Burbage

I don't think you'll find many providers at your budget (what you'll get for ?5 a month is space on a shared server of some sort) that'll let you set up cron jobs. However, that may not be too much of a stumbling block, depending on what you want it for. I'm not very familiar with Joomla, but there's a "poor man's cron" module for Drupal (triggering actions roughly on a pre-set schedule, relying on a page-load to fire the trigger) and Joomla may have something similar or, at least, make it relatively simple to include it. Depending, obviously, on what it is. PHP and MySQL you'll find just about everywhere. Perl is often not found on the cheapest packages, though, so remember to check. Check also whether it will run 'as-is' on the webserver or if it has to be sandboxed away somewhere - if the latter, it can be enough of a pain in the backside to make porting it to PHP a reasonable option. I can echo what MarkE says about UnitedHosting. I'd question Fasthosts, though. They've not been too reliable in my experience, and their packages look a bit tricksy. Now they're owned by 1and1, 1and1 itself might be a better option - they get a lot of flak, but they're robust, if a little secretive on the support front. But, as with everything, check what you're buying and look out for hidden costs.

sunnysideup Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > 1. The "green man" is on for approx 3 seconds. > Nowhere near enough time for a grown adult to > cross the road, let alone the elderly or young. > Completely idiotic. To be fair, this is what they mean by making them compliant with guidelines. > 2. No audible bleep to indicate that it's safe to > cross. A basic requirement of any new system > surely??? This means that they never have to stop all the motor traffic at once, meaning that, to cross to adjacent corners, for example, pedestrians have to wait twice. It's contemptible, disrepectful, abusive and dangerous, but it smooths motoro traffic flows. > 3. Green man signal confusing/hard to detect from > some vantage points. At most crossings, the Green > Man is ahead of, and above one's eyeline, here > they are at waist level so nobody notices it. They're cheaper, though. > 4. It seems like two sets of North/South traffic > is allowed to flow between each pedestrian > request. WHY? In general, pedestrians are a very second-class form of life (see the 20mph thread for exactly what the motoring minority, which are worth real money to TfL, councils and the DfT, think of us). Just be thankful you're allowed to cross at all without a 200 yard detour to a 'staggered' facility (as at the LL/Dulwich Common junction). > In short, the situation is miles worse than before > they started. > Utter RUBBISH. Only for pedestrians. > Please ask council to re-configure the timings > asap. It's part of the TfL empire now, so you're stuffed. Despite two mayoral plans (Livingstone had a five year plan, which Johnson restarted with a six year plan) to put proper pedestrian phases at all major junctions, nothing ever happened, and it now looks as if the DfT guidelines have been 'modified' to stop any mimsy pandering to blind people in particular and pedestrians in general. Given that, not even voting will make any difference, thus neatly ruling out any interest that councillors or GLA reps might have had.

DJKillaQueen Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Most drivers can be trusted to drive according to > the rules and the conditions....let's stop > treating them like idiots James. Can they? If we're playing statistics: "In this year?s Report, 92% of motorists believe they are law abiding, even though 83% admit to regular speeders (sic)." "...This doesn?t stop a sizeable minority speeding on them though, with 46% of motorists admitting to speeding in a 30 mph limit, 37% in a 50/60 mph limit and 36% in a 20 mph one." and some opinion: "There appears to be a fundamental lack of understanding about the social impact of speeding and the increasing likelihood of fatalities and serious injuries as speeds rise. This, and a perceived lack of police presence, has engendered a lax attitude to speeding amongst a significant proportion of motorists that endangers both themselves and other drivers around them." The source (which you might have guessed, given the lack of concern for non-motorised road users) is the RAC Report on Motoring 2012.

Loz Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > This article from December seems to show that most > lenders still have the restriction in place. > It looks like you might be right. Or possibly wrong. If I haven't lost count, but it looks like three u-turns from Nationwide in six months, and they're not having to beg for funding or jump to a Treasury tune. Either way, even before the recent foot-shuffling, at least three major lenders (Nationwide was one, with Paragon and another whose name I forget) didn't exclude HB tenants. Which makes the apparent 90%+ of "no DSS" ads look a little disproportionate. Especially given that, according to Shelter, nearly 40% of private tenants receive housing benefit to some extent. Mind you, given there's no easy way for a landlord to find out if you're a benefit recipient (payslips might do it, but 'replacement' payslips are easily available for a fee), I suspect that a good many landlords just put it in the ads out of habit. Which is a shame, because it effectively means that they're only discriminating against honest benefit recipients.

