Things have been slow around here because I've been busy with work and with various computer problems - also at work. Tomorrow I'm heading to Dallas for 1 day, and then next week I go to Arkansas for 3 days, so updates will continue to be spotty.

Perhaps if you all groveled a bit, Stacy would update the site while I'm too busy. :)

David Carradine is either still going thru a nasty divorce, or he has some real problems. His ex-wife has filed suit against him in LA for engaging in "abhorrent and deviant sexual behavior, which is potential deadly" and of being in an "incestuous relationship with a very close family member."

We went to a Wichita Wranglers (Double-A minor league team for the KC Royals) baseball game for the first time last night. There were fireworks after the game, so everybody had fun, but next time I'm spending a bit more cash for the more expensive seats. The seats we had were unconfortable as hell - not suprising - but they are also directly behind the main walkway for anybody trying to buy refreshments or go to the bathroom. In fact, other than the expensive seats, every single seat in the stadium (5000 or so) has a view of the field that is obscured by people milling around in the walkways.

Don't know what the hell is in it, but the Amazon Goodie Box is free after a rebate - and yet it counts towards the $25 minimum to get the free shipping deal. So I suppose if you are buying something anyway, might as well add it in to save yourself the shipping money.

The mentally retarded woman from Florida who was pregnant after being raped is being allowed to carry her baby to term according to the AP. Nice terminology.

Circuit Judge Lawrence Kirkwood approved a medical plan for the woman — known as J.D.S. in court records — that allows her to give birth. J.D.S.' court-appointed guardian, Patti Jarrell, recommended the plan. Jarrell wrote in a report to Kirkwood that "completing the pregnancy/delivering the child is in J.D.S.'s best interest."

UPDATE: I should mention the original post about this topic as it has quite a lenghty discussion of the pro's and con's of the idea of aborting fetuses of the mentally retarded.

It was only a matter of time, but the RIAA has gone nuclear in its war against MP3 downloaders. The Recording Industry Association of America , citing significant sales declines, said it will begin Thursday to search Internet file-sharing networks to identify users who offer "substantial" collections of mp3 music files for downloading. It expects to file at least several hundred lawsuits seeking financial damages within eight to 10 weeks.

Let the cliches fly: the real risk of having to face the music ... going to begin taking names ... get everybody to obey the speed limit

How many of the people they end up suing are ever going to buy a CD again? I wouldn't if they sued me. Hell, I didn't renew my subscription to Golf Digest after they sent me the cease & desist letter a few months back. What the hell to they expect. You cannot go around threatening your potential customers and expect to do no harm to your business. This is going to end badly for the RIAA.

Because I can. I'm going to use this post to collect all the best little quips about Gephardts goofy statement. The original threads on this topic are here and here:

A Frustrated Artist: When one of the nation's top Democratic politicians declares his contempt for the Constitution so openly, you know the sickness has spread into the mainstream

Porphyrogenitus: No word on any plans he might have to call out the National Guard or the Army to make sure the Court's decisons aren't enforced.

Rachel Lucas: Uhhh...okaaay. So basically, he'd render the United States Supreme Court completely powerless and irrelevant. With the stroke of his own mighty pen, he'd overturn any, er, "wrong thing" the Court does on "any day." And they call Republicans "Nazis"? That's funny.

Pejmanesque: Perhaps, but I think this is a case where Gephardt clearly and completely butchered the meaning of the Constitution and showed his shocking unfamiliarity with the scope of Presidential power. If George W. Bush made this kind of statement, the "dumb" jokes would have been out in force by now.

Intel Dump: My two cents... Harry Truman makes for an interesting choice of precedent for the Gephardt campaign. It is true that he issued Executive Order 9981, effectively ending segregation in the military, when Congress and the Supreme Court did not do so. This was an act of courage and principle for a President who had lots of both. Harry Truman is also famous for another Executive Order -- one held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: Gephardt has 'clarified' his statement. Of course the clarification completely changes the meaning of just about every part of the original offending sentence.

More on the Dick Gephardt debacle: It was not a misquote, it was not out of context and here's the CSpan video to back it up. Via Volokh: At around 43:45, Dennis Kucinich, another Democratic presidential candidate makes a very similar statement. Then at 44:40, Gephardt's rather short speech starts, and at 45:40, he makes the statement that the AP quotes, agreeing with Kucinich.

