• Market Yourself An iParadigm – “The part I love the most is that the people making the ‘just market your app!’ comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store.” Making your application visible is hard.
• Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn’t work. Worth reading the linked articles.
• Robbery suspect left his address – “Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque.” Brilliant.
• Reliving Cuba’s revolution – Interesting to see this on “film.” They wouldn’t let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
• What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – “Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light.” I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
• Internet sites could be given ‘cinema-style age ratings’, Culture Secretary says – “Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms].” The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that’s easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
• Happy Birthday Earthrise – “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn’t that something…” Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
• Fearless: Apple’s Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – “In Apple’s estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is ‘as soon as possible.’ Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that’s exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again.”
• If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I’m into Voodoo and Taoism…

George W. Bush stars in the latest (and little publicised) in the gory Saw movie franchise. In it he discovers some interesting new “enhanced interrogation” techniques and finds that getting out, with no recourse to legal representation or trial, is, quite literally, torture.

• A humanist discussion of… ‘creationism’ – A nice rebuttal of some of the more common “arguments” against evolution.
• Classics in Lego – Famous photographs in Lego. Fantastic!
• A shaming victory on 42 days – The governments absurd law, allowing the Police to detail people for up to 42 days without charge, is not popular. Just hoping the Lords send it back with some rude comments attached.

• French version of The Apprentice ’not allowed to fire contestants’ – Against my better judgement I got quite into this years (UK) Apprentice. The French version sounds even more entertaining…
• No ID Card Function Creep? Pull the Other One – “Now, tell me again why we should trust the UK government over ID cards?”
• Burma cyclone: Regime turns back US aid ships – The Burmese military junta puts their own position above the lives of over two million people. Sick.

• Amnesty unveils shock ‘waterboarding’ film – This video makes it pretty clear why waterboarding is torture and not just an “enhanced interrogation” technique as George Bush would have us believe. Very nasty. (Don’t watch over dinner.)
• DRM: The Gift that Keeps on Taking – “Now, people, aren’t you really glad you bought DRM’d music”
• Free your mind – How can a writer make money when distribution is free…

• The Cost of E-Voting – One of the many reasons that I am against e-voting machines: the cost. “The cost … increased 179 percent per voter on average.” All that money for a less reliable system. Bargain!
• Change we can believe in – I didn’t realise that we were in line for some new coins. They look surprisingly good, certainly much better than the new US notes. (Originally from daringfireball.net)
• Bali bombings: A sister’s search for justice – I’ve always said that it’s much easier to be against capital punishment when it’s just an abstract idea. Here the sister of one of the Bali bombing’s victims argues why she’s still against it.

• eBayer invites buyers to rip him off – It does seem that eBay has become a victim of its own success. Having said that, some of the ways that they’re trying to tackle fraudulent users are clearly bonkers.
• Japan MPs moot halt to executions – Hopefully this will move from “moot” to law, and then from temporary to permanent.
• Designing What’s Right for Consumers – Is it really so hard to design consumer electronics? The manufacturers say it is. Everyone else seems to disagree.
• WordPress 2.3.3 – I’ve upgraded to the current version of WordPress. As ever, if you spot anything amiss please let me know!

• Afghan Student Sentenced to Death After Downloading Report – Good to see that the invasion of Afghanistan has resulted in more freedom for the locals…
• Forget passports – teachers and kids are the new ID card targets – Despite the loss of personal data and despite the fact that they will not (and cannot) do what the Government says they will, the ID Card scheme is still not completely dead.
• The True Cost of SMS Messages – “How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.”

• When is a pencil and paper better than a computer? – And here’s another piece about technology and voting in the States. This time (blatant self-promotion alert) it’s one that I wrote last year…
• Follow the Money – Daringfireball links to this “forgotten” Cringely article about the US voting system. He’s right: low technology can be the answer!
• Pointui, the definitive user interface for mobile devices. – Been playing around with this on my HTC P4350. First impressions: great. I love the fact that I am less reliant on the stylus — one of my main problems with Windows Mobile.
• Make the defence of Human Rights your New Year?s Resolution – “We must all try very much harder to support Human Rights from attack, whether that is from religious or cultural forces.”

The Catholic Church today caused widespread controversy when it issued a statement urging the Government to overturn a law made two hundred years ago.

Clive Adams, standing outside Saint Johns Cathedral in Norwich, read the statement: “The Catholic Church is unable to comply with the Slave Trade Act, the 1807 Act of Parliament abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. This law is incompatible with the teachings of the Bible and we cannot in clear conscience operate under such restrictions. We ask the government to consider an opt-out clause in revised legislation.”¹ Adams, an unpaid volunteer reporting to Cardinal Michael Osborn, denied that he himself was a slave.