earlier.

Gallery and Blog problems to be fixed too - I'm led to believe!

Will try to give at least 24 hours notice of the work.

...griping about bedlington does not give one much to gripe about!

Very pleased to hear it!

So why not do the other thing instead?

What has this to do with Bedlington?

Not quite. It's Three that is marketing the phone and the service. The hardware is a freebie if you sign a monthly contract or £49.99 if you want one on PAYG. Heavily subsidised either way.

You don't pay for the connection. How Three earn revenue is that to maintain the free connection to the Internet (and to Skype) you have to have paid a minimum top-up of your mobile in the previous month. Likely you'd be doing that anyway.

Next launch will be Australia then Italy.

Why it is significant is that it's the very first time that a telecom major has retreated from the cost-per-call model for other than local calls on their own network. There have been a few very limited harbingers that this was going to happen, but VoIP is what is known to economists as a "disruptive technology". In layman's terms: Directly paying for phone calls to wherever is a long-ingrained idea that is dead on its feet!

The point is that it builds on the existing telecoms infrastructure - to the vast majority of the World that isn't even Internet aware.

Many commercial outfits are saving thousands on international calling using Skype, my own company included. This isn't possible using locked-in systems like MSN. And, who in their right mind would want to mortgage their future to Microsoft anyway!

SkypeOut and SkypeIn undermine the existing telecom franchise to an extent Bill Gates could only dream about. But this is just the start, and there will be many more of the same.

That was the entire point of my starting this thread. Mass use of VoIP is coming, and faster than anyone could believe.

Skype isn't the only VoIP service in the field, but it has the highest profile. Extending the *free* use to mobiles is the breakthrough. The current near 10 million worldwide daily users will rapidly multiply. It's great to see that the UK has been selected for the initial roll-out.