KalamityKel Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > saying wot? > > im very confuzzled... Is that anything to do with this or am I confusing my threads? The furry scene is popular with shy people, my friend tells me, but I'm not sure it has much of a presence in ED. Not as yet, anyhow.

Loz Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Most BTL mortgages specifically prohibit tenants > on DSS, so the landlord has no choice. That's not as true as it used to be, even when it was against benefit recipients as opposed to social tenants, which are subtly different. Most lenders now don't have such restrictions, having caved in to some tawdry lobbying by irritating lefties who, possibly fairly, thought it iffy that bailed-out and part-nationalized outfits should be discriminating against their fellow-recipients of taxpayers' money. But it hardly matters, anyhow. Housing benefit recipients might be able to cover the rent, and may even pass the credit checks. But the credit check fees, search fees, booking fees, inventory fees and commencement fees should be something of a barrier, even if the deposits (and the deposit-protection fees - agents being nothing if not inventive) aren't. As for disability discrimination, that's only illegal if its mentioned explicitly. If the property is unsuitable for disabled tenants, which most aren't, you're fine. This because landlordism is one of the few businesses that's largely exempt from heavy-handed, or indeed any, regulation, mainly because, as a growth sector, it deserves more than one form of hidden subsidy. The exception, of course, is the heroic borough of Newham, which has declared itself a "selective licensing" zone throughout, meaning even non-HMO landlords must register, to the horror of landlords and agents, whose squeals were enough to warm a human heart. Although selective licencing is supposed to raise standards in the rented sector, lenders are, naturally enough, now refusing BTL mortgages to properties in such areas, on the grounds that they are supposed to be areas of 'low demand' or of high 'anti-social' behaviour, and thus a shorthand for places that housing benefit might stretch to. But that's only Newham (and, arguably, Scotland and Wales), who may yet be challenged by one or other landlords' associations, assuming they fancy their chances. Southwark, happily enough, has no current plans to inflict selective licensing on landlords. Whether that's because property management and maintenance is currently something of a sore point in Tooley Street is not a helpful question.

computedshorty Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Look on Dulwich Estates to find planed clean up. > > Dulwich Mill Pond > > Dredging and desilting works will commence on 7 > January 2013. Apologies if I've missed a memo, but is there a Mill at all? And if not, what's the point?

Lowlander Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > So what actually happens if they carry out the > survey? Is that a prelude to a lengthy report > saying that your house is falling down? I have no idea, but at a guess I'd reckon it's stone cladding (or similar), possibly being flogged straight, or possibly tied in to the Green Deal, the government-backed loan scheme that's supposed to pay for insulation, or other sops to environmentalism, but that will probably end up being used to fund just about any home improvement that might conceivably reduce heat loss or increase 'efficiency', whether or not it has any practicable effect whatsoever. I'd guess the latter, if only because we've yet to see a government scheme (PFI hospitals, CrossRail, the Olympics, the ID card scheme, rail franchising, NHS IT, Individual Learning Accounts, Free Schools, Further Education, Europe etc) that hasn't been so badly set up that it's "inadvertently" turned into a profiteer's paradise. This isn't necessarily because politicians are stupid and the civil service corrupt, but not to the extent that you wouldn't put money on it.

