I am not at all convinced by this argument. Assuming the technical details that you are describing are correct, the situation is no different from, say, an eight-digit phone number in Munich such as 40123456 and a six-digit (legacy) phone number such as 123456 in Hamburg, which has the prefix (0)40. Both would be represented by precisely the same number and distinguished only by the TON field, so a TON = national number that just starts with 911 can't be a problem either.
Or are you saying that it is the case, and technically necessary, that if I dial 0112 in Germany, resulting in 112 with TON = national, I get the same result as when I dial 112?
Germany has been completely metricated for so long that several pre-metrication generations are no longer alive. Yet some Germans are still using customary units. And that's fine because they are simple multiples of metric units and are the same everywhere in Europe. For example a pound - to the extent that it's still in use - is nowadays exactly 1/2 kg except on those islands in the North West.
What most people are really attached to is words, not the precise size of a unit. What they don't understand is that with metrication they don't have to give up these words. They can call 1/2 kg a pound, they can call 1/2 litre a pint, they can call 1 metre a yard (this is already in use for distances on British motorways), they can call 1.5 km a mile. Years ago my mother sometimes asked me to bring half a pound (= 1/4 kg = 250 g) of butter from the supermarket. You can go down to the pub for a metric pint of 0.5 litres. Sure it's a bit less than an imperial pint, but you will get over it. Maybe see it this way: It will be a bit easier to have two. Or even three. This will be similar to what happened in Bavaria. A "Maß" of beer (e.g. at Oktoberfest) was once 1.069 litres. Nowadays it is precisely 1 litre.
Incidentally, every German child still knows some of the units as they still occur in fairy tales and other old texts, e.g. "7-mile-boots". They just don't know how much these old units are precisely, and as these formerly were different in different parts of the country, there isn't a simple answer anyway.
That's not relevant because for a call to Nürnberg you have to dial either 0911... from within Germany or +49911... for an international call. Neither starts with 911.
What is a problem, though (as someone already pointed out above and I verified independently), is that a huge number of phone numbers in Madrid is of the form 911xxxxxx and has to be dialed like that from everywhere in Spain. They would all have to be changed.
They brag about how much money they are making and speak in passing about the "massive" impact of closing down Megaupload. The one thing that seems to be conspicuously missing is any estimate of how much more money they made due to the reduction in "piracy".
Yes, there are some suspicious elements. It may be part of a big push to get funding for NASA to do a manned Mars mission. And to encourage the Chinese to continue pursuing their plans. I would consider that a good thing.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be reasonable for them to design a transport ship on their own anyway. Apparently they are going to cooperate with DragonX, who apparently said in principle the technology is already there.
"On what conditions would states allow a private company to send humans to another planet? What kind of requirements should a Mars settlement comply with in terms of planetary protection? What legal regime will govern life on another planet? Until now, these questions used to sound very 'far off', but if Mars One lives up to its promise, space lawyers have work to do, and I am excited to be a part of that!"
Tanja Masson-Zwaan, Deputy Director of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University
Interesting idea, but I would hope that anyone going there from Earth would know precisely where the bodies came from, and when and why. And that anyone coming from elsewhere would be sufficiently advanced to realise that those guys can't have been endemic, what with containing lots of elements that are totally rare on Mars.
I think you missed the point about detecting CFCs. It's not about unintended terraforming of someone's home planet. It's about terraforming *another* planet that initially is a bit too cold for the civilisation in question. In human terms we are speaking about creating factories on Mars that pump CFCs into its atmosphere so as to create a more habitable (for us) climate there. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Using_fluorine_compounds
As far as I know Microsoft *does* have a strong interested in being pirated in those jurisdictions in which they are not going to sell much anything. It's a question of market share and staying the monopolist.
Yes, German autobahns have speed limits, though obviously not everywhere. We have them because they are absolutely necessary. Germany has more than twice the population of California on significantly less area. The traffic often is accordingly.
For the same reason, it is absolutely forbidden to overpass another car on the right except under very specific circumstances (stop and go traffic, or direction lines at a crossing). This is the other thing which this driver has done. In contrast to the costly but socially accepted offence of being 30 km/h (20 mph) too fast on a motorway, this is considered absolutely reckless behaviour by almost everybody and raises eyebrows whenever someone does it. Here is an example for what often happens when idiots do it anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AGwQuT0-Lk
In general, driving on German motorways, with or without a speed limit, requires significantly more concentration than driving on Austrian ones (resulting in a significant change of my stress level each time I cross the border), which in turn requires a lot more concentration than driving on a British motorway (in spite of the left-hand side traffic), which in turn is not even comparable to the child's play on American motorways. (At the other end of the spectrum you can continue this with Italy, then probably countries like India.)
