Nelson Pavlosky

Kerry ignored e-voting problems

You may be sick of hearing about me, electronic voting and Diebold’s insecure, buggy voting machines. To be honest, I’m a little tired of it myself, but unfortunately that doesn’t make the problem go …

Swat signs of life

On Monday I saw artist Jonathan Hyman give a talk about photographs that he had taken of ad-hoc memorials to 9/11. On the screen in the Scheuer room, he projected picture after picture of tiles hung o…

Hidden contracts

“Pay attention next time you rip open a cardboard box — you may be entering into a contract without realizing it.” The New York Times presented its readers with this warning earlier this month, as it …

Business method patents hurt local stores

Chain stores, restaurant chains, coffee shop chains — these are the soulless entities that Swatties love to hate. Chains like Starbucks crush local coffee shops out of existence, just as ClearChannel …

Movie industry too strict on DVD imports

One of the more entertaining clubs on our campus is Films of Fury, which is dedicated to showing martial arts movies. Unfortunately, even this innocuous activity suffers from the excessive copyright c…

Copyright laws impede theater

Welcome to another year of Peer-to-Peer! You may recognize my face from the orientation play this year, so I’d like to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about theater. This column is normally…

How the law makes us all criminals

It’s a well-known fact that college campuses are hotbeds of copyright infringement. However, most students are not aware of how frequently they may be technically violating copyright law and how far i…

Lowering the price barriers to education

The student Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) released a study a couple of months ago called “Rip-off 101: Second Edition — How the Publishing Industry’s Practices Needlessly Drive Up Textbook C…

Recording Swarthmore history

How well do we take care of our past at Swarthmore College? Some pieces of our past are preserved well, in places like the Friends Historical Library, or the archives of The Phoenix.

But what was Nirv…

A cell phone defense

By now, most people are well aware of the changes that advances in communication technology have wrought on our campus. The dramatic drop in use of campus phones in the face of increased cell phone us…

Swarthmore ITS an ally in quest for freer society

Why is this column named “Peer to Peer”? For most tech-savvy people, the term refers to peer-to-peer filesharing networks, computer programs that allow you to directly connect with other people around…