Governments print large amounts of money during hyperinflation because they're trying to keep up with the devaluation of the currency, not, as such, to try and stop it. If you reach a point wherein it costs a million of your local currency to buy a loaf of bread and your total money supply is only about 10 million dollars you have a serious problem, well in fact you have at least two very serious problems, a lack of money supply and whatever problem(s) got you into a situation of hyper inflation in the first place.
In a purely isolated environment, not printing the money would, at least in theory actually lead to deflation, which despite how much the folks on Slashdot seem to love the idea, is not a great economic situation to be in and is probably worse than the equivalent level of inflation (inflation hurts people who lend money and deflation hurts people who borrow it). The problem for Iran however(and most countries who go through deflation for that matter) is that they don't live in an isolated system. Even with the embargoes there are foreign inputs into their economy and the external countries aren't all of a sudden going to decide that the Iranian currency is worth more simply because there are less of them to go around. This in theory would mean that salaries would go down with deflation while the costs of foreign inputs essentially increased proportionally providing some great economy crushing fun for everyone. In actuality what happens is that people find an alternative currency and use that instead which tends to trigger hyperinflation of the original currency(since no one wants it anymore for anything but paying taxes).
The neat outcome(at least from a western perspective) is that it causes the governments tax revenue to drop like a stone because the official exchange rate doesn't match what you can actually get for them. Unfortunately none of this applies to bribes or any other "unofficial" government payments as those will be made in the alternative currency so most of the lunatics in Iran will stay rich.
From what I understand it's actually fairly simple.
At the present time, robots which are capable of safely manipulating the screens are more expensive than the humans that do it now. A robot could of course assemble the rest of it, but when you need a human to go and put the screen in on every unit anyway, you may as well have them put the rest of it together too.
Ahh of course, because the government can only do evil by violating the constitution. Congress can't authorize immoral wars, or fail in its responsibility to the common good without breaking the constitution. We'd all be much better off if the government simply did nothing (which is in actuality what most of the rich donors want) because doing nothing at all is perfectly constitutional. It probably isn't of course, but things like the government having responsibilities to its people take a understanding the framers intent instead of just reading the words because the framers didn't think we were stupid, they're mistake.
The only way to solve that is to remove anonymity from political donations and give every voter a fixed limit on what they can donate. There are about 200 million folks who can vote in the US (well as of 2008), we'll give the politicians 20 billion to play with if they want it, so a limit of $100 per head. Heck, make it a grand and we'll let folks donate on your behalf.
The negative side is that your donation essentially becomes non secret, but that's probably not really a problem anyway, you still get to vote however you want and heck at a grand a head even if your company actually forces you to give them your donation they've at least got to employ a whole bunch of people to get any sizable donation.
The theory is that if cutting taxes stimulates growth then a smaller percentage of a larger pie might actually be bigger than larger percentage of a smaller pie. For a ludicrous example let's say you have tax rates of 10% and the total pool of money you're taxing is 10 dollars and dropping the tax rate to 5% increases that pool to 100 dollars. 5% of 100 is significantly larger than 10% of 10.
The problem with the theory, particularly from the Republican side of things where the idea is more extreme, is that it presumes that people on the supply side are being restricted by their costs and not by demand. Specifically they think that if you were to cut the taxes of a corporation by $50k they would use that money to hire someone instead of just pocketing it.
It's true that lowering costs can make certain activities which are currently unprofitable profitable. So if you for instance it cost $5 to make widget X, it sold for $10 and you reduced the tax on widgets from $6 to $3 you might, presuming a demand for widget X start making more of widget X and therefor hire more people and it's also true that during times of economic hardship, providing cash to companies(either directly or through temporarily reduced taxes) can allow them to keep staff employed until things get better(this is essentially how stimulus is supposed to work).
