Open source communities, including users, foster somewhat different attitudes and habits about software complexity. In a way, I expect an OSS package to show me its complexity up front. I want to know more about what my software is doing, how to configure it, etc. I don't "buy" OSS based on how shiny it is or whether or not the salesperson was attractive. And I try not to buy out of sheer ignorance either. So complexity - or someone's idea of it - is a definite plus. Much better than half-assed "simple".
For a Microsoft product, I fully expect that its going to balance stupid with too-simple. Thus its usefulness to me is significantly diminished. But I know people who are exactly the opposite, and look at a Microsoft product as keeping them from having to know things about their computer. Me, I'm more worried that I don't know enough;)
I myself was curious about how you do a random sample of blogs. Apparently, Pew used a telephone survey whereby they first asked if the adult maintained a blog and then they did their survey based on those who claimed that they did. Their sample of the latter group was only 233.
Though one could probably have a lot of fun putting Balmer through various "trials", I really don't find this funny. The fact that people of average competence and experience cannot control their own machines (or what runs on them) is a huge problem. It's almost infuriating that Microsoft considers this a simple matter of offering another service, as opposed to backporting changes. They could have made some *very* basic changes earlier in the life of Windows.
But Windows (Vista) is still implementing these changes (like low-priveleged users). What's more, the real issue of tackling human behavior has been almost completely ignored by Microsoft (witness the security prompts in Vista). If one buys additional services/products from Microsoft, aren't we actually *prolonging* the problem? Shouldn't we raise our expectations before we go another round on the upgrade cycle?
Aside from the all-important issue of "does it look right?", there is the professional issue of what sort of standards you should apply to your work. It's difficult to come close to a more extensive (and yet simple to implement) baseline metric of quality control with HTML/CSS than the W3C parser. Sure, I could go through and decide how I am going to do everything, but that's time-intensive and inflexible. Running something through the parser gives me a fast and consistent report. I can do whatever I want with the results, but they are there.
It does not solve problems for you or guarantee much of anything, but it allows you to see your formatting code in a more objective way. As a bonus, it can help you spot potential problems, mistakes, and open your eyes to some of the structure you are relying upon.
I always use the TidyFirefox extension. It is a little friendlier than the online W3C parser interface. Disclaimer: not a professional web designer.
A lot of people promote democracy - "government by the people". Somehow this became a thing for companies to promote and websites to make money off of. But there is more to our idea of democracy that just democracy. There is more to our freedoms than just "do what you want".
The stable democracies today are heavily influenced by Western/liberal democratic republicanism. The Communist statists learned the hard way that founding a society/order on one system was unmaintainable.
The problem in governments is unchecked power. Whether it's the mob or the elite, power needs to be balanced. Digg quite naturally needs to find ways to balance power. Executive powers are always necessary at some point, so it shouldn't be surprising that Digg exercises them. Democracy is only a *part* of the system.
If you think about it, our centrist ideals of freedom really are not absolute freedom, but a balance of freedom and responsibility. We exchange some liberty for a more controlled system.
A number of the last two generations of PRC leaders have been engineers. Most of them were trained in a Soviet-style polytechnic university (like Hu), some even in the Soviet Union. This goes back to the close ties the Soviets and the PRC had until 1969, when Mao had ambitions of taking over Stalin's post as "father" to the Communist world (never happened). The relationship between universities goes back really to the 1910's; while Paris was a hot place for talk about ideology, Russia was much more active and inspirational.
After the PRC was formed, Mao quickly enacted full relations with the Soviets. Part of this push was for industrialization and therefore the state put massive propoganda into engineering. Post-Mao, government firms and projects were the major drivers of industry and therefore engineering was a prime vector to high-level civil service. The only other profession which came close in importance (aside from Party membership, which was mandatory for top beaurocrats anyway) was the military, but Deng Xiaoping held the military in check, promising better funding if the main-line economy was stimulated.
So that's why we see a rapidly expanding military budget and a government run by former engineers. The next generation will probably be technical as well, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a few economists in the mix. You will not be seeing too many lawers or private-industry businessmen for a while yet though (still they are allowed in the CCP now).
