This is not an accurate description of the law of the sea. Building artificial islands does nothing to increase a state's territorial waters or to expand any other maritime zones it can claim (see Article 121 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a party and which the USA considers customary law). China's building activities do not expand its territorial waters, although it may be difficult to prove later which parts were natural and which were artificial. The building activities do strengthen Chinese presence there. This makes it easier for China to assert its claim to certain "historic rights" in the Sea. China also has disputed claims on a number of features with other states there, such as the Spratlys and Paracels, which leads to differring perceptions of what are territorial and what are international waters in the area.
I agree with the rest of what you say, but I thought it would be good to clarify the legal terminology.
You're confusing courts here. The Hague Invasion Act is directed against the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was only established in the late 1990s to try individuals charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and/or war crimes. The ICJ has been in existence since 1946 (and has a predecessor, the PCIJ or Permanent Court of International Justice set up under the League of Nations) and only tries inter-state cases, like the one you mentioned by Nicaragua in the 1980s.
The article is in The Guardian, so it makes sense for the price of the paintings to be mentioned in pounds, but they could have changed it to euros for the summary. After all, that is the currency in the Netherlands. A bit of googling yielded more details and a price of € 25,000 (about US$ 33,500) for each replica.
But pretty much irrelevant to this story. The neighbourhood in which they found the cabinet is far removed from where the international institutions are and from where the internationals live. As mentioned by previous posts, the Schilderswijk is a low income area with a large immigrant population. The purpose of the cabinet is most likely to help a police investigation into anything between organised crime or jihad recruitment, and on Dutch websites some have already pointed out that exposing this method effectively renders it useless in the future, but police have been doing it for at least ten years. This kind of surveillance was most likely done with the permission of a public prosecutor, unless it was the intelligence services in which case another law applies.
Researcher builds bomb out of articles from airport shops
To demonstrate the futility of current airport security, next week a security expert will demonstrate a remotely controllable bomb. All the materials were bought at the airport once past security.
The detonation mechanism will be presented at security conference Hack in the Box in Amsterdam. It is the result of two years of research by security expert Evan Booth.
“There are all kinds of things we cannot take with us and security checks for those. But it turns out that this doesn’t make much sense,” says Booth.
The detonation mechanism is the result of more than two years of research into deficient security at airports and available materials which are sold the in stores which are located ait airports behind customs.
Drone
To build the mechanism, Booth has used a Zippo lighter, disposable lighters, adhesive tape, dental floss and a remote controlled drone. “Which can be opreated with a mobile phone through a wireless network”, claims Booth.
He used the engine from the drone to operate the zippo lighter. With disposable lighters, it is possible subsequently to create a blowtorch. By doing this, it would be possible to cause a fire, but at the conference Booth will present a more developed concept which even enables the detonation of a bomb.
Simple
“The trick is to prove that you can have dangerous weapons on board without carrying any forbidden items with you”, Booth has stated to NU.nl.
Apart from a bomb, Booth also managed without much effort to create a bow and arrow out of items he had bought in a shop at an airport. For this, he used an umbrella, a hairdryer, socks, a leather belt and condoms. He did not want to further develop things were too obvious, such as using a lighter and deodorant as an alternative gas burner.
Also remarkable is a club he created out of a souvenir, some magazines, dental floss, a leather belt and adhesive tape. During a test, this club turned out to be so solid that a single strike sufficed to break a coconut into several pieces.
Profiling
“Airport security has not been done well for a while now. What annoys me, is that we spend a lot of money on it and, for example, violate people’s privacy with body scanners. In the meantime, it turns out it doesn’t work well”, explains Booth.
“It is a difficult problem, but I don’t know if this security makes any sense at all. I believe more in good intelligence and preventing the wrong people from coming to the airport.”
To pre-empt problems with authorities, Booth has contacted the responsible government agencies in the United States in February. “I have offered to demonstrate my research and provide explanations, but I haven’t received any response. In the meantime, I have continued my research.”
