If you’re tired of hearing about it, good.  If you’re not, you haven’t heard enough about it.  If you’re not yet sick to the heart of the vile, cynical idiocy and greed of it all, you don’t understand it.

This is not about the oppressive, cynical, corrupt nature of SOPA – a bill paid for by an industry that has consistently managed to blame everyone but itself for its failed, obsolete business model.  Nor is it about broken lobbying and media industry interference in government, defective intellectual property laws, disproportionate enforcement, undemocratic and secret trade negotiations, or lack of respect for other nations’ sovereignty when pushing your own broken laws on others.

It’s about the inevitability of pointless and restrictive laws that may have, at some point, had their roots in some well-meaning idiot’s mind, but which serve only to advance the agenda of some fringe.  Blackouts, petitions, and logical arguments won’t stop them, because the forces of greed, fanaticism, and stupidity are an inexorable force that gnaw at liberty, free markets, prosperity and common sense.   And yes, it’s a rant, and a fairly discouraged one at that.  Because I feel like ranting.

A great comment, thieved from here, about “the MPAA’s SOPA backup plan”.  I’ll copy it in its entirety:

It’s not a waiting game, it’s a game of poker. Lamar Smith has a royal flush and few people know it.

SOPA may pass. It may not. He doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter. The MPAA and RIAA started working on their legislative strategy to pass a new anti-piracy bill in late 2010. SOPA was designed to raise the noise. Everyone is playing right into the entertainment industries hand. The lobbyists are laughing manically at the ignorance of the mob. Even Wikipedia and reddit have played into it.

What people don’t know about is the ace: H.R.1981, the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 which is lying in wait. It’s not complete. You see, PCIP is not contestable because it’s about protecting children. They can, and very well might, copy and paste the full text of SOPA to the end of PCIP. That’s the backup. That’s the deal that was struck with entertainment industry lobbyists. We will try to push this anti-piracy bill. It probably won’t work. Don’t worry, we can pass it under an anti-child pornography bill.

There are two things which no Congressman will risk supporting: terrorism and child pornography. There can be no opposition, no discussion. Any anti-piracy law can ALWAYS be reframed as an anti-child pornography bill and it will pass, without even discussion. It will have the full support of the House (minus Ron Paul), the full support of the Senate, and most importantly the full support of the American people. NO ONE wants to risk being called a pedophile.

The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.

We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.

Or, put graphically:

The same goes for all laws that seek to limit, ban, violate, and infringe.  PIPA (PROTECT IP), DMCA, CDA (thankfully struck down), Sonny Bony copyright act, Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, ACTA (international treaty), Sinde (ES), HADOPI (FR), LOPPSI (FR), you name it.  Further afield, you’ll find the same things happening in the name of “security – NDAA, the PATRIOT Act, RIPA (UK), PTA (UK) and others.  Phrase something in terms of wanting to “protect the vulnerable” or “prevent evil”, get enough money in the game from those who would benefit materially from your ham-handed assault on individual freedoms and basic intelligence, and you’re good to go.  You don’t even need to demonize your opponents – just disregard them; after all, a large enough part of your electorate can always be convinced that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.”  Right?

Europe and Canada are not immune to this disease.  It’s in the nature of power and greed for established interests to want to foist their crap on others, in the name of democracy and goodness and fluffy bunnies.

What’s to be done, then?

Naively speaking, I’d say to lobby your elected officials, threaten to boycott companies that support such legislation, run for office yourself, speak out in the media, sign petitions, educate your peers, you name it.

It won’t work, because it’s much more work and cost and grief than any normal human being can afford to deal with over a prolonged amount of time – and the people you are fighting are paid for their efforts.  The more they fight, the better off they are.  The more you fight, the worse off they are.  And they have money – if you ever had any doubt that your supposedly democratically elected representatives are bought, corrupt, and useless, this Mother Jones article, which mistakenly postulates that SOPA is dead, has an interesting link to a Maplight list of campaign contributors to American legislators.  Surprise of surprises, the ones for SOPA got more money from the entertainment industry, the ones against it got more money from the tech industry.

What you can do:

- learn about anonymization methods like TOR and Vidalia.

- support efforts to create distributed communications, like mesh wireless networking – all well and good until you get court rulings like this one in Germany that state that it is the responsibility of the owners of wireless networks to encrypt all traffic.  Bye-bye public access networks.

- use encryption.  SSL for web traffic, TrueCrypt for files, anything and everything – all well and good until you get court rulings like this one in the United Kingdom that state it is the responsibility of the owners of encrypted files to provide decryption keys to police upon request.

- don’t buy from companies that support and lobby for restrictions.  Do buy from those who don’t, and from those who create products free of technological encumbrances to doing what you want with content that you own.  Yes, back to the naive stuff, but it can’t hurt.  Not to mention indie software/movie/music producers.  But I guess you really want to watch Transformers V, huh.

- give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Free Software Foundation, and their local / national equivalents.  They’re usually decent and smart people, and good at hiring lawyers to fight this sort of crap.

Your elected officials are corrupt shills.  They do not care about reason or logic, they don’t care what they are destroying.  The only thing they care about is re-election and money.

Hope for the best, expect the worst.  Sound vaguely nihilistic / fatalistic?  That’s the idea.  The idiots and cynics are out there, and they’re more motivated and have more money than you.  Remember the golden rule:  he who has the gold makes the rules, and you don’t have the gold.

I don’t mean these:

I’m talking about real hats.  Fedora, porkpie, flat cap, Panama, bowler, trilby, etc., or if you want to get a bit more in the direction of awesome, ushanka, deerstalker, fez, or even the 19th century blue forage cap I saw on a gentleman on Barcelona, combined with a nice navy peacoat.  Looked pretty damn manly.