That's actually a very reasonable reaction given the history of this kind of propaganda operation. Effective measures against smoking were delayed significantly by the first generation of these propaganda techniques. The goal never was to prevent anti-smoking legislation, it was to delay it by, e.g., introducing the word "junk science" for any scientific results that link smoking and lung cancer. When that battle was over, the front organisations for the tobacco industry's propaganda moved to denying global warming, initially with the same techniques, though of course they have since been improved. Of course many of the front organisations also changed over the years. There is academic research on this, but people and organisations like Fred Singer and the Heartland Institute really stand out to anyone with half a brain. They moved directly from denying smoking-induced lung cancer to denying (or down-playing, or approving, or all of these simultaneously - anything that creates a fake controversy) anthropogenic global warming.
This fake debate is essentially a denial of service attack against science in order to prevent that politicians act on it. There is no reason why the BBC should be obliged to support this manipulation.
As far as the hardware is concerned, a first-generation EeePC seems ideal to me. These things are easily available second hand, cheap, powerful enough even for a little bit of video, and can take a lot of abuse. As to software - that's more tricky, depends a lot on the child and will require a lot of work.
As it is mostly about space, ignore the smaller files. For large files, the file size is already a pretty close approximation to a unique hash. First of all, create a database with size/path information and some extra fields where you will later add better hash sums and maybe note how far you got in processing.
Process files by decreasing size. If there are only two files of a particular size, compare them directly.
If there are more than two files of a particular size, get a better hash for each. (Choose a fast hashing algorithm that looks only at the first KB or so of the files.) After that, make the obvious comparisons to detect precise copies.
I have some further ideas in case this is still not fast enough, but I am worried that I may have already pissed off enough people by reinventing key parts of their precious patented algorithms without mentioning them.
If a species foolishly relies on clean water, or on yummy food that humans would rather have for themselves, or on polar ice, or if it is yummy itself but not easily domesticable -- then it's likely to go extinct due to our actions. But don't worry, because it's just a normal case of one species evolving, or invading a new ecosystem, and changing the ecosystem as a consequence. We are not the first species doing this kind of thing, and we are not going to be the last one.
If, on the other hand, an extinct species had enough foresight to be extremely cute, easily domesticable and not particularly dangerous, big enough for cuddling but not so big as to make the feeding costs prohibitve -- then the odds are that it will be resurrected. Basically that's just another case of the ecosystem changing due to the presence of a new (or evolved) species. The only thing that is new is the discontinuity that occurs when a species jumps over a century or so. But basically that's just an invasion from a different ecosystem, so again something that happens all the time.
There may be courts involved, but in some cases courts are merely rubber-stamping decisions taken by someone else. E.g., it is almost unheard-of for a German judge to reject a search warrant, no matter how obviously illegal it is. It appears that some judges don't even read what they are signing. From what I have heard -- and of course that's much harder to verify of falsify than the formal rules -- extradition requests from Sweden tend to be treated like that, distorting the chances of a successful appeal even when there is real scrutiny by the supreme court. Also, in most European countries other than the UK and Ireland there is significant direct political influence throughout the legal system.
"Re ECHR and Agiza and Alzery... yes, they could have challenged their rendition." They were rendered before they got a chance to challenge their rendition. The lawyer of one of them had suspected that something like this would happen and had appealed in advance. Of course this was simply ignored. (I am sure they had a good reason, such as an unfortunately unavoidable communication problem.) Are you suggesting that Assange should also appeal to the ECHR after being forced out of its area of influence, resulting in the same kind of helpless appeals by the European Parliament to the US government that have not achieved anything in the case of all those US dissidents? The US is then probably going to pull one of their usual shamelss stunts such as claiming that while they may be ordinarily obliged to return a prisoner if the ECHR decides that the extradition was illegal (not sure if that's even true), unfortunately this does not apply either for enemy combatants such as Assange, or for people outside ordinary US jurisdiction in Guantanamo, like Assange.
