I believe there's a product available from South America that can help you out there. Take a look at this helpful information (and no, it's got nothing to do with cleaning PCs).

Well, not really. It depends where you live. I grew up in rural Scotland, where most people have at least somewhere to work on machinery. When the nearest garage is 30 miles away, you can either spend a lot of time looking at a broken machine or learn to fix it.

Most children just use their bikes to ride about on. One of my friends from school saved up to buy a really good racing bike, then spent all his time taking it apart and building better bits using his dad's workshop.

Now he builds racing bikes professionally, and you *cannot* afford one.

You get all kinds of geeks, everywhere.

It's probably optional - on DMR equipment you can turn off the "talk permit" tone which is presumably the same thing. You still get the FAIIIILLLLL beep if it can't associate to the repeater.

Okay, let's say you disagree with everything your government is doing. Imagine you hate that the government isn't just standing back and letting the medical industry force you to buy the managers new Jaguars, and imagine that you hate that the government is letting women go around with their heads uncovered and own property and stuff and even think they have the same rights as men, and allowing schools to teach that evolution is fact and creation is not. Imagine, in short, that you're a pretty typical right-wing "Christian" American.

Now we invade you. Fucking thousands of deeply warlike Scots, and we are going to take your damn country apart - and you know we could. Once we win, we'll let you shape your government any way you damn well please, but we are taking your country now.

Are you going to fight, or lie down?

For a while I lived in a 17-storey tower block that had four postcodes. Each postcode covered four floors, or five for the top floors.

Oh, it's on Wikipedia so it must be true, eh? If there were as many cameras as that then you'd think I'd have actually seen some about.

Really the right-wing are the anti-privacy lot - the previous right-wing government brought in all the really nasty shit about monitoring phones and emails, and the current load of right-wing extremists are just making it worse. But that's what they're all about - high taxes and big government, with lots of expensive public-funded "jobs for the boys" projects.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, it's summer. It's far too hot and sunny to have a barbecue.

I mean really, who in their right mind wants to go and stand outside on a hot day, cooking hot food on a pile of hot burning charcoal? It's stupid.

Have your barbecue in the winter, when you can stand round a big hot pile of burning charcoal eating hot things and there are no annoying midgies or mosquitos.

It doesn't, though. The whole "eleventy billion cameras in the UK" thing was made up by one of the screaming right-wing tabloids a few years ago, by counting all the CCTV cameras in about a half-mile stretch of the main street of a fairly scummy part of London, and multiplying by the total length of all the roads in the UK. So, the figure is probably accurate *if* you assume that every single road in the UK has lots of off-licenses, bookmakers, cheque cashing centres, "we buy scrap gold" shops the like - but, it isn't. For the figures to be correct, you'd have to have something like one camera every 60 metres or so on *every single road* right down to farm tracks.

Most cities in the UK have no more CCTV than cities in the US - and if you think US cities don't have CCTV then I wonder what you think CCTV cameras look like...