America. Home of the free, land of the overreacting bureaucratic shitheads. If you are an American, call your elected representatives and tell them that you'll slice up their face with a razor blade vote against them if they don't vote against HR 5295. 
Oh, and while we're on the trademark trip - it seems that Mike Arrington owns the regex string "TechCru[.{1,2}]h". Beware!
Here's an idea to Apple's foolishness. Let's call it a feedcast. It is using feed technology (ie. RSS) to deliver audio, video and so on. Apple have been annoying me as a customer and as a user . Now they are annoying me in my role as a coder and soon-to-be-feedcaster.
Related - Ophelia Benson: "The interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible and of clerics and of the newspapers and radio and discourse is a kind of person - a person with a lot of labels stuck on such as omnipotent and omniscient, but still a kind of person, who does person-like things, who loves us and pities us and helps and protects us, so that it makes sense to love it and worship it. The other god, the one that created the whole of the universe - can't possibly be like that. No matter how many labels you stick on it, it still just can't be like that. It can't be both transcendent and immanent, it can't be both outside the universe and our loving parent. It's an either-or thing, not a both-and thing." (Either-Or, huh? Has someone dropped Essence of Søren in to Ophelia's cappucino?)
I've got too much to read at the moment - and to be honest, more scientific-philosophic type stuff isn't what I'm really looking for. The Guardian has excerpts from chapter 1, and the BBC has excerpts from chapters 7 and 8. Beyond Dawkins' excellent ability to put the best words in the right order, most of the information is the same stuff that folks like myself and the other bloggers of a non-theistic, rationalist, reality-based bent have been posting for the last few years. Dawkins takes all this information and hopefully catapults it down the throats of the unwitting useful idiots and flappy-lips who allow illogical nonsense and illiberal hoohahs to pass so as to support (most condescendingly) "communities" against the Evil Nasty Elites.
Excellent libertarian rag, Reason Magazine, has an interview with Chris Anderson.
There's not long left to vote in the first round of MyDreamApp. I've voted, and there's some really exciting stuff in there. You even get a free licence key for Pzizz (the 'short nap energizer' application) if you vote.
Ian has put up some video from Howard Rheingold talking about communities, moderation, "collection action theory" and networks. I went along to a meal last night - organised right at the last minute - and it was great fun.
Condolences to Jennifer and Wade. Keera Snoddy passed away yesterday aged just three months. In the last week or so, Keera had a lot of major surgery.
What an irritating old twat Charles Clarke is/was 
I just dug up this little doozey from the unholy archive. Aren't you so glad that Big Ears isn't in charge of deporting undesirables or providing about the most philistine perspective imaginable for the post of Education Secretary?
That said, this article points up the thing I find most comical about politicans. They can go and invade a country and - in effect - sentence many of their citizens who are serving in the military to a fairly certain death. They can give only the lightest of wrist-slaps to Police officers who brutally unload bullets in to innocent electrians on Tube trains - and have the chutzpah to complain about violence on television.
There is too much violence on TV. And that's because there's too much violence in real life. Most of it is caused by politicians.
