I’m currently at the Royal Society’s “Privacy: A Fine Balance” conference, a DTI-sponsored shindig for eggheads, ubergeeks, cash grabbers and Home Office/defence industry control bureaucrats to thrash out digital rights issues. First speaker is Stephen Hailes of UCL, who’s talking about embedded computing. He says that we need to realise that statistically, most multicellular life…
Read More Privacy: A Fine BalanceAs usual for events that are meant to be a Turning Point in Iraq, temporary calm has been enforced by a total curfew and vehicle ban during Saddam’s judgment. It works, of course, for a few days – but it can’t last, as people have to buy food and go to work. Consider it a…
Read More Watch out!Widely reported that, due to the verdict on Saddam, most of Iraq is under an indefinite curfew and the airport is closed. Except for British Gulf International and Click, though. Two flights from Baghdad arrived in Sharjah today. 05-Nov 12:30 Baghdad International Airport British Gulf International Airlines BGK 1234 05-Nov 15:30 Baghdad International Airport Click…
Read More So much for the Iraqi curfewLe Monde reviews a new French book on the arms trade and our friend Viktor. Trafics d’armes : enquête sur les marchands de mort by Laurent Léger. The publisher is Flammarion. Another review here suggests that the author succeeded in interviewing Michel Victor-Thomas, the French aviation identity who co-founded TAN Aviation Network NV in Ostend…
Read More Book alert!A non-Christian demands that everyone else in Europe become Christian, or more so if they are already, and someone immediately leaps in to defend her by arguing that it is “risible” that the generation who are fighting the war she propagandised “would fight for anything more than a football team.” One of the sickest things…
Read More A double dose of hypocrisyRight, I’ve already given reasons why it’s urgently necessary to start staff talks with Iran about how we can get out of Iraq. Someone asked what incentive the Iranians had to participate. I suggested, essentially, that they would rather not have us shoot our way out with AC-130s down Highway 8. Well, here’s a better…
Read More Talking to Iran, part 3This pissed me off all week. Yesterday, the world’s biggest container ship, M/V Emma Maersk arrived in Felixstowe on her first trip from China to Europe. There has been a degree of pre-Christmas hype about this sailing, revolving around the notion that she is packed with nothing but Christmas presents-to-be. This may be a little…
Read More Saving the planet in the slowest possible wayYesterday, October 31st, at 1126 Central European Time, we had the following entry in the server log… 205.65.1.21 [entrypoint #424] 2006/10/carrierwatch-update_30.html Oct 31, 11:26:28 [0:00:00] views: 1 Proxy: noca-b1.uar.navy.mil – CVN65UCSDC2, 1.0webc2.uar.navy.mil:80 (squid/2.5.STABLE3) That is to say, someone aboard CVN-65, the USS Enterprise, read this post. You know who you are. You know where the…
Read More Best visit ever