I am not a gamer (no real time for that), but sometimes I want to play a not-to-involved game. There were only two reasons I bought a gamecube:
1) It was cheap (only $100 with controller and a game, if I recall correctly) 2) It had some fun games (Metroid, Zelda, Mario, the usual)
I knew next to nothing else about the thing. I think more about ordering a meal at a resturant than I did about this purchase. Now, my PC is a different story, but consoles are for recreation. Keep it simple, cheap, and fun please.
I don't think you have any rights related to software you can't completely control yourself. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here. That said, my experience with most RPG's is that they involve a lot of repetition (which is why the guy programmed some macros). Apparently this is part of the official, mandatory WoW experience. That would explain why goldfarming (or whatever it's called in the game) is so popular. Someone at Blizzard must have taken econ101 somewhere along the line?
The fact that Blizzard needs to know if you're sitting at your computer or not is a bit disturbing, however. Like a parent.
Moreover, why does anyone at Cisco think making casual communication more complicated (and expensive) is going to succeed? When I want to watch the game with friends, I don't want to play the techie. Home networking is already too complicated, placing too much of a burden on the end user all while hopelessly confusing him. Security, ports, IP addresses, and troubleshooting are still beyond the average TV watcher.
Anybody who assumes these challenges will simply fade away as we put more and more services on our networks is insane. I'm looking at you Chambers.
First off, if China offers a suitably cheaper production cost there a lot of things which firms can forgive. Not everything, but many things. They have done so in the past and will continue in the future.
But the problem you relate has already been handled in trade management. The PRC has been suppressing and controlling things for a long time now. It's just a question of effectiveness, cost, etc.
There are many schemes the PRC could implement. A licensing program with a suitable price-tag and oversight could keep only certain firms/people online (effectiveness would be great enough to disuade the average citizen). Special telecom zones could allow direct Internet access. They could tier service so that "business-class" Internet meant regular access and was too expensive for anyone else. Finally, if they really do create a subnetwork that they control (could be done), then it would be very plausible to control what any given nodes do - giving firms special priveleges. Oh yeah, and businesses can always get government discounts on those expensive services, sometimes all-expensives-paid.
Actually, I am sure the PRC has similar programs in place for other things.
This should be universal knowledge for educators/students/anyone who wants to use Wikipedia. Every Wikipedia article revision is given an id/timestamp and every revision can be accessed by URI with the id. In this regard, Wikipedia is more reliable than most websites.
Now, on the history page of the article, you can see a list of article versions in chronological order. When you view an older revision, the article URI changes to reflect this older version. The URI of a past revision will look like this (+/. filter):
It's not the keyword, but a specific domain. Only bmw.de was penalized and not, for example, the international portal bmw.com. The.de domain has apparently been grossly "offending" for some time, so this probably was not a snap decision. I'm sure someone thought to call PR.
Authorities, including the government, are rarely interested in truth. Facts, sometimes. Accuracy and methodology are not the main issues here - just the name "lie detector", just the concept in the body of a contraption is power. It will never go away.
Foucault spoke of this in Discipline and Punish, where just the placing of a subject under observation was a form of power parading as science.
"The job of *any* court is to protect individual rights."
Only those rights already defined and/or upheld, including the situations in which they apply. Which was the point of Gilmore's case - he's asking "isn't this a violation of my rights in the Constitution" and the court said "not in the Constitution, which is where you have staked your claim."
"The judiciary is a third branch of government. It does not exist to cater to the whims of Congress. It exists to hold the Executive and Congress to the Constitution."
The SC has deferred in the past to both the Executive and Legislative branches. If Congress wants a national day for peanuts and the President signs it into law, the SC probably will not question that "whim." When the Constitution and case law has no conflict, the SC almost always steps out of the way. There are exceptions, however, to most everything the SC does. The appellate court, just so we stay on topic here, functions as a filter for the SC so that cases which are not constitutional in nature, like the peanut day law, never bother the Court and those cases which are constitional in nature but may conflict with existing laws, are sent upward.
Now, this issue may be more important than peanuts, but I already mentioned how not everything important is in the Constitution, which is what Gilmore's case rested on, because Gilmore wanted this to hit the SC.
