People make it sound like you're just "buying your way out." If I went out in the dirt and planted twenty trees myself, people would say I was en ecological hero. If I pay someone else to do it, I'm "buying Indulgences."

Yes. Which is a valid complaint, but I think it points more to an unanalyzed deep discomfort with the mechanisms of global corporatism/capitalism rather than specific ecological issues.

It ain't fair that a few filthy rich people get all the breaks, while masses of absurdly poor people get abused and manipulated. What we're hearing is just that general sentiment applied to the domain where cutthroat capitalism intersects with environmentalism.

Just to remind everyone, carbon credits aren't completely imaginary, they're basically hiring someone for the service of taking a certain amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. So if one person's willing to remove that carbon for cheaper, or offer a deal, that would make sense.

The contentious part is that you may be paying someone to do something they'd do anyway - for example if I plant a field of crops and then plow it under, I'm taking carbon out of the atmosphere...but I'd do that either way, so should I be able to sell that service to guilty environmentalists as well?

Overall, the idea has potential, since it creates a new financial incentive for people to do carbon-negative things (now you can sell them!), and provides some impoverished groups like indigenous farmers a way to make money by preserving the environment instead of slashing+burning.

However, the entire idea is predicated on the idea that you have a right to pollute to the extent that you can pay for it, which effectively turns pollution into a privilege of the wealthy. If this model is taken seriously, we'll be looking at a future where the poorest people are living and working in a highly restrictive, environmentally friendly way to take up the slack for the destructive, irresponsible habits of the richest.

Maybe that's more a problem with global capitalism than carbon credits though.

Well, it's a question of what the target is. Clogging the Data Protection Act bureaucracy is a "direct action", and the result is you'll prevent DPA requests from being served. Is that the goal? Are we demanding that CCTV controllers stop providing footage to the public?

I have a better idea for a mass direct action: get a bunch of people to go out, find one public CCTV camera each, and disable or destroy it.

OK, so steampunk isn't avante-garde anymore...are we allowed to like cyberpunk again yet? Surely it's retro-hip by now!

Wait, so are y'all happy with your current internet speeds? You don't care if broadband providers never increase your bandwidth?

Because that's what's being suggested with this "add a new pipe" argument. ISPs constantly upgrade their infrastructure (maybe not fast enough, but nevertheless constantly) as more people come online and bandwidth demands increase. "Adding new pipes" isn't a special occasion, it's the norm.

If we say "ok, you can add new non-neutral pipes as long as you keep the old ones free", we're dooming ourselves to two fates:

1) The only increases in bandwidth we'll ever see in the future will be to certain sites which have bribed the ISP

2) All other sites will become gradually slower as more people become connected and traffic demands naturally increase

I don't know about y'all, but I want the internet to be faster - by which I mean the internet not just yahoo.com. If we tolerate "upgrades for those who pay", we're setting ourselves up for a slower overall internet. Speed increases will change from a routine infrastructure maintenance operation to a special privilege to be doled out only to those companies who can make deals with each ISP.

@ antonius and seyno:
You're both missing a significant part of his argument. Of course I've been trained to enjoy junk food, and of course it's unhealthy. But that doesn't mean that it's not delicious and satisfying.

There's all kinds of people who tell you to eat things you don't like for your own good. Your mommy, your doctor, your fashion magazine, your pals on Boing Boing...they all want you to eat in a way that you may not like, but is for your own good.

Pollan differs - his argument is that you can eat a healthy diet that's actually /more/ delicious and enjoyable than the shit they cobble together for us in factories. He says by eating the way he recommends you'll not only be more healthy, you'll be more satisfied and fulfilled.

That's where I disagree, because it comes down to personal preference. I think a lot of the people who subscribe to Pollan's ideas already have a romanticized idea about eating a "wholesome" diet, with pure, unadulterated produce fresh from the garden. And /maybe/ already have a vague sense of guilt about eating unhealthy "artificial" food. So of course, when they eat a wholesome diet they have a much better subjective experience, and feel much better about the meal and themselves.

I, on the other hand, romanticize a different sort of diet, one involving corn chips, kraft cheese, and candy bars. I've lived off fresh produce and whole grains for good portions of my life, and didn't really feel any different about the food, except vaguely bored by the lack of flavor stimulation. Put a plate full of nachos with "cheese-flavored" dip in front of me, though, and I'll remember it fondly for a long time.

I'm not saying people should eat processed food-like substances - as was said, they're unhealthy and socio-environmentally destructive. I'm just saying that so far all we can say is "don't eat that because it's bad for you" or "don't eat that because it's bad for the world".

For me, the second argument is all I need to hear to convince me to change my diet. But Pollan's arguments don't really acknowledge the fact that some people really do find their current diets delicious, and so telling them to change based on how good locorganic tomatoes are isn't going to fly.

The problem is he's conflating issues which don't necessarily intersect for everyone. For example, some people get really excited about how flavorful a locorganic tomato or a free-range steak is, and that quality is worth extra money and/or effort for them.

But that's not the case for me, and a lot of other people. I think at least part of the reason people fetishize local, fresh, organic food is because of the perception of value, the concept that it's "luxury food", and therefore to be appreciated and connoisseur-ed.

For me, and a lot of other people, we don't really give a crap. Give me a snickers bar and you make my day, I'll savor that thing and get all the same enjoyment that you would from an expensive fresh tomato. I don't just eat a snickers bar because I'm a stupid American who's been duped by industry, I really and truly like that shit.

Of course, I have very strong objections to the industry which produces snickers bars, so I refuse to buy them despite their deliciousness. And I try to support locorganic non-gmo farmers because they're environmentally and socially friendly, even though I don't really enjoy their food any more.

The point is that I think this marriage between food snobs, health nuts, and socio-environmental concerns is a bit forced. The points that he makes are very good, but anyone coming from only one of those 3 perspectives is going to see the overall picture he paints as more than a little inconsistent.

The fact that one shirt insults us and the other doesn't means we're not done combating racism in this country!

What? You're kidding! There's still racism in the US? Guess we haven't been pretending hard enough that there's not a problem...somehow people are figuring out that race-based oppression still happens. And worse, they're talking about it!

I can't imagine why...maybe it's all that police brutality that's inflicted on blacks and latinos. Or maybe it's the studies which show that many employers, educators, and landlords discriminate based on race.

Nah, I'm sure if well meaning people would just shut up and pretend that skin color doesn't matter, we're all the same on the inside, and there's no such thing as race, all those problems would just work themselves out.

Indeed, if homosexuals are known for anything, it's using the word "tard" in an innocuous but potentially offensive way.

That and butt sex, but mostly the tard thing.

They needn't endure the procedures countless millions before them followed. It seems folk think the virtue of coming from a 3rd-world hellhole grants illegal aliens the right to completely bypass extent US laws.

Did you follow those procedures? I did not. I was a US citizen before I even knew what citizens were, I never had to do anything to get it.

Nobody debated about whether I deserved citizenship, or complained that I didn't participate in mainstream American culture.

Nobody judges me based on how hard I work. I had (and still have) all the benefits and privileges of US citizenship even if I just sit around playing video games all day.

Our immigration laws state that people who happen to have exited their mother's womb at GPS coordinates within the range approved by the US bureaucracy win automatic free citizenship independent of any other considerations.

And of course, if you, like most people on the planet, had the misfortune to have exited the womb at one of the many unapproved GPS coordinates, you must go through a lengthy, difficult, and expensive process to even be considered for citizenship.

This seems arbitrary to me, effectively creating a reward system which is mapped to randomness, not merit. I think it's more likely that people who feel strongly about such an arbitrary reward system have other motivations. I'd guess they either want to defend their own unearned privilege, or to simply express hostility towards a particular group they do not like.

@12, I'm not totally sure I get your complaint, but I think you're saying that flash mobs aren't anything new?

In a sense, you're right - the phone tree has been a tool for rapidly mobilizing a lot of people spontaneously, and it's been around for a long time.

But I can't recall phone trees ever being used to coordinate spontaneous mass convergences. Maybe part of the reason is that until recently, phones were fixed permanently in buildings. So contacting everyone in your phone tree could take many hours, since you didn't have a direct communication channel to /them/, just to their home.

Among certain classes of people, the expectation is now that you can very easily make direct contact with anyone in your social circle at pretty much any time during the day.

The initial flashmob is over, but the concept hasn't even started to become interesting.

It's like kids discovering the internet - the first few times they go to message boards or chat rooms and realize that they can get away with being wacky/mischievous, so they do. This is great fun for a little while, the escape from the normal constraints of social interaction. But eventually they get over it. And then realize that message boards and chat rooms are actually /useful/ for things.

