They present one side as "Russia and China", but really, China is in this for themslves. They're making good use of the western sanctions on Russia to enrich themselves, negotiating all of the detals with Russia that they've been wanting to negotiate for a long time at bargain-basement prices that previously Russia had been unwilling to do.
Vietnam, too, is in this for themselves. They want their military purchases from Russia, and they also want investment from America. Buying them off is almost certainly a possibility. The question then becomes however, can the US really afford to buy off everyone? It's about proportionality... if Russia can spend a couple tens of millions of dollars to make the US spend a billion, Russia wins. On the other hand, if the US can spend a billion dollars to cost Russia a billion, the US winds, because the US economy is so vastly larger than the Russian economy.
You got me thinking. Before I'd initially dismissed sound as you'd need strong earthquake-level power outputs to be detectable on the surface. But perhaps sound repeaters might be more realistic than extremely low frequency RF repeaters? Hmm.
Still, I think the best bet is probably just make it fully autonomous with ballast tanks and just have it surface. Ideally with enough fuel to do multiple up/down burrows, so that the first one can be a "safe" run - just down into the ocean, get as much science data (and possibly samples to take back) as you can in a short period of time, then straight back to the top to transmit it. Then once all of the basic data is sent, you could go back down and engage in riskier activities like long-distance navigation, deep dives, etc.
Once again, Assange fans demonstrate their total ignorance of everything related to the case.
Not the claim in court, however. They'd had sex, she says in her testimony (one of the two women) she was sleepy when he started foreplay, and waking to full arousal, they had full sex. She never claimed she was woken by intercourse.
"They dozed off and she awoke and felt him penetrating her." - SW's testimony
"After that, SW told HR that she was feeling worse and worse. She said that the problem was that Assange had had unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping. SW also said that Assange had nagged her and tried to have unprotected sex with her during the night, but that she had made him wear a condom. SW had told Assange several times to wear a condom. SW also told HR that Assange had spoken so strangely, as though he wanted SW to become pregnant. He said things that sounded like he wanted to make women pregnant. He reportedly said that he preferred virgins, because then he would be the first to make them pregnant." -- HR's testimony (friend of SW since childhood)
"SW had said that Assange wanted to have sex with her, and that SW had said that she did not want to have sex without a condom. SW also said that, when she was half asleep on her side, she had been aroused from slumber to feel that Assange was inside her. SW had then asked him what he was wearing and he had replied, “I am wearing you”. The witness said that SW did not believe that he had entered her; rather, she had been aroused from slumber when he was already inside her." - KS's testimony (close colleague of SW)
"He learned about what had happened from SW and his mother. The latter had said that Julian had sex with SW without a condom and against her will as she slept." - KW's testimony (SW's brother)
"Then Sofia said that she had been raped by Julian Assange, in that he had initiated unprotected sex with her while she lay sleeping." - SB's testimony (old friend and one time boyfriend of SW)
Where does your ridiculous "she was just sleepy" claim come from? It's an echo-chamber morphing of a claim from Assange's attorney, which was based on the "half asleep" line in KS's testimony. But KS continued, "she had been aroused from slumber to feel that Assange was inside her."
Moreover, after that morning's sex, she went out to the shops, did some shopping, came back and made breakfast for them both.
False. There was shopping and breakfast - but it came before the reported assault. Here's the descriptions of that from the leaked testimony:
"Earlier, she had fetched some condoms and laid them on the floor by the bed. He reluctantly agreed to use a condom, although he muttered that he preferred her to latex. He no longer had an erection problem. At one point when he took her from behind, she turned to look at him and smiled and he asked her why she was smiling, what had she to smile about. She did not like the undertone of his voice. They fell asleep, and when they woke up they may have had sex again; she does not really remember. He ordered her to fetch him some water and orange juice. She did not like being ordered about in her own home, but thought “what the hell” and fetched the liquids anyway. He wanted her to go out and buy more breakfast. She did not want to leave him alone in the flat — she really did not know him very well — but she did it anyway. When she left the flat he lay naked in her bed and was fiddling with one of his telephones. Before she left she said, “Be good'”. He replied: “Don't worry, I'm always bad”. When she returned she served him oatmeal porridge, milk, and juice. She had already eaten before he awoke, and had spoken with a friend on the phone." - SW's testimony
"While sleeping on the night of the episode, MT was awakened by an SMS message from SW. MT's recollection of that message is that it was not positive — that the sex was not goo
They have offered from the beginning to allow Ny to either question him in London, or to do it via teleconference, both of which Swedish law allows. Even the Swedish press and non-NyD MPs have started ridiculing Ny for her stubborn refusal to do so.
Which would be relevant if this was some sort of "information gathering phase". It is not. They have a court finding (upheld on review) of probable cause of all four charges. According to the sworn statement of the prosecutor to the UK courts, "Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries."
