For years until last December, I avoided installing any version of Windows on my personal computers; I had a Mac, which I used for things like word processing, and a Linux-based PC which I used for net surfing and programming. Then, my parents bought me a laptop last Christmas, a Dell Inspiron 6400 which came with Windows Vista pre-installed. I always found this Vista rather flaky in its operation; it took ages to start up - even when it had appeared to start up, it really hadn't, still being engaged in loading all those programs you see in the icon bar at the bottom right, and that pointless applet panel on the right side of the screen; when I needed to start the Control Panel, it would take ages, and that's only when it would start at all; on about two-thirds of occasions, it would go unresponsive, and take the bottom panel and start menu down with it. I thought that installing Service Pack 1 would cure all this, and various people on the internet say it's improved the reliability of their systems, so I tried doing it the normal way, through Windows Update.

So, last night I got down to backing up all my data, installing the SSH server on my big Linux box so I could transfer everything (mostly installers for programs, but also a few pictures and documents - actually not much actual data which didn't also exist elsewhere) over the network to that machine. At 11pm, I was finally ready to re-install Vista - after trying the System Restore program, which works by finding "restore points" set when you installed programs or updates beforehand, but in this case there were only four such points remaining, all from failed update attempts yesterday, and searching for the Dell PC Restore software which was supposedly bundled with my machine, but which I couldn't find. (Perhaps I deleted it while installing Linux on it, but I don't remember this; I thought I'd left this just in case.)

Well, as it turns out, the Dell manual (which is dated April 2007 and only mentions Windows XP, not Vista) was wrong: if you tell the Windows Vista installer where to put your new installation and do not actually tell it to format your hard drive or partition, it won't. It will simply copy all your old files to a directory called "Windows.old", leaving all your personal data intact. This still leaves the lengthy task of doing all the updates which appeared since Vista appeared in 2006, installing SP1 itself which really does take an hour or more and reboots the system twice, and reinstalling your anti-virus (if you use it) and all your old applications, but it's not the same as wiping your hard drive.

So, this is a public service announcement to anyone whose Vista upgrade is stuck: just re-install. It's not as painful as it sounds.

Still, it makes me appreciate the benefits of Linux install and upgrade programs, particularly the APT software on Ubuntu, which (mostly) just works. It doesn't restart your computer several times during an upgrade, it doesn't tell you to close all your applications while it upgrades, it tells you what it's doing rather than just displaying a green bar ... really, all this has been around for years, so I don't see why Microsoft can't learn from it. Even Apple's update system vastly excels over MS's in this regard. I have long wished Microsoft would do what Apple did, and base their OS on Unix (and they can do this without licensing it, as FreeBSD is just that - free, even for commercial derivatives). As it stands, the Windows Vista disk management software does not even recognise non-Windows partition types, and over-wrote my boot management program, as if to reflect Microsoft's annoyance that I'm not only using their software. Still, making life cheaper for software developers and other customers is not really on Microsoft's agenda.

I also find it a bit odd that some people think we should think well of Bill Gates on account of recently having quit Microsoft and starting work at his AIDS charity. Really, Gates is as rich as he is not because his most lucrative software is good, but because of the miscalculations of the competition (Digital Research, WordPerfect, Lotus) back in the 1980s and 1990s. Most people have a little money, earned with solid hard work, and cannot afford to throw it around. His upcoming retirement, doubtless including a lot of travelling round the world and kissing a lot of babies, hardly compensates for his and his company's decade or more of public disservice.

Well, a lot of people were far more put out by Thatcher's policies than old Tories or Hampstead liberals - the homeless people in London's "cardboard city", for example, and the three million unemployed, and those who lost out when the coal and steel industries were closed. That the deadlock with the unions in the various nationalised industries had to be overcome is not in doubt; the result of Thatcher's policies is not that these industries have gone from strength to strength and are the equal of Mercedes-Benz or any other major European company, but that they are overwhelmingly in foreign hands if they have even remained open, with one British manufacturing company departing for the Far East after another. Perhaps this latter issue has as much to do with "liberalising" far eastern former communist economies turning into sweatshop havens as with Thatcherism, but the fact remains that the 1980s were the beginning of a decline of British industry, not a revitalising.

