Rick's b.log - entry 2008/09/02

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FYI! Last read at 18:31 on 2024/11/21.

You gotta be kidding me!?

Given the deplorable track record the incompetent tightwad dumbass British government have had regarding personal data, and how that have demonstrated time and again that they shouldn't really be trusted with personal data...

I can see Glitter clones just waiting for that memory stick to be "oops" left on the floor of the 8.15 from Charing Cross, can't you?

Added later: Oh look, personal details of prison staff (as in all prison staff) went missing a year ago and it's only just been noticed. See what I mean?

It gets worse

You would have thought that the Americans might have come to the conclusion that a bunch of over-frightened people who have been led by fear for some two-odd centuries living in a place with a serious gun control problem might just have thought the following teletext snippet was a dumb April Fool's gag. Sadly, it is not...

Now, I know it's Texas we're talking about, but surely I'm not the only person that thinks this is a really bad idea? What's so damn difficult about getting rid of guns, as opposed to giving out more?

Extradition

For my final bit of teletext:

I'm not going to get into a debate about the validity of the term "hacker" as, unfortunately, public belief is that this is the sort of stuff "hackers" do.
Instead, I will suggest two things:

Firstly, he shouldn't face life in prison. If he can polygraph to breaking into 97 US military systems looking for UFO information, then that alone has got to be worth the insanity plea!
Secondly, stop being poor losers. If he got into 97 systems, it means your security isn't worth sh!t and really you might like to think about hiring him as (crazy or not) he would appear to have picked a pretty big hole in your defences. Would you rather a Mulder-wannabe on a Roswell hunt break in, or would you prefer it to be a middle-Eastern terrorist, because if you can't get your systems locked up tight (97 accesses, remember) then what's to say that somebody else isn't getting in, only you just don't know it yet.

Of course, what would really make this rock is if Gary used an old Beeb with a 300 baud acoustic modem... yes, "hackers" are supposed to be stuck in the early '80s, remember? When computers were supposed to look like this:

Names, names, names

Once upon a time many cute French girls were called Nathalie. Now they are in their mid-30s to 40s and have been supplanted by a long line of Lucies. No doubt in another decade we'll see a lot of Océanes? Every so often an anomoly turns up - wasn't Chelsea one of Pres. Clinton's daughters? And if the Republicans get in, the VP's daughter is called Bristol (Bristol!?!?). Brittanys exist, and the pseudo-dyslexic Britney too, but oddly enough nobody to my knowledge has named their daughter Clermont-Ferrand!
Then to BBC One comes a programme "The Kids Are Alright" which is a celebration of childhood geekiness with a group of really over-smart children taking on a small group of adults. They dangle huge cash prizes in front of the adults (like "beat the kid, walk away with her age in thousands, so if she's 11 you'd get £11,000), I think the kids ought to have a piece of that action too!
Anyway, the girl on the right caught my eye. Not because she is cute, not because she is mind-blowingly smart, but because... her name is... Lentil - as in the small brownish seed of the Lens Culinaris plant!

Today's word

Today's word is foliage (foah-lee-age), which is a nerdy way of saying greenery, a bunch of leaves...

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