Techy interlude

Forgive the tweet-like brevity of the last post. I was standing in the crowded Apple store in South Beach, holding one of the dozen or so iPads they have for customers to play around with, while a queue of would-be early adopters waited eagerly at my shoulder. Now we’re home (looks like we re-entered British airspace just in time), I can elaborate…

Thanks to Apple’s splendidly open policy of allowing customers free access to their networked machines, and as a result of our teenage offspring’s visceral need for daily access to Twitter, I had several sessions getting acquainted with Mr. Jobs’ latest toy. The verdict? Well, it’s every bit as attractive and easy to handle as I thought it would be. If you’ve used an iPhone, then it’s just like moving up to a larger version, with the same intuitive touch technology and ease of movement between applications.

My main interest was in the one application that you can’t get on your phone: iBooks. It’s stunning. You touch a virtual book to take it from the shelf, then flick through the pages just like a real book. You can change the font, look up words, and see illustrations in glorious colour. Damn: just when I’d got myself a Kindle, along comes the iPad and makes it look like MS-DOS compared to Windows. All the more annoying, then, that iBooks probably won’t be available on the UK version of the iPad, which won’t be in the shops until late May.

Incidentally, we resorted to the Apple store for our daily dose of the internet because the wifi charges in our hotel were so exorbitant. And just before we went away, there was a spate of stories about people using their smartphones abroad and being hit with shocking bills, so I’d turned off data roaming on my iPhone. I wonder, though, why service providers in the UK (like O2 and Orange) can’t come to some kind of reciprocal arrangement with overseas providers (like AT&T), as they do for calls and texts? The assumption seems to be that emailing and looking stuff up on the Web is a peripheral luxury which you should be prepared to forego when you’re abroad. Surely this is no longer the case, and most people would be prepared to pay a small additional fee, as they do for international calls, in order to check their messages and read local restaurant reviews, etc, while they’re on holiday?

(Note to regular readers: this techy stuff is just a temporary aberration and the usual coverage of politics, culture and so on will resume as soon as I get over my jet-lag...)

Where's the internet?

Another normlink: the always spot-on South Park imagines a world without the internet. I watched the clip with a shudder of recognition. We experienced a brief broadband outage of our own recently, and we were that family. Even worse: that panicked, powerless and ridiculous-looking dad in a dressing-gown - that was me.

Where is the Internet? - Click here for more amazing videos

Convert or die

A week after the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain held a conference on apostasy, there's  a reminder that denying people the right to choose their beliefs is not confined to Islam. According to the Observer: 'Hundreds of Christians in the Indian state of Orissa have been forced to renounce their religion and become Hindus after lynch mobs issued them with a stark ultimatum: convert or die.' The report carries a telling quote from a local representative of Vishwa Hindu Pariashad (the World Hindu Council): 'This is a Hindu community. Everyone can stay here, as long as they are part of that community'.

This kind of lethal religious intolerance may seem a long way from the current state of affairs in Britain, but it's the logical endpoint of a communalism that persists in viewing religion as a fixed aspect of a person's identity rather than as a matter of private belief, that believes each community should be governed by its own religious laws, and maintains that particular geographical areas can be identified with particular faiths.

Meanwhile, if you've got a couple of hours to spare, the video footage of the apostasy conference is well worth a browse -  speakers included the fearless and heroic Maryam Namazie, Mina Ahadi and Ibn Warraq, as well as A.C.Grayling and Richard Dawkins. Incidentally, making it possible for a wider audience to share in events of this kind is surely one of the great cultural successes of the Web, and a riposte to the pessimists who claim that the internet is dumbing down the culture. (The Democratiya channel at Youtube is another great source of intellectual stimulation for those of us who don't get out much).

Update

Shuggy makes some good points about religion and secularism, in response to a topsy-turvy piece by Andrew Brown on the Ex-Muslims' conference mentioned above. Brown insists on treating religious belief and secularism as if they're the same kind of thing, insisting that just as believers shouldn't impose their faith on the rest of us, nor should secularists. As often happens in these pieces defending a privileged role for religion in public life, Brown's article shows a complete misunderstanding of what secularism is. It's not a separate belief system: it's the belief that in a free and plural society, private belief and public politics should be kept well apart.