I think that a movie like "Life of Brian" couldn't be made in this day and age. Or it would be made but not shown, what with religious sensitivities flaring up even in more or less normal countries. Think of it: if you screened a new "Life of Brian" (new, because then the excuse of showing it as our cultural heritage doesn't fly), then you'd kind of be obliged to also screen a "part 2" movie spoofing the life of Mohammed, and we all know that that would lead to... Easier to ban any religion bashing, which is what is slowly happening in many European countries.
Unless you expect to be somewhat careless with your phone or can't afford to repair or replace your phone when it breaks, consider self insurance. Put that $100 in your savings account, that already goes a long way towards covering the repair of any one thing that can break in your iPhone (especially if you factor in your insurance deductible). Insurance companies expect to make money on this scheme, so statistically you are better of self-insuring if you can afford it. Insurance for things like these is a "tax on people who are poor at math", just like lotteries:)
I've had some good success stories being involved in implementing several OSS-based solutions for a client. The model they use is: their own team of hired talent sets up the OSS stack, makes sure the software runs in the company ecosystem and that it does what the business needs it to do. Then they hand the thing over to a specialised OSS support team in India. That way we do not have to deal with yet another support contract or vendor, we use our preferred IT supplier to supply hired talent to support these systems. The advantage is that we get support guys who already know our infrastructure inside out, and are familiar with our organisation. Some systems are now running over 5 years, and we have found that the majority of problems are related to system integration or the infrastructure, not to issues with the software itself. Being an OSS generalist is good enough to support our stuff, and in the one case were we did need an expert, we hired one for a few weeks.
A lot of companies go with "in between" vendors like RedHat because they are a liability firewall. We've had some experience with that as well: if an open source product is found to infringe on some patent, or found to contain proprietary bits of code, the claimant will go after large corporate users of the software. Unless there's a vendor like RedHat, in which case it's them who get sued. Support contracts with such vendors sometimes explicitly stipulate where the buck stops in such cases.
Unfortunately, many people think you are right. And even worse: those people are team leads, managers, executives. Small wonder that so few coding shops actually manage to push out code of high quality, and why the profession in general is more like a bunch of craftsmen than real professionals.
Programming well takes skill and experience. It is not an easy craft to learn, the devil is often in the myriad details and idiosyncrasies of the platform, the libraries, or the specification. What helps immensely is having access to senior programmers who can make sure you're not reinventing the wheel a thousand times over. Bad news there: because programming is "the lowest of the low of IT" and every programmer wants to get out, there are hardly any senior coders left. Most of them are to be found in the hobby or OSS arena; I find very, very few of them in the corporate world. By the way: I know a fair few people who would like to stay involved with coding (and they continue to do it in their free time), but they do not become our senior coders because that position has been eliminated in pretty much every company I've worked for.
There is evidence that access to extreme porn fuels fantasies and thus increases the propensity to turn thought into act. There is also evidence that access to extreme porn helps certain people to get their jollies, reducing the urge to actually engage in such extreme sex. In other words, it depends on whom you ask.
Even it it turns out that access to child porn increases the occurrence of child abuse, there is still the matter of balance. Child abuse needs to be stamped out, but not at all cost. If the cost is innocents going to jail (like the teenagers making naked pics of each other) or the introduction of something eerily close to thoughtcrime (like banning cartoons depicting child porn), then I say the cost is too high. Especially because outlawing the possession of child porn has done very little to stop production on one end, and actual child abuse on the other.
The iPad is fine for typing or spreadsheets, especially if you get a separate keyboard for longer sessions. Screen size is not the issue... a much more glaring omission is support for track pads. Controlling a cursor via a touchscreen blows chunks.
I've been involved in a fair few hires for my previous employer, and it struck me that we *sucked* at making a fair assessment of the applicants' abilities. My experience at other firms have been no different, even though most do manage to weed out the obvious knuckledraggers or spot the shining genius. In contrast, observing someone at actual work for a week should give a far better insight in their abilities and soft skills. This is obviously of benefit to the employer, but also to the prospective employee. The only thing I'd hope is that the company already did a short assessment of the candidate to spot any obvious reasons why he/she woulnd't be hired, before asking them to commit for a week.
The author puts forth very few actual problems with online math classes in general; his article focuses on one particular course (Udacity Statistics 101) and gives us a top 10 list of problems with that course. None of these problems are intrinsic to online courses, except perhaps the lack of natural feedback that one does get when teaching a class face-to-face, allowing for continuous improvement of the course material.
