What is it about school shootings that brings out the cranks? I mean the left has 'em and the right. Why can't we be sorry for the families, sad for the dead and outraged that a man wants to shoot kids without having to put bullshit politico-cultural crap on top? 
Some advice - use clean URLs, goddamnit. I'm a really huge fan of mod_rewrite. Of course, I have this belief about how technology works - there is a consistent item called Junk. Junk is all the stuff that's difficult to keep clean. You have to put the Junk somewhere. You either put the Junk in the URL, or you put it in the database or in a whole load of XML, or you put it in the htaccess. I choose to put most of my Junk in the htaccess.
Don't they get it? Read this Techdirt article and then reflect: education works worst when forced. Kids playing video games at school will be just as ineffective at teaching them anything as anything else they do at school.
ID's scientific research programme? Secret!
The BBC are also reporting on a new Nielsen study saying that 40% of online Britons use RSS but don't know about it. I still don't buy the "tech industry is filled with so many acronyms" line of bullshit. For every RSS there is an ABS. For every XML there's a VCR. If people can handle ABS brakes, they can handle RSS news.
Steve Rubel has found a mobile Wikipedia. That's going in my Palm Pilot's bookmarks.
Andrew Sullivan needs to look at how Google Talk does it's thang.
BBC on the mobile market 
It's interesting that the biggest criticism made of the Web 2.0 sphere is how people who write about it - from Mike Arrington on down (dare I say?) - constantly distort the reality of the space.
Bloggers, the story goes, are pumping up the bubble uncritically. Arrington's blog gets criticised for focusing on small, interesting companies (even though TechCrunch gives Microsoft - hardly a small company - undue coverage considering how dull the vast majority of the Windows Live services are).
Why is the same level of cynicism not payed to the mobile space - and more importantly, the mainstream media coverage of the mobile space?
Take a look at the BBC News coverage of the slow down in mobile handset sales, even despite new markets in the developing world.
The cure - the Beeb suggest - is mobile TV. Funny that - a broadcaster suggesting that the cure for the mobile market slowdown is some cobbled together standard (DVB-H) that's controlled by the existing players.
Why are people going to pay for mobile TV as opposed to TV downloaded over their home connections and then loaded on to their phones or portable devices. I mean, mobile TV has a few little physical barriers to get over - tunnels, slower bandwidth networks and so on.
The DVB standard is going to be as irrelevant as the argument over Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. YouTube, Google Video, video podcasts and so on are where it's at - they're more entertaining and not locked down by some Goliath player.
Where is the evolution to mobile TV? Why aren't we getting MP3s on our phones at the moment? Too expensive to transfer and the software sucks far, far more than iTunes could ever suck.
