Note that he didn't say "fully" blind. Perhaps he meant legally blind. One can be legally blind and still have some vision.

The analogies are important here, because this is a legal argument. Besides written laws, there are judicial decisions covering thinks like the privacy of an item in a locked briefcase, or of material stored on a landlord's premises. By making analogies to these things, the author is arguing that the principles in those judicial decisions should be applied to cloud storage as well. If that argument succeeds, it may not be necessary to make any new laws at all, just to correctly interpret the existing ones.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure from the wording that the "opaque case" idea is a specific reference to existing judicial opinions. It's an important principle, even for cryptography: it says that the government is not allowed to break your encryption merely because they can. By encrypting your data, you did more than just secure it, you also made it private, in the same way that an opaque container makes the contents private, even if the lock fails or can be broken or picked.

Strange. Maybe I'm misreading something, but the deletion logs don't show any sign that the article on Metz on the English Wikipedia was ever deleted. Nor the redirects "Metz, France" and "Ville de Metz". I believe what you say, but can't verify it. I was hoping to check whether the person who wrote what you described was an admin, or just a random vandal deleting the text. The current article on Metz was started in 2002.

I don't think wrongful blocks are very common. In a typical case, I would think a "contributing normal user" would drop the admin a polite note requesting he/she reconsider, and would be quickly unblocked. The conditions under which admins are allowed to block users are pretty well established—they are not supposed to be blocking people arbitrarily, and are supposed to try to be impartial. There are appeal mechanisms available if the blocking admin is unwilling to reconsider. Wrongful blocks are more of a problem with new users, who may not know what to do.

Note that admins do not permanently "delete" or ban a user for a single offense. Even outright vandalism typically gets a 24 hour block the first time, and even then only after several warnings. Admins who abuse their tools can and do get de-admined.

I don't get it either. Somebody mod grandparent up; at least "under-rated".

Thanks for replying, and I understand about keeping your identities separate. Sorry if my reply was too gruff. Mistakes do happen, and I agree that when they do, it alienates people. Your case may not be typical, though. A lot of the dissatisfaction with Wikipedia that I see here on /. seems to come from people who want to edit in a way that is not acceptable to the Wikipedia community. People come in and make disruptive changes or are rude to other editors, and react badly when others try to guide them in the right direction. Blocks are an important part of the system; they keep the project on track and prevent the encyclopedia from being drowned in a flood of vandalism and trolling.

Link, please. My experience has been that users who are griping about having been blocked usually deserved it, and the facts of the case are typically not as they present.

Are you confusing the New York Times with the New York Post and/or the Wall Street Journal?

Since the linked article is in the New York Times, the context ought to be clear enough.

The numbers aren't as high as you think. There were 46 pediatric influenza deaths in the 2005–06 season, for example. The numbers since then have been higher: 78, 88, and 115 for the 06–07, 07–08, and 08–09 seasons, respectively. It's a bit of a stretch to say that 43 is about the same number as usually die, but it's not that big a stretch.

The answer to most of those is "yes, exactly like that". This is why scientists do controlled experiments. A simple observation that Y follows X is not reliable and useful data. Progress is made by doing controlled experiments that ensure X and Y are correlated, rule out other possible causes of Y, and explore the boundaries of X.

That's not likely to happen. It's much easier to add a capability that already exists in the human genome, than it is to add a capability that only exists in other animals, or not at all. Besides getting the genetics of the photoreceptor right, the brain has to have the right wiring to interpret the resulting signals. Get it wrong, and at best the new visual receptors won't work. Complete blindness would not be the worst possible outcome, either.

You probably shouldn't take it personally. He's a chief technical officer. He ought to be better at your job than you are.

You and other readers of this thread might be interested in the Political Compass. The thesis is that politics is better described in a two-dimensional space.

I think the current US passports have a foil lining in the cover so that the RFID can only be read when the cover is open. No blocker wallet needed.