Yeah, most people think of them like party balloons, which isn't at all what they're like. The pressure inside a blimp is barely over atmospheric pressure, just enough to keep it in the desired shape. And the volume-to-surface area ratio is huge. It's surprisingly difficult to knock a blimp out of the sky.
What does "the amount of idiots" have to do with anything if they can't fly in manual mode (at least not without having to pass the certs as you do to fly a plane manually)?
And yes, any automatic system, to receive certification, should also be able to demonstrate a safe automated response to failure scenarios. What that method is should be left up to the engineers at hand, whether it's having lots of engines, safe glide-landing options, parachutes with spreader guns, retro-rockets, whatever. So long as it is fully automated when an incident occurs and passes a certification process based on recreating the accident conditions.
There's more benefits (discussed earlier) to aircraft over land vehicles in terms of efficiency, counteracting the losses to lift, than just being able to take a more direct route. Namely, engines always running at near optimal efficiency, dramatically lower drag coefficients, no rolling losses (even at highway speeds, they're about 40% of the total vehicle drag, give or take), and no start/stop losses beyond the one-time takeoff/landing costs.
It's not so simple as just assuming "is and always will be worse".
The energy consumption between cars and private planes isn't that distorted. I think a typical cessna gets something like 9,5l/100km (25mpg) when cruising at 200kph (~120mph). Obviously short hops will hurt your efficiency a good bit, of course. On the other hand, the ability to reduce the number of "miles" traveled by taking a more direct route could be a big benefit (with caveats, see below).
Yes, you're wasting energy keeping a plane aloft. Also since aero drag is proportional to velocity squared, the higher rate of travel of aircraft is no laughing matter in terms of energy consumption. But it's important to keep in mind several things. One, the lack of consumer demands for high-drag profiles on aircraft (like their is with cars - all of those efficient cars that everyone decries as ugly, well, that's streamlining) plus the lack of ground effect drag, wheel well drag, side mirrors, etc means that aircraft generally have aero drag coefficients a tiny fraction of those that cars have, and even traveling at double the speed of cars, small planes generally get significantly less aero drag. There's no rolling drag (a larger share of losses at low speeds, but even at high speeds in a car it's about 40% of your losses). There's no regular accel/decel losses (although there's the one-time not-insignificant hit of takeoff/landing). And the engines of the aircraft nearly always operate in their most efficient power band, unlike those of cars whose torque and RPM demands are always changing dramatically. A propeller-based drivetrain has a slightly lower engine power-to-motion efficiency (90+% vs ~75%), but this should more than be overcome by increased engine efficiency in most circumstances.
The progress of technology such as weight reduction significantly benefits both aircraft and vehicles. However, it should benefit aircraft more. If you picture the extreme case of the mass of the vehicle being reduced to zero, from a thought experiment perspective (obviously impossible - at the very least, your occupants weigh something), the energy consumption equation gets simplified down purely to A) the aero drag which, as discussed, is generally lower on a light aircraft going 200kph than a car going 110kph, and B) the propulsion efficiency, which again, is probably better on the aircraft. And of course, the aircraft, at least in theory, flies a more direct route, cutting anywhere from a couple percent to 100% or more of the distance off the trip. The potential frustrating aspect is that, at least for now, takeoff and landing sites will likely be confined to a narrow set of locations, for safety reasons. Even if the process is fully automated and VTOL, a big gust of wind comes along and blows you into a skyscraper... not fun. There's also noise and pollution concerns in terms of site limitation. And so you might not get a distance benefit, or even potentially end up with a distance penalty.
