PATRIOT act being used to go after "common criminals" instead of against terrorists, as it was supposedly created to do. Story here

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." --James Madison

Ever had two sound files which were identical, except for the quality they were encoded at, and wanted to find out if one really sounded better than the other?

Of course, if there's a great difference in quality then just playing one after the other will be enough to tell. However, it's more difficult to tell if the files are close to each other in quality.

That's where my little s0ngfr0g program comes in. It will play short, random segments from each file and let you vote on the quality of each segment. The file that has the most votes overall is considered to be the better sounding file.

The hope is that listening to short, identical segments from each file, back-to-back, will give you a good idea of their relative quality. Also, the file that's being played will be hidden from you until all the voting is over, so that knowing which file the sample came from won't bias your decisions.

The name s0ngfr0g comes from the program jumping around to different parts of the songs it plays.

This program requires:

perl (tested on v5.8.5)
xmms (tested on 1.2.10)
xmmsctrl (tested on 1.8)

NYT reports details of prisoners being tortured to death at Bagram air base in Afghanistan

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.

The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

from Albert Einstein's Why Socialism?

"I didn't even start dropping out until my mid-20's... In fourth grade I wanted to blow up the school, but I didn't know how... In high school.. I wanted to go live off the land in the Idaho wilderness, but actually doing it seemed as remote and difficult as going to the moon... [now] I'm a specialist at eating garbage -- as I draft this I'm eating a meal I made with organic eggs from a dumpster, and later I'll make a pie of dumpstered apples. I live on under $2000 a year, I have no permanent residence, and moving to the Idaho wilderness now seems like a reachable goal -- but no longer the best idea..."

"Before, I just intellectually thought it was a bad idea to go to war in Iraq. When I saw the faces of the people, the people I was hurting, that I was assisting in hurting I really began to change on a spiritual level...

I looked at these guys and I thought, 'Man, these are young, poor, uneducated guys who didn't have a lot of choices in their life and are forced to fight us'...

And I looked at the guys in my own unit and I thought, 'Man, we're exactly the same... all the guys in my unit were young, poor, didn't have the best education, didn't have the best choices in life'

And when I came to that realisation I felt all my fighting spirit just sort of bleed out of me..."

A consciencious objector talks about his experience in Iraq: Part One and Part Two

Informative animation on what's wrong with Bush's Social Security plan.

"Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the UN that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistand and Iraq, a UN source said... UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities."

Torture Works

1984comic

A newly leaked memo said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult. "It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject," the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be "most unlikely" to obtain the legal justification they needed. The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

Epidemic Computing at Cornell

Teacher in Spain censored for defending filesharing.

A great NPR program about religion in politics in America

In Pursuit of the Gold Star: Diary of a Law Student
from Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left

"Rhetoric is a quarrel with others; poetry is a quarrel with oneself." William Butler Yeats