Don’t Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog)

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

Source: Don’t Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog)

A Modest Proposal For Immigration: The $100,000 Green Card | TechCrunch

Permanent residence in the USA is a valuable asset that is enjoyed by most of you reading this article. Many potential immigrants from around the world want to acquire that asset and become valuable members of American society alongside us. Why don’t we let more of them join us?

Source: A Modest Proposal For Immigration: The $100,000 Green Card | TechCrunch

special report on video games – The Economist

Video games will be the fastest-growing and most exciting form of mass media over the coming decade, says Tim Cross

All the world’s a game

 

Consoles are no longer the only game in town

Thinking out of the box: The business of gaming

 

Virtual goods are worth real money—and cause real dilemmas

Paying for pixels

 

Sport by other means

Gentlemen, start your computers: E-sports

 

The moral panic about video games is subsiding

No killer app: Violence and addiction

 

What video-game technology can do in the real world

The play’s the thing: Alternative uses

 

Why video games will be an enduring success

Homo ludens: The importance of fun

Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? – The Atlantic

For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. For radicals, the wave of white terrorism that followed the war offers lessons on the price of revolutionary change. White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudi­ments of their freedom through the killing of whites.

And for black people, there is this—the burden of taking ownership of the Civil War as Our War. During my trips to battlefields, the near-total absence of African American visitors has been striking. Confronted with the realization that the Civil War is the genesis of modern America, in general, and of modern black America, in particular, we cannot just implore the Park Service and the custodians of history to do more outreach—we have to become custodians ourselves.

Source: Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? – The Atlantic