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.
Category: Contemplation
Indefinite Detention Bill No Longer Faces Veto Threat From White House (UPDATE)
The White House on Wednesday abandoned its threat to veto a defense bill that sets in stone the commander in chief’s authority to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects, including Americans, in military custody.
Source: Indefinite Detention Bill No Longer Faces Veto Threat From White House (UPDATE)
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
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
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
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