prettygood

Andy Hill does four classes each week: Mondays 7:45pm - 9:15pm, Hillsborough Leisure Centre Wednesdays 6pm - 7:30pm, 393 Club, Langsett Road, Hillsborough Thursdays 6:30pm - 8pm, Concord Leisure Centre, Shiregreen Saturdays 1pm - 2:30pm, Hillsborough Leisure Centre Although Concord is admittedly quite a trek from the city centre, Hillsborough Leisure Centre and the 393 Club aren't that far. It's just a 15-minute tram ride.

This is untrue. This year the Vetting and Barring Scheme is being introduced, which is a partnership with the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The number of people estimated to require a CRB check for this, due to them working or volunteering with children or vulnerable adults, is estimated to be 11 million. That's about 1 in 4 of the entire adult population. 1 in 4 UK adults are going to need a CRB check just to do their job or hobby. If that's not poisonous, intrusive hysteria then I don't know what is. 1 in 4! Not only that but you also have the Enhanced CRB check that includes unproven allegations, arrests without charges, court acquittals and hearsay. We're heading towards a dark place and no one is paying attention.

CRB checks are sinister, intrusive and yet another step towards a police state. They're another form of ID card, albeit one coming in under the guise of "won't somebody please think of the children?" That's much harder to argue against than the NIS. CRB checks are wrong for three reasons: 1) They deliberately cause people to mistrust one another (divide and rule). People are more compliant when they're scared and there's no more primal fear than that of someone stealing your kids and murdering them. 2) They deliberately infantilise people, causing them to stop thinking for themselves. The whole point of being an adult, and especially a parent, is to make your own judgements on people and take responsibility for them. CRB checks cause people to stop using their own judgement and just ask the state instead. It's the state crowbarring itself into adult-child interactions where it has no business being 3) It's a revenue earner. A person doing multiple roles with "vulnerable people" needs a separate CRB check for each role, despite it being the same person with the same personal information. What is that but an ingenious way of chiselling money out of hard-working people? It is estimated that 11 million adults are going to need a CRB check to do their jobs. That's about a quarter of the entire working British population needing to be "vetted" just to do their jobs. It's an ID card to work. The forthcoming Vetting and Barring Scheme is even more sinister. This states that it is a criminal offence for a parent to hire someone to work or volunteer with their own child if that person has not been vetted. If I'm a parent and I believe that this CRB hysteria is all a load of paranoid, sinister rubbish (which I do), it should be my choice as to whether someone I hire is CRB-vetted. If I want to skip the whole fearmongering circus, that's my decision to make as the parent. It is none of the government's business.

Hi all, I'm getting a bizarre problem occurring with my laptop keyboard that I'm struggling to understand. I'm using Vista on a Dell Studio 1737 laptop. Every so often something happens to make some of the keys switch with one another. For example, the keys for " and @ will suddenly swap over, and the key for # and ~ will give \ and | whilst the key labelled for those two will still print \ and | correctly. Other keyboard symbols will also switch. Most strangely of all though, this will only happen within certain programs, usually Visual C# 2008 and OpenOffice Writer. I can therefore be in Visual C# where the " key actually gives @, but then click into another window with Firefox where " does give ". If I restart the computer then the keys will be working normally again, but they seem to be switching frequently. Is there some kind of key combination that I'm inadvertently entering in certain programs to switch some of the keys only within those programs? Do I need to reinstall my keyboard driver? It's driving me crazy.

Thanks. I searched around online and managed to find this fix for it: http://masteranza.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/solution-vs-c-2008-project-creation-failed-bug/ After trying it though, I still had the same problem. I then ran Visual C++ as an administrator and bizarrely it worked fine. I'm not sure whether the above fix had done something or whether it would have ran before if I'd have ran it as an administrator.

They're like a bunch of silly little kids aren't they? I stopped reading that Blunkett document after he used the phrase "soft on crime". "Soft on crime" is cheap and base tabloid politics. I expect a basic level of nuance from someone if I'm going to vote for them.

