An Israeli Cabinet minister says his country will "settle the score" with the perpetrators of a bombing attempt in Bangkok.

Did someone just start another war?

Israel to "settle the score" for Bangkok attack - CBS News

For years, high quality information about one of our democracy’s most critical activities has been nearly impossible to come by -- that is, until the Voting Information Project (VIP) was born. The Pew Center on the States launched this initiative in 2008 to become the 21st century transmission line between election offices and voters. VIP answers voters’ most common questions -- things like “where do I vote?”, “who is on my ballot?”, and “how do I navigate the voting process?” -- by making official information available in the places where voters are looking for it, whether online or on their mobile devices.

There.

TransparencyCamp 2012

I have a right to free speech under the first amendment. That does not mean I have "Free Speech Property". Rights are not property. You can have rights over property, but the rights themselves are not property.

Claiming that copyright is property is not intellectually honest. As a creator of a copyrighted work, you can claim ownership of the original work and you have property rights to the original work. However, copyright extends only to the ability to copy that work. That ability to copy is not property. It is a right. Rights can only be infringed not stolen.

RIAA Totally Out Of Touch: Lashes Out At Google, Wikipedia And Everyone Who Protested SOPA/PIPA | Techdirt

Posterick said some of the founding members of Test PAC were involved with previous Internet campaigns to boycott or blackout websites in order to raise awareness of the SOPA bill.

“The website blackout from a few weeks ago, for example, was an idea that our members helped bring to fruition,” Posterick said. “We also pressured Rep. Paul Ryan R-Wisconsin to change his stance on SOPA before most congresspeople had even heard of it.”

I think there is very little chance of unseating Lamar Smith, who hasn't had a primary challenger in 16 years, but there will be more vulnerable SOPA advocates up for reelection in 2014.

Test PAC aims to unseat Lamar Smith | The Daily Texan

"The public prosecutor in Jeddah is filing a lawsuit against Hamza Kashgari on charges of disrespecting God and insulting Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in his Twitter account," sources told Al Hayat daily.

The sources said that public prosecutor in the Red Sea city of Jeddah was likely to summon people who expressed support or agreed with him on the social network, the daily reported on Monday.

"The public prosecutor, as the attorney for the society, has the right to summon anyone who encouraged the defendant or who is connected to matters that motivated his action," Abdul Aziz Al Zamel, a legal consultant, said, quoted by Al Hayat. null

gulfnews : Saudi tweeter's supporters may face court summon

Another response by me to another essay that attempts to discredit SOPA opponents as being misinformed:

I think this essay does a good job illustrating the "inside the beltway" attitudes that are damaging democracy in America. 

Millions of people stood up to oppose SOPA. These people have a historically unprecedented level of access to the full text of the legislation and reams of detailed analysis. In a democracy, the government is responsible to the people and has a responsibility to understand and respect their views and interests. 

Instead, SOPA proponents have engaged this month in a campaign of editorial writing in numerous publications with the intent of discrediting SOPA opponents as "misinformed" through shallow, transparent "straw man" arguments. The intent is to convince policy makers to ignore what just happened and proceed with the creation of an infrastructure in the Internet for blacklisting foreign websites, a step the protestors understood very well and communicated very clearly that they do not approve of.

Consider this author's attitude about ACTA which he says "was successfully negotiated over several years." The primary objection to ACTA is that it was negotiated for years IN SECRET. The American people were NOT ALLOWED TO READ what our government was negotiating on our behalf. Once, the Whitehouse disingenuously cited "national security" as a reason for preventing the public from reading the text of this copyright treaty. And, now that the treaty has been negotiated, the Whitehouse seeks to implement it without the approval of Congress. 

This is fundamentally anti-democratic. The influence of money and lobbying in Washington has reduced our country to a point where the people in Washington who make the rules no longer believe that they are accountable to the public at large. They don't believe that the people need to be able to read the laws that are being negotiated. When people do read those laws and express disagreement they are just dismissed as "misinformed" and the process moves forward.

If SOPA advocates wanted a reasonable dialog, they could start by demonstrating that they understand the legitimate reasons why millions of people oppose SOPA, rather than simply dismissing them all as being misinformed. Anything less is just a tactic, and one that underlines some fundamental cultural and institutional problems in Washington that go far beyond the scope of this particular debate.

Throwing baby out with the SOPA | Washington Examiner

Me writing in response:

The public is not misinformed about these bills. The people who are protesting these bills have a historically unprecedented level of access to both the full text of the bills as well as reams detailed analysis. It is probably the case that no public protest over a federal bill has ever been this well informed.

I know its comforting to tell yourself that, and SOPA supporters have been doing it a lot recently. If you think that everyone who is opposed to what you are doing is misinformed, you don't really need to think about what they are saying. You can just write them off, and if you say it enough maybe other people will write them off too.

These bills require ISPs to create an infrastructure in the Internet that allows them to prevent Americans from accessing any website on an official government blacklist. Once that blacklist mechanism is in place, there will be a rush to add new categories of sites to it. Every group in this country with a censorship agenda is going to jump on the bandwagon. Legislatures at all levels will get into the game.

The American people do not trust their government to operate an official blacklist of banned websites, and the american people have a pretty good understand of the litany of unintended consequences that such a naive enforcement mechanism would have.

If you've got a personal financial interest in doing something, you can easily allow your desires to delude you into ignoring its greater consequences. Thats why we have a democracy. Its a check upon the institutional blindness of factional interests.

The IP Interests need to stop fooling yourselves, and start listening. You don't know as much as you think you do about the thing you are trying to control.

SOPA Legislation | Timothy McCormack - seattlepi.com

With infections that date to September, 2011, the Android botnet sported 11,000 active devices generating revenue for the botmaster as recently as last week. Data from January shows 29,000 active devices, according to Symantec, which analyzed data from a command and control server used by the botnet.

Researchers Discover Android Mobile Botnet 100k Strong | threatpost

As for the ideas tentatively proposed in that dystopian fantasy thirty years ago, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that whatever usefulness they afford modern radicalism is very satisfying.

BBC News - Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the rise of Anonymous

Last night I came home from work with an old Jungle song stuck in my head, and it made me wonder about the origins of Jungle. Jungle is an intersection of Jamaican Dancehall with Breakbeat Hardcore. This video - General Levy's Incredible - is a particularly famous example with incredible rapping. It is the origin of Ali G's "Booyakasha" catch phrase and apparently it caused a schism in the scene between people into this sort of gangster jungle and intelligent drum and bass. Wondering where things had gone recently I found this video, which is a mind-blowing drum and bass jazz fusion. I bought the whole album.

Update: It occurs to me that maybe the reason I like this music so much is a subconscious connection with the constant rhythm of keyboard clacking that is my waking life.

The origins of Drum and Bass