2004

A Norwegian has built a full-motion flight simulator in his living room. A website is here, with videos. It’s all in Norwegian (as well as in hardware).

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Go on. Apparently the security services have foiled a “9/11 attack” on London. The Daily Mail, the Sun, and ITN News all say so. They have all apparently run with a story sourced to a nameless “senior authoritative source” who claims that the training of “suicide pilots” was interrupted, ostensibly…

Section 141 of the Mental Health Act makes the following provision for the case of a Member of Parliament going mad. “Members of Parliament suffering from mental illness 141 -(1) Where a member of the House of Commons is auth­orised to be detained on the ground (however formulated) that he is suffering from mental illness,…

Does Shadow Rural Affairs Secretary James Gray believe in parliamentary democracy? It sounds a pretty extreme question, but when his fellow Beaufort huntsman Lord Mancroft says that “the House of Commons will have to be curbed” you have to wonder. Will Gray disassociate himself from this, or can we assume that he will be happy…

The Ranter is a googlewhack for “malet broadband frequency jammer”. Requested by someone in India. Note for policemen: we have no jammers of any kind. UN inspectors welcome.

Another business opportunity rebuilding the new Iraq: probably the world’s most lucrative taxi service. If you need to get into Baghdad from the airport (or more importantly the other way round), £2,750 now buys you a ride. That’s a car and driver for you, and a chase car with four South African mercenaries toting Heckler…

I have just completed transferring documents the Ranter refers to from my ex-college webspace to a commercial server. And updating all the links. BEER! Please report any brokens to me. Thanks.

David Blunkett has recently been quoted as saying that his proposed compulsory ID card and its database holding records on all citizens is just like a supermarket loyalty card. In fact, even nicer. Because those terrible supermarkets might hold details like these: “‘Store loyalty cards keep continuously updated details such as the size of a…

Edward at the Fistful of Euros delivers a (good) post on the sliding dollar/soaring euro issue and the wisdom or otherwise of a central bank intervention to prop up the buck, or at least manage decline. He, rightly I think, points up the inconsistency in US Treasury Secretary John Snow’s recent remarks – Snow said…

Does anyone else have this odd thought that nothing will symbolise our times so much in future as – the shredder? Think about it. It’s today’s secular confessional – you shovel the paper trail of your sins into the grey plastic maw, hit the button and a few seconds later, you are shriven. Unlike the…