flyinghaggis

I can't imagine the tories or any party would ask any company or charity to sell off assets at less than market value. Presumably they'll simply offer a percentage discount towards the purchase cost for any tenant wishing to buy their property with this subsidy being funded by General taxation (you and me!)? Edit: apparently the Conservatives say that the policy will be paid for by making local authorities sell their more valuable council houses when they become vacant?

Election 2015: David Cameron pledging right-to-buy extension - BBC News Thatcher policy resurrection. Guess Dave's hoping to party like its 1979 come election day

You're right, it's pretty annoying and off-putting when parties focus on undermining their opponents rather than stating what they would do policy-wise instead. It feels like the conservatives and their affiliated press have been spent more time indulging in a character assassination of Ed Milliband rather than saying what their plans are or trying to pick apart Labour's policies.

Oh look.... Policy resurrection .....anyone would think there was an election coming up! Porn sites must have age checks, say Conservatives - BBC News "Pornography websites must adopt age-restriction controls or face closure, the Conservatives say."

https://fullfact.org/2015/apr/10_claims_7_leaders_debate-41361 Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

Zelda delay: Is this another nail in the Wii U's coffin? - BBC Newsbeat Kind of disappointed as it feels like forever since we've seen a non-handheld console version of Zelda.

The best thing about that one is that it's actually a real Tory campaign ad! Row over Tory 'beer and bingo' Budget advert - BBC News

UK debt and deficit: All you need to know - BBC News There's, what seems like a decent. article on the BBC website here on the topic of the debt/deficit. As usual with economics it sounds like it very much depends on your perspective. They could all be referring to differently adjusted figures/stats regarding the deficit so potentially could all be right/wrong

Yeah, the problem with his 'party of the middle strategy' is that is that it makes him look like he'll immediately form another coalition with whichever party has the highest largest number of seats. Given his performance over the last 4 years that just means that nobody will want to vote for him! Came across looking tired, dejected and like he had no ideas of his own. I can't help but feel his party would have fared better if they'd formed a minority government with Labour last time. It seemed like such an odd thing when he signed up to a coalition with Cameron. I suspect this time he might find himself in a position where his party has so few seats he'll be lucky if he can play Kingmaker again. He might struggle to hang onto his own seat.... I'd actually expected Farage to fare better than he did as he's usually quite slick when it comes to public speaking and playing an audience. He seemed oddly out on a limb constantly repeating his 'leave the EU and everything will be fine' mantra. Then he threw in the comment about HIV positive immigrants and everyone else on the panel was like 'I'm not touching that topic with a 20ft barge pole'! I think he misjudged the general mood quite badly and could definitely have done better. Milliband, after doing quite well at the last Paxman interview IMO, looked like he'd spent a bit too long staring into the camera trying to appear sincere. Cameron did look a bit like he was on autopilot and came across quite well but appeared to be going through the motions. If anything the person that came across best from the whole group was Nicola Sturgeon though I disagree with half of the SNP's policies. She looked assured, polished and on point the entire time. Lots of conflicting viewpoints and opinions from all the MP's on the whole debt/deficit issue though. Camerons saying we've got it under control but we need to carry on cutting. Milliband's saying we could spend/tax a bit more and still be fine. Farage saying we haven't even made an impact on the deficit and are still overspending. Then a huge swathe of the more left wing parties saying we don't need to worry about it and that we should stop austerity. I can't quite work out who who's right on that one. Need to go and find some figures but whether they're make any sense to me is another question! Does anyone have any links/etc that could provide an insight into the debt/deficit and whether the last 5 years of cuts have actually achieved anything? Plus, presumably a lot of the debt will be related to bailing out the banks in 2008 after the financial crash then? How much of it was down to Labour allegedly overspending vs global financial events that were outwith their control?

I'm still keen on one as my current laptop is over 5 years old and the Surface 3 would be a nice replacement as my goto mobile device. I tend to grab my ipad when I'm out and about these days but it's still pretty limited when you want to do any real work on it.

That's actually quite tempting now as an iPad alternative. I especially like the 11" screen size, the fact they've still managed to include all the outputs you'd except plus it's still sub £500 even in 4Gb RAM/128GB SSD spec which is the more sensible option. You'd have to be really pinching the pennies no to stump up an extra £80 to upgrade from the basic poverty spec model. Only real question is over whether an Atom based CPU will be up to the job? Also, I really wish they could get the price of the add-on keyboard down slightly. £110 for the typecover is somewhat ridiculous!