Coops46 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Great idea - brings down road noise too, which is > a bonus. Have you looked into average speed > cameras? My understanding is that average-speed cameras will only really work when the whole borough is 20mph, rather than a patchwork of little ones. That's one of the reasons why Southwark is pushing for a borough-wide 20mph zone. Others being the savings in signage, traffic calming, consultations, bickerfests etc. And 'accidents', naturally. The most compelling reason, however, is in a TfL-commissioned report showing that the current 20mph zones disproportionately affect different minority groups. Effectively, those who live in the leafy bits where the zones exist can walk about with a 42% lower risk of being flattened, while those in the deprived margins of TfL's asphalt empire, where the zones don't, have to make do with older odds. Which, in a certain light, could be presented as a callous indifference to the continuing slaughter of certain ethnic and economic minorities, a headline that both Southwark and TfL might prefer to avoid. A whole-borough zone would not only save money and universalize the benefits but, via the cameras, offer a much-needed solution to a growing lack of enforcement. As a further benefit, such cameras would provide further fuel for the road-going paranoid, without whose contributions this forum, and much of the internet in general, would be very much the poorer.

I'd guess it's someone who doesn't like dogs. Or a desperate vet, if such things exist. Probably a matter for Plod.

"here's still a very good chance that in these days of increasing energy prices, similar schemes have saved people a not-insignificant amount off their bills". But, with respect, is that a chance you'd wager half a million of your own money on? With no way of telling the odds, or any evidence that anything like it has worked, it doesn't look very wise. Especially without so much as cherry-picked anecdotes from stock-photo customers. As others have pointed out, if the market worked, then there wouldn't be rip-off tariffs for the unwary to fall into, or a regulator so incapable of stopping them. The problem here isn't so much the spending of public money on a scheme that has no predictable or provable benefit or that it replicates a bunch of similar services, but that it should even be considered necessary. "...or of course decide to switch suppliers again later on whenever they wish to. They will not be tying themselves into a lengthy contract." The FAQ page clearly implies (4th Q at the time of writing) that only fixed-term contracts are being negotiated. There is, admittedly, some room for confusion with fixed-rate but as they tend to be the same thing, I doubt that's the case here. "Lengthy" is a matter of taste, but I'd be astonished if a fixed-term contract was entirely compatible with "whenever they wish". I have not, admittedly, bothered to watch the video, so perhaps there's some visual trick around it. But given that anything that's been deliberately not written down has been deliberately not written down for a reason, and that such reasons have never been good, I doubt I've missed much. I am intrigued, however, at the apparent opportunity for bidders to make further offers to participants their offers, offering them a new opportunity to call, write or ring without technically breaking the rules on pestering punters that it took so long to set up. It looks very much like someone's seen the clampdown on commercial harassment as a gap in the market and has gone pitching it to councils as an idea. Perhaps that's exactly what's happened. "a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to help people - particularly the elderly, vulnerable and those in fuel poverty." It is, of course, right to consider those in fuel poverty. But fuel poverty isn't necessarily down to a shortage of online switching wheezes or even a paucity of of leaflets. It's mostly down to a lack of money. And as those with outstanding bills aren't being allowed to play and, at a guess, those with outstanding bills are likely to be disproportionately represented among the fuel-poor, it seems slightly cruel. It's not just money that will prevent participation, in any case. It will also be the discouragement offered by landlords and their agents who, it seems, remain blithely, if not unknowingly, unaware of the new rules on their obligations to deal with switch requests (or, for that matter, the much older rules on Maximum Retail Prices for energy). And the threat of a potential cost to the tenant, especially where key-meters, HMO's or both are involved, might not help. But I don't suppose those can be effectively tackled. Not without a degree of thought or a callous disregard for the feelings of landlords which, so far, only Newham has dared display. Besides, as we know from countless tedious speeches, insulation and efficiency are the only sustainable routes out of fuel poverty. Yet, despite the serial relaunching of an almost effective insulation grant/loan/subsidy scheme, take-up has been oddly low, especially in London, possibly due to its abject failure to tackle the serious problems posed by leasehold and rented accommodation. The latest resurrection has a bit more of a chance, but only because it's now possible for landlords to improve their properties and pass the cost onto their tenants' via their pre-pay meters. Effectively, short-term tenants will be paying back medium-term loans on investments that are only likely to have long-term benefits, and those for someone else. I know the aim is for the energy savings to outweigh the payments in the interim, but that relies on the palpably dodgy assumption that those in fuel poverty have average patterns of energy consumption and won't reduce consumption (and thus savings) to offset the additional cost. So, as far as I can see, this scheme is more likely to cost the fuel-poor more in the long run, as any damage to the margins will be landed on non-participating customers. Given that they're already paying over the odds, thanks to the schemes for paying small-scale generators (or the landlords and financiers behind them) an astonishing mark-up, I don't see how it helps. It might have increased (albeit very very slightly) the proportion of renewables in the energy mix. But you don't need more than a modest grasp of arithmetic to work out that it's benefited relatively few people while costing everyone else. Including all those, by definition, in fuel poverty. I will, of course, take your word that much else is being done to help the most vulnerable. But it's all having to be done, and more will need doing in future, as a direct result of flaws in every successive act, regulation, guideline or initiative. It's self-perpetuating make-work and, as far as I can see, it doesn't even help very much. It's just deferring problems in the hope that something will turn up and, if life has taught us anything, it's that something never does. In the same way as energy will never "be too cheap to meter". "I appreciate the idea of any taxpayer money being spent on this is an instant red-rag to some" I'd hate to think you thought you might have appeared to have mistaken my impeccably researched and carefully considered argument for some sort of rant. But, in case you had, I am not angry. Merely irritated by the unceasing slew of distractions, of which this is one, to the obvious, serious and fixable problems with our energy strategy, policy and market. In short, I'm tired of public bodies choosing to be gullible just because it's easier. Anger could only be justified if, for example, it turned out that the funding for this particular initiative was coming out of the 'renewable obligations' tacked on to our already-outrageous bills. Confusing a stealth tax supposedly devoted to actual investment in sustainable renewable generation with yet another sop for a broken and carbon-dependent energy market would be utterly inexcusable. But I'm sure that couldn't happen in the wake of the light-bulb scandal, in which, you'll remember, the renewables levy ended up being spent on the mass-mailing of shoddy, unsolicited, unwanted and heavily-branded lamps to every household in a breathtaking display of wasteful cynicism on the part of the billing companies and of flatulent complicity on the part of everyone else.

