No he's not. He's wanted for questioning. There's a distinct difference.
If he was officially accused of rape - i.e. if there was enough evidence to accuse him then the Swedish authorities would've decided to prosecute and ask for extradition based on that prosecution, instead they just want to get him to Sweden merely to "question" him, even though as the Ecuadorian authorities have pointed out there's no reason they couldn't do this at the embassy if it's necessary before pressing charges because they've done this before in other cases so it's perfectly possible under Swedish law.
Which is really what makes it all so odd, if there's so much certainty he committed rape, why not just press charges and issue a warrant based on that? Why pull him all the way to another country merely to just ask a few questions? He even offered to go to them and do this at the Swedish embassy in London for a while prior to seeking asylum.
Really if the rape charges are legit and he desperately needs to answer them this question could be resolved way more cheaply than funding this ongoing saga. Flying a couple of officers to the UK or using some possibly already present in the Swedish embassy would cost next to nothing just to question. Then once they've question if they want to press charges they can, and Assange's case is suddenly greatly weakened. The fact they're unwilling to spend next to nothing to backup their assertions is quite telling.
You don't spend $3.8million guarding an embassy and then millions more in politician, advisor, lawyer and additional police wages just to ask some questions. There's much more to it than that.
Well that's absolutely a fair argument in practice there's very little that good be done.
The only thing I will say is such actions are what have scraped away and weakened American and British credibility on the international stage in the last decade or so though. Things like throwing torture laws out the window, arbitrarily going to war without international legal support, doing away with fair trials with guantanamo, and extraordinary rendition. All these things have chipped away at Anglo-American political capital which is precisely why they now can't get universal agreement on action in Syria. Countries like Russia know that Britain and America can no longer claim the moral high ground on this sort of thing so they get away with blocking.
Any action against the embassy would just be the loss of further capital and would put British ambassadors and over citizens at risk of arbitrary arrest of other interference overseas because we'd no longer have the political capital to prevent it.
So Ecuador couldn't do anything directly, but it'd absolutely harm the UK.
"It might also harm your claim that Assange does not fall under the definition of a "refugee" under those very protocols that you mention."
Yes he does. Go learn what a political refugee is. Refugees aren't just poor black African people at risk of massacre by some butcher in their home country or whatever the hell you think the definition actually is. Risk of political persecution is very much one of the grounds under which someone can be granted asylum and that's the grounds he has been granted asylum on by the Ecuadorian government.
"Oh, and also, neither of those conventions or protocols require a country to ignore its own law with regard to actionable arrest warrants unrelated to refugee status - so even if he did fall under the definition, there is still nothing there which requires Britain to grant him passage out of the Ecuadorian embassy..."
Yes they do. International law trumps national law once you've signed up to it. If it didn't then dictators could make genocide legal whilst retaining their seats at the UN by not pulling out of the relevant treaties they'd signed up to because they'd be doing nothing wrong. Granting asylum is not something done on a whim, it's something granted by a country when it has a genuine belief that someone is at risk of persecution which is why it's used so sparingly worldwide. The whole reason for example that the European Court of Human Rights was created was because Hitler was persecuting the Jews and they had no one higher than their own government to turn to so post war the British authorities above all else realised it was essential to have such supra-national authorities. The relevant UN authorities were created with the same recognition.
Why don't you learn a bit more about the topic before making anymore of a fool of yourself by making shit up on the fly that just isn't true?
If you don't like Assange that's fine, just say that and stick to highlighting your opinion. No need to start making up stuff that is simply false as if that somehow bolsters your opinion and gives it credence. It doesn't to anyone other than those who already share your opinion that Assange is the anti-christ or whatever.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.
Sorry, my mistake, I thought people on Slashdot would all be technically literate enough to use the internet and Google it. The UK is signatory to and has implemented all of these, in fact, it helped write most of them.
Ambassadors don't just turn up at Buckingham palace and ask the Queen if they can stay.
The country of origin phones the foreign office and tells them they're declaring a new ambassador, the foreign office then decides whether to grant or deny, if they grant they stay, if they deny they send them home.
According to international law he has the right as someone who has been granted asylum to be given free passage to Ecuador.
The problem is that for some reason our government seems to be placing law on bail conditions and Swedish law right up above fundamental globally established law on human rights and asylum that we've both signed up to and implemented.
God forbid someone desperate goes to the British embassy in a country where their life is genuinely in danger and is granted asylum because we've now created a precedent where they have absolutely no hope of getting out safely even if asylum granted. The same applies if say a British citizen finds themselves stuck in a nation that falls into chaos or similar for whatever reason and goes for asylum at a friendly embassy - why should that nation give safe free passage back home to a British citizen now given that we've flouted international law that we signed up to and implemented? We no longer have international credibility on issues like diplomatic protection and asylum because of this.
