Thursday, February 5, 2009

Big Brother can't read your national identity card


The UK spent billions on a national identity card system but doesn't have the technology to read it.  Priceless. 

Wish the film Brazil had ended so nicely.

1 comment:

Medawar said...

Medawar can think of around thirteen billion reasons to be extremely angry with Tony Blair and Zanu-Labour none-the-less.

Incompetence does not excuse fascism, nor corruption, as many of the firms given billions on this project, have a record of NEVER delivering a working system. This is because they tend to employ only a handful of properly qualified engineers and programmers, and hundreds, if not thousands, of keyboard fodder who have very basic skills and who serve only to create an impression of activity.

The truly amazing thing was the way that Lockheed took the Westland Merlin Helicopter, which is already in service with the RAF, Royal Navy, Danish Navy, Canadian Coastguard, Tokyo police, as the basis of the new presidential helicopter, and then need $11bn to redesign it.

It already works. It works extremely well, in conditions far worse than anything they will ever fly the president through. How in the name of all that's holy, does the world's most capable naval helicopter, need $11bn of redesign before one man and his briefcase can sit in the back?

Lockheed started to redesign the transmission, and deleted the Rolls Engines in favour of GE ones.
When Westlands adapted the AH64 Apache to make it capable of fighting in places like the Falklands and Norway, which is the UK's main duty within Nato, they took the very same GE engines out, and put the very same Rolls engines in. Combat pilots in Afghanistan report this as an unmitigated good thing, as Rolls Engine gives a third more "welly". If the Apache benefits from having the Rolls Engine, surely it's a no-brainer to stick with the Rolls in the Presidential transport?

Then the US Navy looked at the advanced carbon fibre fuselage section at the rear of the cabin, and decreed that it had to be redone in aluminium. If the idea is to stop the president being shot down by radar-guided missiles, potentially, how does it help to time-travel the fuselage design backwards by thirty years?

I could understand them spending money on making it work better, but it looks to me as if they are spending money on something that already works, in order to turn it into something that might very well not work.

Then, no doubt, Lockheed will claim it's all Westland's fault...