That delay is nothing to do with your browser - that's Slashdot scanning of a bunch of ports on your IP address. I spotted this a few weeks back when I made a post to Slashdot while running a "tail -f" on my firewall logs, although I've been aware of the lag a lot longer than that. It seems that if your firewall just DROPs the packets you get a delay while it retries a couple of times, whereas if you REJECT then it's a good deal quicker. There's some caching going on as well, once you've gone through this the lag disappears for a day or two, then re-starts. As it says in my.sig - WTF?
Interesting co-incidence that you should bring up that example. Tavis Ormandy, one of those who discovered the Linux kernel bug you mentioned, was also the one who posted the details on the Windows 16bit VDM bug that we're discussing here to Full Disclosure yesterday. I guess he must like his code to be covered in cobwebs or something...
I don't think that would work. You'd need quite a bit of thrust to push the ISS (plus the fuel and drive to do the pushing) out of Earth's orbit and I doubt very much that the entire structure would have been designed to take the strain. It's not going to do you much good if as soon as you fire the engines the solar panels snap off and the lights go out...
You might be able to do something using a low thrust Ion drive, but you'd still need to spend an awfully long time going round and round in ever increasing circles while you build up enough momentum to break orbit. In short, and if you'll excuse the pun, it's nice idea, but I just don't think it's going to fly.
Perhaps they intend to roll out new features to 3.6 in the same manner as they do security updates; one 3.6.x release might be a bug fix, another might be new features and another a combination of the two. You don't have to bring out new features on major releases, so this might even mean that we'll get features added to 3.6 sooner than we would have done waiting until 3.7 before releasing them all in one go.
Another vote for "none"; there are plenty of books and comics out there just crying out for being made into movies or series. Personally, I'd like to see someone tackle Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon" trilogy as an after-the-watershed show so they don't have to shirk away from some of the more brutal moments; three movies or a "based-on" series works for me, although the latter might need some work given the need to continually re-cast the actor playing the main protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs.
Why remake a series when they can re-run at least some of the originals episodes if they want to? In fact, for some series I wish they *would* re-run the originals, some of the classic "Doctor Who", "Outer Limits", "Twilight Zone" episodes for a start... Assuming, of course, that the original media hasn't been lost or allowed to perish like happened with some of the Hartnell/Troughton era Dr. Who episodes.
You could even that that point to another stage of abstraction. The OS UI, and by implication any style guides and applications, plays a key role in the requirements of the screen sensitivity. If your OS needs very precise, pixel perfect selections then you either need a highly accurate and expensive touch screen or a stylus, but if you design your UI around chunky buttons and screen sized-gestures then you can get away with a much less accurate and cheaper screen.
A far more meaningful metric would be to have a number of testers each perform a number of typical "real world" tasks on the phones using bundled and popular third party applications, then see how many errors and retries were required. That might lead to something actually useful like Phone A is good for one set of tasks, but Phone B is better for another set of tasks. One would hope that the common set has the expected core functions like making calls and so one, but given some of the abysmal phone UIs I've seen over the years, I wouldn't count on it.
I know you are joking, but there is a very good reason why Asia is so keen on IPv6 adoption; they are going to feel the crunch first and they know it. IANA has in place an agreement that as soon as one of the RIRs is assigned one of the five final/8s each of the other four RIRs receives one of the remaining/8s and IANA washes their hands of the whole mess. That's without a doubt the most critical milestone along the path to IPv4 exhaustion, so let's look at that instant from the point of each of the RIRs:
AfriNIC: Incredibly slow burn rate. They're probably still good for another decade or two at this point.
APNIC: Includes China and India, two of the fastest developing nations on the planet with correspondingly high IPv4 assignment requests. There's no two ways about it; without wholesale IPv6 adoption, they're going to be the ones running out first.
ARIN: Capitalists to the end, they are on record as saying IPv4 exhaustion is not their problem to solve; it's first come first served and when they are all gone that's it. Even so, there are plenty of US institutions with/8s that could mostly be handed back and reassigned if push came to shove.