This is not to say that nobody benefited from some of her policies; Julian Baggini noted in his book Welcome to Everytown, in which he stayed in a district of Yorkshire which included former mining areas because its people had the most average tastes and habits, that many of those living in the mining areas were nowadays glad that the mining had ended, and that the jobs available to them today have far better conditions, although some in one of the towns he mentioned (Maltby) never worked again. For my part, I agree that defeating the Argentinian attempt to seize the Falkland Islands was justified (even if the Argentinians had a better claim to it than the UK, the actual invasion was an attempt by the notoriously brutal military junta to strenghten its legitimacy, and its defeat led directly to the end of that régime), but it is not the same as holding off Hitler from Great Britain. And neither is breaking the unions and driving British industry into the ground.

Of course, there is a possible compromise here: there are plenty of very wealthy people who could afford to pay for a state funeral for Thatcher out of their own pocket, and would. Let them, if they want one. It is not appropriate for the public to have to pay for a state funeral for such a bitterly divisive figure as Thatcher.

While some of us may not agree with the way this woman dresses or lives, it cannot be lost on anyone that it is not just Islam that demands a certain degree of submission from a married woman - I have actually never heard the word submission used in this context in Islam, while it does indeed appear in the New Testament and on certain Christian (albeit not Catholic, which is the majority Christian denomination in France) websites. I wonder which male relatives she submitted to, since a woman is not a servant to her in-laws in Islam - she is, in fact, entitled to a house to share with her husband, free from the interference of in-laws.

I also find it difficult to believe that this lady has "no idea about the secular state or the right to vote"; the right to vote is something that is known of in Morocco, which has a parliament although the monarchy has more power than it does in any monarchy in Europe. Surely she would have heard discussion of laïcité among female friends, or even relatives, albeit most likely scathing; or perhaps they meant she presented no possibility of agreeing with it? Neither the veil, nor this aspect of her lifestyle, nor her probable opinions, are illegal, and they do not impinge on the lives of others either.

A blogger at Harry's Place, in mentioning this case, asked:

Why be a citizen of a country that you have no interest or knowledge of, but in fact live in complete alienation to?

The simple answer is that the woman had lived in France for several years, was married to a French citizen and had French children. The vast majority of people do not choose the citizenship they have, nor do they have to earn it; they are born with it. They do not have to love their country (or, in most countries, pretend to, or even at least pretend not to hate it) or maintain a lifestyle typical of the majority in that country. Most people who take citizenship in a country in which they have settled do not do so because they love it so much, although they might refuse to do so for the opposite reason; they do so because they want to make their residency permanent, and because it makes life easier. A fair proportion of the country's Muslim minority would not care for the French obsession with secularism, even if they do not manifest their religion the way this woman does (and I would imagine that there remain pockets of opposition to it even among the white French); besides, if a male immigrant was to apply for citizenship while his French wife had a lifestyle like Faiza M's, the authorities might not have paid so much attention to that as they did to this woman's dress.

I am sure some are thinking this is typical for a backward Muslim country, but actually, I think having sex in public would offend people in most countries, including many of those where western tourists go to get drunk and, well, whatever else. Everyone knows that if you go and live in a Muslim country, and one which does not even pretend to be a democracy, you have to be careful. People get paid handsomely for working there (although they may have to pay handsomely to live there) and while it's not Saudi Arabia - they do let people, non-Muslims at least, drink alcohol - there are limits.