Now, things get interesting when you start throwing things like electric propulsion as options into the mix... I've got no crystal ball for what will happen to battery tech in the future, beyond to note that it's been advancing at about 7-8% in terms of energy density per-year for the past two decades and shows no signs of slowing in the near future. It's currently sufficient to make electric commuter aircraft, but just barely, and they're certainly not competitive. But if battery mass in the future is brought dramatically down through whatever means (even some of the radical concepts like using quantum effects to trap energy), to the density of fuel-after-engine-efficiency-is-taken-into-account (or better), you find some interesting possibilities. Namely, electric motors of the types used in electric vehicles have very high power density already, and I can only imagine what they'll be like in the future. The same applies to power density of battery packs. So our "future commuter electric private jet" could have copious amounts of thrust potential along with its low mass, allowing for precision takeoff and landing even in highly adverse conditions, as well as no direct pollution. Perhaps that could ease the restrictions on automated takeoff and landing sites?
Hey, I've been around Slashdot long enough to learn that plutonium in baby food is healthy for babies, and anyone who says otherwise is a socialist hippie bent on destroying the global economy.;)
The fact that the ECHR has overturned a number of UK court decisions, and tend to do so a few times a year, suggests that injustice via UK courts is not a particularly rare occurance.
The UK has a very low 'rate of defeat' at Strasbourg. Of the nearly 12,000 applications brought against the UK between 1999 and 2010, the vast majority fell at the first hurdle. Only three percent (390 applications) were declared admissible. An even smaller proportion of applicants - 1.8 per cent (215) - eventually resulted in a judgment finding a violation. In other words, the UK 'lost' only one in fifty cases brought against it in Strasbourg. If adjustment is made for repetitive cases (i.e. cases where the violation has the same root cause and therefore multiple judgments are counted as a single judgment), the rate of defeat falls to 1.4 per cent (161). The latest figures for 2011 show a rate of defeat of just 0.5 per cent, or one in 200.
Of course, we're not talking about "proof" here in the pure mathematical "exhaustive" sense, but in the statistical confidence sense, and more specifically, in requiring a basic set of health/environmental impact studies before a new chemical can be used. Which just seems like common sense. If one is worried about that being too onerous, then the burden could be varied depending on how similar they are to existing chemicals which have gone through the full battery of health studies.
Check the link above. "Generally" doesn't cut it. The British have made it clear that they will, in fact, stop any vehicle leaving the embassy to search for Assange, which is legally permissible (diplomatic plates do not protect you from being stopped).
Were he to be given a diplomatic passport, that would not alter the situation: immunity from arrest is only conferred on diplomats accredited to the Court of St James's by the Foreign Office.
Any attempt by the Ecuadoreans to have him accredited would be rebuffed by UK authorities. Were Assange to accept an Ecuadorean diplomatic passport, some suggest, he would become an Ecuadorean national – and therefore be unable to seek asylum in what would now be his own country's embassy.
The basic summary of it is, there is no international right to asylum in embassies and no magic loophole that can move such a person out of country. Ultimately, the UK is i charge of the situation, with the only real limits being whatever degree of concern they have over upsetting Ecuador. Which I suspect is not that great, and certainly less than whatever level of concern they have over upsetting Sweden and over having every two-bit criminal try to pay off the ambassador of a third-world country to get asylum.
There actually is very little law on asylum in embassies because most embassies and countries have worked very hard to discourage people from taking asylum there and trying to boot out people relatively quickly when they do. There have been a couple high profile cases where people have lived in embassies for years, but it's very rare. Getting someone who sought asylum in an embassy to its state without either the consent of the host state or an elaborate smuggling operation has never happened, as far as what I've read indicates.
As for what you wrote: The Swedish judicial system has a series of stages which things must go through, and being formally charged is one of the later stages. He can't be formally charged until he's back in Swedish custody. He left when there was a warrant being readied for his arrest during those "five weeks", and he knew about this from his lawyer, as emerged during the trial (with the lawyer being lucky he didn't get hit with a perjury charge over that). He most definitely knew he was running from the law.
when he's in the Ambassador's limo on the way to the airport he's on Ecuadorian soil (Diplomatic plates, cops can't stop it)
Wrong. Diplomatic immunity protects people, not vehicles. Police can still stop a vehicle with diplomatic plates. And the UK most definitely will. Now, the police aren't allowed to search a "diplomatic pouch", but people have tried to smuggle other people in diplomatic pouches before, and it's never worked.
