A Glorious Waste of Time
I’ve spent most of the last week going through some sort of nail-biting home IT hell centred around a gradually failing system disk in my PC. Its only about a year and a half old but suddenly it started failing to boot on a regular basis, only saveable by chkdsk. Clearly on its last legs (after refusing to de-fragment) I sent of to Alienware for a new disk for them to send one in a plastic bag with next to no protection only to then limp through formatting making little “cheeping” noises as it spewed IO errors. Thanks a lot guys, great help in a crisis. The day finally saved after a lot of sweat by a disk from PC World and very helpful disk utilities from Paragon and everything is ship-shape once again. I’m glad that’s over but I’ve become rather more of a hard-disk expert than I ever wanted to be and I’ll definitely be starting a regular backup schedule from now on. My advise, look after your disks.
If you live in London you will be well aware that we are living through a whirlwind of violence at the moment, it almost feels oppressive the way every time you turn on the TV news there has been another attack in the Capital. Even though the news presenters strenuously try to avoid giving us a clue as to the identity of the assailants you can be pretty sure that they will be an immigrant by the time you are leafing through the morning paper. As was the case in the unprovoked attack on Jimmy Mizen earlier this week, which has spurred the Mayor and other politicians to start another “zero tolerance”/”stop and search” campaign. Somehow I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Take a look at the weekend murder of Steven Bigby in Oxford Street, he was out on bail and tagged for the gang rape and acid attack on a sixteen year old girl. Why was such a vile and dangerous young man out on bail? Well my dear Londoner for the simple reason that the prisons are full and they simply don’t have anywhere to put them anymore. We have a serious problem and political sticking-plasters are not going to help this time.
One can hardly fail to notice it. I really would hate to live in London now and tend to avoid anywhere but the centre like the plague. Not PC I daresay but I always call it Lagos on Thames.
Quite simply we need more prisons. I would agree there are some who should not be there but there are also clearly even more who are not but should be.
On the first, I reckon PC world is much maligned by some. Reasonable stuff, their blokes usually seem to know what they are talking about and no quibble returns.
Mark my words - we’ll be back to the prison hulks before long and then transportation to a new colony.
Have you considered a Mac?
If it\’s any consolation to people scared of London the vast majority of the violent crimes being committed are between and amongst the different groups of new arrivals and generally don\’t spill over to the wider populace
Not that I\’m claiming that should be any consolation
I don\’t think anyone here needs reminding but migrants are people same as you and me and have the potential to be as law-abiding, or as criminal, as the indigenous population
Problems will arise, of course, if you make a cack-handed mess of your national immigration policy and stick in too many people, too quickly and create such an inconsistent policy that it positively favours the dodgiest characters
What\’s especially rich about the current situation is that the governing political party which until recently was quick to denounce anyone expressing concerns as being racist now seems to have moved sharply across the political spectrum and is fighting a turf war with the BNP
As an example, Tamsin Dunwoody\’s campaign page for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election is worth a quick peek before it gets taken down in shame next week after Labour gets the stuffing it so richly deserves…
http://www.creweandnantwichlabour.org.uk/dont_be_conned_by_tory_boy
The problem with just building prisons is the vast expense involved, keeping miscreants “at her majesty’s pleasure” is always going to be at the expense of other more pressing social needs. If criminally minded immigrants continue to flood here without vetting procedures we are sure to bankrupt the economy eventually. Stef, if migrants were so much like us then the rest of the world would be more like Europe than it is. A lovely sentiment but not in line with my observations of the world at large where it is more than job prospects that make somewhere habitable. If the labour party are borrowing from the BNP I’m sure they are hollow words as much as there was no third way and Gordon Brown was no economic wizard; just another example of the contempt that Labour have always had for the White Working Class of England. I hope they are [at last] learning!
Even Macs have disks die on them.