"This tradition of deferring to higher courts on "decided" matters, though it may be practical at times, is by no means required."
It's as required as the paperwork you need to file a lawsuit. (And no, I don't what the law that stipulates the exact filing procedures is.) First, case law is very much part of law. Else rulings outside the SC would be questionable. Second, the Constitution specifies inferior courts in relation to the Supreme Court. Congress has legislated a court system that complies in this regard and part of the functions of that system are that certain courts have jurisdiction, territorial and operation, and are "higher" than others. Appellate courts are not regular courts and comply with appellate law, granting them special functions - the right to review a trial, for example. If an appellate court breaks all of these, which it can do in one ruling, then the court's ruling may be invalid. Wish I could pull the law that regulates this, but this almost never happens, partly because judges don't want to mess with the turf of other judges.
"Congress never has an interest in individual rights. It was never designed to."
Maybe it never had an interest, but it was designed to represent voters, who are individuals.
The question is, how can we bring this *law* to trial? Procedurally, this law is difficult to pinpoint as the key to a case. Gilmore's case can be ruled on without this "secret" law every having to be submitted, because this is a private carrier. Further, we really don't care so much about the law in question as it's secrecy (which is ludicrous).
Now, what Gilmore probably tried to prove (haven't seen the case briefing) was that it is Constitutionally required that citizens be able to travel in such-and-such a way without ID. I don't recall if this is established anywhere. However assuming it was, this cannot, via the Constitution, be considered a mandate to force private carriers to comply with the Constitution. That is another hurdle entirely. Getting a ruling on this matter would surely step on more than a few big toes. Also, this is really two issues: travel and ID. That's a recipe for indirection by the defense.
What we need is a case scenario where 1)this law is required by existing statutes to be available upon request (i.e. as part of a contract or something), 2)the law/directive is withheld by the government, 3)the law breaks existing statutes, and 4)the law withholds something which is linked to a Constitutional right, by intent or effect.
An even better scenario is where a carrier disobeys the government directive, the government reprimands them, and the carrier counters with a suit (the government might then open multiple cases against them to revoke their operations license). That would be like IBM telling the patent office to void their claims though. It would also really hurt any good will in Congress, which carrier corporations periodically need.
What's the real problem here? Executive orders and lesser "directives" are not well integrated into the legal system. The Executive branch is not really regulated, but it clearly needs it. Part of this has to do with foriegn policy interests, national security, and a bunch of other ares where the U.S. government is less than democratic. The Supreme Court rarely, if ever, touches executive branch directives unless they are in clear violation of the Constitution (not just any law) and previous SC rulings in particular.
So, if we need existing laws to be broken in order for this case to get to court, it is imperative that the executive branch policies be the only reason for this disjunction. The problem is, I'm not sure this has ever been established. Government action is well protected here through private business. It's a two-layer game that is difficult to play ball in unless you already have judges on your side.
Paez is an appeals court judge. He doesn't make the law and he doesn't decide what the Constitution means. He is only interested in upholding existing law and existing Constitutional interpretation (such as it is). If a case does not seem to fall within these limits (i.e. the issue is not "Constitutional"), he is obliged to only consider whether the trial was properly conducted. These are the checks an appeal court handles in the system.
The Constitution is not meant to include *all* our rights. That was by design. Just because a right is not in the Constitution does not mean it doesn't exist or can't exist. It's sloppy interpretation to say any given right that we "should" have is somewhere in the Constitution if only we can extrapolate it. Not all the rights we want/need/deserve are there.
The fact that the Federal system may not be working right, that Congress may have no interest in individual rights, etc. does not change the job of an appeals court.
According to another Wiki article, the parents originally tried to force a German publisher to remove from sale a piece of fiction that had a character with their son's handle, Tron. Allegedly, the publisher declined saying that the Wikipedia used the name. The parents now pursue Wikipedia.
This is all completely based on the Wiki article, though.
I agree, Wikipedia is not a source for scholarship. (The concept and application are not reliable to that end.) I disagree that a thesis cannot depend upon Wikipedia.
