The Britons among you, and possibly some of my more worthy readers, will no doubt be aware that British banks recently had to refund roughly a billion pounds in fees that they'd charged their customers. Unlike most Swiss or German banks, British banks don't usually charge account maintenance fees, so they claw back some profit from retail banking ( Read more... )

Tony Blair is religious "nutter." (To scurrilously quote his spokesman out of context.)

So he goes to church every Sunday. Fair enough. But I do have to wonder how much his religion affected his policy decisions, not to mention his relationship with Dubya, and it makes me quite uncomfortable that he deliberately concealed his faith on the ( Read more... )

Airport-style screening at major UK railway stations.

A-HAHAHAHAHAHAhahaaaahahahahaahahahhhahhhahahahahahaah.

That's its own fucking comedy.

Oh Christ. We're in such deep shit.

Via schneier.

For Christmas I want a credible terrorist.

Okay, I don't really want some fiend to connect Recklinghausen's sewage and water networks, nor do I want anybody thinking it'd be a cute idea to remove Albuquerque from the map. But today brings yet another breathless report of some spotty little dweeb with plans which, on inspection, turn out to be ( Read more... )

Fred Phelps gets whopping fine (or his church does).

Hooray for censorship.

There are some nasty questions to ask about why this didn't happen years ago when he picketed the funeral of, say, Matthew Shepard, and I suspect there are some very nasty answers. But at least this is a positive step towards shutting the man up and consigning him to the ( Read more... )

Re-posted comment that I made to a friend who posted this link [Symantec security blog: privacy on social networking sites]:

[Edit: I do realise I’m not talking about quite the same things as Symantec here.]I’m often bothered by the openness that people will display even in filtered posts. Intimate revelations are one thing, and I think even ( Read more... )

What?

I don’t particularly agree with judicial execution, but for the purposes of this post I’m going to assume that certain US states will continue to execute criminals, and therefore that it’s worthwhile considering how best to do it.

( The practicalities of killing vertebrates. )

I’ve come to the conclusion that the driving and cohering force behind Swiss society is little old Swiss grandmothers. I don’t know why, but you just don’t mess with Swiss grandmothers. If you did, something would happen: you don’t know what it is, but you know you’re not gonna like it. She might hit you over the head with her handbag; she might ( Read more... )

Now here’s an interesting one: a group of lottery players “lost” 27 million euros. They had chosen a set of numbers to run each week, and that set came up-whereupon they found that their ticket buyer had been allowing the system to choose random numbers instead, and they hadn’t won a cent ( Read more... )

In general I am entirely in favour of testing things on lesser animals: the overall medical benefits can vastly outweigh the suffering of the test subjects, they’re cheaper and more consistent to manage than canidae, and after all, God must have created rodents for something. Injecting spider venom into mice to measure pain [SciAm], however, seems ( Read more... )