The Chinese system (and now the UK's) does not overly concern itself with ensuring every possible route through the Great Firewall is blocked--after all, geniuses gonna be ingenious. It merely suffices that the overwhelming majority cannot do this easily, and the technically adept live in fear of the consequences of their clearly pre-meditated actions. The censorship, and the chilling effect, is in the general drag; no need to close down every last loophole.
If John Allsup is right above, all that is required to get around this is "a LAMP stack somewhere on the internet" and some code. What percentage of the population are capable of actually doing this in practice? Taking say, the desktop share of Linux/BSD as a proxy for this, which is probably an overestimate, given the ease of installation of modern distros, that's fewer 3% of all internet users. A repressible minority? The UK government evidently thinks so.

It would help focus peoples' minds on the harmfulness of speed if, rather than setting arbitrary thresholds, the fines were proportional not only to income, but also to the excess kinetic energy of the vehicle:

Ek = 1/2 . m . v^2

Kuisla was doing 65 in a 50 zone, so his "kinetic tariff" would be (65x65) - (50x50) = 4225 - 2500 = 1725 units. (It's the exponential nature of the velocity squared factor that yields the disincentive, but, by all means introduce the weight of the miscreant's vehicle too)

This would be a rational way of reflecting the a) the risk of injury in the event of a collision; b) the undesirable environmental effects (noise, gaseous emissions), both of which rise exponentially with the kinetic energy of the vehicle.

This kinetic tariff can then be applied to income data to calculate the actual fine for the individual.

The choice about whether or not to encrypt traffic should be left to each website's administrator. Many sites--shock!--use the web to disseminate information they wish to be public, and the site's users have no problem with their access to it being public either. So get out of their faces! Using the browser to deprecate admin's particular choices is contrary to the spirit of the web, which should always do its damndest to serve something, and degrade gracefully when it's in difficulty, not pop annoying dialog boxes in the user's way.

Self-certificates are already a fairly effective denial of service attack when Firefox is used to access many independent sites that try to implement https, but who fail to do so in a way that offers a smooth user experience to J. Random User (I'm thinking particularly of IndyMedia).

Please note: in China, the censorship does not rely on blocking everything; just on blocking enough that all but the very motivated fail to access it. This troublesome minority can presumably be picked off at leisure later.

Keep it simple, stupid!

yeh, the French know that sacking the public sector in times of crisis does not help the economy; quite the reverse in fact. M. Hollande is old school ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration) which turns out highly-educated senior French bureaucrats and politicians, who, whatever else they may be, are not daft.

Diigo seems to work quite handily, but I still prefer Delicious and will mourn its passing. It's easy to export your Delicious bookmarks to an html file and import that into Diigo.

A single seed bank like this doesn't make any kind of biological sense. It is remarkably unlikely to be useful in the event of catastrophe: it's a long old road up there to Norway to replenish stocks of some ancient carrot variety from most parts of Europe.

If you actually wanted to guard biodiversity, you would encourage social networks of gardeners to replant varieties each season and share the ensuing seeds. The French organisation Kokopelli does this, but seems to suffer from legal harassment rather than incur the subsidies it would receive in any sane world.

An analogy for the slashdot crowd might be Napster (centralised) vs. BitTorrent (distributed).

MS-DOS and the microcomputer port of BASIC!?

I would counter that format requirements will continue to go up as available tech improves, but the truth is that I ***still*** have not bothered with Blu-Ray at all, and even lossy 1/4 HD rips of Doctor Who look pretty good on my high-def projection system, let alone my tiny iPhone screen. As we already have with audio, we're rapidly reaching a point where most consumers simply aren't going to care about fidelity improvements enough to invest in near-future new technologies.

The screen already looks good to me in 720p or 1080i or even 640p (sometimes less). Spending thousands of dollars on something more impressive isn't going to make my 41-year old eyes see it any better.

Which would be simply awful if anybody was forcing you to pay for cable.

It's kind of irrelevant, actually.

You can buy an iPhone for $199 with a 2-year contract that locks you into AT&T anyway, or you can spend something like $600 on a PHONE just so you can jailbreak it and use it with a carrier that won't support visual voicemail and might lose you support from the app store, just so you can run a handful of "unapproved" apps which most people don't care about.

Guess which option nearly everybody is going to take?

We don't. I don't pay a dime for my TV service, but rather get it for free over-the-air (and via Hulu) thanks to ads.

Nobody HAS to pay for cable. Some people CHOOSE to. And they pay less than they would if cable channels had no ads.

If you want to buy ad-free viewing, get a NetFlix account and watch via Instant streaming.

Hooray for consumer choice!

Joke ----------->
Your head.

Yeah, and we've got the Southeastern states. Pretty much makes us even.

Phone calls are nearly obsolete, as far as I'm concerned. I'd say about 75 percent of my voice minutes are occupied by my over-60 parents calling me about stuff. Everybody else in my life usually "talks" to me via texting, e-mail, social networks, etc. when we're not face-to-face.

that moldy alfafa will have made really nice mulch/compost for growing veg. Your old computers on the other hand are destined to pollute a water table somewhere.