Y’all are sitting there pondering one of the great Left issues of the day. Is Facebook part of the class struggle? Are people on Facebook a class, and if so are they exploiting or exploited? Why are new forms of social media so dangerous? Yes, it’s the American Left in […]
Update: this DT Blogs piece makes it to The Browser My latest piece over at Telegraph Blogs looks at how state A sends a message to state B. Not as easy a task as you might think: Diplomats have mulled over these questions for a good 800 years and more. […]
My various postings and pronouncements on the rights and wrongs of the UK government’s ‘threat’ to remove the diplomatic immunity of the Ecuador Embassy in London to enable J Assange to be nabbed have prompted Brian Barder to weigh in. And when Brian weighs in, he does so thoroughly. His […]
In a comment on my earlier post, my old sparring partner and inveterate contrarian Brian Barder takes up the challenge re diplomatic immunity and Assange: Entertaining knockabout, Charles, but completely wrong. The embassy’s premises are unequivocally immune from entry without the agreement of the ambassador, under international law as laid down […]
Here is my latest piece at Telegraph Blogs: Our Ambassador to the United Nations Sir Mark Lyall-Grant has come out strongly against this further Russia/Chinese veto: “Russia and China are failing in their responsibilities as permanent members, they are failing the people of Syria … The effect of their actions […]
That depends upon what you mean by ‘the Internet’. I was taught at Harvard that the whole thing works because of the protocols that allow one computer to ‘talk’ to another. And because of ‘packet-switching’ – the way digital information is broken up into tiny scraps that then each make […]
A very smart article by Tom Smith over in San Diego, pointing out how Government scrambles to assert to itself an inordinate share of private success but breezily overlooks all the failures it’s caused: It’s difficult to even explain how pervasive, expensive, frustrating and sometimes just plain insuperable the regulatory […]
One of the problems with teleprompters is that you the speaker can’t improvise easily. You’re stuck with the pre-agreed script loaded on to the machine. Those words scroll inexorably across your screen, and if you deviate from them it is not easy for the person doing the scrolling to fathom out what […]
Read this one on the accelerating genius of 3D printing – scanning things digitally then making speedy fast models in new robust materials and at stunning speed. Including for gnashers: It’s pretty intuitive to apply this technology to the automotive and aerospace industries, and jewelry has always been a big market. But […]
Part of the general problem we face these days is knowing what anything is. As we get better at looking at things on quite different scales, down to sub-atomic tininess, different patterns emerge. What looks like a solid, recognisable, definable thing turns out to be system of systems of systems. A lot […]
