Prosthetic Conscience

• Does Last Child In The Woods say anything new?

  I’m currently reading this book, and while I strongly agree with many of its points, and value my childhood in the woods very much, I also agree with this review, and don’t care for some of the knee-jerk luddism of the book’s author.

• Fighting the Greedy Defense Lobbyists: Our Our Schools vs. Their Worthless Weaponry
  
• A jaded left-wing view of Barack Obama, circa 2000? | Straight.com
  
• Camltastic!: Destroying old hard drives
  
• Target: Freedom: Armed jack boots confiscate family’s personal food supply. Is this a prelude to government created depression, or even famine?
  
• LENIN’S TOMB: The intelligence
  

  An analysis of the strategy and propaganda of the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza.

Again, these are delayed a little bit.

• Joe Bageant: Obama’s election will keep liberals happy
  

  Tomas, a Bageant reader writes:

  > So now Obama parades his lineup of economic advisers and, in the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” But only if you’ve not been paying attention all along. The only surprise is how easily the democrats managed to get people all jacked up about pissing in their own beds. I am hoping that Thomas Frank will explain all this in his next book.

  Ayup.

• denialism blog : Cancer 101
  

  The basics of what cancer is, how it works, and how it is treated. If you understand just this much, you’ll never be fooled by quacks pushing woo-woo cancer “treatments”.

• Cruella-blog: Dear Santa
  

  No anti-wrinkle cream for Christmas. Plus, the seven signs of aging. I have one (knows the words to ABBA songs).

• Workers - 1, Wal-Mart - 0: Employees Win Right to Unionize | PEEK | AlterNet
  
• Cooperation, Not Obedience
  

  An article on the roles of expertise and authority.

• Aegisub: If programming languages were religions…
  

  According to this, I am a Humanist/Zen Buddhist, forced to work in a Fundamentalist Christian environment. Which is disturbingly close to the truth.

• from Vim to Emacs - part 1
  

  Debian’s vim package maintainer and author of popular vim extensions switches to emacs.

• What Does Vilsack’s Appointment Mean for the Future of Organic Food and Public Lands? | Environment | AlterNet
  

Again, some of these have been piling up for a while.

• Rally Comrades
  

  Newspaper of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.

• Joho the Blog » Philosophical problems with folksonomies
  
• Note to Obama: The Brightest Advisors Are Not Always the Best | Election 2008 | AlterNet
  

  There is a liberal cult of competence that leads liberals to often ignore the fact that being competent in the execution of bad policy is not a good thing.

• IWW-affiliated truckers to strike | libcom.org
  
• Austenbook
  

  Pride and Prejudice as a Facebook news feed.

• Firefox Pirates Take Over Amazon | TorrentFreak
  

  Not sure how I feel about this. I approve of efforts to undermine the copyright-monopoly regime, but Amazon is one of the good guys here, since they sell digital media (well, music anyway) at a reasonable price with no DRM.

• ISS - Duke Energy CEO for Obama’s Energy Secretary?
  
• The Cafes » Java is Dead! Long Live Python!
  
• Python Is Not Java (dirtSimple.org)
  

  An oldie but a goodie.

• Bob Sutton: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
  
• The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff | | AlterNet
  
• Steven Chu: Obama’s Remarkable Choice for Energy Secretary
  

  It’s hard to decide if the selection of Dr. Chu is more remarkable for who he is — a Nobel laureate physicist and experienced public-sector administrator — or for who is not. Unlike previous secretaries of energy, he is neither a politician, oil man, military officer, lawyer, nor utility executive. His corporate ties are not to major industrial polluters but to advanced technology corporations like AT&T (where he began his Nobel-winning research) and Silicon Valley innovator Nvidia (where he sits on the board of directors). Chu is a man for the moment, and will be a singular addition to Obama’s Cabinet.

• Blog of helios: Linux - Stop holding our kids back
  

  Not sure if the quoted article is legit or not. It seems too close to parody.