So it goes with flashmobs. Everyone needs to go through the phase of goofy mischief as they're introduced to the mind-blowing concept of spontaneous, instant organizing in meatspace. It's the natural and appropriate reaction to the realization that we can organize and interact in this totally new way.

But each person will eventually get over this phase on their own, and will be much better off because of it. They'll then be ready to take their experience of spontaneous organizing and apply it to things that matter.

@ Technogeek, I agree that the move towards teeny little laptops that still try to be whole laptops is kind of awkward. And honestly, it's missing the point of the beginning of this movement, which was not to develop an ultraportable, but to design an ultracheap - a category which doesn't exist in the computer industry, for obvious reasons.

The small screen size was to reduce costs, so a small form factor followed. But the point was originally to create a laptop which was able to competently do the basics (web, email, word processing, photos) for as cheap as possible.

The OLPC project got it down to less than $200, but once the commercial offerings took over the limelight, the features and price started spiraling up into this whole other category of "tiny laptops with luxury features". Can't blame them I guess - there's not much money in $200 bare-necessities laptops.

I prefer the original concept, an ultracheap machine which can do basic things with very modest hardware, and by extension consumes almost no power.

Man, comparing mini laptops must be some kind of crazy new blog fad, I swear I alone have seen probably 6 or 7 of these round up comparisons.

I guess that reflects the level of interest, and also the fact that the machines are a new/different enough gadget that people don't really know what to look for or what distinguishes on from the other.

Either that, or it's just the hot topic of the hour, and everyone wants to get some blog hits from it :)

@Chevlis:
Your alignment: Lawful Neutral

In other news, an experiment found that 0% of passers-by stopped at any point during their commute to contemplate the overwhelming beauty, complexity and infinite potential that is present within us and all around us wherever we are.

People seem to think he's going to catch a lot of hell for taking this stand. Maybe he will, but it'd be a lot easier to take this kind of stand if he wasn't the only one doing it.

Next time you see a cop misbehaving, document it! Once you document it, take it to the media and/or courts. If this happened more than once in a blue moon, it wouldn't be such an intimidating and risky thing to do for people like this guy.

Basically, we shouldn't dwell on how much of an exceptional hero he is for martyring himself for our rights, we should find out how we can join in!

Add one more hitchhiking horror story to the list.

Funny how we only ever hear about the 1 in [huge number] of hitchhiking trips that end in violence, isn't it? Considering how dangerous hitching is considered to be by most Americans, you'd think it'd be much bigger news if someone actually managed to do it safely - and yet that happens every day without notice.

I think it may have something to do with a narrative that most people believe in. Even without any statistical proof, we believe it's seriously dangerous to hitchhike or pick up hitchhikers - it's a concept that recurs in all kinds of fiction and urban myths.

So naturally, when a hitchhiker really does meet a grisly end, it's a very highly publicized and attention-getting story, since it conforms to a narrative we already understand and believe in. And then it's just even more proof of how dangerous trusting strangers is.

Since all non-hitchhikers ever learn about the topic are sensational horror stories, it's no surprise that over time the prospect of hitchhiking has become more and more terrifying, as it becomes more and more caricatured by selective storytelling.

@75, People don't sleep on benches because it's fun to sleep on hard metal/wood on a noisy public street in front of a lot of people. They sleep there because that's the best available option.

That's the problem: Homeless people are in such a shitty situation that a place obviously very poorly suited for sleeping has become their best option for getting some sleep. Maybe if cities made an effort to create areas designed for sleeping, that wouldn't be the case. Micro-shelters, shelter-friendly architecture or outdoor "tent city" areas are good examples of this. These solutions may be somewhat more expensive, but they have the advantage of solving the problems of both groups, those who want to sit on benches as well as those who need somewhere to sleep.

When there are enough people in a city who are so poor and desperate that they end up sleeping on all the benches, keeping benches available for sitting seems like an absurd priority to have.

@9+10, Yeah, that's the type of thing I'm talking about - these anecdotes that have somehow become so ubiquitous that they become the only representation of hitchhiking. Everyone's got a story to relate about hitchhiking, but how many of them are firsthand? Ted Bundy killed some people once, and there were once a some people who may have had the (possibly apocryphal?) "ass, gas, or grass" motto, although I've never met any of them, nor have the many hitchhiking friends I've talked to.

Sure, hitchiking isn't guaranteed safe, just as you can meet a grisly end from any other form of transportation. But it seems like, as Bruce Schneier might say, there's a vast disconnect between the feeling of security and the existence of security when it comes to riding in a car with a stranger.

@7, No, but then again, homeless people don't have to go to jail "for" something these days. Simply being homeless is a pretty sure ticket to jail.

That's very cool about Slug Lines, I'd never heard of that.

What ever happened to hitchhiking? It's still common in other societies, but has somehow become completely unthinkable in the US. I've never seen any meaningful evidence of hitchhiking's supposed danger, just anecdotes. Seems it was a casualty of the same attitude which made us afraid to let our kids out of our sight.

Perhaps we need a "free range people" movement, too!

@27, I'm waiting for it...you've got a week-long retreat to sell me, right?

What you're saying is indeed nothing new, it's been imposed upon young, open-minded people by old, crusty religious and social establishments for ages.

Long-lasting religious traditions are built on the idea that only they know the answers to the "great mysteries", and doing anything but following their instructions is a waste of time. But just being long-lasting doesn't make them right.

@12, For real though - do you not see the arbitrary distinction between hallucination and not? Do you really think you or anyone else can tell what's a hallucination and what isn't?

All types of shit that we take for granted on a day-to-day basis is fairly hallucinatory. "cyberspace", biology, language... we relate to all these things through a highly imaginitive process that would be called hallucinatory if it wasn't so completely ordinary and taken for granted.

Hallucination is an inherent part of the human thought process, and whether or not it has any impact on physical reality, the belief that they do has a very real effect on people and societies. That belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as people's real world is transformed as a result of hallucinations. This is true for both the mystical hallucinations of tribal culture and the "sciency" hallucinations of modern culture.

Is the issue of tolerance and dependency being completely overlooked here?

If you use these types of chemicals long-term to enhance your attention or reduce anxiety, it seems inevitable that you gradually adjust to the enhancement and become psychologically - if not physiologically - dependent on it.

I mean, that's what happens with caffeine, right? People who have two cups of coffee in the morning for years might have felt extra-awake at the beginning, but now they can't feel awake at all without it. They're no longer "enhanced", just addicted.

Surely scientists with all their sciency wisdom would be hip to this? I wonder what the results for neuropharmacologists specifically were?

@9: You assume that because rational-than-thou skeptics aren't out to make money, they must be on the side of truth and justice and all that is right and good in the world, but people are driven by more than just money. In fact I'd say that the need to justify one's own laziness by smugly criticizing the efforts of others is a far more powerful driving force than the almighty dollar.

Knee-jerk skepticism isn't about truth. Well, sometimes... but mostly it's about appeals to ego, cynicism, the prioritization of smart-ass criticisms over constructive advice, and the condescending belief that nobody else is rational enough to have any clue what's best for society.

This is fun, I could go on all night ;)

Since the pictures are sourced from Flickr, it would be fun to subtly photoshop real pictures of scenery to include fantastic elements, and then geo-code them to appear naturally in this app.

like, a normal picture of a block in manhattan, only look, there's osama bin laden buying a hot dog!

i could see a new version of photoshop tennis developing, where artists show off by uploading pictures which modify a section of the virtual environment according to a supposed scenario or theme - essentially creating a photographic alternate universe of a given location.

I bet they sent him the $1.01 because they knew it'd cost at least that in postage to send him back his junk - which presumably they'd have to do if they weren't going to buy it.

@17, Good thing you're one of the privileged few who can see through everyone else's bullshit! Tell us, what percentage of the population is unable to move beyond the egocentric idea that everyone else is an irrational mystic incapable of rational reasoning?

#92 I suggest that we need to respect the real life mechanics of the world as much as does the scientist. Most of it is unknown, but what we do know teaches us rules - rules that are not arbitrary or subject to our ideologies. The most compelling Utopia does not win.

But the rules of the world are both arbitrary and subject to our ideologies - that's the maddening, illogical nature of social science. While a society can't all agree to make 2+2=5 or abolish gravity, they can pretty much arbitrarily change the rules of society and the way people can and do interact with each other. They can do this based on stuff as wacky and illogical as religion, idealism, or ethics.

