If RiverSoft made e-voting machines These leaked emails from Diebold, reported widely on the web, but strangely not in the traditional media, make pretty scary reading. Diebold manufacture electronic voting apparatus (used widely in the US, including the 2000 presidential elections). Read the excerpts to get a taster: “Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss…

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Take my wife, no please, take her… Today (and much of yesterday for that matter) I have been spending far too much time hitting “refresh” on the tickets-for-sale page of the aussie-in-London listings website gumtree, in a vain attempt to get myself a last-minute ticket for tonight’s Powderfinger gig at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. (Entirely my own fault, of course, since I passed up a number of opportunities to (a) buy one when they weren’t sold…

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Classic Newsnight: Did You Threaten To Overrule Him? (links to Real Player video) Tom Watson has more on Michael Howard here. It’s worth a read, in case you need your memory jogging about the nasty little man who will be leader of the opposition (but, god help us, hopefully never the country). The man introduced the poll tax and clause 28. He’s pro-war, anti-abortion, against a woman’s right to statutory maternity leave, opposes the Human…

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Enfield Mormons: Missed blog opportunity It was only after I’d said “Sorry mate, no thanks” and started walking away, that I realised I should have stopped and listened to what the man had to say, if only for its comedy blog entry potential. Unfortunately, when a young, smartly-dressed, American chap approached me in the street this lunchtime with the opening gambit: “excuse me, we’re from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day…”, I…

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I often wonder why I don’t see as many famous people as you’d really expect, what with living in London and all. I wonder if maybe it’s just that I’m either not really paying attention to the people around me, or don’t think that anyone I might have seen is really who I think they might be. I can claim to have spotted Richard E. Grant in Richmond, for example, only because someone I was…

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