Why wouldn't they? Anna Ardin never accused him of rape, just wanted to force him to get tested for STDs. She has even tweeted since then that he never raped her. Why would Assange or his lawyers bother denying facts that no one disputes?
As usual with most assange fans, you're so ignorant of the actual case that you don't even know the bloody charges. There are no rape charges concerning AA. The charges concerning AA are 1-3 on the EAW, the most significant of which is "unlawful sexual coersion", which matches AA's statements, including her most recent (late last year), referring to what happened to her as an assault but not rape. #4 concerns SW. AA's one public statement shortly after the case came out, and the many statements in the leaked police testimony (of which is just a fraction of the total testimony, more was collected after that), was that she went to the police with SW to provide support for SW's accusation of rape, but that what happened to her did not amount to rape. The charges are in line with this.
You're also mixing up all sorts of other stuff in that statement. Her statements about what happened to her in the press and in the police testimony weren't tweets. The "tweet" thing most people talk about were tweets she made during the period in which Assange was living with her. But they're almost always misquoted. The main one misrepresented is usually the one about going to the crayfish party, where she talks about being at a party with the "world's most amazing people". The police interviewed people who went to the party. One of them, KB, testified that AA had complained to her at the party about the "violent" (her words) sex with Assange.
Once again, I'll repeat: there are no rape charges related to AA. So it's a moot point anyway. There are two molestation charges and one unlawful sexual coersion charge related to him pinning her down and trying to pry her legs open until she agreed to consent.
Slight correction there - After the first prosecutor cleared him, and Ny stalled for weeks, Assange asked permission to go to London, which Ny granted (and then immediately issued an international arrest warrant to generate as much worldwide publicity as possible).
This is simply false, and Hurtig's lies about it got him both scolded by a judge and officially reprimanded by the Swedish Bar Association. You can also read the leaked SMS logs from Ny (mainly with Hurtig), it gives a good sense of the game Hurtig is playing - he keeps trying to convince the Swedish side first that Assange is still in Sweden and getting ready to meet with them, then pretends to be out of touch with him and stops answering his phone, then when it's clear that Assange is overseas he still keeps pretending that Assange will be coming back very soon to meet with them Assange is setting up long-term lodging in the UK and hiring local attorneys.
** 22 sep 2010 **
13:50 Lejnefors -> Ny: Hello! It turned out that the police already had that address. Erika
16:02 Ny -> Lejnefors: This was not something that could lead us
By "the history", you mean "the one case a decade and a half ago where Egypt lied to Sweden and told them that two people were convicted terrorists and promised to treat them well, getting them deported on the flight that Egypt arranged with the CIA", a case that caused such an uproar that the two were given residence, large financial compensation packages, and EU extradition law in general was changed so that countries had to have a history of upholding their promises for extradition to be allowed to proceed? The case that led to such an anti-rendition backlash in Sweden that in in 2006 Sweden had their special forces disguise themselves as airport workers to board a CIA jet and stop the extradition program from going through their territory, causing a major diplomatic incident with the US? A case that was exposed by.. wait for it.... Wikileaks!
While no country is perfect, Sweden has the #1 ranking in the world for the rights of the accused by the peer-reviewed World Justice Project. They have the world's best protections for whistleblowers - it's not even legal to investigate who leaked information in most cases, let alone prosecute. Assange thought so much of Sweden that he was moving there and setting up a new Wikileaks base of operations there - that's why he was in Sweden. He repeatedly called Sweden his shield, he thought so much of them. Right up until he was accused of rape, when suddenly Sweden magically transformed into an evil US lackey. Funny how that works.
That "someone" is Hydro-Québec, which is owned by the government of Quebec. They bring the government over 2 billion dollars per year and pump about 10 billion a year into the local economy.
Forgot to link a reference to the statute of limitations part: link
The reason the prosecutor now decides to request permission to interview Julian Assange in London is chiefly that a number of the crimes Julian Assange is suspected of will be subject to statute of limitation in August 2015 i.e. in less than six months’ time.
That's straight from the prosecutor's office website. Strange how much coverage of this decision hasn't mentioned this basic fact.
I'll add that I am curious as to whether anyone has managed to negotiate with Ecuador conditions in which they would hand him over.
I was recently pondering over a potential situation where both Ecuador and Sweden could get their sides met. Let's remember, Ecuador's side is to play up "We're protecting him from the evil imperialists in the US, and won't give him up unless we can be guaranteed that you won't honor any extradition request from the US". Sweden's is "We're not going to let someone who our courts system declared a probable rapist just walk without a trial, and nor are we going to promise to break our extradition law if a valid extradition request from the US was received, never mind that our law doesn't even allow for extradition for intelligence crimes". There's a bit of undertone of mutual disrespect in both cases. In Sweden's case, the undertone is along the lines of "We're a nation of laws, not of kangaroo courts bullied by the executive like you", while in Ecuador's case it's along the lines of "We're not your f*ing colony to order around, we make our own decisions, deal with it."
But there may be a way that both to get out of this with what they want.
