Yeah, but the guards handing him over are all beautiful naked blond women, right?

Assange Consented To Be Extradited, Says British Home Secretary

Wrong. Sweden *additionally* has restrictions in their extradition law banning extradition for intelligence and military crimes, beyond the general EU restrictions. Which is why they refused to hand over Edward Lee Howard (the most major CIA defector to the USSR) after only a very brief preliminary investigation; it's simply banned to extradite for such crimes. Think the US didn't really want Howard? Not to mention that the UK *also* has veto over any extradition, as the sending state under a EU surrender request , so he'd be *safer* in Sweden (it's an extra barrier). And here we're talking about the UK, the country that wouldn't even hand over Gary McKinnon, the most damaging hacker of US military systems on record, because "he has aspergers" (as if Julian I-Have-To-Wear-Specific-Jackets-To-Write-Specific-Documents Assange doesn't?). Think the US didn't really want McKinnon? And of course, the ECHR has veto power over every step of the way - the ECHR which is often considered the greatest refuge for people fleeing extradition on Earth, the same court body that goes so far in terms of protecting the rights of suspects and prisoners that it ruled that you can't ban UK prisoners who are in prison from voting or sex offenders serving time for their offenses from having access to (government paid) reproductive services.

And what praytell was the plan here? Instead of waiting until Julian, famous for being a globetrotter, goes to a trivially easy nation, let's insist on getting him in the nation that *he himself* chose as the most difficult? And then let's not have a single person even watch him to warn the Swedes when he leaves or warn the British when he jumps bail? And let's complicate the whole thing with competing local charges?

The conspiracy theory is so far into fantasyland that parents in Narnia could use it as a bedtime story for their kids. And Assange knows this. Whenever it's pointed out, he always changes the subject. He lost one of his biggest supporters this way, Jemima Khan, who posted a huge chunk of his bail, but now considers him a "new L. Ron Hubbard" because of his dodges on this issue.

Oh come on now. Sweden should change their laws and override the separation of powers clause in their constitition because it's ASSANGE we're talking about. I mean, don't they know that he's just the AWESOMEST AWESOME that ever AWESOMED and everything revolves around him?

Yes, Assange was so terrified of those evil Swedes, those American puppets, that he was moving Wikileaks' base of operations there (after alienating the majority of his Iceland team) and applying for a residence permit there, right? That's why he called Sweden's laws and legal system his "shield" in multiple interviews, right? That's why Wikileaks leaked that in 2006 Sweden caused a major diplomatic rift with the US by outright disguising their special forces as airport workers to break into a CIA rendition flight to stop the US, right?

Funny how Sweden only became evil US lackeys after he was anklagad for rape.

Link

He phoned ahead to the police station to tell them he was coming. There were two phones on his lap but he answered neither one himself. A French journalist was following the car but lost us. At the police station, Sarah stopped and said: ‘Shall I do the honours?’ I watched as she went out and searched the bushes.

‘Is she checking for paparazzi?’ I asked.

‘I wish,’ said Julian.

‘What then?’

‘Assassins.’

There was this incredible need for spy-talk. Julian would often refer to the places where he lived as ‘safe houses’ and say things like, ‘When you go to Queensland there’s a contact there you should speak to.’

‘You mean a friend?’ I’d say.

‘No. It’s more complicated than that.’ He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn’t deliver a package, but made a ‘drop off’. One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out towards Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractors’ tyres. ‘Quick, quick,’ he said, ‘go left. We’re being followed!’ I looked in the rear-view mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back.

‘Don’t be daft, Julian,’ I said. ‘That’s a taxi.’

‘No. Listen to me. It’s surveillance. We’re being followed. Quickly go left.’ Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Sweeney-style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3.48.

‘That was a kid being delivered home from school,’ I said. ‘You’re mental.’

People turned up out of nowhere. No one introduced them properly, and they didn’t have titles anyway: they were just Carlos or Tina or Oliver or Thomas. One night in Ellingham Hall, a French guy called Jeremy came in with a sack of encrypted phones. Julian always seemed to have three phones on the go at any one time – the red phone was his personal one – and this latest batch was designed to deal with a general paranoia that newspapers were hacking all of us. It was always like that: sudden bursts of vigilance would vie with complete negligence. There was no real system of security or applied secrecy, not if you’ve read about how spy agencies operate. Julian would speak on open lines when he simply forgot to take care. The others kept the same mobiles for months. And none of them seemed to care about a running tape recorder. Granted, I was there to ask questions and record replies, but still, much of what they said had nothing to do with the book and they simply forgot about it. Only once was I asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, when Julian gave me a hard-drive containing very sensitive material, but they forgot I had the drive and never asked for it back.

The guy was living like a character in a spy novel long before he started Wikileaks; he's a total paranoid regardless of what threats are actually present. The last person you want running an organization that might draw negative attention from powerful entities is a guy who grew up (for a period, at least) in a white supremicist cult and then was pursued by them for years after he and his mother fled.

He actually once showed up at a speech badly burned and trying to cover it up because he had installed a UV lamp but went way overboard on using it.

