The Null Device
2010/10/25
The Chinese Communist Party organ, the People's Daily, has reviewed Apple's iPad, and found it wanting:
“There are many disadvantages” to the gadgets, it wrote. “For example you cannot install pirate software on them, you cannot download [free] music, and you need to pay for movies you watch on them.”While this is more about the acceptance of copying in China, a country where privately-held intellectual property is the exception rather than the rule, it is still somewhat ironic to see a totalitarian regime criticise Apple for being too locked down.
Charlie Brooker writes about Nick Clegg, the Good Cop of the Coalition behind the deepest economic cuts since 1918, in his inimitable style:
It's hard not to detect an air of crushed self-delusion about all this. At times Clegg sounds like a once-respected stage actor who's taken the Hollywood dollar and now finds himself sitting at a press junket, patiently telling a reporter that while, yes, on the face of it, his role as the Fartmonster in Guff Ditch III: Fartmonster's Revenge may look like a cultural step down from his previous work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, if you look beyond all the scenes of topless women being dissolved by clouds of acrid methane, the Guff Ditch trilogy actually contains more intellectual sustenance than King Lear, and that all the critics who've seen the film and are loudly claiming otherwise are misguided, partisan naysayers hell- bent on cynically misleading the public – which is ethically wrong.
On being the middle segment of a "human centipede": "I've heard a lot of people say, "urgh, Nick, have you seen that film The Human Centipede, where the mad scientist joins three people together by stitching them rectum-to-mouth? Can you imagine how disgusting that'd be in real life?" And I can see how they might leap to that conclusion. But real life is about compromise – sometimes we simply have to swallow a few unpleasant things in the name of pragmatism. In many ways, the coalition is a human centipede – a group of united individuals, all pulling together in one direction – and let me tell you, from the inside, it's surprisingly cosy."It looks like being associated with the Tories is doing to the Liberal Democrats what being associated with the Bush administration did to New Labour; in the recent Tower Hamlets election, the Lib Dem candidate polled only slightly better than the Greens. Mind you, in that case, he was the Bad Cop; while the Tory put on a nondescriptly conciliatory platform, desperately trying to evade any lingering associations with Thatcher's Nasty Party, the Lib Dem went out and promised to shut down arts centres and other such wasteful activities.