Thanks. That clarifies things a bit and you also raise an important point regarding the difference between diplomatic asylum and other cases of people seeking refuge in an embassy.
Before we all get too worked up about the US not recognising the concept of diplomatic asylum (too late I guess), there's less here than meets the eye. Diplomatic asylum is a concept that has long been accepted in Latin America, and it developed there in part because of some periods in which there were many coups and people trying to escape from new regimes found refuge in foreign embassies. Diplomatic asylum is however not the same as Chinese dissidents seeking refuge in the US embassy in Beijing or the Cold War cases, as parent points out, and this reflects that outside of Latin America, the concept of diplomatic asylum is not accepted under international law. That's why it's sometimes described as regional international law. Chinese and other dissidents are rather making use of the diplomatic immunity that these places enjoy, which prevents the authorities of the host state from exercising their jurisdiction on the premises but doesn't mean they can leave.
So while Ecuador sees the Assange case as a one of diplomatic asylum, the UK only accepts the immunity of the embassy (and if the story about threats is to be believed, not even that - but that would be a violation of international law). Had the UK accepted the notion of diplomatic asylum under international law, it could also grant safe passage to Assange to leave for Ecuador upon recognition of the diplomatic asylum granted by Ecuador. In any case, both UK practice and the US position reflect longstanding positions of international law, regardless of what we think about all the other aspects of the case.
I'd like to say at this point IANAL, but I can't, since I'm actually an international lawyer.
The summary misstates the person responsible for using Comic Sans in the Higgs boson announcement. The full quote:
Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, kindly e-mailed Fabiola Gianotti on my behalf. Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs boson, provided a compelling rationale for why she had used Comic Sans. When asked, she said, “Because I like it.”
I was already wondering why a Harvard physicist would be making the announcement of a discovery by CERN.
I doesn't seem that anyone was claiming that MIT were the first, but as long as we're looking at prior art: the first Tetris-on-a-builiding was done by electrical engineering students in Delft, the Netherlands, all the way back in 1995, as you can see on this archived webpage. Futhermore, students at Brown University did it in 2000 (BBC article here). Both prior projects, but not Blinkenlights, are mentioned in an article about the MIT project here. It seems to me that each of these projects has something the others didn't, so no need to be competive about it - it's all in good fun.
Did anyone notice the unintended irony of the word "groupthink" in the Global Times article?
The economic and social turmoil in the US, Britain and France might trigger a worldwide groupthink and introspection on the boundaries of democracy and freedom of speech.
For such a short summary, it sure contains a lot of errors. Kojima is not even a founder of Konami - the company was established in 1969, and Kojima was born in 1963. He only joined Konami's MSX division in 1986, when the company had already been making video games for a while. He did go on to become a VP for a while. And this error isn't even in the original article.
Apologies for the reply to self, but I tried a few more links which did not resolve, but the current IHT landing page says it all: "The most recent IHT articles can now be found by searching NYTimes.com. We are in the process of moving IHT articles dating back to 1991 over to NYTimes.com. Thanks for your patience as we complete this transition."
Interesting. I got quite upset with the IHT-NYT change a while ago for exactly this reason: many bookmarks and links to news articles that I had made throughout the years evaporated overnight, making me regret not printing or saving the text of those articles when I had the chance. But apparently the NYT has fixed it now. Crampton links to two articles of a scoop he had a few years ago, and they resolve to a new page. And a bookmark that I have on the computer I'm working on now has the same thing, suggesting that they must have transferred their news archive to the new site.
Thank you for this and obviously for the work you put into the EEE PC kernel, which I am using on my 901 in the unfortunately named Easy Peasy. I'd just like to add for information that even though my wireless card works fine on WPA and other networks, I have not been able to get LEAP or PEAP working, and therefore assume that something is still not working properly even with 1.7.1.1. People who need this kind of authentication may be better off getting a netbook with a different chipset.