There’s this thing that, with certain kinds of functional / regional / traditional clothing which one shouldn’t wear unless you perform that function / are of that region / tradition.  So, unless you’re a cowboy or in Texas, don’t wear cowboy hats and boots.  Unless you’re a Scot, don’t wear kilts, Malay fisherman/sarong, baseball player/baseball cap.  To hell with that.  I may personally think you look silly, but wear whatever the hell you want.  That’s the whole point of this.  Pull up your pants anyway.

But we were talking about hats.  Men’s hats.

A fair number of officious self-proclaimed fashion experts seem to think that anyone who dares to wear a fedora in public in 2012 is trying to look like

Well guess what, Sparky?  Don Draper is a fictional character.  Same goes for

How about mocking people for wanting to look like

True, not a fictional character, but a movie star with a whole battery of wardrobe experts surrounding him.

You might as well expect all men these days to look like Brad Pitt, or to dress like

(And to carry a 9mm everywhere they go, of course, because that wouldn’t ruin the line of a nicely tailored suit.)

5 will get you 10 that the reasonably well-dressed average slob in the 1950s and 1960s looked more like this

or this

Notice anything?

Hint:  hats.  And yes, don’t wear hats a table.

There’s nothing wrong with hats, any more than there is anything wrong with trying to dress nicely like Leonardo di Caprio in Inception (great movie, by the way).  Or Don Draper.  Or Cary Grant.  After all, aren’t movies all about giving us something to aspire to?

Well, some of them more than others, I suppose.  But nonetheless, nice hats are great.

They keep the sun out of your eyes, they keep your head warm and your hair dry.  They give you something to wave at people with, to take off when you enter a room (as an obvious overblown show of courtesy) and to fiddle with when playing with your cell phone may not be appropriate.  And they set you apart from the  idiot making stupid comments about “hipsters” or “ha ha Don Draper”.

Sure, every time there’s a rise in some sort of niche fashion, the silly comments come boiling out of the sewer grates.  Sometimes they’re justified.  But while it’s not entirely my bag of tricks, I don’t understand the ridicule leveled at people who try to bring back certain pretty cool vintage styles (the bartender at the Comstock Saloon in San Francisco sported a nifty handlebar mustache and sleeve garters, like someone straight out of an old Western – he carried it off brilliantly).  You might as well bash cuff links, even though they are much more comfortable for typing, keep your wrists cool, look nice, and give you an excuse to wear Mickey Mouse jewelry with a suit.

In particular, though, I don’t get the vitriol aimed at hats.

I own a beautiful tweed deerstalker I found in a shop in Edinburgh.  It’s cold here, and very wet.  I love that hat.  Yes, I know it’s a hunting cap, and you’re technically not supposed to wear it in the city, but my only response to that is “bite me, my head is warm”.  The same response, incidentally, goes out to every single “oh look, it’s Sherlock Holmes” comment I overhear.  In fact, I think “bite me, my head is warm” makes a pretty good mantra – most of the haters look cold and wet.

The same goes for my muskrat ushanka (found with great difficulty in St. Petersburg, on a sweltering July day, in a shop run by an incredulous Russian woman who spoke about as much English as I spoke Russian, although she had much more of an excuse than I did).  In the words of a former English colleague, “you look like an idiot.  You look like a very warm idiot.”  I actually think it’s pretty snazzy.

If you want to conform and be one of the uniform, dull, black-clad hordes every winter (or jeans-and-t-shirt wearing masses in summer), go ahead, nobody’s stopping you.  I once a statement in some generic men’s fashion magazine that “if you wear a tuxedo to the movie theater, you’re not overdressed, everyone else is underdressed”.  The same goes for nice men’s hats.

I like nice suits, but I don’t feel like wearing one most of the time.  But lay the fuck off of my hats.  They’re good hats.  You should try one sometime.  I’ll be wearing my fez.

Over the past 16 years since moving back from the US, I’ve noticed that run-of-the-mill consumer articles (clothes, electronics, auto parts, tools, etc.) – as opposed to luxury (stuff like brand purses) or specialist items, are regularly priced much, much higher in Western Europe than their equivalents in the U.S.

For example, today I tried to buy a small camera replacement battery. A 5-pack of these costs ca. US $5 on amazon.com, plus $3 shipping.

Amazon.fr sells this for €4, with shipping. Amazon.de sells a single battery for €5, with shipping. A specialty camera shop in Germany sells it for €13 (!). A top quality Cree LED torch I recently ordered from China came for $25. I’ve seen the same thing in shops in the Netherlands, France and Germany for 3-4 times that amount, online, and even more than that retail!

The same goes for computer monitors, clothes, cameras, and pretty much anything “routine” I’ve bought recently.

So I spent a few minutes looking at examples – this is totally unscientific and the result of a few bored minutes putzing around Amazon and other online merchants in various countries, as well as my own experience.

Cars: a new base model BMW 335i in Germany (since they’re made there) starts at ca. €36k before tax. The same car in the US starts at $42k – fully €4k less. And let’s not start with iTunes, Steam games, and other digital content that in no way incurs any different manufacturing, handling, or shipping costs for us Europeans than the Americans. Another random one: vitamine C supplements – ca. $15 for 500 capsules in the US, ca, £15 for half that in the UK, around €15 for a fifth of the US amount in France.

In fairness, I’ve noted a drop in online retail computer component prices in the past five years, to the point that some products are priced about the same. But these seem to be exceptions. For every example of “costs as much or more in the US”, I’ll find you five examples to the contrary.

15-25% VAT (as opposed to US state/local sales taxes from 4-10%) does not explain this massive price differential, nor does shipping – most of this stuff is made in Asia. European salaries are not, on the whole, that much higher than American ones (according to wikipedia, the US is actually in second place for median household income worldwide).

I understand that a place like Switzerland would have a high Big Mac Index position – it’s always been expensive, still suffers from stupid customs rules and weird regulations, has high salaries and a culture that historically equates expensive with “good”, and still has fairly limited competition in a lot of areas. But why would this be the same for, for example, a pair of Levi’s in the UK, which are up to 50% cheaper in the US?