sncaffarey Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm a local resdent (Camberwell) but I work for > London Councils - the group that represents > London's 33 councils. We've been given a bit of > central government money from the Department of > Energy and Climate Change to help promote this > scheme, and I just think it's genuinely a win-win. Well, to coin a phrase, you would, wouldn't you? Effectively it's a nice chunk of additional taxpayer-funded bureacracy that's unlikely to cover its costs and which will do nothing in terms of sustainability. That doesn't make you wrong. You might, even be right. But I certainly can't tell that, and I strongly doubt you can, either, unless you're spectacularly good at geopolitical, meteorological and economic forecasting. The information currently on the website merely implies a fixed term (length unspecified) contract would be entered into by an unknown number of participating households who would also be required to provide details of their household to organizations that remain to be fully confirmed for purposes that are yet to be wholly disclosed. And what for? The idea of a collective-bargaining auction does look appealing. Or, at least, it did in the late nineties before the dotcom crash knocked the money out of the last lot. But this one's based on very arguable assumptions. "In due course you will receive a personalised offer which will make clear exactly how much money you would save if you make the switch." it glibly says, without so much as hinting that, by "exactly", they mean "roughly" and by "would" they mean "could". For even though the rates will be doubtless 'fixed' (albeit in a seemly raft of bands and standing charges and effective taxes for paying with proper money), consumption certainly isn't. So the actual saving (should there be one, which isn't guaranteed, despite the implied bargaining power) will be be dependent on all manner of things, not excluding the weather, the birth rate, pandemics, homelessness, and death. It also seems to be a dual-fuel deal, and that'll add enough leeway and confusion to the concept of a 'best' rate, that it stands a very good chance of not just not being the best deal, but being distinctly average. For even the 'best' rate won't be the best for everyone, given that even a single rate is an unseemly rafts of tariff bands, standing charges, and payment method taxes. If we further consider the implications of the fixed-term nature of the deal in terms of wholesale prices, exchange rates, inflation and the fact you'll be signing up to a tariff that might get trumped the very next day and can't be got out of, it's looking less like the deal of the century and more like a bit of a fiddle. And for this, the taxpayer's already been stung for more than half a million quid (?686,655, according to your website, being what amounts to a "bit of money")? On balance, therefore, I'm not surprised to see the occasional fragment of scepticism being churned up in the course of this valiant quest to pretend to subsidise the taxpayer with their own money while, in passing, handing a couple of private firms a deal that'll save them a small fortune in adverts and doorstepping. There again, I'm hardly ever surprised by anything. I'm sure it's all done with the best of intentions, and will give a good number of people at least the peace of mind that they won't have actively chosen the worst deal. But, to me, it looks a little oversold.

