Nice to see government forces doing something with such elegance as the rescue of hostages from FARC. The thing I like about it is the way the government troops convinced the FARC members that they were part of the terrorist organisation and were transferring the hostages. This enabled them to just walk the hostages into helicopters and fly them away without a shot being fired. It's such a classic movie trick, usually played by people who have no resources in the face of vastly superior firepower. In this case, it seems to be because the hostage holders were under strict orders to kill the hostages if they even suspected an attack. Still, I'm surprised to see it happen so effectively in the real world.
Meanwhile the NZ IRD seems to have under-spec'ed the system they use to host their online annual tax return website. After 3 attempts to get it to process my data entered on the first page, I now can't even load the first page. I suspect people who need to get their return done tonight (it's due tomorrow) are thrashing somewhat. I would mind less if the pages didn't take 10 minutes to fail each time.
Posted by carla at July 6, 2008 11:01 PM