It can’t be because of regulation – the Americans are easily on a par with the worst the EU can come up with in things like environmental and product safety restrictions. So that can’t be adding extra cost. And in the EU’s defense, they have agreed on a lot of standardization, like for power plugs, so the cost of adaptation to local markets also can’t explain it (not to mention removal of customs borders and the common currency, while it lasts). Nor rent and such overhead – shops in American city centers face occasionally even higher rent costs than those in any random European city outside of maybe Paris, London, Zurich, Munich, etc. It’s also not market size – while European countries are of course smaller than the US as a whole, you’re not going to gain that much economy of scale from selling to 300 million people as opposed to, say, 80 million Germans or 65 million French.

The only possible theory I can come up with is increased labor costs due to social contributions that employers have to pay, but that by itself can’t be driving up prices so much.

So, what the fuck? Is this just “fuck you because we can” price gouging by merchants, along the lines of what our friends in Australia experience?

tl;dr YOORP PRICES, Y U SO HI?

When we first arrived in France, I lived in a farm village and Karin did not have hot water for weeks, due to an all-too-expected administrative fuckup that involved Gaz de France and Electricité de France pointing Tweedledee/Tweedledum fingers of bureaucratic responsibility at each other.   Over the four years that followed, we gradually built up our networks, got to know the neighborhoods, and learned the ins and outs of navigating a perennially stressed out, stylish, expensive city.

Paris has innumerable downsides.  It’s expensive, sometimes dirty, full of dogshit and attitude, frequently inconvenient, infested by gypsy pickpockets, bums, and visitors playing at human pinball with pedestrians while staring into their maps.   Traffic is a nightmare, it’s loud, people are packed in like sardines, and even foreigners with a lot of tolerance for inefficiency and different cultural norms have a hard time making a go of it, both personally and professionally.  I’d hate to be an old or infirm person here, or someone without the financial means to enjoy the place.

But it’s beautiful, by anybody’s standards – jaw-droppingly so at times.  As stupid as it sounds, there is a vibe to the place that’s hard to miss.  Things are always moving, and just walking down the street feels somehow glamorous.  I love the miniskirts (oh god, the miniskirts), the food, the fluid, aggressive predictability of the drivers, having a glass of wine outdoors after work, the feeling of having your shit together when you know what you’re doing in the Métro, the confidence you get from being to stare down a waiter with an attitude.  I’ve even come to appreciate the civility and wry humor that tends to get lost in what is usually mistaken for brusque, impatient, and snotty rudeness.

I’ll miss the Marais especially, with its little details like two orthodox Jews arguing finer points of talmudic theology while two gay men in pink shorts walk past them, holding hands.  There’s even the occasional guilty bit of entertaining sadism, having a glass outside a restaurant and watching the same car with 94 plates circle fruitlessly for half an hour on a futile search for parking, or annoying the BoBo couple hovering over your table, desperately wishing you’d stop ordering drinks so they can sit down and talk about having sex.

Maybe part of my enjoyment is precisely due to the impracticality of life here.  People fuss over small things in a way I’ve never seen elsewhere, like the employees at my bank or the nice people who handle Vélib subscriptions (one of the greatest inventions of all times) – it’s a pain in the ass to get through to them, and the rules often make no sense whatsoever, but lucky me, I’ve had almost exclusively good experiences with service in this city, that run totally contrary to what seems to be the rest of the world’s consensus about Parisian attitudes.  Serendipitously, I have never faced the Kafkaesque nightmares of bureaucratic purgatory that seem to be the hallmark of even French people’s interactions with any sort of authority.

Still, returning home from a Sunday morning shopping trip to cheesy accordion music from a nearby busker, having the local shopkeepers and waiters wave at you, makes even the banal seem like it belongs in a 1950s movie.  And being able to help lost tourists without so much as a glance at their much-folded city maps is just a great feeling – to say nothing of what’s probably the most glamorous cab ride in the world, Eastward up the Quai Georges Pompidou at night past the Eiffel Tower glittering across the Seine.  I’ve always found the searchlight from that monument, sweeping across the city after dark, somehow comforting, and I will miss it as much as biking home from work, looking left and right before crossing a street, and oh hey, it’s Opéra Garnier, oh hey, there’s the Louvre, oh hey, look, Notre Dame.

There’s also something incredibly surreal about the luxury of being able to take for granted what for many people is the trip of a lifetime.  That said, I’m happy that I never lost the sense of marvel and appreciation that I get, just ambling around on foot, enjoying the architectural details and watching people.  Simply being here has made me happy, more so than I’ve ever been for any prolonged period in my life.

Weirdly enough, it all feels so real and full of life, throughout dozens, perhaps hundreds of neighborhoods, much more so than the urban dead spaces that don’t just characterize many other European and American big cities, but also much of the suburban wasteland surrounding Paris.

And underground, both figuratively and literally, lie worlds that even many long-time residents don’t ever get around to discovering.  Whether it’s a back-alley little open-air market, or an illegal party in the catacombs, it feels great to peel back layer after layer of such a historically laden metropolis and to be in the know about something hidden and exotic.

Because our new Cologne apartment was not yet ready by the time Karin began her new job, I had a month’s stay of execution to take in everything around me.  I spent most of that time visiting friends, just knocking around town, and going on some final urban explorations with my mad local friends.  As the movers had hauled away most of our furniture at the beginning of October, this meant I lived like a bachelor squatter in our big empty living room, with nothing but a mattress, rope climbing gear, several servers, tools, and photo equipment to share the space.  It looked like I was plotting a bank heist.

And now even that is gone, the apartment is empty, and soon I’ll hit the road, maybe stop somewhere for a parting drink at a sidewalk café, then head out of town via one last rumbling, potholed cobblestone boulevard as the monuments and rooftops of Paris recede in the rear-view mirror.