Without entering into any of the other aspects of this discussion, I'd just like to clarify what the criteria for statehood are according to international law: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
The borders actually do not need to be fixed, as long as the territory is defined, and the significance of the fourth criterion is subject to discussion, which depends on whether you follow the declaratory theory of statehood, which only looks at the objective criteria, or the constitutive theory of statehood, which holds that states only exist to the extent that they are recognised by other states.
The declarative theory is slightly more dominant. According to this theory, Palestine is a state (and so is Taiwan). According to the constitutive theory, Palestine's statehood is severely restricted (and so is Taiwan's). In any case, all the questions about recognition by various countries and the UN are in category (d). Palestine has a head of state. Whether it has a currency is irrelevant, and embassies and diplomatic immunity are a result of recognition. Being occupied does not end statehood.
Oops, thanks for pointing this out. I did know that the President is the Commander-in-Chief, but I phrased that sentence badly. What I meant is that it is not likely that Bush will be charged with aggression in any country, but both he and (former) members of his administration such as Rumsfeld may be charged with war crimes in other countries.
I'm not exactly an expert on US constitutional law (and I'm a European like you), but I do seem to remember that international treaties are generally considered to be the "law of the land" in the USA in accordance with its Constitution and longstanding jurisprudence. Violating the UN Charter would therefore automatically be a violation of US law, although I don't know if this is sufficient basis for impeachment, so I hope a knowledgeable US contributor can elaborate on this.
In any case, in terms of international law, invading a sovereign nation in violation of the UN Charter (in particular article 2(4)) may well fulfill the requirements of the international crime of aggression (which has not yet been defined, so individuals cannot yet be charged with it at international law at the moment). It is not very likely that Bush will be charged with this in any country, but there is a real risk that members of his administration, including possibly the C-in-C himself, will be prosecuted in some countries for war crimes, specifically torture in violation of the Convention against Torture and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, for what happened in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. International law provides various bases for jurisdiction outside the US. And Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment may prove useful in establishing the case for the prosecutors.
I tried: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/technology/10google.html [nytimes.com], but got redirected to a login page. Perhaps you're a subscriber? or my country isn't allowed to login automatically & yours is? Really? I clicked your link and it led to the article. I'm in the UK, but also at a university. I'll give it a try at home tonight (although I don't think you'll care much for the result).
The NYT hasn't been required registration since last September, when it also dropped its "Times Select" strategy of paying for its columnists that didn't work out. The link from the summary still contains the "?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin" bit, but even if you are not signed in you can access the article just as easily as on the website of the IHT (which, by the way, is fully owned by the NYT company).
Not sure if you're being serious, sarcastic or ironic, but: last week the news was that the English versin of the BBC News website was unblocked, this week it's Wikipedia. And in case you still feel like you're suffering from deja vu, yes, we've been here before. I remember that last year, when I lived in China for three months, Wikipedia was blocked. However, soon after I left in June or maybe even a few days before my departure, the English version was unblocked. Apparently, it got blocked again in the intervening period. I am not sure whether the blocking and the unblocking of Wikipedia in China counts as news, but the unblocking of the BBC certainly was. Unfortunately, there's no telling how long access will continue to exist and as has been noted in many places, Chinese blocking software is by now sophisticated enough to block certain pages or reset the connection if certain words are found in the packets.
The article is just a string of unrelated generalisations that may strike a chord when you first read it, but as soon as you think a bit longer it doesn't hold up. First, as many previous reactions have pointed out, Microsoft was never really liked in tech circles, starting with Bill Gates' letter against copying, even when it stood up to IBM. It was more popular in business circles and still is, despite decades of ridicule of BSODs, using the "Start" button to shut down a computer, and Microsoft's business practices. Apple has been loved and hated ever since it was founded around the same time as Microsoft.