Ecuador could charge Assange with a crime - say, hacking a server in Ecuador, and Assange could admit to it, providing all of the evidence they need to justify an extradition request. The extradition request could be filed concurrently with Sweden taking Assange into custody. Hence Ecuador's extradition request would have priority over any subsequent extradition requests from any third state (such as the US). The Swedish case, operating under the auspices of an EAW, would take priority. Whether he was convicted or not, whenever the Swedish legal system was done with him his extradition request would come into force before he could be set free. Normally both the UK and Sweden would have to approve an extradition request to a third state, both their courts and governments. But a consent to be extradited short circuits all of that, so if Assange consented to be extradited to Ecuador, it would be automatic. The US could file extradition requests with Sweden or Ecuador, but of course Sweden would never have a chance to serve it (having surrendered him to Ecuador in the order of precedence), and Ecuador would never honor such a request from the US.
Once in Ecuador, Assange could deny the charges that got him there and Ecuador could decide to drop the case for a lack of evidence.
It may be a bit distasteful for Ecuador to have to charge their guest with an extraditable offense, Correa might lose a bit of face for having to take that route. But I think he'd gain more face than he lost, with the means being seen as justifiable for the end.
F*ing a sleeping girl is to work around her refusal to consent to one's preferred form of sex - entry #4 on Assange's EAW - is rape in almost every jurisdiction in the first world. And the UK court system has - at multiple levels - upheld that all four entries on the EAW match up to equivalent British charges. And a full court hearing in the Svea Court of Appeals, including testimony from Assange's attorneys, has gone over the evidence and found probable cause on all four counts. Heck, one of Assange's attorneys (Emerson) all but admitted that he did it.
Sweden actually has rather unusually lax penalties in this regard compared to most places. If Assange was convicted of doing that in DC then he'd be facing a 10x longer maximum sentence than in Sweden. In fact, Sweden's rape laws in general are pretty lax. There was a rape case a while back where a teenage girl was gang-raped by a group of three men; however, only the first could be charged because, having been beaten into submission by him, she had stopped resisting by the time that the other two got to her.
Anyway, for the case at hand here, it's amazing that the Slashdot header didn't mention the actual stated reason why the prosecutor is doing this: because the statute of limitations on some of the lesser charges** runs out this year (the statute on the rape charge** doesn't run out until 2020). Thus he has to be indicted**, of which this questioning is a legal requirement (he's only been questioned on some of the charges before he fled***, all other communication has been through Q and A via his attorneys). This will pose some challenges, as in general in Sweden, once indicted**, there's a time limit on when the case must go to trial, but if he still refuses to hand himself over, he could run this out. But the prosecutor's office may be able to extend that, we'll have to see.
** I use here "charged" in the case of "anklagad" and "indict" in the case of "åtala". They don't exactly match up to English words, and a lot of Assange fans like to play this word game where they say he's not been "charged" and use that as an excuse for why he should be able to go free. But in Sweden, the process is that one gets formally anklagad by the processor and a judge issues a warrant (following the same sort of process as a charged person in the US or UK), and then once in custody and sufficient evidence has been gathered for prosecution, they're åtalad, which brings the case to trial. You're anklagad to get you in custody, åtalad to try to convict you.
*** Yes, he did flee. The claim that Assange was "free to go" as promulgated by Björn Hurtig, a former attorney of Assange's. He tried that same line in court and got smacked down by the judge for trying to deceive the court, and then got an official reprimand from the Swedish Bar Association.
Little fertilizer is made from petroleum. Phosphates are mined and sometimes acid modified to make more soluble. Ammonia is made from methane, which today comes as natural gas, but can be made in countless different processes. Nitrates are made from ammonia. Potassium fertilizers are made from mined potash and ammonium nitrate. Etc.
The ability of humans to thrive is not petroleum-limited, but energy-in-general limited.
The amount of arable land on earth is increasing as the planet warms. While some areas closer to the tropics become less arable due to the expansion of the monsoon belts, this is more than compensated for by the increased northern growing seasons. (please don't take this as an ad for global warming, I'm not saying it's a good thing, just pointing this out)
People's lack of care for livestock or our societies' grossly unequal distribution of wealth are entirely unrelated to carrying capacity. Actually, quite to the contrary, inequality dramatically decreases it. Crop yields per hectare in poorer locations are dramatically lower than in wealthier locations.
You've got it backwards. Wind is highly cost ineffective unless done very large. Sub-100kW turbines just don't get you the same sort of buy in your power as the >500kW turbines, and the little rooftop turbines are ridiculously expensive per kWh. By contrast, solar - at least photovoltaic - works just fine at the small scale, especially when the land area for it is "free" (aka, someone wants to add cells to their roof).
Lasers wouldn't even come close to working, unfortuately. Ignoring that the fact that this isn't going to be pure, bubble-free, single crystal ice - celestial bodies just don't work like that - even if it was the laser light would still attenuate way too fast. And it's even worse outside the visible spectrum.