• Amateur Woodworker: Compact TV Cabinet
  
• TV-Cabinet - BluMonkey
  
• Putting Away Your Media Toys | Media Room | Living Spaces | This Old House - 1
  
• Building an Inexpensive Entertainment System | Media Room | Living Spaces | This Old House - 1
  
• Joe Bageant: The Sucker Bait Called Hope
  

  In the big picture though, consumerism was never the problem. Capitalism was. And it still is. Conumerism is merely the way workers are compensated for the general shittiness of their lives. It seems to have worked. Thus, my urge to get on the public address system at the NASCAR Talledaga run and scream: “You fat fuckers don’t need another corndog or that fifteenth beer that has made your belly so big you haven’t seen your dick in ten years.”

  But as historian Eugene McCarrher points out, simply telling people that they’re too consumeristic, too materialistic, doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it gives people the impression that the material and the spiritual are antithetical. Yet the natural material world is the only sacramental thing that exists (minus the corndogs).

• Informed Comment: Pakistani Reaganism Must End: The New Government must take on the Lashkar
  

  A long story, but basically the Mumbai attack traces back to the Reagan administration’s pressure on Pakistan to arm and train right-wing Islamic paramilitary death-squads.

• Occasional Superheroine: If Superman and Wonder Woman Were Real
  
• The Early Days of a Better Nation: All your firewall are belong to us
  

  A short talk on IT security by one of my favourite socialist Scottish science fiction writers.

• S.C. tax cuts get blame for budget woes - Local / Metro - The State
  

  It’s not the tax cuts so much as excessive reliance on sales taxes relative to the income tax. The biggest cut was one I approve of – eliminating sales taxes on groceries, and another was the elimination of the lowest income tax bracket. Both are good things, but they weren’t offset by increases in income taxes (especially income tax top rates).

• 5seven5: a haiku community
  
• Public timeline - Identi.ca
  
• Technomancy: you don’t want tabs.
  
• Free Productivity Planners | Productive Flourishing
  

• End of the Road: Is the Auto Industry Dead? | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet
  

  The automotive industry is an obsolete relic of the twen-cen, and the UAW management union is harming the labour movement and their fellow workers by trying to keep it alive.

• David Graeber, “Hope in Common” | Interactivist Info Exchange
  

  The author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology explains why we are all – sometimes – communists, and the alternative to rebuilding our shattered capitalism.

• Mad Science: A Step-By-Step Guide to Resurrecting the Woolly Mammoth
  
• An activist organization helps place squatters in big empty homes in Miami
  
• Peeling The Apple: In Which I Try To Explain Twilight
  
• Worldchanging: The Last Viridian Note
  Bruce Sterling on our changing relationship to our stuff. Most of this is good advice, assuming a positive future (i.e., a positive outcome to the current transition). But I’m afraid it’s a little early to assume that; we may be headed for big-C Collapse. I’ve got one foot in the Singularity and one foot in the Die-Off, and until I know which way we’re going, I’m clinging to my decent-but-not-marvellous twen-cen tools and my bug-out-bags.
• Cultural theories of risk and the rise of emergence systems | eaves.ca
  

  Why:

  1. Egalitarianism is clearly the right thing (compared to the alternatives of fatalism, hierarchism, and individualism).
  2. Egalitarian movements in the past have nevertheless sucked more than the alternatives.
  3. We are in a position today to produce egalitarian movements that do not suck.
  4. Those egalitarian systems would be better described as “emergent”.
• Past and Future
  

  Obama’s cabinet appointments are mainly backward-looking: they promise continuity not only with the first Clinton administration, but also to a significant degree with the Bush administration. This is, as the author of the article recognizes, the basic problem of liberalism: that it lacks any fundamental vision of a better society other than “pretty much what we have now, but better managed.”

• Governor Says He’ll Cut Statehouse Security Posts
  

  Break out the Rapture kits, I actually agree with Sanford on something.

• Schneier on Security: FBI Stoking Fear
  

Some of these have been stewing for a while.

• Austro-Athenian Empire » Cato Institute Publishes Leftist Screed!
  
• Petition against Larry Summers as Obama’s Treasury Secretary
  Go sign this.
• FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: Prop 8 Myths
  

  I’ve been guilty of spreading the meme that new black and Latin@ voters were a significant part of the reason for Prop. 8’s passage. But it turns out that the main reason it passed is the aging of California’s population; new voters voted primarily against Prop 8.

