Interesting Links for 27-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• Paypal forces publisher to censor themselves
  (tags: writing censorship paypal )
• On feminism
  (tags: feminism )
• Scotland and Ireland in the British Parliament
  (tags: ireland independence politics uk scotland )
• Spain will not veto an independent Scotland joining EU
  (tags: independence uk scotland eu spain )
• Kripke resigns as report alleges that he

Comments

[nancylebov]

Alternatives to paypal. There are more alternative in the comments.

[undeadbydawn]

one might think it worth the relative expense of getting a small team to build the alternative web code, just to ensure, long term, that their business is not held hostage to a single payment portal.

especially given that PayPal appear to be getting worse by the month.

[I have no idea how that'd work in the real world - I am epically not a web dev]

[octopoid_horror]

There are additional concerns for any non-Paypal payment system that relies on a bank or similar. If a site was seen as primarily selling adult content (which Smashwords or Lulu aren't, but some of the "romance" story sites Paypal has forced to change their t&cs recently could be seen as) then that would put it into a high risk category for the bank or payment processing company, which would mean higher charges for payments, a possible annual fee to pay and a lot of hoops to jump through.

[undeadbydawn]

there are those among Labour who either have no appreciation of why they lost, or simply don't care.

and I'm now somewhat sickened by the extent to which my willingness to indulge Labour was based purely on belief in Brown.
there is, I have oft said, a limit to how wrong you can be before it comes crashing down around you. I can only hope people like Harman figure this out before they hand Cameron a decades majority.

meanwhile, I am driven further into the arms of the SNP - who at this point don't even have to prove their own case. They just have to not be anyone else.

[octopoid_horror]

Is this the bit where we post Cool Book Stories?

When I was fifteen, I persuaded my parents to spend a couple of hours driving across Italy when we were on a family holiday, so that we could visit an apparently picturesque spring that I'd read about in a letter by Pliny The Younger, written in the 1st century.

It looked exactly like he'd said, it turned out!

[andrewducker]

I did something similar with the Stannery Parliament in Devon, from The System Of The World. It was just as wet and unpleasant as the book said!

[skreidle]

Steam on the underground: Hopefully not coal-fired, or a particular scene from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged will stay in mind. :)