Hmm, it just occurred to me, yet one more possibility, and probably the most realistic: Fully autonomous probe. No through-the-ice communication. Contains ballast tanks. Heavier than ice when the ballast tanks are full, lighter than ice when they're empty. Mission: probe melts its way down, explores, flushes its ballast tanks with compressed air so that it's buoyant, then melts its way back to the surface. *Then* it can transmit everything that it discovered.
Realistically, it's hard to picture any method that would work other than a nuclear reactor melting itself down through the surface. But then you've got the question of how to handle communications back to the top. That's a *lot* of ice to transmit through.
A 330km cable frozen into the ice that reforms above would be very heavy (tens of thousands of tonnes even if very lightweight), complex to feed, and probably have an unacceptable risk of breakage from shifting / settling ice.
I guess if you considered extremely low bandwidth acceptable you could use a neutrino pulse based transmission method straight from the probe.
Perhaps instead of 330km of cable you could drop behind hundreds of RTG-powered SLF radio repeaters (or thousands of ULF repeaters, or tens of thousands of VLF repeaters...). That'd still be of course incredibly heavy (not just for the power and radio equipment, but for the very sizeable antennae), but that'd likely be more workable than a single 330km cable.
I guess the last option that comes to mind would be to use exceedingly low frequency RF to try to go straight through the ice from the probe itself, less than 1Hz. But surely we're talking an antenna spread out over hundreds of square kilometers to be able to do that.
I should add that we need to think better about how we want to think about early life, what's likely to lead to an evolutionary path.
On one hand, we have self replicators like the misfolded prions of BSE. Injected into a healthy human, a single misfolded prion can begin taking others in the person's body and misfolding them, leading to a catalytic cycle that spreads like a virus and eventually kills the person. One could conveive that if there were a wide range of "roughly prion-like" chemicals in some primordial soup, that their variations in folding could lead to evolutionary adaptation with time.
Is this reproduction some realistic sort of form of protolife? By far most people would say no. Prions are large, complex proteins; the concept of an early world containing large amounts of this exceedingly specific complex protein, or even proteins not exactly the same but still similar enough for reproduction, is exceedingly unlikely.
On the other hand, let's look at something like tin pest. Objects made of pure tin are stable at warmer temperatures, but at low temperatures they can develop something called "tin pest" where tiny spots break out, and then over the course of months expand and eat up the object, breaking it down into dust, like bacterial colonies spreading across a petri dish. This is a low-temperature stable allotrope of tin which catalyzes its own formation to reproduce itself.
Is this reproduction some realistic soft of form of protolife? By far, most people would say no. Contrary to prions, it's input is quite simple: plain, ordinary tin. It's easy to picture where this specific case or other natural cases like it could occur in some early world. But its problem is different: it's too specific. Tin pest seems unlikely to, say, mutate and start catalyzing the production of phospholipids or similar. It's just one self-catalytic reaction, with no real possibility for alterations.
The earliest forms of protolife surely lie somewhere on the spectrum in-between these two endpoints - not with such glaringly simple inputs as tin pest, such that your reaction is too simple to have any chance of it mutating without outright dying off, but not with inputs so complex as prions that you're unlikely to ever find significant quantities in nature. Surely the earliest forms were some sort of middle ground.
But what they were, specifically? This is totally and utterly unknown at this time.
And you know that those are the requirements for LAWKI how? Ignoring the fact that there could be entirely different requirements for other entirely types of life elsewhere, you have no clue how the earliest forms of life on Earth began.
If Titan's natural abiotic organic chemistry laboratory offers any clues, for example, the start of life could have come because of ionizing solar radiation, and in the absence of water, and only later developed into our present form. On Titan solar ionizing radiation builds complex organic compounds, some having been measured at over 10000 daltons, of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, which raises the potential of catalytic cycles.
There have been countless proposed mechanisms for the earliest forms of autocatalysis that could have led up to the theoretical RNA world that could have led to our present world. And orders of magnitude more not yet conceived that could potentially have done it. It's silly to pretend that we have any clue exactly what the requirements are for the earliest "ancestor" to life on Earth. We don't know whether it developed in an ocean, on land, in a lake, in the soil, in rocks deep underground, in the troposphere, in the exosphere, in space... we really don't know. We don't know where it developed and we don't know what it was, and we don't know if it was the only way life could form (but I'd wager "no").
To be fair, some things really do come across as ripoffs. A couple years ago our entry to the Eurovision Song Competition was such a blatant ripoff of "I Am Cow", it's not even funny. Nothing came of it.
Probably not. But they could very likely do it to their close relatives, bees, which might be useful. Bees are actually more closely related to ants than they are to wasps.
3) The engineer's response is to ask if it can be reproduced with noveau and say that they can't understand how it could happen. I replied. And got no response. And no response. And no response. Three months later, no response.
