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But, thanks, I lolled anyway...

Very good. I thought you were referncing Papillon, however... seems like that's where Tarantino got his inspiration, I guess (never saw Pulp Fiction).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papillon_(autobiograp hy)

I didn't find the reference there, but I did here:

http://www.anc.org.za/books/escape4.html

"In Papillon the convicts hid their money up their anuses in what they called 'chargers'. These were metal tubes with screw-on lids in which the money was rolled and inserted."

We might not like the law, but we still have to obey it.

No

we

bloody

well

don't !

Google is right to change the results of South African searchers looking for images and information about the Sharpeville massacre because in the end it's better for Google to be in the South African apartheid market than out of it, and they'd be out if they let them see images like this. Giving them access to some information is better than none and little bits will slip through because you can't censor everything.

What about the ANC you say? Well the South African government considers them terrorists so it's only really obeying the laws of South Africa to change the results of a search for them.

I think it's clear Google shouldn't boycott the South African government because in the end what can Google really do? What would a boycott ever achieve?

Google is staying true to it's motto "Don't be evil" by making compromises that you absolutists simply don't understand.

Google is right to change the results of South African searchers looking for images and information about the Sharpeville massacre because in the end it's better for Google to be in the South African apartheid market than out of it, and they'd be out if they let them see images like this. Giving them access to some information is better than none and little bits will slip through because you can't censor everything.

What about the ANC you say? Well the South African government considers them terrorists so it's only really obeying the laws of South Africa to change the results of a search for them.

I think it's clear Google shouldn't boycott the South African government because in the end what can Google really do? What would a boycott ever achieve?

Google is staying true to it's motto "Don't be evil" by making compromises that you absolutists simply don't understand.

Somewhat off-topic in some ways, but I was amused by a story I read some years ago in a magazine, some mention made here and here, about a UN translator who, stymied by a Russian idiom which defied literal translation, drew from Shakespeare and translated it to "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark" which of course led to protests from the representative from Denmark, etc. The core idea part of the story stays intact, but the location, date, and details of the Russian idiom vary (I remember the first time reading it, it was "something about a cow and two piles of hay" and the links I've included talk about "an orange tree, a backyard, Moscow" and "an elder-bush in the garden and an uncle in Kiev"), so there's a decent chance this is an urban legend.

Personally, I'm curious less about the idioms than I am about the MT's parsing of grammar. Not all languages use Subject-Verb-Object grammar and the rules from adding adjectives, adverbs, suffixes, and the like vary greatly between languages and often aren't all that consistent. For instance, Russian doesn't have articles like English does, instead relying on order of words in the sentence to indicate whether one is referring to a generic instance of an object or a specific instance. The grammar section of Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit provides several examples of differing grammars in other languages. I'm currently taking ASL courses (which admittedly do not have a written form for this kind of translation) and I will freely admit that learning to express sentences in a "Timeframe-object-subject-verb-time signifier-query word" structure is kicking my ass, despite having done some studying of other languages in the past. Heck, just learning when and where to place adjectives before or after words usually takes years for most people. (That's one place where English does seem to shine. Adjectives are always in front of nouns, as best I can recall. Adverbs, on the other hand...)

Anyhow, I'll be eagerly watching the progress here, inasmuch as my scattered attention span will ocasionally provoke me to check my bookmarks list...

His defence speech is a classic.

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mk/mk-histor y.html

Koeberg was the nuclear plant, I don't think it was online at the time, they just showed they could take it...

Firstly, there are current 152 Indymedia websites, not 50 as reported. That means that the loss of ahimsa (the server that was taken down) caused 13% of the IMC (Indymedia Centre) sites to go down, not the "more than 40 percent" quoted.

Secondly, the article makes it sound as if there has been no progress on the cypherpunk front since 1996. While progress has been annoyingly slow, the growth of peer to peer technologies over the last few years has prompted a number of experiments - TOR, I2P, Freenet, etc. (see the I2P network comparisons page for a list), some of which seem to be getting pretty mature.

Thirdly, the bigger sites on ahimsa were up again in hours/days. They would have been up even quicker if a proper backup / mirror system had been in place, and in fact Indymedia techies have now been spurred into action by the ahimsa seizure to make sure the network is more robust. Think about this: the leftie scene is not particularly filled with technologically adept people. The Indymedia network runs on a shoestring budget (in terms of money / time). Despite this, the network was *still* able to respond and repair the damage fairly rapidly.

And finally, don't overestimate the competence of the FBI in this matter. Apparently when trying to do something about the picture of Swiss undercover cops on nantes.indymedia.org, one of the people they approached was from Seattle Indymedia, which has nothing to do with running either ahimsa or nantes.indymedia.org. And anyway, the disputed picture was quickly mirrored all over the place when it became "notorious" (just like the DeCSS code).

So, while I think Grossman's article is a good counterbalance to the mystical rants of people like John Perry Barlow, she leaves out a number of facts that show that the Internet can indeed be used to "route around censorship". Its all a matter of effort - in the 1970s and 80s, the ANC got around government censorship in South Africa by planting "pamphlet bombs" to scatter leaflets at busy rail stations (the cost: activists spending several years in jail). The Internet allows the subversion of censorship with far less effort, but of course it doesn't do it "by magic".

The old South African government (pre 1990s) had laws that allowed them to detain people without being charged for 90 days without even informing their families of their arrest. The 90 days was renewable, so people could dissapear for arbitrarily long periods of time.

The government said that the people they detained were guilty of treason but most were doing nothing but passively resisting the apartheid policies. For instance, many people who attended the Congress of the People at which the Freedom Charter was drawn up, dissapeared for months afterwards (the leaders of the congress were formally tried for treason).

Citizens of the United States should watch very carefully what happens to their human rights. They pay a lot of lip service to 'liberty', but don't seem really concerned that it's liberty for some. If I was a Muslim in the United States right now I would be very worried about my future freedom.

The old South African government (pre 1990s) had laws that allowed them to detain people without being charged for 90 days without even informing their families of their arrest. The 90 days was renewable, so people could dissapear for arbitrarily long periods of time.

The government said that the people they detained were guilty of treason but most were doing nothing but passively resisting the apartheid policies. For instance, many people who attended the Congress of the People at which the Freedom Charter was drawn up, dissapeared for months afterwards (the leaders of the congress were formally tried for treason).

Citizens of the United States should watch very carefully what happens to their human rights. They pay a lot of lip service to 'liberty', but don't seem really concerned that it's liberty for some. If I was a Muslim in the United States right now I would be very worried about my future freedom.

• SABC - South Africa Broadcasting Corporation
• New.com.au
• South african news sources