I couldn’t agree more with this:
No wonder we don’t bother to vote: it no longer makes much difference. At every level, we are governed by bureaucracies: the Child Support Agency, the Learning and Skills Council, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the Financial Services Authority, the Highways Agency, the Health and Safety Executive, the European [...]
While officially learned in many aspects of the American Constitution, I don’t claim to understand Europe’s. Who does? All right, who does that you believe? In any case, it’s all a little bit too recent for my professional tastes. But this article from the Telegraph blog is informative:
The very first line of [...]
Sometimes you couldn’t make it up:
It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked “top secret.” And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.
You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all [...]
If government departments share data they are, we are told ‘more efficient’. They also invade privacy more efficiently. Clearly there needs to be a balance: one would hope that this could be settled rationally and democratically, in an informed manner. After all, we pay over six hundred people in the House of [...]
As every fule kno, once data is on your computer, it is surprisingly hard to ensure that it has been removed. Even if you ask your computer to delete your data, or tick boxes provided by Microsoft that reassuringly suggest that details of your browsing habits might be removed, the data is unlikely to [...]
Stolen passports amount for a good deal of fraud, but it is now possible for fraudsters to seal all the important data from your passport, without even opening the envelope in which it is delivered.
The technical details can be found at the Register, while the Express reports that the Home Office has already admitted the [...]
It turns out that the answer might be political as much as it is scientific.
I was very impressed to read about this piece of equipment for bomb trainers. The CCF at school had a navigation training aid - where they had got it from, I’ll never know - that worked on similar principles: lots of mechanical gears and a model cockpit that moved in response to pilot instructions [...]
I was greatly amused to read this expose of the effect that living in Brussels has on one’s use of English:
Even more irritating is the minimalist, English-as-a-foreign-language idiom that has become the EU’s lingua franca. If you are feeling smug about the fact that English has become universal, I suggest you listen to what [...]