just thought that what with all this talk about nukes in the press at the moment i’d link to the wonderful wikipedia article on the nevada test site. growing up in norfolk at the height of the cold war meant that i often went to bed at night imagining a bright flash followed by the searing heat of a nuclear bomb landing on the marham air base. these days in nevada:

“the test site offers public tours on approximately a monthly basis, although the taking of souvenir material is prohibited.”

not surprising really as they carried out over 925 tests including one of over 700 kilotons (hiroshima was 13 kilotons).

we live in dark times but i love steve bell’s cartoons. he understands the darkness and makes me smile.

you can always view his recent guardian contributions

Is flying the worst way to travel? In terms of pollution I think driving a car with no passengers is nearly twice as bad. Perhaps someone could pull me up if i’ve got these figures wrong:

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OK I wanted to be positive - but I was trying to predict what might happen in 2006 from a geo-political perspective. Fortunately James Howard Kunstler agrees with me….

As part of the ‘amaze non techies about computery things’ campaign this week, I’m pleased to add some information that Simon B alerted me to. There is a website called istock photo which most of us have never heard of and is certainly not as big as some websites. It allows designers to buy royalty free stock photography. Now here’s the amazing bit: They’re upgrading their servers…

With 15,000 servers deployed in over 1,100 networks across 65 countries, everyone from Tahoma to Tokyo should find up to 10x speed in page loads on localized servers.

Yes that’s 15,000 high spec. computers for one website! Anyone know how many Google have?

As the local computer ‘expert’, every day i get a call or visit from someone who’s computer needs fixing. In 2006 they will all be referred to people who make it their business to fix such things. I would love to help everyone, but the ‘fixing’ can take hours and once the ‘fix’ has been applied it’s unlikely that the computer in question will remain working for long. In the past I blamed the users but the complexity of the threats now facing the average internet connected windows pc is astonishing… and it gets more astonishing by the day. (more…)