Brett

Story at The Register

Okay I stole the thread title from elsewhere without thinking about it!! Shaddap

We go to Herons Freezer shop in Ashtoon for biscwits and general rubbish for the bairns cupboard but use Laidlers in Delaval for our fruit and veg. Loads of the stuff is locally sourced and cheap as chips. Currently got cucumbers, courgettes, tomatoes, strawberries and got some potatoes and onions on the way in the back garden too. Even if it saves us a little bit a week by using the home stuff it's better than giving it to Wal Mart.

Hi Si, Welcome to the site again :-)

We have been boycotting Asda for sometime now, still have to go in for certain things but our main shop is done locally so that money is going to local producers for nicer food. Up the revolution and all that.

You may have a point there.

What I would like to know is how they are managing to start it on a Saturday 19th May.

Happy birthday squire. Have a good one.

Which, given the following assumptions. The payment for a house is £238,874 (the current asking price average according to Rightmove.co.uk) The car costs £25,000 and everyone would be driving chinese built MG's!! The univesity fees remain unchanged at £9000 a year for a 3 year course and they take a pension of £25,000 above their statutory requirement of £5200 a year on booze and fags. See's them quite happily through until they reach the age of 76 before they get into debt.

Yeah it is an excellent series and apparently the date for the second series has been brought forward from October to July Movies Online - Walking Dead Season 2 coming July I watched the american broadcasts and the channel 5 show and unfortunately there are small portions missing on the channel 5 episodes, nothing major but enough to make you notice that there were bits missing, like when the motor home broke down and they dropped the infected person off at the tree. There was a bit where one of the characters drove away to find something to fix the motor home so in the 5 version it looked like they broke down, dropped the infected bloke off and then left without fixing the vehicle. I am pedantic when watching films, programmes

I flicked it on for Caged the Elephant on Saturday then resorted to my own music as it got tedious and annoying. Not many acts that I would have liked to have seen to be honest.

ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning? WITNESS: He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?' ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you? WITNESS: My name is Susan! ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact? WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active? WITNESS: No, I just lie there. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all? WITNESS: Yes. ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory? WITNESS: I forget. ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot? ___________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo? WITNESS: We both do. ATTORNEY: Voodoo? WITNESS: We do. ATTORNEY: You do? WITNESS: Yes, voodoo. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning? WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam? ____________________________________ ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he? WITNESS: He's 20, much like your IQ. ___________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken? WITNESS: Are you !*!@# me? _________________________________________ ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th? WITNESS: Yes. ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time? WITNESS: Getting laid ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: She had three children, right? WITNESS: Yes. ATTORNEY: How many were boys? WITNESS: None. ATTORNEY: Were there any girls? WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney? ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated? WITNESS: By death. ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated? WITNESS: Take a guess. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual? WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female? WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male. _____________________________________ ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney? WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work. ______________________________________ ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people? WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight. _________________________________________ ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to? WITNESS: Oral... _________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body? WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time? WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished. ____________________________________________ ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample? WITNESS : Are you qualified to ask that question? ______________________________________ And last: ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse? WITNESS: No. ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure? WITNESS: No. ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing? WITNESS: No. ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy? WITNESS: No. ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor? WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar. ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless? WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Are you wanting specifically about Bedlington job centre or other job centres included.

Will any of this work be going on at a weekend John. Afraid I'm not around much during the week but more than willing to participate at the weekend when not at work. Tuesday May 17th provisionally booked also.

Good luck with the new job mate, was out of work for bloody ages not too long ago and it's so demoralising. I also know what you mean about the Job Centre not being the most helpful of people but if you look at it from their angle and the people that they have to deal with on a daily basis (not jobseekers, the people who are going in just so they can get their money and have no intent on looking for a job). Can be quite patronising. Just in time for summer :-)

osama was just the fall guy, a figurehead for americas hate. in reality he only has a small band of 'warriors'. Plenty more people who believe in the same ideals. Extremists aren't just going to give up because they have lost him, it's not a vampire story where everyone changes back if you take out the head vampire. Bet the Americans are pleased that they got him, if we had got him we would have put him in Belmarsh, worried about his human rights and apologised to Pakistan for trespassing... Nice to see that the conspirisists are already on the case too. Can't say that I'm happy he's dead to be honest but it will give closure for alot of families that have been directly affected with the loss of loved ones. I'm going to remain undecided about my thoughts on this until more details have been revealed.

Thanks folks, turns out I was violently ill with some 24 hour bug the night of my birthday so just tucking into some cidre now :-)

Thankyou all, I shall be investing my birthday money into a somerset company that presses apples to make some delightful drinks.

Thankyou kind sir Although I must have entered my DOB incorrectly when signing up and it's not my birthday until tomorrow so your actually early.

