vivweb01blog

  Modern Warfare – The Future ? Introduction An extra-terrestrial observer looking at the behaviour of Homo Sapiens de novo might reasonably assess our species as: ‘..a primitive bipedal anthropoid primate having a marked addiction to conflict….’ This tendency towards competitive destructive aggression is certainly not a new phenomenon – evolution has done a remarkable job of embedding the need to compete into our psyche – and our genes. Without it, we would not have become the most successful and numerous species on the planet. It is that very success, however, and the remarkable advances in technology that has enabled it, that now threatens our very existence.... War has been our principal way of solving territorial disputes between tribes and nations for millennia. Until relatively recently, although often brutal in its execution, warfare caused little real harm from a global perspective. The First World War (WWI) was the first real ‘mass killing’ event for our specie...

  Just a quick 'heads up' on a very useful tool I came across some years ago for downloading BBC programmes direct from iPlayer servers – and have used regularly ever since. As a committed user of BBC’s services for many years previously, I joined the online viewing revolution and started using iPlayer in the early 2010s. Not being particularly keen on ‘live’ streaming, and in any case having a limited broadband download allowance at the time, I took to selective downloading of anything that particularly took my interest.  As for the old VCR recordings we all remember making in the 80s and 90s, the problem was finding time to actually watch what I'd recorded. I quickly became tired of discovering that much of what I'd painstakingly downloaded from iPlayer, and had finally got round to looking at, had already expired, and was unreadable due to Digital Rights Management (DRM)-protection.  A workround was therefore a must, and fortunately one presented itself in the form...

  The rather unexpected announcement on 29 th November that Louise Haigh had resigned as Transport minister inevitably precipitated much speculation about ‘goings on in high places’. The party line explanation she offered was the bog-standard   ‘I don’t want to be a distraction’ recipe, accompanied by the usual weasel words of support from the PM for the decision and good wishes for the future….which, if course, tells us precisely nothing. To establish what really went on, we need to look at the background. Several pertinent facts emerge: 1)        *  Starmer knew about Haigh’s 2013 conviction for ‘making a false report to the police’ about her mugging when he appointed her to the ministerial posts she has occupied. This rules out concealment on her part as a direct cause for her dismissal. 2)       *  Since the election in July, Haigh has been in the spotlight several times as ‘not seeing eye to eye’ with the PM, most notabl...