What conclusions should we draw from the failure of the US’s Future Imagery Architecture reconnaissance satellite program? After all, under longstanding and still secret agreements with the US, Britain has not developed any satellite reconnaissance capability because the US promises to provide us with access to the product from theirs. This has been denied at…
Read More Dodgy ChequesWell, this is quite the incoherent rant; words fail me to comment suitably, which is a pity because it would have been better for all concerned had they failed him. My substantive comments are in this thread at Aarowatch. The key point here is that by examining Amis’s bullshit we can form conclusions about his…
Read More Words Fail MeI’m getting a ton of referrals to this post from Dillow’s, which is nice. But I am not particularly keen on the substance; the post is swung on a Peter Oborne piece in the Sextator that goes a little something like this: Disturbing reports have emerged that Gordon Brown is rude to his secretaries —…
Read More Unsourced BS is wrong for both sidesThe Biggest Data Fart In The World Ever (BDFITWE) just keeps on getting better/worse. Check this out: Sir John Bourn, the outgoing comptroller and auditor general, told a secret session of the public accounts committee that a senior business manager at Revenue & Customs had authorised the information to be released in its full form.…
Read More That’s not what software-as-a-service is meant to mean!It’s usually the Home Office that leads the way in the British government’s eternal Olympics of stupidity; but now and again, someone is inspired to go that bit further, to be a tiger, to raise the bar. Having built a monster centralised database of every last child in the UK, the Revenue burned it to…
Read More ID Cards will make us safe from identity theftThe IPCC report is, first of all, a cracking job of work, despite that the Met did its level best to dodge the investigators. They have established a lot of facts, and carried out a mass of interviews, and come up with sensible conclusions; I’d like to recommend again that you read it, as it…
Read More Stockwell Report: A ResponseOK, so by chance we have some real data to put into the sums in this post. The head of MI5 has just announced that we should all be very scared, because he reckons there may be 2,000 people in Britain who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism. So…
Read More Some data pointsIf you watched Britz this week you’ll have seen the MI5 chaps and chappesses poring over really complicated social-network diagrams of the jihadi menace. And this has indeed been a boom academic industry since 2001; after Valdis Krebs’s seminal paper in which he mapped the relationships of the September 11 plotters, there were all kinds…
Read More The Failings of Social Network AnalysisSays Royal Holloway prof, and I suppose colleague, David Cesarani in a wankerish letter to the Guardian: Would Mearsheimer and Walt care to explain the power of the Armenian lobby? Apart from “why not ask them?”, I can offer a more useful answer. Aqoul: The bill, pushed by Armenian-Americans, who crucially are an important constituency…
Read More Intellectual RigourIf it looks right, it probably is right, as they say. So LockMart is looking into a seaplane design…but how did they come up with this? Surely that’s too ugly to fly? (hat tip: Aviation Week.)
Read More If it looks right…