Look at this I pulled of the Seagate community forum :
Outsourced manufacturing in the Far East on the cheap with chronic quality control is slowing destroying the world economy. Can people learn before the wheels come off the proverbial cart? I hope so.
Re the Jimmy Mizen tragedy, I was wholy unsurprised to read the Met report detailing a “white middle aged witness” who saw a “person”, i.e. no description given of the perp. WTF do I need to know the age and ethnicity of the witness, when the loon who did it was (at the time) on the loose and undescribed? I wonder why.
“if migrants were so much like us then the rest of the world would be more like Europe than it is. A lovely sentiment but not in line with my observations of the world at large where it is more than job prospects that make somewhere habitable”
I’m closer to your point of view than you might think and I’m not blind to the differences you refer to. I also believe that the differences between those other parts of the world and the UK are narrowing. What I don’t believe is that mass inward migration is the key driver for this convergence. We’d be heading that way regardless
and as for the Labour party learning…
the migration ‘debate’ is following a perfectly predictable arc
a glance at even the totally crooked official migration statistics shows that inward migration leaped up in 1997 as soon as Nu Labour came to power
and now, the same government which permitted/ abetted that unprecedented inflow is, little by little, starting to demonise migrants
my concern about the focus on migrants is not derived from some idealised, fluffy ideals but from the fact that I believe migrants are going to be used as scapegoats for a worsening economic situation and heaps of repressive legislation and authoritarian government
variations of this kind misdirection have happened too frequently in the past for me to believe that it is the result of an accident or ignorance
I agree with you re the biased reporting we hear. news organisations are too fearful to tell the truth; who buys their output after all and over 50% of Londoner s are ‘foreign.’
Still some of the foreign totty is superb so we have to look on the bright side too.
Foreign totty is rather nice, true.
But keeping recidivists in prison is sometimes cheaper than their cost outside. Going from memory of an article I read, when you consider the police and court costs and the costs to the victim, some of these people are costing k100s every year compared to low £10s of keeping them in prison.
I think there is a good case for a progressive increase in sentence for those repeatedly convicted. Maybe a formula that adds all or part of their last remission onto current sentence according to how long they stay out of trouble.
@Tony
Its become a facet of our age typified by the yellow police incident signs. No perpetrator description means only one thing. Do the people who do this think that Londoners are going to form flash lynch mobs like the villagers in Frankenstein moves?
@StefZ
Yep, the differences between the UK and the rest of the world are narrowing at an alarming pace but those causes are a complex web running over decades. What uncontrolled migration does mean is that it becomes harder for ethnically indigenously British people who want to fight the rot to group and campaign. I think you’re wrong in your assertion that migrants will be scapegoated, they have a different attraction in that they have well established tribal self-interests and a predilection towards bribery maintaining the status-quo inherited from their homelands. They serve a purpose in the “cold conflict” in that they bog down dissent by force of number at the cohesive end of society, education, transport, health care and housing. I expect more immigrant internecine conflict as things get difficult; but that’s the plan.
@City
I think my wife falls into the category “foreign totty” so I understand the sentiment, I hope your wife does too.
@Xoggoth
Agreed. However without restrictions on immigration that prison population will continue to grow indefinitely.
One useful trick to have ready for the sort of PC woes you have had is a bootable CD of Knoppix Linux. This isn’t an install CD; it is purely a Linux system on a CD or DVD (use the latter if you can; more drivers and software on it) and it can recognise and read from Windows partitions.
Next up you need a bog-standard 3.5″ hard disk, and an external disk enclosure. Easy enough to buy the two separate and assemble yourself; all you need is a small phillips screwdriver for the job.
The Knoppix CD can be used to boot the PC, and the new hard disk can then be plugged into the USB port of the PC, and a complete backup of data made from the old PC disk to the one in the USB enclosure. After that, please yourself when you replace the disk since you’ve got a backup.
Knoppix CDs also have memtest-86 on them; useful for diagnosing knackered memory on PCs.