Why is Donal Blaney’s unsold property named after Rupert Murdoch’s yacht? (via here). Seems an odd kind of coincidence. “Do you have McAfee antivirus on your computer?” He looked at me and put down his cigarette. “I take it off,” he said. “It’s too annoying.” “A Christmas Carol and Nineteen Eighty-Four are actually disturbingly similar…
Read More Links.A Poundland spokeswoman said: “Over 1000 people have carried out voluntary work experience in our stores. Out of this number, an encouraging 25 per cent have left their work experience early because they received a job offer, and a further 10 per cent have gone onto employment with Poundland.” Pret a Vomir. Matthew Taylor is…
Read More Well…show willing.The Indy‘s City editor (and he is very much a City editor, none of that “business” page nonsense) Anthony Hilton has joined the clamour for the simple plan to save the world! Some of the larger associations are tapping into the aforesaid retail bond market, with Raglan, for example, raising £50m in September with an…
Read More Anthony Hilton joins the Simple Plan!So, Wired writes up three West Point professors and their algorithm to decide which members of a terrorist network to zap. Apparently they implemented it in 30 lines of Python. The paper is here, with some pseudocode and the tantalising hint that they used NetworkX, but no Python. However, even the Wired piece tells us…
Read More Lib Dems: not quite uselessDavid Axe has a good piece on how vulnerable drones are to any kind of organised air defence. “The predominant use of RPAs [Remotely Piloted Aircraft] over the past decade has been passive [intelligence] collection coupled with air-to-ground strikes in permissive airspace,” Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis tells Danger Room. “There’s very little…
Read More The drone that didn’t crashMusic! First up, here’s the last edition of Chuck D’s radio show, notable for the surprisingly great Northern Irish rapper Jun Tzu (and also the highly jamiespheric concept that there’s a Russian MC called Moscow Death Brigade). Further, Mike Check by DJ Eleven and Mike Baker (not the sadly deceased one) is great. I listened…
Read More Non-Thursday music linksWhat did I mean in this series about the politics of the call centre? Here’s an example from the Reddit tech support sub-r. H/t Robin Green, who has a good point: I feel like an outlier on Reddit sometimes. I am the ONLY ONE who recognises this issue as a Health&Safety issue http://t.co/3M6ZeqJk — Robin…
Read More TYR Rewind: call centre politicsBirdy! For it is he, back out of the woodwork to tell us that there might be a surge in homelessness, up or rather down to the depths of the 80s. Well, that’s grim, and only surprising in that the Tories took just two-and-a-half years to get back to mass homelessness. Unlike Birdy I promise…
Read More TYR Rewind: slip inside this house and fuel the fireTYR Rewind. I wonder if there was ever an audit of the UK mobile network operators’ lawful intercept logs? We know that the network of private investigators around the NOTW were able to locate mobile phones, by paying a corrupt copper £500 a dip. If the copper could do that, they could also listen to…
Read More TYR Rewind. So, those logs.So, another TYR Rewind. Here’s a post on last year’s Treasury Autumn Statement, or rather, on the Guardian‘s pitifully spun reporting of it. As a foretaste, here’s the weekend’s Obscurer piece. Last time out, the worst had been briefed out to the papers over the weekend, thus tanking everyone’s expectations so the sops placed on…
Read More the 6th Army has been destroyed. chocolate ration news follows on Tuesday