I should have said in the summary that this all starts on the 5th of September.

Umm... wrong. Anything from 4 to 72 hours. See http://cep.sagepub.com/content/24/1_suppl/23

Because I still managed to leave out a link. Sorry.

I think Julian Assange is a rapist. I still like Wikileaks.

Um, it wasn't a broken condom, it was no condom and in her sleep, and yes it was rape. The British Magistrate's court and High Court said so. Assange: would the rape allegation also be rape under English law?

It helps if I remember to post the links. Here's solicitor and legal blogger David Allen Green quoting Assange's legal team and the high court:
Assange: would the rape allegation also be rape under English law?

Statements made by his own lawyer about what Assange did talk about actions that are legally rape, both in Sweden and in the UK. That's not my opinion, but has been said by other lawyers.

He described Assange as penetrating one woman while she slept without a condom, in defiance of her previously expressed wishes, before arguing that because she subsequently “consented to continuation” of the act of intercourse, the incident as a whole must be taken as consensual.

In the other incident, in which Assange is alleged to have held a woman down against her will during a sexual encounter, Emmerson offered this summary: “[The complainant] was lying on her back and Assange was on top of her [she] felt that Assange wanted to insert his penis into her vagina directly, which she did not want since he was not wearing a condom she therefore tried to turn her hips and squeeze her legs together in order to avoid a penetration [she] tried several times to reach for a condom, which Assange had stopped her from doing by holding her arms and bending her legs open and trying to penetrate her with his penis without using a condom. [She] says that she felt about to cry since she was held down and could not reach a condom and felt this could end badly.”

I don't agree that he should be extradited just for questioning, I think there should be charges first, but the courts have upheld the extradition so Assange should just go and answer the questions. Of course, based on the above quotes, he is guilty and does not want to go and face justice.

In any case, if Assange wants to avoid extradition to the US, Sweden is a hell of a lot safer for him than the UK! The UK government hands over anyone and everyone if the US shows as much as a passing interest in prosecuting. Our government doesn't even ask for evidence! On the other hand, Sweden will not extradite anyone for political crimes or where the death penalty may be applied. In addition to extradition from Sweden being far less likely than from the UK, if he were in Sweden then both the UK and Swedish governments would have to agree for further extradition to the US to take place. Picking Ecuador as a place to flee to just proves that Assange is a hypocrite. Ecuador has a rubbish record on freedom of speech.

I support Wikileaks. I stand for freedom of speech. That doesn't change what Assange did.

Assange is not a hero anymore, he's just trying to avoid justice.

Silent file corruption is the reason why I now keep all my data on a ZFS filesystem. ZFS has a checksum for every block and if you have redundancy at all (raidz, raidz2, or even just tell ZFS to keep two copies of each file) then it will repair the corruption as well as detect it. I've got a HP Microserver running Solaris but I recommend running FreeNAS instead if you don't know ZFS. This blog is a good place to learn about ZFS.

These will be Starstreak IIs. The information sent to the residents of the building where they will be located referred to them as Ground Based Air Defence, High Velocity Missile.

The MOD didn't actually intend this to be on the news, their mistake was printing a nice glossy leaflet to reassure the residents of the building they want to put the missiles on top of. Some of those residents didn't like it and said so on twitter, and from there it was a short step to blogs and journalists.

I personally wrote about this as soon as I saw the tweets, and informed a couple of journalists too. Stupidity like these weapons needs to be exposed and shouted down.

It's not the body of the communications that can be trawled, but the headers. The government want to be able to see who is communicating with who, and when. The plan was written about in The Telegraph last monthbut the plans are much older than that. The last Labour government, lover of all things authoritarian, came up with the Interception Modernisation Programme which in its original form would have had details of all electronic communications sent to a central government database. When the government eventually realised that this would be completely impractical they shifted the work to the service providers, who would all have to keep the details of the communications travelling through their networks and give the government access to their database at all times. The service providers realised just how much this would cost and so the government committed £2 billion to cover those costs over ten years. The plan was heavily criticised by the Conservatives, who published a paper titled Reversing the rise of the surveillance state. (Which is still on their website.) It was also criticised backthen by the London School of Economics.The plan was shelved in 2009 after opposition from communications service providers and a realisation that it would not be popular with the public.

After the election, though, the Conservatives decided to resurrect the plan, giving it a new name, theCommunications Capabilities Development Programme. (CCDP) Questions were raised in 2010 bythe Information Commissioner's Officeand it was mentioned in The New Statesman. Now the government are pushing ahead with the CCDP and the queen's speech will say that they intend to introduce legislation to implement the programme as soon as possible.

There are many things wrong with this programme of spying. It is impractical, expensive, a huge violation of our privacy, it places too much power in the hands of government, a government who we cannot trust. Making the full details of who talks to who available will allow security personnel to trawl through our data on fishing trips instead of requiring some basis for suspicion. Combined with the database for Universal Credit, which will be almost as comprehensive as the National IdentityRegisterthat was criticised so much by the Conservatives, and the centralisation of medical records, this provides private information about us all to the government on anunprecedentedscale with huge scope for abuse and for life-destroying mistakes.

If these plans scare you, please write to your MP to tell them your objection to the Communications Capabilities Development Programme. You can use WriteToThem.com to send it if you don't have their details. Pleasesign theOpen Rights Group's petition against government snooping and maybe consider joining the group too.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 about 7 months ago and it is the best phone I have ever had. I've had all sorts of dumb and smart phones over the last 16 years and I've always wanted to upgrade to something better but now I am completely happy with my phone. (Albeit with the extra battery sleeve.)

I'm using my phone to reply, please excuse the words switched by predictive text.

I've thought about my political views quite a bit compared to most, but then I class myself as a political activist and campaigner. The most useful thing that test did for me us show me that the main political parties in the UK are as far away from my beliefs as they can get. Even the Liberal Democrats, who I used to be a member of, are the other end of the scale from me economically even though they are three same as me on the other scale.