When comparing free market and socialist-leaning think tanks, it's the capitalists who prefer Apache. Could it be due to the name being used for a military helicopter, or could it be that it's a reliable, highly-powered server being offered for 0% of the price of the Microsoft equivalent? You decide! Reminds me, though: whatever happened to all that eGovernment stuff we've been promised since the time the e-Envoy (WTF?) was appointed. It's vapourware. 
Media Watch Watch are reporting the latest silliness from self-flagellation club, Opus Dei, and their desire to censor the movie version of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Apparently, children may be harmed by it's distortion of history. This is so rich coming from the Catholic church... 
It looks like Jean Charles de Menezes' murderers (part of the army of underachievers-in-uniform brigade we call the Metropolitan Police) could finally be charged. This is a pretty much open and shut murder case, right? Wrong. If you wear a police uniform, you are exempt from the same laws as the rest of the country.
Dr. Orac has found that wretched Kevin Trudeau's profile over on match.com. Cruel? Perhaps. Funny? Definitely.
BBC News has an article on university entrace: 450,369 new students last year, up by about 28,000. The thing I don't get is the way that they are calling the new fees "top-up fees". It's a political euphemism of the worst kind. What is actually happening is that fees are being tripled. They are not being "topped-up". The average student will have to pay three times as much.
Kosso seems to think that Dave will counter-switch "if Microsoft come up with something good", and then suggests that "Robert Scoble should hook Dave up with an Alienware bling-mutha-pc with Vista running on it". It's not about Alienware producing something good. They do. It's about Microsoft producing something good. It's the software that's the key, not the hardware.
Nick Matzke is discussing whether or not the DI want ID in the classroom. Their position changes based on what's convenient, not what's true or logical.
Steve Reuland has an excellent post on ID and falsification.
Boing Boing are pointing towards a very cool primer for librarians on the dangers of DRM: "content owners fear that once an unprotected copy of a copyrighted digital work becomes available, it can and will be distributed universally on the Internet, and its distribution will destroy, or at least severely diminish, its ability to generate revenue".
I've written before on the annoyance with FeedBurner. I also got a nice email from Matt Shobe - and I've promised that I will try and hack up NewsRiver so that the blog posting feature translates the URL. I'm just posting again to say: I'm using GPRS, and this is especially annoying when you're on a shaky dial-up connection. But of course. It's all for you, dear reader.
Pat Hayes has a fun post pointing out the silliness of Rob Crowther who tries to condemn the Reverend Barry Lynn for having the same position that the Discovery Institute later adopt. Blogging etiquette? Like, maybe, apologising to your readers and Rev Lynn for being stupid fuck-ups? No, keep waving the flag for the army of sillies and Kool-Aid drinkers without needing to be constricted by logic and reason. Those fucking things have never concerned anyone in the Movement in the past.
Cannabis is to remain a Class C. Of course we should legalise it now!
Ophelia Benson has a good quote from Robert Pennock's testimony in Kitzmiller.
Majikthise is reporting that the faux-"philosophy" class taught by Sharon Lemburg in California has been cancelled. "I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach". Thankfully, the school board thought differently. The Pharyngulans are having, rightly, some fun with this.
Anil Dash is discussing different types of blogging software (with the view to finding a solution to Rebecca Blood's blogging woes). She sounds like she could use the OPML Editor perfectly. It's absolutely the right solution to organising posts. I have mine in the same sort of style as Dave does - titled stuff at the bottom, untitled stuff being added reverse-chronologically at the top (and a file called Draft Posts.opml where I draft new ones). If you want an online solution try iJot.
Chris Pirillo on why your next PC will be a Mac. Dude, my next Mac will be a PC. That's right, next week I am pre-ordering a 1.83Ghz MacBook Pro, which will replace my now rather dead 600Mhz iBook (although my old laptop will still serve some purpose, perhaps as some kind of OPML Community Server). I don't think Pirillo is right with regard to iTunes. I prefer the Apple pricing model to the Napster one. Why should I pay £10 a month if I only want to grab the occasional track from iTunes? The iTunes model is the height of simplicity, and is perfect for those who are either unable or not wanting to commit to a monthly pricing model. Will I put Windows on my Mac? Perhaps. I only really use Windows for gaming and Publisher. I'm not sure that it's worth it.
So, the academies aren't doing well. There's a surprise. Why, oh why, did the government think that handing over control, for virtually no capital investment, of schools to second hand car dealers with a penchant for creationism might improve academic standards?