LACNIC: Not quite as low AfriNIC due to developing countries like Brazil, but are still able to sit back and let any problems with IPv6 get resolved before they make the leap.
RIPE: Have already got the strictest IP assignment policies of the RIRs and will probably just continue to tighten the screw right up until the point of exhaustion; LIR assignment windows are typically about one quarter of what they would have been five years ago. It's a pretty fair bet that APNIC and ARIN will both beat them to the wall.
It's on the homepage of Amazon's UK site, and I've seen a few of the billboard ads outside of London as well, but the core focus in the UK definitely seems to have been on London over the last few weeks. The level of advertising on the London Underground is pretty much at saturation level, I'd say.
No it's not, several of the larger spam/malware gangs including the infamous Russian Business Network have been doing this for several years now. That's partly what prompted Spamhaus to create their solution to the problem: DROP. All it takes is a for the majority of the Tier 1 carriers to adopt the DROP list and it's pretty much game over for this this technique.
OK, yes, the Christmas number one is something of a UK fixation that's almost up there with The Queen's Speech in terms of tradition, you've got me there. That said, I think this matters a great deal because it hopefully shows the music labels that, despite what they might think, there is actually a large proportion of the music-buying UK population, and probably other countries as well, that is fed up with their usual fare. X-Factor is probably the pinnacle (or should that be nadir?) of the trend towards music consisting solely of recycled Pop/R&B numbers; Miley Cyrus' version of "The Climb" was still getting airtime only a few weeks ago, and we're already seeing it covered FFS!
With a little luck, the labels will put a little bit more diversity in their catalogues as a result of this little upset and we might get some genuine talent back onto the airwaves instead of just pretty faces singing banal lyrics over and over. We'd better, because if they carry along the path they are on it's just a matter of time before they find the "ideal" pop song, and put it on an endless loop... Come to think of, wasn't there a story here on Slashdot a while ago about doing just that?
It undermines the claims that piracy is responsible for the declining sales firstly because it shows that a *lot* of people are prepared to pay for music after all, so clearly not everyone is a "freetard" who just downloads everything via P2P. Not only that, but it also shows that they are so fed up with the recycled Pop/R&B performances that labels churn out over and over again, that they are prepared to pay for a song quite a few of them probably won't even listen to in protest. Put the two together, and I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that at least part of the sales decline is actually due to the labels neglecting a sizable chunk of their potential customers taste rather than just P2P.
The problem as I see it isn't so much that the quality music isn't there, because it is. The real problem is that if an act doesn't fit the cookie-cutter Pop/R&B model then they'll get next to no marketing support from the studios, making it all but impossible for potential fans to find them amidst all the dross that's also out there in music's long tail. Frankly, I think that the music industry has got so caught up in its "War against Piracy", that it's forgotten just how wonderfully diverse music can be and that not everyone likes to hear nothing but Pop and R&B.
I've been pondering the ramifications for the BPI and the music industry at large as well, and I'm coming to the conclusion that the BPI and rest of the UK music business are going to be particularly happy with this development once they've had some time to think it through a little.
Firstly, while it's a little screwed up due to the reason for the sales, it shows that one of their key target market segments within the UK population is actually willing to fork over money on-line for music. More importantly, however, is that it shows that a sizable chunk of this sector of the market is not entirely happy with the bland Pop/R&B fare that sounds exactly the same as the last one and makes up the bulk of their product. That at the very least pokes a few holes in their claims that people are not prepared to pay for music, and very clearly demonstrates that they are not catering for the needs of their target market as well as they could be.
Somehow, I suspect that this little incident is going to get used against them the next time they try making claims about on-line music piracy being responsible for their falling sales and (supposed) fall in profits.
Actually, RATM are donating their proceeds from the sales to Shelter as well as the £70,000 (it's even mentioned in the article linked from the summary) and intend throw a free concert in the UK at some point next year. Of course, this is only the artist's cut of 500,000 digital downloads that we are talking about here, so I'd be very surprised if the total was much larger than the £70,000 generated from the Facebook page.
