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It could have been predicted. Social misfit Peter Hain - who quit his own country to tell us how to run ours, and who has become very wealthy telling Labour voters what they wanted to hear - is standing down to spend more time with his mysteriously-gotten millions! I'd rather hoped that when he got what he professed to want in his own country he'd be keen to return there. Sadly, that wasn't to be the case; there were far easier pickings here. It's ever the case with socialists - when they get what they say they want, they decide they would rather have what someone else has. There's the usual two-faced gushing about seeing eye-to-eye with Miliband, but he can see that the end is nigh, and that the gravy train is coming in to the station. Maybe he was looking for the usual transfer to the Euro gravy train? Maybe recent events have stalled those plans? We'd have been a better (and ever-so-slightly richer) country without your "efforts" Peter, and there's still time to return to South Africa! Loads of people there who now really need your "help". Unfortunately they can't pay you as handsomely as the "broken, socially-unjust, UK" can! https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090125115000AArCteL

Another good install on a Asus EEE PC901 but not the GO (3G WWLAN version) this time. Worthy of mention because this variant has built-in Bluetooth, and that works flawlessly too. Writing this using Point Linux on a PC901 using a Bluetooth mouse. This PC901 has two SSDs, so I squeezed the entire OS onto the 4GB flash drive leaving the entire 8GB SSD for /home. The first PC901 also worked with the first Bluetooth USB dongle I tried. I've no idea as to what Bluetooth chip it employed. The minor mistake I made on the first install was to format as ext4. In fact on small SSD(s) ext2 gives more working space. BTW despite the PCI-E connector, and form factor, these SSDs are not mSATA. This is a pity as really decent sized mSATA SSDs are really cheap nowadays. The pin-out is different, and there's only one or two manufacturers of Asus EEE compatible drives. They pre-date the mSATA standard. Confusingly they are called "Mini PCI-e SATA". http://www.kingspec.com/product_xx150.html#

So... you are a lefty BBC producer; you hate your country, its past, and everything it stands for. You are on a crusade for social change, and to "mould minds" - particularly young ones. What would you do? The country's history is a good target. The military? Oh, throw in the royals for good measure. Let's mock them! Let's commission a "comedian" who has a record of this. One who has no record of writing anything even mildly comedic for radio, but has a record of causing insult to the Queen. We'll dress this sick "comedy" up as being "experimental" and innovative. But, here's the master-stroke: we'll wait for an occasion when it will have maximum impact. We'll wait for a time when all the people we so hate have their minds on the very sacrifice and selfless effort we are about to mock. D-Day remembrance - yes that's it! Miliband senior would be proud! An altogether new low for 21st Century BBC! Will heads roll? Probably not; with a dumb apathetic public they get away with it all the time these days. Social engineering at its most finessed. ( It's still on iPlayer if you are interested enough. I'm not going to insult anyone's intelligence by providing a link. )

So what's going on in Newark? From a serious challenger, nine out of ten LD voters desert the party and it loses its deposit! Those votes should have gone to Labour, but Labour is seriously down in the polls too. Seriously down from one of its worst results ever, at a time when it should have been packing on votes! Nine thousand voters certainly haven't deserted the LD's to go to UKIP. The vast majority of those LDs voted for Cameron's left-of-center, split-on-Europe, Tory party! UKIP have taken both Tory and Labour votes, and are likely to keep them. UKIP have likely also brought people back into politics who have felt they've had no real representation in recent decades. The LD screw-up in removing Clegg has likely finished the party for good, and we are back with three party politics - only a different three parties! Miliband is poison, even to most Labour voters, and if he ever becomes PM by default it is going to be a very sad fixed five year term for this country. A completely wasted five years until even brainless Labour supporters, who don't realise who and what they are electing, have had enough of him. There are still a lot of imponderables, but we certainly live in interesting times. A change of leadership could completely transform any of the old parties, and even save the LDs from oblivion. That none of them can do this shows what a disparate rabble each of them really is! Here's the real reason for the surge in devolution: nowadays people feel better able to do things for themselves.

