Whatever you think about Hugh Grant, your opinion might change after reading The bugger, bugged (New Statesman). Grant, by chance, met ex-News of the World hack Paul McMullan when Grant’s car broke down; he was given a lift and was invited to the hack’s pub sometime. Grant was keen to hear more about the phone-hacking scandal, since he’d been a victim. Being a canny sort, he also figured he could secretly record the conversation when he later visited the pub.

The revelations are astonishing, implicating Andy Coulson (“Coulson knew all about it and regularly ordered it”), Rebekah Wade and the Daily Mail. McMullan is quoted as saying:

For about four or five years [The Daily Mail have] absolutely been cleaner than clean. And before that they weren’t. They were as dirty as anyone… They had the most money.

McMullen revealed he was also a fan of the Daily Mail’s cash mountain when it came to non-stories about celebs:

When I went freelance in 2004 the biggest payers—you’d have thought it would be the [News of the World], but actually it was the Daily Mail. If I take a good picture, the first person I go to is—such as in your case—the Mail on Sunday. Did you see that story? The picture of you, breaking down… I ought to thank you for that. I got £3,000. Whooo!

Presumably, McMullen went to them a second time after Grant dropped by his pub, since The Daily Mail on April 4 reported Grant’s invited visit with the shocking, hard-hitting exposé Hugh Grant racks up bar tab worth £5.45 at local pub in Dover… but leaves without paying. Naturally, it neglects to mention the invitation and the chat Grant and McMullen had (and it referring to the pub as Grant’s “favourite pub in Dover” seems spurious at best). Still, perhaps McMullen will be happy he got his retaliation in first (not least those jibes about Grant’s riches, which he used to justify the invasion of celebrity privacy regarding phone-hacking) even if the Mail’s article comes across like a fey slap to the cheek compared to Grant’s knockout punch.

“Er.”

That’s pretty much what went through my head on reading TechRadar’s report about Lenovo’s proposed 23-inch tablet. Now, I largely agree with Steve Jobs that 10ish inches is about the right size for a tablet. It’s big enough to enable more complex interfaces than you get on smartphone apps—something that seven-inch tablets don’t fare well with. Instead, they come across like SMARTPHONES FOR GIANTS.

Someone at Lenovo presumably, then, was thinking about gaps in the tablet ecosystem and yelped “what if Godzilla wanted a tablet?”, because that’s the only explanation that makes any sense.

We think that there is potential for a 23-inch tablet

—said William Cai, Lenovo’s senior specialist in marketing, apparently with a straight face. Fair enough—maybe loads of people have been looking at iMacs and thinking, man, if only that thing didn’t have a stand. Or a keyboard. And I could lug it around the house, like some crazy person, yelling LOOK AT THE SIZE OF MY ONE, to envious and surprised bystanders.

Cai continued:

We’d have to take care of battery life and we are working to get the weight down.

No kidding. Maybe also consider supplying each one with a year’s gym entry, or possibly a small crane.

Amazon’s released a third Kindle into its line-up. As reported in TUAW, the $189 3G and $139 Wi-Fi models are joined by a ‘with special offers’ edition. It costs $114 and the discount is supported by adverts that appear on the screensaver and home screen, but not inside books.

The decision is interesting. Amazon’s one of the few companies able to rival Apple in terms of experience. If you’ve unboxed and used a Kindle, it’s rather like doing the same with an iPad. Despite the relatively low price of the gadget, it feels like a luxury item, and so adverts might place it in a rather different category, cheapening the experience.

Also, arguments are currently raging online that the adverts should have resulted in a much greater discount. Ian Betteridge counters this argument on Technovia:

I think that $25 is a fair reflection of the value of the ads. Remember, these ads are home-screen only, and not in the books. Pundits constantly over-estimate the amount of revenue that ads can bring in, and the expectation that Amazon could price a Kindle at $99 based on these kinds of ads is wrong.

Ian’s right: people often massively over-estimate the value of advertising. It’s pretty clear that Amazon will have reduced the price of the ad-supported Kindle by the same amount of money the adverts are bringing in—while Amazon’s happy to operate on razor-thin margins much of the time, it’s not a company keen to make a huge loss, especially on a top-selling item.

But this leads me to wonder whether Amazon should have bothered at all. I don’t see many people avoiding buying a Kindle but saying they’d be tempted if it was 25 bucks cheaper. In order to get this version of the Kindle flying off the shelves, it really needs to be at an impulse price—$99 would be the sweet-spot in the USA.

The thing is, Amazon knows what it’s doing in retail, and I suspect this new Kindle price-point is nothing more than a test-run, to see if the model works. If it sells, Amazon can up the price of the adverts, and, if it wishes, drop the device’s price accordingly. This could be the long-run to an end-game of a free ad-funded Kindle, supported and subsidised by advertisers, enabling Amazon to continue making huge piles of cash by selling many more eBooks than it otherwise would have.

According to TechCrunch, OMG IPAD KILLAH Kno is dead. This will come as a huge shock to crazy people, who genuinely thought the massive 14.1-inch stylus-operated tablet (available in expensive $599 single-screen version or WHAT WERE THEY THINKING $899 dual-screen) would topple Apple’s iPad, despite Apple’s device working rather well in an education environment.