I do think six years is excessive, but then, this is the country where people have been thrown in jail for having a few poppy seeds on their clothes or the remains of a joint they trod on back home still stuck to the sole of their shoe when they get to the Emirates. In the UK, public sex is known as dogging, and there are those who gather to watch people do it in such places as parks. I am sure the locals wish these people would clear off; how about giving them a one-way ticket to Dubai?

Geoffrey Robertson QC (a senior British lawyer, with an interest in human rights and anti-censorship issues) on the bill going through Parliament right now, which allows people to give evidence anonymously and with digitally distorted voices. The bill is opposed to article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for the accused to "examine or have examined witnesses against him", and to time-honoured English legal provisions going back to 1641, and which inspired the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution; and without such anonymity, British law dealt with the Kray twins and terrorism in Northern Ireland:

The bill is being rushed through before the summer recess to empower all criminal courts and courts martial to receive voice-distorted evidence from witnesses whose identity defendants and their lawyers will never be allowed to know and whose faces they will never see. Defendants could be imprisoned for life solely on secret evidence they can never test by cross-examination so as to reveal, for example, a witness's malice or personal animosity; spiteful or score-settling motives; a reputation for telling lies or devious relationships with the police. Such witnesses will now be handed a perjurer's charter, by way of a statutory "anonymity order" that will keep their identity for ever hidden.

The bill will in effect place the trial process in the hands of the police, who will offer anonymity in most investigations into violent crime; the prosecution will be permitted to make an application in secret to the trial judge to claim that witnesses will not testify unless an anonymity order is made. The judge will have no way of weighing this claim, because the defence will not be present to challenge it. On many occasions at these one-sided hearings, judges will give in to the untestable claim (a form of forensic blackmail) that without these orders trials cannot proceed.

There are no safeguards for the citizen. The prosecution does not even have to prove that a witness has been intimidated or fears any kind of mental or physical threat: any "harm to the public interest" is sufficient - a formula that might cover up questionable police operations. There is no safeguard against a conviction relying entirely on the evidence of an anonymous witness; incredibly, this bill does not require judges to ensure corroboration (independent evidence pointing to guilt), or even to warn juries about the dangers of convicting on the word of witnesses who can't be effectively cross-examined. There is no right of appeal against the granting of anonymity orders.

The law, Robertson concludes, will inspire tyrants in other countries with a Common Law heritage, including Zimbabwe, and is not necessary given that other countries successfully use witness protection schemes to defend people against revenge from the Mafia. It seems like yet another ancient right will be torn away to appease the anti-civil-libertarian press and its "do something" culture.

On that subject, last week the papers (links here) tried to whip up such sentiment by claiming that Muslims had protested against a flyer from the local police with a picture of a puppy on it, advertising a non-emergency police line. The beef was that a Muslim local councillor, who was on the police advisory board, advised (as that's his job) that such a picture wouldn't go down too well; the fact was that nobody actually complained. As it happens, I think that they should have produced an alternative design without the dog (meaning, with something other than the dog), but if was made to sound as if Muslims were up in arms, which they weren't. Read Gabriele Marranci's article for the full story.

I found aspects of the drama rather unrealistic; in particular, I find it difficult to comprehend that police would resort to hanging round the gang in some sort of effort to provoke them into incriminating themselves. Clearly, the focus was on the drama rather than giving a realistic portrayal of either "street life" or policing. Neither of the two main detectives, but especially the black one, can conceal their contempt for the gang, or other local youths, or the two women. On one occasion, Joe reacts when a group of youths who are loudly playing music through a mobile phone on a bus call him a "pussy"; he seizes the phone, twists its owner's arm, then drops the phone through the window of the moving bus. Of course, such an act - theft and assault - would result in an officer getting disciplined, but it does not in this case. Joe clearly identifies with the young lad who got stabbed, being as he is someone who grew up on a nearby estate and did well for himself and got out; he seems to resent being sent back in and the white officers regard him as a poster-boy. None of them are ever shown showing their police ID cards, or do they really only do that in The Bill?