Wikipedia can be used as an object of scholarship - to inquire about the successfulness of collaboration on the Internet, the evolution of articles over time, and as a case study for any number of things. Wikipedia can be studied and it is a fascinating phenomena - NPOV vs. POV debates, mechanism of accountability (such as they are), and how the community functions are all interesting. An economic, political, psychological, or sociological analysis of Wikipedia could be very enlightening. One could even consider philosophical claims in light of Wikipedia's alleged success. The point being, research studying the Internet is valid - Wikipedia included.
When there is actual competition, not just two companies bouncing off one another. Now that we have three serious browsers again, Microsoft's IE Gorilla has to compete with both a lighter, refined Opera and an infinitely customizable, OS Firefox. I expect this particular emphasis has to do with Opera on the cellphones, which seems to be where they will try to make their stand against IE.
The PRC has no civil liberties, so there is nothing to respect. Far from making things simple, that actually is the biggest challenge of maintaining order, because the PRC has to live up to Big Brother.
Ironically, this is probably a very popular policy in China, as the majority of the country is what Americans would call hardline conservative. This is especially true in rural areas. Not so much in the cities, which are changing so fast no one is really in control. Of course, I really can't quantify this, because polling is basically illegal. But the Japanese who have experience in visiting China, particularly students, will vouch for me.
Because porn is basically illegal, it also tends to be associated with a lot of nasty things like child exploitation, so justifying a crackdown (make no mistake, everything needs a justification, even if the PRC is authoritarian) is fairly simple when your labeling system is crude. Just another example of why authoritarian systems really fail in the long run. It's not because there is too much dissent, its because governments really aren't that capable.
Slashdot Mirror
One ironic fact is that China is the leading exporter in IT products (OECD figures). Their biggest customers? Japan and the U.S., naturally.
Open source communities, including users, foster somewhat different attitudes and habits about software complexity. In a way, I expect an OSS package to show me its complexity up front. I want to know more about what my software is doing, how to configure it, etc. I don't "buy" OSS based on how shiny it is or whether or not the salesperson was attractive. And I try not to buy out of sheer ignorance either. So complexity - or someone's idea of it - is a definite plus. Much better than half-assed "simple".
;)
For a Microsoft product, I fully expect that its going to balance stupid with too-simple. Thus its usefulness to me is significantly diminished. But I know people who are exactly the opposite, and look at a Microsoft product as keeping them from having to know things about their computer. Me, I'm more worried that I don't know enough
I myself was curious about how you do a random sample of blogs. Apparently, Pew used a telephone survey whereby they first asked if the adult maintained a blog and then they did their survey based on those who claimed that they did. Their sample of the latter group was only 233.
You can find the actual study at the Pew website.
I happen to agree with you; NPOV is a fiction. Still, I always wondered about this, as the idea struck me as very encyclopedic and similar to the world-view Alasdair MacIntyre described in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition.
Then, one day I was reading Jimbo Wales' Wiki bio. The concept of NPOV may be an application (or possibly a principle) of Objectivism.
Though one could probably have a lot of fun putting Balmer through various "trials", I really don't find this funny. The fact that people of average competence and experience cannot control their own machines (or what runs on them) is a huge problem. It's almost infuriating that Microsoft considers this a simple matter of offering another service, as opposed to backporting changes. They could have made some *very* basic changes earlier in the life of Windows.
But Windows (Vista) is still implementing these changes (like low-priveleged users). What's more, the real issue of tackling human behavior has been almost completely ignored by Microsoft (witness the security prompts in Vista). If one buys additional services/products from Microsoft, aren't we actually *prolonging* the problem? Shouldn't we raise our expectations before we go another round on the upgrade cycle?
Aside from the all-important issue of "does it look right?", there is the professional issue of what sort of standards you should apply to your work. It's difficult to come close to a more extensive (and yet simple to implement) baseline metric of quality control with HTML/CSS than the W3C parser. Sure, I could go through and decide how I am going to do everything, but that's time-intensive and inflexible. Running something through the parser gives me a fast and consistent report. I can do whatever I want with the results, but they are there.
It does not solve problems for you or guarantee much of anything, but it allows you to see your formatting code in a more objective way. As a bonus, it can help you spot potential problems, mistakes, and open your eyes to some of the structure you are relying upon.