*Bob* Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > There must be some corner of the world that could > afford you just the tiniest bit of pleasure - > before you slide miserably into the grave? With respect, I think you're making assumptions about which of the Co-Ops he meant.

KalamityKel Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm curious as to what's on offer for the solution > to "do u love the single life or are u now getting > a bit fed up of being single and looking for that > special someone" I can think of one, but I suspect it's in very poor taste.

"I then decided to do the conversion from POP3 to IMAP, created 2 new accounts, followed all the instructions I found online, then manually, laboriously, copied and pasted emails from the old accounts into the new ones, could only do 20 or so at a time or Outlook would hang. Then removed the old accounts." It's difficult to know how to be diplomatic about this. For future reference, you should have exported ('archived' in Outlook-speak) your emails from the relevant accounts to PST files, copies of which you put somewhere very safe, deleted the old POP accounts, and then set up the new IMAP accounts and then left them well alone for a while. Because IMAP is like webmail, the mail server acts as an 'authoritative' view. All the other machines that connect via IMAP will believe what it says about what messages have been read, which are new and which belong in each folder. If there's lots on the server, it may take a while for them to work out what's happening. However, cutting and pasting messages from one 'live' account to another in Outlook when they both have the same address was unwise, if not bizarre. Sadly, instructions you find online can be both unwise and bizarre, so you don't need to blame yourself. Not as would make much difference, anyhow. In practice, that's the bit that's most likely to have baffled the machinery seriously. That's good news in one sense. I first suspected chunks of your hard drive had gone floppy, but on second reading, I'm inclined to pin it on this. Email isn't quite as simple as it looks, and just having two marginally different messages in the same account with the same message ID might be enough to kick things off nicely. Mind you, that doesn't mean its not your disk, but it's probably best not to think of that just now. Now it's best to just limit the damage. If you really feel the need to continue fiddling then: 1. Take backups of the new accounts on the naughty machine (unless they're all the same), if it'll let you, and make sure you name them properly, and in a way that you know they're possibly corrupt. 2. Delete the new accounts (on the naughty machine, again), no matter what sort they are. 2. Check all the other machines that you're using (if any) and make sure they're set to leave messages on the server (you might want to go offline to do that, just in case they aren't), or are proper IMAP accounts. 3. Set up the new IMAP accounts on the bad machine, and leave well alone. They will, when they've synchronized with the server (which will take a while if there's lots up there) download all the stuff they don't recognize (expect some, if not all, to be 'unread' - if you've not been using IMAP before the server won't know what you've already read). 4. Use your Ipad to check your old messages. 5. If, after a week or so, you find you really do have to restore some old emails onto the laptop, then you can either attempt to restore them from the backup PST files into the new account. But be careful, as they might be dodgy, so make backups of each account first. If you want to be really safe, then set up duplicate POP accounts in Thunderbird (set to never check the server, and always to leave the messages on it) and import the PST files into that. If you find you can't do steps 1 and 2, then dust the parlour, worm the cat or whatever else you normally do on a Saturday night. At some time, you'll probably have to do some uninstalling/reinstalling of Outlook, with an aim to starting with a cleanish slate, but you won't want to worry about that now. It'll be a whole lot easier if you've got reasonably fresh backups from before this episode, but if life was supposed to be easy it wouldn't be us that were stuck with it.