In other words, the author bases his assessment of online math courses on a sample size of 1. ("Based on my review of the Udacity Introduction to Statistics course, I see some compelling strategic advantages for live in-class teachers, that will not be soon washed away by massive online video learning.").
You can only sell new gear to people if the new system isn't worse than the old.
Unless this new gear makes operating costs much lower. Some time ago I visited the production company that handles almost all of Dutch TV programming; these guys made the switch to an all-digital post-production system. According to them, the new (and hugely expensive) system didn't really offer any new or improved functionality, but the reduction in operational costs and time required to do post production was astounding.
Out of curiosity, what is the big deal would be with such a small latency? I can understand that in an analog system you need to keep everything synced up nicely to allow seamless switching, but in a digital system, it should be easy enough to switch between unsynced video streams. Or is the latency an issue with keeping video and audio synced up? (I can imagine that video an audio are separate streams for quite a while in the process).
Don't worry about posting your pics to Facebook; your friends will do that for you. Chances are that a picture with you in it at any social event (sister's wedding, office picnic, drunken dorm blowout) has already made its way to Facebook or another photo sharing service... dutifully tagged with your name by said friends.
If they want my money, why don't they take it? Just today, I went online to shop for ebooks. to have something to read during an upcoming trip. More than half of my purchases failed: "This e-book can only be sold in the following countries: [US]". Well, FU, I'll just take my business to the Pirate Bay then. Hey, waddayaknow? No DRM, no restrictions. Same for movies. Availability of movie content outside the USA in a non-streaming form that allows format shifting doesn't exist. Again, screw you MPAA, I am off to the Pirate Bay. It's not the ethical thing to do, but looking at your own business models and levels of cluelessness, I am not feeling very charitable today.
Music however is different, and the only reason it is different is because the record companies got dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age, in part by piracy (and in no small part because of the likes of Apple). I see no reason whatsoever to pirate music anymore, and I haven't done so in over a decade: iTunes, Spotify and other legal sources have my music needs well covered. And I am not the only one, so yes, I do hope that content providers are taking note. I have some money burning in my pocket, just for you guys. If the big studios offered their movies online, downloadable in a variety of formats, I'd be all over it. With e-books, I try getting them from a legal shop first, perhaps try using Paypal using a bogus US address... but if that fails I'll hit TPB.
TMMM is right but not for the reasons you cite. I have often extolled the merits of using a more or less autonomous team of highly skilled developers instead of following the corporate habit of using a closely managed team of so-so, interchangable programmers, preferably outsourced to some cheap-labor outfit in India or China. Few corporations want to go that route, but not because the autonomous team would be more expensive, or produce poorly maintainable and undocumented code, unfit to hand over to a support team. Neither is (or has to be) true.
There are a few other reasons corporations steer away from crack teams:
- Many managers are good at managing resources but they suck at managing people. In HR Lingo: they find talent management difficult. Which is true for talent in almost all non-managerial career paths, by the way. So they prefer to manage by the numbers, hire 3 mid-level c# guys, a senior UX designer, and a junior db person, rather than hire 5 (or probably fewer) crack programmers who, combined, posess all the necessary skills between them. The first group comes off the shelf. The second group needs to be found, which is harder.
- Corporate IT managers favour predictability and accountability over speed, quality and cost. They prefer to wait a bit and get a mediocre product that comes with a well defined SLA at a fixed cost, over a superior product that is "likely" to be developed faster and "probably" costs less. Quotation marks indicate that we're dealing with stuff that is not part of any SLA.
The two kids in a garage produce better work, and work faster and cheaper... most of the time. However the actual effort and results from project to project are hard to predict, and more difficult to manage. That is why corporations don't go for autonomous crack teams even if they can be an order of magnitude better. Thankfully some corporations are starting to see the value of having such people on the payroll (or on long term contracts), letting them organise their own work and steering on outcome rather than process, often in projects designated as "pilots" but set up to come up with production-ready software. It's how I make my living these days...
IV is a company set up to exploit the horribly broken patent system to the max. They made their fortune not by merit of effort, but by gaming the system, causing untold economic damage in the process. So yes, they suck big time. And now they are changing their tune? That's a bit like praising a hardened crime boss for donating some of his ill gotten gains to the NY Philharmonic. A nice gesture, but in both cases it hardly means they are turning a new leaf.
In the end, getting the patent system reformed is a lot better than hating IV. Fat chance of that happening, though.