4) The NVIDIA people's response was much more convincing that it's an Xorg problem than Xorg's "I don't know how that could happen" response.
5) I fully expected a lot of "pass the buck" between the two. But the buck right now is sitting with Xorg, who hasn't even bothered to respond to the information that they requested and an offer of help in any way that they can, nor a second user with the same problem, in the past three months.
Multiple people experiencing the problem, an offer to assist in debugging it in any way possible, and no responses in three months. Do you find this acceptable?
Slashdot Mirror
If only they had those chemicals back...
As always, The Onion says it best.
That would work.
They present one side as "Russia and China", but really, China is in this for themslves. They're making good use of the western sanctions on Russia to enrich themselves, negotiating all of the detals with Russia that they've been wanting to negotiate for a long time at bargain-basement prices that previously Russia had been unwilling to do.
Vietnam, too, is in this for themselves. They want their military purchases from Russia, and they also want investment from America. Buying them off is almost certainly a possibility. The question then becomes however, can the US really afford to buy off everyone? It's about proportionality... if Russia can spend a couple tens of millions of dollars to make the US spend a billion, Russia wins. On the other hand, if the US can spend a billion dollars to cost Russia a billion, the US winds, because the US economy is so vastly larger than the Russian economy.
You got me thinking. Before I'd initially dismissed sound as you'd need strong earthquake-level power outputs to be detectable on the surface. But perhaps sound repeaters might be more realistic than extremely low frequency RF repeaters? Hmm.
Still, I think the best bet is probably just make it fully autonomous with ballast tanks and just have it surface. Ideally with enough fuel to do multiple up/down burrows, so that the first one can be a "safe" run - just down into the ocean, get as much science data (and possibly samples to take back) as you can in a short period of time, then straight back to the top to transmit it. Then once all of the basic data is sent, you could go back down and engage in riskier activities like long-distance navigation, deep dives, etc.
Once again, Assange fans demonstrate their total ignorance of everything related to the case.
"They dozed off and she awoke and felt him penetrating her." - SW's testimony
"After that, SW told HR that she was feeling worse and worse. She said that the problem was that Assange had had unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping. SW also said that Assange had nagged her and tried to have unprotected sex with her during the night, but that she had made him wear a condom. SW had told Assange several times to wear a condom. SW also told HR that Assange had spoken so strangely, as though he wanted SW to become pregnant. He said things that sounded like he wanted to make women pregnant. He reportedly said that he preferred virgins, because then he would be the first to make them pregnant." -- HR's testimony (friend of SW since childhood)
"SW had said that Assange wanted to have sex with her, and that SW had said that she did not want to have sex without a condom. SW also said that, when she was half asleep on her side, she had been aroused from slumber to feel that Assange was inside her. SW had then asked him what he was wearing and he had replied, “I am wearing you”. The witness said that SW did not believe that he had entered her; rather, she had been aroused from slumber when he was already inside her." - KS's testimony (close colleague of SW)
"He learned about what had happened from SW and his mother. The latter had said that Julian had sex with SW without a condom and against her will as she slept." - KW's testimony (SW's brother)
"Then Sofia said that she had been raped by Julian Assange, in that he had initiated unprotected sex with her while she lay sleeping." - SB's testimony (old friend and one time boyfriend of SW)
Where does your ridiculous "she was just sleepy" claim come from? It's an echo-chamber morphing of a claim from Assange's attorney, which was based on the "half asleep" line in KS's testimony. But KS continued, "she had been aroused from slumber to feel that Assange was inside her."
False. There was shopping and breakfast - but it came before the reported assault. Here's the descriptions of that from the leaked testimony:
"Earlier, she had fetched some condoms and laid them on the floor by the bed. He reluctantly agreed to use a condom, although he muttered that he preferred her to latex. He no longer had an erection problem. At one point when he took her from behind, she turned to look at him and smiled and he asked her why she was smiling, what had she to smile about. She did not like the undertone of his voice. They fell asleep, and when they woke up they may have had sex again; she does not really remember. He ordered her to fetch him some water and orange juice. She did not like being ordered about in her own home, but thought “what the hell” and fetched the liquids anyway. He wanted her to go out and buy more breakfast. She did not want to leave him alone in the flat — she really did not know him very well — but she did it anyway. When she left the flat he lay naked in her bed and was fiddling with one of his telephones. Before she left she said, “Be good'”. He replied: “Don't worry, I'm always bad”. When she returned she served him oatmeal porridge, milk, and juice. She had already eaten before he awoke, and had spoken with a friend on the phone." - SW's testimony
"While sleeping on the night of the episode, MT was awakened by an SMS message from SW. MT's recollection of that message is that it was not positive — that the sex was not goo
Which would be relevant if this was some sort of "information gathering phase". It is not. They have a court finding (upheld on review) of probable cause of all four charges. According to the sworn statement of the prosecutor to the UK courts, "Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries."
