Yes, if we do it before Russia and Canada warm up :-P

We've been doing unintentional geoengineering for hundreds of years now, why would some intentional geoengineering be so bad?

Very nice car. Costs more than half a mil though 8-(

It's not 100% certain that there's geysers on Europa, and if they exist it's likely that they're only sporadic. But it is 100% certain that they exist on Enceladus, and probably constantly.

Anyway, what I'm really wondering is: does this guy want to give extra funding to NASA for an Enceladus mission, or does he just want to rob other programs?

Well, branch prediction doesn't get you much when most of your CPU cycles are going unused. Caching stuff in RAM can be a big win -- under certain circumstances. If adding more RAM means you can increase the probability of a cache hit significantly, good for you. But the fundamental fact remains that if a system is performing well enough, making it more powerful has limited practical utility.

I speak from decades of experience working with database sytems. It's wasteful to take a shotgun approach to performance improvement. You need to find where the bottleneck is, then widen that.

Right. If there are a half million Cynaogen mods out there, hell, let's make it a full million, they certainly don't represent "people getting their knickers in a twist". According to Wikipedia, there are something like 7E10 cell phones out there. 1E6 modded phones means absolutely jack.
'

No, VoIP 911 calls shouldn't get priority. You know that "all circuits are busy" message that you sometimes get on POTS systems? That shows that resources are not infinite on it. Your POTS 911 call gets no more priority than a tween girls' inane conversation. And yet society hasn't burned down.

It can and hopefully will be the same for VoIP 911 calls over a neutral Internet. In fact it will be better - the call metadata is small enough that it should get through regardless, so emergency services will know you tried to call and therefore need some kind of help and to call you back. That won't happen right now if there are too many tween girls on the phone and you try to call 911.

Where's the fun in that?

Not a bad idea. The first effective enforcer bot will bring about the Oppression Singularity. It won't be pretty.

Yeah, at about 300 pounds, 'embrace and extend' would quickly lead to 'exterminate'.

Come on Microsoft. A 300 pound (roughly 136 kg) American robocop? That's simply too obvious.

First off, get your facts straight. This is not an extradition case. It's a surrender case. Mixing up extradition rules and surrender rules is stupid because they're not the same.

Secondly, if you think Sweden's judicial system is so comparably terrible, you should complain to the peer-reviewers who passed the World Justice Project's methodology for ranking countries' judicial systems. Then you should complain to pre-charges-Assange for talking so highly of the Swedish system based on what he saw in the leaked cables. Then you should talk to the hundreds of US military deserters and other fugitives living in Sweden protected by Sweden's extradition law. For starters.

Concerning questioning, from the sworn statement of the prosecutor to the British courts: "Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries."

It's pointless. He can't be åtalad outside of Swedish custody, and the prosecutor is already ready to åtala him, and has the Svea Court of Appeals' formal court findings against Assange of probable cause for rape as backup. So yeah, she could do this little embassy stunt, but why?

Not to mention that the regular prosecutor dismissed all these charges, but they were then reopened by the current prosecutor who works at a national unit for exploring legal boundaries.

Surely you know that about one in 8 cases in Sweden are reopened in exactly the same manner as this one was. It's a very good thing that Sweden has a process for victims to appeal a decision not to prosecute to a higher prosecutor. And are you seriously going to claim that Finne's handling of the case was proper? Heck, I find it bloody hilarious to see Assange's defenders pointing to Finne as a defense of him when in the beginning they were the ones who were bloody furious at Finne, first the info about him being under investigation leaking on her watch, then her issuing a warrant for him when he hadn't yet refused to cooperate. And then just the opposite, she dropped the SW-rape charge (but I should add, the AA charges were *never* dropped) in order to cancel the warrant after the (very justifiable backlash). Not to mention that the victim statement wasn't even in the computer system yet when she did that. Do you really think her handling of the case was appropriate and didn't warrant review? That's a bloody stretch.

