binaryslate

Red tape has given way to black marker tape for thousands of bemused civil servants as part of a £7 million paperclip revolution aimed at ensuring that they keep the tools of their trade in the right place.

Office workers have been given the tape to mark out where they should put their pens and pencils, their computer keyboards and to indicate where to place their phones.

“We had a situation in some offices in Scotland where staff were asked, ‘Is that banana on your desk active or inactive?’, meaning were they going to eat it? If not, it had to be cleared away.�

The scariest point in all this is that these kind of stories seem no longer out of the ordinary. The government seems to excel in finding pointless ways of spending money. It’s almost Lord Irvine’s wallpaper all over again, although seems ironic that wallpaper only cost £650K and black tape costs £7.4m.

tip: Times Online

I do hope this is real!

The Guardian is reporting that the new UK Passports have been cracked.

“The Home Office has adopted a very high encryption technology called 3DES - that is, to a military-level data-encryption standard times three. So they are using strong cryptography to prevent conversations between the passport and the reader being eavesdropped, but they are then breaking one of the fundamental principles of encryption by using non-secret information actually published in the passport to create a ’secret key’. That is the equivalent of installing a solid steel front door to your house and then putting the key under the mat.”

I’m glad something like this has come out, i’ve been an opponent of this and ID cards since they were first mentioned. I frankly wouldn’t trust the government to be a ble to file some word documents securely let alone keep track of my biometric information, or be able to cope with 60 million citizen’s biometrics.

Who even came up with the system? The first rule of encryption is obviously to keep the key secure, not to write it on the document in plain text!

“Captain Sensible, the 70s and 80s punk icon has started his own political party, The Blah! Party. He’s campaigning for no-nonsense, straight-talking politics and aims to become the biggest political party in the UK with over 300,000 members. He’s fed up with people marching on Westminster and then nothing happening, so he wants to take the politicians on, on their own turf. Come election time he wants people to vote for The Blah! Party and register a protest vote, then they’ll be forced to listen. Your support would really be appreciated and everybody else who is currently fed up with the state of British politics.”

You just can’t make this stuff up!

tip: Boing Boing

The Slightly Bemused

The Kingdom of The Slightly Bemused is a small, pleasant nation, remarkable for its barren, inhospitable landscape. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, intelligent population of 12 million have some civil rights, but not too many, enjoy the freedom to spend their money however they like, to a point, and take part in free and open elections, although not too often.

The medium-sized government devotes most of its attentions to Law & Order, with areas such as Social Equality and Social Welfare receiving almost no funds by comparison. The average income tax rate is 13%. A robust private sector is led by the Gambling industry, followed by Book Publishing and Beef-Based Agriculture.

The alarmingly racist TV show ‘Bigtopians Say the Darndest Things’ is a hit, euthanasia is legal, punitive tariffs protect local industry, and the mining industry is making inroads into environmentally sensitive areas. Crime is a problem. The Slightly Bemused’s national animal is the liger, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its currency is the lupin.

The Slightly Bemused is ranked 49th in the region and 19,932nd in the world for Largest Trout Fishing Sector.

Think I’m doing better than Blair? I’ve had two endorsements from other nations, so I must be doing something right

Stumbled across a web based political sim called NationStates.

The general gist is thus:

Jennifer Government: NationStates is a nation simulation game. You create your own country, fashioned after your own ideals, and care for its people. Either that or you deliberately torture them. It’s really up to you.

You’ll be asked to choose a name for your nation, a motto, a national animal, and a currency. Then you answer a short questionnaire about your politics. This will determine what sort of nation you end up with: authoritarian or permissive… left-wing or right-wing… compassionate or psychotic… you get the idea.

Once a day, you’ll be faced with an issue, and need to make a decision as to what to do about it. This determines how your nation evolves.

I’ve joined up to see if it’s interesting, i’ve called my nation ‘The Kingdom of The Slightly Bemused’ and i’m in the England region.

You can create your own regions if you want to play along with friends. If anyone is interested in such do tell me and we can band together.

atm my stats say:

UN Category: Conservative Democracy
Civil Rights: Some
Economy: Strong
Political Freedoms: Excellent

Update: Here’s a link to my nation The Slightly Bemused

Stay tuned for further developments