We got rid of virgin – the headline 150 mbit broadband spent months spluttering along at less than 10 mbit . Over a year of broken “fix dates” and periods when it didn’t work at all meant that we gave up and went to BT which hasn’t missed a beat in the 3 years we’ve had it – a steady 70 mbit is much more useful than an occasional 150meg. Our neighbours tell us the virgin service still has outages all the time so we’re glad we dumped them.

BT has also been much more useful than expected for the hotspot network to the point I have data turned off on my phone most of the time – in most places it finds and automatically connects to BT wifi.

We had Sky for a few years at the last place and like BT didn’t have any problems with it.

anyway its all the fault of those pesky immigants.

Well more kids requiring places at already stretched service is to going to make things better

The newspapers in Germany are now saying that the 1m migrants they were expecting is now more likely to be 1.6m to 2m by the end of the next year, with a family factor of 4-8 people likely to follow in the years immediately after that. All of these people will have right of free movement in Europe so that’s the best part of 10m people who all need housing, health and schooling just from the “open door” in Germany alone.

The migrant debate is somewhat heated but the simple reality is that in Britain we already have many hundreds of thousands of families who do not have permanent, satisfactory or affordable accommodation. This situation is simply unacceptable as anyone familiar with the conditions of families living in poor accommodation will already know.

A further 6,000 net migrants are arriving in the UK every week – throw in the additional challenge of accommodating 20,000 refugees and another 80,000-160,000 of their immediate family members and it’s quite easy to see that our ability to build out new healthcare capacity, schools and housing will clearly not match demand. For those already living on the fringes of our society things will almost certainly get worse.

On housing alone we need to build in excess of 300,000 homes a year just to start addressing the backlog and catching up – that’s equivalent to a city the size of Newcastle on Tyne every 12 months which gives some indication about the feasibility of delivering this given constraints on land and the significant skilled labour shortages in the house building supply chains that will take years to address.

This money that was created – surely it ended up with banks?

Sort of. It ended up with the banks and funded their ability to lend which in turn enabled investment which in turn enabled the strong economic growth we’ve seen compared to the rest of Europe. Although lending levels were lower than prior to the crash this partly reflected uncertainty in businesses and a delay in committing to investments rather than lack of available funding from banks.

no need to pay via 192.com just use http://www.freeelectoralroll.co.uk/

We did ours as follows:

2 x 1 Battens every 40cm
2 layers of overlapped gyproc soundbloc right down joist level
Sealed seams then plastered
Replaced floorboards / skirtings

It’s made a huge difference to the level of noise – our neighbour does band practice with drums several days a week.

Cost wise it was reasonable and we’ve only lost around 6cm room width so barely enough to be noticeable.

Meanwhile Tories desperately struggling to cover up 2bn hole in the NHS budget.

This is chump change on a £110B+ annual budget – not least when the most recent report reckoned that the staff are defrauding it to the tune of £1.5B a year via payroll fraud and the total cost of fraud is up to £6B a year.

http://www.nationalhealthexecutive.com/Health-Care-News/fraud-could-be-draining-almost-6bn-a-year-from-the-nhs

I listened to the interview with her on MoneyBox and it was very distressing to hear what happened to her. These scams are increasingly complex and she was trying to protect her clients money – for that she has lost her career and been made bankrupt.

There seems to be a complete lack of control on money movements and combined with the fact the police can’t be bothered to investigate more than 99% of on-line frauds there are few if any protections for the public or professionals like the one in the interview.

Next up in the Corbyn news – 9/11 was made up and had nothing to do with Osama BL:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/11892383/Jeremy-Corbyn-911-was-manipulated.html

In August Corbyn shared a platform with a nutjob opineing that the world is controlled by “Jewish elders” and a secret new world order that’s apparently so powerful it couldn’t even stop a bearded job-dodging conspiracy theorist from Islington from being elected to lead the Labour Party.

The Labour Party elders of old would be ashamed at the new depths that Corbyn’s dragging the party down to.

If it was in a park there’s a pretty good chance it will have a byelaw restricting cycling – quite a lot of parks were originally common ground and made available for grazing livestock back in the day, so the regulations for many often still reflect this.