• Bursting the proprietary-software bubble - at ZDNet.co.uk
  
• The Yes Men produce a fake version of the New York Times
  The Yes Men are one of the top satire/prank groups in the world today. The fake NYT is maybe a little predictable, but extremely well executed.
• The Oil Drum | A Resilient Suburbia? 2: Cost of Commuting
  The most interesting bit here is that the fixed costs of commuting (i.e., owning and maintaining a car, and parking) are more significant than the price of gasoline. If your family drives two 20-mpg cars every day, you would save more money by just ditching one of them than by replacing them with two 40-mpg cars. And the same goes for replacing your two 30-mpg cars with two 60-mpg cars.
• Against Fake Libertarian Clarity
  Self-styled libertarians tend to define ‘coercion’ in an artificially narrow sense, leading them to consider many types of coercive acts and relationships to be free.
• Philosophy, et cetera: Initiating Force
  
• Philosophy, et cetera: Property is Unnatural!
  
• The %u201CConservative%u201D Moral Sentiments: Do We Need Them?
  
• Obsidian Wings: Trusting Obama
  

  Trust, but verify?

• Facing South: Energy Watch: Ruling could disrupt plans for new coal plants nationwide
  
• News Analysis - Post-Guantánamo - A New Detention Law? - NYTimes.com
  

  What the hell is this fuckwittery? The incoming Obama administration is worried that they might have to release some prisoners when they close Guantanamo because they’re innocent?

• Vote Malik Rahim
  
• Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right - Monthly Review
  

  An article by Noam Chomsky.

• A visual guide to the financial crisis
  
• Who Is IOZ?: More Notes on Libertarian Dickheads
  
• How to Run a Con | Psychology Today Blogs
  

  THOMAS (The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System):

  The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others–this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. “I need your help” is a potent stimulus for action.

  Via Schneier on Security

• The Oil Drum | A Resilient Suburbia? 1: Sunk Cost & Credit Markets
  
• It’s More Dangerous NOT To Ride a Bike : TreeHugger
  
• Kerry Howley » Blog Archive » Libertarian Feminism versus Monarchist Anarchism
  
• Kerry Howley » Blog Archive » Feminism and Libertarianism Again
  

Some of these have been piling up for a while.

• Diebold faces GPL infringement lawsuit over voting machines
  

  It’s not surprising – if a company lacks a culture of ethics, it’s not going to be unethical in only one facet of its business.

• Obama’s Secret Weapon: Geeks. Lots of Them | Linux Journal
  

  Not surprisingly, McCain used Microsoft.

• Millions of Linux Users, they can’t all be experts. « dthomasdigital
  

  My impression is that a lot of these new users are people who are not technology professionals or even hobbyists like the old generation of Linux users, but are experienced, savvy computer users. People who are used to doing a lot of things on the web and who know that the correct response when you’re having a problem with a program is to google to see if anyone else is having it, too.

• Money Oriented Programmers
  

  Thank goddess I’m not one. I don’t get to program as much for my own ends as I’d like to anymore, but at least I still have a fundamental love for what I do.

• Osaka and the Yellow Sign (Shoujo-Ai Archive Azumanga Daioh Fanfiction)
  

  A bizarre story in which Osaka of Azumanga Daioh is chosen by the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign as the new Cassilda…

• Ghosts of Clinton’s Past – In These Times
  

  Why is Obama recycling right-wing Clinton administration advisors for his cabinet?

• Open Source India: The practical problem with software patents
  
• Does the Human Mind Have Potential “Super Powers”? -A Galaxy Classic
  Temple Grandin discusses both the neurological and evolutionary bases of these in her books, as well as what it’s like to experience the world in this way.
• 20 tasks now that the election is over – hEyOkA mAgAzInE
  
• Jannis Leidel - An autocomplete widget for django-tagging form fields
  

• 76-year-old arrested for the 73rd time - General News
  

  Not quite a stainless steel rat, but a slightly tarnished one, anyway.

• Groklaw - The Bilski Decision Is In: Buh-Bye {Most} Business Methods Patents - As text & updated 4Xs
  
• New Contest: Can You Out-Lame the TSA? - Jeffrey Goldberg
  
• Bang! Bang! You’re Dead! by Jenny Knuth
  
• One Good Thing – a letter to Alex and Chris 12 years in the future
  

  A mother writes to her sons about what kind of man she wants them to grow up to be, with helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson as an example.