Very true, and it's something that's often forgotten by people who cry about their freedom of expression.
However, those consequences should not have to include unwarranted abuse by the TSA. The TSA is there to keep passengers safe by keeping people with ill intent out, period. Their remit does not (or should not) include harassing people who rub them the wrong way. If they detained him purely because of the shirt, then they should be taken to task for that. And this seems to be the case... why else would the airline captain mention the shirt at all?
This story is actually relevant; anyone using Apple products may have dealings with these stores at some point. If there are similar shenanigans going on at McDonalds, Fry's or other well known chains (and I am sure that there are), then there's a news item. Nothing world shaking, just interesting.
If you think this is an example of how bad the Apple hype is getting, then you have no idea. Head over to Apple fan sites for any or all of the following:
- Review of an iPhone, with a lengthy description on the orgasmic joy of taking an iPhone out of its packaging.
- An exited article about rumours on what the new iPhone's dock connector is going to look like.
- Pictures of "leaked" parts intended of the new iPhone 5, such as the logic board, the battery, and said dock connector. Popular enough to prompt criminals to circulate these pictures in a PDF that has been infected with some malware.
- "Apple working on red iPhone bumper".
All actual articles taken from Apple fan sites. Not quite up there with Woz' balls, but still...
More than you'd think, I wager. How many people do you know who do regular coding of a reasonably high standard, but who are not coders by profession? I know many, and I am one of those myself. As a freelancer I get to set my own hours and make the call between doing well-paid billable work, charity work, or work for my own enjoyment. Most of the non-billable work that I do is coding; I enjoy it and I do not really do much of it in my regular line of work. Why would doctors (or managers, or astronauts, or accountants) not enjoy coding as a hobby, get good at it, and then apply those skills to help them in their work?
Where I work, "minutes" usually just consist of 2 lists: actions, and decisions. Both are used after the meeting (especially actions).
From an expense standpoint, assuming they're used, is the probably very high cost of this "system" lower than the expense of not having it?
Let me turn that around. If you almost never use detailed minutes of any meeting, but cannot be sure that you won't need them for that one occasion, then recording them is an excellent idea. Per meeting, you get to record and store the meeting essentially for free. Record the audio, don't do anything to it, and store it securely, labelled in a way that you can find it easily (meeting topic, room, date). It'll be there in case it is needed later, and it will free up the participants from making detailed notes "just in case".
China and India have already expressed an interest in Thorium reactors; I am hoping that we'll be buying these things from them in a decade or two. By that time, the enthusiasm with which Germany, Japan and other nations have shut down their nukes out of a (not unfounded) fear of accidents, might well have been replaced with the realisation that wind and solar aren't cutting it. By then the world might be ready for new nukes, and while I do not know what this FSR design offers, a working Thorium plant would at least offer a step change in waste handling, the chance of accidents happening, and the effects of such accidents when they happen.
MS sniping? The involvement of Intellectual Ventures, a scumbag patent troll, is far more interesting. IV distinguish themselves by not just buying up patent portfolios, but also assembling think tanks to come up with the next obvious human activity "but on the internet" or "but with 1 click" to lay claim to. In this case however, it seems they are funding some actual, practical research.
Sniping aside, I'd be more interested in someone making a bid to develop a practical Thorium based MSR. This SFR reactor is supposedly an advanced gen IV design. How safe are these things considered to be?
Even if WikiLeaks isn't what is keeping the president and the joint chiefs awake at nights, that doesn't mean Julian should stop worrying about being whisked away to imprisonment without trial (like Manning). Which, by the way, is the best-case scenario. The alternative is some nasty hidden "facility" in eastern Europe or Afghanistan.
Ah yes, re point 1, one of the "rape victims" alledgedly made Assange a nice breakfast after this so called rape took place, rather odd behavior after having been violated. As it turned out, both victims pressed charges only after finding out that Assange had been double dipping, after conferring with each other and then seeking legal council about their options. At the risk of sounding sexist and dismissing more sinister tin foil theories, I say the most palatable theory about this matter is that it is all about "a woman scorned", or two in this case.