Change is good; while we lived here, it was always clear that it was too good to last.  All things must eventually come to an end, but some of them more than others make you wish it weren’t so.

It’s been real, au revoir, and would the last one to leave please turn out the lights.

07:15 It’s too early for this.

Muddling through a fuzzy mental fog, you realize that pretty much any time is too early for this.  The optimal hour for getting out of bed is somewhere between “now” and “hangover o’clock”, that ambiguous time of day when you aimlessly pad to the kitchen with a killer headache and a tongue that tastes like someone shat on it.  And look at your watch with the “OH FUCK” realization that you’ve slept through most of the day.

07:18 Winded again, but at least you only forgot your wallet, and not the key.  The “snap” of your addled synapses making the connection that you’ve locked yourself out is not a good first coherent thought for the day.

07:20 Not that you feel particularly coherent right now.  And yet, for some reason you decided to walk to work today.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Any recollection of why that was flew out the window as you context-switched to the girl in the short skirt who’s just passed you on the sidewalk.

She’s determined to get where she’s going, fast.  Women in this city always seem in a hurry.  There’s a peculiar rapid-fire clop-clop-clop-clop staccato they make with their heels, as if they’re walking faster than their legs are meant to carry them.  When you hear one coming up behind you, it’s time to get out of the way.

07:26 A beautiful young couple is bringing their two laughing small children to school.   They’re dancing around the still-empty sidewalk, joking and smiling.  Typical Parisian – how does she keep her figure?  Typical except for the smiling bit. It’s like something out of an insurance ad, the wholesome nuclear family intact and well.  Little do they know that he doesn’t work in a bank.  He’s actually an enforcer for an organized crime gang.  He’s already strangled three people this week.

07:28 This store has had the same billboard for weeks.  The lingerie model lounges, sultry and pouting, on her beach.  She’s set off by the gypsy hunched in the doorway.  Not even begging, just standing there, surveying her castle of cardboard boxes, meager belongings meticulously laid out like doilies and commemorative plates in some other old person’s home.

07:30 The street lights go out suddenly.  Washed out, greyish-blue gloom abruptly replaces the warm incandescent glow that bathed the streets, like a woman rising from bed, dolled up the night before, now frazzled-looking and tired.

07:34 You always hate walking past this bakery.  It’s shuttered, oddly, although the staff have probably been up and preparing goodies since four.  Every day, a cloud of blueberry pastry wafts up the street from the ventilator.  It’s torture when you’ve skipped breakfast.

07:37 Who buys some of this crap?  How do these stores manage to exist?  Real estate can’t be cheap here.  Maybe there’s more money laundering than you thought.

07:45 The city begins to lurch and start.  A beeping garbage truck rumbles past to the sound of its crew banging trash cans around the sidewalk.  Slipper-clad concierges rush to bring out their wheelie bins.  One of them steps, cursing, into the river of water a street cleaner has diverted into the gutter.

07:49 Every goddamn day you promise yourself you’re going to go have a civilized breakfast with a newspaper in a café along the way.  Tomorrow.  Every goddamn day.

07:53 A bus is kind of like a two-way aquarium, if you think about it.  Everybody’s looking at the goldfish on the other side of the glass.  Some of them are just a lot more tightly packed in.

A fish tank full of sardines, that’s a funny thought.

You tried meditating on your way to work once.  That didn’t work so well, kept walking into mailboxes and people fiddling with their iPhones.  How do they do it?  Thousands of quick, miniature games of chicken play out on the streets every day, who will be the first to look up from his phone and sidestep the other?  Must lead to a lot of head injuries.

You don’t meditate anymore, just come up with random jumbled thoughts like that.

07:57 Kch-kch-kch-kch kch-kch-kch kch-kch cough you hope that middle-aged lady with the dog didn’t hear you making machine gun noises at passing cars.

08:01 People in this town don’t sleep enough.  Seems like everyone’s walking around with bags under their eyes.  At least it explains why so many of them are stressed and cranky.  Fewer tourists would get their heads bitten off in sidewalk cafés if Paris had a curfew.  And subsidized ear plugs.

It could just be the morning commute, an hour in stop-and-go traffic, every day, all year, would drive anyone insane.  Doesn’t explain wanting to spend ten hours in a Southbound traffic jam every August, though.

Your friend explained his theory of maximum confrontation yesterday.  Never miss an opportunity to flip off people who cut you off at crosswalks.  Maybe he has a point.  Ey, fuck you too, buddy.  Walkin’ here. Yeah, that’s right, didn’t think so.

08:05 Does the security guy out front ever move?  Do you get a quota of security company logo blazers in that job?

08:12 Welcome to the office.  You’re late.  Should have taken the bus.

For some reason, the games that stick in my mind aren’t classics, like Monopoly, nor was I ever really attracted to “serious” games like Settlers of Catan (despite rave reviews.)  The ones I really remember are hilariously absurd and stupid.  Like my sense of humor.

Illuminati

The Steve Jackson Games classic, modeled on Robert Anton Wilson‘s Illuminatus! trilogy.

Play any of 8 conspiracies, each with different powers and objectives — including the UFOs, the Society of Assassins, and the Gnomes of Zurich.  Using money and power, try to take over the world by infiltrating groups like Mad Scientists For a Better Tomorrow, the Fnord Motor Company, and the Robot Sea Monsters.

Relevant:  23, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Meta-relevant:  The Cuckoo’s Egg, the book that first got me interested in security.

I never played any of the expansions — it gets too confusing, and I’m a simple minded kind of guy.

Nuclear War / Nuclear Escalation

Or, “does anyone have change for 50 million people?”

A very funny game from 1965, published by Flying Buffalo.  If the humor in Dr. Strangelove is up your alley, you’ll like this.

