The US supreme court, in a split decision, has ruled that corporations are people, free to spend on political campaign advertising as a form of free speech. This is a terrible decision that threatens the foundation of democracy.

Corporations have different goals to people. They are about their own survival, and act in nobody's interests but their own. Customers? They're out to screw them for every cent the market will bear. Ditto suppliers. Employees? There to be used up and thrown away as soon as it's profitable to get rid of them. Executives? To be sacrificed every time the stock drops, or forced out as part of a merger or acquisition. Shareholders? Love them -- until things get tough. Then declare chapter 11, wipe them out, and find some new suckers.

By declaring corporations people, we have created a new species, parasitic upon our own, and significantly stronger. Corporations will suck us in, use us up, and spit us out, without regard for wealth or class. There will be no lucky ones: we will all be the losers. Once they are in control, the best efforts of humanity will be subjugated to the survival of the corporations. They will wreck our environment, because they do not need to breathe. They have no interest in our health or our life-spans. They don't care whether we're happy, and they don't care if we like them. They only care about other corporations.

Democracy is government by the people and for the people. By declaring corporations people we subvert democracy, pushing towards political goals that are dramatically contrary to our own interests as human beings. This is a genie that needs to be put back in its bottle, immediately, before it is too late.

So the iTablet is coming, or so it seems, and everyone is reading tea-leaves, so here's my own swing:

I know this is ridiculous, but the moment I saw this invitation and this tweet from Ricky, I thought: what if the tablet isn't a device on its own? What if it is more like a Wacom tablet -- not a full device on its own, but more of a peripheral?

Imagine a device the size of a mousepad. It sits on your desk, replacing the mouse itself. It syncs to your mac, and displays a picture of the screen itself -- or a portion of the screen. It acts like a touch screen, or if you want it to, a drawing tablet (it would let you "zoom in" on the drawing area, like Mobile Safari does). In addition to ordinary clicks, you'd be able to use a variety of gestures to simplify various tasks. Applications that were compatible with the device could send dedicated UI to the tablet itself, giving you a range of buttons and tools within a fingertip's reach -- this would be pretty useful in Photoshop, for instance, but other apps as well.

So then you're done drawing your picture on your big screen, and you want to walk across the room and show it to somebody, or take it home with you to work on your home machine. You just pick it up, and walk away. Your tablet has a copy of the document. You can work on it, annotate it, mail it to people, and if you take it to another Mac, it can transfer it right across. Quickly, seamlessly, in the best Apple style. Of course, because it's sort of like an iPhone, it will also have apps and dedicated services, but where it will really shine is as an ultraportable extension of your existing system.

If it were true, this solves a couple of key questions surrounding the tablet:

1. Jobs has been delaying a tablet for years because it needs to be useful for more than "surfing the web in the bathroom". So if they do reveal a tablet, it's going to come with a use-case nobody's thought of so far. Sure, it might work as an eBook reader too, but Steve doesn't want to build one of those, so I doubt that will be the primary use-case.
2. There's been a lot of buzz about the fact that the tablet may be using gestures in some new way, since Apple recently took down the website of FingerWorks, a gestural-input startup they acquired five whole years ago. FingerWorks' primary product was called, coincidentally, the iGesture Pad, and (though I didn't know this when I started writing this) it has all the mouse-replacement features I talked about: clicking, scrolling, dragging, etc.
3. Finally, lots of people have asked: if I already have an iPhone and a Mac desktop or laptop, why do I need a tablet? Is there really a gap in the market there? And this answers the question: it doesn't replace your iMac or your Powerbook, it complements both -- hell, it might even sync with your iPhone too.

All of which leads me to say that if this isn't what the iTablet is, then they should get started on something like this right away. But maybe they had this idea five years ago, when they bought FingerWorks, and it's taken all this time to get it right. In which case, I expect to be very excited indeed when I see what they've come up with.

A ridiculously misleading letter from Wells Fargo is trying to scam their own customers out of $156/year under the pretect of a "free" credit report. I expect better from a reputable national bank.