Valuing practical solutions is a positive thing, but insisting on a hard-science approach to the subjective, muddy domain of social dynamics isn't much help until we have a useful scientific consensus on how social dynamics work.

It's an uncomfortable position to be in, because the hard, objective fact is that social reality really is created and controlled by the soft, subjective opinions and beliefs of the participants in society - and therefore the conventional hard-science approach we know and are comfortable with generally isn't really useful.

@88,
Well, don't be coy - I'm all ears!

@82, spronig3:
It seems like the point you're trying to make over and over is that power concedes nothing without being forced to. Also, I get the feeling you have a deep resentment towards "raising awareness", which you see as feel-good activism, done by naive hippies or whatever.

I can relate to that. Power definitely requires a serious military or economic threat before it will change its ways, and raising awareness alone will never present that threat.

However, I also think that in your rush to take a tough, radical stand against China's oppression (an admirable sentiment), you've overlooked the subtleties of building a powerful movement. Hitting China's economy heavily is probably ultimately the best bet to stop oppression, but it can't happen in a vacuum - a boycott by just you and your friends on BoingBoing has approximately as much practical effect as international Olympic protest. We're still at a pretty early stage in the struggle, and that means most people don't even really know there's a movement happening, let alone what it's about, what the demands are, and what they should do.

"Raising awareness" can become a cop-out when people stop there and do nothing more, but it's also a vital first step towards building a formidable movement. PR campaigns and attention-seeking protests are a very effective way to inject a meme into public discourse, and the more that meme is there, the more support builds behind the movement. There comes a point when it's time to move beyond the comfort of raising awareness and actually threaten power directly, but it would be truly naive to think that the Tibetan human rights movement is ready to make that move right now.

However, maybe if we support the efforts to use the Olympics as a tool to expose China's human rights abuses to the world, a movement able to threaten China's power directly will build sooner rather than later.

To be fair, there are pretty serious risks associated with getting dehydrated, so it's definitely preferable to overestimate the amount of water you need any time you might be in danger of dehydration.

When you're physically active, or overheated, or simply distracted for long periods, it's very possible to become dehydrated to the point of danger without realizing how badly you need water. You don't have to lose a large percentage of the water in your body before you start going into shock from insufficient blood volume.

So, it could be that the 8 glasses advice was stressed to people doing lots of exercise, or working in the sun all day or whatever, since they were at real risk for dangerous dehydration if they didn't consciously monitor their water intake. Then maybe it was generalized by non-experts as advice for everyone later. Like I said, considering the serious and immediate harm involved in dehydration, I far prefer to overestimate my water needs than just assume that when I need to drink I'll notice that I'm thirsty.

@13: You know, there was another guy who "argued that a comparison was appropriate"...his name was Hitler, and he was comparing Jews to animals!

Alternate plan:

Approach townships or county governments and offer to occupy, repair, and maintain some of their abandoned properties. Demonstrate that you have the resources and desire to improve the area and live there. Better yet, found some kind of organization or cooperative that homesteaders can be a part of.

Most small local governments are terrified of slipping into blight, and they'll gladly turn over ownership of abandoned properties to anyone who will turn them into something positive for the community.

Of course, if they're not interested, you can always take over the abandoned housing anyway, and let your neighbors decide whether or not you should be allowed to clean up their neighborhood. Much of the time between the courts and the public pressure, you can be allowed to stay.

@ dcer:
People talk about these "horrible" situations that are easily solved to create better lives.

I think this summarizes very well the assumption that underlies everything you've written. It's your belief that since you've never personally noticed you or anyone close to you having any serious (as in virtually insurmountable) economic problems through no fault of their own, such problems don't exist - they're merely the fantasies of rabid ideologues.

Since the only problems you've ever been aware of were solvable with discipline, intelligence and hard work, you've come to the conclusion that all problems anyone encounters are similar. And by extension, anyone who complains about serious, virtually insurmountable economic problems is just lazy. They're just looking to have things which you worked hard for handed to them on a silver platter.

On a personal level, I can relate to your perspective. I, too, have had pretty much every problem in my life solvable through hard work, intelligence and discipline. But I guess the difference is that I've also encountered many people with problems that cannot be solved that way, because the socio-economic situation is stacked overwhelmingly against them. Because I've encountered these people, I've learned that my situation is not the only one, and it is in fact a fairly privileged one.

I've concluded, therefore, that it's sometimes unfair and unrealistic to judge people according to the standards I or other privileged people are generally judged by. I don't feel bad that I have it good, but I'm under no illusions that everyone can be like me.

@dcer: When rich people move into an area en masse, the area does indeed get nicer grocery stores, better schools, better police, etc.

However, the people who used to live there don't get to enjoy those improvements, because their rent becomes impossibly high. They're forced to abandon their cultural connections with the area and migrate to the new cheap neighborhood, which is generally further from their jobs too.

Even people who have managed, against high odds, to own houses are affected by this process. Many elderly people in the historically black district of my city are finding themselves under serious economic strain or even losing their houses because of dramatically rising property taxes. Some have lived there all their lives, and are now faced with having to abandon their home. The reason? Luxury condos are being built right down the street for yuppies and rich retirees. The neighborhood has a lot more fancy stores now, but somehow I don't think there'll be many black folks shopping in them.

They're all moving to the outskirts of the city - the margins, where they'll just begin to put down cultural roots before the next mass movement of wealth forces them into migration again.

Improving an area's public resources, making it safe and livable is important. But accomplishing it by moving in an entirely new class of people to displace the old isn't a solution at all - it's like pushing the food around on your plate to make it seem like you've eaten some.

Targeted graffiti is also an effective non-violent way to drive off yuppies and uptight hipsters who may be gentrifying a working class/bohemian neighborhood.

This is a positive way to use the "clash of aesthetic ideals" to protect a vibrant low income area from colonization and cultural destruction by wealthy people with no taste.

Haha, this strikes me as very CrimethInc.

Regarding the ubiquitous art or vandalism debate: Some of y'all are way to obsessed with black/white distinctions, which is why you look silly when you try to categorize this act as either admirable artwork or despicable destruction.

There's a certain level of wrongdoing that's minimal enough that it's better to just appreciate it for what it is or ignore it. If graffiti gets out of hand and it's really messing up people's lives, then maybe it's time to take a stand against it. Currently it's just harmless fun, so we'd all do well to chill out about it. I think the anxiety is caused more by the idea that someone's doing something wrong than the actual effect of what they're doing.

I slept in bus, train, and airport terminals when I was "homeless" as a voluntary bum.

The difference is, I did it in New Zealand. The only harassment I received was from helpful, friendly passengers awakening me every hour or so to let me know "my" bus/train/flight was leaving. This was actually a much greater deterrent to trying to squat these locations than having cops around!

It's interesting and kind of sad to think that the reason people can get away with sleeping at Heathrow is because nobody cares enough to pay attention to them. It's often the same reason they're in such a bad situation in the first place.

A radical black activist friend of mine visited the house of a marijuana dealer, trying to buy a small amount. Seeing that nobody was home, he left and was immediately jumped by several black teens, one of whom had an Uzi-type automatic weapon.

They demanded all his money and drugs. He sort of sighed and offered them the 20 bucks he had and the chicken he was taking over to his friend's house. And then he said "Sorry I don't have much for you, I'm a poor man...for real, I'm just trying to look out for y'all - I'm sort of like a Black Panther".

The reference to the Panthers struck the kids strongly. They didn't really believe him, so my friend got out a book about Huey P Newton he was reading and told them a little about what his deal was.

The kids ended up giving him everything back, and acting respectful to him, obviously shocked but pleased to have met someone who was a living representation of their struggle, and of a movement most people think died decades ago.

One of the kids explained that they targeted him because they thought his red, black, and green armbands meant he was Jamaican, and possibly a drug dealer. My friend said "Nah, those are the African colors!" Among the other things the kids said: "If we don't keep these rich people out of our neighborhood, we're gonna have nowhere to go!"

@jeff: I'm really thinking about it, but I can't think of any downsides, things that I liked from the iPod firmware that don't exist in Rockbox. It can't play DRM, as mentioned before, but I don't fuck around with DRM files as a rule anyway.

It was a slight challenge to get it on in the first place, but it's a low-risk operation, and I think they've made it easier since. The worst that can happen if you screw up really bad is you have to connect your iPod to iTunes and reset it. Make sure you have your music backed up.

@#4, Ooh, I've got this one! Many, many pounds of grain go into raising each animal that you eat.