Sure but if status of an ambassador is refused or revoked the normal etiquette is to send them back to the country from which they were supposedly an ambassador, not arrest them.
You seem to be talking up AMD a lot and talking down Intel and nVidia.
Given your points and Intel's supposed major management failures and AMD's devastating of nVidia in the gaming market could you explain how Intel's $11bn of profit and nVidia's $0.5bn of profit factor into the equation against AMD's -$1bn of profit? Yes, AMD lost twice what nVidia made last year, and made $12bn less than Intel.
Something about your argument doesn't seem to stack up. If AMD was doing so well and Intel was so badly run and nVidia was getting devastated one might wonder why AMD's profits have been in the red for a long time now whilst nVidia's have continued to grow whilst Intel is raking in more profit than Google?
Similarly there's a reasonable question as to why both Intel and nVidia hold such a greater market share than AMD and why both Intel and nVidia's products are generally seen to be of higher quality than AMDs.
The reality is there's not really many metrics where AMD is doing well, they're not doing well financially, consumer confidence in their products is lower, and the only large contracts they do acquire are the low/zero profitability ones (like consoles). It'd be nice if they were as healthy and doing as well as you say, because it's nice to retain at least some plurality in any market to keep competition healthy, but it's just not the case right now sadly.
Yep, exactly. nVidia has rarely had much to do with the console market, so what the GP says has really nothing to do with AMD "trouncing" it and everything to do with nVidia avoiding unprofitable markets.
Nintendo has pretty much always been ATI iirc, and only the PS3 and original XBox have used nVidia. Certainly the Gamecube, the Wii, the Wii U, and the XBox 360 all used ATI. The PS2 used some home grown Sony thing.
Reading anything into the fact the new consoles are using AMD GPUs tells us nothing much given that AMD/ATI have held the majority of the console market for over a decade now but it's still not stopped their profits freefalling deep into the negative whilst nVidia has continued to retain healthy profit growth. It's certainly not done ATI/AMD any good being in that market, so why would nVidia care?
Some companies use it for versioning of content as well as just source code and that may mean archiving raw versions of said content such as images, 3D art assets, uncompressed audio and so forth.
Amusingly this is somewhat the answer to your question - most programming languages will avoid unicode characters because it then runs a greater risk of transmission of code between systems because unfortunately there are still all too many applications, sites and programs that don't properly support unicode which means bugs could arise in source code for no reason other than loading it up, manipulating it, and saving it in the wrong text editor.
But I agree, it's a sad state of affairs that we can't rely on the existence of unicode even now.
"It really depends what you are doing. For many projects, scripting with some OOP is good enough (all those web projects, RoR, etc.). Having short code in an expressive language leads to less bugs."
Are you sure you're not conflating two different things here? It sounds like you're saying some languages are better for short, more expressive code, but that's not the same as static vs. dynamic typing.
The only increase in code from static typing is explicit conversion, but I do not see how this extra code can increase bugs, on the contrary, it's what often decreases bugs in applications written with static typing because the developer has to explicitly declare and perform the possible conversions. In contrast, with a dynamically typed language you're relying on the interpreter to guess, which is much more error prone.
If you perform a conversion in a statically typed language and it's wrong, you know the second you try and execute, but in a dynamically typed language you may not know there's a problem until you hit some edge case input, which is more likely to get out into production due to the subtle nature of it.
Do you have any examples of the classes of problem you believe dynamic typing avoids but static typing doesn't? You make the assertion that if you unit and integration test a dynamically typed language you capture more mistakes than you would with a statically typed language. I don't think that's ever the case, because static type makes capture of certain errors explicit in the implementation, the faults are unavoidable when you attempt execution, whilst dynamic typing relies on you stumbling across the error during execution, which means to capture it with unit tests means it's only as good as your unit tests which will rarely be as good as explicit and inherent capture of errors.
I agree that dynamic code has it's place - where you want to make quick changes, dynamic changes and want to see change instantly or where you don't care about code quality because you're just doing prototyping or proof of concept. But I think dynamic code is always inherently more error prone, I think it's a fallacy to pretend otherwise and I've never seen any evidence to suggest dynamically typed code is less error prone than statically typed code so I'd be intrigued to see it because I don't see how inherent ability to capture a certain class of errors coupled with tools for finding every other class of errors can ever be worse than no inherent ability to capture that class of errors with the same tools to find the other classes of errors. It just doesn't make sense.
"I didn't say UKdians, I said Brits. You know, the English. You're reaching."
I don't think you understand the composition of the UK. When you say "Brits" you're not referring to simply just the English, you're referring to the people of Great Britain, which comprises the countries of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This is the same thing as when referring to the United Kingdom which comprises the same 4 countries. Some definitions exclude Northern Ireland from Great Britain but not the United Kingdom, but normally they're one and the same. If you want to refer to just the English, then simply refer to the English.
