AMLinington

I'm under no illusions that LeBoyfriend and I will likely die at our desks. I suppose I'd rather die at my desk than alone in my house with no-one to care whether I'm alive or not, as my poor kittehs will have to eat me to survive.

By the culture of 'something for nothing' I am referring to those who live off the state for no good reason, don't pay taxes or NI contributions and leech off the NI and Tax working people are paying. Then, at the end of it, they expect a pension on top! I read somewhere that it is more profitable for these spongers and wasters to live off the welfare state than for them to get a job, as their income far exceeds what they would be capable of earning when you take into consideration the fact that the majority of people that live off the state for no reason (and we're not talking disability/illness/redundancy, we're talking the 'get pregnant and get a flat on the social' mentality) very likely have few qualifications or practical trade experience and so their job prospects are limited to unskilled or manual labour roles which usually command minimum wage. There are always exceptions to the rule, but generally, if you knock on every door in a Social housing locality, a healthy majority of the inhabitants will have left school with few-to-no GCSEs and are unlikely to hold apprenticeship or trade qualifications. Is it any wonder they pop out a new child every 2 years when child benefit alone is enough to keep them in their XBoxes and iPads?

Finite pot of money notwithstanding, why not take the approach of 'you get out what you pay in'. If the 'State pension' was not a mandatory requirement, but an 'optional' choice where you choose to take advantage of the state scheme (similar to workplace pensions) to get a better investment return, and over your working life you paid in X amount, when you retired, you should get X amount + invested gain back again? Or do away with the state pension and enforce private pensions (similar to the private healthcare system in America) but remove completely the element of income tax or national insurance that goes into the state pension. Pay out what people paid in, and it's fair. The pot of money would only be as large as the amount paid in, but then it would only have to pay out that same value + whatever % it has gained 'in the market' surely? Perhaps that is an overly simplistic view, but the culture of 'something for nothing' is problematic.

To book an appointment at a reasonable time so that I don't get into trouble at work, the earliest I can get is 2 weeks and they book up so quickly you have to have 3 or 4 phones on constant redial to get through... I agree that the state pension is warped - if you earn more, you pay more tax, so therefore you should get back what you pay in. Ultimately that means the people that earned more get higher pensions, but at least it is fair and proportionate! Re: Police - a gang of youths was attempting to break into cars in our road. I stood there on the phone to the police control room telling them so. This was 2am. At 4am they phoned me and woke me up to tell me they didn't have someone available and were the group still there? I was tempted to retort with 'No, they've successfully stolen a car and gone joy riding.' LOL be careful what you wish for - totalitarianism FTW ;-P If I got into power I'd have to rebuild everything from the ground up. Health service, education, policing, law courts, social welfare (workhouses FTW)...

ARGHHHHHHHHH this country is going to the dogs. We have a bunch of useless wasters whose sole aim in life is to 'get preggers and get a flat on the social', a state pension that cannot cover even the most basic of living expenses and human rights, a health service so mired in red tape and bureaucracy that people wait months for vital appointments, cannot get access to their GP, die in filthy, squalid conditions of neglect, abuse or incompetance, a police force so similarly mired, that they don't even have an officer to send when a person actually stands at their window WATCHING a group of lads breaking into cars, an education system that is out of date with the needs of todays society... need I go on? A person works their whole life, paying tax and national insurance, then the government wants them to be forced to work? Are they having a laugh? If a person was still capable of working they would be! Perhaps this peer also has plans to address the discrimination against older applicants? We have some in government that think that older people should 'step down' from jobs to allow young people to advance, and we have others that think the elderly should work until they die. No, what they WANT is for people to work their whole lives, paying extortionate taxes, then, when they are old, they should step down from the important jobs and give them up to the young, then go into a life of menial servitude doing menial tasks. No doubt they'd still have to pay tax on their meagre earnings! Perhaps the government ought to get its own house in order before it starts holding people to ransom. Or bring back the workhouse. All these spongers and wasters get to live in a large community where they are fed, housed and clothed to basic standards and where there is mandatory childcare, and where they must work or obtain marketable skills (practical, important jobs like plumbing, electric work, metalwork etc). If they then get a job 'outside' they can leave. Keep the men and women separate too - that should cut down on the number of girls whining about how they can't work because they have 10/15/20 kids to look after! FTR, before the flamers stoke up, this idea is no more ludicrous than forcing elderly people to look after other elderly people to earn enough credits to heat their homes now is it? It is, of course, an extreme example, but are we not, after all, discussing extreme and inappropriate suggestions?