Look at it this way: if you eat corn, you're responsible for the number of animal deaths caused by producing that corn.

If you eat a cow, you're responsible for (obviously) the death of the cow itself, but also the number of animal deaths caused by the harvesting of like 10x the cow's weight of corn.

Now, I don't know the stats exactly, so don't hold me to it, but the point is that every pound of animal meat is the equivalent of /many/ more pounds of farmed crops like corn, soy, etc. So eating a vegan/vegetarian diet is also a way to reduce the number of "collateral" deaths in the agricultural process by eating more efficiently.

This is the reason I avoid meat, not because I care about the animals, but because it's a far more efficient diet, requiring less natural resources, carbon emissions, pesticides, etc to be ultimately used to nourish me.

Dude, Ray's gonna have a really stressful time dying. I hope he loosens up a little by the time it becomes apparent he's dying. Then again, maybe the fact that he thinks about death so much will make it easier on him than most people.

The road does not belong to automobile drivers. The number of times I have been angrily admonished for daring to ride my bicycle on the street, or been told by drivers that I'm not allowed on the road, goes to show that there's a very strong expectation about the entitlement of automobile drivers to the road-space.

This has very little to do with safety and more with the assumption that on the road, automobile drivers treat each other as equals, but everything else is responsible for watching out for its own ass.

Automobile drivers are piloting one of the most deadly contraptions in the Western world - they have an overwhelming burden to make sure that they wield their vehicle/weapon responsibly. Bikes and pedestrians do have some degree of responsibility as well, but much less so since they're not the ones who decided to hurtle giant hunks of metal around populated areas at high speed.

What I don't understand about XO is why the developers got caught up in the hardware. Computer hardware is cheap. A decent computer can be had for less than the price of a new XO,

You mean you can get a decent computer for less than the price of a new XO. People in most of the world cannot, and even if they could, the amount of labor involved in setting up each different funky used computer would be massive.

In order for something like a computer-centric educational system to be viable, there needs to be a high degree of standardization, so software and firmware can be easily upgraded, interoperated, and mesh networks can form dynamically and organically. We've been trying for decades to abstract hardware from the OS, but it still hasn't happened fully - that's a way bigger battle than OLPC can tackle.

Furthermore, you can get a computer with better "specs" for the same price as an XO, but those specs aren't the whole picture. Is a decent used computer military-grade hardened against environmental damage? Is it readable in direct sunlight? Can it be operated off a car battery or small solar panel? Can it be used for 8 hours straight as an ebook? The metrics we first world computer users measure computers by (megahertz, megabytes, etc) aren't the same ones most of the world cares about.

I case it isn't obvious, Rockbox is fantastic. It's the only operating system I know of that's designed to run specifically on portables - all portables. It's the beam of light leading us out of the dark ages of a proprietary OS for each brand name gadget.

It's the platform that has the potential to turn the computer hardware in each of our portable devices in to an actual, usable computer.

For example, I have an old iPod color, which was fun enough to listen to music on, but that's all it could do. With Rockbox on there, I can listen to more formats of music, record audio in mp3, wav, or aiff, skin the UI, play NES games, read ebooks, take notes, play Doom, and even watch full-speed, full screen video (on a pre-video iPod!).

And as cool as all these little features and gadgets are, the coolest thing is that I could buy a different brand of mp3 player and still run the same shit on it, with the same interface.

"Clay, honey, did you wash your hands for dinner? Let me see them..."

srsly tho, activism has achieved plenty of things in the last 7 years. It's true perhaps you don't hear about it often in the mainstream media, though. I'd point you to http://www.indymedia.org if you want to read a lot of news about activist efforts all over the world, and what they're accomplishing or not.

And come on, 'watch lists'? That might scare ordinary people, but most people who consider themselves 'activists' aren't scared of crap like that. A lot of them have been on watch lists since before Bush was even in office. It's something you live with, the price of being a dissident. People who believe strongly in acting for a cause are a lot less deterred by spooky government programs - assuming what they're doing isn't seriously illegal. It's true they may be more at risk, but they're also far more willing to accept that risk rather than shut up and hope to be left alone.

Yeah, it's a fairly good idea, and certainly worth a try. I wouldn't personally participate, because I already have a set of demands of major businesses which they have not met (and are unfortunately unlikely to barring a serious shake-up), and therefore I'll continue boycotting them.

But for people who already support unethical businesses constantly, this may be something that could reach them.

@12: You're absolutely right that activists should look toward practical solutions and compromises that move us in the right direction.

But you're not right that any time a company does something environmentally friendly it's a 'net gain' for the environment. I wish that were the way of things, but unfortunately the world of commercial public relations is much more sordid and complex.

Many large, environmentally destructive corporations do environmentally positive things all the time. They install solar panels, they give grants to foundations and think-tanks, build electric cars, whatever. In most cases, this is not an effort to genuinely help protect the environment. It is a calculated PR campaign intended to establish an eco-friendly reputation for the company. This reputation is vital to a company which is engaged in hugely destructive activity, because it helps insulate them from public criticism and mass outrage - forces which can, if sufficiently angered, force the company to change their actual business practices.

Basically, McDonalds is responsible for a mind-boggling amount of rainforest destruction in Brazil, but if they have a reputation for planting trees in urban areas and using 10% recycled paper, it's a lot less likely most people will associate them with environmental destruction. Therefore, the tree planting and recycling was a net loss for the environment, because it was actually a component in their campaign to continue a destructive business model.

So that's the basic theory of why we shouldn't pat businesses on the back every time they make a concession to environmentalism. I'm not necessarily saying Carrotmob is doing this, but there's definitely the potential for it to play out like that, so I say be cautious.

They may be full of it. It doesn't matter. I don't expect anything more of the companies than their usual profit-seeking behavior. We're not trying to convince anyone of anything, we're just making deals.

Not that you guys are dumb - I'm sure you've given this campaign a lot of thought and internal debate - but what makes you think that you're getting the better half of these deals?

You made a couple points: The main "carrot" the campaign is bestowing is a positive, eco-friendly image. You're willing to deal with businesses that aren't eco-friendly. And ultimately, you don't expect the business to be doing anything but looking out for its bottom line.

If you take all these points together, it seems that the campaign could easily be construed as "greenwashing". Basically you're making a deal to improve the environmental image of a company, regardless of their overall business practices.

I get the metaphor of the "carrot", and it's true that in general it's been an under-used tool. I guess I would just suggest being very careful when "cooperating" with businesses, because they're often much more clever than well-meaning activists when it comes to manipulating public opinion. If a company is excited about making a deal with you when their overall business model shows no concern for the environment, there's good reason to be suspicious.

Perhaps a more "feel good" variation of this game that would satisfy all the still-bitter geeks who were outcasts in high school would be to have multiple independent ratings, with abstract labels like colors or letters.

So you could have like 7000 blue points, 400 green, 15 red, etc. They'd all simultaneously be exchanged when people associated. This implies the kindergarten lesson that "nobody's good at everything, everyone's good at something", but also suggests a more open-ended game: Do you want to raise all your scores as high as possible? Do you want to focus entirely on one or two at the expense of the others? Would "color cliques" develop, all of people who value the same color score, creating a sub-competition around just that color?

This seems to me to reflect the way actual social scenes work better.

@4 The thing is, even now men 'decline paternity' constantly, and women get stuck with the kid. For some reason, it rarely happens the other way around.

Social conventions and roles have created a situation where in general, men are able and willing to abandon their children, and women are unable/unwilling to do so. I agree that in principle men shouldn't be required to parent a kid they never wanted, but the unbalanced social norms of how men and women relate to babies makes this impossible to apply in an equal way. Basically, you can't just say "men are free to decide to be deadbeats but so are women", because in practice most women feel overwhelming pressures and social stigmas against abandoning a child that men do not.

I'd suggest that if a man feels strongly about not being required to parent a child he may accidentally conceive, that he discuss it with his sex partner and make a legal agreement to that effect. If both parties are really OK with that arrangement, then there should be no problem, right?

@9: Yeah, real cats are furry, but this one is clearly all made out of pixels!

Skeptics cling tenaciously (maybe desperately) to the one thing they've got figured out for sure: there is no such thing as magic.

It's true there's no such thing as magic, but skeptics feel the need to build an entire identity, almost a philosophy around being certain of that fact. Skepticism as an identity eschews uncertainty - the glory is in having unshakeable certainty in the validity of science, and proving that to others.

