Another in our occasional series of comments that ought to be posts: Rob Farley discusses a Max Boot article in which Boot accuses Britain and Canada of “unilaterally disarming” on the grounds that Canada had the world’s third largest navy in 1945. Farley, of course, gives Boot short shrift, but does point out that armies…
Read More Bad British HistoryD2’s post on statis (it’s the new change) and crap government IT brought something to mind. Dan mentions the success of the Bank of England-run Crest settlement system for the London Stock Exchange, contrasted with the hellbroth of disaster the NHS National Programme for IT is descending into. One thing I think he should have…
Read More Why BT’s bit of the NHS IT contract worksYgelsias suggests that the US Army is historically hopeless at counter-insurgency because of the strong Southern influence in the officer corps. His reasoning runs as follows: the Confederates chose to fight an all-out war with the Union, and when it went to ratshit they decided against fighting on as guerrillas and gave up in a…
Read More A Southern strategy?Apparently if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, A nuclear Iran is likely to give or lend nuclear weapons to terrorists, resulting in an undeterrable nuclear strike against an American city or cities. And the answer to this dread scenario? Why, a credible threat of force. Eh? Employing a credible threat of force is only useful…
Read More More DeterrenceIt’s late, but this snark attack on Niall Ferguson must not be missed. Click through and read Rob Farley’s review of Colossus, too. After suffering through some of his earlier writing, I’ve always imagined Niall Ferguson sneaking into the Imperial War Museum in the dark of night. Certain that the coast is clear, he rips…
Read More Niall FergusonJamie K thinks the UNTSO post was bombed to prevent them observing a possible Israeli flank movement from the northern tip of the country, around Kiryat Shmona, down the Litani valley to the sea, with hopes of cutting off the retreat, which means going further into Lebanon. He quotes me, in comments, suggesting that this…
Read More Right flankAccording to IEEE Spectrum, the Holmdel Laboratory, the centre of Bell Labs in their heroic age, is probably going to be knocked down. The structure was once home to the world’s best privately-run research organisation, with some 6,000 scientists and engineers and a library second to none. The work carried out there included the development…
Read More Creative destruction and the Holmdel LabJoshua Bloch, of Google Labs, reports on his chance discovery of a software bug that affects practically every binary search and mergesort function in the world. The problem came to light when a Java application failed, and the failure was traced to part of the Java kernel Bloch originally programmed. The bug was reported to…
Read More The world’s oldest bugI was amused to see in this weekend’s Indy that a British financial advisor has got himself into trouble by selling his clients securities issued by a US firm specialising in death futures, properly called viatical investments. His situation doesn’t look good, as he seems to have told his clients that 20 per cent of…
Read More Killed By DeathNot so long ago I posted regarding the LEO computer and the question of what a British-dominated geek culture would look like. This post was picked up by a certain high-traffic blog, with the result that it saw shack rocking levels of page requests all week. Some answers from readers included a recommendation of Francis…
Read More More on alternate geek history