Mobile Phone Protesters Are Fucking Morons 
Sorry for the continued obscenity (whatever) but this point needs to be made.
The anti-mobile masts people are so totally out of touch with reality, they might as well go the whole hog and become creationists or anti-vax zealots. These people are conspiracy theorists of the worst kind.
Apparently, evil mobile phone companies are preying on children and giving them brain cancer through radio signals. Just think about that for a moment. That's what you have to accept as an unquestionable tenet of the anti-mobile faith.
Then those nasty scientists come along and demonstrate there's no risk of brain cancer from mobile phone usage. They then say things like that the research "doesn't really prove anything". Well, gee, we've got an 'A' student here for philosophy of science. Yes, Mr. Philips, you cannot prove that there is no link. You cannot prove anything in science - that's for mathematicians and logicians.
What you can do is make an inference based on evidence. Then your colleagues can criticise you for not having enough evidence, and present counter-evidence and the suchlike. With mobile phones, what we've had is numerous studies which demonstrate no link between the alleged condition and phone usage. This isn't proof that there isn't a link. It's a pretty good demonstration that we shouldn't take claims that there is at face value.
Instead, the arguments against mobile phone masts are, in order of ridiculousness: they don't look nice. We don't really know how they work. They cause cancer! In children! Think of the children!
The only one of those that has any real validity is the first one. The fake trees they use look silly. That's it. So improve the design.
The argument that we shouldn't put up phone masts because we don't know how they work is pretty silly. We do know how they work. It's this funny thing called radio waves. You know, like with television and radio and wifi and Bluetooth and the suchlike. It's really not that complicated.
The studies we've seen so far show that there is no demonstrable link between cancer and phone usage. And one paper has suggested that if there were to be a link, then it would be exarcerbated by lack of masts. Got that? If your phone is pumping out lots of radio waves, and you're worried about that, the best way to cut down on the power of the waves is to put up more masts. Because then, Einsteins-in-training, the handset doesn't have to pump out as much power to get signal.
In the meantime, we now have, to use the current verbiage of our elected officials, "anti-social behaviour" from these anti-mast idiots. In a town near my home, they had something approaching a sit-down protest in a fucking church. Yeah, all these concerned parents stormed in to a church, sat their asses down and refused to move. Why? Because the vicar was going to put a mast inside the church's spire.
Now, I like people hassling members of the clergy. But they should do it for their repugnant theology, not for their embrace of technology.
What we create when we go apeshit over masts is a society that's more concerned about fighting ghosts than facing reality. Imagine, for a second, what would happen if I were to slip over on the ice. In civilised places, I could pull my phone out and call for help. Not being able to call for help creates disasters.
And, simpler than that. I live in a dead zone for everything. We have to have satellite just to watch television. Our television reception, before we got satellite, required the use of a big old reception amplifier. Our mobile reception is almost totally non-existent. Why should these people ban me from using technology I've bought and paid for because of their irrational delusions?
Mobile phone protestors are preventing technological progress based on superstitious fears of the new and non-existent demon within. Government (who got all that money from the 3G licences) and big business are plotting to give our kids cancer! If you accept that, you might as well accept some of these: the earth is 6,000 years old, the MMR jab causes autism, irreducibly complex biological systems can only be produced by Yahweh and homeopathy is scientifically justified. Just stop pushing your crappy, non-scientific horseshit as the basis for public policy. And don't come crying to me when you need to call an ambulance in a dead zone, because I will only say: "I told you so, fucker."
Netvibes is a portal
Kent Newsome has a review of Web 2.0 applications. I'd agree with Flickr, del.icio.us and Gmail unconditionally. All three rule. Bloglines ain't bad either.
Writely is a pretty good idea, but it still lacks some of the things I most value about offline writing: outlines, BibTeX support, all the nice twiddly bits of LyX.
But I still don't get (a) why we define sites like Netvibes and My Yahoo as Web 2.0; and (b) why anyone would bother using them.
The point about RSS is that you are able to read 300 newsfeeds and not be hassled when one of them doesn't have anything on them.
I don't get why we have home pages. They're personalised portals. Nothing more, nothing less.
Portals sucked. News readers do not. What exactly is there not to understand about this?
Update: Kent Newsome brought me to task, and I've clarified what I meant in his comments section. See tommorow's post.
