We can't simply stop spending altogether until we pay off the debt, so you can't go faulting every program that costs $9 billion per year for the debt problem.
I've seen very little to indicate that High Speed Rail is a "critical" infrastructure investment for the US. Not because I think rail is "bad", but because: 1) 53 Billion over 6 years will connect exactly how many cities with high speed rail? (Not that many, according to TFA - LA to SF is going to cost 2-3 Billion alone.) 2) Will anybody be able to run the trains on time?
If you build dedicated HSR lines and have to buy new engines & passenger cars, that 53 Billion isn't going to go very far - it's not going to be a "national" rail service upgrade. And if you DON'T build new lines, and try to stretch the money by upgrading existing freight lines, then HSR will be rated for "up to 250 mph," and will actually travel at speeds quite similar to the existing rails, due to the delays in getting a freaking right of way, plus scheduling delays, and infrastructure issues on the freight lines. So the "extra speed" benefit won't live up to the promise if we don't build dedicated lines.
This strikes me as primarily a "feel-good" measure, intended to make us look like we're doing something green, but which will mostly just spend money for the sake of spending money. And if you think that 53B is all they'll spend, guess again - overruns and unexpected expenses are the name of the game when you're trying to make large infrastructure improvements in highly populated areas. The Big Dig, here in Boston, was initially estimated to cost ~2 Billion, and ended up costing nearly 15 Billion by the time it completed (8 Billion when adjusted for inflation since the original estimate), and another 7 billion over the next 30 years in interest paying down the bonds. So, either they expect to spend around 15 billion dollars, and let the other 45 billion get sucked up by the inevitable overruns and expenses, or this 53 Billion could easily balloon to 200 Billion worth of spending by the time the projects initiated under its auspices are completed.
So, the question has to be asked: Is it an investment that will generate more revenue than it consumes in the long term? And even if it is - is the money better spent on a long-term investment, or paying down our long-term debt? How do the return rates compare? And even if it is an investment, we only have so much money to go around, so even our investments need to be prioritized. So does building HSR lines to connect SF and LA and a couple other cities around the country really qualify as a high-priority investment that deserves *national* priority, and should be taken on as a *new* expenditure by the government?
You're right - $9bn / year isn't going to fix or create the debt problem all on its own, but a former colleague shared this bit of wisdom with me over lunch one day:
"These guys just don't seem to understand that when you find yourself in a hole, you stop fucking digging."
And while the MPAA collapses, Microsoft and Yahoo form a partnership and launche an aggressive "We don't censor your search results!" campaign, and lots of people just start using Bing and Yahoo, rather than get embroiled in a pissing contest between two big drunks who are both upwind. Meanwhile, MPAA and their lackeys all stop using and dealing with people who advertise via Google (the movie & recording industries generally have pretty big marketing budgets, in case you didn't notice). Ad revenues plummet just as Google has to begin spending lots of money on developing automated methods to scrub search results of any "MPAA-backed" materials. Net result: Google has also committed "suicide by Google!"
The government steps in, declares the movie studios AND Google to both be "too big to fail," and bails them out at taxpayer expense.
Yeah, that would be an awesome scenario. Seriously, I can't wait to see them come to blows, rather than work out their issues like fucking adults.
I heard they're starting to prefer the term "Artisanal Ichthyology", and that every bespoke net comes with your choice of ironic t-shirt, ironic trucker hat, or black-framed glasses.
It's amusing how something that doesn't sound "sci fi" enough is poo-poo'ed by people whose sole exposure to anything resembling a space program consists of having seen the movie "Space Camp" as a kid, and having watched Firefly a few years ago.
I'm sure the physicists, mathematicians, and engineers at the Japanese space agency slept through all of their math and physics classes that would have allowed them to predict the numerous failure modes you've identified for them from your armchair. It's a good thing that they have slashdotters to point out all of the problems that I'm sure they've totally overlooked.
What makes you think that fish net manufacturers haven't considered the fact that a fishing net needs to catch more than ONE FISH before collapsing in on itself and becoming useless? Or did you really think that commercial fishing vessels went out and netted those piles of fish, one at a time?
Service industries (IT, Travel, Banking, Health Care, etc.) always subject to abusive working conditions.
Yeah, sitting on my fat ass all day sipping free Starbucks coffee while writing code, browsing the web, and joking back and forth with my co-workers over the cubicle walls, all while interacting with my boss for maybe 3 hours a week in meetings makes me feel so abused. I think we should unionize and make our cushy job conditions more adversarial. While we're at it, let's negotiate a union wage scale so that I can be paid exactly the same as the shitheel down the hall on the sysadmin team, who spends more time outside each day on smoke breaks than he does inside actually getting work done. You'd think with all that, he'd at least notice the signs which ask smokers to stand at least 20 feet away from the door, in the little covered smoker's area that my employer set up specifically for the comfort of the smokers, but no... he's too busy walking back and forth from his breaks to move away from the doors.
Go work a construction job, or a factory job, and then come back and tell us about how abusive the typical IT worker's working conditions are. I guess when all you've known is "pretty good," "pretty good" starts looking average, huh?
If the claims are false, then you could always sue him for libel.
If the claims are true, maybe you should consider being a nicer person, and try to correct his perception of you.
If you don't want him being an employee, there's a lot of ways you could force him out - you just can't do it an hour after he posts on Facebook, and cite that as the sole reason for his termination. Build your paper trail, or simply announce layoffs amidst a restructuring, and get rid of the people you don't like.
Being able to fork is akin to secession: if you don't agree with me, you take your ball and go home. Thats not "democracy," that's anarchy - no authority has any power except that which is voluntarily given, and which may be taken away at a moment's notice for any reason at all.
I keep reading this "open up to more direct participation from voters" trope, but I have no idea what that means - do we reduce governance to simple mob rule, where everybody gets a vote and majority rules, and if you don't agree and want to secede, you better hope the majority you disagree with isn't inclined to object by force of arms? We already have mechanisms for people to participate in governance - run for election, get in touch with your elected representatives, write letters, advocate... What exactly is a wiki going to add to the mix that isn't there already in some other form?
It's a solution looking for a problem. I'm all for openness, but the problem of "closed-ness" has absolutely nothing to do with the TOOLS we use to participate in our government. Adopting open standards and increasing transparency are great, but without an interested population, installing a wiki does nothing: it's a problem of process, not a problem of technology.
What I find completely amazing is this simple fact: Most well-run and successful open source projects seem to bear very little relationship to a true democracy (i.e., majority rule) in form or function.
The head of these projects is often referred to as a "benevolent dictator" - he whose word is law. The contributors cooperate (and sometimes compete, sometimes even via nasty political infighting) in what is in essence, a ruthless meritocracy-slash-technocracy, led by that 'benevolent dictator.'
