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]

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.

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.