Reisinger relies on people having a poor memory or being too young to remember the eighties and nineties to make a point that doesn't hold up and since his initial premise is faulty, the rest of the piece is no longer worth reading. To add to that, he puts in sentences like "[a]s I've shown, popularity and success breeds jealousy and disdain" even though he hasn't demonstrated that at all - in fact, it's the first time he mentions it. Apparently he has "shown" this in another column in this series, in which he merely claims that Google's popularity and success bred jealousy and disdain in Microsoft, which may be true but hardly supports the point he's making, whatever it is. But anyway, I should have known that I could stop reading when he said "going forward" and didn't refer to a vehicle.
It is a mistake to assume that governments still have unlimited leeway to do whatever they want within their borders. That is why we have human rights: to protect individual citizens against their states, and that's why organisations like Human Rights Watch can express opinions on the human rights situation in all countries, including China. In the past sixty years, these rights have grown from what you would probably call utopian ideals into actual legal rights in international law, so much so that the originally non-binding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, is now considered to be an expression of customary international law. If a notion of customary law is too vague for you, the fact still remains that the great majority of states have signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the freedom of speech in Article 19, which includes the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds". This right can only be restricted in accordance with the provisions of that article. China has signed up to this treaty, although it still has to ratify it. However, as a matter of treaty law it has to refrain from acts which would be incompatible with the purpose of the treaty there's quite a strong argument that arbitrary censorship violates it.
I will be the first to admit that there are all kinds of shortcomings in the protection of human rights through international treaties, but the only point that I want to make here is that you are incorrect when you state that every government "has the right to dictate the rules within its boundaries". That right is no longer absolute, and in large part this is the result of governments providing the stick they are beaten with themselves by signing human rights treaties. It took only sixty years to get where we are now, so the utopian society you mention may be less than a thousand years away.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not an accurate description of the law of the sea. Building artificial islands does nothing to increase a state's territorial waters or to expand any other maritime zones it can claim (see Article 121 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which China is a party and which the USA considers customary law). China's building activities do not expand its territorial waters, although it may be difficult to prove later which parts were natural and which were artificial. The building activities do strengthen Chinese presence there. This makes it easier for China to assert its claim to certain "historic rights" in the Sea. China also has disputed claims on a number of features with other states there, such as the Spratlys and Paracels, which leads to differring perceptions of what are territorial and what are international waters in the area.
I agree with the rest of what you say, but I thought it would be good to clarify the legal terminology.
Iron-rich midichlorians? Hell yeah, you can sign me up for a test run!
You're confusing courts here. The Hague Invasion Act is directed against the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was only established in the late 1990s to try individuals charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and/or war crimes. The ICJ has been in existence since 1946 (and has a predecessor, the PCIJ or Permanent Court of International Justice set up under the League of Nations) and only tries inter-state cases, like the one you mentioned by Nicaragua in the 1980s.
The article is in The Guardian, so it makes sense for the price of the paintings to be mentioned in pounds, but they could have changed it to euros for the summary. After all, that is the currency in the Netherlands. A bit of googling yielded more details and a price of € 25,000 (about US$ 33,500) for each replica.
But pretty much irrelevant to this story. The neighbourhood in which they found the cabinet is far removed from where the international institutions are and from where the internationals live. As mentioned by previous posts, the Schilderswijk is a low income area with a large immigrant population. The purpose of the cabinet is most likely to help a police investigation into anything between organised crime or jihad recruitment, and on Dutch websites some have already pointed out that exposing this method effectively renders it useless in the future, but police have been doing it for at least ten years. This kind of surveillance was most likely done with the permission of a public prosecutor, unless it was the intelligence services in which case another law applies.
Researcher builds bomb out of articles from airport shops
To demonstrate the futility of current airport security, next week a security expert will demonstrate a remotely controllable bomb. All the materials were bought at the airport once past security.