I always use the Tidy Firefox extension. It is a little friendlier than the online W3C parser interface. Disclaimer: not a professional web designer.
A lot of people promote democracy - "government by the people". Somehow this became a thing for companies to promote and websites to make money off of. But there is more to our idea of democracy that just democracy. There is more to our freedoms than just "do what you want".
The stable democracies today are heavily influenced by Western/liberal democratic republicanism. The Communist statists learned the hard way that founding a society/order on one system was unmaintainable.
The problem in governments is unchecked power. Whether it's the mob or the elite, power needs to be balanced. Digg quite naturally needs to find ways to balance power. Executive powers are always necessary at some point, so it shouldn't be surprising that Digg exercises them. Democracy is only a *part* of the system.
If you think about it, our centrist ideals of freedom really are not absolute freedom, but a balance of freedom and responsibility. We exchange some liberty for a more controlled system.
A number of the last two generations of PRC leaders have been engineers. Most of them were trained in a Soviet-style polytechnic university (like Hu), some even in the Soviet Union. This goes back to the close ties the Soviets and the PRC had until 1969, when Mao had ambitions of taking over Stalin's post as "father" to the Communist world (never happened). The relationship between universities goes back really to the 1910's; while Paris was a hot place for talk about ideology, Russia was much more active and inspirational.
After the PRC was formed, Mao quickly enacted full relations with the Soviets. Part of this push was for industrialization and therefore the state put massive propoganda into engineering. Post-Mao, government firms and projects were the major drivers of industry and therefore engineering was a prime vector to high-level civil service. The only other profession which came close in importance (aside from Party membership, which was mandatory for top beaurocrats anyway) was the military, but Deng Xiaoping held the military in check, promising better funding if the main-line economy was stimulated.
So that's why we see a rapidly expanding military budget and a government run by former engineers. The next generation will probably be technical as well, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a few economists in the mix. You will not be seeing too many lawers or private-industry businessmen for a while yet though (still they are allowed in the CCP now).
I am not a gamer (no real time for that), but sometimes I want to play a not-to-involved game. There were only two reasons I bought a gamecube:
1) It was cheap (only $100 with controller and a game, if I recall correctly)
2) It had some fun games (Metroid, Zelda, Mario, the usual)
I knew next to nothing else about the thing. I think more about ordering a meal at a resturant than I did about this purchase. Now, my PC is a different story, but consoles are for recreation. Keep it simple, cheap, and fun please.
I don't think you have any rights related to software you can't completely control yourself. Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong here. That said, my experience with most RPG's is that they involve a lot of repetition (which is why the guy programmed some macros). Apparently this is part of the official, mandatory WoW experience. That would explain why goldfarming (or whatever it's called in the game) is so popular. Someone at Blizzard must have taken econ101 somewhere along the line?
The fact that Blizzard needs to know if you're sitting at your computer or not is a bit disturbing, however. Like a parent.
Moreover, why does anyone at Cisco think making casual communication more complicated (and expensive) is going to succeed? When I want to watch the game with friends, I don't want to play the techie. Home networking is already too complicated, placing too much of a burden on the end user all while hopelessly confusing him. Security, ports, IP addresses, and troubleshooting are still beyond the average TV watcher.
Anybody who assumes these challenges will simply fade away as we put more and more services on our networks is insane. I'm looking at you Chambers.
First off, if China offers a suitably cheaper production cost there a lot of things which firms can forgive. Not everything, but many things. They have done so in the past and will continue in the future.
But the problem you relate has already been handled in trade management. The PRC has been suppressing and controlling things for a long time now. It's just a question of effectiveness, cost, etc.
There are many schemes the PRC could implement. A licensing program with a suitable price-tag and oversight could keep only certain firms/people online (effectiveness would be great enough to disuade the average citizen). Special telecom zones could allow direct Internet access. They could tier service so that "business-class" Internet meant regular access and was too expensive for anyone else. Finally, if they really do create a subnetwork that they control (could be done), then it would be very plausible to control what any given nodes do - giving firms special priveleges. Oh yeah, and businesses can always get government discounts on those expensive services, sometimes all-expensives-paid.
