I’m not a huge fan of The Times, and I’d be happy if Rupert Murdoch got trapped in a cave and had to spend his remaining years munching moss and repenting for his sins. However, I’m nonetheless disappointed by the general reaction to The Times’s plans to start charging for web content (source: BBC).

The plan is for users to pay £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription. As far as I can tell, the generation response is: wah wah wah, not fair, wah wah, I’ll go elsewhere to the other bajillion sites that offer free news, wah wah, everything should be free! *throws toys out of pram*

Here’s the thing: there aren’t that many places that offer well-researched and professionally written journalism, and many of those that do are largely opinion-based rather than investigative. There are, of course, exceptions, but the bulk of them are online offshoots of print publications losing up to £1m per week, and it’s clear they won’t last long. (Indeed, anyone crowing about how great this model is might ask whether a Russian billionaire would have had to buy the Indie for £1 if it wasn’t losing money hand over fist.)

Times columnist Caitlin Moran has been responding to people on Twitter about her publication’s plans, and her tweets sum things up nicely. “Wow – loads of people asking what I think about the forthcoming Times paywall. I think, ultimately, my position is: I have a mortgage,” she says. “I love the freewheeling, anarchic, infinite-information aspect of the internet. I just need to ally that with paying for food and shit.”

Unfortunately, too many people have a warped sense of value these days, and think all creative content should be free, whether it’s news, music, movies or videogames. But when the creators don’t make money (whether said creators are companies or individuals), here’s the thing: they stop creating or, at best, dumb things down and drop the quality. News is already there. Most online ‘journalism’ is bullshit, with people frantically copying and pasting stories without bothering to do any investigation or check any facts, and that’s because they’re being paid a few quid for a blog post (if that), rather than a decent amount of money to write some informed, professional copy.

Perhaps The Times’s experiment will be a massive failure and the future really will be ‘free’ (or ‘freemium’), but, as Jörg Tittel noted to me on Twitter earlier, it’s time the industry stopped trying to justify ‘free’ over ‘paid’ for good value. So, despite the fact I don’t care for The Times and think Murdoch would be better not seen and not heard, I hope the website makes huge wodges of cash, enabling other publishers to follow suit.

Opera’s having fun with Apple. After months of ‘will they or won’t they’ uncertainty regarding Opera Mini’s status, the company has finally submitted the app, and has placed a cheeky ‘countup’ timer on its website. Almost immediately, Mashable fired up its bullshit machine, with Stan Schroeder stating the following in the article Opera Mini Submitted to Apple’s App Store. Your Move, Apple:

Opera is playing a somewhat odd game with Apple. Their Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers are great mobile browsers, but the iPhone already has a great mobile browser — Safari.

This fact alone wouldn’t be that big of a problem if Apple’s rules weren’t prohibiting other apps to duplicate the functionality of their own apps. Simply put, if Apple doesn’t suddenly change that policy, Opera Mini, which Opera has now officially submitted to the App Store, doesn’t stand a chance of being approved.

I don’t dispute the fact Apple has in the past used the ‘duplicate functionality’ excuse to block apps, but it’s been rarely used of late, and to suggest it’s policy is bullshit. Either that or Weather Pro and PCalc on my iPhone (which clearly duplicate functionality of Apple’s own Weather and Calculator apps) are figments of my imagination. Also, there are dozens of web browsers on the App Store. Sure, they’re all WebKit-based, but if Apple blocked all Safari wannabes, none of them would be available for download.

No-one knows (bar, possibly, some senior staff at Apple) what’s in store for Opera Mini, but if it does get denied a place on the App Store, it won’t be because of duplicate functionality (unless someone on the App Store review team is being an idiot)—it’ll be for some other reason, such as APIs used or the funky means by which Opera Mini serves content: through Opera-run proxy servers, returning pages as images in the OBML format, and entirely removing end-to-end security from the equation.

Being a tech and gaming writer, I don’t talk about politics much on this blog, but I’ve been following the attempts of the Democrats to reform healthcare in the US closely. As someone who lives in a country with a fairly robust healthcare system, it beggars belief that any developed nation could allow its citizens to fall through the cracks so readily that you end up with random developing-word-style ‘field clinics’ being inundated whenever they appear. It’s also shocking that people who’ve had and recovered from a major condition (such as cancer) find it extremely difficult to get coverage from that point on. That’s how pet health insurance works in the UK, but to have a similar system for humans is just crazy.

Since Obama came to power, the Democrats have struggled to come to some sort of compromise with the Republicans, before ultimately going it alone. Over time, the Republicans gradually withdrew any kind of support and than had fun spouting all kinds of bullshit about health systems elsewhere, such as the UK’s NHS. This backfired to some extent once people looked past the bluster and examined the facts. One of my favourite posts was by Alex Massie, who quoted Ezra Klein’s research where he noted the NHS costs about 41 cents for every dollar the US spends per capita on health. Massie’s point was that if the US did a straight switch for an NHS-style system and dropped its standards slightly, it’d have 59 cents in the dollar to do with as it wished. That money could improve infrastructure, social circumstances, or just be ploughed back into the health system, making US services the envy of the world in every conceivable way, but for no extra cost.