• Rad Geek People— Daily 2008-10-29 — How To Talk So The Government Can’t Listen. Part 1: how to encrypt your e-mail in Gmail with GPG (for use with Gmail or other web mail interfaces on Firefox in Windows)
  
• Time Management for Anarchists
  
• Quoted-Printable: Scribbish
  

  A standardized stylesheet and markup set for blogs. I’m not going to use it, but I may take some ideas from it.

• In a Blog’s Stead - February 2004
  Natural rights vs. egoism.
• Columbia Closings
  
• gregdek: Why Seneca Matters
  

• Meatball Wiki: WikiLog
  

  I’m pondering implementing a bliki, so I’m interested in seeing what people have thought about them.

• Odd Wiki SocialSynergy: 2006-05-10
  
• CommunityWiki: Local Names
  

  This would be handy to provide in my bliki implementation….

• Packs of robots will hunt down uncooperative humans - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist
  
• PalinAsPresident.com
  
• Stevey’s Blog Rants: A programmer’s view of the Universe, part 1: The fish
  
• Alex Payne: On The Flight to Old Text Editors
  

• Kiva - Loans that change lives
  

  Microlending site – lets you make loans to third-world entrepeneurs.

• WholeSale Industrial Supply Sheet Nylon White 3/4 In T 12 x 48 In
  

  Stock for longsword wasters: would make about 4, and I’d have to sell at least two of them to make up for the materials cost.

• Japan’s young turn to Communist Party as they decide capitalism has let them down - Telegraph
  

  Loli-goths of the world, unite!

• Boston Review — hogeland.php
  

  A brilliant piece of Hamilton-bashing, a sport to which I am much accustomed and of which I am very fond.

• Self-Ownership and Property in the Person
  An examination of these two related concepts and their differences. As far as I can tell so far, the key insight is: “When ‘rights’ are seen in proprietary terms they can be alienated, but in a democracy the right of self-government is only partially alienable.”
• Greenpeace on fusion: Whatever it is, we’re against it – The Register
  
• Pagina prima - Vicipaedia
  

  Wikipedia in Latin.

• Meatball Wiki: ForgiveAndForget
  

  Looking at the big, institution-oriented modern wikis like Wikipedia, it’s easy to forget that early wiki developers put a lot of thought and work into making wiki a social system that didn’t need all the policing that you see on Wikipedia.

• Technological Wasteland: Use Mercurial, you Git!
  This is wildly amusing, if not entirely fair. I’m currently using Mercurial for my own projects, and considering switching to git, only for the reason that the few times I have to do a remote clone of a repository, hg does so excruciatingly slowly and with no visible feedback. But I’m not sure how much git-pain I’m willing to go through just to get better performance in something I do infrequently.
• Mercurial hosting — bitbucket.org
  

• Quick and Dirty Hacks » Blog Archive » Long time no post!
  

  Karl Lattimer has some really nifty ideas for future Gnome, including journal-oriented file management, and simple graphical integration of version control into the file manager.

• The Panopticon Singularity
  

  Not equivalent to the Technological Singularity. Definition:

  … the emergence of a situation in which human behaviour is deterministically governed by processes outside human control. (To give an example: currently it is illegal to smoke cannabis, but many people do so. After a panopticon singularity, it will not only be illegal but impossible.)

  But on why a panopticon singularity is not technologically feasible (without a huge difference in the tech level available to the government and that available to the people), see Cory Doctorow’s young-adult novel Little Brother. In particular, consider the countermeasures to gait analysis and ubiquitous RFID. And of course, the limits of data mining’s utility.

• Researchers Say Ancient Tibetan Practice May Improve Health & Happiness
  

  Compassion meditation as a form of cognitive therapy.

• Manic Pixie Dream Girl - Television Tropes & Idioms
  
• Mutant fish called goonch found on India-Nepal border eating human corpses to be shown in TV documentary | The Sun |News|Weird
  

  Of course, crocodiles and bull sharks are reasonable suspects, too.