Actually, I am sure the PRC has similar programs in place for other things.
This should be universal knowledge for educators/students/anyone who wants to use Wikipedia. Every Wikipedia article revision is given an id/timestamp and every revision can be accessed by URI with the id. In this regard, Wikipedia is more reliable than most websites.
i cle
:// en.wikipedia. org /w/ index.php?title=wikiarticle &oldid=5139350
The typical Wikipedia article URL looks like so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=wikiart
Now, on the history page of the article, you can see a list of article versions in chronological order. When you view an older revision, the article URI changes to reflect this older version. The URI of a past revision will look like this (+/. filter):
http
Just copy the URI which specifies an id.
For more information on citations, see Citing Wikipedia
It's not the keyword, but a specific domain. Only bmw.de was penalized and not, for example, the international portal bmw.com. The .de domain has apparently been grossly "offending" for some time, so this probably was not a snap decision. I'm sure someone thought to call PR.
Authorities, including the government, are rarely interested in truth. Facts, sometimes. Accuracy and methodology are not the main issues here - just the name "lie detector", just the concept in the body of a contraption is power. It will never go away.
Foucault spoke of this in Discipline and Punish, where just the placing of a subject under observation was a form of power parading as science.
Rumsfield has an incredible history of hand motions.
Woah, "revisionism?" Sorry?
"The job of *any* court is to protect individual rights."
Only those rights already defined and/or upheld, including the situations in which they apply. Which was the point of Gilmore's case - he's asking "isn't this a violation of my rights in the Constitution" and the court said "not in the Constitution, which is where you have staked your claim."
"The judiciary is a third branch of government. It does not exist to cater to the whims of Congress. It exists to hold the Executive and Congress to the Constitution."
The SC has deferred in the past to both the Executive and Legislative branches. If Congress wants a national day for peanuts and the President signs it into law, the SC probably will not question that "whim." When the Constitution and case law has no conflict, the SC almost always steps out of the way. There are exceptions, however, to most everything the SC does. The appellate court, just so we stay on topic here, functions as a filter for the SC so that cases which are not constitutional in nature, like the peanut day law, never bother the Court and those cases which are constitional in nature but may conflict with existing laws, are sent upward.
Now, this issue may be more important than peanuts, but I already mentioned how not everything important is in the Constitution, which is what Gilmore's case rested on, because Gilmore wanted this to hit the SC.
"This tradition of deferring to higher courts on "decided" matters, though it may be practical at times, is by no means required."
It's as required as the paperwork you need to file a lawsuit. (And no, I don't what the law that stipulates the exact filing procedures is.) First, case law is very much part of law. Else rulings outside the SC would be questionable. Second, the Constitution specifies inferior courts in relation to the Supreme Court. Congress has legislated a court system that complies in this regard and part of the functions of that system are that certain courts have jurisdiction, territorial and operation, and are "higher" than others. Appellate courts are not regular courts and comply with appellate law, granting them special functions - the right to review a trial, for example. If an appellate court breaks all of these, which it can do in one ruling, then the court's ruling may be invalid. Wish I could pull the law that regulates this, but this almost never happens, partly because judges don't want to mess with the turf of other judges.
"Congress never has an interest in individual rights. It was never designed to."
Maybe it never had an interest, but it was designed to represent voters, who are individuals.
The question is, how can we bring this *law* to trial? Procedurally, this law is difficult to pinpoint as the key to a case. Gilmore's case can be ruled on without this "secret" law every having to be submitted, because this is a private carrier. Further, we really don't care so much about the law in question as it's secrecy (which is ludicrous).
Now, what Gilmore probably tried to prove (haven't seen the case briefing) was that it is Constitutionally required that citizens be able to travel in such-and-such a way without ID. I don't recall if this is established anywhere. However assuming it was, this cannot, via the Constitution, be considered a mandate to force private carriers to comply with the Constitution. That is another hurdle entirely. Getting a ruling on this matter would surely step on more than a few big toes. Also, this is really two issues: travel and ID. That's a recipe for indirection by the defense.
