How 2025 will surely look

Plans for a high-speed rail network are due to be unveiled later today, with £2 billion to be spent every year for more than a decade readying a super-fast connection between London and Birmingham by 2025.

The suave-sounding-but-actually-not-suave-in-the-slightest transport chief Lord Adonis will unveil the plans today, and he’s expected to announce a space-age link that will reduce a journey between the capital and the hub of the Midlands to the speed of a blink of an eye. Well, around 50 minutes.

The new track will be able to handle trains capable of speeds of up to 250mph with 18 trains an hour ferrying 20,000 folk between London and Brum, possibly whether they like it or not.

It is believed that the line would branch off in two directions from Birmingham, with one running west of the Pennines to Manchester and on to Scotland and the other going east through Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle.

The Conservatives are already opposing the plans, suggesting that Heathrow should be included in the scheme and proposing an admittedly more exciting-sounding reverse S-shaped line from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.

What everyone has failed to take into account is that by 2025, the personal high-speed jet packs that the 21^st century promised us must surely have been perfected and we’ll all be racing through the skies at hundreds of miles an hour in a land where dark skies and sleep have been eradicated.

Idiots.

Those dons of electrical retail Currys are overhauling themselves, with a bunch of brand spanking new superstores all over the country, complete with a shitty new logo and everything.

Or in their own words: “Currys has transformed its stores with some new innovative features and services.” And a shitty new logo and everything.

The Junction 9 Megastore in Birmingham boasts that it’s the biggest electrical retail store in the UK. That’s an impressive claim, certainly much more impressive than one of its opening offers, the Kef 5.1 channel home cinema package.

Hmm, those numbers don’t impress us quite so much…

Thanks to BW reader ‘Bargain’

“It’s alright son, no one can see you.”

Thanks to BW reader Anthony. Send us any other Street View oddities you might have stumbled upon. [digg it]

The BBC broadcasts thousands of hours of content every year, across analogue and digital platforms, and is ferocious in protecting its material from being used or copied without permission by third parties – licence fee payers, for example.

When members of a Google Group discussed ways to remove Digital Rights Management from BBC shows during early trials of the iPlayer, the BBC threatened Google with an injunction. Unofficial fan sites for BBC shows have been closed down in the past, even knitting patterns based on Doctor Who characters have been dealt with in an impersonal and non-nonsense manner:

It’s crystal clear what the BBC’s policy is concerning infringement of copyright, so it’s slightly embarrassing when the corporation is then caught with its own hand in the cookie jar. In this instance, the cookie jar is Flickr, and the delicious cookie is an image of Birmingham’s skyline, taken by Bitterwallet reader Michael Bailey:

The image was clearly marked All Rights Reserved on Flickr, requiring any usage to be agreed in advance. So Bailey wasn’t best pleased to be watching News 24 one evening in December, and recognise the “live” backdrop of Birmingham city centre:

Bailey contacted the BBC to ask what the blithering hell they were playing at. With not even a stump to stand on, the BBC admitted the fault (all the time referring to some previously unknown website called Flikr), while offering to pay Bailey a nominal amount and insist he stop bad-mouthing the organisation: (more…)