Or, it may radicalise others, and provide ISIS with some convenient british martyrs for their recruiting. Especially when it’s hung on a shoogly peg- “The british government kills our brothers without even a trial, they say they’re democratic and just but politicians and soldiers kill us without their people and judges having a say!” PR gold.

But this is the narrative anyway and precisely why wahabi / salafist beliefs have been propagating unchecked.

When you do a bit of digging the way that so many people have been convinced their “brothers” are oppressed is because they spend so much time listening to fundamentalists.

In many cases those who believe their community is somehow under attack have chosen or been encouraged to isolate themselves from the wider community, and in the case of women have been forced into isolation by virtue of the requirements to cover themselves and thus avoid face to face contact.

These communities often get most / all of their view of the world from local imams and “religious scholars” who were born outside of the UK and therefore have almost no understanding of how the UK works. These communities also typically get no news or information from uk based impartial sources – as evidenced by the many subscriptions to arabic TV channels and OFCOMs repeated attempts to stop access to channels that openly advocate violence against non believers / jewish / gay people etc. etc.

The whole belief system that underpins this movement is predicated on a “victim” mindset – the lack of participation with wider society enables it and in some cases it’s ably abetted by well-meaning organisations (like universities) who happily give islamists credibility and a platform on which to spread their warped view of the world.

1984

Not so much 1984 more 2005 when home grown islamists with a rabid hatred of the west / western life blew up 52 of their fellow british citizens on London tube trains.

The failure to recognise salafism / wahabi ideology and vigorously confront it is precisely why British citizens are now blowing themselves and others up all over the world, and why our security services are actively monitoring around 5-6,000 individuals the share the same intent.

Personally I don’t have any sympathy for the two nut jobs that were targeted with drones. As far as I can see it:

1. IS/ ISIS is a terrorist group. If you say you’re going to join them / make videos saying you’re going to / travel with the intent of doing so then you should lose your British citizenship (thus rendering them stateless) and should be actively targeted as an enemy combatant (with the exception of children taken by their parents).

2. At the point a person travels to Iraq / Syria to join ISIS they should be treated as a traitor with their entire assets to be taken by the state and disbursed to those who are fleeing the chaos caused by ISIS.

3. Public support for the goals of ISIS is not compatible with a life in Britain and should be dealt with as such – including the immediate loss of all benefits and social housing. Children should be removed from households where parents have extremist views with a view to getting them fostered / adopted by other families.

4. Anyone who believes that the Caliphate is a great place should be given free travel and the option of permanently leaving the UK with loss of citizenship part of the process. The houses freed up should be given to refugees / those who have values compatible with life in a democracy / secular state.

“And this despite the fact that the Vetting Commission also blocked a record number of unsuitable candidates- in the last 15 years only 10 were blocked, in this one group there were 7! That’s how selective Cameron is. “

Not really – for a fair comparison you’d need to apply the current vetting standards to all of the peers nominated over the last 15 years – the number would be far higher than the 10 blocked under the old rules and simply shows the vetting process is actually working. Since we don’t know who was blocked jumping to the conclusion that all 7 were selected by Cameron is a bit presumptive.

Can’t wait to see JC’s proposed solutions to this:

Women bully other women in the armed forces

Also, a couple of posters have hypothesised that “Tory” cuts in BTP numbers might be to blame – the number of officers in 2009/10 was 2667 and 2652 in 2013 (the last year for which data are available).

One thing to keep in mind that banks have some pretty good form on making arbitrary decisions that the value of a property has gone down and then use this to remove the agreed lending amount and effectively stop any “savings” in flexible /offset mortgages to be withdrawn. This has caused some people real difficulty when they have stored large amounts temporarily in the offset mortgage only to find they can’t withdraw it the funds as planned.

it’s good as long as:

– you don’t want to listen to BBC radio.. the streams have been constantly cutting in and out since February and although the problem is know Sonos / TuneInn still haven’t committed to a fix
– you don’t want to listen to any podcasts that aren’t listed on TuneIn

The sound quality is good but for me it’s been a hobbled system that doesn’t even play radio reliably.