It is a totally BS excuse. The real issue is the timing. The Swedish Court system just smacked down his most recent appeal, eliminating any hope that they're going to be dropping the case any time soon. I think he's finally starting to come to the realization that running from the accusations and trying to negotiate or blackmail them away just isn't how the world works. He's got a probable cause of rape finding from the Svea Court of Appeals, upheld by the Swedish Supreme Court, and with the warrants upheld at every level of the British court system up to and including the Supreme Court. You can't "maneuver" your way out of that. Real life isn't a spy novel.

Honestly, I thought this realization would come after his run for the Australian Senate, under the theory that the UK wouln't dare stop an Australian senator (his campaign fell apart when he overrode the democratic vote of his party in order to break their alliance with the Greens and instead caucus with the Neo-Nazi "Australia First" party and other right-wing parties, leading to mass desertions). But... better late than never. If he does, actually, come out, that is.

Yeah, but because it's so weird, all of the tourists who want to be seen as tough have to try it for themselves. ;) I wouldn't be surprised if 75% of hákarl sales are to tourists.

You have to admit, "poisonous urine-scented shark rotted in a pit until it has the texture of cheese, reeks of ammonia and will no longer kill you" isn't the most appetizing food description ;)

Part of the problem is that most restaurants and stores would rather serve farm-raise game animals than wild-killed game. So if you manage to develop a taste for a particular type of meat, people will often start farm raising them.

I let Google Autocomplete it for me to try to figure out. Most were mundane, like "Take the money and run", but I have to say, I was pretty boggled by Google's suggestion of "Take the skinheads bowling". ;)

The best solution is actually monorails.

Were you sent here by the devil???

Tilbit is absolutely correct, though. Nicholai Tesla did some great work, mainly in his early years, but he increasingly started making claims without any serious experimental or theoretical backing whatsoever to drum up public interest, many of which are in complete violations of the laws of physics. A lot of his claims were based on "evidence" along the lines of "It was 30 degrees yesterday and it's 40 degrees today, therefore next year Earth will be vaporized." And in a lot of cases he appears to have outright just made stuff up.

This isn't to diminish his earlier work. He was an excellent tinkerer and ran across some really useful concepts and worked out equations to describe and utilize them. But he increasingly abandoned that for hype as time went on.

That makes absolutely no sense, and I fail to see what relevance it has to my comment.

It makes perfect sense, so you clearly have no conception of what the person is proposing.

You're talking about flying where someone holds onto a stick and manipulates control surfaces, They're talking about flying where they punch in "123 Maple Street" and the computer flies them there. One could of course allow both modes of flight, but the latter is what most people envision (or at least what I thought most people envision) when they hear "flying car".

Beyond that, I would like to add that while flying introduces new risks for manual piloting, it also removes a lot of them. Both commercial pilots and long-haul truckers in remote locations have similar roles in terms of spacing between vehicles and time behind the wheel, but only one's job is easy enough that they can have an autopilot do it for them for 90% of the trip. Yeah, someone cruising at 20.000 feet might be doing their makeup or texting on their phone, but at least they're not going to hit a tree while doing it.

(and yes, I know that if you replace all cars with planes, the skies get a lot more crowded, which is why I compared to a remote-location trucker, just to point out that the basic situation is easier in 3 dimensions where one's "lane" is much wider, there are no ground obstacles to hit, no hills, no bends in the road, etc, and traffic is split up among many well-spaced layers that are easy for a plane to maintain... no, millions of drivers cannot fit into our ATC system as-is, and I'm not claiming that, it requires a new system with greater automation)

Also, I'll add that you missed the obvious criticism of flying cars - the "dropping out of the sky upon failure" one ;) Any realistic "flying car" is going to have to have some really dang good failsafe mechanisms not only to protect its occupants in such a case, but people on the ground as well.

Disagree. A good car doesn't have down force (beyond gravity), downforce means aerodynamic drag, a good car should rely only on the force of gravity for its grip. The things that help a plane also make a car more fuel efficient - streamlining and lightweight construction. Cars have slightly different streamlining reqs due to operating near the ground, but the general principles are the same. Of course you've got wheels out there, but so do many light planes. Lightweight construction is often described as the opposite of crash safety, which is very important in cars, but with foam core composites you can have both.

As for the GP's comments: I don't think anyone really expects your average driver of a flying car to be behind the stick controlling flight surfaces; I think most people envision something more like a good quadcopter where everything is managed for you by control software that maintains position and attitude (despite changes in balance, wind, etc) or even fly preset routes / automated traffic management. People don't envision runways, they envision VTOL. They envision not a helicopter (non-roadworthy, giant exposed spinning prop), but something roadworthy with nacelles.

One big former problem with flying cars was the weight, size, cost and complexity of the sort of high power engines you needed for them, and if you needed multiple engines (quadcopter-style), then all the more problem. It pretty much ensured that your flying car would have a supercar price tag. But electrification of transportation looks to be solving that one - high power outrunner electric motors are very simple and have just ridiculous power to weight ratios. Battery energy density is still a problem (and would be even more of a problem if your lifting surface area is limited and you lose a little efficiency to your prop geometry), but it's constantly improving, the percentage rate of growth on electric passenger airplanes is even faster than that of electric cars (although starting from a much smaller starting point, mind you).

No, I'm not saying I envision the world suddenly switching over to flying cars - far from it. I'm just pointing out that the problems aren't as intractable as folk often make them out to be.

Trust me, you don't want to get spanked by them.

And their christmas gifts are terrible.