Category: Uncategorized

It seems that requirements to replace our current Electricity and Gas meters with Smart Meter’s may drive the upgrading of the national broadband network that just straight forward consumer demand.

The current government has allocated £10bn to fund the replacement – maybe some of this is coming from the UK Intelligence budget and this might be another surveillance method that this government can monitor what your doing, or am I being paranoid – which will please the communications giants like BT.

However, I wonder just how much this will actually drive the promised upgrade  – all UK homes to have 2mb broadband – to a faster Internet connection? We constantly hear about Government IT projects running over on both Budget and Delivery, the NHS and the Inland Revenue being just two examples.

It becoming a bit confusing just which project will deliver faster broadband for the UK, there’s BT’s own 21CN project, the UK Governments own Broadband plans and now Smart Meters.

I just hope that with some many people poking away inside the connection cabinets that my own Internet speed – today monitored at 4.85MB from Readings South Exchange – drops as everyone else’s gets better.

Yes, there is rightly a need to give everyone in the UK a better Internet connection, but sometimes things don’t always work out for the better.

Communications Consumers Council Statement

I came across this short article in an recent copy of the Washington Post about an increase in the suicide rates in Japan. Staggeringly over 100 people a day commit suicide!

That’s over 36,000 a year! Which puts Japan at eighth place in this World Health Organisation (WHO) collated league table behind Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Slovenia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Latvia  and at three times the level of the UK. The Japanese figure has remained over 30,000 per year for the past 10 years!

Various reasons are quoted for this figure including the continuing world-wide economic downturn of which Japan is being particularly hard hit.

However, one recent case highlighted a different reason. Yukiko Shimizu whose father had died when she was 8, had given up quite a successful acting and singing career to look after her mother who had dementia, it is thought that she was becoming overwhelmed with the stress of this task.

Where does the UK fit in this league table? According to these figures from the Office for National Statistics, UK suicide rates continue to fall, although the latest figures are for the end of 2007. However, we’re all familiar with the reporting of  the cluster of suicides in Wales over the past few years and according to these figures from Defra, the high rates of suicides in the faming communities.

Whatever the cause or reasons for these world-wide figures, it’s sad that so many people are driven to this fatal decision.

Resources:

• Samaritans
• Mind Info Line
• Support Line

While writing the previous post, I made a Google search for some info on Caroline Flint, Browns latest abandonee, when I nearly fell of my seat at seeing that Glenys Kinnock, yes Glenys Kinnock is to replace Flint at the Europe Minister!

I don’t understand how someone unelected by ‘us’ to the UK government gets to be put into such an important position!

Wait a moment, I see a trend appearing, didn’t someone else who was in Europe end up as Business Secretary?

For a party that has spouted on quite a bit about House of Lords reforms, it seems that it’s a handy place to have by your side when you want to fast track another of your friends into high places without any need to ask the electorate.

Perhaps we’re going to end up with a whole cabinet of unelected ministers as Gordon staggers from one crisis to another!

Man, am I sick of this Government!

While Gordon Brown continues to find more of his ministers abandoning the ship! – Now its the turn of Caroline Flint (see this) to up sticks!!

A fellow PM, Berlusconi of Italy is facing much fleshier problems. He has managed to get these pictures banned from Italian newspapers, but EL PAÍS of Spain has published the suppressed images. This on top of charges that he has continued to use government planes to ferry his personal guests around Italy may be the final nail in the coffin for this guy.

Due to the supposed UK indecency laws and my unclear interpretation of them, as this image shows an ‘erect’ penis, I’ve edited the image to blank this out.

However, you can go to the EL PAÍS site and see all the images that Berlusconi has managed to suppress in Italy.

So Gordon, you certainly have your own big problems, but I’m sure that Berlusconi has much bigger ones!

Well it seems to be going from ‘Bad to Worse’, or better depending on your point of view as Hazel Blears jumps the fast sinking ship that is now Labour.

Who will be next?

I have never really understood what she has done in politics over the past few years. She had a number of 2nd division ministerial positions (PPS’s etc.) but currently she is (was) the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, incidentally the person responsible for the Local Government elections tomorrow!

