The touchscreen trend launched by the iPhone is a definite step backwards in user interface terms.
A functional user interface should be unobtrusive - it should integrate seamlessly into your other activities. In the case of mobile phones, that means being able to type out a quick text in your pocket, being able to go forward or back a song without looking at the device, or changing the volume mid-call without taking a look.
Touch-screens demand your attention if you're trying to do all of these. That might be a good way of promoting enhanced addiction to the device itself - a key aspect of Apple's success in all its products - but it takes away from usability.
I've filed news stories on an old-style Nokia candybar keyboard - 450 words or so - just using the 10-key numeric keyboard and text-message style tapping. I'd hate to have to do that on a touch-screen. And that's before you remember that the huge, energy-consuming touch-screen would probably have left you without battery power sometime the previous day. Quite an issue when you're travelling long distances at short notice.
Something I really like about this is it seems like an adult device, and it's pitched as such: the expectation is that you use it to create, and the set-up - touch for consumption, a pen for creating - encourages you to engage productively with the material you browse.
What bugs me about the iPad as a concept is that it appears designed around lazy, passive consumption. You're meant to sit, presumably with your jaw hanging slightly open, with your eyes focused on a point about 30cm ahead of you.
It pours pictures, texts, sounds into your head, but it doesn't encourage you to do anything with that raw consumption. Microsoft's answer demands more from it's user, and because of that I find it far more appealing.
But really, why would you buy a Kindle DX when you can have an iPad for the same price?
Because the screen on a Kindle looks like a book. The old kind, the kind which would hold you engrossed from first page to last, leaving you feeling refreshed and full of new ideas at the end, rather than bleary eyed from staring at the flickering, overcoloured backlit screen in front of you until 4 in the morning, after an evening browsing, browsing, browsing, unable to concentrate on the ebook you've just bought, partly because of the eye-strain, and partly because it's too tempting to flick listlessly from your ebook to wikipedia, following link after link, task-switching to read your emails, your facebook, your blog comments. The Kindle doesn't invite you to check out a news story in another tab, or google up some trivia about the C64 or Cicero or the architect of the Taj Mahal. It offers you just one, rich world, that you can devote yourself to.
What's Jobs's vision? You sit there passively on a sofa, consuming idly, listlessly seeking out entertainment put together by somebody, somewhere out there on the web, as your back begins to ache from your awful, inert posture and you get a crink in your neck from staring down at the tesselating brightly coloured lights shining from the fetish object on your lap.
You can't even create on it, because he's taken away the sodding keyboard.
Jobs says the iPad offers a "much more intimate" way of browsing. Well, fuck that. Browsing is disjointed - a link, a new tab, a new blogger, a long list of blog comments, a compulsive e-mail check, a 'surf' over to a news portal. That's not intimacy, which is something you build up through sustained, dedicated involvement, be that with a person or with Crime and Punishment or The Da Vinci Code or the Philosophical Investigations. The web is about diversions and fleeting contact and entertainment. It's useful, it's even fun - but it's no more intimate than Disneyland.
If Jobs really believes its an 'intimate' experience then he's fallen into a black hole of his own making, and the iPad is just another clever device designed to paper over the rapidly expanding gaps in lives devoted to monk-like passivity. The spiritual successor to the TV remote.
The Synaptics touchpad can detect multitouch. The standard Synaptics drivers come with an application called Pressure Graph - you can open it by right-clicking on the Synaptics icon in the system tray.
Watch the graph. Place one finger on the trackpad. The line rises to a level N on the y axis. Put two fingers on the trackpad, and the line rises to something like 2N.
Now notice that, no matter how hard you press on the trackpad with one finger, the line never rises as high as 2N, and nor, if you press very lightly with two fingers, does the line ever fall as far as level N on the y axis. So the software can be sure that there are two fingers on the pad when you put them there.
Similarly, put three fingers on the pad, and the pressure graph rises to roughly 3N on the y axis.
Since the trackpad can detect movement when two fingers are on the pad - put two fingers there, move one or both, and watch - then it must surely be possible to come up with an app or a driver that would allow PC users to benefit from Mac-style two-fingered window scrolling.
Much as the Cult irritates me, that's one feature I quite like.
Presumably Apple would sue for patent violation if anybody tried it.
But that surely can't stop any anarchist libertarian coders out there who want to try it?
