threegee

The only AV I want is a "none of the above" tick box. So I can say "yes I am interested, but you're not hiding behind my not voting to claim a mandate to do dumb things" . Whole thing is just to legitimise a status quo where people don't vote because there's nothing worth voting for. There's not enough votes so give SOME people several votes, and call that an improvement and "a fairer system"! The mantra always was one man/woman, one vote. Seemed fair enough then, and seems fair enough now! If you are going to overhaul the voting system then let's use some imagination, some modern technology, and introduce an electronic one. Can't do that? Why not? Oh, 'cos it removes the cost and convenience excuse to have five years between elections, and in so doing drives a coach and horses through the nonsense that our "representatives" carry out the will of the electorate.

Zebras madame; they come in many colours. But, az a general rule, zebra sould be ze same colour as zepanties!

Sorry to destroy the batting average but neither White nor Black are colours! Pink is a pastel too. There are only three primary colours. Though what they are depends on what you are talking about. Three secondary colours and the in-between tertiary colours, which don't have proper names. So not using a name more than once ain't going to provide a result. The likely explanation of why the task is so difficult! Question needs re-framing!

Yeah, caught that story on 3D Radio.

Put that way it's simply a tad over £17,000 per man/woman/child; well at least for the ones that haven't already left. Don't know why they don't just write their banks a cheque and get on with life. I reckon that's what these locals outside their International Financial Services Centre have just done.

Ireland's turn for fun tomorrow! http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2011/03/the_unbelievable_truth_about_i.html The only common sense thing to do in this situation is default and drop out of the Euro. Something Greece should have done, and will have to do sooner or later anyway. If Ireland flunks this then they deserve what they get - i.e. decades of stagnation and ever erroded living standards. Unfortunately the UK taxpayer doesn't deserve to have to absorb yet another megadose of politician's proflicacy. The idiots who threw yet more UK taxpayer's money away should be held to account. That's particularly true when we've already funded Ireland's boom years with the loss of jobs that would have come to the UK (and particularly our part of the UK) if Ireland hadn't been undercutting us on taxes. Extracting concessions to a level playing field on corporate taxation of foreign multinationals should have been part of any loan agreement anyway. Not to do this was a betrayl of the high unemployment regions in the UK. Suppose we just have to hope that the new Irish government doesn't do the sensible thing, at a time when they have their best opportunity to do it and blame it on the former bunch.

BBC Website Crashes Related Stories: Is this the End of the BBC?BBC Website Fallout Detected on MoonShould West London be Evacuated?BBC Web Meltdown in PicturesHyperbole Measured at 100,000,000 Times Normal Levels Alternatives to the BBCBBC Website Contamination now Found in Berkshire SpinachBBC Reporting Not Safe At Any Price Say GreensLiving in the Shadow of the BBC I Warned About BBC Dependency: Rupert MurdochHyperbole Measurement "a Mistake" - But Can We Believe This?

I'm NOT a Tory! I simply use my eyes, my brain, and my long experience. Every time this country has had an era of sustainable prosperity it has been under a Tory government. Every time we've had a Sterling crisis, and lost control of our economy it has been under a Labour one. Economists warned where the Brown/Blair duo were going, and it has come about. I don't agree with Tory !*!@#-footing around; I certainly don't agree with Clegg and his meaningless "fairness" agenda. I'm MUCH more aligned with the sound ideas of UKIP. But, it's a case of the art of the possible. I'm anti-Labour because I've seen what Labour's "the World owes us a living; it's all the fault of those capitalists" ideas have done for our town. That's not to say there weren't some fine people in the early Labour party people - Clement Attlee for one - but they are people of a bye-gone age. Today Labour is the equivalent of the US Democratic Party - the lawyer's party. People who chase ambulances and don't produce anything. People who are in it solely for building their own careers. And, people who have no belief system or new ideas. That's totally foreign to the hard working people of our area, the people who produced the real wealth that our country is built on. Yet, they continue to be duped by the rhetoric and the meaningless promises. Red Ed even had the barefaced cheek to turn up at yesterday's rally knowing full well that what he'd do is near exactly the same as what the people were protesting about. Oh yes, he'd take longer to do it, and try to sugar-coat the bad medicine, but in the process we'd all end up even worse off, and the government would have even less flexibility due to the increased debt burden. Believe me what the current lot is doing is the very minimum to stave off yet another currency crisis. If you still don't agree with me then tell me how you'd manage the economy to get us out of this mess, and I (and others) will then tell you why it won't work. I'm also happy to tell you how to make this country one of the most prosperous in the world again! You won't like those measures, and neither will the electorate. So no political party is going to go near them - simply !*!@#-foot around the edges of them like the Tories and the Lib Dems. And... at this point, we are back to the art of the possible.

Apparently it's about to be added to the list of recognised medical disorders. It's claimed that up to 30% of Internet users may suffer from it. But this also raises the interesting question... can you have Internet Addiction Disorder by Proxy?

Pretty good budget for the economy and the low-paid. Reduction in fuel duty, scrapping of the escalator, and the fuel stabiliser completely wrong footed Red Ed, who could only drone on about the trimming in the previously fictitious growth forecasts as if they'd had some sort of root in reality. Pumping cash into R&D through the tax system is a really positive step. Not just agreeing to cream off less, but a positive contribution out of tax revenues. Interesting to see the shots of a pensive Darling, obviously wishing he'd had the freedom of action to do the same sort of things.

