I’m not sure what Jaap de Hoop Schepper was going on about here, but I’m slightly distressed that people are *still* being all impressed that there are mobile phones in Afghanistan/Iraq; someone even brought this up for John McCain last year. Roshan has been going for what, five years now? And, of course, the kind…
Read More probably better than a snarky blog postWhat with things like this, the LibDems’ drive to collect members of the scientific-technical intelligentsia at a secret location in Kazakhstan (surely it must be a….), it’s surely time to shake up my ORGANISE project – a messaging and task scheduling system for organisations of all kinds that implements a Stafford Beer viable system approach.…
Read More ORGANISE: a reappraisalNeed to get contacts out of a Nokia phone and into something else? There are various standard things – the “switch mode” on the newer ones may help. But the PC Suite client (which still only seems to exist for Windows) doesn’t let you export data from the phone as anything but a .nbu (Nokia…
Read More getting contacts from an .nbu fileSometimes, at the moment, politics feels like an entirely unconscious business; just a matter of the right reflexes. Like B.F. Skinner’s religious pigeons (see also here). Tap the right kneejerk and get a pellet. Hence this exchange in a US military press conference: Q Yes. Do you have any evidence that there are more or…
Read More pigeon religionAfter MySociety’s triumph on the MPs’ expenses issue, this looks interesting: the Lib Dems are putting out a call for geeks. This was followed up by a survey being sent out; I’ve filled it in, so I may end up spending the next election twiddling bolts on Chris Rennard’s particle accelerator. Apparently, there’s to be…
Read More our futuristic “mailing list” technology will render your crude oppression meaninglessSuddenly, an awful wet crunching and groaning and sick heavy breathing. It’s…huge…festooned in the rags of a once-respectable suit, waving a bladeserver torn from a rack like a child’s toy…dripping with stale blood. No! The NHS IT Zombie has escaped, and it’s fortified itself by eating BT’s brains. Now it’s coming for us. DAATA! it…
Read More brrrains!This really is getting strange. The Tories look worryingly convinced of the wisdom of a plan to build a gigantic airport in the North Sea, split between two separate islands, because you never need to change the runway a plane is going to depart from…right? At the same time, the Government is considering a gigantic…
Read More the latent content of this airport, however…I don’t think Chris Dillow is right. Chris argues that the whole sordid fiasco about the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast suggests the BBC should stop doing radio and TV news and put the money into long form reportage and documentaries instead; this, he reckons, would get people to read newspapers, would create a lot of…
Read More all too often it’s just a comic, not much moreJason Scott tells a sad tale of how AOL eliminated a whole mass of little Web sites and then erased all traces of their content. (Readers with long memories will recall the shutdown of Dave Winer’s blog farm.) What follows showed the best and worst of Internet culture – Scott called for volunteers to start…
Read More a small object lesson on the past decadeThis may or may not be significant, but soon after the An-12 exodus from Sharjah, a dodgy An-24RV was seriously damaged in Boosaso, northern Somalia. Interestingly, this aircraft (serial 47309406) had been used by Aero-Service in the DRC and also by UTAGE in West Africa, the firm involved in the Christmas Day 2003 727 crash.…
Read More you fasten the triggers..