Fundamentally though as a general rule, what constrains supply is demand, you can alter the profitability of certain tasks by lowering taxes, and by lowering things like payroll taxes you can definitely lower the cost of employing someone, but as a general rule, taxes simply aren't a sufficiently high portion of business expenses for even a complete abolition to significantly affect profitability so it doesn't do a lot for employment. When you toss in all the infrastructure you didn't build because you had no taxes, affect on employment could even be a net negative.
I've got no objection to corporate wealth as such, let alone the existence of corporations. What I have an objection to is the fact that the corporations and the individuals who own and/or run them essentially get orders of magnitude more voting power than anyone else does. It's not about whether corporations or wealthy people are entitled to free speech or whether they can petition the government, it's about the fact that if your "petition" comes with a million dollar check politicians listen. Government in the US is very much pay for play and so long as that is the case, we're all screwed.
Actually your Windows Phone Apps 7 apps do get to come along. The problem is that the Windows 8 apps you wrote for Desktop, Tablets and Windows Phone 8 back to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft wasn't stupid enough to actually shaft their developers, just their customers.
I think the OP was referring more to the fact that if you make the hypothesis that if you give drug X to rats their hair will turn green and instead giving drug X to rats caused them to, with a reasonable degree of statistical correlation, grow a third ear instead, you might still have a paper. What you thought was the case was wrong, but you still got an interesting result.
On the other hand the result "nothing happened" or "the rats all died" isn't necessarily all that interesting unless there was an existing scientific consensus that this result contradicted.
Creating an alternative to Facebook isn't a technical problem, Google are probably better technically than Facebook, but they can't do it.
Creating an alternative to Facebook which actually delivers even the tiniest sliver of what Diaspora was supposed to deliver(secure, decentralized and functional without requiring mom and pop to host their own) is a technical problem, probably an insurmountable one.
So Diaspora essentially set themselves up with a technical problem they couldn't solve and a non technical problem they couldn't solve.
Apple's market is also larger than the United States. Over here it made the news because the location of Apple's Sydney store(which is their largest store in the country) was incorrect on their own mapping software. That's pretty damned unacceptable.
The US still does all that, but then the companies that do the design offshore the assembly to the third world. Same as the US economy has been recovering quite nicely, just not for anyone you actually know.
The problem with that quote is that the people who like to use it never analyze what "essential" or "temporary" mean, either in the context of the original quote or in their personal situation.
True, but it's a collective paranoia. Whether your kids are actually in any more danger(I'd argue that forcing the pedophiles out of schools and orphanages has made the streets slightly more dangerous), if you let your kids wander all over the place these days you are considered a negligent parent. In many places both in the US and other places Child Protection will be called on you and, in all likelihood, will attempt to take your kids away from you.
That might be insane, but I'm not going to be letting my kid wander around the neighborhood unsupervised any time soon, and if I got caught leaving him at home alone before a certain point I'd be in more than a little trouble.
Personally I'd like to see the daycare system(we have a government subsidized daycare deal, still expensive, but somewhat covered) converted into an early child hood development thing because if they're going to be stuck somewhere for 10 hours it might not be a bad idea to sort of teach them some stuff too.
The problem with that is that the summers of youth are already gone whether we put kids into schools or not.
These days in all likelihood both parents will work(if they can at least), and young kids running around the neighborhood unsupervised simply isn't as acceptable as it used to be for any number of reasons.
So you're not comparing the summers of your(or my) youth to summer schooling, you're comparing spending 3 months in full day care vs 3 months at school
Now the answer to that question depends an awful lot on the quality of both of those services, great day care can teach, great schools can entertain, but given that the worst case scenarios of both options are about equal and school is a lot less of a financial drain on families, I'd vote for school.
Because Diplomatic status is an agreement. You can't just say "this person is a diplomat", the host country has to approve said diplomat, in addition they can revoke that status at any time(though I believe a period of time is generally granted to get your butt out of the country).
As I said in my original post. The Geneva convention actually covers damned little and as we've seen from the US isn't particularly binding anyway. The rest of it is essentially a deal between two parties.