As far as I can tell, opposition to these viewpoints is centred around the thorny issue of ‘communism’ and ‘big government’. A certain chunk of Americans (roughly half) doesn’t like ‘being told what to do’. They’d actually rather pay more than twice as much as they need to for health because they have the choice to do so. The fact the poor are stuffed is irrelevant to the ‘anti’ crowd, as is the fact that the US effectively has an enforced lock-in anyway, just in the commercial arena rather than at state/national level. (‘Anti’ campaigners also avoid the difficult point that the British system is actually at least three-tier—‘free’/tax-paid coverage for all, but then you have levels of additional ‘private’ services that one can ‘top up’ with if you can afford to do so.)

To my mind, one of the very best responses to this argument came in a comments thread for The New Republic’s The Coming Conservative Health Care Freakout. Someone with the ID ‘singlspeed’ notes that if anti-healthcare campaigners are truly against state support then they should stop being hypocritical and give up all of it. “For all those out-of-work, underemployed or retired, red-meat, red state conservative ’Merikans that are getting social security, disability, medicare and unemployment benefits that rue the day about how big gubmint and taxes are ruining America, I suggest they forfeit all aspects of government that they benefit from,” he says. “No more calling 911 for any emergencies, no using the interstate highways for you, no flying (FAA controls the air paths), no buying gasoline or using electricity (those are gubmint subsidized industries), no buying any food product that includes corn or high-fructose corn syrup (all heavily government subsidized), don’t buy California lettuce (it uses Federally subsidized water to grow it), don’t go to a state university that accepts Federal grant dollars for science and medical research, stop using that Social Security check to pay for your rent…”

As of yesterday’s vote, these points are, to some extent, finally moot. The bill that’s on the table is far from perfect, but as James Fallows says in Why This Moment Matters, “the significance of the vote is moving the United States from a system in which people can assume they will have health coverage if they are old enough (Medicare), poor enough (Medicaid), fortunate enough (working for an employer that offers coverage, or able themselves to bear expenses), or in some other way specially positioned (veterans; elected officials)… toward a system in which people can assume they will have health-care coverage.” And in any reasonable light, that alone can only be a good thing.

Since I was at school, I’ve been accused of being a Mac fan-boy. In the old days, this was down to me having the audacity to suggest that Macs were actually pretty good and rather usable. Detractors suggested Macs were toys, and the Mac OS was for people who didn’t know how to use a ‘real’ computer (rather than people who just wanted to get things done). “Real men,” I was told, “use the command line.”

Not a million years later, Windows evolved from a piece of garbage into something that was actually pretty good (Windows 95), largely by ripping off the Mac OS. “A-ha!” I’d say, only to have fan-boy-accusers say that now it was obviously OK to have a GUI, because [insert spurious reason that only makes sense ‘because’]. Right.

This pattern has continued into my professional career. Of late I’ve been called an Apple fan-boy on an increasingly regular basis, due to my love of iPod gaming and taking the royal piss out of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series efforts. Shots that have been fired my way echo Paul Thurrott’s contradictions that were nicely summed up by Chris Grande a couple of days back.

When iPhone OS arrived, Thurrott derided its lack of copy and paste, saying it was “unreal” that such a feature was “inexplicably missing from the iPhone”. Anyone arguing the toss (either that the feature wasn’t really necessary, or agreeing with Apple’s stance that’s it’s better to do something right, even if that means taking longer to deploy it) was a Mac fan-boy.

Fast forward to the present day and Microsoft’s stated its Windows Phone revamp will lack copy and paste (and there’s no consensus on whether the company is working on a solution—some claim it is, and others say the opposite). Thurrott now states: “No matter”. I’ve experienced pretty similar reactions from people on the Apple/Microsoft scrap. According to some, Apple’s closed ecosystem and lack of third-party multitasking were the most stupid things in the history of tech, but now Microsoft’s doing the same, they’re somehow fine. Anyone defending Apple’s stance before was a fan-boy, but anyone attacking Microsoft for taking up the same position: also a fan-boy.

I find this a strange, somewhat deluded and often hypocritical argument, but there is of course one major difference between today’s mobile space and the early 1990s desktop PC ‘war’: the positions have been switched. Microsoft’s still using its photocopier and playing catch-up, but this is all the more apparent now it’s the underdog with a lower marketshare. It’ll be interesting to see how the two companies fare over the coming year or so. I’m hoping Apple wins the long game for the first time (and also that other rivals—Google, Palm—force Apple to innovate rather than just cloning Cupertino output)—the company cares more about experience and design than marketshare and dominance. I’m sure this stance will have me branded ‘fan boy’ for years to come. So be it.

The more I read about Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7, the more I think senior staff at the company should cut down on the gin. For being utterly drunk is the only explanation other than outright incompetence regarding the direction of its mobile platform.

In tried and tested Microsoft fashion, Redmond has got its photocopier out, and is creating its own iPhone. The only problem is that Microsoft appears to be copying Apple circa 2009, hence its decision to omit copy and paste from Windows Phone 7 (source: Engadget).

Microsoft’s reasoning is that most users don’t really need clipboard functionality. Most users don’t “really need” Windows Phone 7 either, so maybe Microsoft should just cancel the whole thing and buy Palm.