You all know me and my tin-hat feelings about Google - I don't feel hugely different about Facebook, but as far as I'm concerned it's a case of 'better the devil you know' - I'd rather have 1 untrustworthy source raiding my personal info than separate accounts on 6, 7, 8, 9, eleventy-gajillion sites that I lose track of. At least if it's a case of logging in with Facebook, I've only registered with one place rather than several. Yes, adding the app or allowing on facebook does let them share data with the host site, but at the same time they are still going to consider that data their property and so will protect you by proxy even if it is only to maintain propietary ownership of the info they are sharing. I can't say I trust ANY site I have an account on - you CAN'T trust ANY site - even Aviva wind me up by not letting me opt out of marketing when I take out a policy, I have to phone up separately, so I'd rather 'Not trust' a few than many.

I like the ones that make you log in with facebook - means less blimmin accounts to keep track of! Less accounts mean less passwords, less passwords mean less possibility of someone accessing stuff they shouldn't by 'hacking' a forgotton account. On the flip side: single point of failure. Guess it depends on how confident you are that your facebook password is secure...

This behaviour is precisely the reason I haven't made more of an effort to understand twitter. Twitter can be a vicious, spiteful medium that allows users to bully and vilify other users for having an opinion that differs from their own, and because it is 'public' in the sense that people can pass on and retweet and tag usernames in posts even if they don't know them, a lot of harm can be done. It certainly can be a GREAT tool to connect with people you wouldn't otherwise have done @aerospacemango is a great example, but it is too easy for people to make someone a target of hate.

I wasn't aware of that site as it happens. Thank you :-) I'm now going to obsessively check it daily! lol Update: There are only 2 or 3 uses of my avatar that I am not aware of and can't remember making and most of these are probably not real responses as when I try to visit them I get 'page cannot be found'. Phew.

Funnily enough I do exactly the same thing with my 'proper' avatar. I'm very protective of it.

Thats the problem with using so many different ones. You become over-saturated by trying to keep track of them all. Personally I can't get my head around Twitter so don't really use it, but I only maintain 1 profile and that is my Facebook profile. That way I only have one to worry about. I won't use Linkedin or G+ and I refuse to accept friend requests from students (when I was teaching some of my year 8 pupils tried to friend me. My profile is locked down so they couldn't see much beyond my name but it was a nice try) or customers (I've had a few of these) as that is not the point of Facebook - it's private and personal to connect with distant family and friends so people that try to invade my privacy are firmly denied. End of story. The game invites annoy me, but usually as soon as a person sends me 1 game or application invite, I change their settings so they aren't permitted to send me any more invites. Problem solved. If you lock the profile down enough and impose a stringent set of rules, it does not become an annoyance.

Doesn't count if it was a pet or potty training child ;P

LOL. I was working as a rep and we were given those fat, clunky XDAs with windows mobile on it, but the thing was really unwieldy and the slidy keyboard was quite 'keen'. I regularly lunched at an M&S cafe and their vanilla lattes were lovely, so while lunching and enjoying my vanilla latte, I was checking my email and filling in my compliance report holding said clunky phone over my cup of coffee (yes, poor decision) and the overly keen slidy keyboard closed itself back up and I fumbled and dropped the phone. Kersploosh... Fizzle...

I killed a keyboard with a pint of Ribena once. I have also dropped an XDA smartphone into a large vanilla latte. My latest failure was to spill tea over a brand new laptop. It still worked but the keys were sticky, so I replaced the keyboard.

I think this thread is losing sight of that fact that the issue was not that a person was tasered for carrying a sword (and indeed the original article states that a person was later arrested in another part of town for the sword incident), or indeed the issue of the use of tasers in policing, but that a police officer tasered a blind man carrying an assistance stick under the mistaken belief that the assistance stick was a sword. The issue in my mind is (and continues to be) that a device that has been linked to and associated with deaths either directly or from complications associated with its modus operandi was used on an innocent man because the operator of the device did not pause sufficiently to ascertain whether or not the long, slim white stick was in fact a japanese-style sword (of any description) and simply discharged his device. If the officer had a gun instead of a taser, would he have made the same decision? Was the appearance of the taser as 'non lethal' instrumental in the officer shooting this man? Did the officer think that 'I'm not sure if this person is dangerous, but the taser won't kill him so I'll shoot him anyway just to be on the safe side'? I don't think that's the right way to think. I certainly believe that in this day and age of feral 'yoof' and the increasing instance of assault as an answer to almost everything, our police force can no longer continue to be effective without a deterant and the taser is a suitable armament when the alternatives (firearms) are considered. What I don't agree with is that it was even POSSIBLE for the officer to make this kind of mistake. As a previous poster has mentioned, the range of a taser is 5-7m - it isn't hard to make out the details of a blind persons assistance stick at 6m (lets take an average there). If a police officer is in a position to discharge his weapon, clearly it was not a crowded place otherwise the level of risk of 'friendly fire' may have been too great and if it was too crowded to see the suspect properly, how can he be sure what he saw? So he has a clear view of the target, clear Line of sight, and the target is obviously not running, dodging or otherwise evading him. So what concerns me the most is the possibility that either the officer is visually impaired in some way, in which case why was he on active duty armed with a taser, and why did he find it appropriate to discharge a taser if he couldn't see the suspect clearly enough? Or the officer deliberately made the decision to 'shoot first ask questions later' which shows a level of arrogance and disregard for the person he tased. Especially when the circumstances of this specific incident easily allowed for the officer to clarify and confirm his observation whereupon he would have realised that the white stick was not a threat. The bloke obviously wasn't performing parkour-like acrobatics to get away from him was he? Or elbowing through crowds of people waving a blade. So why did the officer feel he needed to shoot so quickly?