Thanks. I just realised how impressive Google spreadsheets is. It's spectacular to see the notification boxes appearing in quick succession at the bottom right, telling you that yet another person's started looking at the spreadsheet. It's so seamless.
For god's sake...We don't even know that the iPhone does have a full-sized web browser. Nobody's used it yet!
Yes, Apple tells us that it runs Safari under OS X - but all that means is that they're recycling their existing brand names for whatever dedicated purpose-written handheld OS and pocket browser they've decided to use.
Sure, they may have reused some of the existing codebase - but it's unlikely. OS X - the desktop edition - is a full-sized operating system. Anything which will fit in a handheld based around a much-slower ARM processor must be far simpler. The same goes for the browser.
Why the swooning? Microsoft will happily point you to a handheld running what they'll call Windows, but of course they mean Windows CE or PocketPC - a completely different OSs with a GUI reminiscent of its namesake's.
Apple's doing exactly the same.
What's full-sized, anyway? The Nokia N and E series happily show every page I navigate to. If they do that, then in what way, exactly, can the iPhone's browser be any more 'full-sized'?
Do you just mean that it has a full-sized brand name?
One division of Sony comes up with some nefarious software, and this makes you really, really angry. So angry, in fact, that you make a sacrifice: you refuse to buy a damn good product (one made by an entirely separate division of Sony) that you'd really like to have. Well done, we're all aplauding you.
However, Apple goes and patents an 'innovation' so trivial that it wouldn't even have occured to most of us that it might be patentable. By patenting it, they deny the rest of the world the opportunity to make better use of this trivial, self-evident 'discovery'. Yes! Maybe there's a company, a tinkerer, or a hacker out there that can come up with better applications than oh-so-saintly Apple!
But no, Apple depriving the world of an entirely self-evident user interface tool doesn't irritate you in the least.
An earlier poster pointed out that the patent deprives us the users of a tool that would benefit us all.
Effectively, Apple has taken a pre-existing technique and removed it from the common pool of ideas. They've stolen it from you. They've made the world a poorer place.
But evil Sony created a rootkit. And that tweaks you and your sense of ethics. Your are a moral giant. You are angry. Well done!
But if they control Windows update - you know, the site from which updates to the operating system are downloaded and installed, automatically on most machines, why would they need a backdoor?
I agree, they can be rich in information, no argument at all. I frequently use it as a resource.
My quibble is with the submitter's argument that the error per word ratio in Wikipedia is lower than in Britannica. I say this is meaningless: we're interested in the error per statement ratio.
As you say, the quality of writing is not what's being examined. We turn to an encyclopedia, whether printed or online, for facts.
For this reason, it's the accuracy of these facts that is of interest to us.
Accept the (indubitably true) proposition that the fact-to-word ratio in Britannica is higher than in Wikipedia, then the submitter's 'argument' is false: dividing the length of an article by the number of errors in it does not give you an average error rate.
A word is neither true nor false, a statement can be.
And it's also nonsense. The Wikipedia article is written flabbily, by a collection of authors, some experts, some not, some good writers, some terrible ones.
The Britannica, on the other hand, is written by someone with clear credentials as an expert, to a word limit, and is then edited for conciseness and clarity. That is to say, the Britannica piece will undoubtedly say more than the Wikipedia piece. The error per word rate in Britannica may be higher, but the error per fact rate is probably much more favourable to Britannica.
Easy example - compare the writing in a mainstream newspaper to a well-written one with tight editorial policies, like the Financial Times or the Economist. Your average Sidney Morning Herald, Guardian or San Francisco Chroncile article is probably longer, but it says less.
A contract would count for nothing if they could show a court that they had suffered harm (ie. humiliation that caused mental or emotional distress).
They could simply claim that Channel 4 had failed to make clear the extent of the embarassment they would suffer. Unless the contract explicitly stated: "You will be unaware that you are not going to space. You will be portrayed as a half-witted imbicile and your moment of dawning revalation and shame will be broadcast on live TV," then their case would be proven.
Of course, if the contract does contain such a provision, then they aren't contestants, they're shills, as I said.
Just an opinion, but they've been making the best phones, with the most practical and ergonomic telephony features, more or less since they started making them a good 15 years ago. The RAZR may be trendier, but it's horrendous to use. In terms of battery life, sound quality, ruggedness and reception, I've never been disappointed by a Nokia. My experiences of Motorolas, LGs, Alcatels, and loads of other failed phone manufacturers have been hellish.