Personally, my eyes are now on Sony UK and, to a lesser extent, Simon Cowell. Sony have profited to the tune of 500,000 digital downloads on the RATM track, plus probably a good 100,000 extra copies of McElderry's bought by X-Factor fans to try and keep RATM off number one spot. Total materials cost: £0. I think it only fair that they make a gesture in kind and make a sizable donation to Shelter as well.
Right... Because the potential effect of a massive tsunami wiping out most of the cities cited along Pacific coastlines wouldn't have any significant impact at all on the global population, or one the economy through the loss of port facilities etc. Depending on the size, velocity and angle of impact the effects of an asteroid strike in an ocean could easily exceed the impact of an event like the Krakatoa eruption of 1883.
Not necessarily. There are 300! sequences of the pieces, but you also need to allow for a few more variables:
Rotation of pieces that are non-uniform in colour
Multiple arrangements - 15x20, 10x30, images etc.
Not using all the pieces - a 17x17 image for instance
Combining multiple sets of the same colour
Combining multiple sets of different colours
OK, the last two are technically cheating, and all but the first option would possibly require custom code since all the example images appear to be 15x20 portraits, but a suitable algorithm probably wouldn't be that hard to figure out. I saw this on Firehose last night and worked out a few likely routines this morning, so I'd expect some custom FL/OSS code (and cheap Chinese manufactured knock-offs) to be available in fairly short order. After that the race will be on to create the largest most impressive image before the fad inevitably passes.
...posting the fact to a site where a good deal of the readership's instinctive reaction to the posting of sensitive information on the Internet is to find and mirror it in as many locations as possible is probably not the best first step. See "Streisand Effect". Then again, if you are just pretending to be the subject of the text in order to humiliate the actual victim even further, then I tip my hat to you sir. Bravo!
Well, yes... that would be why I used the word "innovative" instead of "obvious".
As I pointed out, producing energy efficient data centers has become quite a competetive market sector of late, with several quite distinct approaches to the problem, so it's an area that is not exactly lacking for a little R&D either. If the solution was obvious (without the benefit of hindsight) to someone else skilled in the art then that someone else would have done it already and even the USPTO would have rejected the patent application. OK, maybe not the latter, but I think it qualifies as "non-obvious", at least without the benefit of hindsight.
Don't be silly, this is precisely how patents were originally meant to be used; to allow the inventor of a truly innovative technology to get some reward for their effort, so if you want to use the technology then you need to license it from the inventor, that's all. . And, yes, it *is* innovative or someone else would have already come up with the idea and patented it, the green data centre market isn't exactly short or a little competition at the moment with so many organisations competing for bragging rights over the lowest PUE ratings.
Look on the bright side, since this is Google with their mantra of "Do no evil" that we're talking about, they can hardly charge an extortionate amount for the license fee given what it might entail for the environment if they want to carry on being able to claim that with any degree of sincerity. Regardless of what they charge, you can almost guarantee it would be a lot less than what some vendors *cough* Sun *cough* have historically charged for their more bespoke cabinets.
Whether it's a salaried or hourly wage shouldn't make a whole lot of difference. I've had both types of role, and in all cases there has always been an incentive or some kind of additional remuneration to do the on-call work over equivalent grades in departments that didn't have to do it. That would either be a fixed allowance for the on-call time, a disturbance allowance per call, overtime, or some combination of the three. Then again, I do work in the EU where thanks to the French we are a little more blessed in our labour laws than those unfortunates in the US seem to be.
The best employer's position I had on this went so far as pay you per hour to be on call (0.5x base wage), a disturbance allowance (1.5 hours wage per issue) and overtime (1.5x base wage, or 2x at weekends/public holidays) while you were working on a call, with wages pro-rated for those of us on salaried pay. That was one sweet deal; if you got a whole bunch of quick-fix issues during your week on the rota, then you could quite easily clear a couple of week's pay for just a few hours of actual work. In return, the company had one of the most motivated and loyal IT teams I've ever worked with, but unfortunately almost zero prospects for internal promotion...
