Cameron denies personal Trident missile firing iPad app

Prime Minister David Cameron has denied that he will be getting a personalised iPad app for firing Trident missiles styled after his beloved Angry Birds game. Cameron loves to rock the fondleslab so much that he has often mentioned how he likes to sit back at Number 10, playing Angry Birds or watching TV shows like The Killing …

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS

So where's Apple getting their cut from? Will they charge by the launch or by the megatonne?

[nichomach]

Re: FFS

I suggest that they should receive 30% of the warheads...

[Lord Elpuss]

Re: FFS (Nichomach)

<splutter>

f*ing funny!

[Mondo the Magnificent]

Whoah!

If this "UK Nuke App" can only be acquired via Apple's App Store, we'd better kiss our asses goodbye...

[Jop]

If only

He should have an app that gives a summary of the feelings of UK citizens on the many issues that affect us, scraped from blog replies, news article comments and such like.

A modified angry birds is more likely, where you can fling Blair and brown into buildings all day long.

[Si 1]

Re: If only

I would so buy that game.

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS

and we wonder why we hate politicians.

We have a knob spunking 20K on a personal app because he can't be arse to use prebuilt ones, browser book marks and email.

Then with have an asshole shitting out pointless questions about "will there be a iNuke App."

and here we are the pussys, getting shafted by the dick and being to close to be shit on by the assholes

(Credits to Team America)

[James Micallef]

Re: FFS

FFS are you F serious??? You're complaining about 20k for an app that can collate important indicators sourced from multiple information sources and have them neatly presented at the touch of a button? Have you any idea how much money government typically spunks on IT? Or how much full-scale BI solutions cost? Or even how much it would cost to have a staffer trawl the available information and present it in a neat dossier?

£20k is an absolute bargain, even if it doesn't include a big red button

[Crisp]

An Apple Nuke App

I'm sorry, I can only nuke locations within the United States.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: An Apple Nuke App

I'm not sure that that is neccasarily a problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: An Apple Nuke App

Shurely , an iNukeUK app vetted by Apple's app-police would NOT be allowed to Nuke the US of A ?

It would probably have recommendations like Iran , North Korea , and probably still Russia and China in it's top 10 targets.

I'm guessing if Cameron selected the US of A to be nuked, it'd go in to HAL mode and say "Sorry I can't do that for you Dave" , just before alerting Apple's chums in the Pentagon to do a strike on the UK.

[Smallbrainfield]

It all sounds rather preposterous.

Why would a PM pay for an exclusive app to do something he has staff to do for him?

More likely this is a non- story that's just there to wind up the speak your branes crowd.

[Anonymous Coward]

He does, but it's not a apple product

Given the length of time to develop any govermental project, it is strongly rumoured that he will be getting his CE 2.0 launcher device sometime before christmas.

But seriously though, the chap lives in a house that does not even have a door-bell, so I hardly think he will be surfing the cutting edge.

[Loyal Commenter]

Seriously?

"It's already been reported that Cameron is getting a government-overseeing app for the iPad, although other ministers may be able to use this as well. That app, costing a mere £20,000, will put the latest NHS, crime and unemployment figures at his fingertips, allow him to read Civil Service docs on the slab and, of course, pull in real-time data from Google and Twitter."

Is there anything there that a web-browser, PDF reader, and word processing software can't already do? No.

Is there any need at all for a politician to be using a touchscreen tablet-form computer when a (cheaper) laptop will do the job better? No. Unless, of course, politicians are such retards that a proper grown-up laptop is too hard for them. Ah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Seriously?

But tablets are the future! Don't you read the news?

Obviously our pm is so with it he's jumped on the tablet bandwagon mere days after this was reported on the bbc, it proves he's just so current.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

If iPads had been available when "Yes, minister" was produced

I wonder how sir Humphrey would have managed to subvert it. Could have made for some interesting episodes.

[James 100]

App?

Is it really an "iP{hone,ad}" app as such? Presenting this stuff sounds more like a job for an intranet web page/site. Of course, since those can have icons just like native iOS apps now, distinguishing between them may be splitting hairs.

Besides, the App Store doesn't go up to £20,000...