But let's suppose that something unconsentual has taken place here. If Assange is extradited to Sweden, charged and convicted for rape or whatever, and if it ends there, then I will publicly come out here and eat my words. But if he is extradited, fined or sentenced to do a little time, and then released to the custody of the US, by secret rendition or simple and legal extradition, then all you'll get is a fat "told you so"
Slashdot Mirror
I think that a movie like "Life of Brian" couldn't be made in this day and age. Or it would be made but not shown, what with religious sensitivities flaring up even in more or less normal countries. Think of it: if you screened a new "Life of Brian" (new, because then the excuse of showing it as our cultural heritage doesn't fly), then you'd kind of be obliged to also screen a "part 2" movie spoofing the life of Mohammed, and we all know that that would lead to... Easier to ban any religion bashing, which is what is slowly happening in many European countries.
Unless you expect to be somewhat careless with your phone or can't afford to repair or replace your phone when it breaks, consider self insurance. Put that $100 in your savings account, that already goes a long way towards covering the repair of any one thing that can break in your iPhone (especially if you factor in your insurance deductible). Insurance companies expect to make money on this scheme, so statistically you are better of self-insuring if you can afford it. Insurance for things like these is a "tax on people who are poor at math", just like lotteries :)
I've had some good success stories being involved in implementing several OSS-based solutions for a client. The model they use is: their own team of hired talent sets up the OSS stack, makes sure the software runs in the company ecosystem and that it does what the business needs it to do. Then they hand the thing over to a specialised OSS support team in India. That way we do not have to deal with yet another support contract or vendor, we use our preferred IT supplier to supply hired talent to support these systems. The advantage is that we get support guys who already know our infrastructure inside out, and are familiar with our organisation. Some systems are now running over 5 years, and we have found that the majority of problems are related to system integration or the infrastructure, not to issues with the software itself. Being an OSS generalist is good enough to support our stuff, and in the one case were we did need an expert, we hired one for a few weeks.
A lot of companies go with "in between" vendors like RedHat because they are a liability firewall. We've had some experience with that as well: if an open source product is found to infringe on some patent, or found to contain proprietary bits of code, the claimant will go after large corporate users of the software. Unless there's a vendor like RedHat, in which case it's them who get sued. Support contracts with such vendors sometimes explicitly stipulate where the buck stops in such cases.
Unfortunately, many people think you are right. And even worse: those people are team leads, managers, executives. Small wonder that so few coding shops actually manage to push out code of high quality, and why the profession in general is more like a bunch of craftsmen than real professionals.
Programming well takes skill and experience. It is not an easy craft to learn, the devil is often in the myriad details and idiosyncrasies of the platform, the libraries, or the specification. What helps immensely is having access to senior programmers who can make sure you're not reinventing the wheel a thousand times over. Bad news there: because programming is "the lowest of the low of IT" and every programmer wants to get out, there are hardly any senior coders left. Most of them are to be found in the hobby or OSS arena; I find very, very few of them in the corporate world. By the way: I know a fair few people who would like to stay involved with coding (and they continue to do it in their free time), but they do not become our senior coders because that position has been eliminated in pretty much every company I've worked for.
Nice idea but already illegal in many countries...
There is evidence that access to extreme porn fuels fantasies and thus increases the propensity to turn thought into act. There is also evidence that access to extreme porn helps certain people to get their jollies, reducing the urge to actually engage in such extreme sex. In other words, it depends on whom you ask.
Even it it turns out that access to child porn increases the occurrence of child abuse, there is still the matter of balance. Child abuse needs to be stamped out, but not at all cost. If the cost is innocents going to jail (like the teenagers making naked pics of each other) or the introduction of something eerily close to thoughtcrime (like banning cartoons depicting child porn), then I say the cost is too high. Especially because outlawing the possession of child porn has done very little to stop production on one end, and actual child abuse on the other.
The iPad is fine for typing or spreadsheets, especially if you get a separate keyboard for longer sessions. Screen size is not the issue... a much more glaring omission is support for track pads. Controlling a cursor via a touchscreen blows chunks.
Enough chit-chat; restrain the specimen!
I've been involved in a fair few hires for my previous employer, and it struck me that we *sucked* at making a fair assessment of the applicants' abilities. My experience at other firms have been no different, even though most do manage to weed out the obvious knuckledraggers or spot the shining genius. In contrast, observing someone at actual work for a week should give a far better insight in their abilities and soft skills. This is obviously of benefit to the employer, but also to the prospective employee. The only thing I'd hope is that the company already did a short assessment of the candidate to spot any obvious reasons why he/she woulnd't be hired, before asking them to commit for a week.
The author puts forth very few actual problems with online math classes in general; his article focuses on one particular course (Udacity Statistics 101) and gives us a top 10 list of problems with that course. None of these problems are intrinsic to online courses, except perhaps the lack of natural feedback that one does get when teaching a class face-to-face, allowing for continuous improvement of the course material.