Don't say I'm "reaching" if you don't know what you're on about, it's arrogant and makes you look like an idiot when you then demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the composition of the country you're talking about.
"Again, the almighty says stop changing the subject and answer the fookin' question"
I did, I gave you an example of parts of England (the South West) that have strongly rhotic accents, and pointed out that these were the parts of England that most prominently colonised North America, that also has a rhotic accent, which is hence not particularly surprising. I pointed out that if you think all English or British accents are non-rhotic then your knowledge of the language must be extremely limited to perhaps the Queen's English and the BBC type accents which aren't representative of the vast range of accents which the UK is home to both rhotic (like the US) and non-rhotic.
To be fair it's also one of the prettiest parts of the UK so is actually worth visiting if you ever go to the UK.
Bath which sits right next to Bristol is where a number of Hollywood celebs have situated themselves at least part of the time for exactly this reason. I believe people like Nicholas Cage and Johnny Depp have homes there
Though I like to think that Johnny Depp bought his home there so that he could continue playing Jack Sparrow and not feel out of place even when he wasn't filming for Pirates of the Carribean.
I gave you a list of cases where Apple was found guilty or being investigated and rather than accept that, or go Google for confirmation, you just pretend it's outright not true.
This is really the point, this is why you don't deserve proper answers, you seem to want to continue this discussion but as I said before, if you can't even accept reality then what's the point?
There's really no helping you, you're irrationally defending a firm in spite of the facts and that is why you can be clearly defined as nothing more than a pointless irrelevant fanboy. When you're that far gone your opinion is just meaningless and does not matter.
"That#s circular reasoning. WHY did their first bunch of friends go to facebook?"
Facebook then was very different to Facebook now. Back then it was a startup just trying to get viewers by providing useful tools without doing anything much fancy, now it's a massive scale data mining operation reaching well beyond the boundaries of just the data entered. It is circular reasoning because moving people away from it is a catch 22 situation, but I'm not sure why you view that as a problem, it's just the way it is.
People left ICQ because AOL made the product ever more shit and bloated over time. Facebook came along as a lightweight and new alternative and no one could've foreseen the future of it and the problems that would bring.
"He said that there was even a "pirate village". He said the entire village spoke like what we Americans sound like when we want to pretend to be pirates. One day a member of our church wanted to show off her new automobile. She said, "Elders, come take a look at my new carrrrrrr.""
That'll have been Somerset/Cornwall.
Apparently the accent associated with pirates is the way it is precisely because the actor who played a pirate in one of the earliest/most influential pirate films came from that part of the UK and didn't alter his accent much when playing the role.
Again though given that it's also historically one of the most sea-faring parts of the UK (Bristol for example was the largest slave trading port in the world for a long time acting as the hub for trade of slaves and other commodities between Africa/Asia and the new world), and that the UK is a historically prominent sea-faring nation it's quite possible that there were a number of pirates who indeed actually spoke with such accents.
"True. But fails as a theory as it doesn't explain the observation that people now flock to FB. If it was only about communicating and sharing their photos, they could do it with plain oldfashioned email and ICQ. (MSN, whatsapp, whatever)"
How? Their friends don't use these tools anymore. Facebook has a monopoly on the social graph and the only way to stay in touch with all your friends is to use it. You can't make all your friends leave it for something new, because they'd need all their friends to leave it for something new too, who would need all their friends... and so on.
"M theory is that people want to have those data, too."
I don't disagree that some probably do but I'm not sure what the relevance is because they don't actually have access to that data nor the option to access it. In fact, if Facebook engaged in a transparency drive and made it explicit all the information they've gathered on people and explained how they used it and asked users for consent to use it in this way to keep using the service I don't think there'd be an issue as only users themselves could be blamed at this point. The issue is still that most people aren't aware that Facebook has all this other data, and none of them have even been given the option of giving consent as much of it is even gathered in breach of various national data protection laws. Facebook has for example breached the UK's data protection act numerous times with some of it's practices and people expect large companies not to do this because it's illegal and assume they'd be found out, but if the authorities turn a blind eye for intelligence purposes then people are being grossly misled.
"But all that is not my original point: facebook data mining may or may not ne amoral, but if Zuckerberg should count as an amoral person, it shouldn't be for respecting court or administration orders. That's neither moral nor unmoral, it's plain normal."
I agree with you here but I don't think anyone was necessarily saying he was amoral for respecting court orders, but being amoral for having a reason to be issued court orders in the first place, again, as I say, by hoarding data on people, much of which is against their will or knowledge.
"You have yet to address any single one of my points"
Because they're almost entirely nonsense and you're waffling on with walls of text about something you don't understand. What'd be the point?
