I don’t know what the cancellation of FCS, the US Army’s whizzy all-things-to-all-men, fancy wheeled vehicles, robots, computers etc supergig, will mean for the UK’s FRES, which is a scaled-down version of a very similar vision – lighter, highly mobile wheeled armoured vehicles, heavily networked, using fancy sensors and precision indirect fire rather than heavy…
Read More powerpoint tank watchThe impact of terrorism; new research demonstrates that people who survive terrorist attacks think more highly of themselves. Terrorism causes arrogance. Meanwhile, I enjoyed this Bartholomew’s Notes post, in which a self-made terrorism expert who is currently doing the Nazi-memorabilia circuit with his Barack Obama-is-a-foreigner act turns out to have been a pusher of 1990s…
Read More the science of drivelSpeaking of industrial innovation, which we sort of were, Sadly, No finds Mark Steyn being even stupider than I thought possible. He is arguing with every appearance of seriousness that a) General Motors should invest in bigger cars and b) that otherwise family sizes in the US will shrink and TEH NIGRAS!!! Seriously; he’s got…
Read More artefact = ideology, againA lot of other countries who are small economies compared to the USA or China, industrialised, and heavily dependent on foreign trade have a government policy of keeping a substantial local ownership stake in important businesses or important technologies. This may or may not be held by the State. Examples of such so-called “core investor…
Read More the Harrowell optionCCTV Camera: a device that detects police misconduct and informs its operator by turning the screen black.
Read More definitionIronic to think of it now, but before the police were filmed beating the shit out of Ian Tomlinson and assorted members of the public, there was some sort of media push on against “citizen journalists”, the Internet, Google, etc, and in favour of Good Old Local Newspapers. Well, there must be some explanation for…
Read More the local ragSelf-satirising ID card madness. So they’ve actually got as far as issuing some significant contracts. We’ll begin by noting that one of them has gone to CSC, last seen introducing the joy of Cerner software to the NHS National Programme for IT. But much more to the point, what is this talk about using the…
Read More it is now absolutely certain that the national ID card will be compromised