Link blog: politics, internet, law, lse

Unexpurgated atheist FAQ

At last, it can be told! Via andrewducker.
(tags: faq funny religion atheism parody)

synecdochic: the Megaupload indictment, in detail; or, a crash course in the DMCA and why they're totally fucked

Why Megaupload are doomed, and some interesting stuff about the DMCA. Via andrewducker.
(tags: internet law DMCA copyright megaupload)

YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood

"Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise." Y Combinator requests that startups come up with ways to kill Hollywood.
(tags: internet startups technology sopa hollywood ycombinator)

A Positive Account of Property Rights

Vladmir M on Lesswrong linked to this as a good explanation of what Schelling points are. It's also an interesting theory about how property rights could arise out of a Hobbesian state of nature, although I'm not familiar enough with the literature to know whether that part of it makes any obvious errors.
(tags: game theory philosophy Hobbes Schelling politics Friedman economics)

Alex Gabriel // LSE's student union copy UCL's

More on the LSE nonsense: "Essentially, a large of group of Muslim students felt offended that there were pictures of Mohammed on the facebook group. As a result, they felt that our facebook group was no longer a ‘safe space’ for Muslims." Alex Gabriel points out that the Facebook group in question is a closed one, and certainly not what you'd expect to be a "safe space" for Muslims. It would certainly be crass for a student atheist group to put that cartoon on posters, say, but complaining about a closed Facebook group is just whining for the sake of it.
(tags: lse university freedom religion politics islam)

LSE Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society say giving offence is no crime

More student unions and offended Muslims vs atheists, this time at LSE. "Ms Bartle commented, ‘There has been too much conflation recently of being offended and being intimidated, with the implication being that they are equivalent. Such an assumption is a potential threat to free speech and free debate, and we are concerned to address this underlying problem in the long term.’"

This time, it's about the LSE atheists putting a cartoon on their Facebook page. Again, why are the Muslims looking at it? Very strange.

Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America : The New Yorker

Astonishing (and worrying that it's apparently so easy for British people to be extradited to the US).
(tags: america law crime politics prison)

The New French Hacker-Artist Underground | Magazine

"There is no law in France, it turns out, against the improvement of clocks." Fascinating stuff. Via mefi.
(tags: restoration tunnels underground activism france paris pantheon)