Then, a special prosecutor somehow gets wind of the case

This doesn't even remotely resemble the actuality. The case was brought to Ny via an appeal from Borgström.

Wow, if paulcraigroberts.org says it, then clearly it must be true!

It's a reprint of a Pilger article, Pilger being one of Assange's main misinformation spreaders. First off, there's not even rape charges (yes, they're on the EAW as charges, in the charges section, enumerated as charges, and ruled by the British court system to be equivalent to charges) concerning the "women" plural. There's a rape charge (singular) concerning one woman (SW) and three lesser charges concerning the other woman (AA). AA has said she was not raped, but there are no rape charges concerning her. She has however said that she was a victim of a sexual assault, and reaffirmed that on her blog earlier this year (after being silent since the incident). SW told several people she'd been raped, according to the testimony collected by the police, before she went to the police. The fact that her goal of going to the police was not to press charges doesn't translate to "she says she wasn't raped"; the testimony is quite clear to just the opposite, she had been telling close friends and confidants that she had been raped, right after the incident. Also frequently distorted is the end of her interview, which Assange fans often misstate as her "refusing to go on". It actually very clearly states that the interviewer thought she looked shaken and decided to terminate the interview (it was nearing the end of the shift anyway). SW is then asked if she wants a legal representative (not exactly an attorney, it's a state employee who pushes the case forward for you), and she said yes (her representative, Clæs Borgstrom, was very aggressive about pushing the case forward, although AA, who he initially also represented, felt that he was more in it for attention for himself later fired him and chose another). SW was also asked if she would do a rape kit and she also said yes.

There've been subsequent interviews since then, but they haven't leaked, so we don't know what they say.

Every level of the UK court system up to and including the Supreme Court has affirmed the Swedish legal system's actions concerning Assange. So try again.

By the way, you apparently don't even know that what's being discussed here is surrender, not extradition. And if you think there's no difference, you're quite wrong, the two terms are absolutely not interchangeable.

From the sworn statement of the Swedish prosecutor to the British courts: "Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries."

The questioning is indeed a legal requirement to move the case forward, don't get me wrong. But it's not the point. The point is to åtala him.

Neither Assange nor anyone else will ever be "charged" with rape in Sweden because, it should go without saying, "charge" is an English term and the Swedish judicial system uses Swedish. This may sound like pedantics but it's a key point. The two terms in question here in Swedish law are "anklagad" and "åtalad". Look them up in a Swedish dictionary - there's about a dozen different ones online. Each word can mean "accused", "charged", or "indicted" - but there is a difference in a legal sense.

Being formally anklagad is the first stage. The prosecutor brings said charge to a court of law, where a judge issues warrants for the accused's arrest. The accused can appeal being anklagad to have the warrant overturned and have a court hear their case. They can even appeal that ruling, all the way up to the Swedish Supreme Court. What it doesn't lead directly to is a trial. That is what being åtalad is for. In fact, once åtalad, the accused *must* be tried within a matter of weeks, by Swedish law. Being anklagad is to attempt to get the person in custody so that they can be åtalad. Being åtalad is to attempt to convict the person.

Assange *has* been formally anklagad. The prosecutor took the case and evidence to a judge, who reviewed it and issued warrants for his arrest. A EAW was issued because being anklagad is legally considered equivalent to being charged for the purposes of a warrant. Assange appealed to the Svea Court of Appeals, where a full court hearing was held, including testimony from his lawyers and a full review of all of the evidence. [i]He lost[/i]. The court found probable cause that he commited 1 count of unlawful sexual coersion, 2 counts of molestation, and 1 count of rape. He appealed to the Supreme Court. They refused his appeal, having found nothing wrong with the lower court trial.

Assange, is of course, pretending that only being åtalad means being charged. But he *can't* be åtalad until he hands himself over to Swedish custody. In short, he's using his very run from the law to justify his run from the law.