Otta Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ..... the > thread is about whether victims, or "wronged" > people basically then get a free reign in the > press, because no one wants to be seen as > questioning them, for fear of being labelled > insensitive. I still reckon the answer's no. Not in a world that continues to admit the existence of the Daily Mail. If you mean that some pressure groups get a very easy ride in some parts of the press, then that's true. And if you mean that, on an approximately daily basis, governments, corporations and other ornaments of the establishment are in the habit of losing their spokesperson whenever anything awkard turns up, then that's true as well. But there's a big difference between routine arse-covering and the fear of being labelled. At present, the coincidental collapse of a catalogue of cover-ups has meant that lots of wronged people are getting lots of airtime and are not being challenged. But that's because they've been proven to have been wronged (or cannot be proven not to have been), so there is no other side to put. Not without being sued.

I'm afraid I see it very differently. What's "best" for his outfit should be what's best for the public he's supposed to serve, and futile attempts to get the force painted as better than it should be would only be in the public's interest in a place like North Korea. Here, they're just at the public's expense, and if he can't understand that, he shouldn't be in public service. By the time of the email, remember, the force will have been through the bulk of the inquiry, and done the bit about moving on and learning lesson and whatever other platitudinous guff can be found in the Chief Constable's Handbook. It was doing it's best to pretend to be open and humble and transparent and diligent and reformed after a twenty-year reign of "owning" the "truth" on its own terms and in the most insensitive way possible. Yet here it was again, with a Chief Constable, the person charged with leading his brutish pack out of moral turpitude into the sunlit uplands of approximate lawfulness, playing at spin-doctors and complaining people weren't being fair? A mild rebuke from the IPCC seems not only entirely justified, but the very best he could possibly hope for. On the matter of the victims, the media are being coy for a different reason. It's not that the Press has suddenly developed an indifference to trampling on people's sensitivities, but that the Hillsborough families, as News International found to their cost, have learnt to work the libel courts. Plod can say what it likes, but even the tabloids won't buy their toxic tales any more.

I take the point. But if you've been lying, colluding, forging, perjuring, conspiring and orchestrating a wholesale cover-up (being the facts not under dispute), it might not be wise to bang on about the continuing reliability of a scant handful of arguable details immediately before the gruesome truth is published. There is no law against it, though, so he's only had to get someone to write him an apology. The reason the IPCC took a dim view is because he effectively attempted a tactless PR campaign designed to skew the reporting of what turned out to be a very damning, and independent, report into a mire of mendacity that had denied justice for two decades solely to preserve the careers of some incompetent Plods whose negligence resulted in the deaths of the people they were being paid to safeguard. Trying it to spin it in advance doesn't just show insensitivity to the victims, it shows contempt for the independent process and disregard for the findings. The IPCCs chief complaint is that the emails had "serious implications for public confidence", which they will have done. The police rely on public confidence, and appearing to refuse to take their medicine isn't likely to bolster it. If any PR work was needed, it was in preparing the fulsome apologies and the robust transparency that the inquiry called for, not in cavilling at details or playing at spin-doctors. You may remember the Gulf oil spill in 2010 (well before Crompton's blunder), which was notable not just for the scale of the disaster, but the inept response of BP, who reckoned a bit of optimistic denial and finger-pointing at contractors would be just the thing to comfort the families of the dead and soothe a worried public. It didn't work out too well for BP, and to find a senior Plod trying the same tactics shows a spectacular lack of common sense and a monumental failure of judgement which, if nothing else, raises the very good question of what qualities his juniors must have had to be passed over for the job.

Here is what you're probably looking for (the other side of Queen's Road, though). They'll show you around if you ask. An independent health impact report was done and is squirreled away at webarchive.lewishampct.nhs.uk/documents/1219.pdf.