This whole thing is sheer fantasy. All the experts in the field are pretty much unanimous on this one. There've been some wild proposals for how to move him which might pass legal muster, such as declaring him to be Ecuador's UN ambassador, but he'd haveu to fly first to New York City before he could fly home to Ecuador - and you really think that if he believes all the stuff he's been saying about the lengths the US wants to go to get him, that he'd fly straight into New York City, even if he ostensibly had immunity?
It's not going to happen.
On the other hand, the UK has a number of way to force him out of the embassy - everything from legal maneuvers (embassies are not allowed to take part in operations unrelated to their charter) to outright closing the embassy. Or they could just let him rot inside a little embassy building for the rest of his life, or until he gets sick enough that he has to go to the hospital.
I know... it's one of those "why even bother" things. You know they'll never read the actual charges, you know they'll never read the court ruling against him.... they'll just keep saying "It's sex without a condom and they didn't decide it was rape until they got jealous and the prosector is a feminist with an agenda and the girls are CIA plants!" and on and on.
And amazingly, did that only based on the statements of Assange, his defense teams, and his legion of millions of fans! Clearly the fact that two separate courts in the UK, including the UK high court, means that the UK court system is in on a giant American conspiracy because, hey, Assange, his defense team, and his fans say the charges are ridiculous, and if they're ridiculous, then the only way the charges could be confirmed would be a conspiracy. See how the logic works?
The concept that, hey, defense teams and defendents spin cases toward their perspective (in this case, playing so hard and loose with the facts that one of Assange's attorneys is lucky he didn't get charged with perjury), doesn't seem to have occurred to any of you.
You're mixing things up. The regulation is that to extradite him *from* Sweden, the UK would also have to sign off on it (that would be, two countries would need to approve). It's a quirk of European Arrest Warrants. From the UK, only the UK has to approve extradition to the US. There is no priority, since the US would not be applying under the European Arrest Warrant system.
The "covert CIA operative" line is the most "jumped the shark" accusation in this whole fiasco. Do you actually know where that comes from? It's because Ardin once wrote two anti-Castro articles for a magazine Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas, which is put out by a group, Misceláneas de Cuba, which according to some professor, is itself funded by a Swedish organization (unnamed), which is connected with Union Liberal Cubana, which is led by led by Carlos Alberto Montaner, which a Wordpress article says is connected with the CIA. Oh, and she met with a women's right group in Cuba who once had a parade in Florida wherein an accused plane bomber marched next to Maria Carey. Therefore, she's a CIA operative! I kid you not.
Can you Assange fans please get back in touch with reality here and step out of the echo chamber for once? Start with the judgement.
Yes, that's the yarn which has circled in the fanboy echo chamber. Which has essentially no correlation with reality. Do you really think that two separate British courts, including the high court, reviewed the charges against him and confirmed that they met the definition of rape even in the UK, if that was the case?
Here's a brief summary of what was actually alleged. And here's the court's more detailed fact-finding (you should definitely read the latter). There's nothing "suspicious" about how the case was handled unless you don't actually know how the case was handled (which, of course, has been the main goal of Assange's backers).
To briefly summarize the *actual* accusations, they're that Assange quickly began trying to make out with the first woman, which she initially went along with, only to have him try to force her legs apart and pin her down trying to force sex without a condom, to wherein she consented to sex with a condom to prevent it from happening to her without a condom, only to find out later that the condom was "broken". That night she told a friend about the "violent" (her words) sex with assange, and then moved out of her *own apartment* to get away from him. Concerning the other girl, he had tried to sleep with her without a condom over and over, something which she had never done in her life, even with her previous long-term boyfriend. She kept refusing. He stayed up while she fell asleep, and she woke up to him having sex with her without a condom (if you don't think that having sex with a sleeping person is rape, imho, you're a sick bastard). And yes, she understandably freaked out after it and tried to force him to get an STD test, which he refused.