And I can play Prince of Persia on my Nokia 6230, who needs a gaming phone???
Being a translator or an interpreter is hard. Speaking a language isn't - it just requires time, and a degree of dedication.
It does indeed take many years to train a reliable interpreter (at a minimum, a three year university degree in the language and then 1-2 further years of interpreter training), but your reference to aptitude tests highlights the second problem: your reference to "aptitude tests".
Why bother with aptitude tests?Everyone can learn a foreign language. Or at least, anybody who managed to master a mother tongue can. The people who say they're "useless at languages" are the ones who tell themselves that they're useless: ie., they can't be bothered to apply themselves. But, immersed in a country - as a US soldier in Iraq is - and with sufficient motivation, you could very easily teach Arabic on a large scale to the officers at the very least - and possibly to the infantry as well. It's just a question of cost, but, expensive as good language teachers are, it would still only be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall cost of prosecuting this ludicrous war.
As for motivation - I suspect that your average infantry grunt would not be hugely motivated to learn Arabic. But try this: "Making an effort in this class could very easily save your life tomorrow." I suspect that could make a big difference...
Has anything been heard from employees of Sony's consumer products arm? By and large, they manufacture high-quality kit - they have high standards, and one assumes they can't be happy to see this coming from their music arm. Not to mention the fact that, AFAIK, Sony BMG is essentially a US company, steeped in copyright culture, whereas the consumer electronics arm remains largely Japanese and engineering-led.
do we know about the relative profitability of the two arms? Is this likely to bring forward the day when the two companies go their separate ways?
I know that this is like swatting a fly with a nuclear weapon
That's a game scheduled for release at Christmas.
Now there's a good question... Could you swat a fly with a nuclear weapon? From what I remember, the major destructive force of a nuclear explosion comes from i) the initial passing wave of heat - which lasts a very short time, followed by ii) a huge pressure wave...
it seems to me that a fly should be immune to this. the heat wave is over in instants, and a fly doesn't have many cavities that will explode or implode under changing pressure. and being flicked a couple of kilometres on a pressure wave in the open air shouldn't matter much to a being that small, and especially not to one that can fly in any case.
so it appears that, unless the fly was right at the epicentre and was incinerated, the fly should just buzz on irritating the survivors regardless.
...being able to survey the history of an entry is definitely a bonus - it's a good way to correct for the biases present in any given article.
in fact, it might be helpful to see the entry 'diachronically' - you regard the entry not as the snapshot available at the moment you look it up, but as the cumulative history of the entry from the moment when it was first created.
what would help here would be some kind of diachronic viewing mode. maybe it could be done with javascript - there would be a slider at the bottom of the screen that you could drag back and forth to see the entry at different stages in its history. much more convenient for comparative purposes than the rather clumsy history link at the top of the article. it would allow readers to assess the genesis of the article and also to warn them of any lingering biases that remained from past edit wars.
the idea comes from jon udell's entertaining studyof the history of the article on the heavy-metal umlaut.
Has Time always run arselicking all-but-paid-for advertising for companies? It was only a couple of months ago that they ran an adulatory XBox360 extravaganza which read more or less like a Microsoft press release. Lots of pictures, nod-nod-yes-indeed interviews with developers - no critical views, no interviews with competitors, pretty photos... What happened to journalism?
except you cut the second sentence: countries eventually change their mind. Witness Ghadaffi handing over the Lockerbie suspects - it took 12 years, but he came round. Would it have been worth going to war with Libya over that?
Well then we have these things called extradition treaties. And if they're higher up the food chain, then they'd certainly be criminally responsible, so eminently triable.
Of course, if the extradition request is refused, then some lawyers would argue that we had the right to resort to extra-legal measures. But in general, rather than kill people to put others in prison, it's better to wait for the government in question to change their mind. They will eventually - the Lockerbie bombers were eventually extradited, tried and convicted.
Slashdot Mirror
The touchscreen trend launched by the iPhone is a definite step backwards in user interface terms.
A functional user interface should be unobtrusive - it should integrate seamlessly into your other activities. In the case of mobile phones, that means being able to type out a quick text in your pocket, being able to go forward or back a song without looking at the device, or changing the volume mid-call without taking a look.
