The new Nikon D3/D700 sensor is amazing. This is a handheld shot at 6400 asa.
Daily Archives: October 2, 2008
Statistic of the day
Five of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were written on mobile phones.
Beggar (all) Thy Neighbours
The Irish government’s extraordinary move to guarantee all investments in Irish banks has infuriated Willem Buiter. First of all, he says, it’s illegal under EU rules. And secondly,
Financial crises may not be the best time to make friends and influence people, but the Irish guarantee is the most ‘in-your-face’ beggar-thy-neighbour provocation since medieval armies catapulted bubonic-plague-ridden corpses into the cities they were besieging. Between the attempt to favour Irish shareholders at the expense of foreign shareholders and the poaching of UK sterling deposits (and indeed euro deposits anywhere else in the euro area) through subsidy-fuelled interest rate offers, Ireland should not be surprised to encounter limited support and solidarity in the EU the next time the country is up against it, for whatever issue…
Er, actually the Irish government is already ‘up against it’ in relation to Europe, because of that little local difficulty it had with ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Personally, I’m not sure I’d put money into anything ‘guaranteed’ by a Fianna Fail-led government. One delicious twist in all this is that the EU Commissioner who will have to examine the latest Fianna Fail wheeze is Charlie McCreevy, a grizzled old Fianna Fail hack. How will he square this particular barbed circle? Stay tuned.
Great Firewall of China (contd.)
Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has just released its analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform. No surprises. They uncovered discovered a huge surveillance system that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.
The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.
John Markoff of the NYT has a report.
PDF of the Citizen Lab report available from here.
I’ve always assumed that Skype was compromised — which is why I would never use it for confidential conversations. Wonder what eBay have to say about it all?
Homer Simpson meets Diebold voting machine
The perils of skunk
Agonising article by Patrick Cockburn on his son’s schizophrenia.
I blame cannabis for what happened to Henry. He says he smoked a lot between the ages of 14 and 19, but I didn’t notice at the time.
I would have been concerned, of course, if I’d known back then, but until recently I had no idea about the explosive impact cannabis can have on some people.
I don’t think people realise 19 out of 20 people might take a small quantity of cannabis without ill effects, but for the 20th person who has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, the result is catastrophic.
I don’t believe those who advocate less stringent laws on the sale and consumption of cannabis realise the devastating effect it can have…
Bush’s legacy
Timothy Egan, writing in today’s New York Times…
Among the many dispiriting things to come out of Bob Woodward’s quartet of books on George W. Bush is his observation that the president has not changed since he first started talking to Woodward in 2001.
No growth. No evolution. No regrets.
“History,” Bush replied, when asked by Woodward how he would be judged over time. “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Broke, as well.
It would have been nice to let Bush’s two terms marinate a while before invoking Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan from the cellar of worst presidents. But then — over the last two weeks — he completed the trilogy of national disasters that will be with us for a generation or more…