...and how would someone get involved and help?

European Clegg Boll*x is good for a starter. So the Reichsbank has just cut Euro interest rates to a staggeringly low 0.15% to "avoid deflation". The Euro is in trouble - real trouble - everyone (wow, even the LDs!) have known this for a long while. Our financially astute friends up North worked this out for themselves long ago too. Sterling is just as much theirs as it is ours, we are told. Well, not so fast, but we're glad you eventually noticed. The Euro is predicated on political pipe-dreams of tired, old, out-of-touch, men and is destined to fail - but so, my dear LD friends, is The European Project. Only the Germans have the tenacity (and stupidity) to cling on to a really dumb idea until inevitability is right outside their bunker door. Meanwhile the UK economy is on the rise after Gordo's uberbinge, and the BoE (Bank of Enlightenment) is worried about inflation again. What could further emphasise that the UK is a viable economic unit on the World stage, and simply shouldn't be throwing huge sums of our precious Sterling at a the long dead idea of a European super-state? Yup, it's the seventieth anniversary of 'D' day, and our UKIP troopers are making the first tentative landings on enemy shores. Our French allies are to be regarded with suspicion as they're a funny lot, and a lot of them still support German domination. Elsewhere large swathes of the Continent are quietly hoping we will liberate them. Cue-in for the Abba song: Waterloo, of course! ...The history book on the shelf Is always repeating itself ...

How about ringing Sky up and telling them you want to cancel the contract? You don't? Well that's not really important; the fact that you are ringing at all could be all it takes to collect a massive saving! 82% of the people who've tried haggling with Sky report real savings. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/household-bills/10875750/Martin-Lewis-My-10-tips-for-haggling-with-call-centres.html Do a bit of homework before you ring not just Sky but other major suppliers, and don't forget to report your results back here for others to benefit. Minimising the excess profits that flow out of our Town indirectly benefits everyone in it, and when that money goes to faceless foreign corporations it doesn't even benefit our Country. . Provider - Success rateAA (407 responses) - 90pcTalkTalk (198 responses) - 82pcSky (915 responses) - 82pcRAC (100 responses) - 78pcAdmiral (163 responses) - 78pcAviva (123 responses) - 74pcVirgin Mobile (113 responses) - 73pcVirgin Media (395 responses) - 73pcDirect Line (127 responses) - 70pcEE (156 responses) - 67pc

Point Linux (32 bit) on an old netbook ...works pretty well on an Asus EEE PC901 GO (2GB RAM upgrade). A no hassle install from a live USB stick, with all the hardware recognised and little or no customisation required. Only 4GB of the SSD used for a complete install, so should work on the most basic of machines. Haven't tried the 901 GO's built-in 3G WWLAN card yet, it's not on high on my to-do list. VLC player was struggling a lot playing a sample .mp4, but that's a function of the weak N270 CPU, and poor graphics. I have now installed the IBM Eclipse IDE, and that is quite usable. DropBox installed in minutes too - quite a bonus when you have so little on-board storage. Make sure you limit the number of your DropBox folders marked to synchronise to just a few essential and small ones, or you'll quickly exhaust available flash, and the initial synch will take an age. The real difficulty is cleanly removing the "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP" sticker. So... recommended for an old Atom N270 netbook too. You can put Granny on the Internet with Firefox, and give her e-mail with Tunderbird - all in no time at all. The bundled Firefox actually has Flash pre-installed, so YouTube works out of the box. This is not too bad, even at full screen - better than I'd thought possible with such weak hardware.

Someone just sent me this link without any comment, and it's telling: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-30681834.html I won't tell you what I make of it (well, not just yet ) as I'm more than interested to hear what other people think.