Its almost as if they have had to suffer massive cuts over the last 5 years…… ah the wonders of a Tory government ….

my own experience of repeated damage to property well before 2010 consistently got the same tardy response – even with clear CCTV showing who was doing it still resulted in the police doing FA and failing to even come and look at the video. Our local plod constantly complains about his workload but even when handed evidence on a plate of drug dealing right under his nose lies to locals and says it’s the first he’s heard about it… so the chances of the police being interested and following up seem no different when they are “well” funded compared to when the are “under” funded.

In my view much of the “cuts” narrative is just a smoke screen in some cases for a lack of organisation and a “don’t give a monkeys” mindset. Fortunately some police forces are more progressive and show what can be achieved – Thames Valley police by all accounts seem to have swallowed the cuts, really transformed ways of working and as a result are managing more hours of front line police work.

Good to see Labour are aligning north and south of the border with two new leaders who both share a complete absence of any meaningful work experience outside of the political bubble – isn’t it about time that “Labour” was rebranded to reflect that most of its senior leaders have never had a job in the way most of the population would recognise?

do you know if that also works overseas when you connect thru wifi so you can avoid roaming?

not unless you’re running a VPN back to a UK IP address, and even then EE has tools to detect that and block the connection.

why not just get the neighbour to put a small line of mortar between the slab and your wall? Or paint the edge of his slab and the first inch of your wall with a sealant?

Labour senior leaders wear bow ties as well. What inference are we supposed to draw from the photo above?

EE now has the biggest 4g and 3g coverage area by a substantial margin (90% 4G coverage compared to around 70% for o2 and Vodafone).

They are also the only network to do WiFi calling if you find yourself in an area of no signal… there’s no app to muck about with – the phone just switches to Wifi and works as normal.

Vodafone – they are now the most complained about mobile operator:

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/may/12/vodafone-tops-list-of-most-complained-about-mobile-sevices

Care of Ofcom’s brand new realworld coverage mapping tool we can all see why they get so many complaints about coverage.

why don’t you junk your own landline, keep the work one and then run a SIP based phone on the broadband e.g. Vonage, if you still need your own “personal” number. That would probably still cost £7 a month but it’s still cheaper than paying for a second landline and you’d still get a geographic 01 / 02/ 03 number

is the broadband from work through a different landline?

slightly off topic but wondering if anyone can help me help my parents with this…

They have a plusnet router that supports WPS. The wifi coverage is pretty poor so I’m thinking of buying a powerline wifi extender and using it like so:

plusnet router —-> connect via ethernet to Powerline plug ——-> connect via electricty cables > second power line plug that has wifi

Is it possible to copy the SSID from a home modem to the first non wifi power line adapter or will it only work with the second one / will the SSID on the power line plugs be different to that of the modem so effectively create a second network?

I’ve just read Andy Burnham’s profile in todays Guardian and from this I’ve gleamed

a) He likes his footy
b) He likes watching The Great British Bake Off with his family
c) He actually lives in his constituency but reportedly rents out for profit the flat he owns in London whilst himself living in another flat 1/2 mile away and expensing that to us and doesn’t readily admit to likeing the spoils of Westminster
d) he wants us all to believe he never saw himself as a politcian even though his own wife says he’s always talked about it
e) he would like us to remember he is against privitisation of the NHS and is pro-patient even though as health secretary he presided over PFI deals that saddled the NHS with £billions of debt and spent years refusing to meet the families of patients who died at Mid Staffs or accept there was a problem with NHS care that warranted further action

I’ve fixed that for you

The Times carries a report today with comments from the prosecuting barrister in court case which is said to have been dropped because of the threats made to expose Ted Heath. The prosecuting barrister is now a judge and confirmed the case was dropped because the witnesses failed to turn up with the result.

“One was a male prostitute — over age — who was engaged in business and wouldn’t come to court. He was off seeing a client somewhere. There were two other women. One was in Holloway [prison] and was brought to the court. But she refused to come up from the cells. The other didn’t turn up.”
He said that Forde, who was successfully prosecuted within three years, had men working for her but “nobody suggested to me they were under age”

. Forde was jailed twice in connection with the brothel and used teenagers from a care home in the trade.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article4518578.ece

“I know for a fact that the case was not dropped because of Edward Heath, it had nothing to do with him,”

Mr Seed said, adding that there was no cover-up and “

certainly no conspiracy by police officers

” as they had nothing to do with his decision to abort the case. After its collapse, Wiltshire police redoubled their efforts to get a conviction and close her business, which was exploiting children in care and turning them into prostitutes.