Interesting read from another forum The anomalies of a plurality voting system can be more subtle, though, as mathematician Donald Saari at the University of California, Irvine, showed. Suppose 15 people are asked to rank their liking for milk (M), beer (, or wine (W). Six rank them M-W-B, five B-W-M, and four W-B-M. In a plurality system where only first preferences count, the outcome is simple: milk wins with 40 per cent of the vote, followed by beer, with wine trailing in last. So do voters actually prefer milk? Not a bit of it. Nine voters prefer beer to milk, and nine prefer wine to milk - clear majorities in both cases. Meanwhile, 10 people prefer wine to beer. By pairing off all these preferences, we see the truly preferred order to be W-B-M - the exact reverse of what the voting system produced. In fact Saari showed that given a set of voter preferences you can design a system that produces any result you desire. In the example above, simple plurality voting produced an anomalous outcome because the alcohol drinkers stuck together: wine and beer drinkers both nominated the other as their second preference and gave milk a big thumbs-down. Similar things happen in politics when two parties appeal to the same kind of voters, splitting their votes between them and allowing a third party unpopular with the majority to win the election. Can we avoid that kind of unfairness while keeping the advantages of a first-past-the-post system? Only to an extent. One possibility is a second "run-off" election between the two top-ranked candidates, as happens in France and in many presidential elections elsewhere. But there is no guarantee that the two candidates with the widest potential support even make the run-off. In the 2002 French presidential election, for example, so many left-wing candidates stood in the first round that all of them were eliminated, leaving two right-wing candidates, Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, to contest the run-off. Order, order Another strategy allows voters to place candidates in order of preference, with a 1, 2, 3 and so on. After the first-preference votes have been counted, the candidate with the lowest score is eliminated and the votes reapportioned to the next-choice candidates on those ballot papers. This process goes on until one candidate has the support of over 50 per cent of the voters. This system, called the instant run-off or alternative or preferential vote, is used in elections to the Australian House of Representatives, as well as in several US cities. It has also been suggested for the UK. Preferential voting comes closer to being fair than plurality voting, but it does not eliminate ordering paradoxes. The Marquis de Condorcet, a French mathematician, noted this as early as 1785. Suppose we have three candidates, A, B and C, and three voters who rank them A-B-C, B-C-A and C-A-B. Voters prefer A to B by 2 to 1. But B is preferred to C and C preferred to A by the same margin of 2 to 1. To quote the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland: "Everybody has won and all must have prizes." One type of voting system avoids such circular paradoxes entirely: proportional representation. Here a party is awarded a number of parliamentary seats in direct proportion to the number of people who voted for it. Such a system is undoubtedly fairer in a mathematical sense than either plurality or preferential voting, but it has political drawbacks. It implies large, multi-representative constituencies; the best shot at truly proportional representation comes with just one constituency, the system used in Israel. But large constituencies weaken the link between voters and their representatives. Candidates are often chosen from a centrally determined list, so voters have little or no control over who represents them. What's more, proportional systems tend to produce coalitions of two or more parties, potentially leading to unstable and ineffectual government - although plurality systems are not immune to such problems, either (see "Power in the balance"). Proportional representation has its own mathematical wrinkles. There is no way, for example, to allocate a whole number of seats in exact proportion to a larger population. This can lead to an odd situation in which increasing the total number of seats available reduces the representation of an individual constituency, even if its population stays the same. Such imperfections led the American economist Kenneth Arrow to list in 1963 the general attributes of an idealised fair voting system. He suggested that voters should be able to express a complete set of their preferences; no single voter should be allowed to dictate the outcome of the election; if every voter prefers one candidate to another, the final ranking should reflect that; and if a voter prefers one candidate to a second, introducing a third candidate should not reverse that preference. All very sensible. There's just one problem: Arrow and others went on to prove that no conceivable voting system could satisfy all four conditions. In particular, there will always be the possibility that one voter, simply by changing their vote, can change the overall preference of the whole electorate. So we are left to make the best of a bad job. Some less fair systems produce governments with enough power to actually do things, though most voters may disapprove; some fairer systems spread power so thinly that any attempt at government descends into partisan infighting. Crunching the numbers can help, but deciding which is the lesser of the two evils is ultimately a matter not for mathematics, but for human judgement

That's assuming everyone else wants Parma Violets, the rest of the world hates eating flowery girl sweets and couldn't give a monkeys about Parma Violets. It'll make no difference to the !*!@# we're expected to vote for. They're all products of the same public school system. We're better off voting smarties to save eating dog !*!@#, which is why conservatives got in, the public don't really want them but couldn't stomach another 5 years of !*!@# and voting orange is a waste of a vote

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-13070369