Do we really want a President who thinks that the President has the power to overcome "any wrong thing the Supreme Court does" using an Executive order? I know lots of people think various actions of the Bush Administration are unconstitutional; I too disagree with some of the Administration's positions, for instance on the alleged power to detain all unlawful combatants (including U.S. citizens captured on U.S. soil) with no judicial review. I hope the Supreme Court agrees, and decides against the Administration. But I'm pretty confident that if the Supreme Court does so decide, this Administration will comply with the Supreme Court's order.

Gephardt and Kucinich are promising that they'll flout those orders. Seems to me that they should be taken to task for this, and severely.

And from IP on how this compares to the Trent Lott scandal: Lott just wished that Strom Thurmand had succeeded in subverting the Constitution. Gephardt is promising to do it himself.

This is not helpful. The idiots at Fox News legal department have seen fit to send a cease and desist letter to the folks making the 'Faux News' t-shirts. Thats just more meat for the Fox haters - though they deserve to hear the jeers for this move.

Belated congratulations to Dennis and Traci on the birth of their 2nd son. The actual event took place on Friday morning, but since I pretty much took the weekend off from the internet, I'm just being reminded of it now.

The Supreme Court just upheld U of Michigan racial preferences in Law School admissions. This is a slight suprise.

UPDATE: The Fox News story says that although the preferences were upheld for the Law School, the undergraduate preference system was struck down. That seems contradictory. I'll have to read some of the actual decision to figure out how the court could have it both ways.

Is it really such a good idea for the Democrat Presidential candidates to announce they intend to disregard Supreme Court decisions in order to push their agenda? That article is fully of statements that would scare the hell out of the Left if they came out of Bush's mouth. The worst offender is Dick Gephardt:

"When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day," said Rep. Dick Gephardt (search) of Missouri.

Yep, just ignore that other branch of government. Separation of powers be damned - we're gonna do it Dick's way or not at all.

UPDATE: Gephardt's quote concerns Volokh and IP also. Both of them question whether its a mis-quote, which is possible, but considering the multitude of places I've seen the quote today - including Gephardt's hometown newspaper - I rather doubt it.

In Australia, an Aboriginal activist - Stephen Hagan - (who took his fight against the public use of the word "nigger" to Australia's High Court and the United Nations) is now on McDonalds case about a coffee advertisement that they are running.

The commercial, which has screened nationally since May 6, plays on the use of commonly-used descriptive terms for coffee in Australia, where a filter coffee is termed a "flat white" and various forms of espresso are known as a "long black" or "short black".

The advertisement displays the image of a tall African American basketball player while a voiceover refers to a "short black" coffee.

Similarly, a woman of European appearance sporting a frizzy hairdo is screened while a "flat white" coffee is discussed.

Oh my. Thank goodness that these kind of crazy manufactured outrage lawsuits don't happen in the US. Ahem. [link via Tongue Tied]

Here's something I hadn't thought about before in regards to the Justice Department's ability to label somebody with the 'enemy combatant' tag. Hit & Run agrues (quite convincingly) that although the enemy combatant label hasn't been used very often so far, the mere threat of it against a suspect may be enough to get them to plead guilty to crimes they may or may not have committed.

According to The New York Times, "Prosecutors discussed the idea of declaring Mr. Faris an enemy combatant...and that may have influenced his decision to admit guilt to avoid the prospect of indefinite detention." I have no reason to doubt that Faris, who pleaded guilty and faces a 20-year prison sentence, really did discuss the Brooklyn Bridge's vulnerability to blowtorches with members of Al Qaeda. But it's not hard to see how someone who was mistakenly accused of terrorism might choose a finite prison sentence over "enemy combatant" limbo.

This is a serious issue that has to call into question the series of guilty pleas that the Justice Dept has been able to get from terrorism-related suspects over the past year.

So I get back from New Orleans, check the site traffic and its huge. Huge like I've got to start worrying about bandwidth caps if it keeps up for the rest of the month. The reason: I'm currently #1 on Google for Amber Frey Nude because of this post.