1000 Joe Q Publics writing to the Linux kernel mailing list will be easily outweighed by a simple "NO" from Linus, or any single one of the other frequent kernel contributors. 1000 Joe Q Publics complaining about how some feature didn't get implemented yet will be told, "Go fuck yourself, we're not here to work for you, if you think it's that important, either write the code yourself, or wait until we decide to get to it." Last I checked, they weren't asking people to vote on which features to implement in the next version of the Linux kernel.
Openness and Democracy are often found together, and a well-run democracy requires an educated populace (which, in turn, requires information to be available to the populace so that they may be informed), but the two ideals are absolutely not identical. Opening up governance to "egalitarian collaboration" simply means that you'll see a lot more trolling, a few more Goatse bills, and god help us all if Anonymous decides to get involved in governance "for the lulz."
In the southern areas (Manchester, Nashua, Portsmouth), where a vast majority of the population actually lives, it's no more cold than any other New England state. In fact, in the Nashua area, winters tend to be slightly milder than our neighbors in central Massachusetts to the south, largely due to the way the weather systems flows through & around the mountains here.
mountainous
OH NOES. TEH MOUNTAINS, THEY DESTROY BUSINESSES. I guess California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and the entire eastern seabord, through which most of the Appalachian mountains run didn't get the memo that nobody wants to establish businesses in states with mountains!
landlocked
Um. No, no it's not. Somebody failed 4th grade geography. Portsmouth, NH, sits on the ocean. It's a small coastline, but a fairly active port all the same.
largely inaccessible
I live in NH, in one of the towns between Manchester and Nashua. I can be in downtown Boston in 45 minutes from my home. I can be parked and in the terminal of an airport served by Southwest in 20 minutes, less when the finish a new highway interchange that will bring you almost directly into the airport from Route 3. I can be at an MBTA train station (boston's public transit) in about 25 minutes, and on my way into Boston, with access to the entire Amtrak system from there. This area has an active FedEx and UPS distribution center. The highways in New Hampsire are *markedly* better than the roads in our neighbor to the south, Massachusetts. Some areas are relatively inaccessible, but the areas where there is any business of note are quite accessible by highway and/or air travel and freight.
and a host of other things that make it not the place where people would establish a trading center or do anything requiring a lot of manpower or inexpensive access to resources.
You speak as somebody who has never even visited, much less lived here. Your image of New Hampshire as "bearded mountain men living off the land in hand-built log cabins on the border of Canada" is laughable.
Fidelity Investments, BAE Systems, HP, Dell, UPS, FedEx are all very large corporations with significant presence here doing business. You can easily find more examples if you actually wanted to dispel your idiot notions.
A corporation should have no more rights than the constituent members
I can agree to this, there are certainly abuses in the current setup for corporations that could be resolved by closing loopholes in the tax and legal code that allow the abuses to continue.
It's income should be treated as income for the members.
Impractical and misguided, without sweeping tax overhauls. You have a janitor who makes $18 an hour, and a CEO who makes $5 million a year. What's your corporate tax rate?
If it does something that damages others, then the members should be liable.
A pretty notion, but in practice, completely impossible to enforce fairly, if at all - any idea how massive every legal document would be if you had to sue every employee of Toyota individually for the damage to life & property caused by your stuck gas pedal? How would you ever reach a resolution, with THOUSANDS of defendants? Who truly bears the blame? The engineer? The CEO? The factory workers? Can you really level a 5 million dollar judgement and expect to recoup any of your damages against the line worker who screwed up assembling a couple parts, who makes 35k a year? The mechanical engineer who miscalculated a tolerance but makes $110k a year? And how do you sue some engineers in Japan, some factory workers in Canada, and some executives in the UK, when you live in Ohio? Got deep pockets for legal fees, and navigating the endless complexities of other countries' legal system in addition to your own?
A truly free market cannot be capitalist. (Capital distorts markets, e.g. buying power affects the price of goods.)
Sorry but this just sounds like Newspeak. "Free markets must be tightly controlled by the government in order to force them to be free! Black is white! Bad is good!"
Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the free market; profit is sent to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses and companies.
How is any of that at odds with your assertion that "capital distorts markets"? If I own a factory, and somebody with a lot of money offers to buy in bulk at a huge discount from my normal retail price, I am not obligated to enter into that agreement if it would come at a loss to me; if my factory normally runs at a lower volume, but has a much higher capacity, giving a large purchaser a discount on the normal price to keep my factory running and my workers employed in return for a lower per-unit cost to the purchaser might actually be a very good thing.
Capitalism describes a system where "decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors" - it says nothing about achieving a single set price for goods irrespective of the purchasing power of the buyer and the willingness to negotiate price on the part of the seller.
The law requires the high court and the justice minister to concur, and I believe their decision is still subject to further appeal to the European Court of Justice.
Extradition requests of any sort must be reviewed by the judiciary, and cannot simply be rubber stamped by some political flunky who happens to be "undersecretary for the administrator of the vice minister of the justice ministry."
Honestly, the thing he has going for him now is that the he's not worth the trouble for the US to really go after him. If we wanted him, we'd have already submitted extradition requests and would be leaning heavily on the UK to extradite him. Getting him to Sweden does nothing to help us extradite him, the decision is still up to the UK's high court & justice minister. And if we knew we couldn't get him extradited, and we wanted him silenced all the same, he would have been found floating in the Thames or in an alley, dead of an apparent suicide or mugging-gone-bad.
I'm not suggesting that the US government would never engage in various & sundry bad things to silence someone. I'm suggesting that this whole "Sweden is just asking for him so they can turn him over to the US" is nonsense of the first order - Sweden has zero reason to do it, nothing to gain and a lot to lose from it, and the US has zero to gain and a lot to lose. Sweden would have to break their own laws AND EU laws to do it, and nobody would have any plausible deniability for doing so.
That would be a ridiculous stretch of the semantics of "in custody" - at which point he could appeal Sweden's attempt to extradite him to the European Court of Justice, who would most likely slap down Sweden for their bad-faith attempt at abusing the suspect who was surrendered to them by the UK under extradition laws.
I believe that the Swedish justice ministry would have no choice but to allow him to leave, and tell the US that they need to request extradition from the UK Justice Ministry, since the only reason he is within the reach of Swedish authorities is because of the extradition request that the UK honored.
Are you suggesting that, if a person is extradited for one crime to one country, but then a third country finds they have committed a completely different crime, the person is immune to extradition to the third country simply because they had been extradited to a second country for a different crime?
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what the law says, with one clarifying point: The person is immune from extradition to the third country only for the duration of their custody by the second country, unless the first country's high court & justice minister (the equivalent of the US Attorney General, I presume) both agree that extradition is okay.