The detonation mechanism will be presented at security conference Hack in the Box in Amsterdam. It is the result of two years of research by security expert Evan Booth.
“There are all kinds of things we cannot take with us and security checks for those. But it turns out that this doesn’t make much sense,” says Booth.
The detonation mechanism is the result of more than two years of research into deficient security at airports and available materials which are sold the in stores which are located ait airports behind customs.
Drone
To build the mechanism, Booth has used a Zippo lighter, disposable lighters, adhesive tape, dental floss and a remote controlled drone. “Which can be opreated with a mobile phone through a wireless network”, claims Booth.
He used the engine from the drone to operate the zippo lighter. With disposable lighters, it is possible subsequently to create a blowtorch. By doing this, it would be possible to cause a fire, but at the conference Booth will present a more developed concept which even enables the detonation of a bomb.
Simple
“The trick is to prove that you can have dangerous weapons on board without carrying any forbidden items with you”, Booth has stated to NU.nl.
Apart from a bomb, Booth also managed without much effort to create a bow and arrow out of items he had bought in a shop at an airport. For this, he used an umbrella, a hairdryer, socks, a leather belt and condoms. He did not want to further develop things were too obvious, such as using a lighter and deodorant as an alternative gas burner.
Also remarkable is a club he created out of a souvenir, some magazines, dental floss, a leather belt and adhesive tape. During a test, this club turned out to be so solid that a single strike sufficed to break a coconut into several pieces.
Profiling
“Airport security has not been done well for a while now. What annoys me, is that we spend a lot of money on it and, for example, violate people’s privacy with body scanners. In the meantime, it turns out it doesn’t work well”, explains Booth.
“It is a difficult problem, but I don’t know if this security makes any sense at all. I believe more in good intelligence and preventing the wrong people from coming to the airport.”
To pre-empt problems with authorities, Booth has contacted the responsible government agencies in the United States in February. “I have offered to demonstrate my research and provide explanations, but I haven’t received any response. In the meantime, I have continued my research.”
Thanks. That clarifies things a bit and you also raise an important point regarding the difference between diplomatic asylum and other cases of people seeking refuge in an embassy.
Before we all get too worked up about the US not recognising the concept of diplomatic asylum (too late I guess), there's less here than meets the eye. Diplomatic asylum is a concept that has long been accepted in Latin America, and it developed there in part because of some periods in which there were many coups and people trying to escape from new regimes found refuge in foreign embassies. Diplomatic asylum is however not the same as Chinese dissidents seeking refuge in the US embassy in Beijing or the Cold War cases, as parent points out, and this reflects that outside of Latin America, the concept of diplomatic asylum is not accepted under international law. That's why it's sometimes described as regional international law. Chinese and other dissidents are rather making use of the diplomatic immunity that these places enjoy, which prevents the authorities of the host state from exercising their jurisdiction on the premises but doesn't mean they can leave.
So while Ecuador sees the Assange case as a one of diplomatic asylum, the UK only accepts the immunity of the embassy (and if the story about threats is to be believed, not even that - but that would be a violation of international law). Had the UK accepted the notion of diplomatic asylum under international law, it could also grant safe passage to Assange to leave for Ecuador upon recognition of the diplomatic asylum granted by Ecuador. In any case, both UK practice and the US position reflect longstanding positions of international law, regardless of what we think about all the other aspects of the case.
I'd like to say at this point IANAL, but I can't, since I'm actually an international lawyer.
Funny - I noticed the same mistake (and posted it before I noticed that you did). And then I thought of the same joke, but didn't bother to make it.
The summary misstates the person responsible for using Comic Sans in the Higgs boson announcement. The full quote:
Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, kindly e-mailed Fabiola Gianotti on my behalf. Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs boson, provided a compelling rationale for why she had used Comic Sans. When asked, she said, “Because I like it.”
I was already wondering why a Harvard physicist would be making the announcement of a discovery by CERN.
