September 2004

A German computer science student has built an electromechanical version of the iconic video game, Pong! In a tribute to computing pioneers, Niklas Roy renounced the use of semiconductors, transistors and the like, building a form of computer out of old telephone relays to handle the logic. The game has identical user features to the…

Interesting follow up in the light of my recent post. “Three British soldiers were killed, one of them in a two-and-a-half-hour battle in downtown Basra that resembled the movie “Black Hawk Down,” Wilde said. “That made it just absolutely clear that the middle of the city was under Sadr militia control,” Wilde said. British troops,…

Yorkshire Soul of Ilkley, thanks for the link.

D’you think they’ll fire a special commemorative bullet for the 100,000th shot fired in a month in the British zone of Iraq? Like they used to with the 100,000th (or whatever) car to run off a production line? The BBC has an excellent story here which, among other things, points out that the British battalion…

How George Dubya Won The Lottery Game For GTech Interesting Greg Palast story on former National Lottery operator GTech, and how Dubya avoided the war. “Why did the Texas government work so hard at saving GTech’s licence? An unsigned letter to the US Justice Department, which was evidence in the civil suit, points to one…

Reviewing the vexed topic of the Viktor Bout contracts with the US military…it strikes me that we can draw some parallels between reports. Doug Farah reported that one of the contracts was given to Jetline and subcontracted to Skylink (Farah). The original fuel contracts (to BGIA and Air Bas) make no mention of either Jetline…

It’s just a pity when the Torygraph gets the dirt about the lead-up to war with Iraq before the rest of us. A cache of documents leaked to the rag show that, as early as March, 2003, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning (a performer in the Hutton inquiry, if you recall) was…

Is this worrying, or am I just feeling a tad paranoid? Simbaud quotes this, referring to a CBS news report on the 17th: “FBI field offices and Homeland Security agencies will be advised of “extraordinary measures” that will go into place “beginning the first week of October through the elections” . . . . Specifically,…

William Faulkner once said (note – I may be misquoting) “The past is never forgotten – it is not even past”. Who could disagree with that after this week? I could vaguely recall, back at the start of the week, caring about fox hunting (or in fact *not* fox hunting) in about 1998. But, what…

Looking at the news lately, you might think there was a degree of discontent in the air – first of all, the chap with the sledgehammer outside Downing Street, then Fathers4Justice climbing Buckingham Palace, now foxhunters invading the House of Commons chamber while their comrades fought it out with the cops outside. Not that I…