Over at James Nicoll’s blog: Cellphones don’t require landlines to be strung before they can be used and apparently people have been rather cunning about coming up with ways to use them to replace services they otherwise would not have access to: Some people carry just a card and borrow a phone when needed. Safaricom,…
Read More what M-PESA is notStupidity about pirates. (Yes, this again. When will it end?) No doubt the usual suspects will already be drivelling about this story. Frankly, if you think the best opportunity to rescue the hostages was when they were between a tossing, fibreglass 40-odd foot boat and a 25,000 ton hijacked containership, using as your main equipment…
Read More arr!The iPhone worm is a thing of beauty. Not so much because of the technology involved, which is simple – although, since when has simplicity not been a good thing? – but because of the superb social engineering involved. Its designers demonstrated a perfect understanding of their target user population and came up with an…
Read More iWorm – a truly social virusPeter Beaumont goes for a Holt’s battlefield tour of southern Lebanon: Cruising through the serene green wadis that connect south Lebanon to the Litani river to the north, the commander explains what happened at the end of the last war. “We knocked out three of their tanks on the first day, as they tried to…
Read More we flippin’ murdered themAaronovitch Watch reflects upon dinner with Denis MacShane. There’s an important point here, and one that was well made as a by-product of Nick Davies’ brilliant reporting on Operation PENTAMETER 2, a giant police sweep looking for prostitutes brought into the UK by force that failed to find even one. It turned out that the…
Read More permanently operating factorsIf you think the Superfreaks had demonstrated the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect well enough, especially after this further hammering, and their attempt to gain everyone’s esteem by having NewsCorp send out copyright nastygrams, think again. Here’s some science, via Lou Grinzo’s blog. We’ve been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the…
Read More a reminder that things happen quickly