Google+ A Tangled Rope: Taking Civil Liberties

Monday, April 02, 2012

Taking Civil Liberties

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In the end, it was a far more complex algorithm than she’d anticipated, especially when the marmoset became jammed under the chaise longue and we had to disentangle the Polish plumber from the chamber maid. As you may have realised by now, this meant that I was left holding the nasturtiums… again.

Still, you must admit that as a method of discovering acts of terrorism against the Great British bacon sandwich, it beats blindfolding the spymaster’s personal assistant and having them stick pins in the nearest map… unfortunately due to budget constraints that is usually a map of Venezuela.

However, coming up with a bug-free program that could do all this and still produce those essential coloured graphs that – these days – so much government policy and expenditure depends upon, we thought we may have to resort to a somewhat more creative approach to data generation, possibly using a random number generator and an on-line Bulgarian telephone directory.

So, if you are ever wandering down a street and the suburban peace is shattered by the arrival of several high-speed vans distributing undercover policemen, specialist armed response officers and members of the special forces as they surround and cordon off the corner off-licence and then, from further up the High Street, frogmarch out several pensioners from the Post Office queue, remember that all software does have its teething troubles, and those civil liberties you bleat about… they were never all that much use to you, were they?

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