It's quite scary actually looking at some of the polls. They had the Conservatives on ~35% and UKIP on ~15% which meant that if they formed a coalition they'd be mighty close to an overall majority based on percentages Mercifully, due to our FPTP voting system, it's unlikely that'll translate into actual MPs! Election 2015 poll tracker - BBC News

We used to primarily use Dell's but found the quality dropped away on their OptiPlex range a couple of years ago so have since moved to Lenovo's.

Worryingly that's actually quite a common response. I think some people don't quite realise how social media works and assume there's some kind of special 'IT login' for each website which gives us more access than a regular person!

+2 I haven't actually watched the latest series as I felt it had just gone stale after the last one. I think the people who signed that petition asking for Clarkson to be re-instated need to seriously think about what they're condoning and supporting. I'm sure Clarkson have plenty of offers of work elsewhere so I don't imagine it'll bother him too much. Hammond/May have pretty much said they'll go with him. I can't imagine the BBC being able to continue Top Gear in the short term as I don't expect anyone will want to be seen to be the person trying to replace Clarkson. Just for the purpose of injecting some Top-Gear style controversy I'll leave this Stewart Lee video here :-

I hope it isn't a mini-tablet. I personally don't see the appeal of running full Windows on a tablet smaller than 10-11". To me anything that size just feels like using a big phone. I'd be looking for something like at the current Surface with a fanless x86 CPU, 10-11" 1080p display and a £400-500 price tag depending on spec. MS could really use something like that to tempt people away from their iPads.

Thanks for the advice. I think that warning the pupils of the implications of what could happen, and the serious nature of the offence, if any of them attempt to do it in future is probably the best plan as there isn't really a technical solution to the problem.

That's a good idea but we block it generally so I doubt pupils would try it except maybe on their ipads which could connect automatically if the app is installed. They're on a transparent proxy so it's only going to show us who visited the site which doesn't prove much really.

Yeah, We've a good idea of who it was from the followers/following accounts but it's tricky to prove if nobody owns up.

Oooh, looks like somebody at MS is listening...... Microsoft is reportedly building a new lower-end Surface tablet

If all they want it for it taking photos you'd probably be better just buying a camera and an memory card reader for a regular PC/laptop. It's not really worth spending close to a grand just to save the couple of minutes it take to copy files from a camera onto the network. You'd get better quality images/videos aswell! Speaking of MS Surface I'm quite interested to see how things turn out with Windows 10 and the next gen Surface tablets. Hopefully they'll ditch the Windows RT/ARM version and replace it with one of the fancy new ultra low voltage fanless CPU's from Intel (as used in the new MacBook).

Yeah, we block social media sites in school but I suspect pretty much every pupil has a mobile phone with internet connectivity so it doesn't really stop them! Plus there's nothing stopping them doing it from home. I suspect that, in reality, there's very little we can do but I thought I'd ask as I'm sure other schools must have encountered the same problem.....

We've had a couple of instances recently of pupils creating fake Facebook/Twitter accounts for staff at our school. We've reported the accounts and had them closed down but obviously we'd like to apprehend those responsible and prevent it re-occurring if possible. I realise it's fairy easy for pupils to do this and remain anonymous plus I suspect social media companies wouldn't disclose information regarding who created the account. Also, even if they did the details and emails provided could be inaccurate and fake themselves. What do others on here do in instances like this? Is there anything else we can do other than report the fake accounts to the relevant social media site and request them to be taken down? Has anyone ever gotten the police/lawyers involved in situations like this? The staff involved and the school itself are quite concerned as the culprits seem to be going to some lengths to use photos of staff, images/photos from our school website and even news stories relating to the school to make the accounts appear genuine.

Now there's a company that's seriously in need of a rebrand!

Wow, looks epic! Live action adaptions of anime tend to be a bit hit/miss but it's cool they're making it. Surprised we haven't seen live action versions of Neon Genesis Evangelion or Full Metal Alchemist yet actually? Especially the former given that giant robot movies seem to be in vogue right now!