This message has been received by ‘Love England’. We hope you will all respond positively and send messages of support to a brave Englishwoman fighting for her rights!

Hi, my daughter Jane is mounting a one woman campaign against the authorities refusing to accept cash payments for council tax and other payments. It is a matter of principle bearing in mind that all card transaction etc can be traced and big brother is trying to turn us into a cashless society.

In our area they have refused her cash and consequently she is facing Magistrates – today – in court.

In fact it is an illegal act to refuse cash which is the legal tender of the realm however she is placing her neck on the block over this.she has also just taken out litigation against Ken Livingstone in his official capacity because they have refused to accept her cash to pay a fine on the congestion charge. They have threatened her with the bailiffs and all sorts of things. She is now counter-suing for malicious prosecution.

She has no fancy lawyers – she is acting for herself with the written law of the land in her hands to present in her defence. Could anyone out there like to send a message of support to her.

Jane Sutherland

http://www.loveengland.org/campaigns.html

Astonishing isnt it? She wants to pay her bills with legal tender, but they are refusing to accept, and are taking HER to court!

This is just the beginning. All of these agencies will claim that they cannot accept cash because it is inneficcient, and costs them money to process. No one will argue that it is better to have a system that costs less to run….you see? Like the convenience of CD, where you give up quality for convenience, with the abolition of cash as a means of settling with government agencies, people will be willing to give up privacy for efficiency and ease of use.

But if the coin of the realm is not acceptable to the very government who issues it, why should anyone else accept it?

You can’t make this stuff up!

What with all the controversy about occult loans to the labour party leading to nominations for peerages it has been suggested by some quarters that there should be consideration of taxpayers fnding political parties (Bliar and Prescott it seems)

This is entirely the wrong solution and if polls are to be believed thankfully 73% of the country are ‘against’ such moves. Although given that 80% didn’t vote for labour politicians at the election Bliar will probably view this as an ‘overwhelming mandate for reform’.

Firstly the current scandal is not that political parties are receiving large, private donations; it is that these loans are being used by the political parties to cover up their funding and for the government to be perceived to be using loans as a tool of patronage – to repeaat in neither case is the act of receiving private funding a problem and it is not this aspect that requires attention.

Secondly political parties are not required for a (true) parliamentary democracy to exist, the fact that independent members and members of very marginal parties have been elected to parliament show that it is not necessary to have the support of a large party to be elected. Of course parties make easier to identify what sort of promises will be broken by each MP and in any case we are talking about funding and not the abolition of politival parties (now!).

Thirdly if by some tragedy tax funding of politics were to be extended many of the activities that political parties currently undertake such as (commissioning think tank) reports and policy studies could be organised ‘independently’ by Select Commitees rather than political parties, that way we could possibly get less partial findings and avoid replication of spending.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The $100 laptop project seeks to provide inexpensive computers to people in developing countries. The computers lack many features found on a typical personal computer, such as a hard disk and software.

“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen,” Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.

“Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Before his critique, Gates showed off a new “ultra-mobile computer” which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.

Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week.

“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.

Gates described the computers as being for shared use, but the project goes under the name “One Laptop per Child.” A representative for the project did not immediately reply to an inquiry seeking comment.

Earlier this year, Google founder Larry Page said his company is backing MIT’s project. He showed a model of the machine that does use a crank as one source of power.

“The laptops … will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data,” according to the project’s Web site. […]

http://today.reuters.com/

Here we see the TRUE face of the ‘philanthropist’ Bill Gates. Here is a man worth billions, but who will not give money to this vital project, simply because they will not use his crippleware OS.

The kernel of true nature of generosity is sacrifice. Giving away money, even in the hundreds of millions is not a sacrifice for Bill Gates, no matter how useful that money is to the recipients.

A sacrifice for Gates would be for him to pump hundreds of millions into the GNU Foundation, to  put his legion of developers at work on bolstering Linux and Open Source – to actually give something away that matters to him, ie, domination of the worlds desktop operating systems.
Gates obviously doesn’t care a damn that millions of children will have internet access on these exxcellent computers, whose screens by the way, whilst being small, are much bigger than the screen of a GameBoy, which takes up the time of millions of children to no good end.

Applications cost nothing when they are licenced under the GPL. This is anathema to Bill Gates. If the price of every child on earth becoming not only literate but computer literate, would it not be an act of greatness, philanthropy, charity and sacrifice for Microsoft to support this project and the free software that is going to be run on it? Or would he rather that all those children remain illiterate, cut off and impoverished, all for the sake of transient market share?

I think the answer is pretty clear. Anyone who is against this project is against literacy, learning and impoverished children.

And that my friends, is pure evil.