On which matters this link makes an interesting read: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=88339 On the Akademik Shokalskiy (stuck ship) thing.. at the time I wondered why all these obviously quite wealthy - but from the pictures clearly rather silly - people, had gone for a jolly in the Antarctic. Well goodness me, it turned out the Beeb was only protecting us from the facts which our tiny, non-liberal, non-PC brains, couldn't possibly absorb. (Read down on the above link). When hard facts get suppressed because they don't fit in to someone's model of how the World should be, then science goes out of the window, and dictatorship is banging on the front door. I've recently concluded that it's a total waste of time reading any of the comments on bbc.co.uk web items, because - apart from the complaints about censorship - what's there is carefully cherry-picked to represent the Beeb's view of the World. I've seen something somewhere about how the public participation audiences are filtered - to avoid anything un-broadcastable you understand. It's all about giving an illusion of free and open discussion, whilst keeping things within carefully pre-selected limits. Not too different to broadcasting in China I feel.

The New York Times reporting possible recorded acoustics off the southern tip of India - a long long way from the previous search zone. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-indian-ocean-recorded-noise-offers-clues-to-missing-plane.html?_r=0 UPDATE: This news story could add weight to the above: http://www.phuketgazette.net/phuket-news/I-thought-saw-MH370-fire-says-Phuket/29654#ad-image-2

Here at last: http://www.sammobile.com/2014/06/02/samsung-finally-launches-its-first-tizen-phone-the-samsung-z/ Looks a nice phone, and if it doesn't virtually force the use of Java, and is a true Linux phone, it gets my vote. 2GB of RAM is nice, and has to be about the very minimum for a smartphone these days. If they produce a dual SIM version I will go out of my way to locate one, else it will have to be a half-price flog-off at the local store to persuade me. M$ is going to get its nose pushed out yet again! Number four is nowhere in the mobile space - ask Blackberry! The new LG G3 has come too late for me. If the G2 had had that removable battery and microSD I'd be an LG user now, but Sammy got there (and beyond) last year with the Note 3.

Point Linux (64 bit) as a VirtualBox VM Very easy to create a Point Linux VirtualBox 64 bit VM under W7. Again, everything just works. Mouse integration etc is already turned on. Installed the 64 bit Debian version of DropBox in a couple of minutes no hassle. Removed the pre-installed Thunderbird to save a bit of space, but just at the moment a 10GB virtual drive is more than enough. I turned two cores on for the virtual machine, and bumped the default 512MB RAM to 800MB to give things a bit more oomph, but it was quite usable with the default single core. VirtualBox doesn't specifically list Point Linux so I chose the Debian 64 bit preset. Recommended if you want to concurrently run a full Linux distro on a W7 machine! If you have an SSD - cheap as chips these days - it's magic!

Yet Another Linux Distribution! This one is good, not at all quirky, and just works! http://pointlinux.org/index.html Based on Debian, just like Ubuntu, but it's much less cluttered. Actually, Ubuntu really annoys me on several scores! So far I was able to download the Point Linux 32 bit .iso (for those who don't know that is the CD data image file) and flash it to a cheapo USB stick using Windows 7 using https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer. It booted immediately from the stick on a Windows 7 machine as a "live CD" (i.e. without doing an install), and picked up ALL the hardware, including Bluetooth, WiFi, and HDMI video, with zero problems. I'm aiming to install it from the same stick on a number of old Windows XP machines, so will let you know how I get on. It could be just what many people need to revitalise an XP laptop that's currently gathering dust. I'm also trying out the 64 bit version running under VirtualBox on an i5 lappy. Will report back on that too. I'd previously tried out http://www.geteasypeasy.com/ on an old XP netbook. It looked very promising, but sadly the author seems to have lost all interest a while back. So... Easy Peasy Linux is no longer maintained, and therefore can't be recommended.

I will drink to that! Happy Birthday Adam.