As usual with most assange fans, you're so ignorant of the actual case that you don't even know the bloody charges. There are no rape charges concerning AA. The charges concerning AA are 1-3 on the EAW, the most significant of which is "unlawful sexual coersion", which matches AA's statements, including her most recent (late last year), referring to what happened to her as an assault but not rape. #4 concerns SW. AA's one public statement shortly after the case came out, and the many statements in the leaked police testimony (of which is just a fraction of the total testimony, more was collected after that), was that she went to the police with SW to provide support for SW's accusation of rape, but that what happened to her did not amount to rape. The charges are in line with this.
You're also mixing up all sorts of other stuff in that statement. Her statements about what happened to her in the press and in the police testimony weren't tweets. The "tweet" thing most people talk about were tweets she made during the period in which Assange was living with her. But they're almost always misquoted. The main one misrepresented is usually the one about going to the crayfish party, where she talks about being at a party with the "world's most amazing people". The police interviewed people who went to the party. One of them, KB, testified that AA had complained to her at the party about the "violent" (her words) sex with Assange.
Once again, I'll repeat: there are no rape charges related to AA. So it's a moot point anyway. There are two molestation charges and one unlawful sexual coersion charge related to him pinning her down and trying to pry her legs open until she agreed to consent.
This is simply false, and Hurtig's lies about it got him both scolded by a judge and officially reprimanded by the Swedish Bar Association. You can also read the leaked SMS logs from Ny (mainly with Hurtig), it gives a good sense of the game Hurtig is playing - he keeps trying to convince the Swedish side first that Assange is still in Sweden and getting ready to meet with them, then pretends to be out of touch with him and stops answering his phone, then when it's clear that Assange is overseas he still keeps pretending that Assange will be coming back very soon to meet with them Assange is setting up long-term lodging in the UK and hiring local attorneys.
By "the history", you mean "the one case a decade and a half ago where Egypt lied to Sweden and told them that two people were convicted terrorists and promised to treat them well, getting them deported on the flight that Egypt arranged with the CIA", a case that caused such an uproar that the two were given residence, large financial compensation packages, and EU extradition law in general was changed so that countries had to have a history of upholding their promises for extradition to be allowed to proceed? The case that led to such an anti-rendition backlash in Sweden that in in 2006 Sweden had their special forces disguise themselves as airport workers to board a CIA jet and stop the extradition program from going through their territory, causing a major diplomatic incident with the US? A case that was exposed by.. wait for it.... Wikileaks!
While no country is perfect, Sweden has the #1 ranking in the world for the rights of the accused by the peer-reviewed World Justice Project. They have the world's best protections for whistleblowers - it's not even legal to investigate who leaked information in most cases, let alone prosecute. Assange thought so much of Sweden that he was moving there and setting up a new Wikileaks base of operations there - that's why he was in Sweden. He repeatedly called Sweden his shield, he thought so much of them. Right up until he was accused of rape, when suddenly Sweden magically transformed into an evil US lackey. Funny how that works.
That "someone" is Hydro-Québec, which is owned by the government of Quebec. They bring the government over 2 billion dollars per year and pump about 10 billion a year into the local economy.
Forgot to link a reference to the statute of limitations part: link
That's straight from the prosecutor's office website. Strange how much coverage of this decision hasn't mentioned this basic fact.
I'll add that I am curious as to whether anyone has managed to negotiate with Ecuador conditions in which they would hand him over.
I was recently pondering over a potential situation where both Ecuador and Sweden could get their sides met. Let's remember, Ecuador's side is to play up "We're protecting him from the evil imperialists in the US, and won't give him up unless we can be guaranteed that you won't honor any extradition request from the US". Sweden's is "We're not going to let someone who our courts system declared a probable rapist just walk without a trial, and nor are we going to promise to break our extradition law if a valid extradition request from the US was received, never mind that our law doesn't even allow for extradition for intelligence crimes". There's a bit of undertone of mutual disrespect in both cases. In Sweden's case, the undertone is along the lines of "We're a nation of laws, not of kangaroo courts bullied by the executive like you", while in Ecuador's case it's along the lines of "We're not your f*ing colony to order around, we make our own decisions, deal with it."
But there may be a way that both to get out of this with what they want.
Ecuador could charge Assange with a crime - say, hacking a server in Ecuador, and Assange could admit to it, providing all of the evidence they need to justify an extradition request. The extradition request could be filed concurrently with Sweden taking Assange into custody. Hence Ecuador's extradition request would have priority over any subsequent extradition requests from any third state (such as the US). The Swedish case, operating under the auspices of an EAW, would take priority. Whether he was convicted or not, whenever the Swedish legal system was done with him his extradition request would come into force before he could be set free. Normally both the UK and Sweden would have to approve an extradition request to a third state, both their courts and governments. But a consent to be extradited short circuits all of that, so if Assange consented to be extradited to Ecuador, it would be automatic. The US could file extradition requests with Sweden or Ecuador, but of course Sweden would never have a chance to serve it (having surrendered him to Ecuador in the order of precedence), and Ecuador would never honor such a request from the US.