+1 Informative. While the UK-US extradition treaty is somewhat biased in favour of the US, this is precisely why is being extradited. He's never denied commiting the crime, and frankly given what has been revealled about the incompetence of the US agencies involved I'm surprised that they still want all that dirty laundry aired in what will almost certainly be a media circus.
The reason the waters are so muddy is because some of McKinnon's supporters have made Aspergers out to be something that it is not; a get out of jail free card of some kind. Contrary to what some of McKinnon's supporters might think, it does not in any way make it conceivable that McKinnon did not know right from wrong or understand the potential consequences of his actions. The only thing is does is mean that he has some legitimate medical and psychological requirements that the US must be able to meet before the extradition can proceed, and since those are pretty easy to meet then, barring intervention from the EU, it's a done deal.
Personally, I think McKinnon's defense team royally screwed up. Once he had admitted his guilt and the Asperger's diagnosis was made, they should have used that to press for a trial in the UK, against UK laws and sentencing guidelines, with any sentence also being served in the UK. Both sides could have said that justice had been done, and McKinnon would have got off with a slap on the wrist and at worst a short sentence in a minimum security prison with time off for good behaviour, and quite possibly at the weekends as well. All this would have been over years ago, and he'd have probably made a small fortune out of selling his story to the tabloids and publishing an auto-biography by now.
Unless your company happens to be owned by Rupert Murdoch. In that case you get a bonus of a cool 1 million dollars (raises pinky to corner of mouth) to do exactly what the boss has been asking for repeatedly over the last several months, all courtesy of Mark Cuban. That's got to be the win:win scenario of the year: Cuban's idea gets some takers, some News Corp.' subsidiary CEOs get $1m, Rupert Murdoch gets his sites out of Google and, eventually, everyone finally gets rid of Rupert Murdoch when his companies become insolvent.
That's why smart web developers put those scripts at the end of the body.
It's also why smart users filter them outright with something like AdBlock - anything that I see in the browser history that looks like a tracking/stats domain or URL gets blocked on sight. Come to think of it, I could probably clean it up publish it as an AdBlock filter list if anyone's interested; there's only a few dozen entries on there at the moment, but I'm sure that would grow pretty quickly if it was used by a more general and less paranoid userbase.
You raise a very interesting point - other than the fact that both the companies concerned trade within the EU, this is within the EU's jurisdiction how, exactly? Since this is about two US companies wanting to merge and the US DoJ is happy with the deal, does anyone actually know what the EC/EU actually can do about it? For instance, can they block the deal outright, escalate the dispute to the WTO or some such to prolong matters, or what? And if they can't prevent the deal going ahead, then can they place restrictions on the combined companies ability to trade within the EU without the US being able to go to the WTO?
Slashdot Mirror
That delay is nothing to do with your browser - that's Slashdot scanning of a bunch of ports on your IP address. I spotted this a few weeks back when I made a post to Slashdot while running a "tail -f" on my firewall logs, although I've been aware of the lag a lot longer than that. It seems that if your firewall just DROPs the packets you get a delay while it retries a couple of times, whereas if you REJECT then it's a good deal quicker. There's some caching going on as well, once you've gone through this the lag disappears for a day or two, then re-starts. As it says in my .sig - WTF?
Interesting co-incidence that you should bring up that example. Tavis Ormandy, one of those who discovered the Linux kernel bug you mentioned, was also the one who posted the details on the Windows 16bit VDM bug that we're discussing here to Full Disclosure yesterday. I guess he must like his code to be covered in cobwebs or something...
I don't think that would work. You'd need quite a bit of thrust to push the ISS (plus the fuel and drive to do the pushing) out of Earth's orbit and I doubt very much that the entire structure would have been designed to take the strain. It's not going to do you much good if as soon as you fire the engines the solar panels snap off and the lights go out...
You might be able to do something using a low thrust Ion drive, but you'd still need to spend an awfully long time going round and round in ever increasing circles while you build up enough momentum to break orbit. In short, and if you'll excuse the pun, it's nice idea, but I just don't think it's going to fly.