Each player starts out with a bunch of cards showing population, in millions.  Other cards include nuclear warheads (kill people), delivery systems (carry warheads), propaganda (steals an enemy’s population before the war), secrets (steals population and has some other effects), and special (increases/decreases destruction of attacks, steals population).  Attacks also use the radioactive fallout spinner to determine additional effects of your nuclear strikes:

The game starts as a cold war, during which you try to steal each others’ population, until someone starts throwing nukes around.  This site gets way too enthusiastic about expansions, considering that this is a very silly, cynical spoof of a game.

Risk

The classic strategy board game.  Roughly corresponds to Napoleonic-era strategic combat, or no era at all, actually.  Yes, it’s originally French.

Risk is the perfect antidote to the hyper-complex, hyper-involved Avalon Hill war game I bought at a garage sale once, which (in my limited experience) involved more setting up and rule nitpicking, not to mention hundreds of statistics and die rolls and and and.  That’s not a game, that’s accounting.

It’s a quick, fairly easy to learn game, despite the apparent insane complexity of the rule description in the Wikipedia page above; players use armies (indicated by Roman numerals, or little plastic figures, depending on your version) to try to conquer first neutral areas, then each others’ territories.

Risk is turn-based; each turn consists of (1) getting and placing your armies, (2) combat, (3) fortifying your territories / moving armies around.  Combat is decided by dice roll depending on the number of attacking / defending armies; the defender always has an advantage.

Territories are grouped by continent (more or less).  The more territories you have, the more armies you get.  Holding a whole continent gives you extra armies (depending on the continent), as does territorial conquest.

Each time you conquer a territory, you gain a card.  Cards show either cavalry, artillery, or infantry.  When you have five cards, you turn in either three different ones, or three identical ones, for bonus armies.  Each time you turn in a card, you receive more armies.

We’ve played this for hours on end, mainly in high school and college.  Free online single- and multiplayer versions exist, but with a lot of beer, in a room full of other drunks, is the best.  Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Axis & Allies

This one’s unfortunately a bit more specific and complicated (Wikipedia page here), and harder to find other players for.  There are tons of expansions and versions, none of which I ever tried, plus nearly infinite variations on the rules (given that Karin and I play Scrabble on steroids by allowing any word in any language, I probably shouldn’t even mention this.)  Takes a little while to learn, but well worth it.

You’re start as Nazi Germany, the USSR, Great Britain, Japan, or the United States.  Each country’s territories (including allies) are pre-defined, as is initial unit placement.  Order of play is fixed (it follows the previous list of countries).  Each country gets to buy units (or try to research extra technology), move units, attack, move units again, place new units, and collect income.  Income is determined by the number of and value of territories you own.  Attack and research is governed by die roll, which can be hilariously unfair.

Units consist of several types of naval units (submarine, destroyer, transport, carrier, battleship), aircraft (fighter, bomber), land (tanks, infantry), fixed (antiaircraft guns) and factories.

Combat and movement have some fairly specific rules, including being able to destroy another player’s income with bombing raids, submarines being able to attack separately, fighters being able to land on aircraft carriers, etc.  Each unit also has a different attack and defense strength, meaning you have to allocate and prepare accordingly.  Last man standing wins, unless you play as a free-for-all.

Diplomacy

My all time favorite.  Unfortunately, to do this “right” (i.e. my way) requires some planning and patient players.

The turn-based game takes place in early 20th century Europe, with the great powers (France, UK, Russia, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey) gearing up to screw each other as royally as possible.

Initially, players attempt to negotiate, both publicly and in secret, to build alliances and prepare for war.  The second phase of the game involves open, knives-out attacks.  Millions of patriotic young idiots rushing into muddy trench warfare massacres are conveniently abstracted as army and navy markers; it’s a highly strategic game, and combat is determined purely by number of armies you can bring to bear on an enemy (you can only have one unit per land or sea territory, reinforced by units in neighboring areas.)  No dice are involved, making it purely dependent on player negotiations and strategy.

Why is this fun?  Because, if you’re doing it “right” (i.e. my way) you have a large map out in an open space, with teams of players required to submit their moves in secret once or twice a week, by paper or email.  I’ve run Diplomacy games in college shared housing, where several players would usually be found congregating around the map, analyzing, plotting, getting pissed at each other, and discussing, with other curious types watching the skulduggery.  The attention you get when updating everyone’s markers based on their moves is hilarious.

Victory is the result of conquering 34 “supply centers”, or strategic territories.  Losing all your supply centers results in defeat. Despite the seemingly slow nature of the moves, it can actually be a fairly fast game — most of our games were over in about 4-5 weeks, with 3 move deadlines per week.  You can, of course, also play it as a tabletop board game, but then it becomes a bit difficult to have teams running each country — which is half the fun.

Several web-based free versions of this also exist, which you are doubtlessly able to find on your own.  This site has a large collection of maps, suitable for printing, not to mention rule variants.

…and those are actually real WWI diplomats waiting for me to post the latest diplomacy game updates.

1. Banning guns works, which is why New York, DC, & Chicago cops need guns.

2. Washington DC’s low murder rate of 69 per 100,000 is due to strict gun control, and Indianapolis’ high murder rate of 9 per 100,000 is due to the lack of gun control.

3. Statistics showing high murder rates justify gun control but statistics showing increasing murder rates after gun control are “just statistics.”

4. The Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban, both of which went into effect in 1994 are responsible for the decrease in violent crime rates, which have been declining since 1991.

5. We must get rid of guns because a deranged lunatic may go on a shooting spree at any time and anyone who would own a gun out of fear of such a lunatic is paranoid.

6. The more helpless you are the safer you are from criminals.

7. An intruder will be incapacitated by tear gas or oven spray, but if shot with a .357 Magnum will get angry and kill you.

8. A woman raped and strangled is morally superior to a woman with a smoking gun and a dead rapist at her feet.

9. When confronted by violent criminals, you should “put up no defense — give them what they want, or run” (Handgun Control Inc. Chairman Pete Shields, Guns Don’t Die – People Do, 1981, p.125).