I wont just leave it at that statement, I'll at least offer you the decency of explaining what I mean though with an example, a few posts ago you said:
"I take it that you didn't read the findings of fact. Judge Jackson addressed this point. Back when MS was sued could a consumer get an OS other than Windows when buying a x86 PC from an OEM? No. They could buy an Apple which wasn't x86. The court case was always about consumers being harmed when it came to x86 PCs."
You were making the implication that this was what they were hauled into court over, and what they were judged upon. This is simply false and either an attempt to mislead or just outright ignorance on your behalf. The case was about whether Microsoft abused their monopoly position to unduly give themselves an advantage in the browser market. To judge that to be the case the judge has to first determine that the key premises behind that argument are correct, first and foremost that Microsoft had a monopoly. The point that you quote is simply evidence to that fact, it's simply stating that Microsoft did indeed have a monopoly because no OEMs were offering anything other than Microsoft's operating system - this isn't a finding of illegality in itself but merely establishment of fact so that the judge can then, given that he has now found the premise that they are a monopoly to be true, advance the case to find out if they also abused that monopoly position.
This is an example of why I stopped giving you the credit of proper answers. You either don't understand or are intentionally being misleading, given that how can I expect you to debate the topic rationally? Anyone who feels the need to mislead is debating with clear bias and isn't interested in honest discussion, anyone who feels the need to debate without understanding what they're talking about is just looking to argue for the sake of arguing. Given that, why would I waste my time on full fledged answers if it's clear you're not interested in a proper discussion but rather are simply interested in defending your pet company regardless of the facts?
You're claiming there's nothing to my suggestions that Apple has behaved in an equally anti-competitive manner to Microsoft, if that's true then why have their been rulings against them for price fixing in the UK? Why are they being hauled through the courts over eBook price fixing? Why did the FTC even begin to consider an antitrust probe over their anti-Adobe 3rd party compiler policies if there was nothing in it? Why is the EU currently looking at launching an antitrust investigation? Why was Apple found guilty of antitrust violations in Italy over warranties?
If you were interested in honest debate you'd recognise that Apple has already breached antitrust laws and been found guilty in some jurisdictions, and that it was still being investigated in much bigger probes that may well advance to much firmer action like that Microsoft faced.
Pretending it's not true just highlights the fact you're not interested in honest discussion on the issue, you're simply pretending they haven't already been found guilty of some antitrust violations, and you're claiming that all the others will come to nothing. That's a pretty tall legal claim for someone who doesn't even understand or can't properly represent Jackson's findings of fact.
Given all this do you now understand why I hadn't previously given you a proper answer? If you want to carry on the discussion you'll have to at least explicitly accept that Apple has already been found guilty of some antitrust breaches and is at real risk of being found guilty of even bigger ones to come still. You can't pretend none of this is real and then wonder why someone doesn't bother giving you a proper answer.
No they don't, people use Facebook to communicate with their friends sharing the data they provide.
Whilst I agree it's utterly naive of them, most users are entirely unaware that masses more data about them is inferred from the very little data they provide. Most are even unaware that even their conversations are being farmed.
Most people probably accept that if they like a product then any announcements for that product will be marketed to them, some understand that Facebook builds up a social graph of who they know based on their friends list and who their friends know, but very few are aware that Facebook is also gathering information about who they know from other sources - such as MSN (and presumably now also Skype) contact lists, tying them to liking products purchased outside of Facebook, and mining information about what other things they like and who they know from private conversations.
I think your final post highlights the problem:
"I won't comment on if this is a smart thing to do, but it's the users that shovel data into facebook - and expect it to be processed there!"
If this were true it'd be less of an issue, most people would be fine with that, but Facebook is gathering and linking them to data that they're not shoverlling into Facebook, and is even gathering and storing data about people who have simply never ever even signed up to Facebook. That's the problem - people don't actually have any control of what data Facebook is actually gathering about them, they think it's just want they explicitly enter into it excluding private messages sent to each other, but the reality is it includes mining all those private messages and external data sources as well.
Amoral because he harvests data and builds links from it that weren't explicitly provided and holds them in an easily searchable and mineable manner.
The only reason the warrants can be issued in the first place is because he holds said data in an unsecured well archived manner precisely so it can be handed over to anyone who asks nicely enough.
Were for example data to be stored in a more secure manner and data not farmed (sometimes illegally according to some jurisdictions Facebook does business in) then there'd be little of value for law enforcement to request. There'd also be less for him to make money from of course but that's where the amoral bit comes in - he's more interested in making money than protecting his user's right to privacy in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
In other words, Facebook is almost certainly breaking the law, but the governments that can do something such as the US or UK wont because they find it too convenient when it comes to harvesting data for their own ends.
Slashdot Mirror
No he's not. He's wanted for questioning. There's a distinct difference.
