To the developers of Mozilla Ubiquity: what are you thinking? The whole idea is that you interact with Web things through a command line in the browser that is close to natural language; it’s all a bit like this post about the world’s favourite command line. But at the moment it’s not particularly useful for…
Read More |An unremarked-on aspect of the 1.5% interest rate cut last week. Namely, are we already living in a near-real time planned economy, as Stafford Beer foresaw? It sounds like I must be joking. But how else are we to interpret Sir Terry Leahy’s trip to see the Bank of England and the Treasury? Tesco boasts…
Read More tesco value beerI’m not so sure about this; arsewit wingnut blogger runs out of money, goes bankrupt, various people who should know better jeer. The whole point of everything from some way to the right of centre – Bismarck or thereabouts – leftwards is that IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good…
Read More a cheap holiday in other people’s miseryI’m beginning to enjoy the TUC Touchstone blog, especially in the light of this must-read article from Politico about the unions’ role in the Obama campaign and specifically their efforts to dispel racism. “Many voters have never voted for an African-American candidate for any position,” said AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman. “It’s a proud moment…
Read More RecommendedIt seems to be “Blogging Stuff I Studied At University” Day. Here’s an interesting story via the Armchair Generalist concerning the Proliferation Security Initiative, and the case of a North Korean Ilyushin-62 that was apparently prevented from transiting Indian airspace out of suspicion that it was carrying “something” from there to Iran. I’ve always thought…
Read More trickledown logisticsID cards sliding right again. This time it’s the airport workers – they’ve been downscaled from all the airport workers to just London City and Manchester, and from a production deployment to an “18-month trial”. This comes after the planned issue of cards last month went from “actually issuing the cards” to “announcing it again”.…
Read More all-purpose Home Office bashingWell. Being a Republican Party lawyer, I always thought, would be a job that at least got you out of bed full of curiosity at what the day might hold. A garage stuffed with uncounted ballots that have to disappear before sun-up? Suitcases of Saudi greenbacks? An unmarked Gulfstream-IV full of Cuban mercenaries with compromising…
Read More a season of prodigiesBack in the early days of this blog, it was hardly tied into the British blogosphere at all; if you look at the 2003-2004 archives it’s just stuffed with US presidential politics, and most of its earliest supporters came from the US. Which is ironic given its distinctive Europhile taste, I suppose. That started to…
Read More wave of naive optimismAs I said here, much as I love ManyEyes, it would be drastically better if it accepted data in the same format (tab-separated columns of values) that it expects to be submitted as a form from a URL, so your visualisation could be based on a source of regularly updated information. If you can parse…
Read More technical noteSo Hazel Blears thinks blogs are terrible, rightwing, shallow, cynical, contributing only snark to the debate, no new ideas, no policy analysis, no organising. Her evidence for this consists of cites to Iain Dale and Paul Van Der Staines. Well, you can see how she got those ideas. I should, I suppose, Engage More Fully,…
Read More may the work speak for itself