It just works.

Here's how I use a standard dial-up modem on Windows XP:

Click Start.
Click Control Panel.
Click System.
In the System Properties window, click on the Hardware tab.
Click Device Manager.
In the Device Manager window, right-click on the computer's icon and click Scan for hardware changes.
Wait for the system to detect — sorry, to "auto-detect" the modem.
Close the Device Manager window.
Close the System Properties window.
Actually bloody use the bloody modem.

We have a variety of different dial-up modems in this office, and they all require that same procedure, so no, it's not just me.

I quite like XP. No, really. But this is not one of its best features.

Money and stupidity.

As Jackie points out, Lauren Booth is a bloody idiot:

Of course, I'm hopeful [my Valentine's Day gift will] be thoughtful and expensive enough to take my breath away.

Yet, as I gaze in silence at the antique book, bracelet or ring, I won't be feeling as grateful as perhaps I might.

A voice in my head will be repeating a mantra that I must try extremely hard not to say out loud. 'Gosh I wonder how much all of this cost . . . me.'

Lauren doesn't seem to understand the whole what's-mine-is-yours part of a marriage.

You see, I am a Breadwinner Mum, the sole earner in a household of four. So when my beloved hubby spends weeks picking out the perfect gift, regardless of the exorbitant cost, it is - perversely - me who picks up the bill anyway. Does it rankle? Sadly for us, it does.

And she seems to have no idea what the point of buying someone a present is. If the point were the cost, we wouldn't buy presents; we'd just give each other money. The point is the choice of gift. I wonder if she gets similarly riled when her daughters buy her presents? I got a Christmas Card from my neice last year. She's four. I strongly suspect that she didn't earn the money she spent on the card, yet I find myself strangely unbothered.

As Jackie points out:

Stop saying that your husband is not contributing financially. He contributes financially by looking after your children (who, from the sound of it, absolutely love having him around - which I suspect is what really bothers you). He is also, as you point out, adding value to your real estate by converting your barn into a five bedroom house all by himself.

She's right, of course. Housewives contribute to marriages financially. Therefore, so do househusbands.

Yet there's something deeper here. So many couples get far too concerned with whose money is whose. Ms Booth and her husband have a joint bank account. Is the point of that not that the money is pooled? Yet she feels resentful and embarassed about handing him some cash when he needs it. Weird.

Vic & I, on the other hand, have never taken out a joint bank account; we still have separate accounts. And it never even occurs to us to think of the money as "mine" rather than "ours". We move money back and forth between the accounts depending on who needs what at the time. There are times when I have more and times when Vic has more; there have been times when I've earnt more and times when Vic has earnt more. And we both know that whichever of us has less can rely on the other for help. Why would anyone want to screw up their relationship obsessing about status? Honestly, some people.

And then there's this:

The most frustrating element in my experience is that the maternal breadwinner still ends up doing the lion's share of the work around the home. Not to mention the paperwork, the PE kit, the jabs, organising playdates, and on and on.

Indeed, one of the most intriguing emotional battles in a relationship like mine is over the housework and other domestic chores.

As many feminists and people with common sense have pointed out, this is a real problem. A lot of men feel that, even if the woman's the earner, housework is still women's work. Those men are stupid lazy misogynist bastards. But, while that may be true in the general case, I'm not so convinced that it applies to Ms Booth's life.

The truth is that when you are a woman and you have been away doing something exciting and fulfilling, you simply don't have the heart, when you return, to nag a man for failing to empty the dishwasher.

Perhaps a working woman carries an innate guilt that her bloke is at home clearing out the bin while she has left her children with him to go out and enjoy a stimulating career.

I know I overcompensate when I get back from a business trip. I return to a house that is hardly what you might call spotless, and, tired or not, I just roll up my sleeves and get cleaning, doing the homework and so on.

Reading that, you get the impression that Ms Booth goes out and slogs her arse off at work while her husband has an easy life of sitting around and not pulling his weight. Except, as she has already pointed out, he spends his days single-handedly building a five-bedroom house. Not only will that house, when it's finished, earn them a ton of money, but it is also bloody hard, back-breaking, exhausting work building it. Unlike, say, journalism.

To recap. Lauren Booth spends her days doing a job that involves sitting down and reading and typing. Her husband spends his days doing a job that involves moving tons of stone and brick and timber around; he also looks after their two children, often for days at a time. Because he does not always do the dusting or empty the dishwasher, Ms Booth is resentful that she does all the hard work.

She may like to tell herself that the reason for the tensions in their marriage is their income disparity, but I suspect her total lack of respect for her husband might not be helping matters.

Overfamiliarity breeds contempt.