If he was officially accused of rape - i.e. if there was enough evidence to accuse him then the Swedish authorities would've decided to prosecute and ask for extradition based on that prosecution, instead they just want to get him to Sweden merely to "question" him, even though as the Ecuadorian authorities have pointed out there's no reason they couldn't do this at the embassy if it's necessary before pressing charges because they've done this before in other cases so it's perfectly possible under Swedish law.
Which is really what makes it all so odd, if there's so much certainty he committed rape, why not just press charges and issue a warrant based on that? Why pull him all the way to another country merely to just ask a few questions? He even offered to go to them and do this at the Swedish embassy in London for a while prior to seeking asylum.
Really if the rape charges are legit and he desperately needs to answer them this question could be resolved way more cheaply than funding this ongoing saga. Flying a couple of officers to the UK or using some possibly already present in the Swedish embassy would cost next to nothing just to question. Then once they've question if they want to press charges they can, and Assange's case is suddenly greatly weakened. The fact they're unwilling to spend next to nothing to backup their assertions is quite telling.
You don't spend $3.8million guarding an embassy and then millions more in politician, advisor, lawyer and additional police wages just to ask some questions. There's much more to it than that.
Well that's absolutely a fair argument in practice there's very little that good be done.
The only thing I will say is such actions are what have scraped away and weakened American and British credibility on the international stage in the last decade or so though. Things like throwing torture laws out the window, arbitrarily going to war without international legal support, doing away with fair trials with guantanamo, and extraordinary rendition. All these things have chipped away at Anglo-American political capital which is precisely why they now can't get universal agreement on action in Syria. Countries like Russia know that Britain and America can no longer claim the moral high ground on this sort of thing so they get away with blocking.
Any action against the embassy would just be the loss of further capital and would put British ambassadors and over citizens at risk of arbitrary arrest of other interference overseas because we'd no longer have the political capital to prevent it.
So Ecuador couldn't do anything directly, but it'd absolutely harm the UK.
"It might also harm your claim that Assange does not fall under the definition of a "refugee" under those very protocols that you mention."
Yes he does. Go learn what a political refugee is. Refugees aren't just poor black African people at risk of massacre by some butcher in their home country or whatever the hell you think the definition actually is. Risk of political persecution is very much one of the grounds under which someone can be granted asylum and that's the grounds he has been granted asylum on by the Ecuadorian government.
"Oh, and also, neither of those conventions or protocols require a country to ignore its own law with regard to actionable arrest warrants unrelated to refugee status - so even if he did fall under the definition, there is still nothing there which requires Britain to grant him passage out of the Ecuadorian embassy..."
Yes they do. International law trumps national law once you've signed up to it. If it didn't then dictators could make genocide legal whilst retaining their seats at the UN by not pulling out of the relevant treaties they'd signed up to because they'd be doing nothing wrong. Granting asylum is not something done on a whim, it's something granted by a country when it has a genuine belief that someone is at risk of persecution which is why it's used so sparingly worldwide. The whole reason for example that the European Court of Human Rights was created was because Hitler was persecuting the Jews and they had no one higher than their own government to turn to so post war the British authorities above all else realised it was essential to have such supra-national authorities. The relevant UN authorities were created with the same recognition.
Why don't you learn a bit more about the topic before making anymore of a fool of yourself by making shit up on the fly that just isn't true?
If you don't like Assange that's fine, just say that and stick to highlighting your opinion. No need to start making up stuff that is simply false as if that somehow bolsters your opinion and gives it credence. It doesn't to anyone other than those who already share your opinion that Assange is the anti-christ or whatever.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.
Sorry, my mistake, I thought people on Slashdot would all be technically literate enough to use the internet and Google it. The UK is signatory to and has implemented all of these, in fact, it helped write most of them.
Ambassadors don't just turn up at Buckingham palace and ask the Queen if they can stay.
The country of origin phones the foreign office and tells them they're declaring a new ambassador, the foreign office then decides whether to grant or deny, if they grant they stay, if they deny they send them home.
According to international law he has the right as someone who has been granted asylum to be given free passage to Ecuador.
The problem is that for some reason our government seems to be placing law on bail conditions and Swedish law right up above fundamental globally established law on human rights and asylum that we've both signed up to and implemented.
God forbid someone desperate goes to the British embassy in a country where their life is genuinely in danger and is granted asylum because we've now created a precedent where they have absolutely no hope of getting out safely even if asylum granted. The same applies if say a British citizen finds themselves stuck in a nation that falls into chaos or similar for whatever reason and goes for asylum at a friendly embassy - why should that nation give safe free passage back home to a British citizen now given that we've flouted international law that we signed up to and implemented? We no longer have international credibility on issues like diplomatic protection and asylum because of this.
Sure but if status of an ambassador is refused or revoked the normal etiquette is to send them back to the country from which they were supposedly an ambassador, not arrest them.
No it's worse than that, he posted some text on the internet!