rgutsell Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Do I detect a touch of sarcasm? Well, to paraphrase Mr Eastwood, do you? > I also give thanks for the huge majority of > trained and attentive drivers ( Many of whom are > cyclists) who brake, move out, adjust their speed > etc to compensate for the cyclists. Quite right. Credit where it's due. I've even heard that some of them don't eat babies. > I like cycling, and I think it should continue to > develop. That's very good of you, sir. To do this, one of the things that the > cycling fraternity needs to do is bite the bullet > and get serious about being legal, road ready, and > lose the concept that just anyone can get any old > piece of equipment, and get on the road without > training or knowledge, or any legal concern about > safety. Cyclists would have to lose some of their > "freedom". Of course. But, as you so eloquently pointed out, that's already not the case, and rules do apply. They might not be the rules that suit you in particular, but that's democracy for you. Besides, while the highway remains so depressingly public (even horses can go on it, without so much as passing a theory test), removing the freedoms that make Britain so subtly different from, say, North Korea, is going to take a hard sell. Pedestrians aren't fond of kevlar and buggies are expensive enough without being armoured. Of course, if everyone prepared themselves so considerately, we might be able to scrap some of the oppressive rules that force innocent motorists to (mostly) buy insurance and look out of windows, but that particular utopia seems almost as distant as it was in the 1950s. > I think a serious effort by Police to make safety > checks etc would be benificial in the long run, > painful at the outset. Sure. But, despite popular preconceptions, albeit preconceptions unhelpfully informed by events, the police aren't supposed to persecute people for things that aren't illegal or enforce laws that don't exist. So if you want to stir them up into what passes for action (ignoring, of course, the possibility that they might already be doing exactly what you've suggested), you'll have to forget any nonsense about flashing. You might also, if only to save time, ditch any ideas you might have about exposed ankles or the wrong sort of hat, subjects on which the legislators of modern times have been scandalously lax.

rgutsell Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The laws describing the lighting requirements for > all road users are ages old 1989 might seem ages old to anyone born yesterday, but for those of us of older growth, they're not that ancient. Moreover, they've been amended a few times since, with the last set of changes (a whole eight years ago) leaving us in a position where the DfT guidelines (last updated, shockingly, in 2010) now run, in relation to "pedal cycle lighting": "The lamps may be steady or flashing, or a mixture - e.g. steady at the front and flashing at the rear. A steady light is recommended at the front when the cycle is used in areas without good street lighting." If you are after constructing some sort of campaign, though, you might find rewarding ground in the requirement for pedal reflectors, which is largely incompatible with what are known as "clipless" pedals, thus rendering many keen cyclists well within the scope of your intriguing obsession. If you approached the police with a view to interesting them in a proposal along those grounds you're likely to get a conceivably more constructive response than one based entirely on pre-millennial preconceptions.

davidh Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > the event itself was just a small group of people > having a dance (and fun) for a very short while. > yet this is threatening to become a thread to > rival the dreaded m&s saga. please, everyone, this > one must end now. Surely not. The M&S obsession is just a grubbily aspirational monomania. This is far more interesting. I'm fascinated, for example, by the suggestion that anything that might distract a driver should be purged from the streets. Foot-tappers are only the start of it, I'm sure. It'll soon be foxes, phones, flags and footballs, not to mention dogs and children. As for myself, who delights in a physique that might be described as distracting, I want to know if there are any plans to make me wear a burqa, or if I'm going be purged from the streets during the hours of daylight. I'd also like to know who gets to decide, and how. It's also worth remembering, in these years of bleak unemployment, the job-creation opportunities that might emerge. Moving every billboard to a traffic-free location might be just the stimulus we need. Perhaps the blazer-wearing wings of our motoring organizations are right, and it's time to review our lazy laws that legally oblige motorists to disregard distractions, if only for the sake of the economy. Nobody has quite called for that yet, admittedly, but time is still our friend. After all, unless I'm much mistaken, a similar angle emerged when the proposals for ornamenting the roundabout were first discussed, and some opponents of the provocative Palm raised fears that such a salacious plant, merely through its baleful lurking, would lead to widespread slaughter, cause untold damage to property and foment unlawful thoughts. Although reality is, as ever, more disappointing than surprising, it would be unfortunate if people didn't feel free to advance such arguments, if only because the world needs a lot more giggles than it gets.