I doesn't seem that anyone was claiming that MIT were the first, but as long as we're looking at prior art: the first Tetris-on-a-builiding was done by electrical engineering students in Delft, the Netherlands, all the way back in 1995, as you can see on this archived webpage. Futhermore, students at Brown University did it in 2000 (BBC article here). Both prior projects, but not Blinkenlights, are mentioned in an article about the MIT project here. It seems to me that each of these projects has something the others didn't, so no need to be competive about it - it's all in good fun.
Did anyone notice the unintended irony of the word "groupthink" in the Global Times article?
The economic and social turmoil in the US, Britain and France might trigger a worldwide groupthink and introspection on the boundaries of democracy and freedom of speech.
Cool. It's like a new and improved version of the prank involving the lengthy name of the new German Foreign Minister last year.
For such a short summary, it sure contains a lot of errors. Kojima is not even a founder of Konami - the company was established in 1969, and Kojima was born in 1963. He only joined Konami's MSX division in 1986, when the company had already been making video games for a while. He did go on to become a VP for a while. And this error isn't even in the original article.
Apologies for the reply to self, but I tried a few more links which did not resolve, but the current IHT landing page says it all: "The most recent IHT articles can now be found by searching NYTimes.com. We are in the process of moving IHT articles dating back to 1991 over to NYTimes.com. Thanks for your patience as we complete this transition."
Interesting. I got quite upset with the IHT-NYT change a while ago for exactly this reason: many bookmarks and links to news articles that I had made throughout the years evaporated overnight, making me regret not printing or saving the text of those articles when I had the chance. But apparently the NYT has fixed it now. Crampton links to two articles of a scoop he had a few years ago, and they resolve to a new page. And a bookmark that I have on the computer I'm working on now has the same thing, suggesting that they must have transferred their news archive to the new site.
The original bookmark: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/24/opinion/edcardenas.php now resolves to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24iht-edcardenas.1.20395821.html
I'll try it later with my other bookmarks, but it seems like they have responded to the criticism well.
Thank you for this and obviously for the work you put into the EEE PC kernel, which I am using on my 901 in the unfortunately named Easy Peasy. I'd just like to add for information that even though my wireless card works fine on WPA and other networks, I have not been able to get LEAP or PEAP working, and therefore assume that something is still not working properly even with 1.7.1.1. People who need this kind of authentication may be better off getting a netbook with a different chipset.
Berlusconi is not the president of Italy. He's the prime minister. The president is Giorgio Napolitano.
Without entering into any of the other aspects of this discussion, I'd just like to clarify what the criteria for statehood are according to international law: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
The borders actually do not need to be fixed, as long as the territory is defined, and the significance of the fourth criterion is subject to discussion, which depends on whether you follow the declaratory theory of statehood, which only looks at the objective criteria, or the constitutive theory of statehood, which holds that states only exist to the extent that they are recognised by other states.
The declarative theory is slightly more dominant. According to this theory, Palestine is a state (and so is Taiwan). According to the constitutive theory, Palestine's statehood is severely restricted (and so is Taiwan's). In any case, all the questions about recognition by various countries and the UN are in category (d). Palestine has a head of state. Whether it has a currency is irrelevant, and embassies and diplomatic immunity are a result of recognition. Being occupied does not end statehood.
Oops, thanks for pointing this out. I did know that the President is the Commander-in-Chief, but I phrased that sentence badly. What I meant is that it is not likely that Bush will be charged with aggression in any country, but both he and (former) members of his administration such as Rumsfeld may be charged with war crimes in other countries.
I'm not exactly an expert on US constitutional law (and I'm a European like you), but I do seem to remember that international treaties are generally considered to be the "law of the land" in the USA in accordance with its Constitution and longstanding jurisprudence. Violating the UN Charter would therefore automatically be a violation of US law, although I don't know if this is sufficient basis for impeachment, so I hope a knowledgeable US contributor can elaborate on this.
