Blair:

Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org)

He dragged us kicking and screaming into an illegal war then rode roughshod over thousand year old civil liberties before stepping down to make millions 'at a time of his own choosing' - Now Tony Blair is back... and he wants my Blackberry.

Let me explain. If I should dare pop into London's Piccadilly branch of Waterstones when he appears on the 8th of September - not just to buy HIS book you understand, but any book - I'll be required to check my phone into a "holding point." Bag as well. The terms and conditions for entry listed on their website continue. "There will be no customer photography" "There will be no personal dedications." Perhaps best of all: "Wrsitbands remain the property of Waterstones and will be removed after the signing" ...

Congratulations Waterstones: pettiness, confiscation, restricting the dissemination of information and making grandma's Christmas Present a little less original. All good work for a bookshop. No news yet on whether the masses will be forced to don orange jumpsuits as well.

[...]

So I urge you. If you happen to be in London’s Piccadilly on the 8th, to pop down and insist on being allowed in - phone, bag, jacket and all – to buy a copy of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ or better still John Kampfner’s ‘Blair’s Wars.’ This man still thinks he’s the messiah but the mess in Afghanistan, the carnage in Iraq, the shame of Guantanamo and the CCTV cameras all went ahead with his support. The latest estimate from the group Iraq Body Count suggests a minimum 97,461 civilians lost their lives in Iraq as a result of the war he started. NINETY SEVEN THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE. There will be no personal dedications. NINETY SEVEN THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE. Wristbands remain the property of Waterstones.

Brilliant stuff from James as always. Please, go read the whole article.

The trouble with rounded personalities is that they don't tessellate. I think I get a lot more purchase on the nooks and crannies of life with my spiky one than those poor, well-adjusted sods who are sent out into a world completely unprepared for their goodwill.

Good article by David Mitchell, but I thought that this quote in particular was brilliant.

This concept design for Panasonic's 'Note' headphones, whilst strangely reminiscent of Apple's recent packaging, goes one better by using the headphones themselves to make the shape of a pair of quavers. How cool is that? Clever and simple. I like.

LOVE IT!

After testing Apple's iPhone 4 against competing HTC and Nokia models in a remote area on the edge of Norwegian carrier Telenor's mobile coverage, the county's largest paper has concluded that its antenna design is "just as good and bad as competitors," rather than suffering any defect.

It is not known if Kim Jong-il is a fan of Justin Bieber's music

Best photo caption ever. Well done BBC! :-)

I'm not defending the iPhone 4's issues with reception when held in certain ways - I'm certainly hoping that the rumours of a firmware fix to improve matters are true. But Nokia may really have shot themselves in the foot by posting a blog on their official website mocking the iPhone 4. They say you can hold a Nokia any way you like; "you’re free to hold your Nokia device any way you like. And you won’t suffer any signal loss. Cool, huh?".

Yeah, that does sound pretty cool! So why is it that the E71 (the device pictured in their blog post) comes with instructions saying, "avoid touching the antenna area... [this] affects the communication quality". Hmmm... sound familiar? How about the scores of videos on YouTube showing exactly the same issues have existed with Nokias (and other phones) for years?

I'll re-iterate, I'm not saying the iPhone 4 is perfect, but seriously Nokia, people in glass houses should not throw stones!

Why is it though, that I actually enjoyed this nonsense? It really did make me feel quite cheap, that I was lapping up something written to a formula with me as their target audience (actually 16 year olds were probably their target audience, which makes this whole thing even more shameful).  But it was absolutely a production line movie and I was buying into it.

Is it the same for men with crap action films?

Loving my friend Sarah's take on cinema! The full article is here.

Tweetie 3.0, or as Twitter would like you to call it, Twitter for iPhone is the worst software update I can ever remember downloading. Generally, updates make things better, not worse. Twitter for iPhone adds nothing useful to Tweetie’s base. It actually breaks Tweetie. And I feel fine calling it an “upgrade” because this “new” iPhone app overwrites your exisiting Tweetie 2. I can forgive poor design choices because the corporate overlords who bought your soul told you that you had to include their featured tweets and suggested users, but when you force your shiny new free turd on people and overwrite better software that they actually paid money for, you are taking your credibility and stomping all over it. Cause that’s what gets me more than anything. I’m going to run down some specific interface stuff that doesn’t benefit anyone but Twitter, but it’s this forced upgrade that kills me.