I'd have bet money that your link led to a piece on Tower Hamlets! Real innovation at work there, putting "interpreters" into polling stations to show non-English speakers how to express their gratitude to the party that admitted them to the country - a master stroke worthy of Mugabe. You sort of wonder how readily contraceptive advice is available in that neck of the woods. http://www.edp24.co.uk/lifestyle/tower_hamlets_is_a_rudderless_ship_that_s_totally_dysfunctional_nothing_works_1_1422626

So what exactly did Lord Oakeshott do to bring on such condemnation from the LDs and force his resignation? Well, it seems he used his own money to discover the truth! In LD World the truth is to be avoided at all costs. Not just the truth on how the electorate perceives their leader, but on how their insane path towards a European superstate is panning out. Ask them if they were dead wrong to push for an entry into the EMU and you'll get evasion. Most will grudgingly admit that the EMU entry they pressed for in the ten years prior to 2009 would have crippled our economy, but any suggestion that they are even more mistaken in their headlong quest towards a federal Europe will be dismissed - opponents are simply Little Englanders. You could write a thick book about LD skills at burying the truth, but here's just one example I recently came across. It concerns the LD MEP for North West England, Chris Davies: So did the LDs "Publish everything, reveal all, hide nothing.." about their chummies in Euroland? I refer you to my three opening sentences.

And... you didn't get your phone out and grab us an exclusive?

Yes, off topic so deserves it's own thread moderators! No, no, wait - if we have a Miliband Gaffe thread it will likely run to the same length as the jokes thread. Could turn out just as funny though! He's my contribution anyway: I watched yesterday's press conference to the converted (aren't press conferences supposed to be for the press?). Therein he was asked by a puzzled loyalist why he didn't just offer the public a referendum on Europe to match Cameron, and so be done with it. No straight answer of course; it's all a matter of priorities, apparently. Presumably the priority of kicking an awkward tin down the road, and not exposing that you're as wedded to a European superstate as you are to keeping those labour-voting immigrants flooding in as long as possible. The real fun began when he was asked to describe his "leadership" in one word. After much head-shaking and tutting the answer came back "one nation". Then he went into a lengthy explanation as to what he meant by that err... one word! The core reason for the question - a vain attempt by a loyalist to disprove the allegation that he's unable to answer anything concisely and directly - totally escaped him!

The problem seems to be that here we aren't actually going to get a choice. I'm talking about Nige's "targeted strategy" - I'd imagine that we are pretty low on the list of winnable seats? An interesting observation: If there'd have been even the slightest truth in what Nick Clegg said about business being damaged by an EU withdrawal, and his talk of it "causing uncertainty" then just at this moment there'd have been market meltdown. Markets have been even more twitch than usual recently, and hate uncertainty. In fact after the results the markets have ticked up slightly, and are at near record highs! Something else the LDs don't want you to know is that there is actually a clause in the EU treaties we signed which provide for a withdrawal. It requires the rest of the EU to do a trade deal on favourable terms. We could build on this to involve other EU countries that see the world as we do, and so deliver the sort of free trade area we were all promised when we voted for "The Common Market". Hey, let's call it The Common Market! This isn't going to happen under a Europhile prime minister from either the Tories or Labour. They will sell us out again, when it will be politician's gravy train as usual. Nothing I've seen so far indicates that the EU will reform unless there's a popular revolution. In fact every indication is that the politicians are hell-bent on the road to federalism, and want to get as far as they can before anyone notices what we've really got ourselves into.

Interesting development: Inmarsat recently released 47 pages of raw data to a group of satellite experts. One of them, a Michael Exner, has just said that they've have asked for more background information, and indicated that on what they've seen so far there's no certainty that the original conclusion that the aircraft went South is correct!

Isn't that Watford (gateway to the North)? Cleggy under a lot of pressure to go. He's refusing, so it's now a battle of wills inside the LDs. Other parties must be praying he wins!

It's now an entirely different world inside the M25, and I'm not talking about the obvious things like the gleaming mosques. Someone mentioned the other day that over 200 more skyscrapers had received planning approval. The EU aren't funding any of those. Seems like you can't have the capital of the world, and the capital of your own country, in the same place. Birmingham is out for me, so let's turn England around and balance things up. Moving parliament to Newcastle would mean we could keep a much closer eye on the b'tards, and wouldn't half stick it to Salmond!

This will never happen. Far too many people with too much to lose. I mean Eastern European domestics are already far too expensive. Those nasty unwashed UKIPers in the provinces will put the price of "help" through the roof, they don't even have any colour sense!