Touch-screens demand your attention if you're trying to do all of these. That might be a good way of promoting enhanced addiction to the device itself - a key aspect of Apple's success in all its products - but it takes away from usability.
I've filed news stories on an old-style Nokia candybar keyboard - 450 words or so - just using the 10-key numeric keyboard and text-message style tapping. I'd hate to have to do that on a touch-screen. And that's before you remember that the huge, energy-consuming touch-screen would probably have left you without battery power sometime the previous day. Quite an issue when you're travelling long distances at short notice.
Something I really like about this is it seems like an adult device, and it's pitched as such: the expectation is that you use it to create, and the set-up - touch for consumption, a pen for creating - encourages you to engage productively with the material you browse.
What bugs me about the iPad as a concept is that it appears designed around lazy, passive consumption. You're meant to sit, presumably with your jaw hanging slightly open, with your eyes focused on a point about 30cm ahead of you.
It pours pictures, texts, sounds into your head, but it doesn't encourage you to do anything with that raw consumption. Microsoft's answer demands more from it's user, and because of that I find it far more appealing.
But really, why would you buy a Kindle DX when you can have an iPad for the same price?
Because the screen on a Kindle looks like a book. The old kind, the kind which would hold you engrossed from first page to last, leaving you feeling refreshed and full of new ideas at the end, rather than bleary eyed from staring at the flickering, overcoloured backlit screen in front of you until 4 in the morning, after an evening browsing, browsing, browsing, unable to concentrate on the ebook you've just bought, partly because of the eye-strain, and partly because it's too tempting to flick listlessly from your ebook to wikipedia, following link after link, task-switching to read your emails, your facebook, your blog comments. The Kindle doesn't invite you to check out a news story in another tab, or google up some trivia about the C64 or Cicero or the architect of the Taj Mahal. It offers you just one, rich world, that you can devote yourself to.
What's Jobs's vision? You sit there passively on a sofa, consuming idly, listlessly seeking out entertainment put together by somebody, somewhere out there on the web, as your back begins to ache from your awful, inert posture and you get a crink in your neck from staring down at the tesselating brightly coloured lights shining from the fetish object on your lap.
You can't even create on it, because he's taken away the sodding keyboard.
Jobs says the iPad offers a "much more intimate" way of browsing. Well, fuck that. Browsing is disjointed - a link, a new tab, a new blogger, a long list of blog comments, a compulsive e-mail check, a 'surf' over to a news portal. That's not intimacy, which is something you build up through sustained, dedicated involvement, be that with a person or with Crime and Punishment or The Da Vinci Code or the Philosophical Investigations. The web is about diversions and fleeting contact and entertainment. It's useful, it's even fun - but it's no more intimate than Disneyland.
If Jobs really believes its an 'intimate' experience then he's fallen into a black hole of his own making, and the iPad is just another clever device designed to paper over the rapidly expanding gaps in lives devoted to monk-like passivity. The spiritual successor to the TV remote.
The Synaptics touchpad can detect multitouch. The standard Synaptics drivers come with an application called Pressure Graph - you can open it by right-clicking on the Synaptics icon in the system tray.
Watch the graph. Place one finger on the trackpad. The line rises to a level N on the y axis. Put two fingers on the trackpad, and the line rises to something like 2N.
Now notice that, no matter how hard you press on the trackpad with one finger, the line never rises as high as 2N, and nor, if you press very lightly with two fingers, does the line ever fall as far as level N on the y axis. So the software can be sure that there are two fingers on the pad when you put them there.
Similarly, put three fingers on the pad, and the pressure graph rises to roughly 3N on the y axis.
Since the trackpad can detect movement when two fingers are on the pad - put two fingers there, move one or both, and watch - then it must surely be possible to come up with an app or a driver that would allow PC users to benefit from Mac-style two-fingered window scrolling.
Much as the Cult irritates me, that's one feature I quite like.
Presumably Apple would sue for patent violation if anybody tried it.
But that surely can't stop any anarchist libertarian coders out there who want to try it?
I'd buy it if you did. [hint].
Thanks. I just realised how impressive Google spreadsheets is. It's spectacular to see the notification boxes appearing in quick succession at the bottom right, telling you that yet another person's started looking at the spreadsheet. It's so seamless.
Have no mod points, but this is not -1 Troll. The previous post is funny. Let's not be unfair, shall we?
