Just how big is the threat to our country, and does it justify the erosion of some basic civil liberties? I’m not convinced.
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I should have mentioned this yesterday, but in a welcome piece of good news from America, the Supreme Court has voted (only just!) to ban juvenile executions. One small step towards catching up with the rest of the world, perhaps?
Tomorrow I’m off on a Science trip, it’s not quite “How to pass your GCSE exam in 25 easy steps…” but almost. Meh, a day off school is a day off school.
Tonight’s TV viewing will consist of The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives as usual. Typical, you wait for a good show for ages and then two come along at once, on the same night!
From BBC News:
The government says it will allow judges, not politicians, to decide on house arrest orders for terror suspects.
[Claps]Well, it took the government a scarily long term to remember the basic principle of our entire legal system, but I’m glad they got there in the end. I’m still not very happy about the whole thing, whatever improvement on Belmarsh it may be.
They’ve also set themselves up a big problem – because at some point there is going to be a terrorist attack. It’s inevitable. And control orders, house arrests or ID cards will ‘fail’ because some people will always get through. A lot less than the number of people who kill on the roads each day, of course, and I don’t see any emergency powers coming in to deal with that.
And now for something completely different – PC4 is coming. Soon. We’re also going to be upgrading PC1 to Windows XP, which means a reformat obviously, which means last night I had to find a way of moving several thousand email messages from my dad’s long-defunct CompuServe CIS Mail system into Outlook Express. And for that I’d like to thank CS2Exchange Software. £14 for a wonderful bit of software – cheers!
Mmmm… this will give us a network of 4 PCs which means that with the TV there are 5 DVD players in the house, enough for each family member to watch a different DVD at once. Now that’s what I call an indulgent set-up 
Went to fix a friend’s PC today. Problem: very slow and no windows will open. Surprise surprise, the problem is spyware!
Rishal had about sixty items of malware on his PC altogether. I wanted to reformat the whole thing and start again, but didn’t have anything to back up to, so took the ‘damage limitation’ approach of using Spybot \ Ad-aware \ Microsoft AntiSpyware \ CCleaner \ Add-remove programs to give everything a good clean, then installed XP SP2 and all the other updates.
The PC had gotten into this state despite having a fully paid up version of McAfee Security Centre sitting happily in the corner, complete with AntiVirus, Firewall, AntiSpyware (hah!) etc etc etc. This was no help at all when a program can bypass everything by getting the user to click OK on a random ActiveX control. The next time I’m over, I’ll slip on a copy of Firefox 
And now, I’m delighted to present a very special item: Jason in a Bin.
Fantastic, I think you’ll agree. Bagman to the rescue?
It may be a cynical electioneering ploy to distract us all from Iraq and the whole ‘detention without trial’ thing, but hey, a little manipulation is only to be expected during an election campaign
Minimum wage to increase to £5.05, and then most likely £5.35 in October 2006. One of New Labour’s most popular policies, it’s especially satisfying after all the shit spouted by the Tories in 1999. “Millions of jobs lost” whine whine whine, and this from the ‘economically challenged’ party which has a special, imaginary friend called £35bn. “Just cause no one else can see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!”
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Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