• More than 300 workers arrested in immigration raid on South Carolina plant
  
• McCain-Palin campaign’s attacks on Obama: a whiff of fascism
  

  You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

• Daniel Gross: Working Class Hero, Alexandra Svoboda
  

  Maimed By Cops, Charged With Felonies

• Radical Women revolutionary socialist feminism
  
• Radical Women on Sarah Palin
  
• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Is Obama a Secret Vulcan?
  
• Meditation for children
  
• Productivity 2.0: How the New Rules of Work Are Changing the Game | Zen Habits
  
• Brown lawn means jail time - St. Petersburg Times
  
• Companion planting
  
• V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask in papercraft
  
• GNOME Latine loquitur
  

  There is a translation team forming to translate the Gnome desktop environment into Latin.

• The sword and shield of Hollywood (Stop Me Before I Vote Again)
  

  This is what happens when you’re not paying attention. Hell, it’s what happens when you are paying attention.

• Shaving Horse Plans
  
• Portable Shaving Horse
  
• Alexander Cockburn: Creatures of Capital
  
• Squatter bobcats of doom! | nostate.com
  

  Anarchist discussion of property rights, with extra bobcats.

• Fuck the troops! | nostate.com
  

  A very challenging article. I prefer the motto: “We support our troops when they refuse to deploy.”

• Main Page - Open Source Ecology
  A radical outline of a sustainable, decentralized, high-tech village economy.
• The Raw Story | Denver cops get T-shirts that mock DNC protesters
  

  Denver Cops: We get up early to beat the crowds.

• The Partial Observer - Standard of Living vs. Quality of Life
  

  A fictional treatment of an optimistic future outcome of the changes we are living through today.

• Sad Sack Artists: Neil Strauss’s The Game and Tony Clink’s The Layguide
  

  A book review discussing how pathetic the members of the “pickup community” are.

• Virtue Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  

  An alternative approach to ethics besides the deontological and consequentialist approaches. I’m still not sure I buy this one, either. I find the justification problem very significant. On the other hand, it seems to lack at least one problem of the others, which is that they can be used to provide moral justification for coercing others to behave in desired ways, whereas it seems much harder to argue this from a virtue ethics standpoint.

Some of these are a little out of date given the unfortunate passage of the bailout act, but never mind.

• Commentary: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.com
  

  An article from an academic economist opposing the bailout.

• The Outbreak
  

  A fun interactive zombie movie.

• The Wall Street bailout and the threat of dictatorship
  

  Excellent analysis in the WSWS of a very revealing article in the Unquotable Rag (Washington Post) by a member of the CFR. Basically, this guy considers the failure of the Wall Street bailout as showing that “American political elites have lost the ability to quickly respond to a national challenge by imposing their collective will.” And he considers that a bad thing.

  The writer of the analysis does engage in a little Constitutionolatry (unusual for a Commie) in saying that the Constitution did not replace the Articles in order to allow political elites to quickly impose their collective will. Of course it did! Isn’t he aware of the Anti-Federalists‘ objections to the Constitution?

  But it’s nevertheless an important analysis. The conflict over the bailout is the first time in recent memory that the elite media has outright failed in manufacturing the consent of the American people to the consensus of American elites. Representative democracy is pretty weak tea, but we haven’t even properly had that in years; it’s bracing to see what it actually looks like.

• A brilliant comment at Charlie’s Diary
  This is a rant, but it’s a brilliant, fact-filled, linkified rant on everything that is wrong with the remains of the country we are living in.
• Got Medieval: The myth of pre-literacy
  

  Medieval blogging.

• Schneier on Security: The Two Classes of Airport Contraband
  

  If it’s dangerous, treat it, and the person trying to bring it onboard, as dangerous. If it’s not dangerous enough to do that, stop trying to keep it off the plane.

• Rad Geek People’s Daily How Portland Police Bureau Officers Joseph Cook and Judy McFarlane used a “welfare check” to throw Contia Orsby out on the streets
  
• Daily Kos: The Way Forward {Updated: Obama announces opposition to a blank check.}
  

  I hate to link to the Great Orange Satan, but this article is pretty insightful. Essentially, we are seeing the Shock Doctrine (disaster capitalism) used to consolidate even more power in the Executive than was granted to it after the September 2001 crimes.