And, even if they (first country's high court & justice minister + the second country's judicial authority) do agree to extradite, I believe there is still the recourse of an appeal to the European Court of Justice (the equivalent of the US Supreme Court). Presuming an acquittal, once the person's business is finished in the second country they will be released and allowed to return to the first country (if they wish). At that point, the third country could file a *new* extradition request with the first country, who will then need to consider it in accordance with their own treaties & obligations under EU law.
It is, in essence, a temporary immunity from extradition that is granted to prevent these requests from being made in bad faith - for example, in this instance, to prevent exactly what you're suggesting might happen: The UK denies the extradition request from the US, or the US simply knows the UK would say no, so the US gets Sweden (or some other EU member state) to trump up a charge, extradite the guy from the UK, then have Sweden turn him over to the US. It prevents "jurisdiction shopping" to find the friendliest country with the most permissive laws to allow you to get your hands on someone.
If the US presented compelling evidence to the UK and Sweden that the guy has committed murder and should be tried here, they MIGHT agree, but you've already suggested (and I agree) that the UK wouldn't agree to extradite him anyway. Getting him moved to Sweden won't make extradition any easier, it simply means the UK gets to say no to Sweden as well.
If Sweden disregards the law and surrenders him, they'd be open (as I said earlier) to penalties and sanctions under EU law, and this would basically trash any goodwill they have with the rest of Europe. If the US were to simply snatch him from an EU country without permission, the same would happen. Julian Assange is simply not worth the cost to either Sweden or the US, and so we will either build a case for legitimate extradition, or simply ignore him because doing anything to silence him would cost us more than it would gain - the data's already out in the wild, and I can assure you that the military is taking a hard look at security clearances in the wake of these leaks. That's about all we can do, unless we have ironclad evidence he engaged in espionage, and we are also willing to promise the UK in specific terms that we really wouldn't carry out a death sentence.
And even if we have that, we *still* cannot get him from Sweden while he's in their custody facing the charges he was surrendered to Sweden by the UK to face, without the UK's agreement.
Well, after W, pretty much anything would have been an improvement. It will probably take the US (and, indeed, the West in general) half a century to fully recover from that disaster and it's follow-on effects.
I agree that he was awful, I don't think it'll require 50 years to undo the negative parts of his legacy. Here's hoping, anyway.
I don't know. I don't follow US politics closely enough to know much about more than a handful of people, and none of them are particularly impressive. To be honest, I'm nearly at the point where I don't think a good leader *can* rise from the US political system - it's simply too corrupt and broken.
Perhaps - most of them, democrat and republican alike, appear more interested in maintaining their own power base than they are in actually governing wisely. The arrival of a legitimate third party might shake it up enough for change, but with the current 2-party system, it seems like we'll be locked into a perpetual back-and-forth like we've seen the past 10 years or so.
The politics coming from that side just seem to be too combative, exclusionary and absolutist, with little positive, constructive or useful to contribute - and becoming more so every day.
But this assumes that the "US Right" is a monolithic entity that agrees on everything. I tend to be rather conservative on many spending issues - I'd label it "pragmatic libertarian," or "small government, unless government really can do a measurably better / more efficient job." This makes me fairly liberal (at least with respect to the American mainstream) on "social issues" - drug policy/decriminalization, gay marriage, abortion, all of that sort of stuff, I'd agree almost down the line with the Democratic platform - why? Because the government has no business nosing into my business, simple as that.
But this outlook also means I'm fairly conservative on finance and spending, which places me at odds with pretty much both of the major parties - the Democrats want to create social programs for *everything,* and the Republicans want to create social programs for *everything except abortion & stem cell research.* They've both learned that a government that provides a bunch of benefits is a government that people will want to vote for to keep the benefits rolling. Leadership here has turned into "Vote for me and I'll give you the most stuff?" rather than "Vote for me so I can help us understand what our priorities as a nation should be, and guide us to the right thing for the long-term that may not be the easy thing in the short term."
As an example: I'm willing to entertain the notion that health care is something we need to spend on as a country, and that it's both a priority, and the right thing to do. But when a politician tells me "We're going to add 30 million people to the health care system, we're going to change NOTHING about your existing coverage, and we're going to reduce costs for everybody," well... I can do math, and something there doesn't add up. (That message was delivered more or less exactly by Pres. Obama in several speeches - cover everybody, no change to peoples' existing coverage, less cost all around.)
Leadership is sometimes about breaking the bad news to people that the party's over: getting up in front of people, and saying "Look, we're going to ask everybody who makes more than 60,000 dollars a year to give 3% more on their income taxes to provide this coverage to 30 million new people, and we're going to need to move to a single-payer plan to reduce costs." Delivering potentially unpleasant news in a way that makes me understand (and agree) on the necessity & the 'rightness' of that course of action is a key component. Don't just sweet talk me, tell me what we need to do, why we need to do it, and for god's sake, be honest about it.
I said that he was the candidate offered to us by the left, and that he has failed to deliver on much of the hype and promise we were led to believe he'd bring about. Notwithstanding perenially ineffective third party choices, the choices for Pres/Vice Pres were McCain/Palin, or Obama/Biden.
Of those two, Obama & Biden are the left-most choice available to us, nominated by the left-most party which is likely to field a candidate who might win a popular election. And I know quite a few self-professed liberals and self-described leftists (not just those in the States, but in Canada, Ireland, Germany, and China - my company does quite a bit of business overseas, so I'm not as isolated as you might suspect, despite the fact that I'm American) who swear that the sun rises and sets on President Obama. So, while your characterization of the American Left as "not that Left" may be accurate in absolute comparison, he *was* the left's candidate here.
And none of this answers my question, which was: "Honest question: So who would you suggest is a reasonable leader to look to in these times where we need somebody to stand up and set the bar higher?"
It wasn't about the absolute versus relative positions of left and right in American and global politics, it was a simple question of who can provide us with the leadership the original poster I responded to felt we need. Great leaders can come from the left or the right, the only point I was making by citing Pres. Obama was that he was held up as "the great agent of change" who was supposed to change the tone, set the bar higher, eliminate corruption... and he has largely failed to make any noticeable strides towards that. We're still engaged in Iraq & Afghanistan. Guantanamo Bay still exists. Warrantless wiretapping, PATRIOT act extensions, and the TSA's Full Body Scans and Feel-Good Feel-Ups have all happened or continued under his watch.
I don't think that "electing someone more leftist than Obama, who is sorta not that left" is much of an answer - I'm asking who, in our present political climate, fits the bill, because there really is a dearth of leadership, and that's not a "left versus right" issue. You can certainly have a conservative/right-wing government that is transparent and reasonably free of corruption and graft just as well as you can have a liberal/left-wing government that is transparent and reasonably free of corruption and graft, and you can have corrupt & abusive left-wing and right-wing governments in equal measure as well - the two measures are largely independent of one another.