As for the whole "they didn't decide it was rape until talking together" thing, that's the most offfensive part to me. Do you know how hard it is to admit to even yourself, let alone others, that you were raped? I called mine "an unwanted sexual experience" and whatever other weasel words I could get out of to avoid using that term for myself. It took three months of denial and trying just to move on with my life before I could accept what happened to me. There's a reason most rapes are never reported. You just want to put it in the past and forget about it; the last thing you want to do is have to relive it, to face the person again, to have all sorts of vile allegations leveled against *you*, etc. But if I had found out shortly afterwards that the next day that the guy who attacked me had done the same sort of thing to another girl? I don't know how I would have reacted, but it certainly would have changed the picture.
As for the CPT, they criticize everyone. That's their job. The report on Sweden is no worse than on any other state, and a lot better than a number. And as for giving suspects to the US, Assange felt so comfortable with Sweden that he was *applying for residency* when he was charged with rape. And then fled to the UK from there, which is ten times the US lackey Sweden ever was.
The whole extradition argument was just absurd from the get-go. He sure wasn't afraid of Sweden being such a US lackey when he was *applying to live there*. It only became a "US lackey" when he was charged with rape. Suddenly Britain, the infamous US lackey in Europe, was the beacon of freedom and his salvation against a corrupt Sweden. Only after reviewing the evidence against him, two separate British courts found the charges credible and the extradition request valid. So suddenly Britain became an evil US lackey and now freaking Ecuador is the beacon of freedom.
I really don't understand why anyone is still supporting this attention-hog.
Not only did he have only good things to say about Sweden right up until it became apparent that he was going to be charged with rape there, he was actually applying to *live* there. Which is why the Swedish prosecutors didn't see him as a flight risk. Suddenly Sweden is just a US lackey with a corrupt legal system. While freaking *Ecuador* is a beacon of freedom. Amazing how that happens.
The most ridiculous aspect of it is the fact that Assange is not in, and will not be in, Ecuador. He's in the Ecuadorian embassy. And it's pretty inconceivable how he could possibly get from the embassy to Ecuador.
Honestly, unless the British want every two-bit criminal in London to try bribing some third-world embassador for assylum, I don't expect them to just sit there and take this. I expect them to use anything ranging from legal nuances (there is no international right to assylum in embassies and embassies are supposed to be obligated to do only work relative to their mission) to outright closing the Ecuadorian embassy for flouting their justice system.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, most people think of them like party balloons, which isn't at all what they're like. The pressure inside a blimp is barely over atmospheric pressure, just enough to keep it in the desired shape. And the volume-to-surface area ratio is huge. It's surprisingly difficult to knock a blimp out of the sky.
What does "the amount of idiots" have to do with anything if they can't fly in manual mode (at least not without having to pass the certs as you do to fly a plane manually)?
And yes, any automatic system, to receive certification, should also be able to demonstrate a safe automated response to failure scenarios. What that method is should be left up to the engineers at hand, whether it's having lots of engines, safe glide-landing options, parachutes with spreader guns, retro-rockets, whatever. So long as it is fully automated when an incident occurs and passes a certification process based on recreating the accident conditions.
There's more benefits (discussed earlier) to aircraft over land vehicles in terms of efficiency, counteracting the losses to lift, than just being able to take a more direct route. Namely, engines always running at near optimal efficiency, dramatically lower drag coefficients, no rolling losses (even at highway speeds, they're about 40% of the total vehicle drag, give or take), and no start/stop losses beyond the one-time takeoff/landing costs.
It's not so simple as just assuming "is and always will be worse".
The energy consumption between cars and private planes isn't that distorted. I think a typical cessna gets something like 9,5l/100km (25mpg) when cruising at 200kph (~120mph). Obviously short hops will hurt your efficiency a good bit, of course. On the other hand, the ability to reduce the number of "miles" traveled by taking a more direct route could be a big benefit (with caveats, see below).
