Thanks for FTFM. The quotes around 'grand jury' were, I guess, me admitting that I don't know what one is. It still seems like a broad fishing expedition in the hope of finding a charge to hang on Wikileaks, but I guess that's justified if they find that a real crime was committed by them.

nb. you only get to call me an ass when it's shown that Wikileaks 'conspired' with Manning, which would be stupid on their part. I'm betting they weren't that dumb, since that seems to have been anticipated in the way they configured the whole operation.

Yeah, that's great. It's just the 'bad people' that they're after: including an Icelandic MP. Considering this whole 'grand jury' process is going on in secret, why should we be confident that there's a due process behind deciding whose IP addresses are being fished out of Twitter?

I mean, call me an ass when I'm proved wrong, but the whole point of Wikileaks is that you have a drop-box to leak documents, but it's clean hands from the other side. They don't 'conspire,' they just receive the stuff and publish it. It's pretty open what they do and how. They're just desperate to pin a crime to pin a crime on Julian and his buddies, because that Espionage Act law is looking like weak beer.

I'll raise you one: and why shouldn't China be in 'the center of the world'? America doesn't have a god-given right to be 'top country', just as Great Britain didn't before it, or even Italy or Greece before them. The economic rise of America didn't require the subjugation of Great Britain - our economies and interests are too closely interlinked.

The ways things currently are, China's prosperity is reliant on Americas well-being, too - they own too much American debt to want America to tank. Why do people assume other people doing well is an existential threat of some sort. Looks at all the countries 'behind' America that do perfectly well: the Sweden's, Switzerland's, Singapore's of the world.

The 20th century was America's century, but change is a constant.

"However, Assange is NOT a journalist. Journalists are supposed to have a sense of responsibility."
That's an interesting distinction. How would you legislate for that? A "sense of responsibility test"? Only people who pass this can publish without fear of conviction?
I'd rather say that anyone publishing is protected as a journalist, and people who have secrets should learn to do a better job of keeping them.

One of Wikileaks biggest problems is their name: they aren't actually *leaking* anything - they are publishing other people's leaks. Leaking is legally dubious, but publishing is protected by the concepts like Freedom of the Press in many countries. Calling yourself FooLeaks implies that you commit some kind of crime for a living.

According a Guardian report:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-wikileaks
Over 3 MILLION people have access to this private network. The big story to me is that if this material is really significant, why is the US so incredibly bad at keeping it secret?

Wikileaks is not some kind of 'superspy' organization with resources and techniques beyond the imagining of say, a moderately competent nation state. If they could get full access to this 'damaging' information, then I find it hard to imagine that China, Russia, France and most of the western world couldn't either.

Either this is really sensitive material and this is a wake up call that giving 3 million people access to a sensitive database is a poor strategy, or it's not that damaging anyway and the US foresaw this possibility and thought the risk/damage was acceptable.

If you want an even more amazing view of Stonehenge, here's a visiting tip that doesn't seem to be that well known - if you plan ahead and fill out this form:
http://bit.ly/bYertb ...you can get inside the ropes and get within touching distance of the stones at sunrise. You get the place pretty much to yourself *and* the major road running right by the site is completely empty. It's a genuinely humbling experience and you can get views like this.
http://bit.ly/dxPWXE
Yeah, go ahead and write me, English Heritage.
(although I still feel bad about the moment I found I was accidentally standing on a halfburied lintel.)

"While our data doesn't identify which broken screens resulted from dirt trapped behind a slide case, at least a quarter of the broken glass claims involved the back screen."
"Back screen"? "At least a quarter"?
I'm with Mr Anonymous Coward on this, even if he did use the word "fucktard"

ack! Too late! "The Hobbit" directed by Guillermo Del Toro is now the great lost films of our generation. I really hope there's a chance of re-attaching him to the project. His lightness of touch with fantasy would have suited this material so well.

Last time I felt like this was the canning of Darren Aronofsky's "Batman: Year One"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_Year_One#Canceled_film
which would have been pretty awesome too....

Unlike being tired, or having low blood sugar, having an alcoholic drink is 100% avoidable and voluntary in *every single case*. Choosing to drink and drive is choosing to needlessly endanger other people on the road.
These people have already provably shown that they lack the judgement to make good decisions about their safety and those around them. So it seems proportionate to me to require them, and only them, to demonstrate that they have changed their behavior for some reasonable period of time.

This isn't a civil liberties thing, it's using technology to do something that demonstrably benefits society: not punishing, but changing antisocial behavior.

I wonder if BP have considered spinning the leak as one big homeopathic remedy for global warming?

This has been done before: in the investigation of the poisoning of Alexander Livinenko, the traces of Polonium 210 left wherever the poisoner(s) went gave the UK authorities a very detailed trail to work with - one that not only showed the exact teapot used for the poisoning, but also provides a fingerprint of where the Po-210 was produced and at what date.

It's quite a fascinating story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko_poisoning#Polonium_trails

Simply substitute Po-210 for something not deadly and you have a wonderful tracking mechanism.

Thanks for asking! Most people just go ahead and comment...

You are in violation of a patent if you violate any single claim - but!

Typically, you can describe claims as "independent" or "dependent" - in this case Claims 1 and 13 are the independent claims: they don't refer to any other claims.

These are the most important claims. To work out if you're in violation of a patent, read these first. If you aren't covered by either of these, then you aren't violating the patent.

The dependent claims (all the others) build on the independent claims by adding detail of some sort. You can't be in violation just by having the same detail in your implementation: you have to be violating this claim and the independent claim it refers to together.

By the way, most discussions on patents on Slashdot are usually the result of an accumulation of misinterpretations of the way patents work. It's really *only* the claims that matter, and when the other parts seem broad, it doesn't matter at all. Don't get riled up by the background text or the abstract - as people so often do. However, to my eyes, (IANAL) this patent actually is absurd, for once.

oops. Took me a while to realize that is one of those rare occasions where a site make it worth disabling NoScript...

I have an idea that I'm offering up as a way of making a huge splash and demonstrating a sense of perspective and humor apparently lacking at Apple these days:

Steve Jobs, live on stage at WWDC 2010: "And now, with a very special announcement about a new product we're all very excited about here Apple, may I introduce...
GRAY POWELL!"