The two girls are Shanice and Ronnie, the former a pretty, light-skinned girl who is clearly more "in" with the gang, and the latter a heavier-set, darker-skinned girl with an awkward way of speaking and of apparently lesser intelligence who is also keener on other people's approval, both the gang's and Shanice's. At one point she calls Shanice a "ho" (whore) and tells her she can look after herself; Shanice only has to give her a hug for her to be won over again. When she finally tells Joe and his colleague what she saw, Joe cannot resist the temptation to correct part of her story and the white colleague provokes her by asking her why her friends call her "Troll"; when Joe's very middle-class female superior officer goes over her statement with her, and puts it to her that she stood and watched the incident and did nothing, she panics, recanting her whole story and throwing a tantrum. The upshot is that Ronnie is thrown out and Joe is thrown off the case.

In the end, aside from Emile (the killer) getting a beating from Joe after narrowly avoiding a stabbing from his two mates, there is no real justice delivered and no real wrapping-up of the story and no real dramatic climax either. Perhaps it is just my old-fashioned tastes but I prefer a story to be wrapped up like a story, even if in real life, things often do not happen this way. I found the conduct of the police to be so awful as to be unbelievable; they broke the law in public, they showed no patience whatsoever (keep in mind that Joe was a detective sergeant, so he had had one promotion), they insulted and provoked both suspects and witnesses, and they seemed to get away with all of it. Pretty much everyone in the story is shown in the worst possible light and an awful lot of stereotypes were reinforced. I thought this programme was ludicrous and, and I don't believe it is helpful at a time like now either.

Among the people who have entered the forthcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election, triggered by the resignation of David Davis to fight on a civil liberties platform is Jill Saward (campaign site here), who is best known for being the victim of the Ealing Vicarage rape attack in 1986. The last time she was actually famous was in the late 1990s when she was calling for the introduction of what she called a "manslaughter version of rape", i.e. second-degree rape, manslaughter being roughly equivalent to second-degree murder, and suggesting that women who were less than decently dressed might actually be partly to blame for what happened to them. This time, she is openly defending the 42-day detention law, the prevalence of CCTVs and a national DNA database.

I have long been puzzled as to why anyone thinks a woman's dress contributes to her own experience of rape. Of course, when drink and drugs are brought into it, people's inhibitions are lowered and all that, but this never seems to figure in the discussion. A woman attacked in the street and raped is likely to have been stalked, or otherwise attacked because she was an easy target; a man who attacks a woman because he sees undressed female flesh and cannot control himself is more likely to be fought off, and by the way, men can control themselves, and do all the time. I can well understand why the comments by the Lebanese mufti, Taj Hilali, that such female behaviour leads to "a look, then a smile, then a conversation, a greeting, then a conversation, then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay jail ... then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years" caused outrage; it was not about a man who was overwhelmed with desire while high on drugs, but one who led a gang of thugs who raped a series of women in Sydney.

Now, she's running on a platform that amounts to "nothing to fear, nothing to hide":

Not all men are rapists or sexual predators. But with sexual violence affecting one in three women, the chances are that every man will know victims of sex attacks - even though they may not know it. Many victims feel so dehumanised by their experiences they are unable to tell even their closest friends or family.

Crimes of sexual violence are at epidemic levels - partly because it is a crime that is so easy to get away with. The police and health agencies have dramatically improved the way victims of sexual violence are treated; but it is still increasingly difficult to obtain the proof necessary to bring charges - let alone secure a conviction. So every tool in the fight against this heinous crime must be made available to the police.

One such tool is the national DNA database, which has proved invaluable in identifying those responsible for some of the vilest crimes imaginable.

Her solution to the question of whether it's just to maintain DNA records of anyone who's been in contact with the police, whether they are found guilty or not, is simply to keep records of everybody in the country. Of course, she throws out a dubious statistic as fact - one in three women "affected" by sexual violence, which could be true depending on both your definition of "affected" and of sexual violence. Rape is easy to get away with because it is difficult to prove; however, the most difficult to prove "rapes" are those where sexual intercourse (and therefore the presence of DNA) is not in dispute, but rather, the alleged victim's consent is (more here).