You seem to be talking up AMD a lot and talking down Intel and nVidia.
Given your points and Intel's supposed major management failures and AMD's devastating of nVidia in the gaming market could you explain how Intel's $11bn of profit and nVidia's $0.5bn of profit factor into the equation against AMD's -$1bn of profit? Yes, AMD lost twice what nVidia made last year, and made $12bn less than Intel.
Something about your argument doesn't seem to stack up. If AMD was doing so well and Intel was so badly run and nVidia was getting devastated one might wonder why AMD's profits have been in the red for a long time now whilst nVidia's have continued to grow whilst Intel is raking in more profit than Google?
Similarly there's a reasonable question as to why both Intel and nVidia hold such a greater market share than AMD and why both Intel and nVidia's products are generally seen to be of higher quality than AMDs.
The reality is there's not really many metrics where AMD is doing well, they're not doing well financially, consumer confidence in their products is lower, and the only large contracts they do acquire are the low/zero profitability ones (like consoles). It'd be nice if they were as healthy and doing as well as you say, because it's nice to retain at least some plurality in any market to keep competition healthy, but it's just not the case right now sadly.
Yep, exactly. nVidia has rarely had much to do with the console market, so what the GP says has really nothing to do with AMD "trouncing" it and everything to do with nVidia avoiding unprofitable markets.
Nintendo has pretty much always been ATI iirc, and only the PS3 and original XBox have used nVidia. Certainly the Gamecube, the Wii, the Wii U, and the XBox 360 all used ATI. The PS2 used some home grown Sony thing.
Reading anything into the fact the new consoles are using AMD GPUs tells us nothing much given that AMD/ATI have held the majority of the console market for over a decade now but it's still not stopped their profits freefalling deep into the negative whilst nVidia has continued to retain healthy profit growth. It's certainly not done ATI/AMD any good being in that market, so why would nVidia care?
Lots of places really.
Some companies use it for versioning of content as well as just source code and that may mean archiving raw versions of said content such as images, 3D art assets, uncompressed audio and so forth.
Yeah, just don't tell my girlfriend, she gets jealous.
Amusingly this is somewhat the answer to your question - most programming languages will avoid unicode characters because it then runs a greater risk of transmission of code between systems because unfortunately there are still all too many applications, sites and programs that don't properly support unicode which means bugs could arise in source code for no reason other than loading it up, manipulating it, and saving it in the wrong text editor.
But I agree, it's a sad state of affairs that we can't rely on the existence of unicode even now.
To be fair developing a programming language is actually an excellent project for anyone wanting to further their comp. sci./development skills.
There's just absolutely no need to plaster it over the front page of a news site on the internet. Keep it to yourself, no one cares.
"It really depends what you are doing. For many projects, scripting with some OOP is good enough (all those web projects, RoR, etc.). Having short code in an expressive language leads to less bugs."
Are you sure you're not conflating two different things here? It sounds like you're saying some languages are better for short, more expressive code, but that's not the same as static vs. dynamic typing.
The only increase in code from static typing is explicit conversion, but I do not see how this extra code can increase bugs, on the contrary, it's what often decreases bugs in applications written with static typing because the developer has to explicitly declare and perform the possible conversions. In contrast, with a dynamically typed language you're relying on the interpreter to guess, which is much more error prone.
If you perform a conversion in a statically typed language and it's wrong, you know the second you try and execute, but in a dynamically typed language you may not know there's a problem until you hit some edge case input, which is more likely to get out into production due to the subtle nature of it.
Do you have any examples of the classes of problem you believe dynamic typing avoids but static typing doesn't? You make the assertion that if you unit and integration test a dynamically typed language you capture more mistakes than you would with a statically typed language. I don't think that's ever the case, because static type makes capture of certain errors explicit in the implementation, the faults are unavoidable when you attempt execution, whilst dynamic typing relies on you stumbling across the error during execution, which means to capture it with unit tests means it's only as good as your unit tests which will rarely be as good as explicit and inherent capture of errors.
I agree that dynamic code has it's place - where you want to make quick changes, dynamic changes and want to see change instantly or where you don't care about code quality because you're just doing prototyping or proof of concept. But I think dynamic code is always inherently more error prone, I think it's a fallacy to pretend otherwise and I've never seen any evidence to suggest dynamically typed code is less error prone than statically typed code so I'd be intrigued to see it because I don't see how inherent ability to capture a certain class of errors coupled with tools for finding every other class of errors can ever be worse than no inherent ability to capture that class of errors with the same tools to find the other classes of errors. It just doesn't make sense.
"I didn't say UKdians, I said Brits. You know, the English. You're reaching."
