Prosthetic Conscience

• 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.

It’s nice that Chrome has Incognito Mode. But how incognito is it when your network admin can monitor the content of your traffic? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to switch your network traffic to a secure channel – like an SSH tunnel to an http proxy under your control, or TOR?

Firefox has the ‘Distrust’ extension that provides the same protections as Chrome’s Incognito Mode (other than the v. stylish fedora-wearing spy logo). And it also has your choice of extensions that let you switch proxies without going into the depths of the advanced settings menu: QuickProxy, SwitchProxy, FoxyProxy, and several TOR-specific extensions. Now if only Distrust had a setting that let one turn on their proxy for the duration of the Distrust session…

In Firefox, I have the Mouseless Browsing plugin installed, which lets me hit a key to label links with numbers, then type the number to follow the link. But even without MLB, you can browse mouselessly with the typeahead search – type ‘/’, then start typing the text of the link, and when the link you want is highlighted, hit enter. In Chrome, you can only tab between links, not jump directly to the one you want (even with the search function). That is, you can search for link text, and it will highlight it, but you cannot then select the link without tabbing to it from the beginning.