10. The New England Journal of Medicine is filled with expert advice about guns; just like Guns & Ammo has some excellent treatises on heart surgery.

11. One should consult an automotive engineer for safer seatbelts, a civil engineer for a better bridge, a surgeon for internal medicine, a computer programmer for hard drive problems, and Sarah Brady for firearms expertise.

12. The 2nd Amendment, ratified in 1787, refers to the National Guard, which was created 130 years later, in 1917.

13. The National Guard, federally funded, with bases on federal land, using federally-owned weapons, vehicles, buildings and uniforms, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a “state” militia.

14. These phrases: “right of the people peaceably to assemble,” “right of the people to be secure in their homes,” “enumerations herein of certain rights shall not be construed to disparage others retained by the people,” and “The powers not delegated herein are reserved to the states respectively, and to the people” all refer to individuals, but “the right of the people to keep and bear arm” refers to the state.

15. “The Constitution is strong and will never change.” But we should ban and seize all guns thereby violating the 2nd, 4th, and 5th Amendments to that Constitution.

16. Rifles and handguns aren’t necessary to national defense! Of course, the army has hundreds of thousands of them.

17. Private citizens shouldn’t have handguns, because they aren’t “military weapons”, but private citizens shouldn’t have “assault rifles”, because they are military weapons.

18. In spite of waiting periods, background checks, finger printing, government forms, etc., guns today are too readily available, which is responsible for recent school shootings. In the 1940′s, 1950′s and1960′s, anyone could buy guns at hardware stores, army surplus stores, gas stations, variety stores, Sears mail order, no waiting, no background check, no fingerprints, no government forms and there were no school shootings.

19. The NRA’s attempt to run a “don’t touch” campaign about kids handling guns is propaganda, but the anti-gun lobby’s attempt to run a “don’t touch” campaign is responsible social activity.

20. Guns are so complex that special training is necessary to use them properly, and so simple to use that they make murder easy.

21. A handgun, with up to 4 controls, is far too complex for the typical adult to learn to use, as opposed to an automobile that only has 20.

22. Women are just as intelligent and capable as men but a woman with a gun is “an accident waiting to happen” and gun makers’ advertisements aimed at women are “preying on their fears.”

23. Ordinary people in the presence of guns turn into slaughtering butchers but revert to normal when the weapon is removed.

24. Guns cause violence, which is why there are so many mass killings at gun shows.

25. A majority of the population supports gun control, just like a majority of the population supported owning slaves.

26. Any self-loading small arm can legitimately be considered to be a “weapon of mass destruction” or an “assault weapon.”

27. Most people can’t be trusted, so we should have laws against guns, which most people will abide by because they can be trusted.

28. The right of Internet pornographers to exist cannot be questioned because it is constitutionally protected by the Bill of Rights, but the use of handguns for self defense is not really protected by the Bill of Rights.

29. Free speech entitles one to own newspapers, transmitters, computers, and typewriters, but self-defense only justifies bare hands.

30. The ACLU is good because it uncompromisingly defends certain parts of the Constitution, and the NRA is bad, because it defends other parts of the Constitution.

31. Charlton Heston, a movie actor as president of the NRA is a cheap lunatic who should be ignored, but Michael Douglas, a movie actor as a representative of Handgun Control, Inc. is an ambassador for peace who is entitled to an audience at the UN arms control summit.

32. Police operate with backup within groups, which is why they need larger capacity pistol magazines than do “civilians” who must face criminals alone and therefore need less ammunition.

33. We should ban “Saturday Night Specials” and other inexpensive guns because it’s not fair that poor people have access to guns too.

34. Police officers have some special Jedi-like mastery over hand guns that private citizens can never hope to obtain.

35. Private citizens don’t need a gun for self-protection because the police are there to protect them even though the Supreme Court says the police are not responsible for their protection.

36. Citizens don’t need to carry a gun for personal protection but police chiefs, who are desk-bound administrators who work in a building filled with cops, need a gun.

37. “Assault weapons” have no purpose other than to kill large numbers of people. The police need assault weapons. You do not.

38. When Microsoft pressures its distributors to give Microsoft preferential promotion, that’s bad; but when the Federal government pressures cities to buy guns only from Smith & Wesson, that’s good.

39. Trigger locks do not interfere with the ability to use a gun for defensive purposes, which is why you see police officers with one on their duty weapon.

40. Handgun Control, Inc. says they want to “keep guns out of the wrong hands.” Guess what? You have the wrong hands.

For many years, he had a memorial Risk tournament named after him.

I have no idea whether this is true or not, but what I do know is that for many of the years I attended the school, we were plagued with glacially slow antiques for workstations, which required the use of a special software to ensure nobody logged in to slow down an already-struggling game system with unnecessary programming homework. This software (a “tty grabber” — ttys being virtual sessions, needed by a user to log in, of which a running system only had so many at once to go around), appropriately called N0H0Z3RZ, was usually run right after a manual reboot to make sure any hapless user dialing in remotely was unceremoniously sent packing. Side note: this is why you should always save your work, kids. But given that these computers were one step up from doorstops in terms of performance (which is what they frequently ended up serving as), we hadn’t much choice.

But then the miraculous happened, CS got a new building (albeit one that couldn’t easily be opened after hours by a swift kick to the lock on a side door — the Computer Science Undergraduate Association eventually collected an entire case full of discarded, broken door locks) and new systems. Never mind that it was built on the premises of the old Etcheverry nuclear reactor, never mind that it looked like a green-tiled urinal, never mind that the palm trees outside looked like gigantic wood phalli spewing their leafy ejaculate majestically over the sidewalk — the place was new, and Ben the Filipino janitor-cum-artist sold nice mellow weed at reasonable prices.

Soda had a fairly strict no-games policy, enforced by a brute of a man named Francisco or Fernando or somesuch — a camp guard type who liked patrolling the labs with a sneer, kicking out those of us who wanted nothing more than to leisurely blow shit up when we should have been doing our homework. But play games we did — frequently enough in the graphics lab on the ground floor of Soda Hall.