Sort of a "We promise not to search your diplomatic marked stuff if you promise not to use the diplomatic pouch to smuggle coke" or a "We promise not to come into your embassy if you promise not to harbor criminals" deal.
I don't think that Assange has done anything wrong(at least based on what we know) in terms of his involvement in Wikileaks. I think convicting him of anything in this regard would be a gross miscarriage of justice. That doesn't mean he shouldn't face trial in Sweden or that he's not a narcissistic little shit.
As to self censoring, bull shit. Anyone who is really going to self censor is already going to be doing so because they're convinced that the only thing preventing him from being tried and executed is him being in the embassy after all that's what "everybody" knows.
The only thing that would actually cause anyone new to self censor is if he actually gets taken to the US tried in a normal court and found guilty. That would have a chilling effect, for the rest of it it doesn't matter stuff all whether Assange actually gets tried if everyone believes he's going to be. Above and beyond that, doing the right thing comes at a cost, sometimes that cost is just sometimes it's not, paying it is what makes you a hero. Bradley Manning for instance is a hero, Julian Assange is not.
And they can, if they have good faith belief that it contains something illegal. If the diplomatic bag is a briefcase that's a fairly unlikely scenario, if it's a large box approximately Assange sized with air holes, it's not so much of one.
The thing is, diplomacy doesn't work the way people think it does. You can't just make someone a diplomat, the diplomatic pouch(which isn't actually a pouch) can be searched, embassies are not foreign soil, and asylum doesn't mean jack if you're not in the right country. The fact that generally you can, countries don't, they're treated that way, and it does don't make any of these things true.
The entire diplomatic process is an agreement between two countries. The Geneva convention has a few rules about what is and isn't appropriate(which aren't anywhere near as broad as people think), and the rest is by agreement. If the UK stormed the embassy and took Assange they'd be in violation of no law whatsoever. They'd piss a lot of people off and probably set a precedent they don't actually want to set(the Chinese would love to do the same thing to the US sometimes), but they'd be within their rights to do so.
He broke the conditions of HIS UK HOUSE ARREST, you tool. They could have locked his ass up, instead they let him live at home and were, within the limits of their law, quite reasonable to him, and then he scarpered, which has pissed them off some.
In addition, the UK is really not keen on the idea that criminals can flee to the embassy of any tin pot dictator they may like to escape justice. Whether the president of Ecuador is acting with integrity I don't know(though I suspect his support for Assange is based more on how flipping the bird to the US plays out at home than any support for free speech), but there are plenty of countries with UK embassies who would overlook pretty much anything for a big enough cash payment. The UK cannot and will not let this stand.
And none of this makes a damned bit of difference to this case. Even if Assange was personally responsible for every act of Wikileaks (which he isn't), and even if his actions within Wikileaks were above reproach(they aren't, a lot of the material they released needed to be released, but some of it should have stayed secret, Assange didn't care), and even if everything you say about the results of Wikileaks actions is true(which may or may not be true, very little in the diplomatic cables surprised anyone), it still doesn't give him a free pass on rape.
If the US tries to extradite him, I'd support him, for all that I loathe the man, but that's not what has happened.
Of course the US has a sealed indictment against Assange, he's a prat, he's pissed them off, and they'd very much like to make an example of him. I would thoroughly recommend he avoids US territory in his future travel plans. No one doubts the US would love to try Assange, I'm sure that some members of the US government would love the military trial leading to a death sentence fandango that Assange fears. Personally I think that they're not stupid enough to try it, and if he ended up in the US he'd end up in civilian court and almost certainly walk.
The thing is, none of that matters. The question on the cards here is, does the US, at this point in history, want to pay the price internationally and domestically to almost certainly fail to convict Julian Assange of anything in particular unless they seriously stacked the deck in a way which would be fairly obvious. Personally I don't think the current Whitehouse would think he's worth it, I'm sure they don't like him, but at this point, given their current public stance, grabbing him from Sweden would piss off a lot of folks, for not a whole lot of gain.