Yes, you're wasting energy keeping a plane aloft. Also since aero drag is proportional to velocity squared, the higher rate of travel of aircraft is no laughing matter in terms of energy consumption. But it's important to keep in mind several things. One, the lack of consumer demands for high-drag profiles on aircraft (like their is with cars - all of those efficient cars that everyone decries as ugly, well, that's streamlining) plus the lack of ground effect drag, wheel well drag, side mirrors, etc means that aircraft generally have aero drag coefficients a tiny fraction of those that cars have, and even traveling at double the speed of cars, small planes generally get significantly less aero drag. There's no rolling drag (a larger share of losses at low speeds, but even at high speeds in a car it's about 40% of your losses). There's no regular accel/decel losses (although there's the one-time not-insignificant hit of takeoff/landing). And the engines of the aircraft nearly always operate in their most efficient power band, unlike those of cars whose torque and RPM demands are always changing dramatically. A propeller-based drivetrain has a slightly lower engine power-to-motion efficiency (90+% vs ~75%), but this should more than be overcome by increased engine efficiency in most circumstances.
The progress of technology such as weight reduction significantly benefits both aircraft and vehicles. However, it should benefit aircraft more. If you picture the extreme case of the mass of the vehicle being reduced to zero, from a thought experiment perspective (obviously impossible - at the very least, your occupants weigh something), the energy consumption equation gets simplified down purely to A) the aero drag which, as discussed, is generally lower on a light aircraft going 200kph than a car going 110kph, and B) the propulsion efficiency, which again, is probably better on the aircraft. And of course, the aircraft, at least in theory, flies a more direct route, cutting anywhere from a couple percent to 100% or more of the distance off the trip. The potential frustrating aspect is that, at least for now, takeoff and landing sites will likely be confined to a narrow set of locations, for safety reasons. Even if the process is fully automated and VTOL, a big gust of wind comes along and blows you into a skyscraper... not fun. There's also noise and pollution concerns in terms of site limitation. And so you might not get a distance benefit, or even potentially end up with a distance penalty.
Now, things get interesting when you start throwing things like electric propulsion as options into the mix... I've got no crystal ball for what will happen to battery tech in the future, beyond to note that it's been advancing at about 7-8% in terms of energy density per-year for the past two decades and shows no signs of slowing in the near future. It's currently sufficient to make electric commuter aircraft, but just barely, and they're certainly not competitive. But if battery mass in the future is brought dramatically down through whatever means (even some of the radical concepts like using quantum effects to trap energy), to the density of fuel-after-engine-efficiency-is-taken-into-account (or better), you find some interesting possibilities. Namely, electric motors of the types used in electric vehicles have very high power density already, and I can only imagine what they'll be like in the future. The same applies to power density of battery packs. So our "future commuter electric private jet" could have copious amounts of thrust potential along with its low mass, allowing for precision takeoff and landing even in highly adverse conditions, as well as no direct pollution. Perhaps that could ease the restrictions on automated takeoff and landing sites?
Just musing here.
Which according to insane troll logic means that Michael Vick is a modern Wilbur Wright ;)
Hey, I've been around Slashdot long enough to learn that plutonium in baby food is healthy for babies, and anyone who says otherwise is a socialist hippie bent on destroying the global economy. ;)
Um, yes it is.
You were saying?
Yeah you can, by exhausting the search space.
Of course, we're not talking about "proof" here in the pure mathematical "exhaustive" sense, but in the statistical confidence sense, and more specifically, in requiring a basic set of health/environmental impact studies before a new chemical can be used. Which just seems like common sense. If one is worried about that being too onerous, then the burden could be varied depending on how similar they are to existing chemicals which have gone through the full battery of health studies.
Details which you got from Assange's fans, defense team, and the defendant himself. News Flash, defendent in rape case denies rape, details at 11.
Check the link above. "Generally" doesn't cut it. The British have made it clear that they will, in fact, stop any vehicle leaving the embassy to search for Assange, which is legally permissible (diplomatic plates do not protect you from being stopped).
A better link about the "diplomatic passport" option:
The basic summary of it is, there is no international right to asylum in embassies and no magic loophole that can move such a person out of country. Ultimately, the UK is i charge of the situation, with the only real limits being whatever degree of concern they have over upsetting Ecuador. Which I suspect is not that great, and certainly less than whatever level of concern they have over upsetting Sweden and over having every two-bit criminal try to pay off the ambassador of a third-world country to get asylum.