What strikes me the most about this report of Daniel Craig's rudeness is that it appears not to have occurred to Johann Hari that Craig might have called him a "fucking fool" in response to anything other than the (admittedly fucking foolish) comment Hari had just made about Craig's shorts. It's not at all unlikely that Craig might have read some of Hari's work.

A new low.

Eddie Izzard once said that there's a very fine line between extremely cool and totally stupid. Example: one toothpick in the corner of the mouth — cool. No-one knows why; it just is. But add an extra toothpick and have one in each corner of the mouth — stupid. (A couple of years later, presumably to prove his point, he started to wear fake breasts.)

Hip-hop records tend to contain a lot of swearing. So, for radio play and pre-watershed television, they blank the offending words out. Fair enough.

Then some bright spark finally realised that these records with every third word missing just sounded like the rapper had a rather odd stutter, or perhaps hiccups, and they started filling in the gaps. Eminem decided to use a DJ to scratch-mix in distorted and unrecognisable recordings of the offending lyrics. This is pretty cool.

Then The Pussycat Dolls had the inspired idea of beeping out words, but using a really loud and in-tune beep and making it an integral part of the music. This is very cool indeed.

And now there's Lily Allen, taking it to the next step. She has obscured the "offending" words in her new record, Alfie, with comedy brass fills. So, for instance,

My little brother's in his bedroom smoking weed

becomes

My little brother's in his bedroom smoking [Parp! Wooooooop! Honk honk!]

(Because "weed" is a very, very offensive word, you see.)

Ms Allen must be the only person ever to have responded to the spectacle of one clown pouring whitewash into another's trousers while the trombone plays "Wah... wah... wah... waaaaaaaaaaah!" by thinking "What fantastic music. I must try and incorporate that into a hit record."

An even better idea.

So, what have you come up with this time?

OK. You'll like this.

We were quite surprised you didn't want to go with plan A, to be honest.

But, hey, it wasn't the right image for you.

And we understand that.

Yes, we do.

And we had no idea it'd been done before.

None at all. So, anyway, this is good. You'll be impressed.

And it's totally original.

Oh yes. Like nothing else out there. We're thinking we go with some upbeat pop music. Energy, youth, funkiness, cool...

But nothing alienating.

No, it's got to have wide appeal. Kids and grandmas. And at the same time, it has to really say something about your product. So what we're thinking is...

This is so good. You'll love this.

We'll use I Believe In Miracles by Hot Chocolate — but with different lyrics!

....

What do you think?

Topical as ever.

Continuing my series of totally up-to-the-minute observations on the hot issues of the day, I've just stumbled across this rather interesting piece by Martin Geddes from nearly two years ago. It's ostensibly a review of the marvellous Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, but also has some quite interesting things to say about why Nokia, a phone manufacturer, took the rather surprising step of releasing a beautiful little gadget like the 770, which obviously could have had a built-in mobile phone, with no built-in mobile phone.

The 770 is also significant because it partially separates connectivity from the hardware. Obviously, you need to provide your own Wi-Fi signal. You'll need to use a Bluetooth modem to work on a cellular system. But it springs Nokia free from the design and distribution constraints that the carriers usually impose. Or as El Reg puts it:

It's an open platform, and unlike its phone range, there's no built-in DRM or similar shenanigans to cripple the user experience. ... The 770 will be available through general electronics retailers or direct from Nokia's website.

These two things are not unconnected. The smartphone market is somewhat of a poisoned chalice to handset makers. The more features there are the greater the likelihood some meddlesome operator will want to break or customise them, ruining your already thin volumes and fragmenting your base for developers. The operator urge to make smart networks peppered with toll booths, and use device subsidy to push people towards higher-charging monthly plans, reduces the perceived value of the product to the public and re-allocates the profit pool towards the carrier.

The 770 is an attempt to break this cycle, and recapture the value of the "smarts" that a smartphone would offer, but in an enlarged form factor that is cheaper to make, better to use, and potentially offering high margins. ...

Constrain the handset innovation with a smart network and complex pricing and the innovation goes elsewhere. I look forward to more devices that signal to the market "this is what we can do when the handcuffs are taken off".

How much value will be left in those expensive mobile carrier-owned retail stores if the best devices start being distributed via other channels? How come a hit personal, portable data and media-centric device like an iPod doesn't fit into the distribution network of a mobile carrier? The stores scream "we sell stuff that meets the sales needs of Vodafone and Cingular to pay for their network", rather than "we sell stuff that meets your user needs when you're out and about". Supplier-centric, not user-centric. Not an obvious model for retail success.