And just to correct this article, the laptps will NOT be shipped “without software” , they will also not need a hard disc, since ultra reliable flash drives will do the job of storage, and finally, just what is ‘a huge amount of data’? The smallest flash drives can hold an entire dictionary; if this project can get a laptop into every child’s hands that has an OS, some networking tools and a dictionary, that would be a very cool thing indeed. And of course, when you can get online, the whole internet is your storage medium, so this statement is totally irrelevant to the utility of this device.

With Bittorrent of course. Licence payers should not have to pay AGAIN for programmes they have already funded through the licence. As for people with IPs outside of the UK, our culture and content is the best ambassador Britain could possibly have, and measured against what it costs each licence payer, cheap.

While most media organisations are cutting back frantically to compete with the internet, the BBC is demanding “inflation plus two and a half per cent” from the government to prop up its ratings. The claim is absurd. The licence fee already yields a stunning £3bn. The BBC recently said it could lose 3,700 staff with no loss of broadcast quality; so who hired these useless people? The BBC bureaucracy is the common agricultural policy of the air, filling silos with overheads to cushion its eventual collapse into one gigantic pension fund. Come the digital revolution in a few years, the Cotswolds will be settled entirely by wealthy BBC pensioners all listening to Classic FM.

Simon Jenkins

Who would have thunk it? A supremely great paragraph methinks, “the CAP of the air” wonderful.

Relatedly it seems that the BBQ is thinking of localising it’s free online content, now it would seem perfectly reasonable to give UK resident’s the choice of accessing online content via the license fee or on the same terms as overseas browsers – in fact any system that doesn’t introduce a BBQ tax on the sale of computers or broadband connections

The BBC is set to begin commercialising traffic to bbc.co.uk, two strategies the company is considering are charging overseas users to access the site, and running commercials on the site. David Moody, director of strategy ad new media at BBC Worldwide has asserted that “Now is the right time to look at commercialising international traffic to bbc.co.uk.”

The BBC has also used the services of consulting firm Accenture to investigate ways to “make money from people who use its services but don’t pay the license fee.”

Mr. Moody has hinted that even license fee payers may have to pay an extra fee for certain types of online content, for example they might have to pay to view video material after the expiry of the current seven day window period offered by the online interactive media player.

http://www.editorsweblog.org/news/2006/03/bbc_may_charge_for_web_access.php

There are only two ways of raising Money : Debt and Equity. Right? Wrong.
There are only two forms of tenure: Freehold and Leasehold, Right? Wrong.

Out of the primeval Capital swamp there is emerging a new animal – the “Capital Partnership” – based upon a curious hybrid of a commercial company and a partnership, known as a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP). The LLP is already beginning to make its mark in the commercial world – examples include a recent initiative by the AIM listed company Numerica and a new property portfolio investment scheme by the well known businessman Tom Hunter – but has implications for financing enterprises of all types, in particular those in the field of public investment.

During the early 1990s, professional partnerships such as Arthur Andersen became concerned that their individual partners’ acceptance of liability for their firm’s actions put them individually at risk of bankruptcy. Long before Enron, the City persuaded Jersey’s Parliament to draw up an Act creating the LLP -and the British Government, fearing an exodus of professional partnerships to Jersey, passed the Limited Liability Partnership Act in April 2001. For the first time anywhere in the world, it became possible to form a corporate body -an entity with a legal existence independent of its individual members – which had both collective limited liability and the mutual, co-operative characteristics of partnerships.

There are now over 7,000 LLPs around the country. In part, the growth is because they’re so easy to create: two designated members must complete an application downloaded from the Companies House website, and pay £95. There is no Memorandum of Incorporation, no Articles of Association and no Shareholder Agreement. In fact there isn’t even any requirement for any written agreement at all – although only the most trusting dispense with them – since simple “default” provisions based upon partnership law apply.

The LLP has two key attributes: firstly it is an “Open” Corporate body (NOT legally a partnership as one would expect from the name) in which any stakeholder, whether or not they are Investors may become Members, thereby aligning their interestswith other members. Secondly, the LLP makes it possible for those who invest Money in an enterprise or in Capital assets such as Land to be members of a “Capital Partnership” alongside the users of the Capital or Capital Asset thereby replacing the usual adversarial contracts between those who finance an enterprise or asset and those who utilise it.

In essence, all these stakeholders are brought inside the partnership, so their interests are aligned; it’s quite a change from traditional structures, which pit stakeholders in competition against each other. The LLP delivers an ideal combination of the collective and the individual; it’s flexible and easy to establish while its partnership characteristics are robust enough to make it attractive to the private sector. […]

Open Capital

“Sharia law by the back door”, they will call it, it sounds interesting to me.