So if Tasers are limited by range, then the officer would have been close enough to see the difference between the stick and a sword would he not? If his eyesight is impaired to the degree that he cannot distinguish this, then this calls into question his fitness for active duty does it not? Or at the very least it would indicate that he requires corrective lenses. 15-21 feet is 5-7m therefore, if this officers eyesight is so poor that he cannot make out a blind persons walking stick at 5-7m, then I'd have to question what on earth he was doing on active duty without corrective lenses? FWIW, I sit 5m away from a colleague, and (with glasses) I can easily make out details of items on his desk and in some cases even read the logos on them. I fail to understand how the officer cannot have clearly seen the nature of the stick. Are we getting to the point now where people with walking sticks, crutches, long umbrellas etc are likely to be accused of carrying an offensive weapon and run the risk of getting tased or worse? If the town had been in the middle of a riot I'd understand the excess caution, but they weren't. Either way, I'm bowing out of this thread now before it gets nastier.

This post has nothing to do with the smoothwall product. I will move the thread.

There is a world of difference between a peanut butter sandwich (a normal and acceptable foodstuff) and a taser (a weapon designed to pierce skin and deliver an electric shock) - electric shocks are not a 'normal' thing, eating food is - allergies and heart attacks aside, this analogy is trivialising the danger of tasers. I agree that non-contact is better than a gun or truncheon (I still feel sick when I think about that poor man shot on the tube) but I have to disagree that approaching the man from the front wasn't an option - Sword or no sword, there is a minimum safe distance and if the officer thought he had found the suspect could he not have called in backup in a car or body armour? An earlier poster postulated that a white stick could be mistaken for a rapier - yes, it could, but the report wasn't of a man brandishing a rapier, it was a man brandishing a samurai sword which has a very distinctive appearance and features (the curvature for one...) and I cannot find evidence of a single disability aid that resembles this profile (unless you count the long shoe horns.... but really? Although I am certain someone will prove me wrong...) If I remember correctly, Samurai swords are actually illegal in the UK now under UK law, 2008 legislation and 1988 Offensive Weapons Act but I believe there is a way around the legislation for decorative swords and re-enactment swords. I am sure I read that to make the sword decorative only, they twist and break the tang (meaning the blade is un-usable as a weapon). Or perhaps this was pre-2008 law... I'm not a lawyer so I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong... localzuk's story is interesting as my brother in law experienced something similar in the New Forest. He was leaving his work and had literally pulled out of the car park and gone about 50 yards when a police officer on the side of the road pulled him over for speeding (how can he be speeding in a 40 zone when he'd only just pulled away from a car park?). When my BIL pointed this out the officer accused him of 'abusing him' and threatened to arrest him. It was gone midnight and he just wanted to get home as he was up at 5am the next day so he took the fine. Personally I'd have stuck to my guns, especially if I know I'm right but that's me...