First Alan Williamson asked if Amazon EC2 has become oversubscribed. Then Cloudkick jumped in with graphs illustrating the increased latency seen by spot instances. Amazon has denied there's any fundamental issue. But let's look at that graph:

Something struck me about the timing: the trouble all seems to kick off round the 12th of December: that's the day Amazon announced EC2 spot instances. The way spot instances work is simple: Amazon puts its spare capacity up for auction. Instead of paying a set price, you bid for an instance, and the highest bids that fill up available instances win. If more people turn up demanding instances, the price should rise.

But there's a side effect: assuming spot instances are popular, then we can assume that no matter what the price is, all of EC2 capacity is now being used. What would you expect to happen if that were the case? Well, you'd expect them to start hitting capacity limits -- which is what the ping times seem to suggest is happening.

At the moment this is just my theory. Anybody else got any evidence that might back it up? It would be really nice to see what's been happening to EC2 spot prices over the last month, for instance.

The details are fuzzy. I think I was about eight years old at the time. I was in the car with my mother, in Trinidad, driving from our house on the hill in Curepe towards the junction with the Eastern Main Road. We were just passing the corner where a hand-painted sign advertising "BROILERS $5.00"*. My mother had the radio tuned to the cricket. Somebody else was in the car -- I think it was my best friend at the time, Dari -- and he asked what the score was.

I'm not a fan of cricket, or indeed of any sport. Something fundamental about being a spectator to those sorts of activities escapes me. Coming from a family of sports fan, and already in possession of my gleeful contrarian streak, I quickly announced that I didn't know. In fact, I said, I didn't even understand what the scores meant -- runs and overs and wickets and things.

My mother told Dari the score, and then gave me a very mild rebuke for being so forcefully ignorant of the sport -- this was not the first time I'd done something like this. "It's never cool to not know something, Laurie," she said.

I doubt she even remembers making the comment. It wasn't an important "sit down and get this straight" moment. It was just something she said over her shoulder as she negotiated traffic. She meant that I shouldn't try to stand out from my peers by being deliberately ignorant about things (an emerging habit of mine at the time). She meant that there were better ways to define myself than by what I was not. But it hit home, in a way that things your parents say sometimes do, and it's stayed with me to this day. It's practically the defining tenet of my life.

Starting that day, I never turned down information. I can't say I eagerly sought out information on the byzantine rules of cricket, but I didn't ignore them when they came my way. Since then, when faced with anything new, I have tried to understand it, even if it doesn't interest me. The principle that became embedded in my brain was much broader, and it was that ignorance is uncool. As such I have tried very hard, ever since, to never be ignorant about anything, ever.

It created that infovore that I am today. I absorb anything and everything that falls into my path. One of my most-used phrases is "I once read an article about...". Pick a random topic and I'm not going to know much, but chances are I will have at least one random fact lying around, some connection I can make to my existing store of trivia.

Would I have been like that even if my mother had never said anything that day? Probably, I suppose. But probably not so soon, or so firmly. It's definitely one of those pivotal moments in my life, when a single remark shapes everything that happens afterwards. And I'm grateful for it.

For web nerds, I have revived my long-defunct web development blog with a post about non-spammy website promotion that will hopefully be useful. It includes the phrase "Social Media Optimization" but other than that it is relatively free of douchebaggery.

It's been one of my lightest years for blogging, with an average of around four posts per month. A lot of my short-form output has gone instead to Twitter and my longer-form comments have generally been on Hacker News. However, there were a few things I'd call out as being worth a second glance if you missed them:

• Web developers don't build websites; they develop the web
• I asserted that journalism is dead, not just newspapers. I'm not sticking to this 100%: far-away, high-risk, expensive professional journalism still has value, and people will pay for it. However, the vast majority of people who currently call themselves "journalists" are going to find themselves out of work as the cost of the equipment necessary for real-time observation continues to fall. Opinion columnists and critics are out of luck.
• I explained, in minute detail, why it takes me so long to have a shower.
• I listed ten things that Twitter is not and said that if anything, it is "what's going on". Five months later Twitter changed their opening question from "what are you doing?" to "what's happening?" which is sufficiently close that I feel vindicated.
• I wrote a short story in 8 parts called Pilots. It started off well but the ending was sloppy. However, it's one of my better efforts to date.
• Immigration is good for you. And here's why.
• Apple's App Store needs to be fixed and it will require a fundamental change to the iPhone platform if carriers are going to allow arbitrary software to run on their networks.
• I defended the UK Labour party but conceded that they will lose the next election anyway. Hopefully the conservatives will stay in for only one term.
• Avatar completely blew me away.