I would think that this has something to do with the impending reshuffle that would probably have seen her pushed out by the PM. But it is more about her MP’s expenses; where, once she had been found out, she flaunted the ‘pay-back’ cheque perhaps a bit too vigorously for the Presbyterian that supposedly is Gordon!

Don’t think that she will be missed for one second! But there again, would any politician?

One rule/law I would be introducing today (if I had the chance)  would be to ban any politician that was involved however remotely or small in an expenses ‘scam’ from benefitting from any reward from the publication of their memoirs.

Of course the mainstream media who at this moment  are in full ‘hanging’ mode, will soon be falling over their own troughs to get the latest and greatest. I can just see the headlines in Murdoch’s Sun, Blears Bears All!!!

Oh well! Lets hope the next batch do a better job, though according to a recent poll they are going have to work very hard to win back our trust.

VOTE TOMORROW – VOTE TOMORROW  – VOTE TOMORROW

Did you vote by post? I did , could not believe how big the voting sheet was this time.

Will you vote tomorrow? It is your right and you must exercise it!

I don’t care who you vote for, just make sure that you go out and put your tick in a box. You won’t know how important it was to have this right, until one day you find that you can’t vote. Then who will you blame?

VOTE TOMORROW – VOTE TOMORROW  – VOTE TOMORROW

At last some good news, Jackie Smith is to step down as Home Secretary. I really hope that at the next general election this very dangerous women is also ousted as an MP.

She has single-handedly reduced more of our Freedoms than any other recent politician and the soon she is gone the better.

Another two months of reasonable connection speed for my broadband, with only one glitch in April and little bit of speed difference between the months.

But still way below what is still commonly sold as being ‘up to’ 8MB connection!

Yet more money is being spent on Jackie Smith driven Labour projects to spy on us.

In recent weeks contracts have been awarded to various UK and USA contractors for the new Mastering The Internet programme, as part of the Governments massive £12 billion Interception Modernisation Programme to be run from GCHQ in Cheltenham.

The Register, has a very good article about the whole program as does the Times Online.

It seems that despite all our other problems, this Labour government won’t give up on trying to track every detailed aspect of all of our lives.

Barcodes on our neck from birth is just around the corner?

I was in London today to visit the London Book Fair and after a very busy visit, decided to go over to Westminster to get some fresh air and test out my new camera.

Imagine my surprise to find that the Tamil demonstration was still going on at Parliament Square. Seemed to be a huge number in attendance, some on the green and some on the road around the square closing them to traffic.

Incidentally, there did not seem to be many police around that I could see  and the ones that I did seemed to be fairly laid back – and had all their identification markings showing, perhaps they have learnt their lessons from the G20 demo incidents last week.

Whilst I was there a number of the Tamil demonstrators came up to me and told about their protest and why they were doing this, they seemed to be very apologetic for the problems that they were causing, but felt it was the only way to get their point over to the British Government and of course the people.

Lets hope that they get their point over and something is done about their plight.

As more and more TV companies launch their own download players/services – BBCi Player, ITV Player, 4 oD etc. more and more people are downloading their favourite programmes to watch.

However, a lot of people don’t realise that all these services use peer-to-peer networking for their operation and in doing so, allow the download programs to use multiple PC’s to assist in the distribution of the various TV programmes.

So what is the problem? If you’re on a low cost Internet Service Provider (ISP) contract and have a maximum amount of download allocation per month, you could find that this is now being eaten up by the peer-to-peer networking operations even when you’re not downloading or watching programmes that you’ve downloaded! In some cases ISP’s are now starting to charge additional fees for users that go over their download limits.

Two software programs that I recently came across should help anyone monitor more accurately what is being downloaded (and uploaded) to their PC and with one of the programs, shut off the peer-to-peer downloading operation when you don’t need it.

NetLimiter 2 Monitor is as its name implies is a network monitor, that allows you to accurately monitor and build up a set of statistics for all network activity associated with your PC, including local network traffic. If you are using any of the popular TV players, run this program for a few days to see what the network activity on your PC.

TV On-Demand Monitor when loaded, checks what ‘background’ peer-to-peer programs are running on your PC and allows you to switch them on and off as and when required.

Hope this helps a few people.