Clock The Hypocrisy

British Government Ministers are writing to their counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to seek a UK-wide consensus on a trial of moving the UK clocks permanently forward. In a very European mode, the UK would adopt Central European Time, with BST plus one hour in summer and GMT plus one in winter. However there is a catch, our increasingly weak Lib/Con alliance government has said that each of these small component parts of the disunited Kingdom, will have the right to block any English desire to move to more acceptable times for the fifty five million living there.

Now you might think that a Scottish Government that wants to be at the 'Heart of Europe', and that is proposing a referendum on breaking away from Britain inside three years, would be keen on such a move. Especially as their leader Alex Salmon has gone on record saying that Scotland would be at the centre of Europe, and that England should be able to manage its own internal affairs, without interference from the Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh regional governments .... hmm.

Scottish Farmers and friends,  "nervous" about the potential impact.

But no, with all the hypocrisy that only a bunch of nationalist rascals can muster, the Scottish government has said that its "established position" was that there was "no case for a change to existing arrangements". SNP MP Angus MacNeil said any change would have "massive implications for the safety and well being of everyone living north of Manchester" ... utter tosh.

I live in the North of England, and its dark when I get up even now, and inside a few days it will be dark when I get home as well ... I also lived in Edinburgh for over five years, and I would be getting up and coming home in the dark right now! So what gain me by the clocks going back, nothing. It should be noted that Russia has just decided not to put its clocks back, and although they accept that it means darker in the mornings, they think the compensation for this is the lighter afternoons and evenings.

So just for once will the hypocrites in the SNP, let England have its way, after all they can just keep the old times, and accentuate the differences between Scotland and England, which is surely want they really want?

Voting Rights and Wrongs

There are two essential parts to any democratic system and those are that

(a) The people can vote for whomever they want (within some limitations on parties advocating violence against other citizens), and

(b) People who exercise their vote, do so with the knowledge that they are responsible for the end results.

Tunisia is the first of the "Arab Spring" countries to vote for a new government and has just voted for the Islamist party 'Ennahda' as the biggest party in its constitutional assembly, how this turns out will become clear in the coming months. It may be a mistake that just leads to Sharia law and an Iranian style regime.

The people of Gaza voted for Hamas, and then complained that because they had democratically elected an terrorist organisation as its government, then the rest of the world should accept that this legitimised them and their policies .... wrong.


Voting For These, Is Hard For Democracies To Digest  

If Hitler, or Stalin were 'democratically' voted into office today, would this mean that we should all accept that the 'holocaust', or 'the Purges' were legitimate policy goals, or treat them as pariah states? Well most Hamas supporters believe in much the same policies towards the Jews as Hitler (who is popular in the Muslim world)  ....

As discussed earlier, having a democracy make you responsible for the standard of the government you have voted to represent you. The Tunisians are responsible for what they may end up getting by dabbling with Islamic politics, and the people of the Gaza strip have to live with the results of voting for a terrorist group as their government.

Too many of the deluded apologists for these nasty little regimes in the West forget this second responsibility when they bleat on about the democratically elected groups of the Middle East, and it might be better if responsible democracy rather than oil supplies governed US and Western policies in the Middle East.

Little Thief Loses Assets

Teodoro (or Teodrin) Nguema Obiang Mangue is the son of  the corrupt President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.

Corruption Buys A Lot Of House

 

As discussed in the past, he's as corrupt as his father and has amassed a huge fortune in monies stolen from his poor countrymen.

 

Empires End

The 'American Empire' seems to be drawing to an end after about seventy years of total economic and political dominance, and as the economy falls into a cycle of deep recessions which is mirrored by the other *Western economies retracting with it, there are some strange stories popping up


Empire Nevada, Modern Ghost Town.

 

 .... not least of these are the rust belt towns in Europe and the USA, and now these are spreading into previously prosperous suburbs.

 

Jailbreaking iPhones

"Jailbreaking" was a term that I reserved for 'Jessie James' and the 'Hole in the wall Gang', and to be honest, it was only when I read a BBC article on it, did I realised that for anyone under the age of thirty, the term actually means unlocking the manufacturers operating systems on electronic items such as iPhones, XBoxes, DVD player, iPods, Android phones etc ....  in other words 'hacking'.



'Jailbreaking' was tougher in those days


Once it clicked, I was able to relate it to such innocent activities as making your DVD player 'zone free' by using certain control button codes (something lots of us have done), to rooting your ROM on an Android phone and replacing the stock operating system (OS) with a customised one (warning can go wrong, and voids phone warranties). At a hardcore level this involves breaking into the products and directly altering the programming to perform functions that it wasn't designed to do, and the borders of legality and illegality are a bit blurry at some points, but eventually it is clearly illegal (damaging the systems of other people via 'Malware'), however its hard to police, as in the main its a one machine change.   

The funny part of this is that in the main, these jailbreakers are young (15 - 17), and go mainstream when they get to their early twenty's .... in fact so much are they in demand by I.T. companies that some of the most infamous of the jailbreakers now work at companies such as Facebook, and Apple, or have opened their own software companies. And when the 'Jailbreakers' converged on London last month to talk about their activities at a conference called MyGreatFest, they were being headhunted by the same companies whose OS's they break free.

'Poacher turned Gamekeeper' is still as valid an adage as it ever was .....

NB: If you came here looking for a hack tip, well I don't like to disappoint so here's a genuine jailbreak code change:

If you want to enable your iPhones and iPads panoramic camera's i.e. allow the camera to take a series of images, and then merge them into a panoramic view (only for devices with iOS5 firmware). Then this secret functionality can be unlocked by you switching the 'EnableFirebreak' in the file 'com.apple.mobileslideshow.plist' value to 'yes' ..... of course this requires you to 'jailbreak' which as discussed above most definitely voids your product warranty.