Ted Max Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > There's nothing glorifying about wearing a poppy. > It's a simple mark of respect. > > FFS. I know, but people have odd ideas about Valentine's Day. It might be a flower, and it might be the right colour, but if it's not a bunch of roses, it doesn't count, however noble the motive. It's right, of course, to remember the dead, but the dead aren't half as touchy as the living. Nor can they change the locks.

polla2256 Wrote: > well now you're just being silly I don't think Tom's being silly. Irrelevant, perhaps, but not silly. The point that Tom's missed is that labels say what they want to say, and nobody seems to be checking. We know, at the moment, that certain meat-containing products aren't what they're supposed to be, but food adulteration has just as long and distinguished a place in the annals of herbivory, whether it's sawdust in the flour or carrots in the coffee. If you want to take the gamble that a particular lump of tofu is what you think it is, that soya milk contains more than soybeans, chalk and Pseudomonas extract, or whether a particular sack of lovely mycoprotein came from the right sort of bubbling vat, you're free to take that gamble. But don't pretend it's not a gamble. The key point about the horseburgery is that Nobody Complained. The only reason it came to light at all was because the FSA bothers to read the papers. There is no routine testing, and it's up to customers to raise a fuss. As customers typically can't test their food, fusses are rare. There have been scandals before, of course. But when 'olive' oil, 'wild' salmon, 'free range' eggs, 'basmati' rice, 'British' chickens and 'pure' honey turned out to be something else, it was discovered either by accident, or through the pleasingly selfless snitchery of the disgruntled (who surely deserve a monument by now). And some substitutions - apricot kernels for "bitter almonds", for example - have such a long history that they're almost respectable. In short, vegetarianism is all very fine, but you've no better way of telling what you're eating than anyone else. In the horseburger case it applies to different meats. But it could equally apply to 'non-GM' or 'organic' produce, or any of the other claims made by every food or ingredient on the market. Every we food buy, whether it had a meaningful life or merely vegetated, is now a wager, and there's no way to tell if we've won or lost.

LondonLogCo Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Do you reckon that's Findus done for as a brand > > Remember what happened to Fray Bentos ? Still , > they bounced back as "Tynne Brand" and everyone > *ahem* rushed out to buy it again. Not really. Tyne Brand is owned by Westlers, whereas Fray Bentos was Premier Foods (and may still be). Premier may have offloaded the brand, or be trying to, but the pies are still available, though whether they're any different, or even produced in different factories, is another question. But in the world of brands it's what's on the packet that matters, not what's in it. The last major big-brand scandal I remember illustrates this nicely. John West was hit, back in 1978, when botulism was found in a batch of tinned salmon. Although it was owned by Unilever, it was a proper company with real money, ran it's own European fleet of fishing boats and its own canning factories. In other words, it had more to rely on than just a name, and could still catch fish and tin them, even when demand for its own label hit rock bottom. That meant it could survive, even in the face of the prolonged consumer boycott that followed, if only by tinning stuff from the supermarkets that had removed its own name from the shelves. As a result, it's doing well now, and even though it's now owned by a Thai company running boats out of Ghana, it still catches and packs its own fish. Findus is a bit different. It's just a brand - one name out of many in the portfolios of private equity outfits that used to relate to specific companies but are now just licenced out to whoever cares to pay. The owners are middlemen who happen to have bought a logo, and this story is all about middlemen - whether the exploitative suppliers of dead horse, the processors who construct the 'meals' or the logisticians and contract-swappers who palm off one against the other and will, I imagine, be finding out that the only thing they didn't outsource was the risk. As such, there's no real business to protect. Just the 'brand awareness' that's been built up through advertising over the decades, and that's a lot more fragile than a proper company. However deft their PR agency's response, it will break the suspension of disbelief that the advertising relies on - that Findus is a company that actually produces stuff, rather than a beige collection of dusty skimmers, juggling licences, contracts and invoices in a disembodied pretence of adding value. Although it's not the first brand to be affected, and the supermarkets are likely to continue to support it (as they're almost obliged to do, given their own problems), I suspect it's doomed, at least in the short term. Although it's not a premium brand, their customers do pay a little over own-brand prices, and I doubt they'll be happy to find they've been doing that for a product that's, at best, no better. I may be wrong. There's no accounting for what people will pay for, and some popular brands, while perversely famous for the shoddiness of their goods, still carry on peddling tat to people who like the comfort of a familiar name. Even if it does disappear for a while, there's a reasonable chance of it being resurrected later, either by the current owners or some nostalgic chancer of the future, when the fuss has been flattened. It's a fairly rubbish basis for a business, but it's a fairly rubbish world, and you can't help but grudgingly respect those with the callousness to make money out of it.