[vic 4]

Re: App?

> since those can have icons just like native iOS apps

Not excalty like them, the corners have to be non round.

[Sutekh]

A Strange Game

The only winning move is not to play..

How about a nice game of angry birds?

[John A Blackley]

A suggestion

Labour MP Tom Blenkinson needs hefty and regular kicks to the 'nads for wasting time and taxpayers' money in asking silly bloody questions.

[reader_uk]

Global Thermal Nuclear War

Wouldnt he just prefer to play a nice game of chess?

[nichomach]

Re: Global Thermal Nuclear War

It's Cameron we're talking about - let's just start off with Tic-Tac-Toe, shall we?

[Anonymous Coward]

£20k is sod all...

£20k for an application which needs to display information culled from various (almost certainly non-comptible) sources is bugger all.

It will need to be:

Project managed

Specified

Written

Tested

Bug Fixed

Have any middleware infrastructure built

Have agreements from the datasources put in place

Go through change management processes

etc.

etc.

[W.O.Frobozz]

Great...

..hope it's more secure than all those celebrity iphones that keep getting hacked.

[SpaMster]

A story about someone denying something that isnt true in the first place, thats internets well spent! Huzzah!

[James Micallef]

Thermonuclear Holocaust

There's an app for that

[Thomas 4]

A glimpse of the future

Out of the radioactive holocaust, as civilisation freezes under a nuclear winter, vault dwellers will ponder the meaning of the words that led to mankind's demise.

"Bloody Siri."

[blearrgh]

Re: A glimpse of the future

Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Siri begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. GMT, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug ...

[alain williams]

Dr Strangelove would be disappointed

we have the technology but don't use it as he would have wished!

[Bodger]

Shall we play a game?

Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?

[hugo tyson]

The Secret State

The PM cannot order a nuclear strike; he or she can only authorise nuclear release. The military command(ers) order it after the PM has authorised it.

[Parax]

Scorched Earth

Thank you Wendell T Hicken.

[vic 4]

Time to play angry birds

Wish I was in a position to have as much free time, although I could probably find something better to do. Thought running a country might have been more demanding.

[David Perry 2]

Re: Time to play angry birds

If Hugh Grant's portrayal is anything to go by, there's so much time to constantly think about then go carol singing all the way down a straight so you get to, grab Martine McCutcheon. She is quite nice though :D

[jim0bob]

£20,000?

Surely an iNuke app would be free to download and have no real use, but have the ability to in app purchase each warhead for a billion Dollars?

[Vance P. Frickey]

A 20,000 pound project for presenting policy via an iPad? Really?

Filtering all those information sources for significance is something that just about every stakeholder in government (any government) would like to do. It sounds like just determining who gets to do that would cost more than 20,000 pounds.

Here in the States, our upper-level politicians (the President, etc) have very limited-circulation (classified) "newspapers" like the "National Intelligence Daily," edited by people directly responsible to senior staff, in which hot topics are dealt with by undersecretaries or others with direct responsibility for specific governmental issues. There's some indication that the US Government is moving toward a "wiki" article approach in which articles impacting government policy issues are maintained online, contrarian opinions on issues can be presented and identified as such, and articles on any particular issue can be updated with a change log showing what previous copies of the document said.

However, as in WIkipedia itself, the potential for mis-editing a wiki either unintentionally or on purpose to change the text of a policy wiki (the reasons for doing this being obvious) is great unless moderation to changes is applied, which could itself be a source of institutional bias.

It seems very unlikely to me that a twenty-thousand pound IT project is likely to address all the issues I've raised or others unique to Her Majesty's Government. (I speak as someone who worked in IT in Great Britain briefly and knows what 20,000 pounds will buy in terms of IT consultant time).

[Vance P. Frickey]

Whatever this article is, it ain't journalism...

...the headline and lead-in imply that Cameron was asked about and denied that an iPad app was developed or under development to handle nuclear command and control. The reader has to read all the way to the end of the article to find out the question didn't touch on nuclear C3I at all.

I know that a lot of these articles are semi-humorous, and I appreciate the humor, most times. This goes past humor to flirt with propaganda and/or incompetence in journalism.