The UK is trying to enact a very stupid and logically farcical law, which guarantees to increase religious hatred by outlawing it.

The problem is that religion is not without its own hatred.

Religion is also not based upon the same logic as the secular law, being based upon belief rather than reason, so good people ignore the passages in religious texts that include incitement to hatred. The law would prevent this loose interpretation.

Under the proposed law almost any practitioner of any of the word's major religions could be charged with religious hatred, either for threatening infidels with the ultimate torture, an eternity of hellfire, or for explicit threats within respective texts.

Laws within a tolerant society are based upon logically consistent arguments, such as the existing UK laws against race hatred, which protect groups such as Sikhs and Jews not because of their ideology or belief, but because of who they are.

Changes to the proposed law include making it illegal to explicitly threaten violence against religion, which begs the question what has religion got to do with this? Current laws against violent acts protect society from what people do, there may an argument for extending this to what they threaten to do.

A law that protects religion would have to define what constituted a religion:

If a religion is a 'commonly held belief system', then potentially any type of belief system or ideology like Nazism could potentially be protected by law.

If it isn't all commonly held belief systems, then the law is discriminatory itself.

If it is any commonly held belief system that doesn't itself promote discrimination, then Judaism, Christianity and Islam would be excluded, if tested under current legal arguments.

In other words, you get both Christians and Nazis or a law which manages to break itself. A candidate for the legal equivalent of the Darwin awards.

The reality of this sleepwalk into chaos is that the reason people tolerate each other, who have different beliefs, is often by finding common ground and empathy while ignoring the logical inconsistencies between their beliefs. These inconsistencies are not obscure theological arcana, but whopping great Fuck Yous - such as be ne of us or go to hell. This law will bring these 'inconsistencies' to the surface and result in inevitable persecution.

The best thing to do about religion is to ignore it and focus on good. The best thing to do about this future law in the UK is to provoke a showdown by taking religion itself to court.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Religious hatred plan is defended

Over the last six months I have kept meaning to switch to outline style blogging.

For all the hoo ha about OPML as a standard for reading lists - you might reasonably ask why not use RSS - after all RSS is often used for playlists so what could the difference be?

The difference is really fairly subtle, but also very important, and the real answer has nothing to do with syndication, but the process of writing and what people who evangelize outliners have been trying to persuade people for years.

The comments on Anil Dash: Outlining a Blog are a really clear illustration of the problem.

Later generation blogging tools were designed with the influence of RSS which in turn was influenced by news headline syndication.

This meant that every post had a headline and with only one default template for post styles post templates tended to look like news stories with a big bold headline and text beneath.

If you want to post small snippets, the news story style format is a problem. If you put the headline in the body, then what do you use for the headline? If you use the snippet as the headline, the bodyless post looks empty and you can't put links to sites mentioned in the snippet in the headline.

Non outline style blogging leads to the type of writing where you feel compelled to make every post a mini essay. This is bad for both writers and readers - since most people don't want to read essays about everything and most bloggers don't really want to write essays about everything.

The headlineless style allows people to write more freely and more often, note style - what blogging is about.

Reading through the comments on Anil's site my gut feel is that the solutions to this are:

Multiple styles for post templates - headline or essay.

Dates/times as default headlines in syndicated outline style posts.

Named anchors as permalinks for individual entries within an outline style list post.

Ability to nest OPML within RSS within OPML namespace or use separately for a pure list.

(BTW- if anyone reading this knows - how are images handled in OPML?).

First store in Manhattan to open in Union Square in 3 months - all hail Trader Joe's.
Considering that we hired a car and spent 4 hours going to Trader Joe's and back again, only last weekend, I am, as they say - stoked.

Even better news is that they are opening a separate wine store next door to get round the stupid New York license laws which are a throwback to prohibition.

Trader Joe's to Open in New York - New York Times

In the UK in the late 80's British Telecom carried out one of the single biggest acts of design vandalism when they systematically removed the famous red telephone boxes designed by Gilbert Scott et al.

The justification for this was that they were not accessible to people in wheelchairs. This argument was impossible for people to counter and yet hid the truth - there were other ways of making phone boxes accessible that would not have required a complete change.

People argue, quite rightly, for web accessibility, but what are the results?