The charges he is being extradited from the UK to Sweden are for some sort of sexual assault. Are you really suggesting that the treaty is written in such a way that makes it completely okay for Sweden to take him and pass him along to a third country, as long as the third country is not ALSO charging him with sexual misconduct? How would the third country reach the conclusion that they have jurisdiction over the crime of his sexual assault in Sweden to begin with? I'm baffled by this reading of the law, because I don't see how you can possibly reach that conclusion if you've actually looked at any of the statements made by Sweden, the UK, or the relevant statutes, particularly the European Arrest Warrant Act.
The quote I provided above is quite clear, and it's from the Swedish Prosecution Authority: "Sweden cannot, without such consent [from the UK, who rendered him to Sweden], extradite a person, for example to the USA."
The European Arrest Warrant Act is available for you to review online - I suggest you take a look at it, especially the section entitled "Surrender of person by issuing state to third state," which would apply here if the UK surrenders him to Sweden, and then the US were to file a request for extradition from the Swedish government. There is nothing there about restrictions on the types of requests - it is a blanket assurance that, while he is in Swedish custody as a result of extradition from the UK, he may not be surrendered to a "third state" without the approval of the UK or the approval of the European Court of Justice. It does not matter what the charges are, or how much pressure the US puts on Sweden to "come on, just hand him over, okay?" -- either the UK consents, or the European high court must order him to be surrendered and overrule the UK's objection.
Those are very subjective definitions, and there is no universally accepted standard for what each field of a release number really means. I generally agree with your definitions, but I suspect that even if we agree in broad strokes, if you asked us to assign release numbers to an arbitrary set of 20 different releases of the same software, we'd end up with fairly different results.
Point is, if you're taking the version number as anything more than a rough & highly subjective interpretation of "how big this release is," you're reading way too much into it. If they want to call it "4.0, 5.0, and 6.0" versus "3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 4.0", does it really matter? They're labeled uniquely, find the functionality you want, and run that version.
It's possible that this will also produce changes (or reflect them) in the development process, I'd hope that they'd take the opportunity to focus tightly on specific functionality for each release, rather than spend months tinkering all over the code base to get a single "big bang" release out the door, and present us with better-tested results at the end of each smaller release cycle, rather than one massive code dump at the end of a year.
I'm simply not clear on why somebody would get so upset over the digits of a version number: it's the functionality of the software that matters, not the label you use to identify a release.
"Clever" wordplay does nothing to answer my question, and does nothing to inform or advance the discussion.
Since the question was not "Compare the political parties in the US to the Australian Green party," would you care to offer an answer to the question I posed, or should we just engage in a bunch of semantic dick measuring over whether or not left and right are absolute values or only have meaning relative to one another?
It should be noted that a member of the Australian Green party is probably not the person who's likely to strike a leadership chord with the American people. I'm sure they're fine people with earnestly-held beliefs... but they're not American, and as such, probably have very little interest in engaging in American politics, or providing leadership to the American people. I'd expect them to be more concerned with Australians.
You clearly do not understand the law. That EU law applies to Mr. Assange for as long as he's in Swedish custody - it does not matter *when* the US files an extradition request, Sweden may not extradite someone who has been extradited to them by another EU member country without first getting approval of the country from whom they extradited him initially.
What you are suggesting is likely is only possible if Sweden and the US ignore the letter and the spirit of the laws which Sweden is bound by as a member of the EU, opening themselves up for legal penalties and sanctions from the entire EU. If the UK renders Assange to Sweden to satisfy their extradition request, Sweden MAY NOT render him to the US without the UK's permission.
And to answer your last: I am being derisive towards you because you have shown absolutely no interest in understanding the reality of the situation, and instead are clearly only interested in advancing your conspiracy theories. When I'm pointing out flaws in the conspiracy theory, and the response is "BUT, BUT, $CONSPIRACY_THEORY," I see no point in trying to engage in civil discourse, as lending paranoid delusion the air of rational debate does nothing but cheapen real rational debate.
You are suggesting that there's some trick whereby Sweden can go "AHA, PSYCH! Now we've got you, and we'll drop our charges and hand you over to the US!" And there isn't. It really is that simple - or did you think that a slashdot armchair lawyer ("IANAL, BUT I PLAY ONE ON TEH INTARTUBEZ!") could spend 20 seconds thinking about the situation, and find a legal loophole of that size in a law which was written, vetted, and ultimately approved by the finest legal minds across Europe, but which not a single one of those legal experts noticed?
I'll say it again: We have no way of getting at him legally without the UK's permission (or if he's stupid enough to enter the US at some point during his travels). The only way we'll get at him illegally is if he's found dead in a London alley or behind a dumpster in Stockholm. We will not abduct him from foreign soil to bring him back here to the US and make him stand trial. Abducting him is simply not worth the further hits we'd take in foreign opinion, and let's be honest: if we wanted him dead, we'd already have read his obituary by now.
This doesn't mean the US government wouldn't love to get their hands on him, and wouldn't love to throw him on trial for something. It simply means that there is no good way we can do so without incurring far greater costs to our image and standing with the rest of the world.
Jesus, did you even read that link, even the 4 short sentences I quoted? I'll reiterate here, in big capital letters to aid your understanding:
UNDER EU LAW, SWEDEN MAY NOT EXTRADITE HIM TO THE US WITHOUT THAT EXTRADITION BEING EXPLICITLY APPROVED BY THE UK.
Which means that, if Sweden were to extradite him without that approval from the UK, they would incur the displeasure of the *entire European Union,* which no doubt comes with significant penalties and sanctions for violating something this fundamental. This would ruin Sweden's standing with just about every other country *but* the US, and if you think they care more about the US than they care about their relations with the entire rest of the European Union, you are gravely mistaken.
There is no way for the US government to *legally* get its hands on Assange without the UK's approval. And if the decision is made to use illegal means, as I said, he will simply be found dead in a London alley, no expensive trial or abduction required, and no messy hit to our public image for abducting an Australian citizen from UK or Swedish soil to put him up in front of a sham court in order to railroad him into the death penalty for espionage. If they're going to break the law, they're going to do so in a way that gives them plausible deniability ("looks like he tried to karate-chop the wrong mugger in London. Such a shame, we deplore violence!"), rather than abducting him and then putting him on trial for the entire world to see, and *admitting* that we abducted him in violation of dozens of international treaties.
But by all means, continue with your conspiracy asshattery, it's clear you have no interest in understanding these things in the context of the real world, which - unfortunately for you - is where these things do, in fact, happen. I look forward to reading further fiction from you in the weeks to come!
A version number increment is only as important as you want it to be. The difference between "3.6" and "4.0" is entirely subjective, as is the difference between "4.0" and "5.0".
By convention, a "major" release increment signals significant changes, but what constitutes "significant"? Is expanding Windows support to 32-bit AND 64-bit versions "major"? Could be. Is implementing a new feature to support "identity," as the roadmap suggests? Could be. So is adding Windows 64-bit support worthy of a major revision number? If it is, do they have to increment again when they release "identity" support? Is one "more major" than the other?