I often wonder how skeptics react to the uncertainty that remains in our world. I imagine they don't like to think about it, which is a shame and a loss for them. Being right isn't everything. There are still many aspects of our world where being clueless and mystified is the most rewarding attitude.

One of the most interesting (to me) and unmentioned stories of pretty much every recent Olympic Games is the systematic purging of homeless people from the city hosting the games.

It's not surprising when you think about it - with all this construction done to pretty up the town, 'Olympic City' will be damned if its unsightly beggars ruin the image for visiting tourists and dignitaries. The same basic game of "hide the poor people" happens in most cities, but it's usually much more subtle and gradual. When the Olympics comes to town, it's like time-lapse photography of gentrification.

What's interesting to me is how consistent it is - Atlanta, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens...there's always this sweep in the months leading up to the Olympics, with police or city officials trying to bus all homeless people out of town, or arrest them.

I'm sure Beijing will have a similar policy, but it'll be interesting to see the Chinese spin on this phenomenon.

@42, Chevan: Almost every book ever published? That's news to me - I'm not even really sure if I believe it. Does the "book piracy" scene work similar to the pre-napster mp3 trading scene, or warez kids? That is: is it closed communities, or something people like me could find and access?

Seems like the labor involved in 'ripping' a book is high enough, and with books more numerous than software or movies it would be much, much harder to get everything converted. It'd take an undertaking like Google's...

Dijjer is cool as a technique for distributing legal content, but its centralization means it's not nearly as censorship-resistant as BitTorrent, which I think is why it's not popular. Using Dijjer for the distribution of illegal data or information powerful institutions would like to suppress isn't very successful. And honestly, that's one of the largest uses of BitTorrent.

You can measure dollars and cents.

But that's a tautology, it's like saying "you can measure numbers". Yeah, dollars exist specifically to be measured/counted. But more to the point, they exist to represent the abstract concept of value, and make it easy to measure/count.

But money fails at representing value. You can't accurately quantify the beauty of a poem for the same reason you can't accurately quantify the value of a loaf of bread: they both involve a subjective interpretation - the bread is hugely valuable to some people, and worthless to others, depending on their situation and perspective.

What I'm saying is that yes, you can measure money, and say "This bread is $5 and this gold bar is $50,000", but that doesn't accurately reflect real value. We've developed an entire elaborate "science" called economics to try to explain and rationalize the inconsistencies between money and value, and come up with theories whereby something's "dollar value" is the only kind of value it holds. And because of the focus on money in our societies, we've come to analyze almost everything exclusively in terms of dollar value.

That's not reality though, it's just a game we've made up and decided everyone should play. Sort of like the GDP, come to think of it...

Essentially, saying something is "worth more dollars" does not mean it's more valuable, and vice versa. Therefore, the metric of dollars is just as arbitrary and distortion-prone as a metric to measure happiness.

How tasteless and vulgar these two ruffians of the lower classes are! Why, merely the sight of their unsightly body modifications reveals them to be no better than vermin!

Imagine attending the opera with such a tattoo! Or meeting an ambassador, or delivering an oration at a civil society luncheon...it boggles the mind how such "people" can even survive!

It's true that in this age of modernity, the free and pure expression of one's inner spirit is celebrated, but surely this is an exception! Such "free expression" is commendable when pursued in the manner of fine artistes and the refined philosophes of London and Paris...but this base expression by dirty, rural, impoverished swine is so, as the French would say, declassé!

How tasteless and vulgar these two ruffians of the lower classes are! Why, merely the sight of their unsightly body modifications reveals them to be no better than vermin!

Imagine attending the opera with such a tattoo! Or meeting an ambassador, or delivering an oration at a civil society luncheon...it boggles the mind how such "people" can even survive!

It's true that in this age of modernity, the free and pure expression of one's inner spirit is celebrated, but surely this is an exception! Such "free expression" is commendable when pursued in the manner of fine artistes and the refined philosophes of London and Paris...but this base expression by dirty, rural, impoverished swine is so, as the French would say, declassé!

The main dissenting argument among these comments seems to be "there's no unit to measure happiness, so the idea of creating an absolute measurement of such a thing is ridiculous".

I'd like to ask everyone who's open-minded enough to take a step back and apply the same perspective to the GDP, and the concept of economic value.

Somebody said "you cannot be 7 more happy than me", which is true, but isn't it similarly absurd to say "you're 7 more valuable than me"? It's fair to say that attaching a numerical unit-value to happiness is arbitrary and doesn't reflect reality, but I think it's also important to acknowledge that specific market indicators are just as arbitrary.

For some obvious examples of the failure of economic metrics, consider: the real value of a pound of rice fluctuates wildly depending on how much you like rice, whether you're starving, etc. But the economic value is simply "$3". Similarly, the real value of an hour of your time is utterly dynamic - some hours you would probably give anything to keep, others you'd give anything to skip. But the economic value of the hour is simply whatever your hourly wage is. Fundamentally, money fails at representing value just as much as a happiness metric would.

Ironically, the proponents of a quality of life metric, have caused their detractors to come to grips with the really important point: any time people start taking quantifications of subjective phenomena too seriously, bad things happen.

There seems to be a lot of talk about how the people who are losing their homes are to blame, that they made a bad financial decision and should have read the contract with a lawyer, etc.

I was thinking about another common cause of recession - people getting laid off and fired, and how you can make the same kind of hard-line personal responsibility argument:

"Look, those people got those jobs knowing they could be fired at any time - they should've read their employment contract more closely. If they were smart they would've gone to night school and studied to become tenured professors! They made a gamble to stake their livelihood on a risky factory job, and now they have to take responsibility for it."

It's interesting how the same argument seems absurd when taken out of the context of loans and debt. I think this is because we have a deep cultural ethos linking debt to a sense of personal responsibility - if you can't or won't pay back what you owe, you're worthless and a social failure...much more so than if you just lose your job.

Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff!

Pointing out that the show bears similarity to torture techniques - particularly sleep deprivation and stress positions - isn't really a value judgment.

I certainly don't think such a show should be banned or suppressed, but that doesn't change the fact that it probably does have a normalizing effect on the overall public perception of torture. Despite the obviously vast practical differences between such a show and real torture, I can see a show like this causing people to believe that psychological torture techniques don't have any lasting effects, or serious consequences.

After all, Joe Q. Public endured 2 weeks without sleep and being strapped to a pegboard (or whatever), and he came out just fine in the end - so why is it so much worse when the same techniques are used in a torture setting? There are rational explanations, sure, but I think the public gut-level revulsion against torture is pretty much the main reason it's not in widespread use today.

i never touched her
she never saw it
when she was hit by space junk!
she was smashed by space junk!

@7, yeah I think there's definitely something to the idea that this kind of show could normalize the idea of torture even when it's not really torture. If you can get the public psychologically adjusted to seeing people in agony, it's not as much of a shock to see depictions of real torture.

Fascinating show though.

@blazenhoff: I think it's safe to say that you're better off without the kind of boyfriend who would happily let you sit on a toilet for 2 years.

Anti-fashion? Post-fashion? What do you call it when clothes that are deliberately, self-consciously utilitarian and functional are commodified as fashionable clothes?

"Stupid" seems to be a common critique, but there's something deeper here I think. It's like people are weary and disgusted with the idea of "fashion", and superficial trends, but can't quite escape its frame of reference. So they end up looking to the fashion world to provide alternatives and criticisms of itself, which of course is done in the form of new fashions.

Nearly Free Speech is awesome for solid hosting, good customer service, and solid defense of free speech.

But, they are located in the US, which means they can be compelled by US institutions like, say, police departments or homeland security.

For a reliable registrar not subject to US silliness, try Gandi.net. It's located in France, and explicitly promises that you can use it for anything that's legal under French law. They offer hosting and virtual dedicated servers, too.

Y'all sound like die-hard communists do when they claim that the theory of communism is perfectly sound, it's just that the Soviets weren't communist /enough/ - they didn't establish the extreme communist utopia where all the USSR's problems would have worked themselves out!

Bruce is talking about the real world, not techo-fantasy land where all people have hidden cameras in their clothes that automatically post to YouTube. In the real world, law enforcement and government officials have way more power in most situations. And I'm not just talking about "information is power" power, I'm talking about "kicking your ass, locking you up, and taking your shit" power, and "access to more money than you could ever dream of" power. When the government already has these advantages, it's not hard for them to bend surveillance technology to work overall to their advantage.

But that's just theory - I can tell you something about using monitoring technology against the police, because I've done it fairly extensively, in the real world.

