- Blog
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Broadband viewing habits
Trying not to gender-type my kids, tonight we watched the following videos on the Powerbook at bedtime (when we really should have been reading The Twits): Avril Lavigne’s Sk8er Boy and Losing Grip; NASA’s amazing, speeded-up video of Discovery spinning in orbit to provide astronauts aboard the space station with a good view of its…
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It’s a Digital Rights Barbershop Quartet
Danny O’Brien thinks we might need a ‘digital rights’ organisation here in Britain. Something like the American EFF. He’s put his money where his mouth is and started a pledge that requires 1,000 signups by Xmas (and is about halfway there). I don’t disagree. Liberty, as hazily defined by Britain’s unwritten, common-law masterpiece of a…
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Causality and Morality
I must be getting old. Don’t try telling me the London bombings were ’caused’ by the Iraq war or Blair’s entrainment with the neo-cons or the lies about WMD or whatever. Those arguments – nicely wrapped in condemnation for the bombings themselves, of course – leave me cold. They’re morally void. And an abuse of…
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Sardar in the Statesman
You’ll be wanting to read Ziauddin Sardar’s excellent, really thought-provoking The struggle for Islam’s soul about Islam’s obligations after the London bombs and the religion’s historic predisposition to violence from the New Statesman. You might need to pay for a 24 hours subscription to do so but I’d say it’s worth it (and you can…
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This is how they make business myths in America
If I remember the sequence correctly, plucky little Pipex (Britain’s first proper, commercial ISP) was bought by UUNet (America’s first proper, commercial ISP). UUNet was subsequently bought by MCI (America’s Maverick number 3 post-break-up telco), scouting round for an entry to the strange, new world of unmetered bits, which was subsequently bought by Worldcom (America’s…
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The lost leading the lost
The young men who attacked London last week are pitiable – profoundly lost to humanity. Theirs isn’t a religion, nor a cause. It’s a sacrifice cult, a bloody creed designed to glorify not God but a millionaire demagogue called Osama Bin Laden and a bankrupt, history-less ideology from the fringes of world culture. Five hundred…
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40° coloureds/cottons
This is how you kill a Sony Ericsson K700i.
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Citizens censored?
Helen Boaden, the BBC’s head of news, quoted in The Guardian, says that: “Within minutes of the first blast we had received images from the public,” says Boaden. “We had 50 images within an hour. Now there are thousands. We had a gallery of still photographs from the public online, and they were incredibly powerful.”…
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I suppose it was inevitable
The Daily Mail’s RSS feed is up so, you’ll be happy to know, you can now read all about tidal waves of dirty immigrants, neighbours from hell, meddling bureaucrats and interesting new diseases in an aggregator of your choice.