This, as it turns out, is relatively easy. Install Circumventer on your home computer and just leave it on most of the time. It's as easy as that.
Circumventer is just a Perl script which sets up your computer as a proxy that people operating behind internet filters may connect to sites that would otherwise be blocked. It works by generating a URL you can enter into any computer to connect to the computer on which you installed Circumventer, which will forward your connections from there to the site of your choice. Your server sees that you're opening a connection to your home computer; it knows nothing of what happens to the connection after that.
Lest you think that this is just a way of aiding kids in looking at naughty pictures, consider that current estimates place something like two billion people behind active, state-run censorious firewalls: China as well as pretty much the entire Islamic world. Granted, most of them don't use the internet, but hundreds of millions do. This is one of the most effective ways that we, as individual citizens can do to defeat despotic, reactionary governments abroad.
Install it today.
As an added bonus, if you install it on your computer at home, you can browse fun sites at work without hitting the filters most corporations install.
Walking to class in near-white-out conditions is No Fun At All.
Welcome to South Bend, IN, where "2-4 inches of snow" really means "8-10 inches", and you have to plow your own damn streets, you wusses.
The New York Times Magazine has an interesting piece entitled "Unhappy Meals" about, well food. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Avoid eating things that make health claims, for though they may be edible, they are not actually food.
Awesome.
Via BoingBoing.
Chris Hedges, a Harvard Divinity grad who writes widely on political/religious issues, has a piece in Pop Matters about his book American Facists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
The basic thesis is that the Christian Right, which I assume he defines with some specificity in the book though not in the article, is essentially fascist in its character, a description I find hard to dispute these days. He also advances the thesis that the personal motivation behind those who belong to the Christian Right is despair, particularly a middle-class suburban despair.
I won't go into excruciating detail about the descriptions; you can read them for yourself. I'm rather suspicious of the idea of suburban despair as such though: this seems like a self-serving countercultural argument which does far more to set its proponants apart from the madding crowd than actually describe real phenomena.
I do have two observations to make though. First, from what I can tell from the article, he's describing a largely Protestant movement. Again, this may be better specified in the book, but I think this distinction worth making, even in light of previous discussions on this site. Catholics, from my limited experience, may exhibit despair about the next life, but seem to be significantly more optimistic about this one. Catholics tend to be more Thomistic, less Augustianian, whereas Protestants are the opposite.
Second, the idea that there is some degree of despair is not entirely inaccurate, though the characterization leaves something to be desired. We come to Christ because we have despaired about any salvation apart from him. I think his description of "suburban despair" misses the theological nature of what's going on. What is sought isn't capable of being provided by politics, at least not for the Protestants about whom he seems to be talking, and any political activism tends not to have this world in mind as a final goal.
He obviously doesn't like the Christian Right and clearly has an axe to grind, but it's still worth a read.
It's fantastic. It's not quite the heart-warming fairy-tale that one might expect from the title and the rough plot blurbs available in various places, but given the director, lately of Hellboy and *cough* Blade II, this is perhaps unsurprising. It's a lot more violent than I was expecting. But it's still a touching foray into innocence and betrayal.
The second task is truly the stuff of nightmares, and captures exactly the deeply creepy Brothers' Grimm-style fairy tale that's been missing for too long. I mean, "Little Red Ridinghood" is supposed to be cute and all, but it's worth pointing out that a number of people wind up getting eaten by a wolf, who is subsequently chopped up by a lumberjack. That's not cute, but somehow it's been sanitized to the point that we think of it that way. Pan's Labyrinth is good, old-fashioned fairy-storytelling as it was meant to be.
Also! Guillermo del Toro doesn't like fascists. I'm just sayin'.
There's an interesting article on Slashdot about the digital economy of Second Life. The authors argue that not only is the market startlingly illiquid, but the market is perhaps a really pretty interface for what amounts to a Ponzi scheme: new suckers put money in, and the few people sitting on top - particularly the developers - arbitrage the hell out of everyone else.
This seems to me to be accurate. It's a basic economic rule that there is no free lunch, as if something this easy was actually a reliable way of making money, everyone would be doing it.
Ars Technica is reporting on a fascinating new "protection" scheme for digital media. Instead of attempting to artificially restrict access, something which has been shown to be futile, they simply make the files they sell unique and traceable. So you can share it with as many people as you want, but all anyone needs to do to implicate you of copyright violations is look at the file.