Did nobody notice the date on that Observer article?
For god's sake...We don't even know that the iPhone does have a full-sized web browser. Nobody's used it yet!
Yes, Apple tells us that it runs Safari under OS X - but all that means is that they're recycling their existing brand names for whatever dedicated purpose-written handheld OS and pocket browser they've decided to use.
Sure, they may have reused some of the existing codebase - but it's unlikely. OS X - the desktop edition - is a full-sized operating system. Anything which will fit in a handheld based around a much-slower ARM processor must be far simpler. The same goes for the browser.
Why the swooning? Microsoft will happily point you to a handheld running what they'll call Windows, but of course they mean Windows CE or PocketPC - a completely different OSs with a GUI reminiscent of its namesake's.
Apple's doing exactly the same.
What's full-sized, anyway? The Nokia N and E series happily show every page I navigate to. If they do that, then in what way, exactly, can the iPhone's browser be any more 'full-sized'?
Do you just mean that it has a full-sized brand name?
Who says you are being watched? You sound a little paranoid...
One division of Sony comes up with some nefarious software, and this makes you really, really angry. So angry, in fact, that you make a sacrifice: you refuse to buy a damn good product (one made by an entirely separate division of Sony) that you'd really like to have. Well done, we're all aplauding you.
However, Apple goes and patents an 'innovation' so trivial that it wouldn't even have occured to most of us that it might be patentable. By patenting it, they deny the rest of the world the opportunity to make better use of this trivial, self-evident 'discovery'. Yes! Maybe there's a company, a tinkerer, or a hacker out there that can come up with better applications than oh-so-saintly Apple!
But no, Apple depriving the world of an entirely self-evident user interface tool doesn't irritate you in the least.
An earlier poster pointed out that the patent deprives us the users of a tool that would benefit us all.
Effectively, Apple has taken a pre-existing technique and removed it from the common pool of ideas. They've stolen it from you. They've made the world a poorer place.
But evil Sony created a rootkit. And that tweaks you and your sense of ethics. Your are a moral giant. You are angry. Well done!
But if they control Windows update - you know, the site from which updates to the operating system are downloaded and installed, automatically on most machines, why would they need a backdoor?
I agree, they can be rich in information, no argument at all. I frequently use it as a resource.
My quibble is with the submitter's argument that the error per word ratio in Wikipedia is lower than in Britannica. I say this is meaningless: we're interested in the error per statement ratio.
What's the content unit? The fact or the word?
As you say, the quality of writing is not what's being examined. We turn to an encyclopedia, whether printed or online, for facts.
For this reason, it's the accuracy of these facts that is of interest to us.
Accept the (indubitably true) proposition that the fact-to-word ratio in Britannica is higher than in Wikipedia, then the submitter's 'argument' is false: dividing the length of an article by the number of errors in it does not give you an average error rate.
A word is neither true nor false, a statement can be.
And it's also nonsense. The Wikipedia article is written flabbily, by a collection of authors, some experts, some not, some good writers, some terrible ones.
The Britannica, on the other hand, is written by someone with clear credentials as an expert, to a word limit, and is then edited for conciseness and clarity. That is to say, the Britannica piece will undoubtedly say more than the Wikipedia piece. The error per word rate in Britannica may be higher, but the error per fact rate is probably much more favourable to Britannica.
Easy example - compare the writing in a mainstream newspaper to a well-written one with tight editorial policies, like the Financial Times or the Economist. Your average Sidney Morning Herald, Guardian or San Francisco Chroncile article is probably longer, but it says less.
Nonsense.
A contract would count for nothing if they could show a court that they had suffered harm (ie. humiliation that caused mental or emotional distress).
They could simply claim that Channel 4 had failed to make clear the extent of the embarassment they would suffer. Unless the contract explicitly stated: "You will be unaware that you are not going to space. You will be portrayed as a half-witted imbicile and your moment of dawning revalation and shame will be broadcast on live TV," then their case would be proven.
Of course, if the contract does contain such a provision, then they aren't contestants, they're shills, as I said.
Oh come off it, they're actors. They've been paid to do it. They know what's going on.
Otherwise they'd come out to all the humiliation and Channel 4 could legitimately be sued for the psychological stress and stolen time.
in a cunning twist, it's the viewers who will be revealed to be gullible.
You see, it's Channel 4, so it has to edgy, self-referential and provocative, or shit as the less sophisticated among us would call it.