If you pass some of the top web sites' front pages to the W3C validator:

Yahoo - does not validate

Ebay - does not validate

Amazon - does not validate

Google - does not validate.

These have all been around for a while, however. What about the newer breed of online services?

Flickr - does not validate

Digg - does not validate

Del.icio.us - does not validate

Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?

In the next part I'll look at the current state of HTML and argue for a different approach.

Tom Foremski reports on the irony of America's most famous investor buying Business Wire, a company that flourished under web 1.0 but is entirely obsolete in web 2.0. Online press releases will be part of an open infrastructure rather than a walled garden service. Which means no long term room for Business Wire, period.

5 other companies that Buffett could buy to match his most recent acquisition:

Xerox

Siebel

Kodak

Sun

Silicon Graphics

Buffett acquires business wire

We wait till people reach maturity before we allow them to choose their political affinity and vote based upon it. As Dawkins points out, labelling a small child a neo-marxist is absurd. So why don't we let people choose their own religion when they grow up?

Religion is traditionally passed from adults to children.

The second part of Dawkin's documentary on religion was shown in the UK last night - thankfully torrent files are already available.

This tackled the dirty little secret of all religion - that it requires people in a vulnerable state of mind to infect. Of course the best place to find vulnerable minds, as a matter of course, among the healthy is in schools. The program suggested, perfectly reasonably, that religious teaching in schools is a form of child abuse.

In the UK:

"The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government's proposed City Academies will be run by religious organisations and there's a growing number of private evangelical Christian schools. ACE: Accelerated Christian Education has developed a curriculum which includes a mention of God or Jesus on every page of its science text book."

For people who would like to see a world of both reason and understanding, then the best thing to do is to teach young children to have an open mind, to enjoy mysteries and fiction but to question and discover the wonder of the world around them - to teach children atheism, as I will teach my children.

Channel 4 - Can you believe it? - The Real Exorcists

I just noticed that Google add automatic Map Links when something that looks like an address appears within a message in Gmail.

This kind of on-the-fly detection of metadata to create searches could be used for auto-dialing phone numbers or adding appointments to a calendar - but I guess we'll have to wait for a Google Calendar product for that.

"Gmail makes it easy for you to keep track of your packages, and map out directions to your destinations; when you open a message that lists an address or package tracking number, Gmail shows you handy links to maps and directions, or your package's delivery status."

I watched some of the Alito hearings in awe. Alito is very impressive, a great speaker, coherent and logical - but he is damaged goods since his reason and logic has boundaries.

The evidence - the refusal to acknowledge that the constitution is a 'living document'.

This is the latest meme to attack the very foundation of American Democracy by people who cannot accept the Constitution unless it is 'Intelligently Designed' and not Evolutionary.

Since the constitution clearly does change - there are amendments, the argument against it as a living document is not creationist - i.e. it does not pretend that the amendments are fiction, that would be crazy.

Instead, like Intelligent Design it tries to create a mechanism whereby things do change but they change because of an original, divinely inspired and complete design - the original Constitution.

This is the exact opposite of what the founding fathers intended and unlike the biblical history - we have thousands of sources to verify it.

The reason the constitution has amendments is not because it was perfect to start with but badly interpreted, but precisely because the people that wrote it knew the dangers of a frozen religious like document being the central pivot of government.

If you seriously think the constitution is not a living document, then you either:

Stupid: think that Black people should not be treated as human and are too stupid to sit on a supreme court

A constitutional creationist: think that scientific discussion of the Constitution is not possible because it is divinely inspired and therefore your application of reason only extends to areas that are not infected by faith.

A constitutional proponent of Intelligent Design: think that every amendment was because the founding fathers really meant what the amendment says, but people didn't really understand not because there is progress.

Alito is in the last category, he thinks that the Constitution is a religion.

Google Search: living document

Although unannounced publicly, Google appears to be testing its Yellow Pages killer, maps based advertising.

If you do a search for Hotels in New York on Google Local, you get something that you don't get for a search for 'hotels in San Francisco' - ads. Right there as little blue map balloons rather the red, algorithmic, local search results.

Not only are the ads local, but they are contextual i.e. hotel searches bring up sponsored results for local hotels.

In some ways this is a relatively obvious move, however its big news considering that:

1. The Yellow Pages advertising market is bigger than the entire existing online search advertising market.

2. Offline Yellow Pages directories will clearly be replaced, over time, by online products, and it looks like maps are how this plays out.

