This is probably a screw-up more than censorship. Given the popularity of Blogspot, I suspect the people who did this just simply entered in a website, got an IP address, and added an iptables rule or equivalent, without looking or realizing what they were blocking. Hell, that could even be scripted, and I could easily see an intern or low-level staff having just entered "leakymails.blogspot.com" into a script without knowing what happened behind the scenes. I know ISPs hate net neutrality, but it's really not in their best interests to completely cut off access to blogspot.com; even if they have a monopoly they're just going to get flooded with complaints, with real competitive advantage in return to justify the added cost.

Barring a simple but stupid mistake like this from someone routing traffic, IANAL but it should not be the ISP's responsibility to not only screw with people's internet access at the request of the government, but go the extra mile and cut off access to the entire service provider. If we allow that kind of action, then we'll see a whole array of other sites getting blocked at a national level. Then, in an effort to keep themselves accessible around the world, we'll see hosting providers around the world bend over backwards to censor themselves and their users just because somebody, somewhere in the world, might object to some kind of political content one of their users posted.

No, anyone who thinks this will effectively censor the websites in question has never worked as a network engineer. If they think messing with the DNS will comply with the court order, then they're probably spot on (how many judges do you know who will be able to work around that, or even know the difference?), and the nerdy people who will change their DNS settings to get around it are also probably not far from using a proxy to access the site in question, which will, incidentally, bypass this type of filter.

Given the popularity of Blogspot, I suspect the people who did this just simply entered in a website, got an IP address, and added an iptables rule or equivalent, without looking or realizing what they were blocking. Hell, that could even be scripted, and I could easily see an intern or low-level staff having just entered "leakymails.blogspot.com" into a script without knowing what happened behind the scenes. I know ISPs hate net neutrality, but it's really not in their best interests to completely cut off access to blogspot.com; even if they have a monopoly they're just going to get flooded with complaints, with real competitive advantage in return to justify the added cost.

Barring a simple but stupid mistake like this from someone routing traffic, IANAL but it should not be the ISP's responsibility to not only screw with people's internet access at the request of the government, but go the extra mile and cut off access to the entire service provider. If we allow that kind of action, then we'll see a whole array of other sites getting blocked at a national level. Then, in an effort to keep themselves accessible around the world, we'll see hosting providers around the world bend over backwards to censor themselves and their users just because somebody, somewhere in the world, might object to some kind of political content one of their users posted.

Just imagine how the lawyers will respond when some patent troll or monopolistic company tries to sue their favorite software out of existence.

Would have been nice to cite the full-size image, or the article in which it appears, rather than a badly resized Google image result, but whatever. The graph you cited compares hourly wages to productivity, and I'm not sure how that relates to standard of living rather than employee productivity. Within its context the graph pretty poorly done; the axis aren't labeled ($140 per hour in 2005?), the description is vague, nothing is said about what was actually measured (or how) and I'd be willing to bet any mention of standard of living doesn't even account for inflation over the 55 years it covers.

Forgive me for being blunt here, but based on your original post (with a questionable source), and your relatively hostile response to criticism of said post, it looks like the only person stuck on partisan analysis here is you.

Ok, I'll bite. Those questions are heavily weighted to someone's political beliefs, in an apparent attempt to confirm right-wing ideologies, and paint liberals as ignorant about the economy with conservatives being the guys with an educashun. Not surprising, given that it's published by a company owned by Rupert Murdoch (who also owns Fox News). Basically, if you disagree with their viewpoints, you're "unenlightened". Let's take a look at the questions:

In summary, the entire linked article is just a conservative cherry-picking economic talking points to give liberals and conservatives in a scientific-looking survey, then present anybody who disagrees with his beliefs as uninformed.

If you need to be that horrible to get this award, then it must be very prestigious indeed. I mean, there was that Citi Bank disaster, for example, it's nothing in comparison to Sony but as horrible as it was it's nothing in light of Sony. Think of the honor the CEO is having bestowed upon him. Heck, this was possibly worse than the ping of death. What do you compare it to?

Ok, I know this is just DNS and not some network-level hijacking, but crap like this is exactly why we need net neutrality. Capitalizing on customers' traffic by redirecting their searches (or otherwise interfering with customers' activities) is type of behavior net neutrality activists have claimed will happen for a long time, and that ISPs have claimed will never happen. Odd that the big players aren't the culprits for once (they're probably scared of regulation after the bittorrent scandal), but I'm sure if this is successful, or if a corrupt judge somewhere rules there is nothing wrong with what's going on, then we can expect to see all the big players stepping in and this will become a lot more widespread than it already is.

The lawyers WERE the monkeys. Can't anybody else see that? They're beating their chests over some pictures, demanding compensation (in bananas), and monkeying around with the judge over how far their "property rights" extend (being territorial).

Basically, the IRB (also sometimes referred to as "ethics review committee") signed off on this. Now, once he's about to publish the results, they pull the plug.

Putting aside the university's hypocrisy (believe me, I can think of far worse privacy breaches), give me one good reason why collecting this kind of aggregate, anonymized data is ok for an advertiser who is studying how to most effectively manipulate people into buying something and generally won't even let people opt out of tracking, but it's not ok for a sociologist to publish aggregate statistical data from mined Facebook profiles. Advertisers are a lot less ethical about it than academic researchers.

This is just propping up the already large, uninnovative, and anti-competitive companies like Microsoft and Apple, while leaving smaller companies in the "dirt road" of domains. In the future, we can consumers to look for .BRAND, and blow off anybody with .com/.net/.org/whatever because they didn't pay the small price of $185,000. It's not like the market is unbalanced now or anything, so what could this hurt? Thank you, ICANN, for putting the big players first.

Phishing means tricking users into divulging sensitive data, usually a password. It is just one type of social engineering. What is being described here is another form of social engineering, where users are told instead to install malware or something like that. It is not phishing, or even spear phishing. When you get a lot of information together to plan out an effective attack on human psyche, it's called pretexting.

That word. I don't think it means what you think it means...

Lobbyists lie. News at 11. Good that law enforcement is starting to realize it now though. Now if only their laws were looked at with this kind of scrutiny...

Think of pain in a psychological, adaptive sense, where it's an undesirable stimulus that lessens the chance we will perform some kind of behavior again. I think that's what is being picked up by an MRI. Not the immediate reflex that causes you to pull your hand away from the glowing red thing on the stove, but the part that causes it to hurt afterward, leaving a strong memory of the situation.

However, I did have a psychology professor last quarter tell the class you can lessen the effect of a break-up by taking pain medication. He said that most anti-inflammatory medications are believed to affect a certain part of the brain, which is incidentally the same place triggered by a break-up. He told us this right after Valentine's day, apologizing for not getting to that point in the curriculum a day sooner.