I'm struggling to figure out whether Geddes has been proven right or proven wrong by the iPhone. Perhaps a bit of both. He certainly helps to make sense of Nokia's new strategy of building both wi-fi and VoIP into their top-end phones, which shows they feel they have enough clout to ignore the demands of the network providers. My phone, the E70, can be used to make calls via the Internet when I'm at home (and regularly will be, just as soon as I get my shiny new router properly configured), and can even make VoIP calls with reasonable sound quality over a 3G mobile Internet connection, potentially far cheaper than paying the standard network rates. Combine phones like this with the new flat-rate unlimited Net access deals that 3 are offering, and we could see some major changes to the mobile phone market. Perhaps VoIP will be where 3G really comes into its own — perhaps having the networks specialise in handling voice traffic will turn out to have been a mere brief phase: in the future, they'll just connect you to the Net and leave you to it.

Anyway, it looks like both the 770 itself and the ethos behind it were successful enough for Nokia's liking, because they've now come up with the N800, which is the same only even better. It has a built-in phone, but not a cellular phone: it's VoIP only. At the very least, this constitutes a major thumbing of Nokia's nose towards the networks.

They must be doing something right, 'cause I want one.

You could nick some off the roof.

Mr Rob Hinkley, Finder of Nutters has found The International Alchemy Guild, who appear to be either unaware of or disdainful towards those jumped-up upstart "scientists" and their so-called "periodic table".

The alchemists' grasp of science is displayed quite concisely in the first few sentences of their front page:

The last building used by the Guild from that era still stands and is shown at right.

The photo's on the left.

Anyway, what do you get if you join up?

All new members receive a gilded Certificate of Membership (suitable for framing) which assigns you a license to practice alchemy

Rob has rightly noticed the absurdity that one can get a license for this, but has failed to point out the even greater absurdity that the certificate is gilded. Surely a more effective system of licensing would be to give members a plain paper certificate and only allow those with gilded certificates to practice.

Hostility.

This is so cool. In response to my extreme extremist position that abortion should be legal for any reason in the first trimester but only for medical reasons in the third (I'm a bit hazy about the second), I've been called a stupid out-and-out misogynist anti-choicer, a woman-hating control freak, a wingnut, I've been compared to a Jew-hater, accused of trolling, and, helpfully, told about how people like me are hostile to reason and engage in arguments by shouting and screaming.

Nuttery.

OK, here goes. I shall now blog about one of those things that is pretty much guaranteed to start a bloody great big fight. In preparation, I'll just say that I'll tolerate any amount of disagreement in the comments, but zero abuse. Stay polite. Thanks.

Right.

It is commonly believed in the UK that American anti-abortionists are extremist nutters. What we see of them over here certainly tends to support that view. However, it is also commonly believed in the UK that American abortion law is similar to British abortion law. It isn't even close.

For instance, in my experience, Britons are surprised to discover that abortion is legal in the US during the ninth month of pregnancy for non-medical reasons:

Together, Doe and Roe recognized abortion as a constitutional right and by implication overturned most laws against abortion in other US states.

The decision stated: "...the medical judgment maybe exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age — relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs...," implying that the "health" exception was not just for physical health, and could therefore be used to allow abortion for any reason at any stage of pregnancy.

One might ask how one goes about aborting a baby that is pretty much ready to be born and that could in fact be delivered healthy and alive if need be. The answer is partial-birth abortion:

Once the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the doctor uses an ultrasound and forceps to grasp the fetus' leg. The fetus is turned to a breech position, if necessary, and the doctor pulls one or both legs out of the birth canal, causing what is referred to by some people as the 'partial birth' of the fetus. The doctor subsequently extracts the rest of the fetus, usually without the aid of forceps, leaving only the head still inside the birth canal. An incision is made at the base of the skull and a suction catheter is inserted into the cut. The brain tissue is removed, which causes the skull to collapse and allows the fetus to pass more easily through the birth canal.

Now, Americans who support abortion object to the use of the term "partial-birth abortion", mistakenly believing that it is the term, rather than what it describes, that people tend to find abhorrent. More sensibly, they point out that medicine is full of procedures that are, frankly, disgusting, and describing their disgustingness doesn't necessarily tell us anything about their morality. But that objection only really holds up when you're discussing abortion for health reasons. Once you get into a debate about the merits of performing a partial-birth abortion on a perfectly healthy baby at thirty-six weeks because the mother has decided she just doesn't want a baby, well ... most people I know, including those who believe abortion should be legal, call that "infanticide". In my experience, Britons are shocked to discover that such a practice is legal in a supposedly civilised country like the US. American left-wingers, as a general rule, will defend to the hilt its legality. The recent fuss over George W Bush's attempts to — so we were told — ban abortion was in fact over his attempt to stop the partial-birth abortion of healthy babies for non-health-related reasons.