Perhaps they intend to roll out new features to 3.6 in the same manner as they do security updates; one 3.6.x release might be a bug fix, another might be new features and another a combination of the two. You don't have to bring out new features on major releases, so this might even mean that we'll get features added to 3.6 sooner than we would have done waiting until 3.7 before releasing them all in one go.
Another vote for "none"; there are plenty of books and comics out there just crying out for being made into movies or series. Personally, I'd like to see someone tackle Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon" trilogy as an after-the-watershed show so they don't have to shirk away from some of the more brutal moments; three movies or a "based-on" series works for me, although the latter might need some work given the need to continually re-cast the actor playing the main protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs.
Why remake a series when they can re-run at least some of the originals episodes if they want to? In fact, for some series I wish they *would* re-run the originals, some of the classic "Doctor Who", "Outer Limits", "Twilight Zone" episodes for a start... Assuming, of course, that the original media hasn't been lost or allowed to perish like happened with some of the Hartnell/Troughton era Dr. Who episodes.
You could even that that point to another stage of abstraction. The OS UI, and by implication any style guides and applications, plays a key role in the requirements of the screen sensitivity. If your OS needs very precise, pixel perfect selections then you either need a highly accurate and expensive touch screen or a stylus, but if you design your UI around chunky buttons and screen sized-gestures then you can get away with a much less accurate and cheaper screen.
A far more meaningful metric would be to have a number of testers each perform a number of typical "real world" tasks on the phones using bundled and popular third party applications, then see how many errors and retries were required. That might lead to something actually useful like Phone A is good for one set of tasks, but Phone B is better for another set of tasks. One would hope that the common set has the expected core functions like making calls and so one, but given some of the abysmal phone UIs I've seen over the years, I wouldn't count on it.
Nah, that's not Slashdotted. It's proving the point by showing the importance of a higher framerate.
Than zero.
It's on the homepage of Amazon's UK site, and I've seen a few of the billboard ads outside of London as well, but the core focus in the UK definitely seems to have been on London over the last few weeks. The level of advertising on the London Underground is pretty much at saturation level, I'd say.
No it's not, several of the larger spam/malware gangs including the infamous Russian Business Network have been doing this for several years now. That's partly what prompted Spamhaus to create their solution to the problem: DROP. All it takes is a for the majority of the Tier 1 carriers to adopt the DROP list and it's pretty much game over for this this technique.
OK, yes, the Christmas number one is something of a UK fixation that's almost up there with The Queen's Speech in terms of tradition, you've got me there. That said, I think this matters a great deal because it hopefully shows the music labels that, despite what they might think, there is actually a large proportion of the music-buying UK population, and probably other countries as well, that is fed up with their usual fare. X-Factor is probably the pinnacle (or should that be nadir?) of the trend towards music consisting solely of recycled Pop/R&B numbers; Miley Cyrus' version of "The Climb" was still getting airtime only a few weeks ago, and we're already seeing it covered FFS!
With a little luck, the labels will put a little bit more diversity in their catalogues as a result of this little upset and we might get some genuine talent back onto the airwaves instead of just pretty faces singing banal lyrics over and over. We'd better, because if they carry along the path they are on it's just a matter of time before they find the "ideal" pop song, and put it on an endless loop... Come to think of, wasn't there a story here on Slashdot a while ago about doing just that?
It undermines the claims that piracy is responsible for the declining sales firstly because it shows that a *lot* of people are prepared to pay for music after all, so clearly not everyone is a "freetard" who just downloads everything via P2P. Not only that, but it also shows that they are so fed up with the recycled Pop/R&B performances that labels churn out over and over again, that they are prepared to pay for a song quite a few of them probably won't even listen to in protest. Put the two together, and I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that at least part of the sales decline is actually due to the labels neglecting a sizable chunk of their potential customers taste rather than just P2P.
