Ages ago, during a comments thread discussion here about British nuclear weapons and Trident replacement, Chris Lightfoot (peace and blessings be upon him) suggested the option of “virtual” nuclear capability; that is, maintaining all the necessary technology, keeping the plans on the books, but not actually making a bomb. The canonical example is Japan, which…
Read More Fear of a Swedish BombRussians demonstrate swarming UAVs down in sunny Aberporth. Which reminds me – I once met a man who lived near there and claimed to have seen numerous UFOs. Yup, just across the bay from the RAE/DERA/WhateverIt’sCalledNow missile range. Still, Flight doesn’t give much detail, but here’s the maker’s webpage. Damn, a swarm of those would…
Read More Flock: the social UAVRemember the great Vodafone Greece/Ericsson AXE hack? We blogged it and some of its freakish consequences. Now, the IEEE Spectrum has published a detailed analysis of the hack, here. It’s fascinating stuff, but if anything it deepens the mystery. What essentially happened; well, somebody who probably had physical access to the switch used a rare…
Read More Damn Strange “Teenagers”Rob Farley has reviewed a book I’ve just been rereading, Marc Levinson’s The Box. It’s a history of containerisation and how it had a massive impact on the economy – Levinson argues that port and cargo handling costs were so great pre-containers that containerisation itself was enough to bring about a huge reorganisation of world…
Read More Big Big Steel Boxes!The German Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Crime Agency, BKA) recently decided to try out one of those face recognition programs on CCTV cameras placed in a railway station in the city of Mainz. And what happened? Well, having installed the software in October last year, they recruited 200 regular travellers as volunteers, whose faces were recorded in…
Read More CCTV Face Recognition: Not Just Evil, Useless TooI don’t like the “contraction and convergence” approach to stopping climate change. Why? Well, I have a number of reasons. C&C states that we should set a global CO2 target lower than present (contraction), and that poor countries should be allowed to expand up to it while rich ones cut down to it (convergence). The…
Read More Criticisms of Contraction and ConvergenceLawyers for the son of the dictator of Congo-Brazzaville are trying to force our old friends at Global Witness to take some kompromat’ they have on him off their website. It looks like the son has been helping himself to the oil money – what did I tell you? – in order to fund his…
Read More Mirrorball: Global Witness and the President’s SonNecrocracy: government by the dead, for the dead. Thoreau@Jim Henley’s says s/he expects Dick Cheney to invoke executive privilege in relation to an act performed after he ceases to be Vice-President. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m going to raise the bar. I predict that Dick Cheney’s lawyers will attempt to invoke it in relation…
Read More Necrocracy!Says Terry Eagleton, in a Guardian Content..sorry..Comment is Free screed: For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne…
Read More Eagleton: Intellectual SnobDavid Axe reports on various American officials moaning that the Dutch Army in Afghanistan is not sufficiently keen on burning the peasants’ crops, specifically the poppy crop. Now, Dave is currently engaged in something like the Four Days’ Fight of the Anglo-Dutch War, when the Royal Navy and Martin Tromp’s fleets got locked into a…
Read More Burn this filth