The only way any of Assange's paranoid fantasies can be anything other than fantasies is if the US genuinely believes he did more than just receive and release the documents, for which their seems to be no evidence.
Sweden's laws are a bit funny, and the new prosecutor almost certainly wants to score some points with a high profile trial. That said though, sex cases are always massively complicated and I can see the idea that a person can consent to sex with a condom without necessarily consenting to sex without one, tricky, I know, but it is just possible he could be guilty, or at least possibly enough that maybe he should face trial.
The big problem we have in this world, and in particular on Slashdot, is that people can't seem to separate Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Wikileaks is an organization which seeks, at least to some degree, to better the world through the revelation of the kind of information that people need to know to accurately judge their government. Julian Assange on the other hand is a narcissistic, hypocritical little shit who doesn't care what the consequences of his actions are and is willing to go hide in a country which has far less freedom of expression than any of the ones he criticizes to avoid facing any. I don't think he should die for that, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't face a rape case.
The problem is that winning and your case having merit are not synonymous, not in the US, and not in Europe either. You can have a legitimate grievance against someone, sue them, be in the right in every way, and still lose. This goes doubly if the party you are suing is a multinational corporation and has a legal team either in house or on retainer.
Loser pays is a shitty system unless it's tempered by the involvement of a judge to apply it only to cases without merit(which should actually be tossed out not paid for). The legal system is already heavily biased in favor of the people who know how to play the game, we don't want to make it any worse.
Government offices are open business hours. If you have a low paying menial job, the kind where your boss will sack your ass for calling in sick(they exist), you won't get to a government office during business hours. That's with one job, forget 3. US elections are held on weekdays and if you live in a poor neighborhood where most of the population is in the same situation as you, rocking up first thing after work will give you pretty long shot odds at actually getting to vote before the polls close. Every election polls close while people are still lined up outside. Just because in your middle class white neighborhood(like my middle class white neighborhood) it takes 10 minutes to vote and you can do it on your lunch break, doesn't mean that everyone can.
The Feds are suing the state of Florida because they were pumping out letters to people saying "We think you might be an illegal immigrant, please prove your not or you can't vote" with little to no evidence and to close to an election(I believe it was actually a primary, but an election none the less). They're accuracy rate was abysmal given a large percentage responded with proof they were citizens. It wasn't the purge as such they objected to it was the "Hey his name is Sanchez, he must be an illegal." or "Hey, this guy here is called John Smith, and we've got a convicted felon here called John Smith, must be the same guy".
Voter disenfranchisement is unconstitutional, and it's one of the really fucking big unconstitutional actions. It is probably in fact the most unconstitutional thing someone can do.
No one is arguing that illegals or dead people should be allowed to vote. Some people(myself included) would argue felons ought to be able to vote, but even then it's more an issue of removing the laws preventing them from voting as opposed to having them vote illegally. What people are arguing is that if you're going to purge someone off the voter roll you better be damned sure they aren't eligible to vote, and you should do it far enough out from an election that any false positives you do get(which should be a handful at most) have enough time to rectify the situation, which you better damned well bend over backwards to accommodate, because disenfranchising one single eligible voter is one too many.
They'll see the man who said that Medicare and Social Security ought to be eliminated and put it into a proposed law last year. They'll see Mitt Romney endorsing said plan. They'll see Romney in office ratifying said plan(whether he would do so or not).
They'll see that because the footage of when that actually happened will be on every TV screen in America for the next 3 months.
