Thabo Mbeki, presumably in an effort to appear even-handed, has lashed out against the nicknames of our national football teams. One of football’s big three, Jomo Sono, former coach of the national side and owner of the Jomo Cosmos club side, agrees.

They squads are fondly known among supporters as Bafana Bafana (the boys), Banyana Banyana (the girls), and for the junior team, Ama-glug-glug (in imitation of a famous advertisement by their sponsor, Sasol). Likewise, the Springbok rugby squad is often referred to as Ama-boko-boko. Even the paraplegic teams haven’t escaped the trend: they’re known as Ama-kroko-kroko. This is both funny and endearing, and has done a lot to raise their profile among sport fans.

But these names are disrespectful, Mbeki believes. This all appears to stem from the controversy around the name of the rugby Springboks. As the second story above makes clear, there’s a perception that “the national sides used to be known as the Springboks during the whites-only apartheid era which ended in 1994, but most of the teams have since adopted new monikers such as the Proteas in cricket.”

The last part is true. Only the rugby squad were excepted from the Proteas rule. But I fail to see what the Springbok emblem, colours, name or history have to do with Apartheid.

The South African rugby union side was called the Springboks long before isolation, long before Apartheid, and before even the Union was formed in 1910.

In 1906, as the programme alongside shows, they not only played as the Springboks, but delivered a Zulu-derived war cry. (Accounts differ, but the Springbok war cry may even have predated the New Zealand team’s famous Maori-inspired war dance, the Haka.)

“The public should participate in a plan where we look for new names for our national teams,” Mbeki is quoted in the article as saying on a local radio station. “I’m not saying we must call all our national teams Springboks, but we have to change the names, the emblems and the colours the teams wear, so that they can be recognised as representatives of South Africa.”

Firstly, I don’t know what name would be more recognisable than the Springbok. It’s a famous African animal, and is far better known that the pretty but relatively obscure Protea.

Second, and more importantly, the public were involved, and they decided on Amabokoboko, Bafana Bafana and Banyana Banyana. What the politicians call the teams is their own problem. Please don’t feign “consultation” and “participation” and all that tripe when you’ve just told people that the names they chose are disrespectful and insufficiently patriotic.

If they want to call all national colours “Proteas”, fine. I’d be sorry to see the Springbok symbol go, because it’s a strong rugby brand with a long history, but they’re South African colours and I guess the government that issues them gets to call them whatever they want.

But what officials don’t get to mess with is the nicknames teams get from their supporters.

On the other hand, perhaps we should ban the word “Bucs”. Bucanneers! How unoriginal. And who’s ever heard of an African side being named after French outlaws who made bacon in the Caribbean anyway? They’re Orlando Pirates, and don’t you forget it. Anyone — especially Amakhosi — who calls them Bucs should get a fine, or perhaps an hour or two in the stocks outside the stadium. Speaking of Amakhosi, they aren’t. They’re Kaizer Chiefs. Besides, honkeys confuse it with Ezenkosi, and that makes Jomo cross.

Look people. It’s simple. You’re being disrespectful and unpatriotic, and The Honourable State President Mr Thabo Mbeki says so. He’d have wagged his finger, if he could, but he was speaking on radio.

You know, you’d think that the news director of the country’s public broadcaster would bristle at accusations that he’s just a government spin doctor. That he’d protest that yes, he used to be the communications man for a government department, but what journalist hasn’t stooped to PR to pay the rent on occasion, and anyway, you can’t assume someone would have any obligations to past employers.

Not Snuki Zikalala. He revels in it. The Times has the story: No news is good news, says Comrade Snuki.

The SABC would not have broadcast stories about Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s behaviour during her hospital treatment, or on her conviction for theft for stealing a watch from an unconscious patient — because the public broadcaster only carries stories that aid the country’s development.

“We are guided by the constitution not to incite violence or hatred in our reporting, said Snuki Zikalala, the SABC’s chief of news yesterday.

“Publishing such a story is disrespectful.”

You know, all this wouldn’t be such a problem, if people could realistically be expected to ignore it, and switch to a more wholesome news station. If the SABC wasn’t the dominant player in a small government-protected cartel. Market forces don’t act very robustly when the government only permits a single free-to-air licence holder to compete with the SABC. When the owners of any device that can receive TV signals must pay mandatory TV licence fees which go to the SABC. When new competition cannot arise without an invitation from the Minister of Communications, and then is likely to be required by law to charge fees from their viewers, or even agree in their licence conditions not to carry news at all.