I suppose this is what the Register was talking about when they said that weblogs were mucking up search engines.

Orin Hatch just went off the deep end and endorsed remotely destroying the computers of people who download copyrighted music.

He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer." "If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.

Surely enough, but how many people's computers will get wrongly fried before the senator realizes the seriousness of his actions.

UPDATE: CAPx2000 posted about Orin's big plan over here.

Today is the last day to pre-order the new Harry Potter book and still receive it on its scheduled release date of June 21. We ordered ours about a month ago, and Stacy is anxiously awaiting the UPS man on Saturday.

Another classy anti-Bush cartoon from the DNC. At least they don't have him killing a senior citizen this time.

Here's an interesting movie rumor from Radar Magazine about Tobey Maguire that I hadn't heard anywhere else. Seems he actually got himself fired from the Spiderman sequel for a short time, and that the movie folks had decided to replace him with Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko): After banking a cool $12.5 million for Seabiscuit, Maguire was sufficiently sure of his star power to slap Columbia with a lengthy list of demands for the Spider-Man sequel. When the studio balked, Maguire threatened that a “bad back” might keep him from making the stunt-heavy film, got fired on the spot, and was replaced with the equally Peter Parker–y (and much cheaper) Jake Gyllenhaal. Luckily, Maguire had the spider sense to be dating Jen Meyer, whose father Ron—cofounder of CAA and president of Vivendi-Universal—swooped in and coaxed Columbia into rehiring Maguire.

UPDATE: Tomas happened to post about Donnie Darko today as well. Perhaps a little wormhole opened between us for a split second eh?

Spike Lee won his first little court battle with Spike TV, getting a temporary injunction preventing TNN from changing their name until there can be a real hearing about the matter. It ain't all roses for Lee though, the judge made him post a $500k bond to cover TNN's losses if Lee ends up losing the case.

"Contrary to defendants' position, the court is of the opinion that in the age of mass communication, a celebrity can in fact establish a vested right in the use of only their first name or a surname," the judge wrote. "There are many celebrities that are so recognized, including Cher, Madonna, Sting and Liza."

The difference here is that Spike Lee has never been known as just 'Spike'. Do a Google search for Sting, and you get results for the singer. Google search for Cher, Liza and Madonna turn up the celebs very high and very often in the results. But a search for Spike turns up nothing on the 1st page of results for Spike Lee. Google, does however assume you are looking for a movie director - just not Lee, as it returns the category for Spike Jonze.

He also said the name protection would probably be available if a network proposed a program called the "Cronkite News Hour." But thats different because it pairs the name with a medium that the name was associated with - Cronkite and News go together in a way that Spike and TV don't. Spike is associated with film/movies, not television.

High school put on lock-down due to play prop. A 14-year old boy was bringing a play prop to school - a fake Civil War musket made of broomsticks painted black when he was spotted by a parent. Half an hour later, the police had found and confiscated the play prop and the kid who brought it to school had been sent home until school officials decide if he can return to class.

"It could be he simply did not know he wasn't allowed to do this," Campbell (school district spokesman) said. "There will be a lot of questions asked to determine what will happen to this student."

Not allowed to do what?! Bring a prop to school?

Its not the first time something like this has happened to a student either. In Nov of 2002, a student was suspended for carrying a plastic prop gun while taking a bathroom break from play rehearsal. The 'gun' had been issued to him by the school for his role as a police officer in the school play. via [Taranto]

When something bad happens, sue. When something horrible happens, sue everyone.

Is being murdered while changing a flat tire on the side of the road horrible enough to justify suing the tire maker (and Ford) claiming ...that a Firestone tire failed on the 1997 Ford Explorer driven by their daughter, setting off the events that would end in her murder. They should have sued the gas station that sold her the fuel most recently also, eh?

Its rather like suing the government for issuing a party permit after your kid attends the party, gets high and then drives his car off a cliff. Clearly thats the government's fault.

