This is depressing; they couldn’t find enough volunteers to count the votes in the Norwich North by-election on the night. What’s especially worrying is that it’s one of those assumptions that you never think about – a sort of minimum of commitment to the special importance of voting. And it’s being eroded, just as the…
Read More democracySomeone’s been doing a good series on the recent loss of a Mi-26 helicopter near the British base in Sangin, a civilian machine chartered in to carry supplies around Helmand. The aircraft was ER-MCV, and it apparently belonged to Pecotox Air, an old and fairly dodgy charter operator from Moldova; however, it was apparently wearing…
Read More heliviktorRemember those Tuareg uranium guerrillas? Back in the summer of 2007, just before the crash, they were busy raiding Chinese prospectors and intriguing with both the French and the Nigerien government. And blogging, ISTR, on their Thuraya satphones. Now look what’s happened: they’ve been recruited by the Algerians to fight Al-Qa’ida, or more specificially the…
Read More making an arrestHas anyone else noticed that SpinVox achieved the Turing Test in reverse? Rather than constructing a machine capable of conversing in a manner indistinguishable from a human being, they constructed a company to make human beings appear to be a machine. The shock some people claimed to feel at discovering that SpinVox is people! is…
Read More der mensch maschineWired reviews a book on the media of the Middle East, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. Well, even pirates have press spokesmen these days. It sounds like it could be interesting, but it strikes me that this piece by Tom Griffin about trolls sponsored by various Middle Eastern actors…
Read More twitbook: book of twitsFurther, after the last post, BT futurologist says we’re living in science fiction. And what particular works does she mention? Blade Runner, Judge Dredd and Solyent Green. Well. In the world of Halting State, meanwhile, the Germans have had a wee probby with their electronic health cards. Partly it’s due to a reasonably sensible design;…
Read More i’ve got the key, i’ve got the secret…whoopsIn 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…