A diplomatic passport would not help.
There actually is very little law on asylum in embassies because most embassies and countries have worked very hard to discourage people from taking asylum there and trying to boot out people relatively quickly when they do. There have been a couple high profile cases where people have lived in embassies for years, but it's very rare. Getting someone who sought asylum in an embassy to its state without either the consent of the host state or an elaborate smuggling operation has never happened, as far as what I've read indicates.
You know, you could read the actual ruling on the facts of the case, but you know, what fun would that be? Conspiracy theories are so much more fun!
As for what you wrote: The Swedish judicial system has a series of stages which things must go through, and being formally charged is one of the later stages. He can't be formally charged until he's back in Swedish custody. He left when there was a warrant being readied for his arrest during those "five weeks", and he knew about this from his lawyer, as emerged during the trial (with the lawyer being lucky he didn't get hit with a perjury charge over that). He most definitely knew he was running from the law.
Wrong. Diplomatic immunity protects people, not vehicles. Police can still stop a vehicle with diplomatic plates. And the UK most definitely will. Now, the police aren't allowed to search a "diplomatic pouch", but people have tried to smuggle other people in diplomatic pouches before, and it's never worked.
This whole thing is sheer fantasy. All the experts in the field are pretty much unanimous on this one. There've been some wild proposals for how to move him which might pass legal muster, such as declaring him to be Ecuador's UN ambassador, but he'd haveu to fly first to New York City before he could fly home to Ecuador - and you really think that if he believes all the stuff he's been saying about the lengths the US wants to go to get him, that he'd fly straight into New York City, even if he ostensibly had immunity?
It's not going to happen.
On the other hand, the UK has a number of way to force him out of the embassy - everything from legal maneuvers (embassies are not allowed to take part in operations unrelated to their charter) to outright closing the embassy. Or they could just let him rot inside a little embassy building for the rest of his life, or until he gets sick enough that he has to go to the hospital.
How about you read the actual charges and the lower court ruling, which was upheld by the UK high court, mmmkay?
Or are conspiracies just too much fun?
I know... it's one of those "why even bother" things. You know they'll never read the actual charges, you know they'll never read the court ruling against him.... they'll just keep saying "It's sex without a condom and they didn't decide it was rape until they got jealous and the prosector is a feminist with an agenda and the girls are CIA plants!" and on and on.
And amazingly, did that only based on the statements of Assange, his defense teams, and his legion of millions of fans! Clearly the fact that two separate courts in the UK, including the UK high court, means that the UK court system is in on a giant American conspiracy because, hey, Assange, his defense team, and his fans say the charges are ridiculous, and if they're ridiculous, then the only way the charges could be confirmed would be a conspiracy. See how the logic works?
The concept that, hey, defense teams and defendents spin cases toward their perspective (in this case, playing so hard and loose with the facts that one of Assange's attorneys is lucky he didn't get charged with perjury), doesn't seem to have occurred to any of you.
You're mixing things up. The regulation is that to extradite him *from* Sweden, the UK would also have to sign off on it (that would be, two countries would need to approve). It's a quirk of European Arrest Warrants. From the UK, only the UK has to approve extradition to the US. There is no priority, since the US would not be applying under the European Arrest Warrant system.
The "covert CIA operative" line is the most "jumped the shark" accusation in this whole fiasco. Do you actually know where that comes from? It's because Ardin once wrote two anti-Castro articles for a magazine Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas, which is put out by a group, Misceláneas de Cuba, which according to some professor, is itself funded by a Swedish organization (unnamed), which is connected with Union Liberal Cubana, which is led by led by Carlos Alberto Montaner, which a Wordpress article says is connected with the CIA. Oh, and she met with a women's right group in Cuba who once had a parade in Florida wherein an accused plane bomber marched next to Maria Carey. Therefore, she's a CIA operative! I kid you not.