The problem as I see it isn't so much that the quality music isn't there, because it is. The real problem is that if an act doesn't fit the cookie-cutter Pop/R&B model then they'll get next to no marketing support from the studios, making it all but impossible for potential fans to find them amidst all the dross that's also out there in music's long tail. Frankly, I think that the music industry has got so caught up in its "War against Piracy", that it's forgotten just how wonderfully diverse music can be and that not everyone likes to hear nothing but Pop and R&B.
I've been pondering the ramifications for the BPI and the music industry at large as well, and I'm coming to the conclusion that the BPI and rest of the UK music business are going to be particularly happy with this development once they've had some time to think it through a little.
Firstly, while it's a little screwed up due to the reason for the sales, it shows that one of their key target market segments within the UK population is actually willing to fork over money on-line for music. More importantly, however, is that it shows that a sizable chunk of this sector of the market is not entirely happy with the bland Pop/R&B fare that sounds exactly the same as the last one and makes up the bulk of their product. That at the very least pokes a few holes in their claims that people are not prepared to pay for music, and very clearly demonstrates that they are not catering for the needs of their target market as well as they could be.
Somehow, I suspect that this little incident is going to get used against them the next time they try making claims about on-line music piracy being responsible for their falling sales and (supposed) fall in profits.
Actually, RATM are donating their proceeds from the sales to Shelter as well as the £70,000 (it's even mentioned in the article linked from the summary) and intend throw a free concert in the UK at some point next year. Of course, this is only the artist's cut of 500,000 digital downloads that we are talking about here, so I'd be very surprised if the total was much larger than the £70,000 generated from the Facebook page.
Personally, my eyes are now on Sony UK and, to a lesser extent, Simon Cowell. Sony have profited to the tune of 500,000 digital downloads on the RATM track, plus probably a good 100,000 extra copies of McElderry's bought by X-Factor fans to try and keep RATM off number one spot. Total materials cost: £0. I think it only fair that they make a gesture in kind and make a sizable donation to Shelter as well.
Right... Because the potential effect of a massive tsunami wiping out most of the cities cited along Pacific coastlines wouldn't have any significant impact at all on the global population, or one the economy through the loss of port facilities etc. Depending on the size, velocity and angle of impact the effects of an asteroid strike in an ocean could easily exceed the impact of an event like the Krakatoa eruption of 1883.
They would be the virginis that are being talked about. Please try to keep up!
OK, the last two are technically cheating, and all but the first option would possibly require custom code since all the example images appear to be 15x20 portraits, but a suitable algorithm probably wouldn't be that hard to figure out. I saw this on Firehose last night and worked out a few likely routines this morning, so I'd expect some custom FL/OSS code (and cheap Chinese manufactured knock-offs) to be available in fairly short order. After that the race will be on to create the largest most impressive image before the fad inevitably passes.
...posting the fact to a site where a good deal of the readership's instinctive reaction to the posting of sensitive information on the Internet is to find and mirror it in as many locations as possible is probably not the best first step. See "Streisand Effect". Then again, if you are just pretending to be the subject of the text in order to humiliate the actual victim even further, then I tip my hat to you sir. Bravo!
Well, yes... that would be why I used the word "innovative" instead of "obvious".
As I pointed out, producing energy efficient data centers has become quite a competetive market sector of late, with several quite distinct approaches to the problem, so it's an area that is not exactly lacking for a little R&D either. If the solution was obvious (without the benefit of hindsight) to someone else skilled in the art then that someone else would have done it already and even the USPTO would have rejected the patent application. OK, maybe not the latter, but I think it qualifies as "non-obvious", at least without the benefit of hindsight.
Don't be silly, this is precisely how patents were originally meant to be used; to allow the inventor of a truly innovative technology to get some reward for their effort, so if you want to use the technology then you need to license it from the inventor, that's all. . And, yes, it *is* innovative or someone else would have already come up with the idea and patented it, the green data centre market isn't exactly short or a little competition at the moment with so many organisations competing for bragging rights over the lowest PUE ratings.