The answer is: who cares, really? The only thing that users really need to worry about: 1) What version am I using presently? 2) What is the latest stable version? 3) What's changed between #1 and #2, and is it worth upgrading?
Whether #1 and #2 are "3.6" and "3.9", respectively, or "4.0" and "7.0", it really doesn't matter. It's the delta, #3, that really matters - what's been added, removed, updated, fixed, and broken between the two?
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I've seen very little to indicate that High Speed Rail is a "critical" infrastructure investment for the US. Not because I think rail is "bad", but because:
1) 53 Billion over 6 years will connect exactly how many cities with high speed rail? (Not that many, according to TFA - LA to SF is going to cost 2-3 Billion alone.)
2) Will anybody be able to run the trains on time?
If you build dedicated HSR lines and have to buy new engines & passenger cars, that 53 Billion isn't going to go very far - it's not going to be a "national" rail service upgrade. And if you DON'T build new lines, and try to stretch the money by upgrading existing freight lines, then HSR will be rated for "up to 250 mph," and will actually travel at speeds quite similar to the existing rails, due to the delays in getting a freaking right of way, plus scheduling delays, and infrastructure issues on the freight lines. So the "extra speed" benefit won't live up to the promise if we don't build dedicated lines.
This strikes me as primarily a "feel-good" measure, intended to make us look like we're doing something green, but which will mostly just spend money for the sake of spending money. And if you think that 53B is all they'll spend, guess again - overruns and unexpected expenses are the name of the game when you're trying to make large infrastructure improvements in highly populated areas. The Big Dig, here in Boston, was initially estimated to cost ~2 Billion, and ended up costing nearly 15 Billion by the time it completed (8 Billion when adjusted for inflation since the original estimate), and another 7 billion over the next 30 years in interest paying down the bonds. So, either they expect to spend around 15 billion dollars, and let the other 45 billion get sucked up by the inevitable overruns and expenses, or this 53 Billion could easily balloon to 200 Billion worth of spending by the time the projects initiated under its auspices are completed.
So, the question has to be asked: Is it an investment that will generate more revenue than it consumes in the long term? And even if it is - is the money better spent on a long-term investment, or paying down our long-term debt? How do the return rates compare? And even if it is an investment, we only have so much money to go around, so even our investments need to be prioritized. So does building HSR lines to connect SF and LA and a couple other cities around the country really qualify as a high-priority investment that deserves *national* priority, and should be taken on as a *new* expenditure by the government?
You're right - $9bn / year isn't going to fix or create the debt problem all on its own, but a former colleague shared this bit of wisdom with me over lunch one day:
"These guys just don't seem to understand that when you find yourself in a hole, you stop fucking digging."
And while the MPAA collapses, Microsoft and Yahoo form a partnership and launche an aggressive "We don't censor your search results!" campaign, and lots of people just start using Bing and Yahoo, rather than get embroiled in a pissing contest between two big drunks who are both upwind. Meanwhile, MPAA and their lackeys all stop using and dealing with people who advertise via Google (the movie & recording industries generally have pretty big marketing budgets, in case you didn't notice). Ad revenues plummet just as Google has to begin spending lots of money on developing automated methods to scrub search results of any "MPAA-backed" materials. Net result: Google has also committed "suicide by Google!"
The government steps in, declares the movie studios AND Google to both be "too big to fail," and bails them out at taxpayer expense.
Yeah, that would be an awesome scenario. Seriously, I can't wait to see them come to blows, rather than work out their issues like fucking adults.
I heard they're starting to prefer the term "Artisanal Ichthyology", and that every bespoke net comes with your choice of ironic t-shirt, ironic trucker hat, or black-framed glasses.
Really, so they do collect the fish one at a time?
It's amusing how something that doesn't sound "sci fi" enough is poo-poo'ed by people whose sole exposure to anything resembling a space program consists of having seen the movie "Space Camp" as a kid, and having watched Firefly a few years ago.
I'm sure the physicists, mathematicians, and engineers at the Japanese space agency slept through all of their math and physics classes that would have allowed them to predict the numerous failure modes you've identified for them from your armchair. It's a good thing that they have slashdotters to point out all of the problems that I'm sure they've totally overlooked.
What makes you think that fish net manufacturers haven't considered the fact that a fishing net needs to catch more than ONE FISH before collapsing in on itself and becoming useless? Or did you really think that commercial fishing vessels went out and netted those piles of fish, one at a time?
Australians also willingly eat vegemite. From these two data points, we are forced to conclude that Australians get everything wrong.
What the fuck, Australia?
And sweet Jesus, don't even get me started on the marsupials!
Yeah, sitting on my fat ass all day sipping free Starbucks coffee while writing code, browsing the web, and joking back and forth with my co-workers over the cubicle walls, all while interacting with my boss for maybe 3 hours a week in meetings makes me feel so abused. I think we should unionize and make our cushy job conditions more adversarial. While we're at it, let's negotiate a union wage scale so that I can be paid exactly the same as the shitheel down the hall on the sysadmin team, who spends more time outside each day on smoke breaks than he does inside actually getting work done. You'd think with all that, he'd at least notice the signs which ask smokers to stand at least 20 feet away from the door, in the little covered smoker's area that my employer set up specifically for the comfort of the smokers, but no... he's too busy walking back and forth from his breaks to move away from the doors.
Go work a construction job, or a factory job, and then come back and tell us about how abusive the typical IT worker's working conditions are. I guess when all you've known is "pretty good," "pretty good" starts looking average, huh?
If the claims are false, then you could always sue him for libel.
If the claims are true, maybe you should consider being a nicer person, and try to correct his perception of you.
If you don't want him being an employee, there's a lot of ways you could force him out - you just can't do it an hour after he posts on Facebook, and cite that as the sole reason for his termination. Build your paper trail, or simply announce layoffs amidst a restructuring, and get rid of the people you don't like.
Being able to fork is akin to secession: if you don't agree with me, you take your ball and go home. Thats not "democracy," that's anarchy - no authority has any power except that which is voluntarily given, and which may be taken away at a moment's notice for any reason at all.
I keep reading this "open up to more direct participation from voters" trope, but I have no idea what that means - do we reduce governance to simple mob rule, where everybody gets a vote and majority rules, and if you don't agree and want to secede, you better hope the majority you disagree with isn't inclined to object by force of arms? We already have mechanisms for people to participate in governance - run for election, get in touch with your elected representatives, write letters, advocate... What exactly is a wiki going to add to the mix that isn't there already in some other form?
It's a solution looking for a problem. I'm all for openness, but the problem of "closed-ness" has absolutely nothing to do with the TOOLS we use to participate in our government. Adopting open standards and increasing transparency are great, but without an interested population, installing a wiki does nothing: it's a problem of process, not a problem of technology.
