George Griffith is a british sci-fi writer who wrote many books at the turn of the century. Angel of the revolution is about a war of the future as envisioned from the victorian era involving wars with giant airships and such like. Reminded me quite a lot of michael Moorcocks warlord of the air books. The attitude to chivalry is a bit over the top by todays standards as is the authors notion of the superiority of the British empire but they are an interesting read never the less. I only found out about this book from a random link on wikipedia! You can get this for free from guttenburg.

This puts a lot of private information in the hands of telephone companies and internet providers. I doubt their security is going to be very good. Anyone with any private information that could be of use to anyone else had better be encrypting it. This would bu businesses guarding their companies trade secrets, people in the public eye who could be implicated in scandals, or any political group with enemies. In the UK they recently had a scandal where the papers were tapping in to phones to get stories. Imagine what a government or maybe just a senior person in the intelligence agency could do with this information. They can often have their own agenda these people which isnt always in the public interest.

What if a police tried to flags one down? Can it read all signs? I doubt it. What if theres an accident and diversion signs are put up? I can only see them working on specially restricted roads. I have seen programming jobs advertised recently for automonous trucks in coal mines, these sound like a more reasonable use of them as the conditions can be more tightly controlled and people can keep out its way.

The world doesnt need any more programmers. I should know, I have been looking for a programming job for ages and no one will give me a job. On the other hand, there is a shortage of engineers. In the oil industry there is a dire shortage of engineers, anyone qualified as a chemical engineer can command a good salary, yet strangely all the univerisity courses on this in the UK are being closed down in place of non vocational courses. No one in the media or government seems aware of this. Instead of all these shows on TV telling people what a good idea it is to try and be a pop star or super model, they should have shows encouraging people to take up more practical professions.

Monkeys are as smart as dolphins. Why doesnt someone teach them to use guns? then we could get people out of harms way. What you would do is first fo all locate your enemy with reconnaisance planes then drop some bananas over them and unleash the monkeys. They would naturally move towards the bannanas. It would probably be hard to teach a monkey to target troops of a particular country, so when they were sent in the friendly troops would have to get out of the way.

Most big computer project run by the governments fail. Looking at my home in the UK, the government had this big idea about computerizing the air traffic control system and it all went wrong. They did the same with an attempt to computerize everyones health records and then repeated similar errors with an identity card system. I think the problem is maybe to do with people in government not really understanding the projects they are running. Another thing though, I read a declassified report by the CIA for a project done in the 50s which was about some guy investigating the use of the psychic powers of dogs and pigeons for the detection of land mines. It was one of the funniest things things I ever read. If you think about it, if a senior official of the CIA would spend good tax payers dollars on such a hair brained scheme, what is his reliability going to be on a some big technical project?

Well youd think they would have made an attempt to quantify that annual death toll from dirty keyboards before deciding it was worthwhile sterilizing them.

Is anyone on record of having died from a dirty keyboard? I never heard of it. Germs are rarely dangreous. What about when you walk out your door into the coutryside, no one ever sterilises that. If we follow the logic behind this, we should sterilise that to.

You could maybe buy a matt screen laptop abroad and then change the keyboard. With most laptops you can quite easily pop out the keys and move them around. If the problem is that you have a unique alphabet, maybe you could buy a replacement keyboard. They're not too expensive for laptops. I was looking for a replacement for mine the other day and they were about $20 (australian).