The BBC has got into bed with Microsoft to provide its planned “download everything BBC TV shows for a week after the event for free” service.
The BBC and Microsoft? Surely the BBC is a public service organisation, digital rights management (DRM) is evil and Microsoft is worse? Why not use Ogg or some similar open-geek format? [...]

You’ll have noticed that things have been rather quiet of late here at The Sharpener.
Not for much longer. A shiny new coat of paint in about to be applied and a refreshed roster of writers are being strapped into their flight seats ready for launch in April.
Keep watching the skies.

Douglas Murray, author of the Social Affairs Unit’s Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, recently made a speech at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Lecture on the topic “What Are We To Do About Islam?”. This lecture has been reproduced on the SAU’s blog, trots out the usual rhetoric about “dhimmitude” and calls for, among other [...]

“As Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure exists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage… Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his own vanity.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
“It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that [...]

British kids, as anyone who’s met one can attest to, are stupid. Their English, so new research tells us, is worse than those for whom the empyrean tongue is a second language. Half of them can’t spell ’separate’. Almost four in five think that there’s an apostrophe in the possessive form of [...]