What I find completely amazing is this simple fact: Most well-run and successful open source projects seem to bear very little relationship to a true democracy (i.e., majority rule) in form or function.
The head of these projects is often referred to as a "benevolent dictator" - he whose word is law. The contributors cooperate (and sometimes compete, sometimes even via nasty political infighting) in what is in essence, a ruthless meritocracy-slash-technocracy, led by that 'benevolent dictator.'
1000 Joe Q Publics writing to the Linux kernel mailing list will be easily outweighed by a simple "NO" from Linus, or any single one of the other frequent kernel contributors. 1000 Joe Q Publics complaining about how some feature didn't get implemented yet will be told, "Go fuck yourself, we're not here to work for you, if you think it's that important, either write the code yourself, or wait until we decide to get to it." Last I checked, they weren't asking people to vote on which features to implement in the next version of the Linux kernel.
Openness and Democracy are often found together, and a well-run democracy requires an educated populace (which, in turn, requires information to be available to the populace so that they may be informed), but the two ideals are absolutely not identical. Opening up governance to "egalitarian collaboration" simply means that you'll see a lot more trolling, a few more Goatse bills, and god help us all if Anonymous decides to get involved in governance "for the lulz."
In the southern areas (Manchester, Nashua, Portsmouth), where a vast majority of the population actually lives, it's no more cold than any other New England state. In fact, in the Nashua area, winters tend to be slightly milder than our neighbors in central Massachusetts to the south, largely due to the way the weather systems flows through & around the mountains here.
OH NOES. TEH MOUNTAINS, THEY DESTROY BUSINESSES. I guess California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and the entire eastern seabord, through which most of the Appalachian mountains run didn't get the memo that nobody wants to establish businesses in states with mountains!
Um. No, no it's not. Somebody failed 4th grade geography. Portsmouth, NH, sits on the ocean. It's a small coastline, but a fairly active port all the same.
I live in NH, in one of the towns between Manchester and Nashua. I can be in downtown Boston in 45 minutes from my home. I can be parked and in the terminal of an airport served by Southwest in 20 minutes, less when the finish a new highway interchange that will bring you almost directly into the airport from Route 3. I can be at an MBTA train station (boston's public transit) in about 25 minutes, and on my way into Boston, with access to the entire Amtrak system from there. This area has an active FedEx and UPS distribution center. The highways in New Hampsire are *markedly* better than the roads in our neighbor to the south, Massachusetts. Some areas are relatively inaccessible, but the areas where there is any business of note are quite accessible by highway and/or air travel and freight.
You speak as somebody who has never even visited, much less lived here. Your image of New Hampshire as "bearded mountain men living off the land in hand-built log cabins on the border of Canada" is laughable.
Fidelity Investments, BAE Systems, HP, Dell, UPS, FedEx are all very large corporations with significant presence here doing business. You can easily find more examples if you actually wanted to dispel your idiot notions.
I can agree to this, there are certainly abuses in the current setup for corporations that could be resolved by closing loopholes in the tax and legal code that allow the abuses to continue.
Impractical and misguided, without sweeping tax overhauls. You have a janitor who makes $18 an hour, and a CEO who makes $5 million a year. What's your corporate tax rate?
A pretty notion, but in practice, completely impossible to enforce fairly, if at all - any idea how massive every legal document would be if you had to sue every employee of Toyota individually for the damage to life & property caused by your stuck gas pedal? How would you ever reach a resolution, with THOUSANDS of defendants? Who truly bears the blame? The engineer? The CEO? The factory workers? Can you really level a 5 million dollar judgement and expect to recoup any of your damages against the line worker who screwed up assembling a couple parts, who makes 35k a year? The mechanical engineer who miscalculated a tolerance but makes $110k a year? And how do you sue some engineers in Japan, some factory workers in Canada, and some executives in the UK, when you live in Ohio? Got deep pockets for legal fees, and navigating the endless complexities of other countries' legal system in addition to your own?
Sorry but this just sounds like Newspeak. "Free markets must be tightly controlled by the government in order to force them to be free! Black is white! Bad is good!"
From Wikipedia:
How is any of that at odds with your assertion that "capital distorts markets"? If I own a factory, and somebody with a lot of money offers to buy in bulk at a huge discount from my normal retail price, I am not obligated to enter into that agreement if it would come at a loss to me; if my factory normally runs at a lower volume, but has a much higher capacity, giving a large purchaser a discount on the normal price to keep my factory running and my workers employed in return for a lower per-unit cost to the purchaser might actually be a very good thing.
Capitalism describes a system where "decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors" - it says nothing about achieving a single set price for goods irrespective of the purchasing power of the buyer and the willingness to negotiate price on the part of the seller.
But yeah, "fuck corporations," I know.
The law requires the high court and the justice minister to concur, and I believe their decision is still subject to further appeal to the European Court of Justice.
Extradition requests of any sort must be reviewed by the judiciary, and cannot simply be rubber stamped by some political flunky who happens to be "undersecretary for the administrator of the vice minister of the justice ministry."
Honestly, the thing he has going for him now is that the he's not worth the trouble for the US to really go after him. If we wanted him, we'd have already submitted extradition requests and would be leaning heavily on the UK to extradite him. Getting him to Sweden does nothing to help us extradite him, the decision is still up to the UK's high court & justice minister. And if we knew we couldn't get him extradited, and we wanted him silenced all the same, he would have been found floating in the Thames or in an alley, dead of an apparent suicide or mugging-gone-bad.
I'm not suggesting that the US government would never engage in various & sundry bad things to silence someone. I'm suggesting that this whole "Sweden is just asking for him so they can turn him over to the US" is nonsense of the first order - Sweden has zero reason to do it, nothing to gain and a lot to lose from it, and the US has zero to gain and a lot to lose. Sweden would have to break their own laws AND EU laws to do it, and nobody would have any plausible deniability for doing so.
That would be a ridiculous stretch of the semantics of "in custody" - at which point he could appeal Sweden's attempt to extradite him to the European Court of Justice, who would most likely slap down Sweden for their bad-faith attempt at abusing the suspect who was surrendered to them by the UK under extradition laws.
I believe that the Swedish justice ministry would have no choice but to allow him to leave, and tell the US that they need to request extradition from the UK Justice Ministry, since the only reason he is within the reach of Swedish authorities is because of the extradition request that the UK honored.
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what the law says, with one clarifying point:
The person is immune from extradition to the third country only for the duration of their custody by the second country, unless the first country's high court & justice minister (the equivalent of the US Attorney General, I presume) both agree that extradition is okay.