3. Ad products are where Google makes the money that justifies its gargantuan Market Cap. so a new ad product is a big deal. Now, alongside Adwords and Adsense it has a third revenue source that is in a bigger marketplace.

With ads - Google Local - hotels loc: New York, NY

Without ads - Google Local - hotels loc: San Francisco, CA

Channel 4 - The Root of All Evil

Buried within the comments of Jermey Zawadny's post about Feedster is this comment:

"I don't recall Feedster ever being all that useful. But I also don't find Technorati particularly useful. Why can't someone just create a simple search engine for feeds/blogs?"

The truth is that it is very difficult to build a search engine with real-time updates, since search engines are optimized for retrieval and usually use batch indexing. In addition, the majority of weblogs are spam, further compounding the problem.

Blog search, which may once have seemed niche, will eventually be a standard part of search engines. At the moment, nobody, including Google, have a weblog search product that works.
If they did it would be very useful.

The real reason this is important is that it has nothing to do with weblogs, long term. There are only two things that matter in search - freshness and relevancy.

At the moment search engines like Google do not have a button that says order results by date - they will, eventually, and from that comes blog search or from blog search comes that.

Feedster Will Die in 2006 (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

Heh, great post.

Having never had a proper job since i left architecture, I used to fantasize about doing job interviews since I could really tell the truth if I wasn't looking for a job.

Now that its possible to bootstrap a modest web service, I fantasize about really telling the truth to VC's.

Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC:

Q. How big is your market?

A. $0

[The current market size is $0 because I haven't been doing any paid work because I have been building this product for a marketplace of 1 - me. I built it because I really want this and believe in it.]

Q. What is your burn rate 6 months from now to fund growth?

A. No real growth will be apparent 6 months from now.

[We don't really need that much money the burn rate won't be that much, I'll be doing things on the cheap since I am as tight as a Camel's ass in a sandstorm and if the growth is exponential it'll likely look flat for 6 months.]

Q. Do you suffer from founderitus - i.e. would you step aside for more seasoned management?

A. Yes and No - but Yes. Steve Jobs is just super duper.

[I suffer from founderitus in spades, the reason I start companies is that I have a problem with authority. Steve Jobs is my hero not Sculley. However, I'll be moving to take a 'founder' role at roughly the speed of light, if I'm out of my depth.]

Q. Pages 2-20 of your business plan, after the bullet point introduction read 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy', over and over again, can you pass me an uncorrupted copy?

A. I don't want to do a business plan.

[I'm going to write the business plan after the business becomes clear and we have adapted to it in a Darwinian fashion - it'll make for a much better read. I don't think you can truly design things in advance, I don't believe in crap like Intelligent Design.]

Q. Here is our term sheet, its pretty standard, I think you'll agree?

A. I'd never sign an agreement based on that.

[Unless you remove the conditions on the pref shares I won't be saying looky here, 'we have a term sheet' - I would rather have a one in ten chance of making $1M than a cats chance in hell of $100M, my risk isn't spread across a portfolio, and if it isn't going to be a billion dollar company I will still be trying to make it worth something.

Digg is the real deal for web 2.0, in the sense that, for all the hype, it does absolutely nothing new but is about to render obsolete, geek central itself, Slashdot.

Zawodny goes through the usual ideas as to why digg is successful - and then hits it on the nail - 'Lets face it. The slashdot guys are getting old'.

Sure there are some improvements over Slashdot in the way the Digg does things, but this is not the product shakeup of Google Maps vs. Mapquest. Digg wins because the community has more vitality.

Digg is about fashion, it makes Slashdot look like a bunch of ageing rockers. We are seeing the first generational switch in web applications - and that is really web 2.0.

If this is natural churn, then someday someone else will beat Digg, and if this is a precedent then the lifespan of an otherwise very successful site could be less than 10 years. This is more than a nightclub or a teenage fad, but much less than offline companies.

Slashdot is Going out of Style in 2006 (by Jeremy Zawodny)

It seems that a war is brewing between the carriers (Verizon) and the service providers (Google). The carriers want to tax revenue generating traffic based upon the revenue potential rather than the traffic, and they want to charge both the sender and the receiver of the traffic.

