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t was supposed to deal an initial, crippling blow to that other non-state Islamist militia, the one based on Palestinian soil itself, that was becoming an increasingly coherent, disciplined and effective fighting force - and, though still lagging way behind it, more and more like the Hizbullah which it sought to emulate, and which, together with Iran, had helped to arm and train it. The missile was Hamas’s trademark weapon too. For years it had been lobbing the primitive, home-made, short-range Qassam into the Israeli border town of Sderot. But of late it had introduced longer-range types that could reach such major southern towns as Ashkelon, Ashdod or Beersheba. The idea behind the inaugural onslaught, said an Israeli defence analyst, had been ‘to kill as many people connected to Hamas as possible’ in the hope of persuading its leaders to ‘surrender or plead for a ceasefire’. That was why, ‘in planning to attack buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, the Israeli Defence...

EPILOGUE Obaman Peace — Or Seventh War? Coming hard on the heels of Lebanon 2006, Gaza 2009 was yet another and yet more dramatic episode, not merely in the Arab-Israeli conflict but in that interconnected, multi-faceted Middle Eastern mega-crisis of which it is the heart. Could anyone doubt that without some new and truly serious diplomatic action to stop the rot, not only would things get worse, they would do so at a quickening pace? If there was any quarter in the world that might - and after decades of unseriousness it is as well to stress the might — possess the means, and above all the will, to undertake one it had to be the new American administration. This is not the place for an armchair contribution to the ‘peace process’, or rather to that industry - of debates and seminars, policy papers and punditry, the outpourings of think tanks and academia - which, in addition to the practical exertions of governments and international officialdom, it endlessly engenders. Suffice it t...

Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data. This is expected to improve response times and save bandwidth.[1] Edge computing is an architecture rather than a specific technology,[2] and a topology- and location-sensitive form of distributed computing. The origins of edge computing lie in content distributed networks that were created in the late 1990s to serve web and video content from edge servers that were deployed close to users.[3] In the early 2000s, these networks evolved to host applications and application components on edge servers,[4] resulting in the first commercial edge computing services[5] that hosted applications such as dealer locators, shopping carts, real-time data aggregators, and ad insertion engines.[4] Internet of things (IoT) is an example of edge computing. A common misconception is that edge and IoT are synonymous.[6] The edge computing infrastructure Definition Edit One defi...

It was a crisp September day in 2015 when Timothy Young arrived at Houten, an unremarkable Dutch commuter town, determined to collect an almost 400-year-old debt. He carried a case containing a fragile piece of goatskin covered in dense writing and numbers. It was a bond, issued in 1648 by a group of Dutch landowners, who managed the dikes on a stretch of the river Lek. They had borrowed 1,000 guilders from a local merchant and the bond explained that, in return for the loan, the merchant would receive a 5 per cent interest payment every year — for ever. Although the terms of this so-called “perpetual” bond have changed over centuries of wars, depressions, revolutions and new currencies, it is still a valid liability of Stichtse Rijnlanden, a Dutch utility, and is now owned by Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Young, a curator at Yale, was collecting €136 of interest from a delighted Dutch official, who had made a giant cheque to commemorate the payment. For Young, the biggest thr...