A total disjuncture between cost and value; such was the problem facing Gorbachev. Consider this; Pajamas Media, that heroic attempt to refute the principle that putting 15 idiots around a table gives you the average of their intelligence, not the sum, is reorganising as a subscription video site. You will be able to pay $15…
Read More stupidity quantifiedThis is wrong; Gitmo will be closed. Binyam Mohammed will be returned to Britain, or put on trial in the USA. Either way the details of his treatment, and that of all the other inmates, will become public. What are Foggy Bottom and the CIA playing at? Get it over with Consider this BBC story.…
Read More BullSo, we looked into the fake phone call to Mr 10%’s office. We even did a little HOWTO. If you recall, we concluded that you needed a bulk SIP carrier sufficiently unscrupulous or clue-light that they didn’t verify the CLI string you passed them, but who hadn’t yet offended at least one major telco in…
Read More your voice across the line gives me a strange sensationRemember this post? Well, Geoff Forden at Arms Control Wonk has a brilliant series on the system that Stanislav Petrov was monitoring, how it worked, what went wrong, and how to draw conclusions from pictures of a missile launch with Google Earth. And why you should worry now.
Read More be your own Stanislas PetrovHere’s an interesting sidelight on the satellites post below – “somebody” is trying to restrict access to commercial satellite imagery of the so-called “Box on the Euphrates” in Syria, the suspected nuclear reactor the Israelis blew up. And how are they doing it? They’re buying the rights and trying to use intellectual property law. Another…
Read More ASATing with lawyersAn interesting document was turned up in the course of the row about John Brennan, the CIA officer who was the Obama team’s original choice as intelligence chief before he was dropped as being insufficiently opposed to torture, under a volley of criticism from the blogosphere. (“Opposition was mostly confined to liberal blogs,” said the…
Read More Is this the CIA? Is this the IRA? Is this the UDA? No, it’s the Grauniad…Back in the spring of 1997, the sterling trade-weighted index stood at 93, exactly the average since 1990, and the deficit (PSBR at the time) was 8% of GDP (See note). This, according to the Conservative Party, was a golden legacy Labour were squandering. Now, the sterling trade-weighted index is at 93, exactly the average…
Read More further OsbornewatchOh dear, oh dear. A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west. That the map was first circulated as a theoretical…
Read More killed by the puppet forces, 2008OK, so about them Iranian superbomb spookologists. We’re not convinced. Even at the height of the nonsense, a lot of the military in Iraq were regularly quoted pouring cold water on the tale. Later, we looked into just how hard it would be to find out how to make an EFP. (All you need is…
Read More beating the statue with my shoesOK, so I’ve spent some time getting more data together on the correlates of BNP membership. I’ve created a table which contains the following metrics: population growth (%), change in population density (%), Gross Value Added(GVA) in 1991, 2006, change in GVA, % GVA growth, unemployment, long-term unemployment as a % of total unemployment, the…
Read More Yet More BNP Data Analysis: Does Not Compute!