Full article here. It's a bit full on, but I totally agree... I want Tweetie back! Twitter for iPhone is worse than what came before, which is especially a shame as it's still better than anything else out there, meaning we're stuck with a worse selection of Twitter apps than we had a month ago. Boo!

It's an old point that's been made many times, but I did quite like this. In particular, the phrase, "I believe in morality, which is doing right regardless of what I'm told... not in religion, which is doing what I am told regardless of what is right."

the BBC contributed at least £7.7billion to the UK economy in 2008/2009 - which generates at least two pounds of economic value for every pound of the licence fee

A nice little soundbite to throw at those who suggest that funding the BBC is a waste of public money.

Frankly, the way Google has handled the On2 acquisition and the release of VP8 simply has me puzzled. Google's not a bunch of dumb folks and I don't see why they would rush an inferior product out to the market, make it open-source and then hope it would unseat H.264 all while not getting any input from developers before the initial first release, even if it is beta. If Google permits changes to the spec and allows the developer community to help fix some of the glaring issues with VP8, I could see that approach. But at no time during Google's presentation yesterday did they frame the release of VP8 that way or ask for help from the development community to fix issues that they must know exist.

Whilst the Google Android OS is growing rapidly, the market for paid apps is just not there yet. In the paid apps space it’s 1/10th the size of the iPhone market and there are problems with fragmentation, payment systems & even multiple stores. This makes it cumbersome for users to purchase applications & makes it really difficult for developers to be rewarded for their efforts.

The amount of people prepared to pay for an application on Android pales in comparison to the iPhone. I don’t blame the consumer, just take a look at the Android Market website.

You can not:

• Search it
• See the price
• Read any reviews
• Download applications

Yes, I know that the Android way is to download on the phone directly (and this is what many do on the iPhone) but don’t you think as a potential customer I am going look at the Android Market website to see what my app options are?

Based on some of the email exchanges I have had, it’s very interesting to note that some people are buying Android phones (even switching from iPhone to Android) based purely on philosophical grounds. They certainly aren’t doing it for the games titles, because the choice & quality on Android compared to the iPhone platform is abysmal.

One person comments as to why they switched to Android…

“Unlike apple is giving what they want, rather than what people want”

People don’t have to buy Apple products, no one is forcing them too. People are buying Apple products because it is what they want. They like the ease of use, ease of app purchasing & many other things about the platform. Apple are not infallible, one may argue they over step the line with what they allow or don’t allow; but it’s their platform and they can do whatever they like with it. Just as SkyTV can decide what sports they will or won’t show, it’s their channel.

NEW YORK—While millions of young, tech-savvy professionals already use services like Facebook and Twitter to keep in constant touch with friends, a new social networking platform called Foursquare has recently taken the oh, fucking hell, can't some other desperate news outlet cover this crap instead?

Hehehehehe. Click above for the full article. If you can be arsed. It's funny.

Head on over to reclaimprivacy.org for a nice little tool to automatically check your Facebook privacy settings, for those of us who think Zuckerberg is playing it a bit fast and loose with our data...

I would say that the average Conservative, while 100% wrong, is no more than 30% actual evil. It gives you something to work with.

Fucking brilliant! Read the whole thing. Now!
(via the lovely @kateru).

So it came down to Tory minority govt, or LibCon coalition.  In other words, either an unstable government that limps on for a few months, does some populist things and then calls a snap election, or a strong coalition government that includes Lib Dem policies in it’s programme.  Either unchecked Conservatism, or Liberal conservatism. Either no major constitutional change, or fixed term parliaments, a House of Lords elected under PR and a referendum on AV for the Commons.  Do you see where I’m going here? Try as I might, I can’t blame the Lib Dem MPs for making the decision they did.

Simon Hughes made a point last night that I think is the most key. Having banged on about proportional representation for god knows how long, Nick Clegg having repeatedly stated, as I referred to in my previous post, his ambition to be Prime Minister – we can’t then balk at the first chance we’ve had to govern for over 90 years. This is our chance to prove we can do it. And more broadly, it’s up to us to show that coalitions – even with the most unlikely partners – can work, if you’re grown up about it.

My good friend Sarah has beaten me to the task of writing up some thoughts on our new government. And she's done it pretty darned well. Full bloggythingy here.