And.. I thought this thread was another Prince Andrew story!

The short answer is yes; this time it's personal! Gaddafi is blaming al-Qaeda **and** Zionists **and** the Crusaders (the West). That has to be a historic first: all the bitterly opposed forces of history are somehow lined up against him. To some extent he's right, but that doesn't mean he's not a paranoid, manipulative, murdering, power-hungry, friendless SOB. There's hardly a nation on earth that wouldn't like to see the back of him. It's quite simply pay-back time!

Oh come on, use your imagination! We've got those two massive new aircraft carriers Gordo ordered and we can't now cancel. I'm sure Gaddafi could be persuaded to cling on to power until 2019 to 2023 when they are commissioned. This leaves us plenty of time to develop convincing cardboard-cut-out strike aircraft to line up on the decks. When that lot comes sailing over the horizon every dictator in the World is going to want to leave for Sharm el-Sheik as fast as they can clean the billions out of their private safes. Only a matter of time until Britannia rules the waves again - you can bet your civil service pension on it!

Not to minimise the seriousness of the problems, or these guy's dedication, but I don't believe the levels of radiation are anything like as high as the media would have us believe. Sure a few hot spots right close up, but it's completely indistinguishable from background levels in Tokyo and other places we are being asked to believe there is/will be a serious radiation problem. Looks like over 15,000 deaths from the tsunami, and hundreds of thousands homeless, many camping out in freezing conditions with minimal food, and all the media can do is constantly harp on about nuclear meltdown and radiation. Never let grim reality get in the way of a good shock-scare story! I haven't done the math, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the ongoing amount of radioactive material emitted by a select bunch of coal fired stations exceeds this release. Anyway I think the Japanese authorities have it about right in the 20Km highly-precautionary evacuation on all present information, and that the hysteria in other areas (particularly in the USA) is just plain dumb, or at worst exploitative.

Oh look, Mr G. has declared a "ceasefire"! Must have been all those messages of condemnation that were starting to weigh on his conscience. Anyway, can't have had anything to do with the long overdue UN authorisation for action, because they "absolutely do not recognise" it. Wonder what happened to the bit about civilian and military activities in the Mediterranean becoming "the target of a Libyan counter-attack"?

I'm told that he's joined the great employed, and is working hard to save Britain from Brown/Balls debt legacy! He is around though; just spreading his time more productively..

So Yahoo sidesteps the injunction by referring to him as "former bank chief"? A whole world of difference between that and "banker" then! Another injunction; another £50K in legal costs - please; ching! Can you take out an injunction against being reffered to as "former chief of a near-failed bank who is not living in the real world, and who - if it were not already obvious - clearly has more wholly undeserved money than sense"? If the word banker now has derrogatory connotations I wonder who exactly had a significant hand in this coming about?

..and all this time I though it was our lawyer! Anyway he's got to share it with that extended Mexican family, so that doesn't count. And just remember when you buy that computer with Windows 7 Starter Edition and find you have to pay another £50 directly to M$ (no middle man) to get access to the code that you already have, and that they spent oodles of time and effort crippling, that Bill really needs the extra money to get back to the #1 spot W7 Home SE = Windows 7 Ha Ha, So You Thought You'd Bought an Operating System You Could Use Edition!

Things looking rather bleak for Punch Taverns! http://online.wsj.co...303-712110.html

Didn't do a free customer survey, so off to a bad start. Pictures someone, please?

Goodness I think you are probably right. Never been that far down Palace Road for several decades. Thought it might have been Sleekburn school, but not even close, forgot about the old "Bedlington Station Grammar School". Google has caught someone popping up from behind a bush at the bottom of the road. Seems you can't even play truant these days without getting caught on camera!

Very interesting, but not a Bedlington building I think. Note that Rediffusion has two f's. http://www.rediffusion.info/

The first virtual product placement is apparently due to take place on tele this morning. They're inserting a coffee machine into a program at a cost to the advertiser of about £100K! Seems to me an awful lot of trouble to go to just to get a picture of a product into a program. Interesting to see how this is done as there's apparently no pre-knowledge of where it is going, and it has to be inserted into whatever spatial real estate is available. Seems to me to preclude any sort of interaction, but you never know! Where is this taking us? Is it Stork, is it Butter, or is it Virtual (and which is easier to spread)?

Spot on - well, maybe left a bit, stop!

That's the one Fourgee; formerly Hay's the Chemist (as opposed to "the top[end] chemist" which was Binks). Unfortunately it's off Cympil's picture at the right, but we must have a really old picture of the Vulcan Place / Marketplace corner somewhere. Betty Charlton / Oliver was definately very well known to our family, as I wouldn't remember the name unless it had been repeated many times. Unfortunately I can't fill in any of the details - it was one of those many things that as a kid you don't connect with, so just becomes part of the background noise. Pity you didn't post this in the 1980's! The Olivers (and I'm assuming here the same Olivers) were good friends of Dr. Brown's family, and I remember Eileen Brown often inviting them over to Horton Road.