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n a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter.

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[A]dvertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.

– T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906

More and more.

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The mobile industry – most of it – has finally got its act together to challenge Apple’s dominance of mobile applications.

The “Wholesale Applications Community” can certainly claim wide support – three handset makers, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, along with dozens of carriers and operators including China Telecom, AT&T, Orange and Vodafone. It is expecting more members in coming weeks.

The group, which claims three billion customers, wants to create a single market place for mobile applications regardless of what platform they run on.

So it’s been three years since Apple woke them up, and this is what they figured was needed? They couldn’t be more wrong on the wrongest day of their life if they had an electrified wronging machine.

I’m a mobile developer, and I don’t give a shit about a single market place. I might give a shit about a single development environment, but that probably leaves me with an API that doesn’t cover the device features that aren’t as generic as a monochrome 480×320 pixel display, so I’m perfectly willing to port apps around a bit.

What I do care about is a device where users actually buy shit for. And there have been several attempts (mostly by folks not on this “Wholesale Applications Community” vendor list) to create those devices. Like RIM, Palm, and Google. And how many apps are sold on those platforms? Right now it’s just a rounding error in the numbers Apple is seeing.

Until these idiot corporations realize that the user experience matters far more than whichever marketing buzzwords they’ve been able to shoehorn into their clunky tat, they’re just going to keep on hearing a strange, almost continuous whooshing sound. It’s the sound of the fucking point whizzing right by them over and over again. If I were Steve Jobs, I’d want all my competitors to get involved in a project like this.

Leaving me with just a single platform to target. I understand the “complaints” about Apple, about locked devices, the app store process, multitasking, etc. Say about it what you want, but it did change the game. Understand that, and give me an alternative already!

Until then, I’m not going to port my stuff to your devices.

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The American government has finally revealed details of a secret mission to raise a sunken Soviet submarine.

The admission ends more than 30 years of silence over one of the most elaborate and expensive projects of the Cold War.

The CIA has always refused to confirm even the barest details of Project Azorian, a daring 1974 exercise that was backed by the industrialist Howard Hughes and estimated to have cost £1 billion in today’s money.

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Joe the Plumber is no longer a fan of either Sarah Palin or John McCain, it seems.

Joe, also known as Sam Wurzelbacher, told an audience in Pennsylvania this week that McCain “is no public servant.”

“McCain was trying to use me,” Wurzelbacher said, according to public radio correspondent Scott Detrow. “I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy.”

“I don’t owe him s—,” Wurzelbacher continued. “He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it.”

And it took you two years to figure that out?