This lab was only used by certain upper level computer graphics-related programming classes, and not cluttered with hyperventilating undergrads frantically struggling to finish writing their “Hello World”-based operating system in some nonsensical language cooked up by a sadistic CS prof. It was equipped with special graphics-capable versions of the HP boxes, which in turn apparently were delivered with a special graphics-capable programming library by the manufacturer.

It was on these systems that I played one of the many online games that caused me to waste a disproportionate amount of time in darkened, cave-like computer rooms during college, called PEXdrive — written by HP to showcase just this library.

PEXdrive was a pretty weak game by today’s standards, consisting of up to ten or so players racing various vehicles along a course in a primitive polygon landscape. There were stunt bikes, ferraris, cop cars, a rocket car, even a (totally impossible to control) UFO.

And a tank. I’ve always had a thing for tanks.

Unfortunately, the game had loops, and jumps. Tanks don’t do loops and jumps really well — mainly because they are tanks, and tanks are not built for acrobatics. But the tank had one thing the other vehicles didn’t.

A turret. With a cannon.

And so, when everyone else took off to go chasing across the course, I would lumber across the pale mustard-colored countryside, between the pyramids and cubes and cones, directly toward the finish line. And wait there, occasionally casting envious glances at my fellow players whooping and shouting throughout the lab as they performed stunts and nudged each other off the flyover bridges.

And I’d wait

and wait

and wait until some moron showed up, screaming jubilantly toward the end of the race.

From across the room, there’d be a quietly muttered “erk”, accompanying the dawning realization that, although he’d beaten everyone else, there was a tank at the finish line, with a turret slowly rotating toward him.

Waiting.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Formula 1 racing needs tanks.

Yes, egregious border controls in supposedly “free” countries are something I feel strongly about.  Not to mention, freedom of information flows, the right to privacy of data from unreasonable search and seizure, and the responsibility of government to provide airtight justification in the case of any intrusion into its citizens’ privacy.

Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher and Wikileaks volunteer, was recently detained at Seattle Tacoma airport by United States Customs and Border Patrol agents.    He had been previously detained last July at Newark International Airport, while returning from a trip abroad.  His laptop and mobile phone were temporarily confiscated and taken out of his sight (thus opening the possibility for the installation of espionage components.)  Security consultant Moxie Marlinspike was similarly detained in November, and his electronic equipment was searched.

In contrast to last July’s stop, Appelbaum did not carry any electronic equipment this time around, except for some USB sticks with the Bill of Rights “encoded into the block device”.

Such stops are beyond “dangerous precedent”.  They are neither random, nor do they serve any security purpose.  From a risk management perspective, they are useless intimidation.

Boingboing has collated Appelbaum’s Twitter feed concerning the event.  Here’s a repost:

• It’s very frustrating that I have to put so much consideration into talking about the kind of harassment that I am subjected to in airports.

• I was detained, searched, and CPB did attempt to question me about the nature of my vacation upon landing in Seattle.

• The CPB specifically wanted laptops and cell phones and were visibly unhappy when they discovered nothing of the sort.

• I did however have a few USB thumb drives with a copy of the Bill of Rights encoded into the block device. They were unable to copy it.

• The forensic specialist (who was friendly) explained that EnCase and FTK, with a write-blocker inline were unable to see the Bill of Rights.

• I requested access my lawyer and was again denied. They stated I was I wasn’t under arrest and so I was not able to contact my lawyer.

• The CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) agent was waiting for me at the exit gate. Remember when it was our family and loved ones?

• When I handed over my customs declaration form, the female agent was initially friendly. After pulling my record, she had a sour face.

• She attempted to trick me by putting words into my mouth. She marked my card with a large box with the number 1 inside, sent me on my way.

• While waiting for my baggage, I noticed the CBP agent watching me and of course after my bag arrived, I was “randomly” selected for search.

• Only US customs has random number generator worse than a mid-2007 Debian random number generator. Random? Hardly.

• During the search, I made it quite clear that I had no laptop and no cell phone. Only USB drives with the Bill of Rights.

• The CBP agent stated that I had posted on Twitter before my flight and that slip ended the debate about their random selection process.

• The CBP agents in Seattle were nicer than ones in Newark. None of them implied I would be raped in prison for the rest of my life this time.

• The CBP agent asked if the ACLU was really waiting. I confirmed the ACLU was waiting and they again denied me contact with legal help.

• All in all, the detainment was around thirty minutes long. They all seemed quite distressed that I had no computer and no phone.

• They were quite surprised to learn that Iceland had computers and that I didn’t have to bring my own.

• There were of course the same lies and threats that I received last time. They even complemented me on work done regarding China and Iran.

• I think there’s a major disconnect required to do that job and to also complement me on what they consider to be work against police states.

• While it’s true that Communist China has never treated me as badly as CBP, I know this isn’t true for everyone who travels to China.

• All in all, if you’re going to be detained, searched, and harassed at the border in an extra-legal manner, I guess it’s Seattle over Newark.

• It took a great deal of thought before I posted about my experience because it honestly appears to make things worse for me in the future.

• Even if it makes things worse for me, I refuse to be silent about state sponsored systematic detainment, searching, and harassment.

• In case it is not abundantly clear: I have not been arrested, nor charged with any crime, nor indicted in any way. Land of the free? Hardly.

• I’m only counting from the time that we opened my luggage until it was closed. The airport was basically empty when I left.

• It’s funny that the forensics guy uses EnCase. As it, like CBP, apparently couldn’t find a copy of the Bill of Rights I dd’ed into the disk.

• The forensics guy apparently enjoyed the photo with my homeboy Knuth and he was really quite kind. The forensics guy in Newark? Not so much.

• The CBP agent asked me for data – was I bringing data into the country? Where was all my data from the trip? Names, numbers, receipts, etc.