Peggy Noonan's newest book A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag : America Today was released today. An excerpt:

I think 9/11 is like that. People are still changing from it, being affected by it. There are those who have wondered why 9/11 was so cataclysmic, compared with, say, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, by essentially the same people with the same motives and intentions. One answer is that on 9/11 almost 3,000 people died, and eight years before the number was six. Another is that the Pentagon was in effect bombed on 9/11. America has two great capitals, of politics and money, and both capitals were hit.

Both answers are true. But truest I think is this: The first time the towers didn't fall. The first time they were damaged and unchanged. They were blacked with smoke. We cleaned them up.

We took it--some of us anyway--as a warning. The second time--that was not a warning. That was war. And a war shockingly begun, with two great skyscrapers crumbling to the ground.

You can read the whole excerpt at Opinion Journal.

More discussion of Bush's 'lies' about Iraq's WMDs:

...you'll note that the "lies" he's accusing Bush of are the exact same "lies" President Clinton alleged throughout the '90s. The only difference is Bush did something about it. ...check out The Washington Post's Robert Kagan in Sunday's paper. Kagan lists a number of prominent politicians over the past decade who have "lied" about Iraq's possession of WMDs, including: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, former CIA director John Deutch, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, Jacques Chirac, Al Gore, Bill Clinton and the German intelligence service. Kagan concludes:

So if you like a good conspiracy, this one's a doozy. And the best thing about it is that if all these people are lying, there's only one person who ever told the truth: Saddam Hussein. And now we can't find him either.

Though they would object to the charge ... conspiracy theorists believe that Saddam Hussein is more trustworthy than President Bush. That's their argument at its heart. It tells you something about them, and it's not pretty.

The Deck of Weasels playing cards from NewsMax were funny, but now they are selling the Deck of Hillary which isn't particularly funny at all. The life-span of political playing cards is officially dead.

Interesting post at Metafilter by pardonyou? in regards to the 'lies' about Iraq's WMD programs we've been told by the administration. I don't think he'll mind if I repost it here:

Here are some of the amazing lies we were told:

"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." - the President

"There has never been an embargo against food and medicine. It's just that Hussein has just not chosen to spend his money on that. Instead, he has chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies." - the Secretary of State

"The United Nations has determined that Saddam should not possess chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, and what we have is the obligation to carry out the U.N. declaration." - the Secretary of Defense

"It is ineffectual; it is not able to do its job by its own judgment. It doesn't provide much deterrence against WMD activity." - the president's National Security Adviser, speaking about the U.N. inspections regime.

"Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction, but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people." - a prominent senator of the president's party.

"For the United States and Britain, an Iraq equipped with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons under the leadership of Saddam Hussein is a threat that almost goes without description. France, on the other hand, has long established economic and political relationships within the Arab world, and has had a different approach." - another prominent senator of the president's party.

In hindisght, it's hard to read these quotes and not come to the conclusion that the U.S. was deliberately lying.

Thats some pretty damning stuff. Oh, there was one more sentence to pardonyou?'s post:

(by the way, for citation purposes, these remarks were made by President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Sen. Tom Daschle and Sen. John Kerry)

Interesting, no?

Anybody have suggestions for an online place to get photos from a digital camera printed? I am leaning towards using ofoto.com for my first batch, but don't have any experience with them. If you've got a place that has done good work for you, let me know.

The trend continues. Dislike of Bush by many on the left cause them to believe anything that potentially puts the administration in a bad light. It happened back in February, when Oliver Willis believed Al Jazeera and Bin Laden while claiming that Bush and Powell were lying.

Today, its Oliver again believing an Al Qaeda capitive who claims no connection to the former Saddam regime. Now, this captive may indeed be telling the truth. But to take a terrorists word at face value just seems silly to me. In the comments, Oliver had this to say:

I'm not even saying these guys are credible, but why would they lie - expanding Al Qaeda to involve mideast leaders would make the org seem bigger and more powerful than it is, eh? Al Qaeda doesn't have a motive to lie? They are a terrorist organization that is being hunted down all over the globe. Keeping a low profile is part and parcel to their survival right now.

I also find it interesting that the right uses statements from Al Qaeda/Iraq/Iran as gold when it fits the world view they already have. The administration uses those statements when they corroborate intelligence information they have already gathered. When the statements of terrorists don't match our existing intelligence, the administration is sceptical of their veracity - and rightly so.

