FT: the AirTanker bond issue has, not surprisingly, gone pear-shaped as the monoline insurers fall apart. The story includes some vital detail on precisely what the Defence Procurement PFI team and the consortium have been doing all this time; essentially, trying to finance the deal at an acceptable rate of interest in the middle of…
Read More Can haz air-to-air refuelling? Oh noes…The Tory is sure to leap on the news that, as Dr Rant points out, there is little point in doing a “deep clean” of hospitals because hospital-acquired diseases are propagated by the staff. Strange, I remember when Michael Howard floated a whole election campaign on the line “How difficult can it be to keep…
Read More How difficult can it be?Interesting article in Aviation Leak & Space Technology about the Chinese air defence system, built of standard telecoms/IT stuff. Encrypted IP over many different bearers, landline fibre rather than microwave, that sort of thing. Two things come to mind: 1) Americans; can you just accept that Huawei exists and its engineers are competent? OK? You…
Read More PDA. UAV. Cup of tea?Nonbarking dog of the year, 2007 was the fact that the increasingly heavyweight NATO force in Afghanistan’s logistics are dependent on the road from Kandahar-Quetta-Karachi, that is to say through Taliban and Baluch rebel country to Pakistan’s most politically unstable and violent city. As you’ll see at the link, someone finally attacked trucks on it…
Read More The Flashman OptionJames Graham asks: does your candidate for Mayor of London pass the 7th July competence test? This is of course a strong suit for the Liberals; perhaps the only one going in a dead campaign. Picking Brian Paddick as the candidate against lardbucket and International Marxists for Police Bullets was a cracking idea; wouldn’t JG’s…
Read More Liberal CompetenceI would like to take this opportunity to make clear that I stand for surgery. We know that the queen of specialisations is a highly effective treatment for many different conditions; British surgeons are respected around the world. In fact, I believe we would be failing in our moral duty to patients of all kinds…
Read More In Favour of Surgical InterventionSomeone in Pakistan googles for US army jobs in pakistan as cctv operator.
Read More CuriousDear Lazyweb: I have a mystifying Linux problem. To begin the tale, I’ve been running Mandriva Linux on my laptop since last October with considerable satisfaction; I use KDE and the Metisse 3D window manager. However, I had to disable the ACPI power management support to get the thing working; eventually I grew tired of…
Read More Sometimes I just can’t function