I found this on Glazblog:

“Iraq will take in May 2003 the presidence of the…UN Conference on Disarmament!!!! No, that’s not a hoax. That’s just alphabetical order: India now then Indonesia, Iran, Irak, Irlande and finally Isra?l.”

I watched a program on BBC1 last night about the sex offenders register and the loopholes in it. They came up with 5 loopholes of which 3 were variations on a theme. I found the whole program annoying and sensationalist. They didn’t put anythingn into proportion or tell us the scale of the problem of pedophilia and how much of that was as a result of their “revelations”. Also they didn’t suggest any ways that parents could minimise the risks of these loopholes. Grrr…

Anyway the loopholes are

1. If you are on the list that prevents you working for a school or such body, there is nothing legally to stop you teaching privately or for a private school.
   

2. If you are convicted in another country, then you won’t be registered in this country if you come here.
   

3. The rules came into affect in 1997, so if you committed a crime and had served your sentence before then, then you aren’t on the register either.
   

Clearly, 3 was intentional on the part of the people who framed the law, so you can hardly call it a loophole imo! I’m not sure what you can do about 2 as there isn’t that much co-operation at international level with all countries. I should think that this could be tidied up with “friendly” countries a bit though.

I have no idea what you could do about 1. You could make it an offence, so that if you are caught, then you can be banged up in jail again, but I don’t see how you can stop someone being self employed. Monitoring is clearly out as there are over 40,000 people on this register and I can’t

see us as a country being prepared to pay the costs of regularly checking up on all 40,000 people.

I also have no idea about how many people we are talking about! I mean, out of the 40,000 how many were family/close friend abusers? And of the remainder, how many are trying to get around the law? My understanding is that there is far more “danger” from family/close friends than anything else,

but this program didn’t inform me about anything other than trying to pat themselves on the back for finding some flaws in the system.

Anyway the program just annoyed me and I thought you should know!

It’s Monday, so I’m back to work. Lots of traffic on the Motorway today for some reason too. I listend to LBC whilst trundling round the M25 – it’s great that it’s is back on FM!

I have been playing with Firebird today. It’s very nice and the license is wonderful too :)

In other news, Phoenix and Mozilla now has a much improved about:config page (yay!). Full details are at Mozillazine.

You know it’s bad when the Ref is the Man of the Match!

Taking the work out of marketing!

Why can’t I wake up at a sensible time? For the last few days I’ve been waking up at 5:30am :(