threegee

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

Now this IS news! I use it several times a day to make international calls, and have done for almost a year. Skype Out may be what you are confused by. It enables you to call an ordinary phone in any country, most often for for far less than the cost of a local call. Both are fabulous services. Though the new 3 Skype mobile has to prove itself, it looks very promising, and really is free at the point of use.

In the USA comedian Steven Colbert announces his candidacy for president: http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/pl...p;is_large=true Which UK comedian would you like to nominate for British Prime Minister?

The Mail has now re-written their article to remove both the name, and the holier-than-thou stuff about the Internet. But they've added an open invitation to find out for yourself: Obviously a more experienced journalist at work here, and a better read. I believe the gender may already have been mentioned by the British press: yesterday - by the Daily Mail!

And now... someone has removed it! :D Censorship on Wikipedia? Is there a new year's honour at stake here? The plot thickens.

Skypezones, now free calls worldwide from your pocket. http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/allfeature...CFQOTMAodWXmyJw Watch Newsnight on BBC2 tonight.

And the Daily Mail is playing games too: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/arti...70&ito=1595 Read the article and it's a simple process of elimination. If you are in any doubt they've almost spelled out the location. K.E.N..

Wikipedia has just added a paragraph to cover it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Frederick_Windsor The amusing bit is the quote from 1999: "It is very difficult to avoid getting into this sort of thing when you move in these circles.." Now which circles could he possibly mean? Surely not the Royal Family?!