An Ilyushin-76T formerly with GST Aero has been destroyed in an accident at Entebbe, crashing into Lake Victoria bound for Mogadishu with supplies for the Burundian military. Burundian and Ugandan officers were on board. The aircraft, S9-SAB serial number 73410301, was owned by Aerolift, a company banned in the EU which officially ceased operations in…
Read More candidProfessional reactionaries, or put-on reactionaries, are as much of a characteristic feature of Internet culture as their polar opposite, professional neophiles and boosters. I can’t remember a moment in the last few years where there hasn’t been someone making a good living by bemoaning the kids of today and their…enter application…here in the public prints.…
Read More talking nonsense about Facebook: nonsense squared!The Guardian leaps in on the Nemesysco lie-detector crapware story, and misses; notably, they are apparently too chicken to point out that they are claiming to get 129 dimensions of data from only two actual measurements. This wouldn’t even involve the Lacerda/Eriksson paper; it would just involve reading their published statements and the content of…
Read More quack quack oops“Londonstani” has a superb post at Abu Muqawama about Ed Husain’s The Islamist. Read the whole thing. Then look at the comments and cry. Meanwhile, shouldn’t this story be getting much more press? Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers…
Read More spiesIt took a while, but somebody finally acted on those 38-year old gaskets. The BBC is reporting that the RAF’s Nimrod MR2 fleet has been grounded for the replacement of the engine bay hot air ducts, the famous pipe involved in the loss of XV230 over Afghanistan in September, 2006. According to my own sources,…
Read More XV230 consequencesIn the last couple of months, I’ve been increasingly fascinated by XMPP; I said this to a colleague of mine, who reacted roughly as if I’d informed him that I now perceived time as simultaneous. Hey, it’s a tech company but not that techie. Specifically, however, I’ve become convinced that I was barking up the…
Read More Rethinking ORGANISEDavid Axe: For instance, which of these is better: * An air-superiority system comprising, say, 381 F-22s with 60-percent readiness, two pilots per plane, no electronic jamming and very aged tankers, or * A system, costing roughly the same, but comprising 187 F-22s plus 200 brand-new F-15E+s, with a combined 75-percent readiness, three pilots per…
Read More PFI does not mean “public flying initiative”But not to the right people. Via Jason Sigger’s blog, the US Marines have second thoughts about all those new armoured wheeled vehicles they bought. Demanding more vague armoured vehicles was an easy cross-party response to Iraq; it got around saying whether you actually opposed the war, or what strategy you favoured. If you were…
Read More giant armoured bus considered harmfulThis is sad: ITV kills the Yorkshire Television studios in Leeds. The wikipedia article should tell you why – the first studios in Europe designed for colour TV, the biggest working TV studio in Europe, and a lot of very impressive programmes. The history is interesting, too – the station set up in 1967 was…
Read More you’ve got to get out of the valley25 years; the strike was the first political event, indeed one of the first events, I actually remember. At least I remember power cuts and TV news broadcasts with the number of weeks the miners had been out counting up. After that, I recall Chernobyl – they set up a radiation monitor in the car…
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