Aside from the fact that Paul Ryan is, in and of himself a douche, he's also a boat anchor. I don't mind that he's a boat anchor since for all that I don't actually hugely mind Romney, and am not a huge fan of Obama anymore, Republicans cannot be allowed to win the presidency till they calm down and get over this rewriting the world shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Governments print large amounts of money during hyperinflation because they're trying to keep up with the devaluation of the currency, not, as such, to try and stop it. If you reach a point wherein it costs a million of your local currency to buy a loaf of bread and your total money supply is only about 10 million dollars you have a serious problem, well in fact you have at least two very serious problems, a lack of money supply and whatever problem(s) got you into a situation of hyper inflation in the first place.
In a purely isolated environment, not printing the money would, at least in theory actually lead to deflation, which despite how much the folks on Slashdot seem to love the idea, is not a great economic situation to be in and is probably worse than the equivalent level of inflation (inflation hurts people who lend money and deflation hurts people who borrow it). The problem for Iran however(and most countries who go through deflation for that matter) is that they don't live in an isolated system. Even with the embargoes there are foreign inputs into their economy and the external countries aren't all of a sudden going to decide that the Iranian currency is worth more simply because there are less of them to go around. This in theory would mean that salaries would go down with deflation while the costs of foreign inputs essentially increased proportionally providing some great economy crushing fun for everyone. In actuality what happens is that people find an alternative currency and use that instead which tends to trigger hyperinflation of the original currency(since no one wants it anymore for anything but paying taxes).
The neat outcome(at least from a western perspective) is that it causes the governments tax revenue to drop like a stone because the official exchange rate doesn't match what you can actually get for them. Unfortunately none of this applies to bribes or any other "unofficial" government payments as those will be made in the alternative currency so most of the lunatics in Iran will stay rich.
From what I understand it's actually fairly simple.
At the present time, robots which are capable of safely manipulating the screens are more expensive than the humans that do it now. A robot could of course assemble the rest of it, but when you need a human to go and put the screen in on every unit anyway, you may as well have them put the rest of it together too.
Ahh of course, because the government can only do evil by violating the constitution. Congress can't authorize immoral wars, or fail in its responsibility to the common good without breaking the constitution. We'd all be much better off if the government simply did nothing (which is in actuality what most of the rich donors want) because doing nothing at all is perfectly constitutional. It probably isn't of course, but things like the government having responsibilities to its people take a understanding the framers intent instead of just reading the words because the framers didn't think we were stupid, they're mistake.
The only way to solve that is to remove anonymity from political donations and give every voter a fixed limit on what they can donate. There are about 200 million folks who can vote in the US (well as of 2008), we'll give the politicians 20 billion to play with if they want it, so a limit of $100 per head. Heck, make it a grand and we'll let folks donate on your behalf.
The negative side is that your donation essentially becomes non secret, but that's probably not really a problem anyway, you still get to vote however you want and heck at a grand a head even if your company actually forces you to give them your donation they've at least got to employ a whole bunch of people to get any sizable donation.
The theory is that if cutting taxes stimulates growth then a smaller percentage of a larger pie might actually be bigger than larger percentage of a smaller pie. For a ludicrous example let's say you have tax rates of 10% and the total pool of money you're taxing is 10 dollars and dropping the tax rate to 5% increases that pool to 100 dollars. 5% of 100 is significantly larger than 10% of 10.
The problem with the theory, particularly from the Republican side of things where the idea is more extreme, is that it presumes that people on the supply side are being restricted by their costs and not by demand. Specifically they think that if you were to cut the taxes of a corporation by $50k they would use that money to hire someone instead of just pocketing it.
It's true that lowering costs can make certain activities which are currently unprofitable profitable. So if you for instance it cost $5 to make widget X, it sold for $10 and you reduced the tax on widgets from $6 to $3 you might, presuming a demand for widget X start making more of widget X and therefor hire more people and it's also true that during times of economic hardship, providing cash to companies(either directly or through temporarily reduced taxes) can allow them to keep staff employed until things get better(this is essentially how stimulus is supposed to work).