One of the questions that has occurred to me more than once when I've seen things like a short film made for $300 that has better special effects than Independence Day is: where do movies go from here?

For the longest time, the difference between movies and television, for anything other than straight real-world drama, has been the quality of the special effects. Either just sets and props, or better lighting or sound, or in the case of science fiction and fantasy, whole characters and worlds. That's why it's been possible to endlessly re-make certain types of movies (like alien invasions), because every time you re-make one the effects have come so far that it's been another quantum leap in visuals.

For the last decade or so, the gap has been narrowing. For me it was particularly evident in the Star Wars movies, where episodes 1 through 3 came out in the mid-2000s, and then three years later random fan films came out with effects that, while visibly worse than the real thing, were not a million miles away, either. Big-budget TV shows like Battlestar Galactica had effects that were essentially of movie quality, without barely any quality gap. What would be the justification of a big-screen experience, a big-budget experience, when you could get the same thing at home? 3D was a gimmick, an expensive trick that added nothing to the film.

In Avatar, I have my answer. This is a game-changing film. In the same way that Toy Story ended the era of hand-drawn animation, all big-budget movies filmed in 2D will from now on look somehow dated and cheap. This movie is big, it's beautiful, and the depth of the field afforded by 3D is used consistently, frame-by-frame, with none of the overpowering, out-of-place 3D set-pieces that characterize older 3D films. This is how it's done, and anything not done this way from now on will look amateur.

From the amazing reviews, I was expecting a great movie, and I was still completely blown away. The plot is extremely simple, in a way that real-world conflict is not, but it is solid (unlike, say, 2012). The acting is excellent (Sigourney Weaver could carry the whole movie by herself if she needed to) and the dialogue, very surprisingly for a Cameron epic, mostly avoids cringe-worthy cheesy lines. But overriding all of that is that this movie is deeply, gloriously beautiful, and drove me almost to tears more than once, in the way that a symphony can for other people: not because anything sad is happening, but just sheer joy that anything so beautiful can exist.

I had a conversation with Owen on his Facebook wall over the weekend about Tony Blair and the Labour party, spurred by an off-handed comment of his that Tony Blair had deliberately lied to the nation about Iraq.

I genuinely believe that Blair never intentionally lied about Iraq, and more generally that Labour has got a lot of mostly undeserved flak from a lot of ex-Labour supporters. Since the UK seems to be heading towards an inevitable victory by the Conservatives, a fact that deeply distresses me, I figured I'd make my own small case on their behalf.

Firstly, on the subject of Iraq, someone else chimed in:

But how was he [misled by US intelligence], when we went through the dossier and found it so full of holes it was like a macro of a tea bag? Either he knew it was a crock, and lied about that, or he lied about being competent to judge it.

I think he took the US at their word and didn't give a toss about the dossier. In fact, I'd be surprised if he even read it. The US are the UK's closest allies and the US military is the best in the world; when they tell you something you believe them -- or you did in 2001, at least. That was a gigantic mistake, so I'm not going to say he wasn't incompetent. But I don't think he's a liar.

Fundamentally I just don't see any upside for him in lying. Why would he do it? It destroyed his political career and ruined his public image, which was the thing he cared about most. He had no grudge against Iraq like Bush did; he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do, and he was terribly, terribly wrong.

At which point Owen broadened the argument to general disaffection with Labour, which I believe is what happened in the electorate at large. Iraq became the cause celebre for a large chunk of Labour supporters who were actually upset about a totally different issue -- or rather, a series of small issues that had built up over time. Iraq was just the straw that broke the camel's back. From Owen:

But the impression that always came across was that Blair was most concerned about his place in history and in sticking to Dubya like glue.

To me, it showed that, whilst Blair obviously had sincere principles, that those principles were less aligned to mine than I'd thought.

