Spy drones: Coming to a highway near you?

Sure, this story is from the U.K., but since some highways already warn of speeder surveillance by aircraft, spy drones would be no surprise at all here.

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

I've been surprised that RFID chips haven't been placed in license plates yet.  This would eliminate the need to have a separate IPass unit for the toll roads, and make it simpler to do those cameras at intersections.

Does modern railroad gauge go back to charioteers?

There's some very interesting stuff about chariot wheels and railroad gauge here:

http://www.spikesys.com/Trains/st_gauge.html

particularly the post by Mr. A. W. Worth:

"Chariots were pretty well technologically obsolete by the time of the Romans, because they had developed horses that were big enough to ride. If you go back 1000 years before that, though, to the late bronze age, the time of Troy, the horses were too small to take the weight of a man in armour, and chariots were the ultimate weapon of warfare."

Worth also notes that it's not the Romans who came up with this width, but the earlier Persians.

Sufficiently Advanced

The original:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

Version 2:

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy.
Peter Boulding, internet post, 2008, re curious handling of the Ivins anthrax case.

[I received a comment that Peter was probably quoting Terry Pratchett; I haven't verified this, but it certainly sounds Prachett-like. Wikipedia quotes something very similar as Grey's law. This spot says it's Riddell's Law]

The picture above shows the perils of automated translation software. Or maybe it's an anti-Chinese conspiracy.