The assumption of hyperbole assumes I'm not counting the US news stories I see in various sensationalist news feeds, blogs I follow and links attached to other stories etc etc. Having 'lost count' indicates that I can't accurately put a number on the quantity of stories I've read. Easily more than 10 - certainly enough for me to not pay attention to how many I've read. Which is more than the UK deaths, true, but significantly less than the worldwide number of deaths. Perhaps I should have broadened my statement to say 'I've lost count of the number of stories where the poor judgement of police officers has caused death' - this number is presumably (given worldwide media) in the thousands if not more when you take into account the varying methods of death - shooting, being hit by a police car, dying in police custody due to neglect and/or beating, riot, tasing, being hit over the head, restrained in such as way as to result in suffocation, and so on. Either way, it is still disgraceful and surely indicative of misconduct that an officer tases an elderly man for no reason other than assumed threat based on misunderstanding. Blind or not, even if he'd had a walking stick, or a silver-coloured crutch, the shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach of this officer was inappropriate and the officer should be removed from any duty where he may make mistakes of this potential gravity again. Electrocuting ANYONE is dangerous, but the elderly aren't known for their robustness... The fall alone could have resulted in a fatal head injury and a stroke sufferer would be at increased risk of haemorrage by virtue of a pre-existing weakness in the blood supply to the brain. That being said, my father is 63 and he is reasonably robust, but being hit with a taser would still cause him significant issue - even if he has no effect from the electricity itself, a fall onto concrete/tarmac/paving of any unspecified description can break bones!

Or don't speak english and don't understand? Oh... wait... What about deaf people that use the internationally recognised gesture for deafness that get thrown in jail for using 'foul hand gestures' and accused of being drunk and disorderly? Oh... wait.... Tasing an innocent person is disgusting! I've lost count of the number of stories I've seen in the news of people killed by taser... The officer should be dismissed from his post and forced to submit a public apology admitting culpability (and stupidity!).

Road dirt in an engine probably contains just as much fecal bacteria, decaying roadkill and random critters - how often do you see squashed horse manure in the middle of the road? Thats up in the wheel well now... It disgusts me how many people just blithely walk out of the loo without washing their hands, but I do understand it - I've lost count of the public toilets I've been into where half the taps don't work, most of the soap dispensers are broken or empty, the water that comes out of the tap is either cold or lava (you try singing Happy Birthday twice while holding your hands under volcano-temperature water...) and to top it off, the hand dryers don't work or are cold, or the paper towel dispenser is empty and the bin is overflowing!!! It's not surprising that people opt to leave without washing their hands. Personally I can't bring myself to do so, and even if I have little hand wipes, I still feel 'guilty' standing there 'washing my hands' with an antibac hand wipe (which in reality is probably better than the soap-and-water approach) and feel as though others are judging me. The fact that the door handle is probably smothered in filth makes me feel a bit sick. But then you will probably find fecal bacteria everywhere you go and not just human bacteria either. As a previous poster has said, if everything was sterile, our immune systems would never have any work to do.

I refuse to watch anything related to Saw. Or 'Human Centipede'. I remember watching the original 'The Thing' at a tender age of about 9 and it scared me half to death - I had nightmares for weeks. I still can't watch 'Jurassic Park' or 'Lost World' without having nightmares about Velociraptors afterwards, even at the ripe old age of 29! Every single time, without fail, after watching Jurassic Park I will have a nightmare involving Velociraptors getting into my house. Given that the key 'Scary bit' was the T-Rex, that doesn't feature at all, yet the Velociraptors are always creeping through my house and I'm hiding myself in wardrobes and cupboards trying not to breathe... It's quite horrible actually. It doesn't help that my Kitten is particularly 'pointy' and to wake up from a Velociraptor-related nightmare with a no-so-tiny-anymore predator gnawing on my arm or licking my face and breathing fish-breath on me isn't the most calming experience... lol

I've only seen 2 episodes as I was hoping to extend my enjoyment - LeBoyfriend and I have a nasty habit of 'acquiring' an entire season of a new show we love only to end up watching the whole thing in a week and be left with nothing to watch... I've just spent the last few days in a lust-fuelled stupor over having watched back-to-back episodes of 'The Vampire Diaries'. *Sigh* I love Ian Somerhalder. Sometimes, I pause the episode just to enjoy looking at him... But I digress. It now means that we have to wait until Season 4 is available for us to acquire. Which won't be for AGES. So I'm taking my time with Continuum. But don't worry about spoiling it for me - I hate surprises and always look up plot synopsises for episodes I haven't seen yet.

LOL Not literally seeing the Google logo, but mentally seeing it on the Sadtech tower, on the embedded contact lens/brain implant technology. Google glasses are the first phase of their plan to subvert humanity - it won't be long before they are funding research into neural interfaces.... I have some spare foil if anyone wants to join my tin-hat brigade... ;-) I like the time travel aspect, but surely if they are ascribing to the single timeline theory, then the time travel paradox applies here where her world is the way it is BECAUSE of the time travel? They haven't given indications that they are pursuing the alternate reality or splintered timeline theories...

Apple? I immediately thought of Google when I saw this comic... Anyone watching Continuum? LOVE that show. But every time I watch it, I see the Google logo instead of 'Sadtech'...