Her "victims' rights" platform precludes any sympathy for the potential victims of the policy, as opposed to what the policy is intended to prevent:

(Bindel:) Isn't she worried that she's deflecting debate from the important issue of detention? "I know that some people who support Davis's stance on the 42-day issue will criticise me, but the reality is that terrorists are using increasingly clever methods to escape detention, and the investigation into these crimes are always complex. If the police say they need more time to work on these cases, then I support them. I want to be safe from terrorism."

And what about the effect of the 42-day change on the Asian community? "It will target people who are seen to be a threat to our nation's freedom. At the moment, that might be some Muslim men, 10 years ago it was the IRA - so people with Irish accents were the target - and soon it could be Mugabe's men." In this case, her sympathies tend towards victims of terror attacks and those who enforce the law, rather than potential victims of the detention policy.

Of course, it is easy for Saward to support extended pre-trial detention on the grounds of upholding the rights of potential victims of terrorism, because she is among the least likely to be affected by the latter, being as she is a well-connected, middle-class white woman. Those likely to be affected are mostly dark-skinned and mostly male, most of them no more wishing to see another terrorist attack in London than someone like Saward. Whether it is necessary, on the basis that there has only been one successful attack due to a combination of police work and the low calibre of the terrorists, is in much dispute. Nobody seems to question whether police chiefs would claim to need enhanced powers to detain and interrogate suspects in order to curry favour with politicians who want to be seen as tough on terrorism.

Simon at Obsolete/Septicisle has already taken apart Saward's platform; among other things, her apparent lack of understanding as to why "criminals" (or rather suspects) have rights in law that "victims" do not, and her statistics about the efficacy of DNA testing. Her campaign website is headed "True Liberty", which echoes the saying of politicians recently that security is the highest civil liberty, as if protection from harassment by the state, and being caught up in whatever plans state officials have. Saward claims she's not a politician, but has already got the hang of using selective qutoes, quoting the words "she will have done the nation a service" from an article in the Independent by Deborah Orr, which is about rape rather than any of her central campaign issues, and does not actually say "vote Jill". Her stance is a selfish one, buttressed by a spurious "victim's licence"; perhaps she really expects a constituency of people like her - provincial, middle-class whites, unlikely to be caught up in the "war on terror" - to kick out a long-standing MP for her, at a time when the Tories are in the ascendant. It would be interesting to see if they fall for it.

One call that stuck out was from a lawyer who herself grew up in a rough area (in Ilford, east London), who said she faced temptations to get into trouble when she was that age, but had been told by her parents that if she did, her dreams of being a lawyer would be just dreams. She accused him of not facing up to his responsibilities, admitting that he had pled guilty, and thus admitted that he was dishonest, while conceding that he may have received bad legal advice. She also opined that medicine is one area where standards cannot be lowered, that "three years is nothing in the life of a teenager", which in my experience is anything but the case, and that he try again in a few years.

There are two separate issues to consider when deciding whether someone in this situation should even be admitted to medical school in the first place. The first is whether someone with a petty burglary conviction incurred when he was 15 would be fit to practise by the age of 23, let alone at any later point in his life. Medical training takes five years, and this is followed by several years of doing junior "house officer" jobs; specialising is something a doctor does in his late twenties or later. If this individual had committed a burglary in which he had threatened and robbed people, let alone did anyone harm, I would certainly not wish anyone to start on a road which would lead to a sensitive job, not that it would matter, because he would most likely still be in prison. However, in this case, if he was telling the truth during his radio interview, it did not in my opinion.