You see an arrest, traffic stop, or police harassment going down. You walk over and start recording with your video camera, keeping a reasonable distance. The cop comes over and tells you to stop filming. You ask for his name and badge number - which you have a right to know in the US. He may or may not provide them.

If you stop filming, you're usually allowed to go on your way. If you continue filming, there's a significant chance you will be detained and searched yourself, during which your camera footage may be deleted or film exposed. It's even possible (though not common) that you'll be arrested. Although charges will be ultimately dropped, you'll spend a day or two in jail.

If you actually happened to film a cop breaking the law, it's much more likely you will be harassed and have your equipment seized. If you're filming at a political demonstration, it's not unheard of for police to simply grab your camera and walk away, or smash it on the ground.

Civil liberties groups are surprisingly unenthusiastic about taking on cases like this (they're common and not precedent-setting), so you'll probably have to go it yourself.

If you have the time and resources to bring a civil lawsuit and have good evidence and witnesses, you may get a modest settlement from the city/police department, or maybe not. If there's good publicity, the officer will at best be given paid leave and a training course or something. You will fail if you bring criminal charges.

The point of this is not that monitoring the cops is a waste of time - it's absolutely vital that we do it. The point is that every step of the way, the government is using its other forms of power - primarily wealth and violence - to inhibit your surveillance efforts. Meanwhile, it uses its power to assist and proliferate its own surveillance apparatus.

Surveillance technology is a tool, and though it's technically accessible to everyone, it's no surprise at all that the government is able to use the tool very effectively and freely themselves, while persecuting those who try to use it independently.

@ Landowner,15: Actually, I find that i'm much more concerned about graffiti when I don't own property, because if my home gets defaced the landlord may blame it on me. If it was my property, I could be laid back about it.

But I guess, when you get down to it, many of us just don't give a fuck about the sacred "private property", and feel that exposing the public to experience interesting and artistic spaces is a greater good than any damage it may do to someone's public or commercial property.

Also, the "in your house" thing is pretty hackneyed by now - very little graffiti is done in people's personal living space, and bringing up that possibility is just appealing to people's natural fear of having their home invaded, which is closely associated with a fear for personal safety.

Haha, what a charismatic guy, he comes across as both knowledgeable and self-confidently reasonable.

Homeless shelters and very often intolerable places to stay. Common experiences in your average homeless shelter include:

- Having your belongings stolen by other homeless people or confiscated by staff
- Being kept up all night by noise or activity
- Getting sick from being in cramped quarters with sick people
- Being ordered around by grumpy, power-tripping staff
- Having to get in by 7 or 8pm
- Being locked in until morning every day
- Being separated from your wife or children

Believe it or not, homeless people don't sleep in parks or on the street just to piss you off, they do it because it's the best option available to them. Maybe that reflects badly on them, but it reflects worse on a society that allows a park bench to be the best option a homeless person has.

There's a new strategy emerging among people who actually want to eliminate homelessness, as opposed to just moralize about handouts versus bootstraps.

Give them housing. The first thing a social worker or shelter does when they find a homeless person is set them up with an efficiency apartment or comparable housing arrangement. No strings attached, no sermons to sit through, no programs to participate in or bureaucracy to handle, just a room of their own.

The results are pretty striking, who'd have thought that simply by giving someone the decency of a home, they're far more likely to be able to deal with the other problems in their life, be they mental illness, drug addiction, disability, or simply being broke and alone in the world?

Homeless people consume a disproportionate amount of resources in most cities - not because they're greedy free-riders, but because their situation requires it. And making these people not homeless anymore is usually worth more than the expense of housing them in money saved on services.

For example, a disabled homeless person occupies a large amount of ambulance and hospital time, because living on the streets often gets them hurt or sick, and the only help available to them is calling an ambulance. Giving them housing turns out to be a net gain for the city.

@15: Judge Judy, is that you?

It's modified in the real world. That's the main point, to turn a high-visibility public advertisement into a high-visibility statement about the advertiser or product.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Liberation_Front

It's a common thing on capitol hill for people of the political class to pay poor people - often bike couriers - to get in line for them for hearings or other first-come-first-served political events.

it's called "line standing" among those who do it - basically you get paid an hourly fee to get in line for someone, and then when they show up you give them your place.

Only a lot of times, the political person never shows up, they just paid to have a spot saved for them in case. Normally, this just means that the courier goes home before the event starts and someone else gets in instead, but I can see how it'd be possible for them to use the same kind of arrangement and ask them to sit through the whole hearing. Pretty clever.

I think people usually criticize complaining because people do it /instead/ of taking their business elsewhere, or boycotting the company. Essentially, people are saying "Don't just sit there bitching while you continue to play their game, do something about it!"

Which I think is excellent advice, and applies to more than just corporation-consumer relationships. Complaining isn't bad per-se, but many people see it as the primary method of reforming bad institutions, corporate, government, or even interpersonal.

In that context complaining can often be a worthless distraction, so it's bad for people to get too wrapped up in it.

@1: "Underpowered" is relative to the goal of the machine. If it was billed as a machine to play Unreal 2010 on, then yes, it's underpowered.

But seeing as how it's designed to be an ebook, calculator, web browser, word processor, analog measurement device, audio/video player, run simple educational games, etc. I'd say it's actually overpowered - they anticipated heavier uses than it's being used for currently.

I've gotten Doom and Quake running fine on mine, for example - I still remember the days not long ago when computers which could run those really were considered "overpowered".

Also, I haven't had any problems with the screen being too dim. At night, I can turn down the brightness very low to save battery life and still see the screen fine. During the day the backlight provides more than enough light indoors. Outdoors or in direct lamplight I can turn the backlight off completely and enjoy the high-res sunlight-readable mode, which really is awesome, especially for reading books. Unlike a conventional LCD, where bright light overwhelms the screen and makes it unreadable, the OLPC's screen actually becomes /sharper/, looking more like a printed page when hit with bright or direct light.

Let's not talk about it, let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with the consequences

I admit I haven't looked deeply into this research, but I'm not the only one who thinks that quote is terrifying, right?

@Teresa,#126

Ok, so if Boing Boing does need the money from Microsoft then it stands to reason that, just like those embarrassingly unhip offline media companies, they're dependent on their advertisers. And that obviously gives the advertisers a certain amount of influence over content, commentary, etc.

Now, I read your post on the long tail, and I can see the counter argument already: Boing Boing does need the money, but they don't need any particular advertiser. So if some advertiser gets controlly, Boing Boing can just drop them and get another one.

But that implies that Boing Boing is independent enough that they get to play with advertisers they like, and give the finger to those they don't. Which raises the question: why has Boing Boing chosen to play with Microsoft? The only reason I can think of they'd accept an advertiser like Microsoft is because they don't have any other good options. Either that, or they're big fans, which seems like a stretch :)

Basically, it can't be both ways. Either Boing Boing is dependent on the advertising - which introduces a sketchy influence over the content and commentary - or they aren't dependent on the advertising - which means that Boing Boing has chosen to do business with a very pro-establishment and anti-information freedom company simply because it's especially profitable. Or maybe for some other reason, I can't really guess - but it'd have to be a pretty good one considering what Microsoft is all about.

"But if Boing Boing lost all of but a handful of its smallest advertisers, it would still come out.
[...] Weblogs can turn their backs on advertisers, and maintain their editorial independence"



That's very interesting to read, because it dispels the myth that Boing Boing doesn't want to have advertising, they just have to in order to keep the site going.



If Boing Boing could keep going without its advertisers, if it's so financially independent that it can take or leave advertisements, why is it adding new, invasive advertisement?



I think some people are more understanding when advertisement is a financial necessity to "pay the bills", but when the advertisements are just an unnecessary grab for more money, it will understandably upset people.

@27: Try to think of another job where you could treat someone like that and not get fired. I'm sure there's one, but I can't think of it. Physically accosting and then berating someone in a very angry and personal way is pretty much unacceptable across the board.

There is this one exception though: Cops, in the course of their duty, sometimes need to use physical force to control someone trying to commit a serious crime. Because of this one exception, both the public and cops themselves seem to have concluded that cops can use physical force whenever they like, that they're somehow exempt from the social standards of when violence is appropriate.

Basically, there's a double standard. Perhaps society as a whole feels that it's appropriate to put kids in headlocks and aggressively intimidate them for skateboarding or failing to use sufficiently respectful language. That's a separate issue.

But if that's the case, the consequences for me headlocking that kid should be the same as if a cop did it. Independent of the question "is it an appropriate response?" is the question "why is the situation treated differently simply because that guy happens to be wearing a uniform?"