And, even if they (first country's high court & justice minister + the second country's judicial authority) do agree to extradite, I believe there is still the recourse of an appeal to the European Court of Justice (the equivalent of the US Supreme Court). Presuming an acquittal, once the person's business is finished in the second country they will be released and allowed to return to the first country (if they wish). At that point, the third country could file a *new* extradition request with the first country, who will then need to consider it in accordance with their own treaties & obligations under EU law.
It is, in essence, a temporary immunity from extradition that is granted to prevent these requests from being made in bad faith - for example, in this instance, to prevent exactly what you're suggesting might happen: The UK denies the extradition request from the US, or the US simply knows the UK would say no, so the US gets Sweden (or some other EU member state) to trump up a charge, extradite the guy from the UK, then have Sweden turn him over to the US. It prevents "jurisdiction shopping" to find the friendliest country with the most permissive laws to allow you to get your hands on someone.
If the US presented compelling evidence to the UK and Sweden that the guy has committed murder and should be tried here, they MIGHT agree, but you've already suggested (and I agree) that the UK wouldn't agree to extradite him anyway. Getting him moved to Sweden won't make extradition any easier, it simply means the UK gets to say no to Sweden as well.
If Sweden disregards the law and surrenders him, they'd be open (as I said earlier) to penalties and sanctions under EU law, and this would basically trash any goodwill they have with the rest of Europe. If the US were to simply snatch him from an EU country without permission, the same would happen. Julian Assange is simply not worth the cost to either Sweden or the US, and so we will either build a case for legitimate extradition, or simply ignore him because doing anything to silence him would cost us more than it would gain - the data's already out in the wild, and I can assure you that the military is taking a hard look at security clearances in the wake of these leaks. That's about all we can do, unless we have ironclad evidence he engaged in espionage, and we are also willing to promise the UK in specific terms that we really wouldn't carry out a death sentence.
And even if we have that, we *still* cannot get him from Sweden while he's in their custody facing the charges he was surrendered to Sweden by the UK to face, without the UK's agreement.
I agree that he was awful, I don't think it'll require 50 years to undo the negative parts of his legacy. Here's hoping, anyway.
Perhaps - most of them, democrat and republican alike, appear more interested in maintaining their own power base than they are in actually governing wisely. The arrival of a legitimate third party might shake it up enough for change, but with the current 2-party system, it seems like we'll be locked into a perpetual back-and-forth like we've seen the past 10 years or so.
But this assumes that the "US Right" is a monolithic entity that agrees on everything. I tend to be rather conservative on many spending issues - I'd label it "pragmatic libertarian," or "small government, unless government really can do a measurably better / more efficient job." This makes me fairly liberal (at least with respect to the American mainstream) on "social issues" - drug policy/decriminalization, gay marriage, abortion, all of that sort of stuff, I'd agree almost down the line with the Democratic platform - why? Because the government has no business nosing into my business, simple as that.
But this outlook also means I'm fairly conservative on finance and spending, which places me at odds with pretty much both of the major parties - the Democrats want to create social programs for *everything,* and the Republicans want to create social programs for *everything except abortion & stem cell research.* They've both learned that a government that provides a bunch of benefits is a government that people will want to vote for to keep the benefits rolling. Leadership here has turned into "Vote for me and I'll give you the most stuff?" rather than "Vote for me so I can help us understand what our priorities as a nation should be, and guide us to the right thing for the long-term that may not be the easy thing in the short term."
As an example: I'm willing to entertain the notion that health care is something we need to spend on as a country, and that it's both a priority, and the right thing to do. But when a politician tells me "We're going to add 30 million people to the health care system, we're going to change NOTHING about your existing coverage, and we're going to reduce costs for everybody," well... I can do math, and something there doesn't add up. (That message was delivered more or less exactly by Pres. Obama in several speeches - cover everybody, no change to peoples' existing coverage, less cost all around.)
Leadership is sometimes about breaking the bad news to people that the party's over: getting up in front of people, and saying "Look, we're going to ask everybody who makes more than 60,000 dollars a year to give 3% more on their income taxes to provide this coverage to 30 million new people, and we're going to need to move to a single-payer plan to reduce costs." Delivering potentially unpleasant news in a way that makes me understand (and agree) on the necessity & the 'rightness' of that course of action is a key component. Don't just sweet talk me, tell me what we need to do, why we need to do it, and for god's sake, be honest about it.
I said that he was the candidate offered to us by the left, and that he has failed to deliver on much of the hype and promise we were led to believe he'd bring about. Notwithstanding perenially ineffective third party choices, the choices for Pres/Vice Pres were McCain/Palin, or Obama/Biden.
Of those two, Obama & Biden are the left-most choice available to us, nominated by the left-most party which is likely to field a candidate who might win a popular election. And I know quite a few self-professed liberals and self-described leftists (not just those in the States, but in Canada, Ireland, Germany, and China - my company does quite a bit of business overseas, so I'm not as isolated as you might suspect, despite the fact that I'm American) who swear that the sun rises and sets on President Obama. So, while your characterization of the American Left as "not that Left" may be accurate in absolute comparison, he *was* the left's candidate here.
And none of this answers my question, which was: "Honest question: So who would you suggest is a reasonable leader to look to in these times where we need somebody to stand up and set the bar higher?"
It wasn't about the absolute versus relative positions of left and right in American and global politics, it was a simple question of who can provide us with the leadership the original poster I responded to felt we need. Great leaders can come from the left or the right, the only point I was making by citing Pres. Obama was that he was held up as "the great agent of change" who was supposed to change the tone, set the bar higher, eliminate corruption... and he has largely failed to make any noticeable strides towards that. We're still engaged in Iraq & Afghanistan. Guantanamo Bay still exists. Warrantless wiretapping, PATRIOT act extensions, and the TSA's Full Body Scans and Feel-Good Feel-Ups have all happened or continued under his watch.
I don't think that "electing someone more leftist than Obama, who is sorta not that left" is much of an answer - I'm asking who, in our present political climate, fits the bill, because there really is a dearth of leadership, and that's not a "left versus right" issue. You can certainly have a conservative/right-wing government that is transparent and reasonably free of corruption and graft just as well as you can have a liberal/left-wing government that is transparent and reasonably free of corruption and graft, and you can have corrupt & abusive left-wing and right-wing governments in equal measure as well - the two measures are largely independent of one another.
The charges he is being extradited from the UK to Sweden are for some sort of sexual assault. Are you really suggesting that the treaty is written in such a way that makes it completely okay for Sweden to take him and pass him along to a third country, as long as the third country is not ALSO charging him with sexual misconduct? How would the third country reach the conclusion that they have jurisdiction over the crime of his sexual assault in Sweden to begin with? I'm baffled by this reading of the law, because I don't see how you can possibly reach that conclusion if you've actually looked at any of the statements made by Sweden, the UK, or the relevant statutes, particularly the European Arrest Warrant Act.
