In the comments at Charlie Stross‘s blog, a horrible detail about the latest misbegotten monster database. It seems that you can be employed in “controlled”, as opposed to “regulated”, activities even if you are on the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s list of kiddy-fiddlers, so long as “safeguards” are in place. What are “controlled” activities? • Frequent…
Read More and now for some truly appalling stupidityJohn Quiggin blogs about his zombie economics book, specifically the chapter on the efficient market hypothesis. This can be summarised as the doctrine that the current price of a security contains all the publicly available information about it. There is a debate about the degree of predictive power this has and the scope of its…
Read More picking a curveOK, so some more Symbian-related whining. I’ve discovered Ensymble, the pythonic package that turns your .py scripts into SIS Symbian packages and signs them. Great. And then you can send the package to Symbian Signed Online and get them signed. Great. And here’s a useful map from Nokia showing which capabilities require which forms of…
Read More yet more symbian whiningOh Gawd, this is precisely one of the things I hate about Symbian S60 development. OK, so I’ve now got a version of the PythonForS60 runtime that doesn’t require a note from my parents or Jack Straw or God or someone to use GPS; but at some point they’ve pushed out an update to the…
Read More a pain in the arse…There are trolls. And then there are Spectator defence-policy thread trolls.
Read More under the bridgeBecause we’ve set up the bureaucracy for it. Laugh! as the people responsible for the new US Cyber Command try to work out what it’s for. As far as I can see, it duplicates all or part of NSA, DISA, CIA, DHS, NIST, and the services’ signals commands and electronics materiel agencies. It is true…
Read More there’d better be such a thing as “cyberwar”Other things I disagree quite strongly with Charlie Stross about. James Nicoll asks what happens if/when Moore’s Law is exhausted. Charlie has a well-known theory about this, based on the aerospace industry’s recession in the early 70s. The CE industry is inherently deflationary — Moore’s law conceals this because we double the number of transistors…
Read More no progress since 1970, except in minor fields such as cost, safety, reliability, capacity, efficiency…Charlie Stross feels that the Bernie Madoff case has put the sequel to Halting State behind the curve of criminal weirdness. I disagree strongly. Madoff was an American classic, as perfect an artefact of his society as aerosol cheese or moon landings. His fraud was a simple, well-executed example of the tried and trusted Ponzi…
Read More ye olde scammeQuite ridiculous microtale about the head of MI6’s wife being on Facebook. But what’s this, from Patrick Mercer MP? The Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who chairs the counter-terrorism sub-committee, said the mistake had left the Sawers family “extremely vulnerable”. Referring to Miliband’s suggestion that the incident was not significant, Mercer said: “If that is the…
Read More did you know Twitter stimulates Shatner’s bassoon?Does anyone actually imagine that Blairites are interested in the ideas of Amartya Sen? I ask chiefly for information. After all, they often do things that look superficially like engaging intellectually with new ideas from the Left; writing articles about Sen or Etzioni or whoever in journals like Progress or Renewal, taking part in seminars…
Read More an elegant drive through the covers of Renewal