This, I contend, is very creative, and has the potential to solve numerous problems with the existing regime. There is no need to intrude into users' privacy. All a content owner need do is find out who bought it in the first place and sue them. The burden would then shift to the user to demonstrate that someone else uploaded the file, because it would be pretty easy for a judge to allow the inference that the user whose stamp is on the file can be held accountable for copyright violations if the file is found "in the wild" as it were. Res ipsa loquitur.
There's already an HD-DVD movie available on BitTorrent. It's Serenity. It's 19.6GB.
DRM is stupid.
There's a new quote on the sidebar, from the book I'm currently reading, which is also listed there:
Politics and law [are] not paths to grace and faith, but grace and faith [remain] paths to right politics and right law. The Christian [is] supposed to be law-abiding, and the law of a Christian prince [is] supposed to achieve both order and justice. Law [is] supposed to induce people to avoid evil, to cooperate, and to serve the community. The Christian [is] not to think that by doing good he [can] earn credits in heaven; nevertheless, he [is] to use his will and reason - with full consciousness of their defective nature - to do as much good as God as made possible. --Harold J. Berman
Litigation is expensive. Any time you engage legal professionals for a process that frequently takes years, you're looking at a hefty bill for attorney's fees. In America, each side generally pays their own attorney's fees, regardless of who wins.
But in Britain, the loser pays the attorney's fees for both sides. Which is what's going to happen in this case, to the tune of approximately $2 million.
The advantage of the American rule is that if you lose, all you've got is your own costs, and if you were the plaintiff, you frequently don't have to pay anything, as many attorneys take cases on a contingency basis. This means that people who cannot afford to lose can still have their day in court, as losing doesn't cost them anything.
The advantage of the British rule is that if you win, you really win, as most of your costs are passed on to the losing party. So if you're the plaintiff and win, not only do you get whatever judgment is awarded you, but the losing party also pays your attorney's fees. But if you lose, you have to pay for everybody. The advantage here is that it keeps many frivolous cases out of court, as you don't dare bring a case you aren't really sure you're going to win. The other advantage is that barristers generally can't dip into the award or settlement, as their pay comes from the side that loses, not the side that wins. In America, attorneys working on contingency have a vested interest in winning as much as possible and going after rich targets, because they'll get a third of whatever they win. This isn't true in Britain, which some argue keeps things on a more even and sensible keel.
I am not a lawyer (yet). I have not passed the Intellectual Property Bar (and probably won't). But it doesn't take a law professor to be able to tell that you can't patent something a competitor has spent the past five years developing.
Which is exactly what Red Hat is trying to do by filing a patent for pretty much exactly the same kind of DRM that is to be used in Vista.
Nice try, guys, but that really isn't supposed to work. Especially as SCOTUS has just handed down a ruling which enables patent licensees to sue the licensor over the validity of the patent, something previously not possible.
Got to give 'em credit for trying though. I'll be greatly entertained and amused should the patent be granted, as Red Hat will simply refuse to license the patent and sue the bejesus out of Microsoft, but it ain't gonna happen.
I just finished reading a rather lengthy article by Jeff Sharlet for Harpers. It's a look by an outsider into the world of the Christian right, particularly it's historiography.
The article doesn't so much articulate a thesis as create a sense of deep dread, loathing, and foreboding. Sharlet clearly thinks the people he's writing about are completely crazy if not downright evil, but instead of saying why and making an argument about it, he makes comments in passing calculated to communicate his antipathy, hopefully encouraging the same in the reader
Thing is, I grew up around a lot of the kinds of people he's talked about - I was homeschooled after all - and have read many of the less extreme things he mentioned. My family has never been much into the hagiography theory of American history, but we did use a number of BJU Press texts for various things. And names like Colson, Schaeffer, Van Til, Kuyper, Rushdoony, etc. are just a laundry list of (mostly) Presbyterian celebrity-types. So reading the article was a bit surreal, but quite instructive.
Thing is, even if the biases described give me almost as bad a case of the willies as they seem to give the author, at least the fundamentalists make no bones about what they're doing. They are right about one thing: everyone is biased, and pretending that you aren't is rarely anything other than a covert attempt of privelaging your own biases. Objectivity is really just an attempt to persuade someone of your opinion without letting him know that you're doing so.
It's a long read, but it's worth it.
It's now January 3, and I'm still waiting for my grades. This is a bit unpleasant. It was one thing before finals when there was still something I could do about them. Now it's just waiting. And waiting.
I need another drink.
For further aggravation, there's tonight's Sugar Bowl, which does not look particularly good for ND. Oh well. I'll be watching it with my grandfather tonight, so there's that.