Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as House Bill 3261 or H.R. 3261 is the big stick that’s being waved around like I wave my whiffle bat at the moosies – they both make a lot of noise, but I would never actually whack anyone with it.  And the whiffle bat people aren’t paying me off:  Therein lies the difference.

Starting in 90 minutes, Wikipedia will go dark for 24 hours to protest this attempted muzzling of more of our free speech rights – well the ones that haven’t already been trampled on by the Patriot Act (and don’t even get me started on a law that requires libraries to tell government officials what you’ve been checking out on your card, but prevents that same library from notifying you about it – I used to run searches on political assassinations just to dick around ).  So here’s the linky to MUM‘s site because she’s got all the deets and I’m lazy and going to bed to read about Harry Truman’s Excellent Road Trip.  Ah, 1953:  The Good Old Days…good if you were a middle-class, white male, that is.

Oh, and I’d advise downloading Soapy, a plug-in that works on Firefox:

Soapy works by automatically redirecting users to the website’s server directly. It replaces the DNS system entirely for these blocked websites.

Domain Name Servers match domains like Google.com to their server’s IP address (in this case http://74.125.224.72/ ). This process is usually invisible to the user, but you can access Google’s site by using their IP address as well.

I like to plan ahead. This is why I download coupons and rebate forms well in advance of need.  it’s my justincase mentality