In any case, in terms of international law, invading a sovereign nation in violation of the UN Charter (in particular article 2(4)) may well fulfill the requirements of the international crime of aggression (which has not yet been defined, so individuals cannot yet be charged with it at international law at the moment). It is not very likely that Bush will be charged with this in any country, but there is a real risk that members of his administration, including possibly the C-in-C himself, will be prosecuted in some countries for war crimes, specifically torture in violation of the Convention against Torture and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, for what happened in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. International law provides various bases for jurisdiction outside the US. And Kucinich's Articles of Impeachment may prove useful in establishing the case for the prosecutors.
The NYT hasn't been required registration since last September, when it also dropped its "Times Select" strategy of paying for its columnists that didn't work out. The link from the summary still contains the "?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin" bit, but even if you are not signed in you can access the article just as easily as on the website of the IHT (which, by the way, is fully owned by the NYT company).
Not sure if you're being serious, sarcastic or ironic, but: last week the news was that the English versin of the BBC News website was unblocked, this week it's Wikipedia. And in case you still feel like you're suffering from deja vu, yes, we've been here before. I remember that last year, when I lived in China for three months, Wikipedia was blocked. However, soon after I left in June or maybe even a few days before my departure, the English version was unblocked. Apparently, it got blocked again in the intervening period. I am not sure whether the blocking and the unblocking of Wikipedia in China counts as news, but the unblocking of the BBC certainly was. Unfortunately, there's no telling how long access will continue to exist and as has been noted in many places, Chinese blocking software is by now sophisticated enough to block certain pages or reset the connection if certain words are found in the packets.
The article is just a string of unrelated generalisations that may strike a chord when you first read it, but as soon as you think a bit longer it doesn't hold up. First, as many previous reactions have pointed out, Microsoft was never really liked in tech circles, starting with Bill Gates' letter against copying, even when it stood up to IBM. It was more popular in business circles and still is, despite decades of ridicule of BSODs, using the "Start" button to shut down a computer, and Microsoft's business practices. Apple has been loved and hated ever since it was founded around the same time as Microsoft.
Reisinger relies on people having a poor memory or being too young to remember the eighties and nineties to make a point that doesn't hold up and since his initial premise is faulty, the rest of the piece is no longer worth reading. To add to that, he puts in sentences like "[a]s I've shown, popularity and success breeds jealousy and disdain" even though he hasn't demonstrated that at all - in fact, it's the first time he mentions it. Apparently he has "shown" this in another column in this series, in which he merely claims that Google's popularity and success bred jealousy and disdain in Microsoft, which may be true but hardly supports the point he's making, whatever it is. But anyway, I should have known that I could stop reading when he said "going forward" and didn't refer to a vehicle.
It is a mistake to assume that governments still have unlimited leeway to do whatever they want within their borders. That is why we have human rights: to protect individual citizens against their states, and that's why organisations like Human Rights Watch can express opinions on the human rights situation in all countries, including China. In the past sixty years, these rights have grown from what you would probably call utopian ideals into actual legal rights in international law, so much so that the originally non-binding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, is now considered to be an expression of customary international law. If a notion of customary law is too vague for you, the fact still remains that the great majority of states have signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the freedom of speech in Article 19, which includes the "freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds". This right can only be restricted in accordance with the provisions of that article. China has signed up to this treaty, although it still has to ratify it. However, as a matter of treaty law it has to refrain from acts which would be incompatible with the purpose of the treaty there's quite a strong argument that arbitrary censorship violates it.
I will be the first to admit that there are all kinds of shortcomings in the protection of human rights through international treaties, but the only point that I want to make here is that you are incorrect when you state that every government "has the right to dictate the rules within its boundaries". That right is no longer absolute, and in large part this is the result of governments providing the stick they are beaten with themselves by signing human rights treaties. It took only sixty years to get where we are now, so the utopian society you mention may be less than a thousand years away.