people have presupposed Assange's innocence

You have a problem with "Innocent until proven guilty"?

On my old Casio graphing calculator, assignment was carried out using an arrow, so what would be written as "

A = 3

" in C would be written as "

3->A

" on the calculator. It's the best syntax for that operation that I've ever seen. "A" is the name of the pigeonhole, 3 is the value stored in it. "Put 3 in the pigeonhole labelled A." It makes perfect sense.

I don't know the stats, but maybe it's more correct to say that malware sites are more likely to host pornography than they are to fall into other categories? It's probably the best way to attract large streams of users.

Cars come with steering wheels that let me go where ever I want, even if it is an off road adventure in some nasty, sticky muck.

Cars come with radiator caps so if too much pressure builds up, the hot fluids are released into an overflow tank.

And children are not allowed to drive them!

It is, to me, beyond plausibility that [transfinite numbers] could have any practical application in trading

...The terrifying alternative, of course, being that Wall Street has discovered a way to create a literally infinite quantity of money, and a year from now, the only way to tell who is richer than whom will be by comparing the size of two transfinite ordinals.

(It makes bank transfers insanely difficult because there's no consistent way to perform ordinal subtraction. If I have $^2 and I owe you $ then either I still have $^2 left over afterwards, or I can't pay you at all!)

Well, if the <sarcasm> tag is a text modifier that works in the same way as <em> and <strong>, you can safely nest them. They might prove idempotent but not necessarily. It depends on Slashdot's specific CSS.

"Get a second opinion" has always been good advice in medicine. The internet is not a good place to get a second opinion, but if encourages people to get second opinions from real doctors, that's a net positive.

The terrorists haven't won. "The terrorists" have nebulous and ill-defined victory conditions which vary greatly from terrorist to terrorist - if they even have a clear idea of what they want. But you can be sure that "Waste Americans' time at the airport" wasn't the objective.

You have lost, but it's not a zero-sum game.

No, that was the day that the USA lost. "The terrorists" have an entirely different set of victory conditions - most of them not yet satisfied, although it depends greatly on the terrorist - and it's not a zero-sum game. If they cared about your personal freedoms they would have hit the Statue of Liberty.

Actually, school teaches you that. If it didn't, you were not paying attention in class.

Sure, if your degree was in computer science.