The quote I provided above is quite clear, and it's from the Swedish Prosecution Authority: "Sweden cannot, without such consent [from the UK, who rendered him to Sweden], extradite a person, for example to the USA."
The European Arrest Warrant Act is available for you to review online - I suggest you take a look at it, especially the section entitled "Surrender of person by issuing state to third state," which would apply here if the UK surrenders him to Sweden, and then the US were to file a request for extradition from the Swedish government. There is nothing there about restrictions on the types of requests - it is a blanket assurance that, while he is in Swedish custody as a result of extradition from the UK, he may not be surrendered to a "third state" without the approval of the UK or the approval of the European Court of Justice. It does not matter what the charges are, or how much pressure the US puts on Sweden to "come on, just hand him over, okay?" -- either the UK consents, or the European high court must order him to be surrendered and overrule the UK's objection.
Those are very subjective definitions, and there is no universally accepted standard for what each field of a release number really means. I generally agree with your definitions, but I suspect that even if we agree in broad strokes, if you asked us to assign release numbers to an arbitrary set of 20 different releases of the same software, we'd end up with fairly different results.
Point is, if you're taking the version number as anything more than a rough & highly subjective interpretation of "how big this release is," you're reading way too much into it. If they want to call it "4.0, 5.0, and 6.0" versus "3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 4.0", does it really matter? They're labeled uniquely, find the functionality you want, and run that version.
It's possible that this will also produce changes (or reflect them) in the development process, I'd hope that they'd take the opportunity to focus tightly on specific functionality for each release, rather than spend months tinkering all over the code base to get a single "big bang" release out the door, and present us with better-tested results at the end of each smaller release cycle, rather than one massive code dump at the end of a year.
I'm simply not clear on why somebody would get so upset over the digits of a version number: it's the functionality of the software that matters, not the label you use to identify a release.
"Clever" wordplay does nothing to answer my question, and does nothing to inform or advance the discussion.
Since the question was not "Compare the political parties in the US to the Australian Green party," would you care to offer an answer to the question I posed, or should we just engage in a bunch of semantic dick measuring over whether or not left and right are absolute values or only have meaning relative to one another?
It should be noted that a member of the Australian Green party is probably not the person who's likely to strike a leadership chord with the American people. I'm sure they're fine people with earnestly-held beliefs... but they're not American, and as such, probably have very little interest in engaging in American politics, or providing leadership to the American people. I'd expect them to be more concerned with Australians.
You clearly do not understand the law. That EU law applies to Mr. Assange for as long as he's in Swedish custody - it does not matter *when* the US files an extradition request, Sweden may not extradite someone who has been extradited to them by another EU member country without first getting approval of the country from whom they extradited him initially.
What you are suggesting is likely is only possible if Sweden and the US ignore the letter and the spirit of the laws which Sweden is bound by as a member of the EU, opening themselves up for legal penalties and sanctions from the entire EU. If the UK renders Assange to Sweden to satisfy their extradition request, Sweden MAY NOT render him to the US without the UK's permission.
And to answer your last: I am being derisive towards you because you have shown absolutely no interest in understanding the reality of the situation, and instead are clearly only interested in advancing your conspiracy theories. When I'm pointing out flaws in the conspiracy theory, and the response is "BUT, BUT, $CONSPIRACY_THEORY," I see no point in trying to engage in civil discourse, as lending paranoid delusion the air of rational debate does nothing but cheapen real rational debate.
You are suggesting that there's some trick whereby Sweden can go "AHA, PSYCH! Now we've got you, and we'll drop our charges and hand you over to the US!" And there isn't. It really is that simple - or did you think that a slashdot armchair lawyer ("IANAL, BUT I PLAY ONE ON TEH INTARTUBEZ!") could spend 20 seconds thinking about the situation, and find a legal loophole of that size in a law which was written, vetted, and ultimately approved by the finest legal minds across Europe, but which not a single one of those legal experts noticed?
I'll say it again: We have no way of getting at him legally without the UK's permission (or if he's stupid enough to enter the US at some point during his travels). The only way we'll get at him illegally is if he's found dead in a London alley or behind a dumpster in Stockholm. We will not abduct him from foreign soil to bring him back here to the US and make him stand trial. Abducting him is simply not worth the further hits we'd take in foreign opinion, and let's be honest: if we wanted him dead, we'd already have read his obituary by now.
This doesn't mean the US government wouldn't love to get their hands on him, and wouldn't love to throw him on trial for something. It simply means that there is no good way we can do so without incurring far greater costs to our image and standing with the rest of the world.
Jesus, did you even read that link, even the 4 short sentences I quoted? I'll reiterate here, in big capital letters to aid your understanding:
UNDER EU LAW, SWEDEN MAY NOT EXTRADITE HIM TO THE US WITHOUT THAT EXTRADITION BEING EXPLICITLY APPROVED BY THE UK.
Which means that, if Sweden were to extradite him without that approval from the UK, they would incur the displeasure of the *entire European Union,* which no doubt comes with significant penalties and sanctions for violating something this fundamental. This would ruin Sweden's standing with just about every other country *but* the US, and if you think they care more about the US than they care about their relations with the entire rest of the European Union, you are gravely mistaken.
There is no way for the US government to *legally* get its hands on Assange without the UK's approval. And if the decision is made to use illegal means, as I said, he will simply be found dead in a London alley, no expensive trial or abduction required, and no messy hit to our public image for abducting an Australian citizen from UK or Swedish soil to put him up in front of a sham court in order to railroad him into the death penalty for espionage. If they're going to break the law, they're going to do so in a way that gives them plausible deniability ("looks like he tried to karate-chop the wrong mugger in London. Such a shame, we deplore violence!"), rather than abducting him and then putting him on trial for the entire world to see, and *admitting* that we abducted him in violation of dozens of international treaties.
But by all means, continue with your conspiracy asshattery, it's clear you have no interest in understanding these things in the context of the real world, which - unfortunately for you - is where these things do, in fact, happen. I look forward to reading further fiction from you in the weeks to come!
A version number increment is only as important as you want it to be. The difference between "3.6" and "4.0" is entirely subjective, as is the difference between "4.0" and "5.0".
By convention, a "major" release increment signals significant changes, but what constitutes "significant"? Is expanding Windows support to 32-bit AND 64-bit versions "major"? Could be. Is implementing a new feature to support "identity," as the roadmap suggests? Could be. So is adding Windows 64-bit support worthy of a major revision number? If it is, do they have to increment again when they release "identity" support? Is one "more major" than the other?
The answer is: who cares, really? The only thing that users really need to worry about:
1) What version am I using presently?
2) What is the latest stable version?
3) What's changed between #1 and #2, and is it worth upgrading?
Whether #1 and #2 are "3.6" and "3.9", respectively, or "4.0" and "7.0", it really doesn't matter. It's the delta, #3, that really matters - what's been added, removed, updated, fixed, and broken between the two?