An issue I've found with developing my OPML mashups - they don't work with Unicode. Grazr displays Unicode perfectly, but I'm having numerous Unicode issues. I'm not the only person to have these issues. 
PZ Myers has a collection of refutations (or 'vivisections') of Jonathan Wells' rubbish new book.
Peter is explaning why theology is not the source for democracy.
TUAW sort of gets it. The reason that Apple aren't bothering with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is because they're thoroughly irrelevant. I spent an enormous amount back in the day on PlayStation and PS2 games. I found value in the CD and DVD game, but the HD realm isn't relevant anymore. Hard drives and networks matter - smartened up DVDs aren't relevant any more. I can't remember the last Hollywood movie I watched. The argument over Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is a bit like the argument over which variety of steam train is best while diesel and electric are waiting in the wings.
Bryan Appleyard: "I just saw Gordon Brown get his bloody kids into the first sentence of an interview as an explanation of his sleepless nights. Oh no, he wasn't losing sleep over his conference speech. Nausea gripped me. George Walden is right - cheap, infantilsing populism is rotting public life."
MySpace is a safe - but boring - space 
I don't know, Kent. If we're playing analogies, then the difference between MySpace's 'dark alley' and New York as 'dark alley' seems artificial if not non-existent. New York City's government and the business who pay tax to it make millions if not billions of dollars enticing kids to buy whatever it is kids buy in New York City. It's owned by a large organisation that doesn't seem in any major way different from a large media company like News International. You are right about the third item you list, but it doesn't seem like a big concern.
The problems that a site like MySpace has aren't going to be solved by technological means - if MySpace locked down their platform like MSN UK did with their chatrooms a few years ago - then everybody loses. MySpace loses because their users - or at least ones with more than a few brain cells - go elsewhere. Then the parents lose, because it becomes harder to track ten social networks than one. The kids gnash their teeth and think that the world has conspired against them having fun.
MySpace has about the same incident rate as any large city. We don't demand that New York City or Boston or London locks down their city and ensures that nothing bad happens within the confines of the city. We hope they take sensible and economical steps towards preventing as much crime as possible. The difference is that if you live in London, yo don't have a choice as to who runs the place - whichever buffoon the rest of the population choose becomes the ruler. But if the users stop liking MySpace, they can go elsewhere. Parents can tell their kids not to use the site if they have cause for concern.
MySpace has more limitations than the web at large. Huge chunks of the site can't be accessed without membership. When people are concerned about MySpace, they are actually concerned about the Internet. The difference is that the Internet doesn't have a puppet-master behind it that you can blame when stuff goes wrong.
What a crap day
I'm back on the daily commute grind - and blogging from the train. Of course, I'm hoping that the delays I've had today (over 20 minutes) aren't a predictor for the future.
On the way back, all the trains are up the spout. If you are travelling to or from London on the South Coast trains (Hastings line, specifically) - be sure to check with National Rail or equivalent.
(Talking of which: wouldn't an hCommute microformat or an xmlCommute format be useful? That way you could easily tag your stuff as referring to a specific train line, bus service or road - we could have an "edge aggregator" for train information. It would certainly save the mobile costs of a lot of people if people texted in delays and then a central aggregator sent out information using XML, e-mail and SMS - a bubble-up, open source traffic and transport problems aggregator.)
All of this wouldn't be a problem if my college hadn't tried to get everyone together for a pointless meeting. That was worth a four hour round trip.
The other people who've been giving me grief today are Orange. Every day I phone up Orange and pay £1 for Internet access. I did so at 10am this morning. Only their computers didn't recognise it, and they've completely wiped out my account of any credit that was on there. Then suddenly everything stops working. I spent 20 minutes on the line with them (thankfully they don't charge by the minute for customer service calls). Apparently their systems haven't updated yet, and I need to phone them back later to get them to fix up the mess that they have made of my account.
If you have a system where you phone a number and they say "this package has been applied to your account" and then they send you an SMS text message to confirm that it's gone through, you would expect this to be the case. Is it not somewhat surprising, then, to be told that it is not?
It's really quite simple - you've got to take packets from my mobile phone and send them out to the 'net and vice versa - and do it affordably. Anything else is irrelevant, and has about as much value to me as sugar does on a turd. (All these train delays are turning me back in to the grumpy old bastard that I used to be).