Hi all, I'm having a few problems with Visual C++. I'm using the 2008 Express edition on Windows Vista. I've used C++ before but on Linux with g++ and Vim, so I don't have any experience with Visual C++. After starting up Visual C++ I select File > New > Project from the menu, which gives me a dialog window with eight different Visual Studio installed templates to choose from. For each one I select, I enter a project name, press OK then either one of two things happens: a) Nothing happens b) Another dialog window comes up with the title "Welcome to the Win32 Application Wizard". This has a panel that says "These are the current project settings" and there are three bullet points underneath, but they don't have any text. If I press either the "Finish" or "Cancel" buttons nothing happens, so I then have to close the window with its close icon. If I select File > New > File then "C++ file (.cpp)" it'll let me open and enter a new file but then won't give me the option to run it using "Start without debugging (Ctrl + F5)". Any ideas? Am I missing something obvious? The frustrating thing is that I also have Visual C# 2008 Express edition installed and that runs fine.

This is why I always sit on the front row. For some reason that I've never quite understood, it's considered "sad" to sit on the front row in a cinema. This means that if you sit on the front row there'll be about three empty rows behind you, so you'll get peace and quiet regardless of what eejots are doing at the back. It's my solace from the savages who don't have the manners to sit and watch a film quietly.

Yeah let's not bother with all that due process and freedom under law nonsense. Instead of innocent-until-proven-guilty and trying someone by a jury of their peers, as has been the case since Magna Carta, let's just dish out justice based on our gut instincts. It'd be quicker and cheaper than all that hassle of open trials and persuading a jury of the merits of the case. You seem like a good-thinking person unaffected by all that political correctness rubbish pushed by soppy do-gooders, so we'll appoint you Supreme Enforcer-in-Chief and you can decide on justice. Anyone accused of a crime will be bought to you, you can chat to them for ten minutes and if your gut tells you they're a wrong 'un, we'll throw them in jail and nick all of their stuff. It's people like you who believed that Colin Stagg killed Rachel Nickell, even though he was completely innocent. It's people like you who believed that Barry George killed Jill Dando because he was an "oddball". It's people like you who believed that Robert Murat kidnapped Madeleine McCann, just because he "looked a bit creepy". I call you the "Well of course he's guilty, just look at him!" brigade and you're more dangerous to liberty than any terrorist. The state stealing the possessions of people convicted of no crime is the actions of a tinpot dictatorship, not a democracy. It's the kind of thing I'd expect Robert Mugabe's goons to be doing.

This assurance is nowhere near good enough. The whole point of the database state is that once my data is collected, I have no idea what is done with it. I don't know how many people will handle it, how many departments it will be passed to, how it will be "processed", how it will all be linked together or how long it will be stored for. Even if it's not being used much at the moment, I don't know whether twelve months from now there'll be a new senior manager who wants to find more "dynamic" ways of using it. I don't know whether it will eventually be used in exactly the same way as the police use their ANPR data and frankly, I'm not going to take your word or the word of any other bureaucrat about it. It's my data and it belongs to me. You are not entitled to have that level of information about me and I deny you permission to have it. I don't care how much fun you have modelling it or how shiny your traffic models are. I don't care how secure you believe that your system is or how great you think your software is. I don't care whether you believe you've got the greatest algorithm since traffic modelling began. Get your hands off my data and remember your place as a public servant.

When describing what's illegal and what's permissible, an important distinction needs to be made between the citizen and the state. For the citizen, the argument that you make is correct. Anything that's not explicitly forbidden under law is legal. It's not illegal for me to light my own farts or stop up until 4am watching internet porn so I'm perfectly entitled to do so if I choose. For the state, however, the inverse should be true. The state should be given a set of things that they are allowed to do by law, then they're not allowed to do anything else outside of that. If the set of laws is insufficient then the government of the day should go before parliament and justify why they need more powers. If legislation passes for these powers then the state can be granted them. As the state is funded from taxpayers' money and delegated the responsibility of managing society, it should be limited by a well-defined set of powers that it is entitled to have. The inherent corrupting power of authority means that any state should always be restricted in the things that it can do. That's a necessary safeguard in any democracy. As an autonomous citizen I should be given a list of things that I cannot do. In your role as a state-funded bureaucrat you should be given a list of things that you can do. The two situations are not the same thing.

