Interesting Links for 31-10-2011

[andrewducker]

• Now _this_ is welfare fraud. 97% of Long Island Railroad workers retire on disability...
  
  (tags: welfare usa disability fraud )
• Met Police spends millions of pounds on secret aircraft to eavesdrop on mobile calls
  
  (tags: police london uk spying )
• Prince Charles has the power to veto some government legislation
  
  (tags: uk royalty politics law wtf )
• two thirds of UK homes to have fibre broadband by 2014 (mostly FTTC I suspect)
  
  (tags: fibreoptics internet broadband bt )

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Wow, the Indy does not want to load today!

[andrewducker]

Horribly slow for me, but it works.

[azurelunatic]

I'm getting 503s from their Varnish server.

[andrewducker]

Hmmmm. Something looks wrong there. I'll have to work out what's going on there... I suspect Delicious have changed the way they store the "description" in their RSS feed again.

[andrewducker]

In case anyone is wondering, FTTC is Fibre To The Cabinet, where BT run fibre-optic cable to your local telecoms cabinet, and then it's copper the last bit to your home. This is mostly going to be a lot faster than running copper all the way from the exchange to your home, but not as fast as running fibre optic from the cabinet to your front door. A hell of a lot cheaper though.

[skington.livejournal.com]

To be fair, there's no point in giving people in rural areas fibre to the home - the cost would be ruinous.

[andrewducker]

Yup. If they were laying new lines then it would be worth it. But the cost of digging up miles of cable out to remote places is just far more than it's worth when FTTC will provide speeds of up to 100MB/s (depending on distance to the cabinet).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

They would, after all, only keep coal in it.

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

Met Police spends millions of fraudulently accounted for pounds on secret aircraft to eavesdrop on mobile calls
Fixed that for you.

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

"The disclosure of the spending, which is not detailed in official accounts"

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Good heavens. Does this mean that The Plod have been able to crack A5/1 at will?

[andrewducker]

Interesting question:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I read that as 'Plod have bought a bogus base-station/EMX and probably don't have to decrypt the over-the-air traffic any more.'

Fucksake.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

The Prince Charles thing is pretty outrageous. I'm in favour of the current constitutional monarchy setup (where the monarch technically has the right of veto, but hasn't actually done it for over three hundred years now, and didn't do it very often even before then) and, as you know, I'm opposed to an elected House of Lords. But Prince Charles regularly oversteps reasonable constitutional boundaries in order to promote either his own commercial or aesthetic interests, or whatever ridiculous quackery he's into this week. And it's really long past time he stopped.

[skington.livejournal.com]

He's just bitter because Mum won't abdicate and let him be King, because she wants to beat Queen Victoria.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The law in originates from a Royal Charter drawn up in 1337. It's one of any number of quirks of our laws, and whilst it should be amended, there is at lease a reason why it exists.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/30/prince-charles-ancient-charter-consent

The title and property of the Duchy of Cornwall were created in 1337 by Edward III, and were given by royal charter to his son, the Prince of Wales also known as the Black Prince.

Under the charter, the duchy always belongs to the sovereign's eldest son who is the heir apparent. If the heir apparent dies without leaving children, the property of the duchy reverts to the crown. So although the duchy belongs to the Prince of Wales, who is also the Duke of Cornwall, there is a theoretical possibility that it could revert to the sovereign, who therefore has a contingent personal interest in matters that affect the property of the duchy.

Bills in parliament that would affect the sovereign's private interests (or the royal prerogative) require the Queen's consent; by extension, therefore, bills that would affect the duchy also require consent, and since the Prince of Wales administers the duchy he also performs the function of considering and granting relevant requests for consent.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I’m assuming in this that Charlie can only (or has only) apply his veto to the effect of legislation to his own personal business concerns. I think if he could (or had) struck down bits of legislation in their entirety we’d have noticed.