You're a beautiful woman probably...

We've heard a lot lately about the desperate financial straits our country is in, and how eager the Government is to save money. All this is very worrying, and it certainly needs to try to ensure we're not deep in debt for a whole generation. There's one area where definite and large savings could be made with only a relatively minor degree of political embarrassment - i.e. by the Government admitting that its plans for a National Identity Card are misconceived and vague, and scrapping the whole project. The aims of the project are very vague , and the Government has been publicly criticised by its own advisors for trying to do too many things. Every citizen who knows anything about information technology knows that all of our recent governments have been technically naive on databases, and have an appalling record in both getting large databases to work (at a cost anywhere near their original budget) and in securing confidential data. We are told that the scheme will pro...

I'm feeling a little bit guilty about splashing out on a Blu-ray player, since I'm still waiting to hear the results of my job evaluation that may mean a cut in salary. Blu-ray discs are still much more expensive than standard DVDs too. However: our two-and-a-half year old Cambridge Audio DVD89 has been playing up, showing shadows on light parts of the picture and what looks like randomly increased contrast (the dark parts of the picture suddenly look too black). I've also been trying to use it as a CD player and, despite favourable reviews of its audio quality, have found it cuts off the first couple of seconds of each track on certain CDs. Obviously that's enough to ruin the "musical experience". I first had the idea of replacing the player when I saw that there were Blu-ray players from Sony and Panasonic that got glowing reviews - at under £200. Apart from the fact that I'm now sceptical in general of reviews in hi-fi magazines , at least they weren...