Mike Maskin has a note on The Feature about downloads of Opera's Symbian OS-based browser, now with download numbers over a million, and points out the silliness of comments from 3 UK's COO that "Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts."

We've all long known about the success Opera has had in carving out a unique, albeit small, space in what was once a crowded field of browsers. People can't be limited by rinky-dink WAP browsers stuck in a carrier's walled garden. The WAP experience is merely functional, at best. But for anyone who's craved access to information and been stranded with only a phone -- WAP can be handy, if the site you need supports it. Or then again, maybe I'm nuts to access the internet with a screen that size. Or maybe my nuts are the size of the internet screened. Something like that.

Reqwireless has been out there with their J2ME browser for some time, and seem to regularly place near the top of Handango's popular product listing -- at not a cheap price, I might add. There are aspects of their approach, or at least the results of their approach, that are strong, and yet -- even having written and discarded a few Java based web browsers, I'm feeling that itch again to build another one, to build my own browser. Maybe open source, maybe focused on performance and usability adaptations for mobile devices -- how can the browser affect page-to-page navigation so that it's easy to use?

Nope, not Press Conference, Pete Carroll or Personal Computer: Politically Correct. From the Sun-Sentinal, an article about Florida's new regulation to rename offensively named streets and locations (emphasis mine):

So far, the state's list reads like a handbook of slurs and names many consider pejorative: Jap Rock, Negro Island, Jewfish Creek and Cracker Swamp. That some names are open to interpretation, however, has caused confusion. The well-intentioned legislation does not list which words could be considered offensive, nor does it penalize locales for refusing to change a name.

...

"I've heard about Hooker Highway in Belle Glade and Cracker Street," said Todd Bonlarron, Palm Beach County's executive director for legislative affairs. "It's really subjective regarding the history. We need to figure out whether or not it was done in a derogatory manner."

I laughed my ass off just reading those names, and how incredibly insensitive they are. Who knew? I thought Jap Rock was a derogatory name for Hoobastank. Here's a picture of "Jap Rock" (below, from Wanna Surf) but where's the rock? Makes me almost wish we had a "Imperial British Venereal Disease Sailor Bay" in Hawaii.

But wait, just like everything else in the news, it gets better and better. The article goes on to try to explain away those names as "unoffensive", or done in a "non-derogatory manner." Turns out "Chink Rock" has nothing to do with the Chinese -- it's because, the rock, uhh, has a, chunk, a chink in it. And "Jap Rock," why them Japs used to fish on it!

"Jewfish" also is open to interpretation. Three years ago, the American Fisheries Society changed the name of the "jewfish" to goliath grouper after it was determined that the fish got its name because it looked like a big nose. Still, a subsequent effort to change the name of Jewfish Creek in Monroe County stalled when local residents decided it didn't bother them. There are currently eight creeks, basins and islands named for the fish.

While you certainly can't legislate away racial tensions, I find this article also points out the fact that you can't legislate away sheer stupidity either.

Link here.

David Pescovitz, a regular over at Boing Boing, has a great feature at, umm, The Feature, called Birth of the Bluetooth Robots. He breaks downs a variety of small robots that utilize Bluetooth to communicate, including info about the Acroname Brain Stem kit. I'd want one even if was a bendy-straw attached to a paperclip, what a cool name.

Oh well, another birthday, perhaps.

Boing-Boing covers a news story about a guy in L.A. who was stalking his girlfriend with the aid of a Nextel GPS device. Not sure which device actually fits this description:

"Gabrielyan had purchased a Nextel phone device that has a motion switch on it that turns itself on when it moves. As long as the device is on, it transmits a signal every minute to the GPS satellite, which in turn sends the location information to a computer."

I wouldn't mind finding out more about it, as I can think of legal ways to leverage that as a data-gathering device (GPS or not).

My first reaction, truly, is a slow, dissapointed sigh -- not in the nature of this man's inability to deal with his own shit instead of terrorizing someone else with the aid of modern technology -- but in that the takeaway from this, for the press and in the general public, is that GPS for consumer applications is inherently dangerous, ridden with privacy issues, and only useful for nasty-ass big brother applications. I've built a few tracking/GPS cellphone apps, and I've scaled back planning and prototyping way back to avoid the inevitable sense that it has some evil use at it's core. While I certainly feel that perception needn't be that way, I'm not naive enough to think that advanced tracking and location wouldn't be used for breaking the law.

I'd love to build a killer app for GPS on the phone. Just not literally.