Stephen Fry, writing for Time, travels to Cupertino for some touch time with the iPad.
So I stumbled across this story on Digg today. To cut a long story short, some fuck nut Iraqi in charge of national security (Major General Jehad al-Jabiri) has foregone the usual technique of sniffing out car bombs and other such explosive shit with sniffer dogs, and has instead opted to use… I shit ye not…. dowsing. The art of finding stuff with magic and sticks.
There’s nothing nice to be said about this man. Not only is he fucking stupid in a way that can’t be measured because the universe simply can’t hold numbers that big, his stupidity will, and indeed HAS, caused the death of many many people. People who depend on this guy to do his job, not to fuck around with naive ideas about magic, which is what dowsing is, and I’ll stab anyone who thinks otherwise in their stupid little face with a cheese knife.
Alas, Iraqis are their own worst enemy so this kind of stuff doesn’t really surprise me. It makes me angry and I feel sorry for the people that have to live with this nonsense, but in the UK, we tend to think of ourselves as a little bit more balanced. There’s no way this sort of shit would go down at Heathrow or Gatwick airport. We all know it’s hokum, it’s not even up for discussion.
But! General Jehad al-Jabiri has spent millions… pause, think about that number for a second… millions of dollars on dowsing equipment from a UK company; ATSC UK Ltd.
Un-fucking-acceptable. It’s ok when they’re selling this shit to fuck-wits to stupid to know better who want to find Elves or fairy gold, but when some poor man/woman/child/family/community get’s blown up by a bomb that their magic rods failed to detect (which a sniffer dog would have), then that’s out of order. Totally and unforgivably out of order.
Major General Jehad al-Jabiri should be shot before he kills more people with his stupidity. ATSC UK Ltd should get the same treatment for the same reason. These are real lives, of real people we’re talking about here.
Sometimes I hate to be human. Today, and not for the first time, I’m ashamed to be British.
John Gruber put it best, “If you can’t beat em, sue em!” And so Nokia is about to try and sue the socks off apple for using standards it claims to have developed. I doubt it did, but outright lies and suspect legal battles seems to be the way we do business these days. Ho hum, anyway…
One thing in Nokia’s rationale that stuck out for me, and almost sent me into a violent rage is this line from Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President, Legal & Intellectual Property at Nokia
“The basic principle in the mobile industry is that those companies who contribute in technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for…”
Um…. no. That’s not it al all you stupid prick. People contribute to standards because it’s better for everyone. Hardware manufacturers, software developers, carriers and most of all, consumers. Well, that’s the plan anyway. But you guys obviously didnt get the memo. I see you’re happy to mooch off the hard work of others though.
The reason this grates me so much is that Nokia, and a few others, have clearly just ripped off the iPhone, as in almost carbon copied it. But they’ve been in business for years, they had all the time in the world to make better phones, and they didn’t. They were lazy, and now there’s something better on the market, they think they can just copy it and then sue it into submission. For Christ’s sake Nokia, just compete you pussies.
Grrrrrrrrrr!
Good luck with the court case, I hope you lose and that it costs you a fortune.
A teeny tiny little update to flightm8, it’s now got a reset button, which was a major oversight on my part.
In other news, traffic has been pretty good. We has aimed for about 1000 unique visitors in the first month, but we achieved that in the first week. Let’s hope it keeps growing like that!
Ok, so Flightm8 launched last week. Then we took it offline for about an hour due to some serious oversights on my part, and then it went back up. It’s in a stable condition now and the response has been…. good.
Some people love it, other people think it’s ok. No one has torn it to peices yet which is a good thing. It’s already appeared on the Google Maps Mania blog which was great news. Hopefully that will pull in some much needed traffic. Someone posted it on Stumbleupon, which was also nice. And slowly but surely, people are discovering it.
So what now? Well, there’s always bugs to fix. Today I solved a problem with locating users based on their IP address. There’s more routes to add, and more new features, most of which I wont talk about for now since I don’t want to write checks our time and skill can’t cash.
But one feature that’s currently in progress and looking promising enough for me to talk about now is the Connecting Flights feature. Very soon, Flightm8 will show you connecting flights between different airlines. For example, flying half your Journey with Ryanair, and the other half with another carrier like Jet2, or Virgin Atlantic.
That’s a feature no other website offers, and it will also multiply the number of routes you can search for. We think that’s a killer feature that will help make Flightm8 an indispensable tool for a lot of people.
Anyway, it’s been a long and difficult 6 months and I hope I can find time to write about how Flightm8 was born, and the circumstances that gave rise to it’s existence. Thanks to everyone who took time out to give us feedback, report bugs and give us moral support while we toiled at this little project. When we’re super rich we’ll send you all a post card from our private islands in space.
Anyhoot, it’s back to work for me!