I don't trust Al Qaeda more than I trust our government. But I don't trust our government a whole lot.

I don't believe that statement. I think Oliver does trust our government (he largely trusted it under Clinton). Its Bush that he doesn't trust, and the two aren't interchangable. I think Oliver (and alot of other folks), have conflated their distrust of Bush into a distrust of our government generally. There is a difference and to believe otherwise is to buy into a huge conspiracy theory that the day a Republican walked into the door of the White House all the career military and intelligence decided to start lying.

Why oh why does Amazon keep recommending Brainscan to me? I haven't bought anything remotely resembling that movie from Amazon. Yet, nearly every day it sits at the top of my Amazon page. Make it go away!

Some of the attorney analyists have argued that Amber Frey's nude photos that are currently being shopped to Hustler and others hurt her credibility as a 'witness' in the Laci Peterson case. Considering that she stands to make no money upon their publication, I don't think thats the case. However, I do think that her own attorney - Gloria Allred - hurts Amber's credibility when she gets up in court and lies to the public about the photos:

"She is very offended by those photos," Allred said outside the Modesto courthouse on Friday. "It's hurtful to her. She's in tears about it. It's really unfair to her."

I don't doubt that Amber is/was in tears, but 'offended'? Please. How the hell does she get offended by pictures of herself that she hired somebody to take? That she posed for? This kind of manufactured outrage is shameful.

Since Hollywood stopped making decent horror movies years ago, its nice to see that somebody, Asians, are still trying to do well with the genre. Between The Ring (which was excellent) and now The Eye (which based on the trailer appears to have potential, even though its subtitled - reading and being spooked just don't mix well with me), they are doing horror very well. The official site mentioned at the end of the trailer isn't currently working for whatever reason.

Some of the reviews for 'The Eye' aren't so great though.

Wow. Wanna see something cool? Go check out CSS Edit using Netscape 7 (Mozilla included) (any platform), Safari (Mac OS X), or IE5/Mac. As you scroll down the page watch the text/graphics you are scrolling upwards slip under a partially transparent layer. Very cool. [via zeldman]

Yet another reason to make the swith from Kazaa to Kazaa Lite. Kazaa is going to begin patching its current software with Peer Enabler - which lets the Kazaa network use your computer as a distribution hub. The Register had this to say about it: It also says the utilisation of your computer will be "unobtrusive". That may be so, but the licence still grants Joltid the right to use your computer whenever it wants to for the benefits of content providers.

It's a bit like saying HP's distribution team can use your car to deliver PCs to any of its customers just because you once went to a store, bought an HP PC and brought it home in said vehicle.

One other note, if you make the switch away from Kazaa, make damn sure to run something like Ad-Aware or Spybot Search & Destroy after uninstalling - because uninstalling Kazaa doesn't uninstall all the creepy crawlies that are packaged with it.

A female teacher was assaulted by a male student, the student's brother and mother after suspending him for spitting on her and pushing her. Jamie Mereness, 34, and her 17-year-old son William Ramos, went with her 12-year-old son to the school Tuesday afternoon to confront the teacher, who was not identified, police said Thursday. Police said Mereness, Ramos and the younger son choked and punched the teacher, then used a desk and a chair to beat her in a basement classroom, Detective Lt. Santo Centamore said. The alternative school program is held in a church.

Considering how much money Finding Nemo has made already, I'm one of the few that never thought it looked even half as funny as Pixar's previous efforts. Coming on the heels of some news that the Pixar folks were pissed at Disney I thought maybe that Pixar was just trying to pump out another movie or two to finish off their contract and get out from under Disney. After seeing the teaser trailer for their next film - The Incredibles - I can happily say that Nemo looks like a fluke and not a trend. Its just a teaser, and their isn't much dialogue, but its fucking funny.

Please please please don't let this happen. 40 year old PGA Tour nobody John Riegger challenges Annika Sorenstam to $1,000,000 match. Luckily, Annika is a smart classy player, who won't be easily baited into such a contest.

UPDATE: Annika says no. Not a big suprise there.

