Ricky Gervais on WSJ’s Speakeasy:

It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are.

Amen to that.

Apologies about linking to the Daily Mail, but it broke a story yesterday on the UK government’s plan to auto-block EVIL PORN from your internet access if you’re UK-based, unless you request access under an ‘opt in’ system.

SO THAT’S GOING TO WORK WELL THEN!

• Communications Minister Ed Vaizey has already managed to fire off the Mr Weasel card, saying that the government will legislate if ISPs don’t block porn first. This cunningly flings the inevitable PR shit-storm that’s going to happen at the ISPs. Nice.
• The UK government has a long history of being technically inept, and so if it does get involved in any way, this will become even more of a disaster.
• How will it be determined what is ‘porn’ anyway? Is The Sun porn, with its Page 3 girls? If so, it has to be auto-blocked. If not, equivalent ‘porn’ sites would have to remain unblocked. Unless—SHOCK!—the UK government somehow rattles off some bullshit about credible publishers (i.e. UK MP mates with deep pockets) being exempt.
• Who’s going to create and maintain the blacklists? There are quite a few sites on the internet. There’s literally no way that every single porn site will be caught; more to the point, there’s every chance innocent sites will be caught. I await Wikipedia being blocked to everyone with trepidation.
• What’s to stop the list being used for targeting? “Well, Dave at 37 is clearly a perve, because he opted in to porn. Let’s do a surprise raid and take his equipment away for weeks. MWAHAHA!”
• Young kids seeing porn isn’t great, obviously, but what about violence? Plenty of that online, and yet Vaizey didn’t even mention that.
• Young kids seeing porn isn’t great, obviously, but what about parental responsibility? How about looking after your kids and watching what they’re viewing? How about learning about internet controls before planting your kid alone in a room with access to the web?
• The ONS states that the majority of households in the UK do not have dependant children, and so this scheme will block for the minority (although I suspect it will appeal to Middle England voters—gosh, I wonder if that’s the real reason behind this bullshit?).
• What’s next? What else will our ‘big society’ and supposedly anti-inteference government decide we shouldn’t have access to, ‘for our own good’?

See also: Nigel Whitfield’s Censorship – Won’t someone think of the adults?

I get how companies have to big up their products, but RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie needs to lay off the crazy juice. As reported by AppleInsider and others, Balsille got a little over-excited and bullish when RIM beat Wall Street expectations with its quarterly earnings call, and, not for the first time, he decided to take a pop at Apple. The iPad was the target, with Balsille claiming RIM’s PlayBook is “way ahead” of Apple’s device. This being the PlayBook that’s not actually out yet, and won’t be out until March, according to Macworld, an entire month before the iPad 2’s likely to show up.

But what, specifically, makes the PlayBook so special? Balsille eludicated in a rant that some poor bastard at Yahoo transcribed in full. Some highlights follow.

I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do.

Fair enough. It’ll be great to have some massive competition for the iPad, to kick Apple’s arse and ensure it continues to innovate. Do tell us exactly how you’re ahead…

I think we’ve articulated some elements of it

You’ve “articulated some elements of it”. Uh, OK. That sounds… positive.

and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps—though there’s a huge role for apps—I think is going to shift in the market, and I think it’s going to shift very, very quickly.

Those would be the unnecessary apps that are selling like hot cakes? And the proprietary SDK demanded by devs furious at Steve Jobs when he initially told them to bugger off and make web apps? Uh, OK.

And I think there’s going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity.

Areas the iPad utterly fails in, what with its excellent web browser and consistent, usable interface, along with increasingly strong support from the likes of Google with web apps designed to work better on the iPad than any other platform.

Now, how do you align or go over the top on carriers and content providers? Well, we have different strategies, and that’s fine, and there may be room for more than one model, who knows.

It’s good that you’ve thought this through. You’re making Steve Jobs’s responses during Apple’s earnings calls look shoddy and ill-prepared by comparison. (Top tip: “Who knows?” doesn’t make for a confident-sounding co-CEO when you use it once. When it’s seemingly your favourite phrase, you need to be locked in a cupboard until you can learn to speak without embarrassing your entire organisation.)

And, you know, it’s a very dynamic market. Plus, there’s enormous growth and shifts happening around the world, you know.

The biggest shifts being from analysts who said the iPad would fail and who are now trying to pretend that they knew from the start it’d be huge, along with people who claimed Android tablets would immediately wipe the floor with the iPad, despite, in the main, not actually being much better than something you’d wipe from your arse.

How many fronts people want to take on contention, that’s a question you can ask. Do you want to go over the top of banks, do you want to go over the top on content, do you want to go over the top on carriers, do you want to go over the top on video content providers? I mean, who knows, you know? What part of it’s good strategy and what part of it’s a bridge too far? I mean, who knows?

And who knows what you’re talking about at this point? I’m pretty sure I don’t. More worryingly, I’m pretty sure you don’t.

There’s a lot of moving parts, but I think we’re just well ahead on the PlayBook, well ahead internationally, and extending very very well.

This being the PlayBook that’s being released in March 2011, remember.

And so, people can have their views on sentiment, but when is it a good entry strategy, and when is it a bridge too far? Who knows? We have turbulent ecosystem right now. How do you work with banks, how do you work with carriers, how do you work with content, how do you work with enterprise ecosystem?

How do you work with a co-CEO who doesn’t know what they’re talking about? Still, RIM’s certainly ahead in terms of babbling, ‘something exciting that might happen in the future, if its own bluster is to be believed’ and in looking at something successful in a market it wants to enter and yelling ‘you’re doing it wrong’ while the competition makes money hand over fist.

You’ve got to love polls versus editors. The two rarely match up, but in Time’s case, the difference is astonishing. Readers were asked who their person of the year was. Julian Assange topped the list with 382,026 votes, about 150,000 ahead of second-placed Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

So, who did Time choose? Not Assange. Not Erdogan. Not third-placed Lady Gaga (146,378) nor Barack Obama (sixth, 27,478 votes), Steve Jobs (seventh, 24,810) or the rather odd ‘The Chilean Miners’ entry (eighth, 29,124). Nope, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg took the prize, despite placing tenth in the poll, amassing only 18,353 votes.

Given the fact that Facebook’s hardly been astonishing this year, and has mostly made the news for various appalling privacy issues, it’s an odd decision; and while editors shouldn’t capitulate to readers, I do wonder whether Time’s editorial team realises how far out of touch it is with the people who read the magazine.

Via BoingBoing:

It’s clear to me that kettling is punitive, not preventative. It isn’t intended to cool out a dangerous situation (if that were the case, police would release demonstrators in a small, steady dribble, defusing whatever chaos they’re trying to prevent). It’s intended to punish protestors for democratically assembling in public, and to frighten off potential supporters who would like to express their displeasure with government