Designing intelligent petitions too taxing for Brits

Letters Tony Blair has his finger on the button and is preparing to fire. Fortunately, there are no weapons of mass destruction, only emails of mass dissemination, as New Labour preps a reply to the 1.5 million people who don't want road tax priced by the mile:

Re: Blair ready to spam Britain ...and what will happen to the No. 10 systems when we all hit the "reply" button?

Ian

There are worse problems than an email being deleted as spam.

Suppose a million people wish to have a conversation with the government about road pricing. Can No. 10 deal with a million answers offering arguments against the crazy scheme?

Geoff

Why not see how much support can be gathered for the notion of Tony writing all 1300000 spams by hand. I've come up with the suggested text for a petition on petitions.pm.gov...

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to write all the replies to the 1.3(4?)million people that have so far signed the anti-road tax petition by hand without the aid of a mail merge program

"We believe that in order to reduce any further harm to the country, Tony should be kept busy for the forseeable future by writing all 1.3million emails by hand. By calculation of approximately 3 minutes per email to 1,300,000 people, with an estimated 7 working hours per day in a 5 day week, this should keep him out of trouble for the next 1857 weeks."

Rgds,

J.

Hmm.. If this system does come into effect, I'd love to know how they'll police it - my guess is to reference the cars odometer with that of the GPS/GALILEO based system... so what happens if the tracker breaks? What happens if you can't get a signal? Will I then not be allowed to drive my car as I can't be tracked?

GPS technology needs to cold/hot start by design. I've certainly found with current equipment that if I set off without allowing it to cold start properly, I often won't get a signal at all until I've stopped.. so will we have to sit around waiting for the system to track me each time I start my vehicle? Will I bollocks.

The alternative is to have tracking devices at the beginning/end of each road/slip road similar to the congestion charging cameras in London. If one is vandalised (And you know they will be..) then a whole day/week/however long worth of traffic will get away with a free trip down X road, whereas everyone else driving on 'unvandalised' roads will pay for themselves, and probably for the repairs on the vandalised camera.

So many posibilities to this idea, but none will work. The Government will realise this eventually (probably not before enough cash has been spent researching the idea to build another lane on a congested road?)

Louis

So Tony is planning on emailing us all to put us strain on his tracking, sorry pricing systems. Well I think that such effort on his part shouldn't go unoticed, how about we all reply to Tony. Then if the police want to find the secret email system they will just have to follow the smell of burning server...

Peter

A man loses his laptop, and his employer gets hit with a bill for almost a million quid. Reckon that puts him out of the running for employee of the month?

What actually happens to that £980,000 they are fined? Does it get shared between the 11,000,000 customers that have been affected by this or does it simply go into the pockets of the FSA?? Personally I would like to see the £11.23 credited to my account for the distress it is going to cause me.

Greg

Why, when ever a laptop goes missing, does it always contain several million customer records? You never see the headline "Bank employees laptop stolen containing his Tesco shopping list and his alphabetisised collection of midget porn"

Luke

£980,000 for 11 million accounts. So that's a fine of, err, 9p per customer? For a company that made £539M in profit last year? Well, I'm just glad I've never crossed the FSA. They must really petrify Nationwide.

Ian

Google can find anything you want., except a full alphabet:

You know, maybe those Google guys are more erudite than we thought!

A lookup in wikipedia finds that Barnabe Googe, a 16th century English poet, "is well-known in Australia for one line of poetry, I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die."

Patty

America's latest contribution to the poor regional accents hall of fame. For this Vulture's money, a mention should go to Leo DiCaprio and his continent-busting attempt at a South African accent, but that is another story:

It's not just films that have abysmal accents. Try, for example, Age of Empires II. Nice game, but the voice acting appears to have been done by whoever finished their bit of coding first. Or Myth III - in which "Connacht" (which, in previous instalments, had been pronounced in a properly Scots manner as "Balor") was repeatedly given a throat-clearing by the vocal "talent". Oh, for the days of Shakespeare's Captain Fluellen...

Silas

Oh you forgot my favourite "bad attempt at a foreign accent by an American actor" (That really should be an oscar catagory). Kevin Costner for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Where he basically just doesn't bother.

Steve