You know, I hate it when people don’t apologise when they say something stupid and insulting. NYDailyNews.com has a story about Burger King’s CEO, Bernando Hees, where he recalled his days working on an MBA in the UK:

The food is terrible and the women are not very attractive. Here in Chicago, the food is good and you are known for your good-looking women.

Unsurprisingly, the remark has pissed off a lot of people. Since Burger King’s food isn’t exactly of a high quality, Hees has been called a hypocrite; and he’s vexed women—Charli Fritzner, a women’s campaigns officer from the university where Hees studied, stated: “It doesn’t make Burger King an attractive employer for women.”

Inevitably and sadly, a half-hearted backtrack followed from a Burger King spokesperson:

Mr. Hees apologizes if his comment has offended anyone. It… was intended as a humorous anecdote to connect with his audience.

Two points there. First, being an arsehole isn’t excused if you’re making what you consider a humorous anecdote to connect with your audience, but it’s doubly stupid if you’re the CEO of a global fast-food chain. Secondly, the weaselly nature of the ‘apology’ is so greasy that it would be suitable for a politician. Don’t say you apologise if your comment has offended anyone—that’s a get-out. Apologise for any offence your comment caused. (There is a difference in the wording there, albeit a subtle one.) Better: just apologise succinctly: “I’m sorry. What I said was wrong”.

Issue three of the rather spiffy Tap! magazine hits UK newsstands today. It’s another chunky 132-page tome, packed full of reviews, tips and features about the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Yours for a fiver, guv.

This issue, in my role as Contributing Editor, Games, I lead the games section with the excellent World of Goo HD, and we also cover another 30 titles, including Helsing’s Fire HD, Dead Space and Real Racing 2.

Elsewhere in the mag, there are the usual helpings of Matt Gemmell, Ian Betteridge and Caitlin Moran, an in-depth feature on using your iOS devices to watch tele, an interview with an indie company using iOS devices and social media to compete with global brands, and more app and kit reviews than you can shake a stick at.

So you’ve got new iPad killer coming out, and it, for reasons known only to slightly crazy people, dual-boots into Windows 7 and Android 1.6 (two operating systems clearly leagues ahead of iOS when it comes to optimal tablet experiences—again, if you’re stark staring mad). What better way to advertise it than using a badly cropped grab of a Microsoft Office app running in Mac OS X?

In case of deletion, here’s a bit of it:

Nice. The close-up of exciting touch-based workflow in action is also, I’m sure you’ll agree, brilliant and doesn’t look at all like it was faked by a bored unpaid intern:

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.

Today is International Women’s Day. But the first news article sent my way this morning was Woman Carries Non-Viable Pregnancy Due To Law (expanded on The Republic). It’s practically the opposite of any kind of celebration, instead recounting how a “Nebraska woman said she was denied the ability to end her non-viable pregnancy because of state law”. Instead, she was forced to go into labour naturally, and her baby died 15 minutes after birth, significantly increasing grief and trauma for both parties.

I find it hard to understand how any modern Western nation can still have such laws in 2011 (abortion law is always a thorny issue, but not even having exceptions is draconian), and attempting in this case to justify them on the basis of the ‘sacred nature of life’ is hypocritical, given that Nebraska also has capital punishment. Either life is sacred or it isn’t. Make up your minds.

Also, in a country that’s supposed to be democratic and a shining example of modernity, it’s depressing how much of the USA (albeit at state level) still considers it acceptable to trample all over a woman’s rights, on the basis of religious beliefs.

Gary Marshall on the iPad 2:

What Apple gets—and what I think a lot of firms don’t—is that most people, the kind of people who are currently buying iOS devices and apps in extraordinary quantities, don’t care about specifications any more than they want to think about how their lunchtime sausages are made.

Geeks forget this. Many in the tech press also forget this. People care about the experience, not the innards of a device.

I wrote along similar lines on TechRadar:

For example, instead of boasting about the cameras in the iPad 2, Apple concentrated on demoing FaceTime and Photo Booth. The company then showcased practical applications of footage taken by the new rear camera by revealing the revised iMovie – an update to the $4.99/£2.99 app.

iMovie is now universal and on the iPad has an interface resembling the desktop release. And as if to drive the point home regarding what Apple really cares about (clue: it’s not gigahertz and gigabytes – it’s enabling creativity), GarageBand for iPad was unleashed, boasting an interface in many ways superior to that of the Mac version.

The point is that technology and specs are all fine, but they only really mean something if you can employ them. It’s no good having a quad-core tablet with 8GB of RAM if the only software available is a slightly knackered version of Solitaire.

This is what every other company in the tech space needs to understand. The killer feature of the iPad 2 launch wasn’t its RAM or its chip-speed; it wasn’t the megapixels in the camera sensor, nor even the tablet’s form; the killer feature of the iPad 2 is that you can do a ton of fun stuff with it.