While I’m on related topics, I need some help. I need an example given by Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Michael Howard or anyone else of similar stature which describes a plausible way in which ID cards will help prevent terrorism. Or not even plausible ways - I keep hearing that ID cards will “help with the war on terrorism”, but I really don’t see how. I don’t read all the papers, so maybe one of you have seen an example given to illustrate their use. Rewards are on offer.

Unless the plans are that some ID cards will have the word “Terrorist” in big red letters on them. And a strobe. And have an audible warning. And a GPS locator. Yeah, maybe that would mean ID cards would be useful.

Tiny snowflakes combine to make an avalanche. Here’s my contribution.

I’m sure you’ve read it all before, but this is about the indefinite detention of foreign terrorist suspects I metioned last time.

“The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve.”

Lord Hoffman’s opinion in A(FC) and others (FC) (Appellants) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent)

It keeps on getting better. And for once, that’s not sarcasm.

Firstly, my all time least-favourite politician has resigned. Unfortunately, everyone seems to be focussing on trivial visa applications, and not on the gob-smacking authoritarianism that was spewing forth from the Home Office while he was in charge. As I said before, I’d have rather seen him leaving under pressure from his policies rather than some personal issue. There’s a small story to be made from the slight abuse of office that might have occurred, but for all those who think it was a big deal - open your eyes. People who I know get to jump the queue for IT support from me, and if they’re an arse then the go to the end of the queue. Life’s not completely fair, it just has to be reasonably fair. It’s not like Mr Blunkett strong-armed anyone into giving a convicted mass murderer a visa and a million quid mansion after all. But his policies were wrong, wasteful, and avoiding sorting out any real problems, and I don’t think he’ll ever realise why.

In related news, it’s good to see that our courts are more sensible than our politicians. Locking people up for ever without charging them (never mind giving them a fair trial) has been deemed ‘a bad thing’. It’s quite depressing that it’s gone on for so long - I can’t take the moral high ground about Guantanamo bay when we have our very own Belmarsh. After all, the folks across the pond have been told that a military tribuneral is in the offing. Over here? Detention for the rest of their lives, with no charges brought. Disgraceful. I don’t want to see them immediately released, since I’ve no idea about their innocence, but we’ve got well established procedures to find out if somebody is guilty of a crime, and we should damn well use them.

When I’m President of the UK, I think Tony and his cronies might get some indefinite detention, with no charge, trials or suchlike, and see what they think about it.

We received an order of patch cables and cable management at work today, and it came with a Christmas hamper. Now there are certain things you would expect in a hamper, and certain things you would expect at a food collection for the less-well-off amongst us. Maybe our supplier thinks that we’ve spent so much money buying cables off of them that we can’t afford to buy staple foods for ourselves.

I was tempted to run this as a game of “guess which of these aren’t in our hamper, but it’s too funny for that - everything below was in our Christmas hamper. Even the sardines.

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Adam writes about the joys of rubber-necking. What confuses me is why british motorways don’t have hedges or somesuch dividing the different flows of traffic. I’ve seen them all over the continent, and not only does it improve the rubber-necking situation, it helps enormously during rainy nights, since you don’t have everyone else’s headlights blinding you.

Steve is making me feel guilty about my lack of fitness. I’ve got a long term plan to run the marathon, but that’s probably long-term as in never. We’ll see.

Another of those “I couldn’t find the answer on Google so I’ll write it here” postings.

By default, Thunderbird only checks your Inbox for new messages (which stems from a POP3 legacy). If you have server-side rules (or use a web interface to do your rules), then you’ll want Thunderbird to check subfolders as well. This can be done by right-clicking the folder in question, selecting properties, and ticking the appropriate box. There’s no(t yet an) option to do this globally.

Applies to Thunderbird 0.9.

Update: April 2008

Years later, even with Thunderbird 2.0, this is still a problem. But there’s now a global option, thankfully. Although it’s completely hidden, it saves a lot of time if you’ve got lots of subfolders.

Open up the preferences dialog (either Tools -> Preferences or Edit -> Preferences), and click Advanced -> General -> Config Editor. In the filter box start typing ‘mail.check’ and then double click on mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new. It should then change the value to true (and it’ll appear in bold since you’ve changed it) and all should hopefully be hunky-dory.