This is like charging Walmart trucks more than other trucks for a bridge toll, just because Walmart make more money than other companies, but where the equivalent of the toll has already been paid for by Walmart's customers.

One can assume that everyone is being superficially friendly but playing hardball in the background. The problem is that its impossible for the carrier to know the value of a single 'bit', since it varies according to what the 'bit' contains - is it part of an app, an ad, a video or text.

Verizon want a slice of the action because they know that some people's bits have a high value-add and they themselves have been charging an absolutely massive premium for voice bits which are now being arbitraged to nothing.

The problem is that they cannot both the sender and the receiver, and they cannot charge the sender based upon the value of the data, without knowing what that data is.

This will be a titanic fight and everyone will lose, but nobody more so than people like Verizon, even if they do get people like Google to pay up in the short term. Equally the free ride is over, for the likes of Google, but they wont be paying what Verizon want. The Internet is more like the road network than a railway network - and Verizon are thinking in terms of railway networks.

I'm sure Om Malik will disagree, but then again, what do I know - he really understands what's happening here.

InformationWeek | Broadband Networks | Verizon Says Google, Microsoft Should Pay For Internet Apps | January 5, 2006

Last Year's predictions.

Technology:

1. Digg gets acquired.

2. Google releases Google Calendar and Google Micropayments and OEMs Google maps as a UI for portable iPod like GPS handhelds. Click spam becomes a real worry.

3. Microsoft does a $10billion plus acquisition.

4. Apple takes on Tivo with a Mac Mini style product with Front Row built in.

5. Energy scares and middle east politics dampen the economy such that 2006 is not like 1999 for Web 2.0.

Not technology:

6. US switches foreign policy away from direct military involvement to insurgency funding in Venezuela and ups anti-Chavez rhetoric.

7. Castro dies and Chavez threatens to stick his nose into Cuba.

8. Cracks appear in the Saud's control over Arabia and information leaks suggesting that Ghawar oil field is water logged.

9. Natural gas prices spiral, US house prices cool and plans for renewed US nuclear power push are drawn up.

10. The first signs of long term problems between the US and China appear over disagreements over Iran.

Lee Smolin's answer to this year's Edge Question: 'What is Your Dangerous Idea' is my favorite, touching on something I've been thinking and reading about for the last year.

Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin

1. All systems leak - so they are fuzzy and relative.
No system is fully open, or it ceases to be a separate 'system' and no system is fully closed, or it cannot be observed. Yet most science looks at or approximates closed systems. Just as the motion of objects depends on a frame of reference, I suspect the notion of how systems interact, how entropy flows between them, requires sensitive measurement to provide predictions , since all systems will tend to interact at a fine boundary between chaotoc and stable conditions, over time. Because of the required accuracy, these measurements will be dependent on something analogous to a 'frame of reference' since at some level, on the one hand, clear boundaries between systems are impossible and on the other any 'observing' system will only be able to perceive boundaries relative to itself.

2. All systems interact over time, and there may be emergent patterns in these interactions creating defined periodic cycles as with living or growing things.
If this is so, why should biological theories of evolution apply only to biological systems of systems made by living things, such as economics? What I mean by this is that evolutionary ideas apply to iterative systems that teeter on the edge of chaos (i.e. crystals presumably only evolve very very slowly) - but what if all interactions between systems tended to become iterative. Only recently has science begun to look quantitatively at the rules governing iterations between systems as over time. i.e. algorithms rather than formulae. I suspect that any all encompassing theory of evolution applies to any set of interacting systems (living or non living)

My dangerous idea is that Darwinism can be expressed in terms of physics, in terms of patterns in entropy flow between systems and more specifically in terms of a new and relativistic look at thermodynamics.

I suspect there may be a relativinstic view of thermodynamics and that a fourth law of thermodynamics may include an extended idea of natural selection, defined in terms of the physics of interactions between systems, where all linked systems tend to become either linked, or 'iterative' over time.

I normally beat up right wing incompetence, but time to have a go at left wing paranoia.

Unlike stories of outing spies etc., many people in technology know that using tracking pixels or cookies is ubiquitous, accepted practice, i.e. neither unusual or sinister.

So the thing that can be learned from the story below, is that if something sounds sinister, people will report it as such and one can assume that this is the case for other accusations against the government.

ABC News: U.S. to Probe Contractor's Web Tracking