Just an opinion, but they've been making the best phones, with the most practical and ergonomic telephony features, more or less since they started making them a good 15 years ago. The RAZR may be trendier, but it's horrendous to use. In terms of battery life, sound quality, ruggedness and reception, I've never been disappointed by a Nokia. My experiences of Motorolas, LGs, Alcatels, and loads of other failed phone manufacturers have been hellish.
And I can play Prince of Persia on my Nokia 6230, who needs a gaming phone???
Being a translator or an interpreter is hard. Speaking a language isn't - it just requires time, and a degree of dedication.
It does indeed take many years to train a reliable interpreter (at a minimum, a three year university degree in the language and then 1-2 further years of interpreter training), but your reference to aptitude tests highlights the second problem: your reference to "aptitude tests".
Why bother with aptitude tests?Everyone can learn a foreign language. Or at least, anybody who managed to master a mother tongue can. The people who say they're "useless at languages" are the ones who tell themselves that they're useless: ie., they can't be bothered to apply themselves. But, immersed in a country - as a US soldier in Iraq is - and with sufficient motivation, you could very easily teach Arabic on a large scale to the officers at the very least - and possibly to the infantry as well. It's just a question of cost, but, expensive as good language teachers are, it would still only be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall cost of prosecuting this ludicrous war.
As for motivation - I suspect that your average infantry grunt would not be hugely motivated to learn Arabic. But try this: "Making an effort in this class could very easily save your life tomorrow." I suspect that could make a big difference...
Has anything been heard from employees of Sony's consumer products arm? By and large, they manufacture high-quality kit - they have high standards, and one assumes they can't be happy to see this coming from their music arm. Not to mention the fact that, AFAIK, Sony BMG is essentially a US company, steeped in copyright culture, whereas the consumer electronics arm remains largely Japanese and engineering-led.
do we know about the relative profitability of the two arms? Is this likely to bring forward the day when the two companies go their separate ways?
Now there's a good question... Could you swat a fly with a nuclear weapon? From what I remember, the major destructive force of a nuclear explosion comes from i) the initial passing wave of heat - which lasts a very short time, followed by ii) a huge pressure wave...
it seems to me that a fly should be immune to this. the heat wave is over in instants, and a fly doesn't have many cavities that will explode or implode under changing pressure. and being flicked a couple of kilometres on a pressure wave in the open air shouldn't matter much to a being that small, and especially not to one that can fly in any case.
so it appears that, unless the fly was right at the epicentre and was incinerated, the fly should just buzz on irritating the survivors regardless.
what's slasdot's view on this important matter?
...being able to survey the history of an entry is definitely a bonus - it's a good way to correct for the biases present in any given article.
in fact, it might be helpful to see the entry 'diachronically' - you regard the entry not as the snapshot available at the moment you look it up, but as the cumulative history of the entry from the moment when it was first created.
what would help here would be some kind of diachronic viewing mode. maybe it could be done with javascript - there would be a slider at the bottom of the screen that you could drag back and forth to see the entry at different stages in its history. much more convenient for comparative purposes than the rather clumsy history link at the top of the article. it would allow readers to assess the genesis of the article and also to warn them of any lingering biases that remained from past edit wars.
the idea comes from jon udell's entertaining studyof the history of the article on the heavy-metal umlaut.
Has Time always run arselicking all-but-paid-for advertising for companies? It was only a couple of months ago that they ran an adulatory XBox360 extravaganza which read more or less like a Microsoft press release. Lots of pictures, nod-nod-yes-indeed interviews with developers - no critical views, no interviews with competitors, pretty photos... What happened to journalism?
except you cut the second sentence: countries eventually change their mind. Witness Ghadaffi handing over the Lockerbie suspects - it took 12 years, but he came round. Would it have been worth going to war with Libya over that?
Well then we have these things called extradition treaties. And if they're higher up the food chain, then they'd certainly be criminally responsible, so eminently triable.
Of course, if the extradition request is refused, then some lawyers would argue that we had the right to resort to extra-legal measures. But in general, rather than kill people to put others in prison, it's better to wait for the government in question to change their mind. They will eventually - the Lockerbie bombers were eventually extradited, tried and convicted.
Thanks, I don't think we need your mourning. And don't go into a psychotic blood-donor exstacy either. It didn't help last time.