The second, perhaps more pertinent, issue is whether the conviction would prevent him getting a doctor's job, which in this day and age it might well do, making his medical training a waste of time for both him and the college. In the UK these days, any criminal record might prevent someone taking a sensitive job such as being a doctor, or anything which involves children or other vulnerable people. A while back, while working on an agency driving job at a mobile library service in south London, I was told off for taking a stack of books into an old lady's house, because only people who have been checked can go into an old lady's house on the job (anyone else has to pretend to be a salesman and trick their way in). It is a well-known problem that increasing numbers of adults are being required to prove that they have no criminal records to do any kind of work, paid or voluntary, which involves contact with children, and it has been suggested that the distrust, particularly of men, is such that people will not hug or help a distressed child anymore (see this article in the current New Statesman).

Of course, not having a criminal record does not mean that one is actually suitable for such work, but a conviction for burglary, or even some sort of dishonesty that does not involve physically harming children, or indeed anyone, or a fight outside a pub, does not take away one's suitability to work with children either. If it did, such people would not be deemed suitable parents either, and there would be an awful lot more children in care. The record check culture, then, gives a false sense of security, particularly when builders, meter readers and others come into our houses without needing to be record-checked. The fact that one has not been caught does not mean one is a decent person; I wonder how many people Imperial College admits who were bullies when they were 15 or 16, and had in fact inflicted harm or distress on children; since their antics never attracted the attention of the police, they found their careers in medicine and their path to being pillars of society unimpeded.

Osama Saeed, who recently helped to establish the Scottish-Islamic Foundation, replies to accusations from the likes of the "Centre for Social Cohesion" that they are some sort of Islamist "front" with links to all sorts of people:

At the same time, we were baffled by a briefing put out by the gloriously named 'Centre for Social Cohesion' warning people against us. They don't have as wide a remit as their name suggests, a quick scan of their website shows almost everything is on the topic of Islam and Muslims, and very few escape their wrath.

Their "research" was in reality nothing more than a quick Google job, and a negatively screened one at that. The tactic of these kind of hatchet jobs which emanate from London is to smear by association. Attaching Muslims with someone controversial is like the "six steps to Kevin Bacon" test. It's a modern day McCarthyism.

We could disavow the A-Z of Muslim groups that are blacklisted, and one or two groups in London have gained celebrity criticising other Muslims on the drop of a hat in a game that never ends. They as a result have no friends, while we're committed to working with our community in improving things wherever necessary. If there's criminality involved, then let the police deal with it, but there's not a hint of that.

These kinds of hatchet jobs, although those in the UK tend to emanate from London, seem to have their origins in the USA, where guilt-by-association smears are a routine tactic of certain pro-Israel agitators.

The same station, yesterday, gave us "breaking news", apprently shoving other stories further down the list, which turned out to be that a guy who was found guilty of murder a couple of weeks ago (for hiring two hitmen to kill his wife so he could claim her life insurance and move in with a prostitute) had been given a life sentence. This is not "breaking news" because you know someone will get life when they are found guilty of murder (unless they are juveniles, in which case they get indeterminate sentences); the only thing to decide is the tariff (the actual minimum time inside; whole-life sentences are rare in the UK). I don't want to hang around to hear "breaking news" which I knew two weeks ago.

Finally, whose idea is it to set the speed limits to 30mph on bits of dual carriageway in London where roadworks are being done? On Monday I came off the M3 at Sunbury onto the road it leads into - the A316 - at which point the speed limit came down to 50 (fair enough), and then well before passing over the bridge they were working on, the limit came down to 30. This is really disconcerting for a driver who has just driven straight off a motorway where he had been doing 60 to 70 all the way from Southampton; has nobody ever pointed this out to those who set these speed limits. On motorways it's rare to have speed limits lower than 50 in roadworks; it seems that since 50 was the normal speed limit, someone decided that it had to come down further because there were roadworks. It doesn't make sense, and it makes even less to have the limits come down a long way before you hit the narrowed lanes or other signs of roadworks. My impression coming through those roadworks was that the limit did not need to be lower than 40.