Nobody cared enough about wikileaks when it was publishing leaks about Kenyan corruption to donate. Now that the US is Assange's main adversary, wikileaks is bringing in the cash.

I think I have an idea for a startup....

At the moment, only Assange, Birgitta Jonsdottir and manning likely know for sure if it was solicited or not; which is likely the reason behind the Twitter subpoena. They (the US Justice department) probably want to know whether Assange was in contact with Manning while he was still downloading or not.

Birgitta Jonsdottir thought she was funny when she took Assange to a cocktail party at the US embassy in Iceland. If she showed so little discretion there, then she might very well have been dumb enough to communicate with Manning and Assange in a substantial manner on Twitter; leaving behind evidence if it indeed was an espionage case. At least that would be my logic if I was a DOJ investigator.

Just because Joe Biden said something, does not make it US Government policy.

1 - US Politicians say stupid things. Enough of them are absolute morons whose main attribute is being able to say something trite that goes over well with enough of their voters.
2 - UK Politicians say stupid things... blah blah. I've been reading UK papers long enough to know this.
3 - I've been living in Germany long enough to see enough German politicians do the same.

What do they all have in common? Second tier politicos scoring points with a specific domestic constituency by saying absurd things that that particular group likes to hear.

The question is one of timing. If Assange was in contact with manning while he was still downloading, then Assange is a spy handler. If Wikileaks was an after the fact drop box, then the only one whom a case can be brought against is Manning. The US DoJ won’t be able to convince UK or Swedish courts to extradite Assange on “we don’t like him”, nor would they be able to convict him in an American court if Wikileaks was a drop box because of the Pentagon papers case.

Espionage is a different matter, legally speaking.

No actually.

Subpoenas are an investigative mechanism. Nobody goes to jail (directly) because of a subpoena. It is used to establish the “these are the facts” of a case. It is the traditional legal mechanism to shine light on something.

From what I’ve read, the US Justice department thinks it is very unlikely that they can mount an effective court case against Assange and Wikileaks over the publication of the leaks. There is too much precedence in the other direction (specifically the Pentagon Papers) to pass muster in an American court. The legal precedent in the US is that if someone gives you classified information and you publish it, that you are not criminally liable; regardless of what the foaming at the mouth commentators would wish to be true. Anyway, neither the UK or Sweden would extradite for such a case. Facing two, high legal hurdles, they’ll want a very strong and airtight case before pushing ahead. What they are likely investigating is whether Manley was in contact with Assange while he was still doing his downloads and if Assange encouraged him; and more importantly, whether it is provable in court. That is an entirely different affair if Assange encouraged the downloads, because it becomes espionage.

Birgitta Jonsdottir is likely the weak link if that is indeed the case. She is possibly the one who put Manley in contact with Assange. We know that she lacks discretion, having taken Assange as a guest to a function at the American Embassy in Iceland, so it is not surprising that investigators may feel that they can gain relevant information to the case there.

I find it funny and ironic that self styled openness activists would be up in arms about a subpoena. I take that back. I find it sad and disheartening. I agree with what Assange says in public (e.g. his statements during his TED interview and his op ed in the Sydney Morning Herald), but Wikileaks’ secretiveness reminds me a bit too much of the pig in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

...by reading Damian Schubert's blog and his posts on the mud dev2 mailing list.

He is the lead designer for the combat systems on that MMO and his views are straight up conventional.

Ah, but I am personally affected by this. If someone climbs into a car after drinking too much and causes an accident that involves me or a family member, it does affect me. It is what economists call a negative externality. Essentially, someone else is paying a price for your behavior. Along with freedom comes the responsibility not to be a dick to others.

Or to put it another way:
“The nanny state does not want me to toss my candy wrapper and empty water bottle out the window. Holding on to them until I find a garbage can restricts my freedom and I object to this on principle.” But wait, we all want that guy to find a garbage can and not make us look at his trash.

This is different from the state forcing me to wear a seat belt in a car or a helmet while on a motorcycle. In both cases, I’m only victimizing myself by being a dumbass.

Never ever do business in China? Ever? Can you be certain that strategy won’t change next year? Or even tomorrow? This king of lazy thinking is how we got the Y2K nonsense in the last century. You're not one of those people with an allergy to unicode, are you? ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html )

From the new policy

These hit right to the core of Linden's Business model and are something that SL content creators have been screaming about. If people make things in SL and sell them to each other, Linden makes money. If people stop bothering (at least professionally, leaving only the amateurs) because of copying, then this trade does not happen and Linden makes no money (and ultimately has to shut down).

>'You must not mask IP or MAC addresses' (reported to the server),

Any bets that this has been driven by griefers more than anything else?

And there were not many other choices in 1998. If you wanted to play online and were not interested in being a wolf, then you had to be a sheep. Now you have 10^7 other choices and the only people who really miss pre-trammel UO are the killers. It is no accident that Shadowbane, which was built to cater to exactly those people, failed in the market and Darkfall will never be anything more than a niche. I predict that it will fail in the long term because a world that only appeals to wolves will force most of them to be sheep (there can only ever be a few wolves, even if everyone aspires to be one) and they won't stay.

Reverse engineered gray shards are a FAR cry from what would happen if WoW were open sourced. If you could create your own WoW shard, would you play on any of Blizzards? Sure they lose people to gray shards now, but they would lose a lot more if they open sourced it. MMO are fundamentally a service business and open sourcing your MMO is essentiaslly saying, "feel free to skip using our service". Where exactly does Blizzard gain here? I know where players and those advocating that it be open sourced gain, but where does Blizzard gain?

The only way it might work is if the servers were still closed source, but the content was OSS ( with a restrictive license such as GPL) and modifiable and you essentially rented a server from the company. If you want your own highly customized world, then you can create one and pay the rental fee on the company's cloud. Richard Bartle advocated exactly this on a Terra Nova thread yesterday and I think it has merit.

And with it a tyranny of the majority. Too much lawmaking by referendum and you get nonsense like the minaret ban and California's budget problems.

Dieting is silly for the reason you pointed out. Your body will go into starvation mode and you’ll somehow manage to put on pounds while eating 1500 calories a day.

I’m trying to lose 25 pounds to get back into lean shape and end the slow trend towards porkerism that I was on. My tactic run 25-30 miles a week, do strength training and go cold turkey on the sweets. Cutting the sweets is not really about dieting, so much as not snacking to make up the shortfall. By running and doing the strength training, I’m kicking my burn rates up over 3000 calories a day and my body is not exactly in starvation mode. I’ve only lost 5 pounds so far in the past 2-3 weeks, but my waist size is melting like butter in a frying pan.

It’s all very simple and requires no special willpower. It only requires that you plan your life around 5-6 hours of sports per week.