Fundamentally though as a general rule, what constrains supply is demand, you can alter the profitability of certain tasks by lowering taxes, and by lowering things like payroll taxes you can definitely lower the cost of employing someone, but as a general rule, taxes simply aren't a sufficiently high portion of business expenses for even a complete abolition to significantly affect profitability so it doesn't do a lot for employment. When you toss in all the infrastructure you didn't build because you had no taxes, affect on employment could even be a net negative.
I've got no objection to corporate wealth as such, let alone the existence of corporations. What I have an objection to is the fact that the corporations and the individuals who own and/or run them essentially get orders of magnitude more voting power than anyone else does. It's not about whether corporations or wealthy people are entitled to free speech or whether they can petition the government, it's about the fact that if your "petition" comes with a million dollar check politicians listen. Government in the US is very much pay for play and so long as that is the case, we're all screwed.
Except she was 13.
Actually your Windows Phone Apps 7 apps do get to come along. The problem is that the Windows 8 apps you wrote for Desktop, Tablets and Windows Phone 8 back to Windows Phone 7. Microsoft wasn't stupid enough to actually shaft their developers, just their customers.
I think the OP was referring more to the fact that if you make the hypothesis that if you give drug X to rats their hair will turn green and instead giving drug X to rats caused them to, with a reasonable degree of statistical correlation, grow a third ear instead, you might still have a paper. What you thought was the case was wrong, but you still got an interesting result.
On the other hand the result "nothing happened" or "the rats all died" isn't necessarily all that interesting unless there was an existing scientific consensus that this result contradicted.
Creating an alternative to Facebook isn't a technical problem, Google are probably better technically than Facebook, but they can't do it.
Creating an alternative to Facebook which actually delivers even the tiniest sliver of what Diaspora was supposed to deliver(secure, decentralized and functional without requiring mom and pop to host their own) is a technical problem, probably an insurmountable one.
So Diaspora essentially set themselves up with a technical problem they couldn't solve and a non technical problem they couldn't solve.
Apple's market is also larger than the United States. Over here it made the news because the location of Apple's Sydney store(which is their largest store in the country) was incorrect on their own mapping software. That's pretty damned unacceptable.
The US still does all that, but then the companies that do the design offshore the assembly to the third world. Same as the US economy has been recovering quite nicely, just not for anyone you actually know.
The problem with that quote is that the people who like to use it never analyze what "essential" or "temporary" mean, either in the context of the original quote or in their personal situation.
True, but it's a collective paranoia. Whether your kids are actually in any more danger(I'd argue that forcing the pedophiles out of schools and orphanages has made the streets slightly more dangerous), if you let your kids wander all over the place these days you are considered a negligent parent. In many places both in the US and other places Child Protection will be called on you and, in all likelihood, will attempt to take your kids away from you.
That might be insane, but I'm not going to be letting my kid wander around the neighborhood unsupervised any time soon, and if I got caught leaving him at home alone before a certain point I'd be in more than a little trouble.
Personally I'd like to see the daycare system(we have a government subsidized daycare deal, still expensive, but somewhat covered) converted into an early child hood development thing because if they're going to be stuck somewhere for 10 hours it might not be a bad idea to sort of teach them some stuff too.
The problem with that is that the summers of youth are already gone whether we put kids into schools or not.
These days in all likelihood both parents will work(if they can at least), and young kids running around the neighborhood unsupervised simply isn't as acceptable as it used to be for any number of reasons.
So you're not comparing the summers of your(or my) youth to summer schooling, you're comparing spending 3 months in full day care vs 3 months at school
Now the answer to that question depends an awful lot on the quality of both of those services, great day care can teach, great schools can entertain, but given that the worst case scenarios of both options are about equal and school is a lot less of a financial drain on families, I'd vote for school.
Because Diplomatic status is an agreement. You can't just say "this person is a diplomat", the host country has to approve said diplomat, in addition they can revoke that status at any time(though I believe a period of time is generally granted to get your butt out of the country).
As I said in my original post. The Geneva convention actually covers damned little and as we've seen from the US isn't particularly binding anyway. The rest of it is essentially a deal between two parties.
