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.

A while back, Samsung VP Lee Young-hee was reportedly misquoted when talking about the sales of its wee iPad wannabe, the 7-inch Galaxy Tab. He was stated to have said:

As you heard, our sell-in [for the Galaxy Tab] was quite aggressive… around two million. In terms of sell-out, we believe it was quite small.

Samsung then argued that ‘quite small’ was in fact ‘quite smooth’, which sort of makes sense if you get a bit drunk. On March 4, Yonhap News quoted Lee Don-joo, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile division, talking about the soon-to-be-unveiled Galaxy Tab 10.1:

We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate. Apple made [the iPad 2] very thin.

Again, Samsung has presumably been misquoted. Clearly, he meant to say ‘inedible’, because Samsung’s going to go one better than Apple in making its tablet totally safe should your child get really frustrated with Angry Birds and take a chunk out of the device with its teeth.

And on the Galaxy Tab being close to $900, compared to the iPad 2’s $499–$829 range:

The 10-inch (tablet) was to be priced higher than the 7-inch (tablet) but we will have to think that over.

By ‘higher’, Samsung presumably meant ‘lower’. After all, there’s no way an iPad competitor would today launch its product at a higher price-point than Apple’s latest device, because that would just be stupid.

The BBC reports that the 2011 Census is underway. As always, the form is compulsory but the Census is also anonymous, so your answers “can’t be used against you”, as noted on a few council websites.

The thing is, your answers can be used against the country. Many thorny issues in the UK (such as faith schools) are to do with religion, and a government can use Census results to justify policy. If you’re religious, fair enough—tick the relevant box. But if you’re not, tick the closest answer to ‘none’—don’t get smart and say you subscribe to a faith made up by George Lucas, because otherwise when government simply splits the results into ‘religious’ and ‘not religious’, you’re batting for the other team.

UPDATE: Apparently, the ONS is wise to Jedis. However, the general point stands—only select a religion if you’re actually religious.

At the iPad 2 launch this week, Steve Jobs unveiled his new and slightly annoying favourite catchphrase: post-PC. I say slightly annoying, because it’s clearly tech buzzword bingo fodder; but, unlike the astonishingly irritating ‘magical’ (Does the iPad do tricks, joining Penn and Teller in Vegas? No it bloody well doesn’t.), post-PC makes sense: we’re entering a world where the typical PC is no longer the star of the show.

Microsoft is currently almost dead in the water in this area of computing, thrashing around, clinging to a half-deflated lifeboat with ‘Nokia’ spray-painted on the side, and lunging half-heartedly for a favourite possession: a book entitled We Will Love Windows Forever.

Bloomberg reports Microsoft’s cunning plan to rescue itself from sinking to the bottom of the ocean and being eaten by iSharks and myriad Android fishes with pointy teeth is as follows:

[Microsoft] won’t release a competitor to Apple Inc. and Google Inc.’s tablet operating systems until the 2012 back-to- school season, people with knowledge of the plans said.

Public testing of a new version of Windows will begin at the end of this year with partners and customers, said the people, who declined to be identified because the plans haven’t been disclosed publicly.

As Bloomberg notes, this will likely pitch whatever Microsoft comes up with against the iPad 3; frankly, its tablet plans had better be nothing short of spectacular or the post-PC world will also be post-Microsoft.