Interesting Stuff

I suspect my anagrams are showing more than Hannibal Lecter’s, but I didn’t want another boring title.

Israel has ended its blockake of Lebanon, now that UN troops supplied by Europe have begun to take charge of the area. Near as I can tell, Israel has now completely withdrawn its military presence from Lebanon. Although I am not optimistic that this will mark the start of a more peaceful era in the region, it’s at least a new direction for events to take. We’ll see how well this all works.

Also, here is an interesting/scary portrait of a hardcore member of the religious right (and a Wikipedia biography of her). Special thanks to muddbstrd for the first link. To summarize: this woman has accepted large amounts of illegal campaign donations, presided over the Florida election recount in 2000, and claims that it is a sin to separate church and state. It’s a bit creepy that such people are playing such a prominent role in the government, and that they have such widespread support: Rep. Harris has been elected for 2 terms now. Now that Tom DeLay has resigned, I seem to be noticing several other people with unethical and unconstitutional agendas, most notably in the Republican party. I realize that the segment of the population with whom I associate is a bit skewed, but I still can’t understand how people like this have so much support. Are they elected by uninformed people who don’t know about Rep. Harris’ views, or do they actually agree with her? Is there really a significant part of the country that believes that separation of chuch and state is a bad thing? Am I only reading about the really outlandish claims because they are the only ones who can get into sensationalist stories these days? Can anyone actually find a good argument to back up a statement such as, “If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin” or a similar claim about putting the 10 Commandments in courthouses?

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has heard the complaints of the Facebook members and added more privacy settings to the News Feed and Minifeeds on the site. It was pretty special to see 750,000 people stand up in protest to the Feed over the course of about 3 days. I wish people could do this for more important issues, such as all the human rights issues that China is having. Unfortunately, it seems that people will only do stuff like that if the consequences directly affect them. Still, it was pretty cool to be a part of this and have a satisfactory conclusion.

Finally, it seems that Amazon Unbox, Amazon.com’s new system to sell and distribute DRM’ed movies, has some very spyware-like characteristics to it. It seems to call home quite often, and has some very odd behavior when you try to uninstall it. A choice quote from the article that was also on the Slashdot synopsis: “to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can’t burn to DVD and can’t watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it.” This seems like a kind of bad deal. Hopefully other consumers will be aware of this and either explicitly accept it or not use Unbox.