Can you Assange fans please get back in touch with reality here and step out of the echo chamber for once? Start with the judgement.
Yes, that's the yarn which has circled in the fanboy echo chamber. Which has essentially no correlation with reality. Do you really think that two separate British courts, including the high court, reviewed the charges against him and confirmed that they met the definition of rape even in the UK, if that was the case?
Here's a brief summary of what was actually alleged. And here's the court's more detailed fact-finding (you should definitely read the latter). There's nothing "suspicious" about how the case was handled unless you don't actually know how the case was handled (which, of course, has been the main goal of Assange's backers).
To briefly summarize the *actual* accusations, they're that Assange quickly began trying to make out with the first woman, which she initially went along with, only to have him try to force her legs apart and pin her down trying to force sex without a condom, to wherein she consented to sex with a condom to prevent it from happening to her without a condom, only to find out later that the condom was "broken". That night she told a friend about the "violent" (her words) sex with assange, and then moved out of her *own apartment* to get away from him. Concerning the other girl, he had tried to sleep with her without a condom over and over, something which she had never done in her life, even with her previous long-term boyfriend. She kept refusing. He stayed up while she fell asleep, and she woke up to him having sex with her without a condom (if you don't think that having sex with a sleeping person is rape, imho, you're a sick bastard). And yes, she understandably freaked out after it and tried to force him to get an STD test, which he refused.
As for the whole "they didn't decide it was rape until talking together" thing, that's the most offfensive part to me. Do you know how hard it is to admit to even yourself, let alone others, that you were raped? I called mine "an unwanted sexual experience" and whatever other weasel words I could get out of to avoid using that term for myself. It took three months of denial and trying just to move on with my life before I could accept what happened to me. There's a reason most rapes are never reported. You just want to put it in the past and forget about it; the last thing you want to do is have to relive it, to face the person again, to have all sorts of vile allegations leveled against *you*, etc. But if I had found out shortly afterwards that the next day that the guy who attacked me had done the same sort of thing to another girl? I don't know how I would have reacted, but it certainly would have changed the picture.
As for the CPT, they criticize everyone. That's their job. The report on Sweden is no worse than on any other state, and a lot better than a number. And as for giving suspects to the US, Assange felt so comfortable with Sweden that he was *applying for residency* when he was charged with rape. And then fled to the UK from there, which is ten times the US lackey Sweden ever was.
The whole extradition argument was just absurd from the get-go. He sure wasn't afraid of Sweden being such a US lackey when he was *applying to live there*. It only became a "US lackey" when he was charged with rape. Suddenly Britain, the infamous US lackey in Europe, was the beacon of freedom and his salvation against a corrupt Sweden. Only after reviewing the evidence against him, two separate British courts found the charges credible and the extradition request valid. So suddenly Britain became an evil US lackey and now freaking Ecuador is the beacon of freedom.
I really don't understand why anyone is still supporting this attention-hog.
Not only did he have only good things to say about Sweden right up until it became apparent that he was going to be charged with rape there, he was actually applying to *live* there. Which is why the Swedish prosecutors didn't see him as a flight risk. Suddenly Sweden is just a US lackey with a corrupt legal system. While freaking *Ecuador* is a beacon of freedom. Amazing how that happens.
Right. Because it's so appropriate to call allegations of rape which haven't been tried "so-called rape".
Did you forget that the guy is not *in* Ecuador? He was granted a not-internationally-recognized status which he has no ability to make use of.
The most ridiculous aspect of it is the fact that Assange is not in, and will not be in, Ecuador. He's in the Ecuadorian embassy. And it's pretty inconceivable how he could possibly get from the embassy to Ecuador.
Honestly, unless the British want every two-bit criminal in London to try bribing some third-world embassador for assylum, I don't expect them to just sit there and take this. I expect them to use anything ranging from legal nuances (there is no international right to assylum in embassies and embassies are supposed to be obligated to do only work relative to their mission) to outright closing the Ecuadorian embassy for flouting their justice system.