• The mental environment that this creates for traveling is intense. Nothing is assured, nothing is secure, and nothing provides escape.

• I resisted the temptation to give them a disk filled with /dev/random because I knew that reading them the Bill of Rights was enough hassle.

• I’m flying to Toronto, Canada for work on Sunday and back through Seattle again a few days later. Should be a joy to meet these guys again.

• All of this impacts my ability to work and takes a serious emotional toll on me. It’s absolutely unacceptable.

• What happens if I take a device they can’t image? They take it. What about the stuff they give back? Back doored? Who knows?

• Does it void a warranty if your government inserts a backdoor into your computer or phone? It certainly voids the trust I have in all of it.

• I dread US Customs more than I dreaded walking across the border from Turkey to Iraq in 2005. That’s something worth noting.

• I will probably never feel safe about traveling internationally with a computer or phones again.

• None the less, safe or not, I won’t stop working on Tor. Nor will I cease traveling. I will adapt and I will win. A hard road worth taking.

Side note:  I tried to do my little part by “opting out” at San Francisco International Airport on December 26.  Out of two lines for scanners, one with a metal detector and one with a rape scanner, I chose the metal detector line.  I’d previously only encountered an “advanced imaging” full body scanner (backscatter or millimeter wave array) in Amsterdam Schiphol airport earlier in 2010; I pointedly refused to go through it and was wordlessly redirected through the metal detector with no fuss.  By contrast, at SFO I was pulled from the metal detector queue and ordered through the full body scanner.  I refused, and received my complimentary TSA groping.

From The Daily Patdown:

...and Santa, of course

For all the nice folks who believe that there’s actually a point to intrusive scans and molestation, here are a few random points to consider.

• Body scan images are stored and shared, despite claims to the contrary.  Here’s one I found (note toy gun for demonstration purposes):

Let's see what happens when I invert it in Photoshop

Ooh…

No, it's not NSFW, this is National Security we're talking about.

• Travel is a fundamental right, and airport infrastructure / air lanes / resources polluted by aircraft are common goods.  There is no false choice between submitting to invasive security and not flying.
• The former head of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration worked as a consultant for the largest manufacturer of backscatter radiation devices and played a key role in the devices’ sale.
• Backscatter radiation is potentially harmful.  No conclusive studies have been performed.  TSA personnel are not permitted to wear radiation exposure detectors.
• Scanners are easily defeated.  The linked article is one example of many.  Here is another (not so easy, but no less of a threat, one that cannot be addressed by a patdown.)
• The TSA has harassed pilots who have objected to the pointlessness of airport security procedures.  Even with pilots, enforcement of security rules is arbitrary and opaque.  You do realize that pilots can crash the plane, right?  And that airport workers can enter “secure” areas just by using a swipe card or PIN code?
• X-Rays are ineffective, particularly when analyzed by poorly trained / hassled employees.
• The TSA has a track record of hastily deploying expensive devices that do not work.

The examples of abuses of passengers in the name of “security” are too numerous to list, from the woman forced to remove her nipple rings in 2008, over the gentleman unlawfully detained by the TSA after wanting to leave when he refused a grope and threatened with a $10k fine, countless people forced to go through the kafkaesque process of clearing their names off a nebulous “no-fly list” whose existence the TSA only recently admitted, unable to fly because they shared a name with someone placed on it, possibly wrongly in the first place, sexual assault victims traumatized by physical inspections, and many others.

From a risk management model, the whole idea is deeply, darkly flawed.  Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theater“to describe how pointless it is.  After all, don’t forget that the last two major attempts to bring down an airliner bound for the United States (the “shoe bomber” and “underwear bomber”) were foiled by alert passengers — as was the 2007 would-be Glasgow airport bomber.  Even had one of the first two amateurish attempts succeeded, it is doubtful whether either would have brought down the plane at all.  As for sharp objects, what about buying a bottle of champagne at duty free and breaking it in the aircraft bathroom?

As far as targets go, the 2004 Madrid train bombing and 2005 London bus bombings proved that, when you harden one target, a determined attacker simply diverts to another, softer one.  Do you want to live in a society where control is so pervasive that all potential targets are safeguarded beyond the point of risk?  Or would you like to see the risk intelligently minimized by addressing the causes of terrorism, good police work, and security measures that do not cause massive economic losses, personal inconvenience, and loss of fundamental liberties?

Here’s a flier with your rights (pdf) when dealing with the TSA.

Cracked.com, comedy site or not, has a list of TSA “greatest hits”.

How to fix this?  I don’t have an answer.  Israel has not suffered a single bombing of an airline taking off from its territory throughout its history — despite being the most loathed target for most attackers that “security” measures are supposed to guard against.  Techniques include relentless profiling, behavioral analysis, and well-trained staff.  Thankfully, various American legislators have taken note of the issue and are introducing legislation to curtail abuse.  Meanwhile, the TSA helpfully informs us that thermos bottles may be used as bombs.  Thanks, guys, I feel safer already.

Why does it matter to the rest of the world if the Americans want to have clownshit-insane paranoid security nonsense ruling the country?  I first came across a backscatter scanner in Amsterdam Schiphol airport earlier this year, and told the woman manning it in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t going near it.  She wordlessly directed me through the regular x-ray machine, which I didn’t set off.  However, the mere presence of such an egregious device in an otherwise civilized country is representative of the general influence the United States government exerts on how security in other countries is handled.

When American officials decide to ban nail clippers or water from planes, other countries follow suit.  The same goes for removing shoes at security checkpoints, and other stupidity.  The United Kingdom has made advanced imaging scanners mandatory for travelers from several airports, and is progressively deploying them — no pat-downs as an alternative (not that they are one anyway).  Other countries will eventually take the same path.

Unfortunately, the number of people who are willing to defend such abuses in the uninformed understanding that they will thus be kept safe from a largely imaginary threat is huge.  Here’s hoping that at least one of them reads this and has second thoughts.