Once in Ecuador, Assange could deny the charges that got him there and Ecuador could decide to drop the case for a lack of evidence.
It may be a bit distasteful for Ecuador to have to charge their guest with an extraditable offense, Correa might lose a bit of face for having to take that route. But I think he'd gain more face than he lost, with the means being seen as justifiable for the end.
No need to write the same reply again.
F*ing a sleeping girl is to work around her refusal to consent to one's preferred form of sex - entry #4 on Assange's EAW - is rape in almost every jurisdiction in the first world. And the UK court system has - at multiple levels - upheld that all four entries on the EAW match up to equivalent British charges. And a full court hearing in the Svea Court of Appeals, including testimony from Assange's attorneys, has gone over the evidence and found probable cause on all four counts. Heck, one of Assange's attorneys (Emerson) all but admitted that he did it.
Sweden actually has rather unusually lax penalties in this regard compared to most places. If Assange was convicted of doing that in DC then he'd be facing a 10x longer maximum sentence than in Sweden. In fact, Sweden's rape laws in general are pretty lax. There was a rape case a while back where a teenage girl was gang-raped by a group of three men; however, only the first could be charged because, having been beaten into submission by him, she had stopped resisting by the time that the other two got to her.
Anyway, for the case at hand here, it's amazing that the Slashdot header didn't mention the actual stated reason why the prosecutor is doing this: because the statute of limitations on some of the lesser charges** runs out this year (the statute on the rape charge** doesn't run out until 2020). Thus he has to be indicted**, of which this questioning is a legal requirement (he's only been questioned on some of the charges before he fled***, all other communication has been through Q and A via his attorneys). This will pose some challenges, as in general in Sweden, once indicted**, there's a time limit on when the case must go to trial, but if he still refuses to hand himself over, he could run this out. But the prosecutor's office may be able to extend that, we'll have to see.
** I use here "charged" in the case of "anklagad" and "indict" in the case of "åtala". They don't exactly match up to English words, and a lot of Assange fans like to play this word game where they say he's not been "charged" and use that as an excuse for why he should be able to go free. But in Sweden, the process is that one gets formally anklagad by the processor and a judge issues a warrant (following the same sort of process as a charged person in the US or UK), and then once in custody and sufficient evidence has been gathered for prosecution, they're åtalad, which brings the case to trial. You're anklagad to get you in custody, åtalad to try to convict you.
*** Yes, he did flee. The claim that Assange was "free to go" as promulgated by Björn Hurtig, a former attorney of Assange's. He tried that same line in court and got smacked down by the judge for trying to deceive the court, and then got an official reprimand from the Swedish Bar Association.
Little fertilizer is made from petroleum. Phosphates are mined and sometimes acid modified to make more soluble. Ammonia is made from methane, which today comes as natural gas, but can be made in countless different processes. Nitrates are made from ammonia. Potassium fertilizers are made from mined potash and ammonium nitrate. Etc.
The ability of humans to thrive is not petroleum-limited, but energy-in-general limited.
The amount of arable land on earth is increasing as the planet warms. While some areas closer to the tropics become less arable due to the expansion of the monsoon belts, this is more than compensated for by the increased northern growing seasons. (please don't take this as an ad for global warming, I'm not saying it's a good thing, just pointing this out)
People's lack of care for livestock or our societies' grossly unequal distribution of wealth are entirely unrelated to carrying capacity. Actually, quite to the contrary, inequality dramatically decreases it. Crop yields per hectare in poorer locations are dramatically lower than in wealthier locations.
Really, so you're dumping water out rather than letting it run through the turbines?
No, you're selling it to outside Quebec and making vast amounts of money off of it. And you'll be exporting even more power once you get the turbines.
Power transmission doesn't stop at regional borders.
You've got it backwards. Wind is highly cost ineffective unless done very large. Sub-100kW turbines just don't get you the same sort of buy in your power as the >500kW turbines, and the little rooftop turbines are ridiculously expensive per kWh. By contrast, solar - at least photovoltaic - works just fine at the small scale, especially when the land area for it is "free" (aka, someone wants to add cells to their roof).
[Citation needed]
Lasers wouldn't even come close to working, unfortuately. Ignoring that the fact that this isn't going to be pure, bubble-free, single crystal ice - celestial bodies just don't work like that - even if it was the laser light would still attenuate way too fast. And it's even worse outside the visible spectrum.
Hmm, it just occurred to me, yet one more possibility, and probably the most realistic: Fully autonomous probe. No through-the-ice communication. Contains ballast tanks. Heavier than ice when the ballast tanks are full, lighter than ice when they're empty. Mission: probe melts its way down, explores, flushes its ballast tanks with compressed air so that it's buoyant, then melts its way back to the surface. *Then* it can transmit everything that it discovered.
