There’s a kind of balance in the fact that, having been criticised widely criticised for only talking a good game before his election as President, Barack Obama finds himself being criticised whenever he only plays a good game. Despite the relief of Bush being gone, some people seem to have an almost desperate need for…
Monthly Archives: March 2011
The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Anyone seeking to understand why the world’s trouble spots don’t fall over themselves in admiration for the West should find plenty of reasons in this distressing article in Rolling Stone magazine. Truly sickening stuff….
“The UN Shifts Priority from Peace to People”
There’s an excellent opinion piece by Thomas Darnstädt in De Spiegel which neatly summarises both the importance and the danger of intervening in Libya: The intervention of some European countries and the United States in Libya’s conflict marks a turning point in international relations: The world community has shown that it values human rights over…
I don’t know who you are. Just where you live.
If you’re somewhere between 8 pm and 5 am or 7am, it’s probably where you reside .. What’s cool about this is we collect no personally identifiable information. The technology community, otherwise quite fond of the whole logic thing, manages some impressive intellectual acrobatics when arguing in favour of their self-interest. The above example is…
Re-defining who is a friend
This is a time of real uncertainty and threat in Israel, and what we saw at the hearing is part of a larger trend of Israel turning in on itself. It is redefining who is a Jew, redefining who is a citizen and now redefining who is a friend. The quote above comes from Jeremy…
Fairer Fridays: Playing the long game
(One of a series of regular posts on the run up to the AV referendum on May 5th. As the post makes clear, I’m in favour of voting Yes. For those whom it concerns, I believe the question is either a choice between FPTP and AV – or between standing still and electoral reform –…
Women shouldn’t need to hide behind a screen
Gina Trapani (founding editor of the wonderful LifeHacker blog) has written an excellent article on women in technology. There is much excellent advice regarding inclusivity, and some great links. My headline about hiding behind a screen is a bit of hyperbole, but it makes sense in the context of some of the comments on the…
On the dangers of implying women are incapable
I really don’t know how to take opinion pieces on the impact of government cuts on women, such as Zoe Williams‘ in the Guardian. In defending women, they accidentally (I hope) imply that women were hired by Labour not because they might be good at the job, but because of a top-down mandate to improve…
Why Women Rule The Internet
Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce. The ongoing debate about women in tech has been missing a key insight. If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you can rock the world. Excellent article on TechCrunch on how patterns…
Software patents: apparently the internet changes everything
The patent world isn’t really something navigable by common sense alone. Like copyright, privacy, and every other area being reinvented by the internet, it has long become a playground for lawyers, who build strange labyrinths for themselves, as oblivious to users as users are to them. From CrunchGear, a great example of how software patents…