You can play the paranoid card if you wish, but I've heard it all before. Given that the local authorities can't even keep the roads free of potholes, I'm very sceptical of their ability to create accurate traffic flow models, especially given the huge amount of data than an ANPR camera network would provide. Such a model would be a highly complex nonlinear model that would keep a group of mathematicians busy for a long time. Human behaviour is not deterministic, despite what devout bureaucrats may believe. Such a predictive system would cost millions to create and would be commissioned to a private-sector IT company who would create poor software that didn't do what was asked and went massively over budget. This always happens with large-scale IT projects commissioned by central or local governments. I don't want my taxes wasted in such a way. If police ANPR cameras are only there to catch illegal drivers, why is it necessary to store journey data at all? Let's take an example of John Smith from Sheffield who is driving round the ring road. His car is caught by an ANPR camera and then checked against the database. The database returns with the information that the car is properly registered, has valid insurance and has not been reported as stolen. Given this, why is it necessary to store John Smith's journey data at all? The police currently store this data for everyone for two years and they're proposing increasing it to five. If the car didn't have insurance or was stolen then the police could be immediately alerted, but the database has confirmed that this isn't the case. Why can't John Smith's record therefore be deleted immediately so there is no record that he was ever there? There's a huge difference between targetted surveillance and mass surveillance. Targetted surveillance involves the police receiving evidence that someone is committing a crime, then using surveillance to catch them at it or gain evidence for a conviction. I've got no problem with this. Mass surveillance on the other hand involves watching everyone just on the off-chance that they commit a crime. It's totally indiscriminate and I find it offensive. I presume that you haven't engaged in any drive-by shootings or ram raids recently so why do your journey details need storing? Assuming that you don't have any convictions for smuggling huge blocks of crack from continental Europe, I'm prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt that you won't do so tomorrow, the day after that or the day after that. I don't see why granting this benefit of the doubt to every other law-abiding taxpayer is so much to ask.

That isn't what I said. The point I was making is that the authorities are not entitled to collect ANPR data because there is no law concerning ANPR. It's regulation by fiat and would be more at home in some tinpot dictatorship, not the mother of all democracies. ANPR is illegitimate because it wasn't introduced under any law and is therefore illegal. If an angry citizen were to start smashing up ANPR cameras (which I'm not advocating of course), they'd be well within their rights because the cameras shouldn't be there in the first place. It'd be the equivalent of me breaking down a section of a neighbour's fence that'd been built one metre over on my property. Just because something can be done doesn't mean that it should be done. This is something that bureaucrats such as yourself can never seem to grasp. Mass surveillance of the population's journey details is entirely for your convenience, not for ours. It's the dream of a bureaucrat to monitor people because that's the kind of clinical, bean-counting mentality that they have. I'd rather be stuck in traffic jams and keep my privacy than have my journey details stored for several years to be accessed by god knows who.

It's about standing up for yourself. I caught a train last week and encountered the ticket barrier staff for the first time. I'd entered the station at the back entrance and purchased a ticket from the machine. There were four staff there at the top of the steps and one of them asked for my ticket. I gave it to him, he scribbled on it with a marker and then handed it back to me. I then told him that this was theft, the station footbridge was partly set up by public money and that restricting public access to it made them no better than the fare dodgers they claim they want to stop. He looked bemused but one of his colleagues said "we're just doing our job sir". To which I replied "No, you're stealing public money is what you're doing" and walked off towards the platform. If more people start protesting the footbridge closure then it'll only hasten the humiliating climbdown East Midlands Thieves will soon be making regarding the footbridge.

The depressing truth is that there is no legislation concerning ANPR. It was never introduced by any act of Parliament; the government and police just went ahead and did it. The current data retention limit of 2 years by the police is merely an entirely arbitrary limit that they themselves have set. When they talk about extending it to five years, there's nothing to stop them doing this because no law exists for ANPR. When Planner1 says that the council haven't decided how long they'll be retaining their ANPR data for, he's essentially correct because there is no limit defined for ANPR. If Sheffield council wanted to keep their ANPR data for 10 years, 20 years or even indefinitely, there's nothing to stop them from doing so. It's an incredible situation in a supposedly democratic country that gross invasions of privacy can be undertaken by fiat, not by law. ANPR is an absolute disgrace, whether by the police or by local councils. It's information that the authorities simply aren't entitled to and as far as I'm concerned it's completely illegitimate. Schemes that involve a significant change without being introduced by law are equivalent to me marking out an area of pavement outside my home and then refusing to let people walk across it unless they pay me money. It's not the actions of a democracy. It may be the dream of unaccountable statist bureaucrats such as Planner1 to have extensive journey information on the general public but that doesn't mean they should get it. Information is the currency of bureaucracy and is entirely for their convenience, not ours. Function creep inevitably means that ANPR will be used for many other things besides "traffic modelling".