What we need is a case scenario where 1)this law is required by existing statutes to be available upon request (i.e. as part of a contract or something), 2)the law/directive is withheld by the government, 3)the law breaks existing statutes, and 4)the law withholds something which is linked to a Constitutional right, by intent or effect.
An even better scenario is where a carrier disobeys the government directive, the government reprimands them, and the carrier counters with a suit (the government might then open multiple cases against them to revoke their operations license). That would be like IBM telling the patent office to void their claims though. It would also really hurt any good will in Congress, which carrier corporations periodically need.
What's the real problem here? Executive orders and lesser "directives" are not well integrated into the legal system. The Executive branch is not really regulated, but it clearly needs it. Part of this has to do with foriegn policy interests, national security, and a bunch of other ares where the U.S. government is less than democratic. The Supreme Court rarely, if ever, touches executive branch directives unless they are in clear violation of the Constitution (not just any law) and previous SC rulings in particular.
So, if we need existing laws to be broken in order for this case to get to court, it is imperative that the executive branch policies be the only reason for this disjunction. The problem is, I'm not sure this has ever been established. Government action is well protected here through private business. It's a two-layer game that is difficult to play ball in unless you already have judges on your side.
Sorry, you're argument does not apply here.
Paez is an appeals court judge. He doesn't make the law and he doesn't decide what the Constitution means. He is only interested in upholding existing law and existing Constitutional interpretation (such as it is). If a case does not seem to fall within these limits (i.e. the issue is not "Constitutional"), he is obliged to only consider whether the trial was properly conducted. These are the checks an appeal court handles in the system.
The Constitution is not meant to include *all* our rights. That was by design. Just because a right is not in the Constitution does not mean it doesn't exist or can't exist. It's sloppy interpretation to say any given right that we "should" have is somewhere in the Constitution if only we can extrapolate it. Not all the rights we want/need/deserve are there.
The fact that the Federal system may not be working right, that Congress may have no interest in individual rights, etc. does not change the job of an appeals court.
According to another Wiki article, the parents originally tried to force a German publisher to remove from sale a piece of fiction that had a character with their son's handle, Tron. Allegedly, the publisher declined saying that the Wikipedia used the name. The parents now pursue Wikipedia. This is all completely based on the Wiki article, though.
You can download database dumps and you can find some help with importing into a fresh Mediawiki installation. You can try Wikifilter for converting the dump data into HTML.
Douglas Adams, is that you?
I agree, Wikipedia is not a source for scholarship. (The concept and application are not reliable to that end.) I disagree that a thesis cannot depend upon Wikipedia.
Wikipedia can be used as an object of scholarship - to inquire about the successfulness of collaboration on the Internet, the evolution of articles over time, and as a case study for any number of things. Wikipedia can be studied and it is a fascinating phenomena - NPOV vs. POV debates, mechanism of accountability (such as they are), and how the community functions are all interesting. An economic, political, psychological, or sociological analysis of Wikipedia could be very enlightening. One could even consider philosophical claims in light of Wikipedia's alleged success. The point being, research studying the Internet is valid - Wikipedia included.
When there is actual competition, not just two companies bouncing off one another. Now that we have three serious browsers again, Microsoft's IE Gorilla has to compete with both a lighter, refined Opera and an infinitely customizable, OS Firefox. I expect this particular emphasis has to do with Opera on the cellphones, which seems to be where they will try to make their stand against IE.
The PRC has no civil liberties, so there is nothing to respect. Far from making things simple, that actually is the biggest challenge of maintaining order, because the PRC has to live up to Big Brother.
Ironically, this is probably a very popular policy in China, as the majority of the country is what Americans would call hardline conservative. This is especially true in rural areas. Not so much in the cities, which are changing so fast no one is really in control. Of course, I really can't quantify this, because polling is basically illegal. But the Japanese who have experience in visiting China, particularly students, will vouch for me.
Because porn is basically illegal, it also tends to be associated with a lot of nasty things like child exploitation, so justifying a crackdown (make no mistake, everything needs a justification, even if the PRC is authoritarian) is fairly simple when your labeling system is crude. Just another example of why authoritarian systems really fail in the long run. It's not because there is too much dissent, its because governments really aren't that capable.