In other words, the author bases his assessment of online math courses on a sample size of 1. ("Based on my review of the Udacity Introduction to Statistics course, I see some compelling strategic advantages for live in-class teachers, that will not be soon washed away by massive online video learning.").
You can only sell new gear to people if the new system isn't worse than the old.
Unless this new gear makes operating costs much lower. Some time ago I visited the production company that handles almost all of Dutch TV programming; these guys made the switch to an all-digital post-production system. According to them, the new (and hugely expensive) system didn't really offer any new or improved functionality, but the reduction in operational costs and time required to do post production was astounding.
Out of curiosity, what is the big deal would be with such a small latency? I can understand that in an analog system you need to keep everything synced up nicely to allow seamless switching, but in a digital system, it should be easy enough to switch between unsynced video streams. Or is the latency an issue with keeping video and audio synced up? (I can imagine that video an audio are separate streams for quite a while in the process).
Don't worry about posting your pics to Facebook; your friends will do that for you. Chances are that a picture with you in it at any social event (sister's wedding, office picnic, drunken dorm blowout) has already made its way to Facebook or another photo sharing service... dutifully tagged with your name by said friends.
If they want my money, why don't they take it? Just today, I went online to shop for ebooks. to have something to read during an upcoming trip. More than half of my purchases failed: "This e-book can only be sold in the following countries: [US]". Well, FU, I'll just take my business to the Pirate Bay then. Hey, waddayaknow? No DRM, no restrictions. Same for movies. Availability of movie content outside the USA in a non-streaming form that allows format shifting doesn't exist. Again, screw you MPAA, I am off to the Pirate Bay. It's not the ethical thing to do, but looking at your own business models and levels of cluelessness, I am not feeling very charitable today.
Music however is different, and the only reason it is different is because the record companies got dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age, in part by piracy (and in no small part because of the likes of Apple). I see no reason whatsoever to pirate music anymore, and I haven't done so in over a decade: iTunes, Spotify and other legal sources have my music needs well covered. And I am not the only one, so yes, I do hope that content providers are taking note. I have some money burning in my pocket, just for you guys. If the big studios offered their movies online, downloadable in a variety of formats, I'd be all over it. With e-books, I try getting them from a legal shop first, perhaps try using Paypal using a bogus US address... but if that fails I'll hit TPB.
TMMM is right but not for the reasons you cite. I have often extolled the merits of using a more or less autonomous team of highly skilled developers instead of following the corporate habit of using a closely managed team of so-so, interchangable programmers, preferably outsourced to some cheap-labor outfit in India or China. Few corporations want to go that route, but not because the autonomous team would be more expensive, or produce poorly maintainable and undocumented code, unfit to hand over to a support team. Neither is (or has to be) true.
There are a few other reasons corporations steer away from crack teams:
- Many managers are good at managing resources but they suck at managing people. In HR Lingo: they find talent management difficult. Which is true for talent in almost all non-managerial career paths, by the way. So they prefer to manage by the numbers, hire 3 mid-level c# guys, a senior UX designer, and a junior db person, rather than hire 5 (or probably fewer) crack programmers who, combined, posess all the necessary skills between them. The first group comes off the shelf. The second group needs to be found, which is harder.
- Corporate IT managers favour predictability and accountability over speed, quality and cost. They prefer to wait a bit and get a mediocre product that comes with a well defined SLA at a fixed cost, over a superior product that is "likely" to be developed faster and "probably" costs less. Quotation marks indicate that we're dealing with stuff that is not part of any SLA.
The two kids in a garage produce better work, and work faster and cheaper... most of the time. However the actual effort and results from project to project are hard to predict, and more difficult to manage. That is why corporations don't go for autonomous crack teams even if they can be an order of magnitude better. Thankfully some corporations are starting to see the value of having such people on the payroll (or on long term contracts), letting them organise their own work and steering on outcome rather than process, often in projects designated as "pilots" but set up to come up with production-ready software. It's how I make my living these days...
"Yes, I could, if I didn't use the name of the first president of Russia, who renamed KGB."
FTFY
IV is a company set up to exploit the horribly broken patent system to the max. They made their fortune not by merit of effort, but by gaming the system, causing untold economic damage in the process. So yes, they suck big time. And now they are changing their tune? That's a bit like praising a hardened crime boss for donating some of his ill gotten gains to the NY Philharmonic. A nice gesture, but in both cases it hardly means they are turning a new leaf.