I suppose people could switch to non-TV media. But is this a realistic expectation? The fact is that there’s no robust competition against the SABC in the huge middle- and lower-income demographic, so the government’s propaganda outlet is virtually guaranteed to find a huge audience. And while their income might be lower, their votes count just the same.

(Hat tip: Sarah Britten, who recently started a Facebook group on the subject of media freedom in South Africa.)

No sooner had a judge carved huge holes in the famous one-click-checkout patent which Amazon.com swindled out of the US Patent and Trademark Office, than the very same idiots at the very same mental institution awards it a patent on another amazing new thing: putting search terms into a URL.

The novelty, it appears, is that the entire contents of the section which follows the first single slash is a search term, instead of referring first to a file, and then placing the search term after a question-mark character. The application was made in March 2004, so it took the patent researchers over three years to even comprehend the enormity of this invention.

True, it is mind-blowing. Imagine, being able to interpret the path specified in a URL to actually pass data to a web application? Imagine if it didn’t just have to indicate a file name, but could reference an object? The implications are staggering. The innovation is profound, the ambition soaring.

The time and investment that Amazon.com put into this must have been immense. Mean time, people in Amazon.real are starving. Someone should just give them some Amazon.com shares. Imagine being able to sue, by proxy, most of the people who have ever written anything for the web! Surely, anyone who admits knowledge of REST, or has ever hacked a 404 page to parse and act on the given URL, would be guilty as sin? The Amazonians (real and imaginary) would be rich!

I’m thinking maybe I’ll licence this brilliant idea. I don’t want to give too much away here, but just think what you could do on the command line, for example, if the string following a command could actually contain data, like options and parameters, to be parsed by the command you’re running? Or better yet, if the very same script could be called using two different names, and do different things, depending? Think about it. It would revolutionise computing! History books would talk about the mainframe era, the client-server era, the internet era, and the Amazon.ivo era. That would rock. (Anyone who wants to invest, please leave your name, number and proposed capital commitment as a comment. My people may call you, pending pre-qualification screening.)

There is legitimate debate among free market supporters about whether a patent is a justifiable application of property and contract rights, under which the owner of a trade secret agrees to disclose it in return for the temporary protection of that intellectual property (in which case the patent should, in fairness, last in perpetuity), or whether it is an articifial monopoly bestowed by government that has no place in a free market. The latter is perhaps theoretically more sound, but it also makes unlikely allies of private-property-rights libertarians and information-wants-to-be-free socialists. I tend to agree with the concept of patent protection, because if they are not granted the information won’t be free, but will remain secret. I think it’s worth rewarding people for disclosing trade secrets, so they become publicly available for innovators to build upon, without expropriating the rights of the original inventor to the fruits of their labour.

However, that does assume a working patent registration system, which makes sure trivial patents on non-secrets aren’t awarded to every Jack and his lawyer who bothers to turn up to the USPTO in Virginia. The one-click-checkout patent, obvious though it was, survived ten years of lawyering and judging and reviewing before it finally took a serious knock. Millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours were wasted on lawyers, judges and reviewers because of that single daft patent. And now they’ve got another one to play with. Someone should check this scheme for kickbacks and corruption, but even if it’s clean as a whistle, it’s evidence of a government’s awesome skill at burning cash.

Patent reform is sorely needed. It must be comprehensive, including but not limited to properly researching the prior art and non-obviousness criteria on an application, limiting the practice of patent ring-fencing, declining to issue patents on inventions that have long been in commercial use, or preventing patents on mere concepts that have not actually been developed and cannot be demonstrated. A good approximation to some of this is to abolish software patents altogether. It’s so broken, it may not be fixable.

And patent reform is needed before international patent harmonisation at the World Intellectual Property Organisation, I might add. Harmonising so everyone has the same broken system is hardly progress.

So someone please shut down the laughing stock that is the USPTO. Impeach them. Vote them out. Do whatever it is Americans do with tax-funded boondoggles. (Oh wait, scratch that. Do whatever Americans usually fail to do with tax-funded boondoggles.)

The bureaucratic clowns over in Virginia make anyone who supports patents in principle look like an idiot.