He imagined that satellite broadcasting might help a hundred Indian villages save two cows a year and understood what an impact that might have. Says a commenter at PZ Myers’ place, on the occasion of Arthur C. Clarke’s death. Two cows a year; now that’s genius. I can’t presume to say whether this came true;…
Read More Two cowsWhen Pakistan Telecom tried to kill the Internet in an effort to stop the public seeing evil things on YouTube the other week, there was instant media-reaction and a fairly swift fix by the organisations involved. Things are different when you’re a small Kenyan ISP, though; for about a day now, Africa Online (AS36915) has…
Read More On the African Internet, no-one can hear you screamSpyblog is, of course, making sense when they say that the BT/Virgin Media/Carphone Warehouse spying scheme may be illegal because of the sweeping-up of e-mail traffic with the rest. As you know, Bob, e-mail has the legal status of a letter, thanks to the good folks of the EFF years ago. I thought of this,…
Read More More Phorm HorrorsThe RepRap just gets cooler; they’re now working on plastics derived from plants that are cured solid with UV light, so as to bring more of the toolchain into the project. Also see here. If that don’t work, there’s always Lego. (If anyone gets this title, I’ll be delighted.)
Read More tha mun laike w’it gangling-ironMy ISP just did something naughty. BT, Virgin Media, and Carphone Warehouse have been caught in a scheme to sell details of all your Web activity to marketers (…and anyone else) without your knowledge or consent. And the full details are genuinely worrying. The Register has a major scoop, in that it’s got hold of…
Read More Who needs remote control?Back from Barcelona, after a terribly intense 3GSM. This was my third, and the first in which I was actually participating rather than just reporting; I feel the need to decompress, my feet hurt, and I’m feeling the effects of eating breakfast at 5pm, covering every game in town, and finally dining (or rather lunching)…
Read More Back from 3GSM Mobile World CongressIt appears that the defence procurement stories we’ve been tracking are coming to a head. Recently, it emerged that the Astute SSN, Nimrod MRA4, and T-45 destroyer projects are going significantly overbudget again; the first two of these are, of course, the ones that were already £800 million over budget and several years later. The…
Read More The Defence Crisis; BAE Are Still HopelessThis PPRuNE thread reminds me of something from the archives. During a meeting we had not long ago, the increasing sophistication and cost of the Unpersonned Aircraft was raised – because by becoming too sophisticated and HVAA in nature, they were in some danger of becoming too valuable to risk in certain scenarios. Rather defeating…
Read More Some are expendable; others are just expensiveAn extra titbit on Nimrod: XV230 was the airframe that had refuelled from a TriStar the most. In second place was XV235; and on the 5th November, this aircraft experienced a fuel leak from one of those 38-year old rubber seals. In other news, apparently the decision to stop Nimrods air-to-air refuelling had little effect;…
Read More XV230 UpdateThe XV230 Board of Inquiry has travailed, and brought forth many PDFs. And some appalling numpty discposter has printed out the clearly wordprocessed documents, tippexed classified information, and scanned them chunk by chunk as huge uncompressed graphics files, before pdf-ing them into a round dozen fat-arse documents. Still, anything to keep google out, right –…
Read More XV230 Accident Report is Out