I don't think you understand the composition of the UK. When you say "Brits" you're not referring to simply just the English, you're referring to the people of Great Britain, which comprises the countries of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This is the same thing as when referring to the United Kingdom which comprises the same 4 countries. Some definitions exclude Northern Ireland from Great Britain but not the United Kingdom, but normally they're one and the same. If you want to refer to just the English, then simply refer to the English.
Don't say I'm "reaching" if you don't know what you're on about, it's arrogant and makes you look like an idiot when you then demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the composition of the country you're talking about.
"Again, the almighty says stop changing the subject and answer the fookin' question"
I did, I gave you an example of parts of England (the South West) that have strongly rhotic accents, and pointed out that these were the parts of England that most prominently colonised North America, that also has a rhotic accent, which is hence not particularly surprising. I pointed out that if you think all English or British accents are non-rhotic then your knowledge of the language must be extremely limited to perhaps the Queen's English and the BBC type accents which aren't representative of the vast range of accents which the UK is home to both rhotic (like the US) and non-rhotic.
To be fair it's also one of the prettiest parts of the UK so is actually worth visiting if you ever go to the UK.
Bath which sits right next to Bristol is where a number of Hollywood celebs have situated themselves at least part of the time for exactly this reason. I believe people like Nicholas Cage and Johnny Depp have homes there
Though I like to think that Johnny Depp bought his home there so that he could continue playing Jack Sparrow and not feel out of place even when he wasn't filming for Pirates of the Carribean.
I gave you a list of cases where Apple was found guilty or being investigated and rather than accept that, or go Google for confirmation, you just pretend it's outright not true.
This is really the point, this is why you don't deserve proper answers, you seem to want to continue this discussion but as I said before, if you can't even accept reality then what's the point?
There's really no helping you, you're irrationally defending a firm in spite of the facts and that is why you can be clearly defined as nothing more than a pointless irrelevant fanboy. When you're that far gone your opinion is just meaningless and does not matter.
"That#s circular reasoning. WHY did their first bunch of friends go to facebook?"
Facebook then was very different to Facebook now. Back then it was a startup just trying to get viewers by providing useful tools without doing anything much fancy, now it's a massive scale data mining operation reaching well beyond the boundaries of just the data entered. It is circular reasoning because moving people away from it is a catch 22 situation, but I'm not sure why you view that as a problem, it's just the way it is.
People left ICQ because AOL made the product ever more shit and bloated over time. Facebook came along as a lightweight and new alternative and no one could've foreseen the future of it and the problems that would bring.
"He said that there was even a "pirate village". He said the entire village spoke like what we Americans sound like when we want to pretend to be pirates. One day a member of our church wanted to show off her new automobile. She said, "Elders, come take a look at my new carrrrrrr.""
That'll have been Somerset/Cornwall.
Apparently the accent associated with pirates is the way it is precisely because the actor who played a pirate in one of the earliest/most influential pirate films came from that part of the UK and didn't alter his accent much when playing the role.
Again though given that it's also historically one of the most sea-faring parts of the UK (Bristol for example was the largest slave trading port in the world for a long time acting as the hub for trade of slaves and other commodities between Africa/Asia and the new world), and that the UK is a historically prominent sea-faring nation it's quite possible that there were a number of pirates who indeed actually spoke with such accents.
"True. But fails as a theory as it doesn't explain the observation that people now flock to FB. If it was only about communicating and sharing their photos, they could do it with plain oldfashioned email and ICQ. (MSN, whatsapp, whatever)"
How? Their friends don't use these tools anymore. Facebook has a monopoly on the social graph and the only way to stay in touch with all your friends is to use it. You can't make all your friends leave it for something new, because they'd need all their friends to leave it for something new too, who would need all their friends... and so on.
"M theory is that people want to have those data, too."
I don't disagree that some probably do but I'm not sure what the relevance is because they don't actually have access to that data nor the option to access it. In fact, if Facebook engaged in a transparency drive and made it explicit all the information they've gathered on people and explained how they used it and asked users for consent to use it in this way to keep using the service I don't think there'd be an issue as only users themselves could be blamed at this point. The issue is still that most people aren't aware that Facebook has all this other data, and none of them have even been given the option of giving consent as much of it is even gathered in breach of various national data protection laws. Facebook has for example breached the UK's data protection act numerous times with some of it's practices and people expect large companies not to do this because it's illegal and assume they'd be found out, but if the authorities turn a blind eye for intelligence purposes then people are being grossly misled.
"But all that is not my original point: facebook data mining may or may not ne amoral, but if Zuckerberg should count as an amoral person, it shouldn't be for respecting court or administration orders. That's neither moral nor unmoral, it's plain normal."
I agree with you here but I don't think anyone was necessarily saying he was amoral for respecting court orders, but being amoral for having a reason to be issued court orders in the first place, again, as I say, by hoarding data on people, much of which is against their will or knowledge.
"You have yet to address any single one of my points"
Because they're almost entirely nonsense and you're waffling on with walls of text about something you don't understand. What'd be the point?