Look on the bright side, since this is Google with their mantra of "Do no evil" that we're talking about, they can hardly charge an extortionate amount for the license fee given what it might entail for the environment if they want to carry on being able to claim that with any degree of sincerity. Regardless of what they charge, you can almost guarantee it would be a lot less than what some vendors *cough* Sun *cough* have historically charged for their more bespoke cabinets.
Whether it's a salaried or hourly wage shouldn't make a whole lot of difference. I've had both types of role, and in all cases there has always been an incentive or some kind of additional remuneration to do the on-call work over equivalent grades in departments that didn't have to do it. That would either be a fixed allowance for the on-call time, a disturbance allowance per call, overtime, or some combination of the three. Then again, I do work in the EU where thanks to the French we are a little more blessed in our labour laws than those unfortunates in the US seem to be.
The best employer's position I had on this went so far as pay you per hour to be on call (0.5x base wage), a disturbance allowance (1.5 hours wage per issue) and overtime (1.5x base wage, or 2x at weekends/public holidays) while you were working on a call, with wages pro-rated for those of us on salaried pay. That was one sweet deal; if you got a whole bunch of quick-fix issues during your week on the rota, then you could quite easily clear a couple of week's pay for just a few hours of actual work. In return, the company had one of the most motivated and loyal IT teams I've ever worked with, but unfortunately almost zero prospects for internal promotion...
+1 Informative. While the UK-US extradition treaty is somewhat biased in favour of the US, this is precisely why is being extradited. He's never denied commiting the crime, and frankly given what has been revealled about the incompetence of the US agencies involved I'm surprised that they still want all that dirty laundry aired in what will almost certainly be a media circus.
The reason the waters are so muddy is because some of McKinnon's supporters have made Aspergers out to be something that it is not; a get out of jail free card of some kind. Contrary to what some of McKinnon's supporters might think, it does not in any way make it conceivable that McKinnon did not know right from wrong or understand the potential consequences of his actions. The only thing is does is mean that he has some legitimate medical and psychological requirements that the US must be able to meet before the extradition can proceed, and since those are pretty easy to meet then, barring intervention from the EU, it's a done deal.
Personally, I think McKinnon's defense team royally screwed up. Once he had admitted his guilt and the Asperger's diagnosis was made, they should have used that to press for a trial in the UK, against UK laws and sentencing guidelines, with any sentence also being served in the UK. Both sides could have said that justice had been done, and McKinnon would have got off with a slap on the wrist and at worst a short sentence in a minimum security prison with time off for good behaviour, and quite possibly at the weekends as well. All this would have been over years ago, and he'd have probably made a small fortune out of selling his story to the tabloids and publishing an auto-biography by now.
Unless your company happens to be owned by Rupert Murdoch. In that case you get a bonus of a cool 1 million dollars (raises pinky to corner of mouth) to do exactly what the boss has been asking for repeatedly over the last several months, all courtesy of Mark Cuban. That's got to be the win:win scenario of the year: Cuban's idea gets some takers, some News Corp.' subsidiary CEOs get $1m, Rupert Murdoch gets his sites out of Google and, eventually, everyone finally gets rid of Rupert Murdoch when his companies become insolvent.
Sounds like a good plan to me!
It's also why smart users filter them outright with something like AdBlock - anything that I see in the browser history that looks like a tracking/stats domain or URL gets blocked on sight. Come to think of it, I could probably clean it up publish it as an AdBlock filter list if anyone's interested; there's only a few dozen entries on there at the moment, but I'm sure that would grow pretty quickly if it was used by a more general and less paranoid userbase.
You raise a very interesting point - other than the fact that both the companies concerned trade within the EU, this is within the EU's jurisdiction how, exactly? Since this is about two US companies wanting to merge and the US DoJ is happy with the deal, does anyone actually know what the EC/EU actually can do about it? For instance, can they block the deal outright, escalate the dispute to the WTO or some such to prolong matters, or what? And if they can't prevent the deal going ahead, then can they place restrictions on the combined companies ability to trade within the EU without the US being able to go to the WTO?