The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

This and this needs to be set alongside the NIMBY rhetoric coming out of the White House over the Gulf of Mexico spill.

We are running an election to see which of the following characters are most important to you on Maemo: $ % & ( ) < = > \ _ | ~ £ €

Dear Dave,

This is a difficult question indeed; I must admit I have certain partiality for the £ but these days I should perhaps prefer the €, even if € < £ (€ > £ , banish the thought, $ = £ God help us all). I could _ not _ possibly live without %, since I have to borrow at least some of the $, £ & €. My day job relies on the |, and no day job ~ no £. But you can have the \, I could not care less about that one,

Yours truly,

I have not laughed like this for years — whatever you do not read this at work!

How about rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall?

(It’s been a long time, I know. I have a whole bunch of half written posts about all kinds of things lying around, but much prefer twitter [tthef] and flickr [tf] these days.)

I wish the ******* in the present UK government that are determined to push ID cards upon us would read this and reflect upon it.

In unrelated news it became known that the UK government lost personal details of another 3,000,000 people, this time by exporting learner driver data to the US for processing. It’s been a while I have had to deal with the Data Protection Act, but I am pretty sure that exporting private data of UK residents to the US is prohibited under the Act because the US does not have sufficient (any?) data protection legislation (IIRC, the Act is accompanied by guidelines for data processors, in which this is explicitly spelled out), and if this is the case, then the data was lost not merely through incompetence, but because of the UK government broke the law to start with.

In case you missed the fuss, these alternative tube announcements are quite amusing. (My favourite one is A Reminder for American Tourists, the runner-up being A Reminder for residents of London.)