Free Speech Hosting

Free Speech Hosting: 11 Web Hosts That Won’t Dump You at the First Sign of Controversy | Dedicated Hosting Guide

The Internet, once the last bastion of truly free speech, is slowly being overrun by lawyers and government officials the world over. Certainly, there are criminals who need to be apprehended for their online exploits, but those of us who are merely exercising our first amendment right should feel protected. Sadly, many mainstream Web hosts will drop your site as soon as you attract the smallest amount of opposition. They are, after all, intimidated by the threat of losing money in a lawsuit. Luckily, there are still a few brave Web hosting companies that cherish free speech and that will stand behind your site. Below, we have listed 11 hosts that won’t dump you at the first sign of controversy.

(From the EFF.)

Not for everybody -- they tend to run a little on the expensive side compared to others I've seen. But if you're controversial...

This and that

Woke up with my shoulder feeling considerably better: down from pain all over to pain that was pretty localized and felt like a muscle spasm. It's been getting gradually better all day, though it still hurts to shrug or to raise my left arm more than 45^o above horizontal. Even that's an improvement: last night horizontal was as far as I could go. Hooray for gin and Flexoril.

Took a 2.5 mile walk at lunchtime. Went much better than yesterday, when I only went 2 miles and was feeling distinctly shaky by the time I was done.

I've been moderately productive at work this week, getting involved in an interesting side-project involving Google Maps and a bit of browser-side scripting. So I'm learning Javascript. The syntax is, of course, familiar; the prototype-based (classless) object semantics are a little unusual, but fun. (There's a proof, by the way, that classes and prototypes are formally equivalent in the computations they can perform, but that's small consolation when you need an anonymous closure for a callback and the language you're using doesn't provide them. JS does provide them.)

The equivalence of function in Javascript, blocks in Smalltalk, and function plus lambda in LISP makes me feel all warm and comfortable inside.

For the last couple of days I've been trying to work through the exercises in my old recorder book. I've taken to practicing in the car before heading home from work, so as to avoid driving my family crazy. (Some might argue that it's more of a short walk, but I digress.) The book, Enjoy Your Recorder by the Trapp Family Singers, has been in my possession for roughly half a century, and I have not been practicing in all that time, but the fingerings seem oddly familiar.

The album is progressing through the fab line at Oasis; the press run has started and the CD replication is scheduled. Their tracking web page leaves a lot to be desired: refreshing the job status page puts you back two clicks away. Weird. I'm not sure how you would get that effect in the first place; it may be a side-effect of whatever weird Microsoft crud they're using on the server side. (It's all .aspx pages, and some of what they claim are links aren't.)

I've been plagued by doubts about just how thoroughly I QA'ed the master. I really wish one could simply upload .wav files and a table of contents, and let them put it together.