Archive for the ‘fail’ Category
Quietly, the Eurofighter project seems to be running into trouble. First of all, Dassault got the Indian contract and the Indians claim that Rafale is dramatically cheaper. Further, they weren’t impressed by the amount of stuff that is planned to come in future upgrades, whose delivery is still not certain. These upgrades are becoming a problem, as the UK, Germany, and Italy aren’t in agreement about their schedule or about which ones they want. Also, a Swiss evaluation report was leaked that is extremely damning towards the Gripen and somewhat less so to Eurofighter.
This is going to have big consequences for European military-industrial politics. So is the latest wobble on F-35.
Remember this post from 2006, and especially this one from a year later on the next big miscarriage of justice? Well, look what just happened. It’s far worse than even I thought – the police were well aware that there were serious problems with the Landslide case as early as February, 2003. Specifically, the old National Crime Squad seems to have been extremely gung-ho about the whole project while the regional police forces were much more sceptical. Later the whole thing was slung to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, one of the weird sort-of police agencies that proliferated in the late Blair years. Meanwhile, a suspect has succeeded in claiming damages. Both cases show various police forces in a very bad light indeed – the US postal inspector in the first suddenly retired to look after his “sick wife” when his evidence was challenged, while as for Hertfordshire Police:
Despite this, the officer, Detective Constable Brian Hopkins, pressed three charges of possession of indecent images of children. Mr Justice Mackay said he cut a “rather pathetic figure” in the witness box, having initially claimed he could not give evidence because of a psychiatric condition….The judge found that Mr Hopkins, who has since left policing, not only had “no honest belief in the possession charges when he caused them to be brought against [Mr Clifford]”, but did so “to protect his own position”.
Feel the fremdscham, baby!
Meanwhile, my bank card has been compromised. So I was in San Francisco of a Sunday, walking around the Tenderloin looking for a cash point that wasn’t looking back at me with mischief in its eye. Preferably one attached to a bank. I eventually walked up as far as Van Ness and found a Wells Fargo branch. It wouldn’t give me any money, nor would the Bank of America. So I ended up phoning the bank at extortionate roaming rates, standing on the forecourt with a small encampment of the homeless. Thinking that I had less US currency to my name than they did, I struggled through the IVR thickets, confirmed my salary hadn’t somehow vanished, and got into a queue to report that the fraud-detection robots had zapped me. I stayed on the line until AT&T dropped the call after 12 minutes. The phone started whining; it’s like a little jet fighter. You can do a lot of cool things with it, but it’s best not to go too far from the refuelling tanker or you’re screwed. Back to the hotel. I tried to call them on Skype, but AT&T’s WLAN was too bad to hear the IVRs. I plugged in the phone, called again, explained that I didn’t want to report the card stolen but rather the opposite, and sat in 23 minutes of queues. Curses…curses…24 hour fraud algorithms…not 24 hour staffing, though…why not call me?…banks…banks…banks…!
And then I got through. And the fraud investigators told me that the police had found my card in a list of cloned cards offered for sale on the black market. In the circumstances, they hadn’t called me or given out any information for fear of giving away the secret, as the investigation was still going on. Oh…right. They listed some transactions, agreed to let me withdraw up to £100 a day in cash and honour direct debits, and left the Visa facility frozen. They refused to say anything about where or when the security breach might have occurred, although I think the detail about the Visa card might be significant. Call us when you get back to the UK – and by the way, here’s the direct number.
The whole incident had just been annoying up to that point, but this changed the game. I was left with a whole load of surplus indignation on my hands past its use-by date. It cluttered up my room at the Phoenix like a chunk of un-Californian, clanking machinery. I suppose I could spend it on the thieves, but who were they? Rather than just harassing me and profiteering, my bank had actually done something I could only agree with. And the police had actually protected me from an actual crime, without my even noticing, with the occult efficiency Norman Lewis said had attached itself to the word “intelligence”.
As far as I know, no money is missing, but I haven’t audited as many as 14 months’ worth of transactions through my current account yet. That’s since this card was issued – they couldn’t give me any other bounds on it. After all, as they said, it was impossible to say how far the list of cards had been sold on by whoever had originally collected them.
Anyway, I didn’t even need to draw any more cash after the first $100. My expenses in Silicon Valley were unusually frugal – the nearest I came to spending significant amounts of money was trying to catch up with two colleagues who’d gone out looking for amusement. (I spent 20 minutes looking for a cab in Palo Alto at 10 o’clock at night and eventually gave up, having noticed that there seemed to be less traffic on the roads at that time of night than I would have expected in a Yorkshire Dales village.) I read the two Operation Ore articles and logged them for future use. As briefed, I called HSBC on my arrival back in Britain and they initiated a new card.
And it was only as I wrote this that I remembered I ought to be scared. After all, it is impossible to say how far the list of cards…
I approve of this message. What was the BBC development hierarchy thinking? As Vowl says, it wasn’t even so much the content, awful though it was, but the quality. Airport documentaries: might have been funny, in 1998. Stelios hasn’t actually been in charge of EasyJet in years, and IIRC he doesn’t own it any more either. An Asian character who’s obsessed with hip-hop and constantly talks about “bitches”: well, Ali G was funny, in 1996, and he’s somebody else’s material anyway. Sacha Baron Cohen should sue but he probably doesn’t want to associate himself with this shite. Stealing jokes is one thing, but stealing ones that will soon be old enough to join the Army is pathetic.
Also, if you’re going to poke fun at crappy low-cost airlines’ grasping, self-publicising executives, surely Michael O’Leary’s endless grandstanding and bullshitting must be a seam of comedy gold…unless you’re Matt Lucas and David Williams, in which case you’re clearly too scared he might sue, so the other bucket shop is still Irish but has to look like Aer Lingus.
Something else: production values. Obviously something posing as a cheap docusoap has to look cheap, but once you spend a certain amount of effort pretending to be shit, the face grows to fit the mask. I didn’t actually see any sets falling over, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. Perhaps I don’t watch enough TV, but was this the worst slab of dreck broadcast in the last 10 years? Further, you, me, and everyone else is going to be rolling out to defend the BBC enough times in the next twelve months that we’ll all get even sicker of it than we did during the Hutton inquiry, and this isn’t going to help.
“Richard sent me photos of his private parts before I’d even met him,” says the redhead. “I thought this was very odd for a politician.”
Somewhat in the spirit of this XKCD cartoon. There are memes that allow us to tell if other people are likely to be worth speaking to – like biomarkers for language. For example, someone who disbelieves in plate tectonics probably has a wide range of other weird beliefs.
The latest one of these I’ve noticed is the idea that you have to be unemployed to get housing benefit in the UK. Knobber after horrible knobber shows up talking about claimants “in houses working people couldn’t dream of”. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So unfortunately, I’ve come to the parting of the ways with Tim Garton Ash. In an otherwise mostly sensible column:
It’s surely not right that people can be worse off if they choose to work than they would be on welfare; or that people on inflated housing benefits make rented accommodation in some areas unaffordable for the working poor.
You don’t have to be unemployed to get housing benefit, Tim. I predict bad things.
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