It is safer to be a carbon chauvinist if you accept that ancient Mars was covered with oceans. A silicon-based microbe would be hard pressed to explain its distaste for water to its carbon-based neighbor.
There are localization issues as well. Some place names in Turkey appear to be transferred over from legacy windows-1254 code page (e.g. Avcılar displayed as Avcýlar) Some have replacement letters for certain characters (dotless i, ş, ç, ğ). For example, "Sık orman" (dense forest) became "Sik orman" (penis forest).
Overall (at least in Turkey) the legends appear to come from an old, low quality source.
I agree with your first paragraph but not with the Django example. User.objects.get(id=1) failing is exceptional because you are asking for an object with a specific and unique property. Otherwise, you would be using User.objects.filter(age>20) (which doesn't throw an exception).
I might kinda agree that exact queries against primary keys not having results (or having more than 1) would be exceptional, but this actually happens for every other field as well.
There are languages with true alphabets, ie. there is a one-to-one relation with written letters and sounds. A good example is Turkish. Once you learn the sounds of the 29 letters in the alphabet, you can perfectly pronounce all Turkish words.
I believe there is a way around this. Google doesn't need to hide or remove pro-SOPA search results. Making them harder to find would be equally effective. Something like this perhaps?
In order to show you the highest quality results, we have omitted some entries.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
I don't like this stance at all. Give the user free access to information, even if you don't like that information, you need to serve it just the same. You won't find any compelling arguments about SOPA on anti-SOPA sites, you need to go to pro-SOPA sites for pro-SOPA material and anti-SOPA sites for anti-SOPA material :/ They misrepresent each other (and sometimes themselves) because of their biases. For an informed decision, you need all the information.
It depends what you mean by "new internet," and how much control the government eventually takes over the actual hardware routing the current Internet. Even If the government owns every ISP, you could take part in encrypted communication, and I don't think there's any way for them to stop that. At the absolute worst, you could go back to basics, and just use the plain old telephone system to dial into known servers.
".. government owns every ISP, you could take part in encrypted communication, and I don't think there's any way for them to stop that.."
Sure they could: just disallow any "unknown" encrypted communication. For example requiring the en/decryption to happen at the ISP or only allowing traffic they can decrypt and check.
(I'm not saying this is likely, but it could be implemented and most folks wouldn't care)
> Sure they could: just disallow any "unknown" encrypted communication.
Even then, it's impossible to prevent arbitrary communication. You can always hide your message inside of allowed messages (steganography), or an even more basic albeit inefficient technique: just use the timing between allowed messages to encode your hidden message.