I wont just leave it at that statement, I'll at least offer you the decency of explaining what I mean though with an example, a few posts ago you said:
"I take it that you didn't read the findings of fact. Judge Jackson addressed this point. Back when MS was sued could a consumer get an OS other than Windows when buying a x86 PC from an OEM? No. They could buy an Apple which wasn't x86. The court case was always about consumers being harmed when it came to x86 PCs."
You were making the implication that this was what they were hauled into court over, and what they were judged upon. This is simply false and either an attempt to mislead or just outright ignorance on your behalf. The case was about whether Microsoft abused their monopoly position to unduly give themselves an advantage in the browser market. To judge that to be the case the judge has to first determine that the key premises behind that argument are correct, first and foremost that Microsoft had a monopoly. The point that you quote is simply evidence to that fact, it's simply stating that Microsoft did indeed have a monopoly because no OEMs were offering anything other than Microsoft's operating system - this isn't a finding of illegality in itself but merely establishment of fact so that the judge can then, given that he has now found the premise that they are a monopoly to be true, advance the case to find out if they also abused that monopoly position.
This is an example of why I stopped giving you the credit of proper answers. You either don't understand or are intentionally being misleading, given that how can I expect you to debate the topic rationally? Anyone who feels the need to mislead is debating with clear bias and isn't interested in honest discussion, anyone who feels the need to debate without understanding what they're talking about is just looking to argue for the sake of arguing. Given that, why would I waste my time on full fledged answers if it's clear you're not interested in a proper discussion but rather are simply interested in defending your pet company regardless of the facts?
You're claiming there's nothing to my suggestions that Apple has behaved in an equally anti-competitive manner to Microsoft, if that's true then why have their been rulings against them for price fixing in the UK? Why are they being hauled through the courts over eBook price fixing? Why did the FTC even begin to consider an antitrust probe over their anti-Adobe 3rd party compiler policies if there was nothing in it? Why is the EU currently looking at launching an antitrust investigation? Why was Apple found guilty of antitrust violations in Italy over warranties?
If you were interested in honest debate you'd recognise that Apple has already breached antitrust laws and been found guilty in some jurisdictions, and that it was still being investigated in much bigger probes that may well advance to much firmer action like that Microsoft faced.
Pretending it's not true just highlights the fact you're not interested in honest discussion on the issue, you're simply pretending they haven't already been found guilty of some antitrust violations, and you're claiming that all the others will come to nothing. That's a pretty tall legal claim for someone who doesn't even understand or can't properly represent Jackson's findings of fact.
Given all this do you now understand why I hadn't previously given you a proper answer? If you want to carry on the discussion you'll have to at least explicitly accept that Apple has already been found guilty of some antitrust breaches and is at real risk of being found guilty of even bigger ones to come still. You can't pretend none of this is real and then wonder why someone doesn't bother giving you a proper answer.
No they don't, people use Facebook to communicate with their friends sharing the data they provide.
Whilst I agree it's utterly naive of them, most users are entirely unaware that masses more data about them is inferred from the very little data they provide. Most are even unaware that even their conversations are being farmed.
Most people probably accept that if they like a product then any announcements for that product will be marketed to them, some understand that Facebook builds up a social graph of who they know based on their friends list and who their friends know, but very few are aware that Facebook is also gathering information about who they know from other sources - such as MSN (and presumably now also Skype) contact lists, tying them to liking products purchased outside of Facebook, and mining information about what other things they like and who they know from private conversations.
I think your final post highlights the problem:
"I won't comment on if this is a smart thing to do, but it's the users that shovel data into facebook - and expect it to be processed there!"
If this were true it'd be less of an issue, most people would be fine with that, but Facebook is gathering and linking them to data that they're not shoverlling into Facebook, and is even gathering and storing data about people who have simply never ever even signed up to Facebook. That's the problem - people don't actually have any control of what data Facebook is actually gathering about them, they think it's just want they explicitly enter into it excluding private messages sent to each other, but the reality is it includes mining all those private messages and external data sources as well.
You are being sarcastic right?
Amoral because he harvests data and builds links from it that weren't explicitly provided and holds them in an easily searchable and mineable manner.
The only reason the warrants can be issued in the first place is because he holds said data in an unsecured well archived manner precisely so it can be handed over to anyone who asks nicely enough.
Were for example data to be stored in a more secure manner and data not farmed (sometimes illegally according to some jurisdictions Facebook does business in) then there'd be little of value for law enforcement to request. There'd also be less for him to make money from of course but that's where the amoral bit comes in - he's more interested in making money than protecting his user's right to privacy in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
In other words, Facebook is almost certainly breaking the law, but the governments that can do something such as the US or UK wont because they find it too convenient when it comes to harvesting data for their own ends.