So how long until some minor league baseball club has a Sammy Sosa 'Champagne Night'? I'm envisioning something where the 1st 500 people in the gate get a free bottle of bubbly, or perhaps get a chance to participate in a pop the cork for distance contest. No way this opportunity gets passed up.

Its been my impression that Spike Lee has always had a high opinion of himself, but its getting a bit crazy now. Seems Spike is going to sue TNN over its name change to Spike TV. Thats right Spike, everything is about you. Spike even got some other celebs to shill for him in this lawsuit: ... has included affidavits from actors Ed Norton and Ossie Davis and former senator Bill Bradley. The signatories said they had thought of Lee when they heard about Spike TV and believed he had become affiliated with the network.

Crazy as it seems, the judge appears to be preliminarily siding with Spike Lee: Viacom, which also owns broadcasters such as CBS, MTV, and VH1, has been directed by the judge to explain why it should not be barred from using the name. From that sentence, it appears the burden of proof has been shifted to Viacom. I would have thought that Spike would have to prove confusion and harm (3 letters from his friends doesn't cut it).

UPDATE: Great article in the Washington Post about this issue: Did you know that "Spike" is the eighth most popular male cat name in America? Right behind Buddy, but just ahead of Rusty (which, ironically, is the name of the Washington Post TV Team Test Cat). And that Spike the Chihuahua of Harrison, Maine, has his own Web site? And did you know that a baby horse is called a "foal," but a baby mackerel is called a "spike" (or, sometimes, a "blinker")?

I wonder if Mr. Lee knows this. He should sue them, too.

And music-video-maker-turned-filmmaker Spike Jonze. Lee should definitely sue him; Jonze probably has a lot of money.

We tried in vain to reach Spike Lee to ask him whether he had gotten permission to use the name Spike Lee from the estate of the original Spike Lee, the actor Henry "Spike" Lee, who, according to the Internet Movie Database, played Spike in several "Our Gang" flicks in the late '30s. At press time, we had not heard back from Mr. Lee or his attorney.

Iraq - even Wolfowitz admitted it was all about oil! Oh wait, no he didn't.

Weapons of Mass Destruction - the evidence was fake. Even Colin Powell and Jack Straw didn't believe it! They had a meeting in NY about how bad the evidence was! Oh wait, that was wrong too.

Coupled with the false story about Jessica Lynch being rescued by Special Ops armed with blanks, CNN's trouble over a misleading segment on assault weapons and the resignation of Howell Raines from the NY Times, this has not been a good couple of weeks for journalism.

While I was in New Orleans last week, my daughters computer stopped working after a particularly bad thunderstorm. I figured that the power supply got fried, and just got finished taking it out. Along with being very dusty inside there (power supply was new in 1998), there were some burned out pieces. Here's a close-up of the damage.

Anyhow, so now I've got to find a reasonably cheap 250w ATX power supply. Any suggestions?

Time to increase Courtney Love's medication again. Fresh off the asshole waxing stories, she's talking about giving a song to Britney Spears, claims to have named Edward Norton as her heir in the event of her death, and continues her obsession with Norton by claiming that he will 'never' marry his fiancée, Salma Hayek. Jealous? Maybe. Bitter? You bet.

Jonah Goldberg has an 'Oh The Irony" moment regarding Dems and the tax cut: All of this hooplah about some low-income families getting left out of the new child-tax credit baffles me. The Dems were against cutting taxes in the first place, so presumably they didn't want these people to get the credit. So, in effect, the Dems are getting their way for the people who get noting, and yet they think it's outrageous the tax cut isn't big enough to include them ... if only the Dems hadn't fought a larger tax cut in the first place, these lower-income folks might have gotten more help.

I was glad to hear that the lawsuit against Google over PageRank was thrown out of court. The whole thing just smelled bad. The judge dismissed the case on the grounds that Google's formula for calculating the popularity of a web page, or "PageRank", constitutes opinions protected by the First Amendment.

"PageRanks are opinions - opinions of the significance of particular websites as they correspond to a search query," according to the decision filed in the US Western District Court of Oklahoma.

"The court simply finds there is no conceivable way to prove that the relative significance assigned to a given Web site is false," the decision said. "Accordingly, the court concludes Google's PageRanks are entitled to full constitutional protection."