In the end, getting the patent system reformed is a lot better than hating IV. Fat chance of that happening, though.
Very true, and it's something that's often forgotten by people who cry about their freedom of expression.
However, those consequences should not have to include unwarranted abuse by the TSA. The TSA is there to keep passengers safe by keeping people with ill intent out, period. Their remit does not (or should not) include harassing people who rub them the wrong way. If they detained him purely because of the shirt, then they should be taken to task for that. And this seems to be the case... why else would the airline captain mention the shirt at all?
This story is actually relevant; anyone using Apple products may have dealings with these stores at some point. If there are similar shenanigans going on at McDonalds, Fry's or other well known chains (and I am sure that there are), then there's a news item. Nothing world shaking, just interesting.
If you think this is an example of how bad the Apple hype is getting, then you have no idea. Head over to Apple fan sites for any or all of the following:
- Review of an iPhone, with a lengthy description on the orgasmic joy of taking an iPhone out of its packaging.
- An exited article about rumours on what the new iPhone's dock connector is going to look like.
- Pictures of "leaked" parts intended of the new iPhone 5, such as the logic board, the battery, and said dock connector. Popular enough to prompt criminals to circulate these pictures in a PDF that has been infected with some malware.
- "Apple working on red iPhone bumper".
All actual articles taken from Apple fan sites. Not quite up there with Woz' balls, but still...
More than you'd think, I wager. How many people do you know who do regular coding of a reasonably high standard, but who are not coders by profession? I know many, and I am one of those myself. As a freelancer I get to set my own hours and make the call between doing well-paid billable work, charity work, or work for my own enjoyment. Most of the non-billable work that I do is coding; I enjoy it and I do not really do much of it in my regular line of work. Why would doctors (or managers, or astronauts, or accountants) not enjoy coding as a hobby, get good at it, and then apply those skills to help them in their work?
Let me turn that around. If you almost never use detailed minutes of any meeting, but cannot be sure that you won't need them for that one occasion, then recording them is an excellent idea. Per meeting, you get to record and store the meeting essentially for free. Record the audio, don't do anything to it, and store it securely, labelled in a way that you can find it easily (meeting topic, room, date). It'll be there in case it is needed later, and it will free up the participants from making detailed notes "just in case".
China and India have already expressed an interest in Thorium reactors; I am hoping that we'll be buying these things from them in a decade or two. By that time, the enthusiasm with which Germany, Japan and other nations have shut down their nukes out of a (not unfounded) fear of accidents, might well have been replaced with the realisation that wind and solar aren't cutting it. By then the world might be ready for new nukes, and while I do not know what this FSR design offers, a working Thorium plant would at least offer a step change in waste handling, the chance of accidents happening, and the effects of such accidents when they happen.
MS sniping? The involvement of Intellectual Ventures, a scumbag patent troll, is far more interesting. IV distinguish themselves by not just buying up patent portfolios, but also assembling think tanks to come up with the next obvious human activity "but on the internet" or "but with 1 click" to lay claim to. In this case however, it seems they are funding some actual, practical research.
Sniping aside, I'd be more interested in someone making a bid to develop a practical Thorium based MSR. This SFR reactor is supposedly an advanced gen IV design. How safe are these things considered to be?
Even if WikiLeaks isn't what is keeping the president and the joint chiefs awake at nights, that doesn't mean Julian should stop worrying about being whisked away to imprisonment without trial (like Manning). Which, by the way, is the best-case scenario. The alternative is some nasty hidden "facility" in eastern Europe or Afghanistan.
Nice... But I am sure the Obama administration, in all its wisdom, has since repealed that law.
Ah yes, re point 1, one of the "rape victims" alledgedly made Assange a nice breakfast after this so called rape took place, rather odd behavior after having been violated. As it turned out, both victims pressed charges only after finding out that Assange had been double dipping, after conferring with each other and then seeking legal council about their options. At the risk of sounding sexist and dismissing more sinister tin foil theories, I say the most palatable theory about this matter is that it is all about "a woman scorned", or two in this case.
But let's suppose that something unconsentual has taken place here. If Assange is extradited to Sweden, charged and convicted for rape or whatever, and if it ends there, then I will publicly come out here and eat my words. But if he is extradited, fined or sentenced to do a little time, and then released to the custody of the US, by secret rendition or simple and legal extradition, then all you'll get is a fat "told you so"