OK, so there’s the magic army vehicle project that spent more on powerpoint presentations than Drayson managed to spend buying several hundred actual vehicles. FRES, as it is known, started off as the British half of a US project that ended up being the Future Combat System, a pharaonic lashup of vehicles, radios, computers, and…
Read More on my radioIt’s that time again: OpenTech is next Saturday. I’m not presenting anything, which will leave me more time to argue about random things in the ULU bar. But I’m especially keen to do this with readers, and anyone who’s interested in the political uses of Asterisk, starting out with Ardour, which I’ve just installed, and…
Read More admin: opentechBrilliant post from Dan Lockton on the design problems of making smart meters usable and useful. In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA’s Social Brain about “the dark side of “nudge””; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people’s decision processes into ones that are more rational,…
Read More tattyArbor Networks has a great post with data on Iranian Internet censorship. As well as the deliberate transit shortage, they seem to be targeting specific protocols, notably SSH, the secure shell protocol one uses to administer servers and also quite often to provide a VPN tunnel. This isn’t surprising, really, but it is depressing; practically…
Read More spamLynne Featherstone MP: for workers’ representation, against managerialism, for Iraqi employees. WIN. More seriously, I’m increasingly convinced by the argument that the fundamental driver of the economic crisis is the falling labour share of national income. This was J.K. Galbraith’s take on the Great Depression; despite the roaring 20s, wages had been flat for years.…
Read More some MPs considered beneficialOK, so I got no takers for this prediction. My money’s on the Latvian or the Hungarian to out himself as a buffoon or neo-nazi. Not surprising, really. But what I didn’t expect was that even though the Latvian turned out to be the neo-nazi, the buffoon would turn out to be Timothy Kirkhope MEP,…
Read More too many right-wing meetingsWhat is the legacy of the so-called “loony left”? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out? And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for…
Read More Loonies 2.0Back in May: Somebody is clearly rationing the leaks according to partisan considerations; I for one can’t wait for Gideon’s exes to hit the tabs, but do you see any of that? Well, you still don’t. After all, look what crawled out of his expenses; he bought a house, which he later sold at a…
Read More I think Flipper is trying to tell us something!A quick UR-CAK update. The owners are vigorously protesting, but it still isn’t clear who they are. The crew apparently claimed that the arms belonged to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, and the handling agent and the Equatorial Guinea government say they are for Equatorial Guinea. But it seems that the plane came from Zagreb,…
Read More Kano seizure updateWe keep hearing that the Iranian government, or at least one of the competing centres of power within it, is trying to jam satellite TV downlinks and harassing the owners of satellite dishes. The BBC World Service and Al-Jazeera have reportedly both been targeted, specifically as they both use one of the HotBird satellites over…
Read More satellite’s gone, way up to Mars…