Asked how many Symbian applications are running on his phone (a Nokia 6600).
"Not one," he says. He simply doesn't see a mass market for software. Instead, he thinks, most people will want "a lot of things you can get on the Internet on your phone translated as a service, piece by piece".

The appetite for data cannot be underestimated - people are just looking at the wrong type. It's just not going to be download or video data - it's going to be transaction data.

You already don't carry money or a ticket with you. I have a wireless card for my car and I don't carry keys: if only I could get rid of my wallet! Then my passport. This has a very high consumer appeal, but you've got to make it easy to access.

The reality is that trying to push everything into everything just doesn't make sense. We'll see an unfolding of more things like the iPod - focused at a particular consumer solution. Everything doesn't go into there. Where you can break out groups of functions - the phone and the camera may work for some segments but not others; some might never want it, or might never use it. As we get more and more digital, all this complexity has to be tamed in a way that the consumer can access it.

So what innovation and what services do you think we are going to see?
Ask yourself, what are people going to with all their pictures in the future? What are they going to do? Is writing to CD-ROM really safe? Sorry - it's gone in a few years. Are people going to do a 3-stage offering, or make one of their copies in an alternative geographical location? Nobody does that.
No one has designed architecture for the home. We've got Wi-Fi and broadband and Bluetooth but there's no way to put it all together.
You have to tackle the product offering yourself. You start doing something vertically because you can't work with everybody. So somebody has to break through, starting with a niche.
Whoever does this has got to do the hardware, and the software, and the systems infrastructure, and not many people can do that; and they must have a brand that the consumer respects. On the one hand they have to be known for style going into the home, and on the other be able to manage infrastructure. And they've got to be big.
So they need to establish a beach-head, and some companies wouldn't even bother to try to cross this chasm. And it needs a really big organization to be able to deliver. So I don't even know if they know they should be doing this.

I have been told of websites that needed content management systems, as most frequently updated websites need these days. However, one site in particular, which has had a content management system written especially for them has me aghast at the waste of public money.

Over the past 4 years that it has taken to write this system, the company developing it has charged around £100,000 each year.

The RSS feed cost £12,000 to develop. To add department or category RSS feeds will cost another £2,000. I could list several simple components that cost this sort of money, for example, It uses a shortcut sytem that that is so tricky to use, that it isn't used. This cost £15,000.

It uses it's own desk top application, which is not user friendly.

I'm not saying that the company developing this platform, for that's what it is, has ripped off or cheated. I believe they have worked hard. Some of the money came from an IT grant (still, public money).

Each Manila installation can handle, to my knowledge over 1,000 sites, take over 150,000 dynamic page builds per day (though statically rendered pages can take much, much more—obviously).

It's UI is far, far, superior, with 7year old children using quite merrily, it's been around for 4½ years with hundreds of thousands of users, so it's been bug tested to hell and back.

When Radio Userland is connected up to Manila, then you have an out of this world, powerful desktop CMS application. Radio, itself opens up several orders of magnitude of functionality on top of a Manila site's functionality. Throw a developer in there and you'd have more easy to use features than you could shake a stick at.

The list price for a Manila installation is nearly £600 (plus some developer time for that extra 5%). Against nearly £500,000 for a CMS that nobody else will use. What's worse? I know of several other departments thinking they need to spend hundreds of thousands also! There seems to be two reasons: 1) the hard-on of spending so much taxpayer's money, 2) the apparent comfort in thinking, "it must be worth it."

Perhaps I should tender with Manila's functionality yet at a price that's one thousand times more than it's six hundred quid, take an afternoon to install it and use the rest of my life trout fishing.

An excerpt: "Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him.

The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."

Well, I've just watched it. He talks about Bush's and Wolfowitz's strangle hold on the US and though the tone was very frightening, I see many similarities with Blair's leadership of the UK. Certainly the US is becoming more fascist — the media aren't interested in the deeper stories, the military are cowed and so is the justice system.