Hmm, I seem to recall this rhetoric from 1917. Are they at risk of falling under the sway of the Commies again?

Go For IT, MOD, IT is not as if you do not have the Access to Sensitive Sources for Intellectual Property Protection and Extraction...... Phish Pharming.

""Developments might include the invention of synthetic telepathy, including mind-to-mind or telepathic dialogue. This type of development would have obvious military and security, as well as control, legal and ethical, implications."

So obvious, in fact, that the MoD brain trust declines to say what they are.

The staff-college moguls of the DCDC also seem worried about some blasted boffin inventing something which they have failed to predict. To deal with this, Admiral Parry's crystal-ball-gazers include a splendid catch-all:"

No worry if IT is Shared though, then IT becomes an Asset to employ to the Theatre of Operations. Although how would one share some blasted boffin.

Spirit them away into Thin air a la Jim Gray?

It saddens me that this fool, with his snout in the public trough, can come up with nothing better.

"disillusion with meritocracy, " ??

Just don't get me started you pi** taking **** !

Clearly he's just wangling for more public funds based on nebulous scare-mongering.

God preserve us from the public sector and their consultants.

amanfromMars obviously learned to capitalize somewhere other than Earth.

Personally, i like the idea of EMP bombs. Especially with the digital GATSO cameras they're using these days.

""The middle classes could become a revolutionary class," says the report."

We need to watch these people more closely. Set up some sort of early warning system. My dad still in his robe after noon on a summer Sunday; maybe he wouldn't have even shaved or showered, grim faced, braced at the living room window, steeled in his resolve not to cut the lawn. Harbinger of civilization's end. Maybe my mom would back him and go out to do the week's shopping in her sweats, without makeup. The horror! The horror.

Would it come to wearing whites after Labour Day. Could it come to wearing whites after Labor Day. And what might follow? The anarchy of a brightly lit night sky marking the end of it all as the Xmas lights remain up after the end of the first week of the new year. Be afraid, be very afraid.

"amanfromMars obviously learned to capitalize somewhere other than Earth." Deutschland gave me a Respect for Specific Language ......the Nuance Hiding in Plain Text....... Semantic Intent.

I've always assumed the amanfromMars is actually somebody's joke. The posts always read like the output from a 419 letter writer .

1) He's afraid people will realise nothing has changed in society since Leonard Cohen wrote Everybody Knows.

2) He's afraid that people will move here but maintain their cultural identity using the internet and this will drive them to destroy this country's internet so they can be model citizens.

Film at 11?

no,really! that's what it sounds like. quick! download a lawyer to my wetware!

If the super rich got that way through the operation of a meritocracy - ie in proportion to their value to society, I wouldn't mind so much. It's the ones that come up through the a***holetocracy I object to.

"A cheap, simple-to-make and easy-to-use weapon might be invented that is effective against a wide range of targets and against which established countermeasures are ineffective"

That would be an AK47 then?

There again since when would the MoD buy anything; cheap, simple-to-make and easy-to-use, let alone reliable for a change and being cheap we might get sufficient quantity to be useful.

I figured it was an Elisa program myself...

amanfromMars : I assumed to be something written using markov chains to regurgitate the input text into something that wasn't completely unlike english. Is this just another incarnation of Mark V. Shaney? (try googling...)

One of them is the cultural differences between europe and most of its immigrants. The other is the problem of the neoliberal market system, which pushes down the 'middle class' to extract more money. The first one can only be solved by cutting immigration (those countries who have too many immigrants now are already lost) and the second with the reform of the current capitialist system (restoring free market within each country and disabling monopolies would be enough).

All the technological threaths can be countered but only when european countries still exist in the future. (instead of turning into giant refugee camps or colonies of some near or far east country)

I could see the middle class going totally haywire. I don't know how things are in the U.K., but in the U.S. one of the dreams that we've all grown up with, real-property ownership, is starting to go up in smoke for the middle class. While some of the ideas presented seem far-fetched, much of what is presented makes sense. I live in the San Francisco bay area, and violent crime has been on a serious upswing lately. Mostly owed to the so-called urban underclass. Aside from the cost of property ownership being largely prohbitive we are seeing the 'rewards' of greed in a sharp upturn in property foreclosures. If anything is going to piss-off that middle class that is just above that under-class, I think the current trends are likely to be that thing. The coming years will certainly prove to be interesting, if not bleak. Yeah, some tangents, but I think it's all related when it comes right down to it.

As a Kiwi living on your fine fertile shores, I'd like to say...

Yarrrr!!!! We are here for your jobs and your women :)

This message is brought to you from

The barbarians at the gate and the letter P

All nuclear armed countries already have EMP weapons.They are more often refered to as atom bombs all that needs to be done is to get it into space before it is detonated.Just ask the Pentagon the after all did it in the sixty's right over Hawaii knocked out their comms well and good.As I recall wasn't this also in the background to Dark Angel on the TV a couple of years ago as well as a lot of other "scientific" nastiness.