The cop was afraid of appearing on YouTube. This shows the power of YouTube, and that power is extended into the camera itself.

Cops used to be afraid of being filmed because it might show up in the courtroom some day, as evidence against them. That danger isn't that huge, because thanks to the "blue wall of silence" and a friendly court system, most of the time cops can wriggle out of big legal trouble.

YouTube and viral video, however, is a new threat. Video no longer has to show up in court to ruin an officer's career, it just has to be widely available on the internet, and suddenly you'll see it popping up on talk shows and maybe even news programs.

When evidence like this is widely available, people outside of the courts demand action, and those responsible get fired or suspended.

I think the awareness of officers that cameras have this new potency means that shooting video is both more dangerous and more powerful. If the cop had known he was being recorded the whole time, he probably wouldn't have acted as he did. At the same time, he would probably have insisted that the camera be turned off (even though he had no right to do so), and confiscated it forcefully if he was not obeyed.

Are cameras more valuable as a way to document abuse, or to prevent it from ever happening?

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Yeah! What we need is nationwide gun control combined with insanely tight border security to keep guns out! And of course, in order to keep that border secure, we're going to need a lot of guards. Armed guards...

It's ok for them to be armed though. Since they're government employees, that guarantees they're good guys!

Bonus: This could solve our illegal drug problem too - wonder why nobody thought of it before?!?!

I support gun control and disarmament, but only if it's universal. That means civilians, organized criminals, police, and even the military must be subject to the restrictions.

To restrict weapon access to one class of people (civilians) while allowing government-favored groups like the police and military to carry weapons creates an unbalanced situation. Such an imbalance of force lends itself to abuse, corruption, and oppression.

It is a pretty consistent truth that people with power use it to screw over people without power. And the power to kill is one of the most basic forms of power there is. Gun control is inherently not about eliminating the power to kill, it's about restricting that power to select institutions, namely the police and military.

So while I agree that it would be ideal to eliminate the power to kill entirely, it's so unlikely as to be fantasy. The second best option is not, however, to remove the power to kill from certain classes of people, because this just sets those classes up for oppression and violence at the hands of those who retain power. The second best option is to distribute the power to kill as evenly as possible amongst all people, so that the incentive to actually /use/ that power brings with it as much danger and negative consequences as possible. This is the most realistic way to creating a society where people work together because they want to, rather than because someone, somewhere with more power than them is coercing them to.

@5: I don't know what time you're thinking of, but it's not the case that moneyless societies were the cause of extreme rich/poor dichotomies. Of course, there have been a whole lot of extreme rich/poor dichotomies, but there have been a whole lot of moneyless societies, so it's inevitable that there will be a lot of overlap.

In some societies, the lack of money caused most goods to lose their "hoarding value", resulting in a pseudo-gift economy. After all, if I have 100 potatoes, I can only eat about 20 of them before they rot. Since I can't sell the other 80 and immortalize their value, I might as well share them with some other people. Increased sharing leads to a more economically equal society, since it's difficult for anyone to hoard wealth, and it's difficult to be completely impoverished when other people have an incentive to share.

Moneyless societies meant that people who were "rich" couldn't as easily stay rich, since their wealth was based on perishable material objects as opposed to abstract currency or property ownership, which is eternal. Of course, that doesn't mean the societies were inherently egalitarian - wealth is only one way to become the boss. Accumulation of religious or violent power is another, and that served as a substitute for money in some hierarchical moneyless societies.

@1: Of course it could work, it has in the past. We haven't always had rock-solid American dollars you know (and we may not have them in the near future). There have been plenty of times in history where there was no stable currency, and people managed to exchange labor and goods just fine.

Admittedly, it restricted the scope and scale of such trading to a local level, but many people feel that's a good thing.

"Bad entertainment/art never gets past the superficialities and just uses "shock" as an excuse to "stimulate discussion"."

Ok, so it's bad art. That's a fair allegation to make, but you seem to be implying that because it's bad art, it somehow has less of a right to exist or be displayed in public. Like bad art is somehow /wrong/.

First off, that's messed up. Secondly, I think you should always allow for the possibility that it's not bad, you just don't fully appreciate it. If you don't grasp the deeper meaning of a piece of art, it's easy to conclude that it must just exist to be offensive and piss you off.

That's exactly what religious fundamentalists think about most contemporary art.

@4: If you get overzealous with a gun, you have a death on your conscience and you stand a good chance of losing your job and possibly - though very rarely - going to jail. Misusing a gun can make a cop's life very complicated, which discourages them from using it unless absolutely needed.

If you get overzealous with a taser, you get immediate compliance from your target, and your superior (and the general public) doesn't even blink. Misusing a taser makes a cop's life much simpler, which encourages them to use it whenever it's convenient.

@13: Actually, Wikipedia blocks pretty much all TOR nodes, specifically because of the abuse potential by vandals. A lot of popular spam-targets do this - for example Slashdot won't let you post from a TOR node either.

@the paranoid crowd at large: TOR is a solution for anonymizing a particular aspect of internet communication: TCP connections.

There are many tools available to anonymize other aspects of computer security, for example "cookie cleaners", SSL certificates, GPG keys, spyware scanners, browser spoofers, etc. Most anonymity leaks are ultimately under the control of the user, and can be secured by a user who is diligent and values their privacy enough. All the security threats that have been described here were solved before TOR even existed, and a diligent user can avoid them.

Anonymity in TCP communications, however, cannot be anonymized by an individual user no matter how much they need or value anonymity. It requires a large group of "co-conspirators", which wasn't easy to come by in the past. This is what the TOR network does - it coordinates a large network of people who agree to anonymize each other's TCP connections. That's about all it does, but it does it very well.

@10: Yeah, riseup.net is great. They're one of the few geek organizations that I can give money to and trust that it's really all going to be spend on providing useful services, not ending up as someone's big salary or spent on a fancy fundraising dinner or something. Most of it goes towards buying computer equipment and connectivity to provide free, anonymous, secure hosting for radical political activists and dissidents. They do give a few full-time volunteers sub-poverty-level stipends to keep them alive and coding, but I think that's fair :)

They're also hardcore about privacy and security, so if you donate anonymously, they make sure you stay anonymous.

Hopefully he'll set an example for other chocolate producers by taking care to abide by the so-called "Cocoa Protocol", which asks chocolate producers to ensure that cocoa they get from West Africa is not supporting forced child labor.

I'd sure be glad to recommend his chocolate if so!

@35: Yeah, that's the idea. I'd far rather people across the board became more politically engaged, because I'm very confident that the overall result would be an increase in support for issues I care about and agree with. More importantly, though, a vocal opposition to any movement, regardless how well intentioned, is a valuable thing which prevents group-think, and some of the worse symptoms of abstract ideology.

I'm sure things wouldn't go all exactly how I feel they should, but I have enough faith in the power of an enthusiastic, engaged crowd that I'm willing to submit to their will when it contradicts my own - that's the essence of democracy.

What I'm not willing to submit to though, is the will of a nation of apathetic people, who have not asserted anything other than their willingness to go along with whoever demonstrates the most convincing claim to power.

Why do you need to set your wall on fire to keep infections from getting infected into your computer? This sounds dangerous!

@14 I understand your misgivings about political engagement, and the fear it could lead to war and mindless aggression. It's certainly true that if you work a bunch of desperate people into a belligerent political frenzy, violence is likely to erupt.

But the idea that the only way to avoid chaos and civil war is to keep people ignorant and apathetic...that seems completely counter to the concept of democracy. I mean, if the only way to save democracy is to have people not participate in it, what's the point, right? It just smacks too much of the argument of a despot - the false choice of repressive patriarchal government vs. chaos and mass murder.

Surely people can be engaged and principled about politics without committing murder?

@11: True, we wouldn't want things to get ugly or polarized. Let's just stick with an abusive government and wars of aggression to make sure everyone's safe and friendly. ;)

I kid, really. Over the internet these arguments might sound self-righteous, but it's just kind of thinking out loud. It is striking how quickly any possibility of effecting change is discounted, though. Maybe because if we acknowledged our own power to change these types of policy, it would saddle us with the responsibility of actually doing so?

@6: My favorite is work stoppage combined with civil disobedience - sort of Ghandi-style i guess. If even a relatively small part of the population refuses to work and uses civil disobedience to make it difficult for everyone else to work (for example by peacefully blocking railroad tracks, highways, mass transit), it doesn't take long for the economy to start suffering. Economics and money are something the people in power can understand and will bend to, no matter their personal opinions.