Still, the Kno guys aren’t fussed, because, apparently, it was always about the software and platform-agnosticity. CEO Osman Rashid said:

We have accelerated our 2012 strategy to 2011. Our long-term plan was always to support multiple platforms.

“No, really—honest,” he didn’t add, unless you read between the lines—lines positively bulging with sadness and delusion.

Still, it’s early days yet, and there’s loads of room in education for strong software. So what’s Kno’s next move?

Although Rashid wouldn’t confirm which platform Kno would support first, it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be the iPad.

Because supporting the leading tablet would be really stupid.

Kno’s software centers around using a stylus, not your fingers. “There is no real concept of a stylus on the iPad,” says Rashid.

This is probably because humans by default come with ten perfectly reasonable styluses attached. That said, there are things like the AluPen. Of course, you’re pretty much screwed if you’ve based most of your software around stylus (read: fiddly) input, eh, Kno-guys?

“The current iPad is mant [sic] for the finger.”

Actually, it’s meant for direct manipulation of content, without any abstraction layer. The mouse cursor was always a nice idea but a terrible concept from an intuition standpoint, since you have to be taught to use it. But even a stylus is a poor content manipulation tool compared to a finger—again, because you need to be taught to use it.

He hopes this will change. “We hope Apple over time sees the value of a stylus in education because kids do need to learn how to write.”

Rashid favours teaching kids to interact with content rather than manipulating content. By contrast, I think writing is overrated, and is something fewer and fewer people bother with. I don’t debate that it’s a skill that children need to learn, but I’d sooner have a child immersed in solving maths puzzles rather than first having to grasp manipulating a pencil and laying out the sums; I’d sooner have a child immersed in finger-painting (real-world or digital) than battling with a fiddly paintbrush.

They can sort out their penmanship later.

Oh dear. You’ve got to hand it to the anti-AV lot—they’re pretty sneaky. On today’s inevitable daily BBC article on the matter, ex-Labour minister Caroline Flint wades in with her size whatevers:

The suffragettes fought for One Person, One Vote, not a political stitch-up like AV, which has been rejected by almost every country that has used it.

Yes, if you vote for AV, you are ANTI-WOMEN and ANTI-WOMAN-WHO-WANT-EQUALITY.

Unless,  of course—and I might just be guessing here—what the suffragettes were in fact fighting for was the right to vote at all. They weren’t chaining themselves to unmovable objects and chanting catchy slogans like:

Voting rights for women—as long as the United Kingdom retains the first-past-the-post voting system for Parliamentary elections, otherwise we’re really not that fussed.

Flint moans about Nick Clegg’s most recent defence of AV, where he states generations to come would see the ‘no’ arguments as nonsensical. She reminds everyone that Clegg himself called AV a “miserable little compromise”. This, of course, is entirely accurate: AV is a miserable little compromise. But it’s a step forward. Flint doesn’t seem to understand this:

One Person, One Vote – the bedrock of our current system – has stood the test of time and remains the only way to ensure elections are fair.

So under AV, is Flint arguing that random people are somehow given extra votes? Or is she suggesting that FPTP is the “only way to ensure elections are fair”? Man, those countries using proportional representation to ensure their elected ministers actually broadly represent the voting patterns of the country are SUCH IDIOTS with their unfair elections.

Let’s ignore the fact that, at present, it takes three times as many votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. That, clearly, isn’t unfair. (And if your response has anything to do with the Lib Dems in government being a bit rubbish, do sod off. Under PR, we’d have likely had a Lab/Lib coalition from the most recent election, which would have resulted in very different options; instead, we have a very senior partner and a very junior partner, with the latter sadly run by a gutless twit. It’s the overall argument that’s important—that some parties can have MPs elected far more easily than others, which is hardly democratic in any real sense of the word.)

Let’s ignore the fact that, in 2010, we got one elected Green MP when we should have had six, and absolutely no UKIP or BNP MPs exist, despite the parties securing 3.1 and 1.9 per cent of the vote, respectively. (Also, if you’re thinking PHEW!, that’s fine, but part of democracy is that you don’t always get what you want. If 919,546 people voted for UKIP, is it fair that there are no UKIP MPs at all, even if the party is pretty reprehensible? Not unless you have some interesting ideas about what ‘fair’ happens to mean.)

Instead, let’s keep arguing for an outdated system that will, without question, more often elect a Conservative government backed by a minority of votes (because the more liberal vote is split several ways); let’s argue for a system of exclusion for smaller parties; let’s argue for a system that largely eschews the evils of coalition (read: compromise and, in many cases—as evidenced elsewhere in Europe—some degree of continuity) in favour of wild swings between the Conservatives and Labour, with a new incumbent every 10 or 15 years, keen to throw out everything its predecessor did. Because, hey, that’s been working so brilliantly for the UK since World War 2, hasn’t it, so why bother changing anything?

UPDATE: And as @alexwlchan rightly says on Twitter:

If she really hates AV, why didn’t she argue against it when Labour used it to elect their party leaders?