You are missing a number of important points here. One is that the idea in this case is to PREVENT the torture occurring in the first place. For this it is obviously necessary to prevent deportation to the arbitrary US regime. But the European states are still keeping up the legal fiction that there is rule of law in the US. Even for high-profile political cases.
"the minister involved was assassinated before a full investigation could happen" - Yes, of course. If there is a scandal after an assassination, everything that can plausibly be blamed on the victim will nobody else's fault. Anna Lindh, being dead, didn't contradict and didn't point to anyone else being complicit, so it must all have been her doing alone. Therefore the lone perpetrator is dead and this kind of thing can't happen again, apparently.
The extradition of Assange to the US will be completely legal, of course. The US will undertake not to give him the death penalty. It's not their fault, of course, if everyone involved in Wikileaks is suicidal and therefore must stay in an upright position without back support from 5 am till 10 pm every day, for months or even years. And of course it will be entirely Assange's own fault and without any provocation whatsoever, should he ever get involved in physical altercations with guards. Etc.
"some times bad things happen, and are impossible to undo. That's what damages are for; to try to compensate."
And sometimes bad things can be foreseen by everyone who doesn't intentionally keep their eyes shut. That's what prevention is for.
Mutual recognition is irrelevant to this question. The question is whether it is proportionate to get someone by arrest warrant when one would normally do this via video conference in similar situations. Actually, they wouldn't do this in the case of rape accusations because for these it's general practice to put the accused in prison for a few days, incommunicado. But this is only because they find it easier to find out what really happened if they have everyone available with a fresh memory and no uncontrolled communication going on. This practice makes no sense if they don't insist on it from the beginning (they didn't) and only think of it months later.
Re ECHR: You mean like Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Alzery could challenge their CIA flight to Egypt for torture after it happened? What would that be good for except perhaps for getting damages? (Btw, I wonder how much the ECHR would grant Bradley Manning if he had been extradited from Europe rather than from Iraq.)
I don't know about the numbers, but so far as I know Sweden decides this kind of thing on a political level and almost never rejects extradition of foreigners. In the UK, on the other hand, there is due process. It was a proper independent court which decided to go forth with the extradition to Sweden. An extradition to the US on bogus charges would likely have been blocked. Maybe even one on reasonable charges, given the related case of Bradley Manning, who has already been subjected to about two years of prison without a trial -- complete with torture.
Interviewing abroad: They have done this before, even with people suspected of murder. And when a prosecutor got an arrest warrant against a suspected tax evader resident in Dubai, the Swedish supreme court reversed this as disproportional because the person was available for interview in Dubai and merely didn't want to travel to Sweden.
Getting him from Sweden easier than from the UK: As far as I know, Sweden does not have a record of denying extradition of foreigners, ever. The decisions are essentially taken on a political level. This is in stark contrast with the UK, where independent courts decide about extraditions.
Given a long succession of British governments strongly criticised by the population for being in bed with the US, unrest within the country (remember the riots in London? and this year a pro-Islam, anti-war party left of Labour got 59% in a by-election in Bradford; *after* its founder said "God knows who is a real Muslim"), as well as increased scrutiny on politicians due to the phone hacking scandal, I doubt that any British politician now wants to risk exerting improper influence towards getting Assange to the US for torturing when Sweden clearly has already offered to take care of the matter in a more elegant way.
"a prosecutor clear across Sweden took the very, ahem, unusual step of deciding to re-start a case from outside their normal jurisdiction"
It just occurred to me that this is a problem which the Swedish legal system shares with Wikipedia. Wikipedia admins can pick up whatever they feel needs doing. Normally this works surprisingly well, but when you have hundreds or thousands of admins (or prosecutors) with a bad opinion of someone, then each time they come under public scrutiny for one reason or other, they are concurrently deciding whether he is to blame or not, and whether he should be punished. Every one of them has a veto against not doing anything.
In other words, this kind of system is fair for average people, but unfair for very well known people and extremely unfair to well known controversial people.
... which are necessary to understand the situation.
Ecuador has published the precise text of the letter. The key part is: "You need to be aware that there is a legal base in the UK, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, that would allow us to take actions in order to arrest Mr Assange in the current premises of the Embassy." The UK has not denied this letter.
The Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 was a reaction to the terrorist incident at the Lybian embassy in London in 1984. It's not easy to see how it is relevant from reading its text, but it does allow the UK to revoke diplomatic status of a (then former) embassy - to the extent that it is permitted by international law.
Embassies are not extraterritorial. They are just inviolable - as long as they are embassies. Diplomats are not immune from being arrested (e.g. for drunk driving), just from prosecution. Diplomatic cars are not immune from being stopped by police, just from being searched.
The Ecuadorian embassy in London is not a building but a flat on the ground floor of a larger building. Just google for images. The police can therefore legitimately enter the building (and has done so) without violating international law. This also makes it very hard to smuggle Assange out of the embassy, though maybe revocation of embassy status as necessary for storming the embassy, resulting in unsearchable relocation vans, would make this feasible. Also, it looks as if the physical conditions should make the prolonged presence of Assange in the embassy a nuisance in practical terms.
From the point of view of a typical journalist, it doesn't matter what they write about science so long as it is amusing. They don't even try to get this stuff right. They don't consider it part of their job description to get it right.
I mostly agree, though with some qualifications. I think 3 hours isn't all that bad (mine still gets close even though it was already one of the 4-cell models), and 6-cell replacement batteries should still be available. In my experience the thing doesn't run very hot, and even when it gets very warm, it's still very quiet. 2GB is plenty for Ubuntu so long as you are careful only to install what you need and you don't have any unusual needs. The main advantage of the SSD (apart from robustness) is that it makes the computer boot as fast as one with a lot more computing power. The only reason why I might consider a later model is the bigger screen size, definitely not the HDD.
My favourite application for this thing is trains. E.g. when I lived in the UK a few years ago, the National Express trains had free wireless LAN (and power sockets), and you could fold down a little table thingy from the back of the seat in front of you which was just big enough for this computer but not sufficient for any other. It is also the computer which I take to places where I would normally go without one.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not at all convinced by this argument. Assuming the technical details that you are describing are correct, the situation is no different from, say, an eight-digit phone number in Munich such as 40123456 and a six-digit (legacy) phone number such as 123456 in Hamburg, which has the prefix (0)40. Both would be represented by precisely the same number and distinguished only by the TON field, so a TON = national number that just starts with 911 can't be a problem either.
Or are you saying that it is the case, and technically necessary, that if I dial 0112 in Germany, resulting in 112 with TON = national, I get the same result as when I dial 112?
Germany has been completely metricated for so long that several pre-metrication generations are no longer alive. Yet some Germans are still using customary units. And that's fine because they are simple multiples of metric units and are the same everywhere in Europe. For example a pound - to the extent that it's still in use - is nowadays exactly 1/2 kg except on those islands in the North West.
What most people are really attached to is words, not the precise size of a unit. What they don't understand is that with metrication they don't have to give up these words. They can call 1/2 kg a pound, they can call 1/2 litre a pint, they can call 1 metre a yard (this is already in use for distances on British motorways), they can call 1.5 km a mile. Years ago my mother sometimes asked me to bring half a pound (= 1/4 kg = 250 g) of butter from the supermarket. You can go down to the pub for a metric pint of 0.5 litres. Sure it's a bit less than an imperial pint, but you will get over it. Maybe see it this way: It will be a bit easier to have two. Or even three. This will be similar to what happened in Bavaria. A "Maß" of beer (e.g. at Oktoberfest) was once 1.069 litres. Nowadays it is precisely 1 litre.
Incidentally, every German child still knows some of the units as they still occur in fairy tales and other old texts, e.g. "7-mile-boots". They just don't know how much these old units are precisely, and as these formerly were different in different parts of the country, there isn't a simple answer anyway.
That's not relevant because for a call to Nürnberg you have to dial either 0911... from within Germany or +49911... for an international call. Neither starts with 911.
What is a problem, though (as someone already pointed out above and I verified independently), is that a huge number of phone numbers in Madrid is of the form 911xxxxxx and has to be dialed like that from everywhere in Spain. They would all have to be changed.
The MPAA's original paper: http://de.scribd.com/doc/115644694/NOT-Motion-Picture-Association-of-America-Final
They brag about how much money they are making and speak in passing about the "massive" impact of closing down Megaupload. The one thing that seems to be conspicuously missing is any estimate of how much more money they made due to the reduction in "piracy".