Plus, assuming one's doing it for a popular cause, it's likely that sympathetic but less principled people will join in once it's started, it just takes a some brave souls to start the trend. Bandwagons and all...

Yeah, unfortunately it's easier to run a repressive regime in real life than in Civilization :( At least we haven't had the same god-like dictator since the stone age though!

Still, I think if real citizens reacted the way those little civvies do - by preventing all production and taxation in the city until placated - we'd get much better response from government...

This is pretty scary. What's even more scary is that revelations like this can come to light without any danger of large scale civil revolts, work stoppages, civil disobedience, etc.

If this was Civilization, Bush's production would have dropped to 0 due having so many little red citizens in revolt. Where are the RL red citizens? Why aren't you one?

When I think of online reputation systems, I think of the web of trust model that PGP uses - a completely decentralized system based on a universal standard which basically allows people to vouch for each other by signing each other's encryption keys.

Currently, PGP uses the web of trust to rate how likely someone is to be who they claim to be, but it could be applied to all sorts of other areas.

With systems like this, all the data is transparent because it can be simultaneously hosted by multiple independent organizations - 'keyservers' in the current implementation. And it's protected from corruption because nobody can control more than their own signature and key - there's no technical possibility for one organization to distort or control the ratings.

Re: internet anonymity, web-of-trust based identity is the best system to protect anonymity, because it doesn't require any information about a person's real, legal identity or offline persona to work. If I and a bunch of other people trust you online as "revolution", then "revolution" has a good reputation, and other people will trust your crypto key even though they don't know who you "really" are!

This kind of problem is inevitable with the current structure of "Web 2.0". While content and the ability to collaborate is free-as-in-beer, it's not free-as-in-freedom. The freedom we seem to see running loose in places like YouTube may increasingly prove to be illusory.

The web sites and apps which people use to communicate and network in a Web 2.0 way are still firmly out of the hands of the people participating in the network. The electronic means of production are still centralized in the hands of a small handful of commercial interests.

The difference is that it doesn't have to be this way anymore - almost anyone has the capability of setting up a half-decent YouTube clone. The reason these commercial interests have so much power is because they do the job well enough for almost everyone, so almost nobody sees a need to move away from them. After all, none of my videos have ever been censored from YouTube, why should I care?

Hopefully as people begin to come down from the Web 2.0 high, they'll realize that participatory centralized corporate media enterprises on the web don't grant any more true freedom than their non-participatory counterparts in television and print. The internet's free nature only frees us if we use it to eliminate our dependency on centralized corporate media.

Use your freedom of choice!

This is a great idea, and one that (as usual) the open source community really led the way on. iPodLinux, a Linux ditro for ipods, has had a module which allows iPod to iPod copying through a firewire cable.

Of course, this commercial device is much more graceful, but I wonder how much its creation was helped by the innovations of open source iPod hackers.

Again, I agree. But think of it this way - most wealthy people don't realize they're wealthy. They genuinely feel that they need everything they have. For example, my standard of living is easily higher than a huge majority of the world's, but I don't feel wealthy - almost everything I have, I feel like I need, and couldn't do without.

People won't give up things they feel they "need" voluntarily. The only long-term sustainable solution is to help people realize that they really don't need all that they have. Only after that realization will they be willing to consider sharing their excess with someone who really does need it.

"what is the virtue in tying up $33 billion in symbolic resources? Wouldn't it be far more virtuous to do some good with it now?"

Yeah, for sure. Make no mistake, I think this guy is extremely self-centered for having that much wealth at all. After all, it's far more than a person could ever need in a lifetime, and his refusal to share it indicates a profound apathy towards the suffering of others which could be eased with such a huge sum.

However, that doesn't negate the fact that he's deliberately living far below his means - not because he has to, but because he prefers to. It's a simple concept, but one that's so alien to most western people that it's worth noting. As a strong believer in the voluntary simplicity movement, I think his is an example non-stupidly-rich people could benefit from following as well. And maybe once people get used to the idea that "you don't have to spend it just because you have it", they'll be more willing to give their excess to help out others.

To everyone who, like me, has the instinctive reflex to cynically dismiss calls like this: please take a step back and consider.

Is the "QuestionAuthority" proposal pie-in-the-sky? Probably. Will it change the face of politics? Probably not.

But it might. Sillier, less likely forces have changed the world before, and you never know which confluence of well intentioned, smart people will suddenly swell into a powerful movement given enough initial support.

Support this proposal, put some effort into making it a reality. If it fails, it fails, but at least it won't have failed because of you.

@16,mghuntb5: I think the most appropriate term for this guy is "class traitor", and you seem to be greeting him with the same attitude people held towards "race traitors" in less tolerant times.

Maybe he just doesn't identify with the uber-rich, and relates better to working-class people...does that mean he has "issues"? To expect that he behave according to class guidelines because of his bank balance seems unfair.

Also, this guy probably has something to teach us. He's probably one of the most qualified people on earth to determine whether money can buy happiness. While we imagine we'd be happy to live the uber-rich life, we've never actually tried it, so it's hard to know. This guy actually has that opportunity and apparently decided it wasn't for him.

Maybe it's like Scientology - once you're rich enough you can finally get access to the big secret, only this big secret is that all that you've been accumulating is worthless.

I got thinking some more on this idea, here's some features I think would be cool:
- Allow people to create forum-style accounts with the artist, or maybe the whole multi-artist "system" if it's a unified thing.
- Allow people to optionally tie their donations to this account, so that artists can easily track how much each 'fan' has given.
- Implement messageboards, chatrooms, and other fanclub-type community stuff which allow fans to display how much they've donated as a sort of status symbol.
- Make it easy for the artist to set up special invite-only chats or webcasts, to which they can invite a subset of their 'fans', presumably those who have been good financial supporters.
- Similarly, allow the artist to easily configure "staggered" release announcements, so that subscribers at various levels can get a 'sneak preview' of the latest mp3 or whatever.

i think the biggest thing is the transforming of the donation/subscription into something you can brag about. A large reason people like to buy CDs is so they can show off their musical taste, so their friends see what a huge Tupac fan they are or whatever. Turn the donation from an anonymous 'tip' into an expression of fandom which will bring respect and even a bit of status from your peers, and people will be glad to donate.

This is a really nifty idea, but I was hoping that the description of "a framework" meant that she had created a system that lots of independent musicians could participate in on their own. But it looks like (at least so far), it's just a promotional method for her own music.

I wonder if there is an existing site or software app that artists can just plug into which allows them to "sell" their music for donations, and manage subscriptions and relationships with their donors. A sort of e-anticommerce system...

@31,Cory: The "something is better than nothing" argument is a common one, but things aren't that black and white. "Something" is sometimes worse than nothing, and I think in this case may be one of those times.

When you buy this bag, you're buying two things: the bag, and the image the bag is marketed with. Now, I'll agree that the bag itself is marginally better than a similar bag that doesn't generate clean electricity. So if that were the only issue the choice would be clear.

But really, the difference between the two bags is pretty small - I mean we're talking about a really small amount of electricity. The far more important impact this purchase has is in the mind of the buyer. Does someone who buys this bag feel that their environmental "dues" have been paid? Do they feel that making occasional purchases like this justifies or mitigates the rest of their wasteful lifestyle? Essentially, does a product like this provide a mental crutch that allows people to project a false image of environmentalism to themselves and others?

Or, on the other hand, does buying this bag make the buyer identify more with environmental issues, and more likely to take meaningful action in the future? Does the bag cause other people who see it to reconsider their own energy use?

This bag could go either way, I'm not sure...but there are definitely products which fall firmly into the first category, and it's worthwhile and important to be wary of such things. Even though they're "something", they're counter-intuitively worse than nothing.

@27,Teresa: The problem is that ever since environmentalism became mainstream, every business and entrepreneur has been trying to "cash in", like it's the latest fashion craze sweeping the nation.

But environmentalism shouldn't be a fashion craze, because fashion is all about image, and environmentalism should be all about results. For example, companies are glad to market products that appear green, or appeal to "green sensibilities", because they realize that many people are willing to pay more for things that have the image of environmentalism, even if they don't have a significantly different environmental impact.

It's because of this kind of duplicity - companies and individuals constantly trying to brand themselves as "green" when they're not at all - that environmentalists tend to be hyper-critical of commercial enterprises that purport to be green.

If the environmental movement had stopped testing the "purity of intent" of businesses and embraced anyone who made the slightest gesture towards caring about the environment, we'd be left with a big circle of everyone patting themselves on the back for appearing "green" by doing essentially nothing.