• Naomi Wolf: The Battle Plan II: Sarah “Evita” Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State
  
• Rant: The Day the Earth Stood Still Remake Is Pure Sucky Evil
  

  I finally saw the original for the first time last night.

• BuyMyShitPile.com: Hey Washington, can you buy my bad investments too?
  

  Use the form below to submit bad assets you’d like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD “MMMbop”, it’s not what you can sell these items for that matters, it’s what you think they are worth. The fact that you think they are worth more than anyone will buy them for is what makes them bad assets.

• Kansas City - Plog - Pirates duel with Phelps family
  

  God hates shrimp and poly-cotton blends!

• Charlie’s Diary: Straws in the Wind
  I don’t think it will come to that, but it certainly looks bad.
• HARDCORE ZEN: BIG FART CIRCLE
  

  Taking the piss out of a spiritual con-man.

• Why is a U.S. Army brigade being assigned to the “Homeland”? - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
  

  This article actually goes a little more into the rules they will be operating under.

• “Jonathan Lee Riches” tagged Cases and Lawsuits :: Justia News
  

  Master of the prisoner lawsuit.

• National Journal Magazine - John McCain. Youth You Can Believe In.
  

  The Law of the Excluded Middle is not in the Constitution! No one voted for it!

• Newsvine - The New Left?
  

  A really fascinating article using the “Mitchell Chart” from 8 Ways to Run the Country to explain political changes between the New Deal, the 1960s, and the 2000s. Does a lot to explain the rising prominence of libertarians on the Left.

• Lost middle-class tribe’s ‘secret’ eco-village in Wales spotted in aerial photograph taken by plane | Mail Online
  
• MIT OpenCourseWare | History | 21H.001 How to Stage a Revolution, Fall 2007 | Home
  
• The Anti-Federalist Papers
  

  Letters arguing against the adoption of the US Constitution, and for the limited amendment of the Articles of Confederation.

• Nader, Barr & Paul: ‘Told you so’ - Ben Adler - Politico.com
  
• So here’s the plan…
  

  Writer Ken MacLeod explains the US financial industry bailout with pictures.

• cryptogon.com:» U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team Assigned to NORTHCOM Beginning October 1st
  

  For those keeping score at home, NORTHCOM would be the US.

• Interventions: Science Fiction reflects on the contemporary period%u2026 « The Cedar Lounge Revolution
  
• Why is American liberalism bankrupt? A history lesson for New York Times columnist Bob Herbert
  

• Monbiot.com » Bring on the Recession
  
• Third Party Watch » Blog Archive » “We Agree”
  

  This should be big news: all the minor presidential candidates, from Left parties like the Greens, to Right parties like the Constitution party, agree on a set of statements that sharply distinguish them all from the Democrats and the Republicans.

• Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-09-13 On class consciousness
  
• Is J2EE appropriate for developing web apps?
  
• This is Your Nation on White Privilege | Red Room
  

  An interesting and timely list of examples of white privilege: how similar behaviours are viewed positively or neutrally when done by whites, and negatively when done by blacks.

• Edge: WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt
  

  On the one hand, this article does a good job of showing how Republicans are successful in relating to the non-rational side of American citizens. On the other, its advice to the Democrats is basically more of “How can we learn to gull the masses that well?”

• Political Compass: US Presidential Election 2008
  

  Note that all of the major-party candidates, and Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr are in the right-wing authoritarian quadrant.

• al3x.net: al3x’s Rules for Computing Happiness
  

  I could certainly dispute some of these rules. But the overall thrust of this is about right.

• Atomized � Blog Archive � On computing happiness
  

  And these are similar to some of the exceptions I’d make.

• U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity | Politics and Law - CNET News
  
• ParanoidLinux.org
  
• chartjunk � Blog Archive � Tax Plans (that’s one for you, nineteen for me).
  

  Nice graphical comparison of Obama’s tax plan vs. McCain’s. The lowdown: If you make less than $110,000 a year, you will get a bigger tax cut from Obama than from McCain. If you make more than $100,000, you will get a bigger tax cut from McCain, but your taxes will not actually increase unless you make more than $600,000 (which would put you in the top 1% of incomes in the US). Anyone making around the median income gets a much bigger tax cut from Obama than from McCain.