Yes, there are some suspicious elements. It may be part of a big push to get funding for NASA to do a manned Mars mission. And to encourage the Chinese to continue pursuing their plans. I would consider that a good thing.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be reasonable for them to design a transport ship on their own anyway. Apparently they are going to cooperate with DragonX, who apparently said in principle the technology is already there.
See http://mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/advisers
"On what conditions would states allow a private company to send humans to another planet? What kind of requirements should a Mars settlement comply with in terms of planetary protection? What legal regime will govern life on another planet? Until now, these questions used to sound very 'far off', but if Mars One lives up to its promise, space lawyers have work to do, and I am excited to be a part of that!"
Tanja Masson-Zwaan, Deputy Director of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University
Interesting idea, but I would hope that anyone going there from Earth would know precisely where the bodies came from, and when and why. And that anyone coming from elsewhere would be sufficiently advanced to realise that those guys can't have been endemic, what with containing lots of elements that are totally rare on Mars.
Someone just sufficiently far removed from the judge made a bet on Yahoo's shares falling just about this time.
I think you missed the point about detecting CFCs. It's not about unintended terraforming of someone's home planet. It's about terraforming *another* planet that initially is a bit too cold for the civilisation in question. In human terms we are speaking about creating factories on Mars that pump CFCs into its atmosphere so as to create a more habitable (for us) climate there. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Using_fluorine_compounds
As far as I know Microsoft *does* have a strong interested in being pirated in those jurisdictions in which they are not going to sell much anything. It's a question of market share and staying the monopolist.
Yes, German autobahns have speed limits, though obviously not everywhere. We have them because they are absolutely necessary. Germany has more than twice the population of California on significantly less area. The traffic often is accordingly.
For the same reason, it is absolutely forbidden to overpass another car on the right except under very specific circumstances (stop and go traffic, or direction lines at a crossing). This is the other thing which this driver has done. In contrast to the costly but socially accepted offence of being 30 km/h (20 mph) too fast on a motorway, this is considered absolutely reckless behaviour by almost everybody and raises eyebrows whenever someone does it. Here is an example for what often happens when idiots do it anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AGwQuT0-Lk
In general, driving on German motorways, with or without a speed limit, requires significantly more concentration than driving on Austrian ones (resulting in a significant change of my stress level each time I cross the border), which in turn requires a lot more concentration than driving on a British motorway (in spite of the left-hand side traffic), which in turn is not even comparable to the child's play on American motorways. (At the other end of the spectrum you can continue this with Italy, then probably countries like India.)
The stuff installed in this car makes no sense if the driver didn't (intend to) use it while driving. Germans don't live in their cars, they use them to quickly get from A to B. That's one reason we have smaller cars. If he used this setup, then he risked lives in much the same way as "Turbo Rolf" did in 2003: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/1454812/Turbo-Rolf-jailed-for-tailgate-deaths-of-mother-and-girl.html
That's actually a very reasonable reaction given the history of this kind of propaganda operation. Effective measures against smoking were delayed significantly by the first generation of these propaganda techniques. The goal never was to prevent anti-smoking legislation, it was to delay it by, e.g., introducing the word "junk science" for any scientific results that link smoking and lung cancer. When that battle was over, the front organisations for the tobacco industry's propaganda moved to denying global warming, initially with the same techniques, though of course they have since been improved. Of course many of the front organisations also changed over the years. There is academic research on this, but people and organisations like Fred Singer and the Heartland Institute really stand out to anyone with half a brain. They moved directly from denying smoking-induced lung cancer to denying (or down-playing, or approving, or all of these simultaneously - anything that creates a fake controversy) anthropogenic global warming.
This fake debate is essentially a denial of service attack against science in order to prevent that politicians act on it. There is no reason why the BBC should be obliged to support this manipulation.
As far as the hardware is concerned, a first-generation EeePC seems ideal to me. These things are easily available second hand, cheap, powerful enough even for a little bit of video, and can take a lot of abuse. As to software - that's more tricky, depends a lot on the child and will require a lot of work.
As it is mostly about space, ignore the smaller files. For large files, the file size is already a pretty close approximation to a unique hash. First of all, create a database with size/path information and some extra fields where you will later add better hash sums and maybe note how far you got in processing.
Process files by decreasing size. If there are only two files of a particular size, compare them directly.
If there are more than two files of a particular size, get a better hash for each. (Choose a fast hashing algorithm that looks only at the first KB or so of the files.) After that, make the obvious comparisons to detect precise copies.