Sort of a "We promise not to search your diplomatic marked stuff if you promise not to use the diplomatic pouch to smuggle coke" or a "We promise not to come into your embassy if you promise not to harbor criminals" deal.
I don't think that Assange has done anything wrong(at least based on what we know) in terms of his involvement in Wikileaks. I think convicting him of anything in this regard would be a gross miscarriage of justice. That doesn't mean he shouldn't face trial in Sweden or that he's not a narcissistic little shit.
As to self censoring, bull shit. Anyone who is really going to self censor is already going to be doing so because they're convinced that the only thing preventing him from being tried and executed is him being in the embassy after all that's what "everybody" knows.
The only thing that would actually cause anyone new to self censor is if he actually gets taken to the US tried in a normal court and found guilty. That would have a chilling effect, for the rest of it it doesn't matter stuff all whether Assange actually gets tried if everyone believes he's going to be. Above and beyond that, doing the right thing comes at a cost, sometimes that cost is just sometimes it's not, paying it is what makes you a hero. Bradley Manning for instance is a hero, Julian Assange is not.
And they can, if they have good faith belief that it contains something illegal. If the diplomatic bag is a briefcase that's a fairly unlikely scenario, if it's a large box approximately Assange sized with air holes, it's not so much of one.
The thing is, diplomacy doesn't work the way people think it does. You can't just make someone a diplomat, the diplomatic pouch(which isn't actually a pouch) can be searched, embassies are not foreign soil, and asylum doesn't mean jack if you're not in the right country. The fact that generally you can, countries don't, they're treated that way, and it does don't make any of these things true.
The entire diplomatic process is an agreement between two countries. The Geneva convention has a few rules about what is and isn't appropriate(which aren't anywhere near as broad as people think), and the rest is by agreement. If the UK stormed the embassy and took Assange they'd be in violation of no law whatsoever. They'd piss a lot of people off and probably set a precedent they don't actually want to set(the Chinese would love to do the same thing to the US sometimes), but they'd be within their rights to do so.
He broke the conditions of HIS UK HOUSE ARREST, you tool. They could have locked his ass up, instead they let him live at home and were, within the limits of their law, quite reasonable to him, and then he scarpered, which has pissed them off some.
In addition, the UK is really not keen on the idea that criminals can flee to the embassy of any tin pot dictator they may like to escape justice. Whether the president of Ecuador is acting with integrity I don't know(though I suspect his support for Assange is based more on how flipping the bird to the US plays out at home than any support for free speech), but there are plenty of countries with UK embassies who would overlook pretty much anything for a big enough cash payment. The UK cannot and will not let this stand.
And none of this makes a damned bit of difference to this case. Even if Assange was personally responsible for every act of Wikileaks (which he isn't), and even if his actions within Wikileaks were above reproach(they aren't, a lot of the material they released needed to be released, but some of it should have stayed secret, Assange didn't care), and even if everything you say about the results of Wikileaks actions is true(which may or may not be true, very little in the diplomatic cables surprised anyone), it still doesn't give him a free pass on rape.
If the US tries to extradite him, I'd support him, for all that I loathe the man, but that's not what has happened.
Of course the US has a sealed indictment against Assange, he's a prat, he's pissed them off, and they'd very much like to make an example of him. I would thoroughly recommend he avoids US territory in his future travel plans. No one doubts the US would love to try Assange, I'm sure that some members of the US government would love the military trial leading to a death sentence fandango that Assange fears. Personally I think that they're not stupid enough to try it, and if he ended up in the US he'd end up in civilian court and almost certainly walk.
The thing is, none of that matters. The question on the cards here is, does the US, at this point in history, want to pay the price internationally and domestically to almost certainly fail to convict Julian Assange of anything in particular unless they seriously stacked the deck in a way which would be fairly obvious. Personally I don't think the current Whitehouse would think he's worth it, I'm sure they don't like him, but at this point, given their current public stance, grabbing him from Sweden would piss off a lot of folks, for not a whole lot of gain.