Realistically, it's hard to picture any method that would work other than a nuclear reactor melting itself down through the surface. But then you've got the question of how to handle communications back to the top. That's a *lot* of ice to transmit through.
A 330km cable frozen into the ice that reforms above would be very heavy (tens of thousands of tonnes even if very lightweight), complex to feed, and probably have an unacceptable risk of breakage from shifting / settling ice.
I guess if you considered extremely low bandwidth acceptable you could use a neutrino pulse based transmission method straight from the probe.
Perhaps instead of 330km of cable you could drop behind hundreds of RTG-powered SLF radio repeaters (or thousands of ULF repeaters, or tens of thousands of VLF repeaters...). That'd still be of course incredibly heavy (not just for the power and radio equipment, but for the very sizeable antennae), but that'd likely be more workable than a single 330km cable.
I guess the last option that comes to mind would be to use exceedingly low frequency RF to try to go straight through the ice from the probe itself, less than 1Hz. But surely we're talking an antenna spread out over hundreds of square kilometers to be able to do that.
I should add that we need to think better about how we want to think about early life, what's likely to lead to an evolutionary path.
On one hand, we have self replicators like the misfolded prions of BSE. Injected into a healthy human, a single misfolded prion can begin taking others in the person's body and misfolding them, leading to a catalytic cycle that spreads like a virus and eventually kills the person. One could conveive that if there were a wide range of "roughly prion-like" chemicals in some primordial soup, that their variations in folding could lead to evolutionary adaptation with time.
Is this reproduction some realistic sort of form of protolife? By far most people would say no. Prions are large, complex proteins; the concept of an early world containing large amounts of this exceedingly specific complex protein, or even proteins not exactly the same but still similar enough for reproduction, is exceedingly unlikely.
On the other hand, let's look at something like tin pest. Objects made of pure tin are stable at warmer temperatures, but at low temperatures they can develop something called "tin pest" where tiny spots break out, and then over the course of months expand and eat up the object, breaking it down into dust, like bacterial colonies spreading across a petri dish. This is a low-temperature stable allotrope of tin which catalyzes its own formation to reproduce itself.
Is this reproduction some realistic soft of form of protolife? By far, most people would say no. Contrary to prions, it's input is quite simple: plain, ordinary tin. It's easy to picture where this specific case or other natural cases like it could occur in some early world. But its problem is different: it's too specific. Tin pest seems unlikely to, say, mutate and start catalyzing the production of phospholipids or similar. It's just one self-catalytic reaction, with no real possibility for alterations.
The earliest forms of protolife surely lie somewhere on the spectrum in-between these two endpoints - not with such glaringly simple inputs as tin pest, such that your reaction is too simple to have any chance of it mutating without outright dying off, but not with inputs so complex as prions that you're unlikely to ever find significant quantities in nature. Surely the earliest forms were some sort of middle ground.
But what they were, specifically? This is totally and utterly unknown at this time.
And you know that those are the requirements for LAWKI how? Ignoring the fact that there could be entirely different requirements for other entirely types of life elsewhere, you have no clue how the earliest forms of life on Earth began.
If Titan's natural abiotic organic chemistry laboratory offers any clues, for example, the start of life could have come because of ionizing solar radiation, and in the absence of water, and only later developed into our present form. On Titan solar ionizing radiation builds complex organic compounds, some having been measured at over 10000 daltons, of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, which raises the potential of catalytic cycles.
There have been countless proposed mechanisms for the earliest forms of autocatalysis that could have led up to the theoretical RNA world that could have led to our present world. And orders of magnitude more not yet conceived that could potentially have done it. It's silly to pretend that we have any clue exactly what the requirements are for the earliest "ancestor" to life on Earth. We don't know whether it developed in an ocean, on land, in a lake, in the soil, in rocks deep underground, in the troposphere, in the exosphere, in space... we really don't know. We don't know where it developed and we don't know what it was, and we don't know if it was the only way life could form (but I'd wager "no").
To be fair, some things really do come across as ripoffs. A couple years ago our entry to the Eurovision Song Competition was such a blatant ripoff of "I Am Cow", it's not even funny. Nothing came of it.
Probably not. But they could very likely do it to their close relatives, bees, which might be useful. Bees are actually more closely related to ants than they are to wasps.
1) A second user reported the exact same problem.
2) There are many similar problems across the net
3) The engineer's response is to ask if it can be reproduced with noveau and say that they can't understand how it could happen. I replied. And got no response. And no response. And no response. Three months later, no response.
4) The NVIDIA people's response was much more convincing that it's an Xorg problem than Xorg's "I don't know how that could happen" response.
5) I fully expected a lot of "pass the buck" between the two. But the buck right now is sitting with Xorg, who hasn't even bothered to respond to the information that they requested and an offer of help in any way that they can, nor a second user with the same problem, in the past three months.
Multiple people experiencing the problem, an offer to assist in debugging it in any way possible, and no responses in three months. Do you find this acceptable?