In short, even without getting into the interesting constitutional issues, it is difficult for Britons to understand either side of the American abortion debate because it is taking place on a completely different playing field to our own. Even the staunchest British pro-abortionist would hesitate to propose a situation as extreme as what, in the US, is the status quo.

My own position, in case anyone's wondering, is that I broadly support the British situation: abortion legal for a while, illegal afterwards. We can and do have sensible debates about exactly how long that while should be, and we change it a little now and then, depending on who's winning the debate at the time. The situation here is sufficiently reasonable that it very rarely makes the news because so few people, on either side, are particularly upset about it. If I lived in the US, however, I'd be a pro-lifer. American abortion law is at such an insane extreme that the best reaction to it is to oppose it as strongly as possible until a more sensible compromise is reached.

Anyway, the other day, that nice Mr Worstall commented on a story on Pandagon, a blog of which I had not previously heard. And blow me if it doesn't give even Johann Hari a run for his money in the being-wrong stakes.

Yesterday, Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte posted a piece about the evils and stupidity of anti-abortion campaigners. Ironically enough, I have rarely seen a better example of the extremism and nastiness of American pro-abortion campaigners.

First, here's what American left-wingers think of the concept of pregnancy:

a lot of anti-choicers are ... invested in turning the fetus into a person (or really a super-person bearing rights — specifically the right to use someone else’s body for sustinence against their will — that ordinary real people don’t have)

....

a fetus ... is in a parasitic relationship to its mother

In the American debate, this is standard boiler-plate stuff. In the UK, I don't think anyone could describe the state of pregnancy as "having a parasite use your body against your will" without getting some rather odd looks. And, of course, it's entirely alien to the way women tend to feel about pregnancy.

Reading through the large number of comments from people who agree with Ms Marcotte, there are some truly stupendously stupid responses to one lone anti-abortionist commenter:

grow a uterus or shut the hell up.

(Funny how you never see that one used against male pro-abortionists.)

why do you want me to have a miscarriage, stillborn, or severely disabled baby? Why do you want me to be permanently disabled or dead? Why do you hate women and babies?

he doesn’t know how babies are actually made, and blames them on those times he accidentally sneezed on his wife without covering his mouth.

And there's plenty of generalised offensiveness and contempt on display:

I wonder what they think about aborting fetuses who wouldn’t develop to become white, straight, able-bodied and conservative?

it’s neurochemically impossible for anti-abortioners to care less about the welfare of unborn children. What they care about is using them as a punishment for sex. And if the slut has to deal with a sick or dying baby, as far as tha antiabortioners are concerned, so much the better. ... And the anti-abortion crowd sure as Hell isn’t going to put itself out for anyone who couldn’t be bothered to get themselves some white parents.

the whole point of being a pro-lifer is that women who have sex without intending to have children deserve to feel bad about it. Pro-lifers would like these women to suffer further consequences — death, permanent sterility, extreme emotional damage — but if they can’t force women through unwanted pregnancy/childbirth, the least they can do is try to make women who decided to terminate feel absolutely rotten.

But by far the most disgusting comment comes from Amanda herself. I just couldn't believe I was reading this:

Getting an abortion is, from a certain angle, liberating the fetus from its womb-prison. That it can’t survive outside of it is not the fault of the liberator, I would think.

So, if you didn't before, now you know why American anti-abortionists seem so extreme. This is what they're up against.

A great idea.

So, what have you got for us?

Well.

Well.

We think you'll like this.

See, we thought, what, when you get down to it, is the primary selling point of your product? What is its point, its ... ah ... raison d'etre?

Er, it's low in fat.

Low in fat! Exactly! Exactly. It's low ... in ... fat. Hence, "light". Your product is light. Not literally, of course.

It is the same weight as your competitors' products.

We weighed it.

No, but in the commonly accepted colloquial sense that eating your product will lead the eater to become lighter. Or not to become so heavy, at least.

It's not fattening, is what we're trying to say here.

Light.

And that gave us an idea.

So we'll have some person eating your product.

A good-looking person.

Well, obviously.

Or a photogenic animal.

I keep telling you, it's "anthropogenic".

A photogenic and anthropogenic animal.

A good looking person, I think would be better.

I like animals.

Right. Anyway, who or what is eating your product is not the point. As long as they're attractive. No, the point is that they're outside, on a sunny day, with plenty of nice big sky. Maybe they're in a park. Lots of green grass.

Green stuff — health. See?

And here's the thing.

You'll like this.

The product escapes from them! It floats away on the breeze, up, up into the sky.

Because it's light!

....

What do you think?