“We need to tackle the inequalities that stifle growth and productivity by preventing women from reaching their full potential in the workplace”.

He’s as perfectly placed as most of the other leadership candidates to address productivity via workspace strategies given the fact that he’s been a professional job-dodging politician almost his entire career.

To date his only job has been a brief stint as an official “National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers” – other than that he’s basically spent 40 years being paid by the state to blow hot air.

it’s worth getting a quote to get the existing windows refurbed – may not cost much more. Chucking out wooden sash windows and replacing with upvc might save a few quid but damages the look and value of the property when you come to sell.

Plan is to sell our main house here, buy a place in Spain, rent that out over the summer/holiday season while we go traveling in our camper. That should give us around £12k a year on top of pensions etc. Unless the Spanish government screw that up for us.

For starters the Spanish Govt will issue you with a tax bill based on what they think you could have rented it out for – irrespective of how much rent you actually received. The same goes when you sell it. It goes downhill from there so unless you like playing roulette best avoid buying property in Spain for a while..

brompton wheels are bad enough – I’d hate to hit a pothole at 20mph with those….

Question for the STW hive mind – what would you do if a quad copter was hovering over your garden at about 30m height at 11pm on a Saturday night?

Said quadcopter was making slow passes over several people’s houses to the annoyance of several neighbours. The “pilots” were found about 400m away in a public space but behind several tree lines each of which is around 40m high.

They were flying using some kind of remote video but didn’t have line of sight control and deleted the video they were taking when the police and a super irate neighbour turned up. Ironically, when we tried to take a photo of them they were immediately into “you can’t photograph us in a public space” / “you’re invading our privacy”.

Views from mates range from “i would have smashed it up” to “there’s no harm but invading privacy is well out of order”. What would STW do if a drone was hovering over your garden at night and being controlled by persons unknown?

around 25% of the Greek economy is “grey” – some estimates put the figure a lot higher. If the Greek’s had addressed the systematic tax evasion by their citizens over the last 10 years and put in place reasonable controls on spending they most likely wouldn’t have needed these bail outs in the first place.

The problem with the “get it automated” suggestion is that many of the tube lines already are – the drivers don’t do any driving as such and would be better described as “cab based door operators”

the strike probably has more to do with unions flexing their muscles and giving the Tories a poke in the eye than anything else but the tube drivers basically need sacking. If they really think they are hard done by when many of them sit in the cabs of trains that are already automated (central, victoria, jubilee) then they need a wake up call.

They already *start* on £50K, work 35 hour weeks, get 43 days annual leave (with a high rate of sickness absence on top of this taking time off for many drivers to close to 60 days a year), get unlimited free travel for their families across London (worth another £10-12k in salary) and enjoy one of the best pension schemes going.

They’ve been asked to work 7 x night shifts a year (note – same number of shifts in total) and for this have been offered a £2K bonus and a 2% pay rise.

buy to let reforms are long overdue and also a poke in the eye to the “tories are the party of the rich” camp… can think of a lot of people I know who have massively over extended themselves on buy to lets without ever really thinking about the affordability / returns if interest rates and tax allowances change.

The change should see a cooling off on prices for smaller properties with more coming back on to the market for sale as the returns from buy to let diminish.

the problems we’re seeing are almost entirely down to three root causes:

1. An expansionist Iranian state that is fighting and funding proxy wars in other countries.

2. Salafist / wahhabi ideology has now reached a point of mass acceptance after 3 decades of funding of propaganda, imams and other materials by the Saudi state. It’s coincidence that concerns were raised in the UK 10 years ago about young people receiving religious instruction with materials that stated that killing gays / jews / kuffir is acceptable and the many tens of thousands of british citizens who not only believe this but are increasingly willing to act on it.

3. An ongoing failure to connect the dots and see the real picture which is that any further delay in tackling the ideology head on will simply allow matters to deteriorate even more quickly.

not quite bike kit but I still use a Pace thermal jersey from 1994 and a Camelback sweatband from 1991!

sticking with Spotify here – the days of apple being an innovator have long since past and I’d rather give my hard earned to services that work now (spotify & sonos) rather than to services that offer jam tomorrow (apple music & sonos)