I have some further ideas in case this is still not fast enough, but I am worried that I may have already pissed off enough people by reinventing key parts of their precious patented algorithms without mentioning them.
If a species foolishly relies on clean water, or on yummy food that humans would rather have for themselves, or on polar ice, or if it is yummy itself but not easily domesticable -- then it's likely to go extinct due to our actions. But don't worry, because it's just a normal case of one species evolving, or invading a new ecosystem, and changing the ecosystem as a consequence. We are not the first species doing this kind of thing, and we are not going to be the last one.
If, on the other hand, an extinct species had enough foresight to be extremely cute, easily domesticable and not particularly dangerous, big enough for cuddling but not so big as to make the feeding costs prohibitve -- then the odds are that it will be resurrected. Basically that's just another case of the ecosystem changing due to the presence of a new (or evolved) species. The only thing that is new is the discontinuity that occurs when a species jumps over a century or so. But basically that's just an invasion from a different ecosystem, so again something that happens all the time.
There may be courts involved, but in some cases courts are merely rubber-stamping decisions taken by someone else. E.g., it is almost unheard-of for a German judge to reject a search warrant, no matter how obviously illegal it is. It appears that some judges don't even read what they are signing. From what I have heard -- and of course that's much harder to verify of falsify than the formal rules -- extradition requests from Sweden tend to be treated like that, distorting the chances of a successful appeal even when there is real scrutiny by the supreme court. Also, in most European countries other than the UK and Ireland there is significant direct political influence throughout the legal system.
"Re ECHR and Agiza and Alzery... yes, they could have challenged their rendition." They were rendered before they got a chance to challenge their rendition. The lawyer of one of them had suspected that something like this would happen and had appealed in advance. Of course this was simply ignored. (I am sure they had a good reason, such as an unfortunately unavoidable communication problem.) Are you suggesting that Assange should also appeal to the ECHR after being forced out of its area of influence, resulting in the same kind of helpless appeals by the European Parliament to the US government that have not achieved anything in the case of all those US dissidents? The US is then probably going to pull one of their usual shamelss stunts such as claiming that while they may be ordinarily obliged to return a prisoner if the ECHR decides that the extradition was illegal (not sure if that's even true), unfortunately this does not apply either for enemy combatants such as Assange, or for people outside ordinary US jurisdiction in Guantanamo, like Assange.
You are missing a number of important points here. One is that the idea in this case is to PREVENT the torture occurring in the first place. For this it is obviously necessary to prevent deportation to the arbitrary US regime. But the European states are still keeping up the legal fiction that there is rule of law in the US. Even for high-profile political cases.
"the minister involved was assassinated before a full investigation could happen" - Yes, of course. If there is a scandal after an assassination, everything that can plausibly be blamed on the victim will nobody else's fault. Anna Lindh, being dead, didn't contradict and didn't point to anyone else being complicit, so it must all have been her doing alone. Therefore the lone perpetrator is dead and this kind of thing can't happen again, apparently.
The extradition of Assange to the US will be completely legal, of course. The US will undertake not to give him the death penalty. It's not their fault, of course, if everyone involved in Wikileaks is suicidal and therefore must stay in an upright position without back support from 5 am till 10 pm every day, for months or even years. And of course it will be entirely Assange's own fault and without any provocation whatsoever, should he ever get involved in physical altercations with guards. Etc.
"some times bad things happen, and are impossible to undo. That's what damages are for; to try to compensate."
And sometimes bad things can be foreseen by everyone who doesn't intentionally keep their eyes shut. That's what prevention is for.
Mutual recognition is irrelevant to this question. The question is whether it is proportionate to get someone by arrest warrant when one would normally do this via video conference in similar situations. Actually, they wouldn't do this in the case of rape accusations because for these it's general practice to put the accused in prison for a few days, incommunicado. But this is only because they find it easier to find out what really happened if they have everyone available with a fresh memory and no uncontrolled communication going on. This practice makes no sense if they don't insist on it from the beginning (they didn't) and only think of it months later.