The only way any of Assange's paranoid fantasies can be anything other than fantasies is if the US genuinely believes he did more than just receive and release the documents, for which their seems to be no evidence.
Sweden's laws are a bit funny, and the new prosecutor almost certainly wants to score some points with a high profile trial. That said though, sex cases are always massively complicated and I can see the idea that a person can consent to sex with a condom without necessarily consenting to sex without one, tricky, I know, but it is just possible he could be guilty, or at least possibly enough that maybe he should face trial.
The big problem we have in this world, and in particular on Slashdot, is that people can't seem to separate Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Wikileaks is an organization which seeks, at least to some degree, to better the world through the revelation of the kind of information that people need to know to accurately judge their government. Julian Assange on the other hand is a narcissistic, hypocritical little shit who doesn't care what the consequences of his actions are and is willing to go hide in a country which has far less freedom of expression than any of the ones he criticizes to avoid facing any. I don't think he should die for that, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't face a rape case.
The problem is that winning and your case having merit are not synonymous, not in the US, and not in Europe either. You can have a legitimate grievance against someone, sue them, be in the right in every way, and still lose. This goes doubly if the party you are suing is a multinational corporation and has a legal team either in house or on retainer.
Loser pays is a shitty system unless it's tempered by the involvement of a judge to apply it only to cases without merit(which should actually be tossed out not paid for). The legal system is already heavily biased in favor of the people who know how to play the game, we don't want to make it any worse.
Government offices are open business hours. If you have a low paying menial job, the kind where your boss will sack your ass for calling in sick(they exist), you won't get to a government office during business hours. That's with one job, forget 3. US elections are held on weekdays and if you live in a poor neighborhood where most of the population is in the same situation as you, rocking up first thing after work will give you pretty long shot odds at actually getting to vote before the polls close. Every election polls close while people are still lined up outside. Just because in your middle class white neighborhood(like my middle class white neighborhood) it takes 10 minutes to vote and you can do it on your lunch break, doesn't mean that everyone can.
The Feds are suing the state of Florida because they were pumping out letters to people saying "We think you might be an illegal immigrant, please prove your not or you can't vote" with little to no evidence and to close to an election(I believe it was actually a primary, but an election none the less). They're accuracy rate was abysmal given a large percentage responded with proof they were citizens. It wasn't the purge as such they objected to it was the "Hey his name is Sanchez, he must be an illegal." or "Hey, this guy here is called John Smith, and we've got a convicted felon here called John Smith, must be the same guy".
Voter disenfranchisement is unconstitutional, and it's one of the really fucking big unconstitutional actions. It is probably in fact the most unconstitutional thing someone can do.
No one is arguing that illegals or dead people should be allowed to vote. Some people(myself included) would argue felons ought to be able to vote, but even then it's more an issue of removing the laws preventing them from voting as opposed to having them vote illegally. What people are arguing is that if you're going to purge someone off the voter roll you better be damned sure they aren't eligible to vote, and you should do it far enough out from an election that any false positives you do get(which should be a handful at most) have enough time to rectify the situation, which you better damned well bend over backwards to accommodate, because disenfranchising one single eligible voter is one too many.
They'll see the man who said that Medicare and Social Security ought to be eliminated and put it into a proposed law last year. They'll see Mitt Romney endorsing said plan. They'll see Romney in office ratifying said plan(whether he would do so or not).
They'll see that because the footage of when that actually happened will be on every TV screen in America for the next 3 months.
Aside from the fact that Paul Ryan is, in and of himself a douche, he's also a boat anchor. I don't mind that he's a boat anchor since for all that I don't actually hugely mind Romney, and am not a huge fan of Obama anymore, Republicans cannot be allowed to win the presidency till they calm down and get over this rewriting the world shit.