I am finding the debate over the proposal to introduce a new offence of “incitement to religious hatred” really scary.

Free speech used to be one of those cornerstones of British liberal democracy (like… erm… the right to trial by jury) but it looks like it might be the next thing for the chop in this brave new labour / new puritan / Christian right world of ours.

Some comedians here caused a minor splash recently by focussing on the danger that religious satire might be banned by this law. Whilst I’d be sad to lose Father Ted, I have heard far more scary things suggested. I heard a British Muslim “leader” on Radio 4 this mornin suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that it would have been handy to have had this law in place when Salman Rushdie published the Satanic Verses, as it would have allowed them to force him to “change a few words here and there”.

Religion is not the same thing as ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or disability. People choose their religion (or at least they should be allowed to, if they haven’t had it stuffed down their throats by parents, teachers, or missionaries).

If you choose to believe something, that is your right, and I would defend your right to express that belief, however distasteful I might find it. By the same token, you should then be prepared to accept the same from others - including their right to debate the wisdom of your belief, and the possibility that it may be misguided, wrong, or even downright harmful.

Likewise, if your belief causes you to act in an illegal way (for example by attacking, or inciting attack on a group of people with a different belief), you should be subject to the same laws as anyone else. We already have laws protecting people against violence, and punishing people for inciting others to violence. We don’t need any more, and we certainly don’t need specific protection for religion.

The erosion of these kinds of freedoms are the thin edge of a very, very dangerous wedge. There is an awful lot of complacency in this country. Next time you watch the news on TV and tell yourself that it couldn’t happen here, it might be worth checking the statute books and the next labour manifesto first.

Universal Free Dictionary: "Zdenek Broz writes 'The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). We are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL.'"

(Via Slashdot.)

As mentioned a while ago, we’re moving house soon. Since my server lives at home, it is likely to be down for a while. Transit time should be fairly short, but a change of location requires a new broadband connection, and a new static IP address, so I fully expect everything to go horribly wrong.

I’ll try to set up some sort of placeholder in the meantime. Expect everything to go offline on Monday, and be back anytime from Wednesday onwards!

And keep your fingers crossed for me…

The old chestnut of someone buying Apple has reared it’s ugly head again, now that IBM have sold their PC business.

Personally I think it’s a bit of a non-starter; IBM would stifle Apple’s freedom and I suspect that they’d haemorrhage creative staff after any such take-over. And I can’t really see Steve Jobs wearing a short sleeved shirt with a tie and a bunch of pencils clipped into his top pocket :)

On the other hand, some sort of strategic alliance would make a hell of a lot of sense. A bit of you-scratch-my-back technology sharing, a la the old Apple-Microsoft deal, would do no harm to either.

This Ars Technica review contains a nice survey of Dock substitutes and other launch utilities.

Most interesting is the stuff about Quicksilver, which is a really interesting utility that Josh pointed out to me a while ago. Whilst I was working at SI I had it installed on my G5, and it really started growing on me. For a long time I didn’t have it on my laptop, so I’m only just starting to get into it again. It’s pretty good though - kind of like a graphical command line (but much better than that might sound!) :)