A peculiar Chinese tactic against non-famous dissidents: forcing them to take an all-expenses-paid vacation.

US citizens: call on Obama not to appoint right-winger Ward Armstrong as a federal judge.

According to Daily Kos, Ward Armstrong voted to abolish Obama's health care law, supported allowing handguns in bars, voted to close Virginia's abortion clinics and supported a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

US citizens: call on the FDA to require food labels to mention GMO content.

US citizens: tell the Dept of Education to stop dealing with Sallie Mae.

Greenpeace is embarrassed because its director was commuting by airplane. However, questions of which technologies to eschew personally for the sake of the environment are not so easy to answer.

We can't end global heating by choosing to fly less. We need to convince millions of others to fly less, for instance with a higher tax on flying such as the EU tried to impose.

Burning fuel is not an act of oppression; it only becomes harmful because of the amount we burn. This makes the right decision about Greenpeace's own fuel use less clear. In the end, I think it is important for the director to take trains, not because it will save significant energy, but so he can set a better example.

In the free software movement, campaigning for users' right to control their computing, we face questions that at first sight look similar to those Greenpeace faces, but there is a crucial difference. Nonfree program is not a form of pollution, it is an injustice. If you run a nonfree program, the injustice towards you is independent of who else runs it. Thus we say nobody should run a nonfree program and nobody should develop one. For us to legitimize nonfree software would be self-contradictory.