That and the other authoritarian securicracy measures (not all post-9/11, things like ID cards and the terrorism legislation) were the main things that lead me — and many left-wingers like me — to feel betrayed by the whole New Labour project.

In 1997, I genuinely believed that things could only get better. By 2003, I had become so disillusioned with New Labour (and British politics more generally) that I no longer believe we could have that Obama moment, promising genuine change we could genuinely believe in. After all, isn't that what the New Labour project was meant to be all about? Whereas, 12 years later, it seems more clearly to be the removal of socialism from the British political spectrum, signing up to "the power of the markets" and neoliberal economics, to authoritarianism and to a control-obssessed presidential style of government.

All of these are things for which I can't see myself ever being able to forgive Blair, Campbell and Mandelson.

There's a lot of truth in this. Fundamentally, Blair's candidacy and the entire New Labour project was about becoming electable by shifting the party dramatically toward the center, becoming a center-right party, while still giving lip service to the very strongly leftist party it had once been, so as to keep support of unions and other strong voting blocs of the left. It was an amazing confidence trick, but there was no way they could maintain the illusion for long. They simply did not vote for the party they thought they had; a sense betrayal was the only rational response.

That said, the center-right party called "New Labour" did a lot of good, spending the economic dividends from reforms enacted by (whisper it) Thatcher on things like education and health care. By moving to the center-right, Labour also forced the Conservatives to shift further right, producing extremism and defections that left them leaderless and rudderless for more than a decade. It was a brilliant move.

So of course Labour have signed up the the power of the markets and deregulation: they're a center-right party, that's what they believe in. The difference between me and a large group of UK voters is that I was quite happy to vote for a center-right party, while they still can't believe they did, and are very angry about it. But for the most part, the bulk of the electorate was okay with it, or at least liked it better than the alternative -- at least for a while.

The two places it broke down were Iraq -- again, no question, a horrible mistake on Blair's part -- and, as Owen mentioned, the system of targets and centralized measurement Labour tried to use to get value for the money they were pouring into social services.

Labour's mistake in the second was to believe (or hope) that anything measured would improve, instead of the much harder job of enacting real reform. But the reforms they needed would have been far too jarring for the left to handle -- shaking up the NHS and teaching would be political suicide -- so they had few other options. Essentially, it was to keep the support of people like Owen that the targets were invented, but it eventually failed because it meant the services produced very little value for all the new money spent on them.

So on Iraq, Britons are totally within their rights to feel angry -- but, again, I think it was incompetence rather than malice. The left can also feel like they were betrayed -- but, on actual issues of governance, did Labour really do that badly? What would they prefer Labour did that the Tories are now promising to do? It seems like even if they were tricked into voting for Labour, it worked out pretty well. A party that was actually as leftist as the loudest of Labour's current detractors would like has no hope of getting elected in Britain, where the population as a whole is very much center-right.

Labour are still being punished for Tony Blair's mistake, as well as Gordon Brown's charm-free personality and dissatisfaction with the general economic climate which can't really be laid at their feet -- in fact, the UK's response to the credit crisis is generally agreed to have been pretty competent, level-headed and as effective as possible in the circumstances.

Now the UK looks set to throw away a center-right party with a strong commitment to social services in favour of a party that, despite Cameron's mirroring of Blair's strategy with a strong push to the left, is still very much against them, and whose economic leanings are towards the kind of laissez-faire capitalism that gave birth to the credit crisis in the first place. Brown is a poor leader of the party and should be replaced, but the party as a whole is still the one that would be best for Britain. It's too late for this election, but I hope it only takes the UK one term of Conservative government to figure that out.

The incredibly respected PPK has added his own thoughts to the debate on fixing the App Store problem (which I was talking about last week).

Initially he said that iPhone developers are idiots who should be building web apps instead, where Apple has no say over how their applications get delivered. He has subsequently recanted somewhat, given the lack of several key APIs and, even more importantly, a practical, easy mobile payments option beyond the app store.

This opens up the debate in a useful direction. I think some apps could be web apps that are currently not, but I still think native apps have the edge. However, this reiterates for me that half of the value of the App Store is that Apple have invented a simple, easy, secure mobile payment solution. They should open this up, entirely independently of the app process, and start raking in PayPal-sized dividends.