Re ECHR: You mean like Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Alzery could challenge their CIA flight to Egypt for torture after it happened? What would that be good for except perhaps for getting damages? (Btw, I wonder how much the ECHR would grant Bradley Manning if he had been extradited from Europe rather than from Iraq.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_and_Muhammad_al-Zery
I don't know about the numbers, but so far as I know Sweden decides this kind of thing on a political level and almost never rejects extradition of foreigners. In the UK, on the other hand, there is due process. It was a proper independent court which decided to go forth with the extradition to Sweden. An extradition to the US on bogus charges would likely have been blocked. Maybe even one on reasonable charges, given the related case of Bradley Manning, who has already been subjected to about two years of prison without a trial -- complete with torture.
Interviewing abroad: They have done this before, even with people suspected of murder. And when a prosecutor got an arrest warrant against a suspected tax evader resident in Dubai, the Swedish supreme court reversed this as disproportional because the person was available for interview in Dubai and merely didn't want to travel to Sweden.
Getting him from Sweden easier than from the UK: As far as I know, Sweden does not have a record of denying extradition of foreigners, ever. The decisions are essentially taken on a political level. This is in stark contrast with the UK, where independent courts decide about extraditions.
Given a long succession of British governments strongly criticised by the population for being in bed with the US, unrest within the country (remember the riots in London? and this year a pro-Islam, anti-war party left of Labour got 59% in a by-election in Bradford; *after* its founder said "God knows who is a real Muslim"), as well as increased scrutiny on politicians due to the phone hacking scandal, I doubt that any British politician now wants to risk exerting improper influence towards getting Assange to the US for torturing when Sweden clearly has already offered to take care of the matter in a more elegant way.
"a prosecutor clear across Sweden took the very, ahem, unusual step of deciding to re-start a case from outside their normal jurisdiction"
It just occurred to me that this is a problem which the Swedish legal system shares with Wikipedia. Wikipedia admins can pick up whatever they feel needs doing. Normally this works surprisingly well, but when you have hundreds or thousands of admins (or prosecutors) with a bad opinion of someone, then each time they come under public scrutiny for one reason or other, they are concurrently deciding whether he is to blame or not, and whether he should be punished. Every one of them has a veto against not doing anything.
In other words, this kind of system is fair for average people, but unfair for very well known people and extremely unfair to well known controversial people.
... which are necessary to understand the situation.
Ecuador has published the precise text of the letter. The key part is: "You need to be aware that there is a legal base in the UK, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, that would allow us to take actions in order to arrest Mr Assange in the current premises of the Embassy." The UK has not denied this letter.
The Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 was a reaction to the terrorist incident at the Lybian embassy in London in 1984. It's not easy to see how it is relevant from reading its text, but it does allow the UK to revoke diplomatic status of a (then former) embassy - to the extent that it is permitted by international law.
Embassies are not extraterritorial. They are just inviolable - as long as they are embassies. Diplomats are not immune from being arrested (e.g. for drunk driving), just from prosecution. Diplomatic cars are not immune from being stopped by police, just from being searched.
The Ecuadorian embassy in London is not a building but a flat on the ground floor of a larger building. Just google for images. The police can therefore legitimately enter the building (and has done so) without violating international law. This also makes it very hard to smuggle Assange out of the embassy, though maybe revocation of embassy status as necessary for storming the embassy, resulting in unsearchable relocation vans, would make this feasible. Also, it looks as if the physical conditions should make the prolonged presence of Assange in the embassy a nuisance in practical terms.
From the point of view of a typical journalist, it doesn't matter what they write about science so long as it is amusing. They don't even try to get this stuff right. They don't consider it part of their job description to get it right.
A total study size of 100 individuals and marginal differences found? That's not what I'd call evidence.
I mostly agree, though with some qualifications. I think 3 hours isn't all that bad (mine still gets close even though it was already one of the 4-cell models), and 6-cell replacement batteries should still be available. In my experience the thing doesn't run very hot, and even when it gets very warm, it's still very quiet. 2GB is plenty for Ubuntu so long as you are careful only to install what you need and you don't have any unusual needs. The main advantage of the SSD (apart from robustness) is that it makes the computer boot as fast as one with a lot more computing power. The only reason why I might consider a later model is the bigger screen size, definitely not the HDD.
My favourite application for this thing is trains. E.g. when I lived in the UK a few years ago, the National Express trains had free wireless LAN (and power sockets), and you could fold down a little table thingy from the back of the seat in front of you which was just big enough for this computer but not sufficient for any other. It is also the computer which I take to places where I would normally go without one.