It is clear the reopening of Sweden's investigation into Assange, and the extradition proceedings, were at the behest of the Americans, but I am puzzled. Why does the US want to eventually extradite Assange from Sweden rather than more quickly from the UK? In this kind of political case, the UK is likely to be at least as cooperative as Sweden. Who has a good theory?

what I'm curious about is how long a reverse-terrorist attack will take to happen (enough westerners are so pissed off at islam that I do wonder how long it will be before some christian crashes a plane into a mosque or equiv).

I think an interesting example of this is the Anders Brevick affair: a middle class, white Christian male murders 77 mostly teenage victims to protest the increased acceptance of Islam in his country. A small proportion of the population anywhere that (i) feels irrationally strongly about some issue; and (ii) is powerless to fight it in any other way will convince themselves that it is helpful to protest the perceived (often real) wrong by attacking innocent third parties. Demonizing groups that are already extremely angry will make them even more unhappy and possibly turn 0.001% of them into terrorists.

The only valid reasons an airline employee might have to refuse boarding to a passenger with a damaged passport are:

• It is being proffered as proof of identity and is so badly damaged (for instance, the photograph is unrecognizable) as to be inadequate for that purpose. Or
• (Only if boarding an international flight) the employee has a reasonable concern that the immigration official at the destination might refuse entry based on the condition of the passport. This is because the airline becomes responsible for returning you to your starting point should this occur. Airlines (and individual airline staff) vary in their strictness over this kind of issue. I strongly suspect that this was the real reason for refusing boarding, and the statements about the passport being a privilege was just a gratuitous (and rude and insensitive) comment.

First, unless you are an expert debater, recognize that others can argue this better than you can. I suggest you ask him to spend 10 minutes watching the educational video on SOPA/PIPA put together by the folks at Khan Academy. Next suggest that he browse Doc Searl's (Harvard Law School) blog post on why SOPA/PIPA is a disaster waiting to happen. You might casually ask why he thinks even the sponsors of SOPA (once educated on the issues) have withdrawn their support.

Since the Oracle take over, it seems all Sun's products have been degraded. The likely consequences of allowing Oracle monopoly control of Sun were clear from the beginning. The interference with Java, OpenOffice and MySQL was bad enough, but they are now allowing Sun to emit dangerous plasma clouds. When are the responsible authorities going to take action to prevent Oracle from inconveniencing us all in this way.

Perhaps, you would care to reread Judges 21. Here are some selected highlights:

10 So the assembly sent twelve thousand fighting men with instructions to go to Jabesh Gilead and put to the sword those living there, including the women and children.
11 “This is what you are to do,” they said. “Kill every male and every woman who is not a virgin.”
12 They found among the people living in Jabesh Gilead four hundred young women who had never slept with a man, and they took them to the camp at Shiloh in Canaan.
...
20 So they instructed the Benjamites, saying, “Go and hide in the vineyards
21 and watch. When the young women of Shiloh come out to join in the dancing, rush from the vineyards and each of you seize one of them to be your wife.
...
23 So that is what the Benjamites did. While the young women were dancing, each man caught one and carried her off to be his wife. Then they returned to their inheritance and rebuilt the towns and settled in them.

This is according to the most recent translations. Trust me, the older translations are worse.

If you will claim that it glorifies violence, would you also say that the Diary of Anne Frank glorifies violence? Because both are the same style of literature-- that is, historical writings, and both contain violence.

I guess I was not very observant, but I failed to read any approval of the violence in the Diary of Anne Frank. When "the lord" burns people who murmur against him, tells his people to kill all the non virgins of a town they have captured, but keep and rape all the virgins, mandates death for homosexuals, and a thousand other acts of violence in the OT, it is in the context that everything God does is beyond approach.

It's the Old Testament! THAT, isn't a childrens story!

It also is of dubious artistic merit, contains explicit sex scenes and glorifies violence. If one is going to justify censorship at all, I can see no reason why the sale and possession of this filth should not be banned.

I am not a history buff, but even my hazy recollections were enough to know that your post contains some pretty dubious thinking

Catalonia wasn't a nation then (otherwise they wouldn't have taken part in the war to choose Spain's next king, would they?)

Based on this logic, Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire would not have been nations either, since they most definitely took part in the war. Nevertheless, I would tend to accept that Catalonia's independence by that point in its history was questionable.

Feel free to point _any_ time of history before 1714 when Catalonia was an unified entity

The same Wikipedia article you researched contains these quotes:

... after the defeat of Emir Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqiwas's troops at Tours in 732 local Visigoths regained autonomy , though they voluntarily made themselves tributary to the emerging Frankish kingdom, [emphasis mine]

and

As part of the Crown of Aragon — most historians would say the dominant part — the Catalans became a maritime power, expanding by trade and conquest into Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and even Sardinia and Sicily.

This second quote suggests to me that, at a certain point of time, the Crown of Aragon amounted to a Catalonian empire. As with all empires, it eventually collapsed, but Catalonia has arguably as much right to a claim of nationhood as England, (previously the centre of the British Empire, and now a constituent part of the United Kingdom)

This brings up some interesting points: if you have a property interest in a domain, then what do you pay the yearly fee for?

Administrative costs. In a similar way, once I stake a claim to a particular trademark, I continue to own it as long as I do not abandon it. IMHO, this is an easy decision, though I agree there will be pressure in some quarters to get it quashed.

Note that the study is freely available at link from "Polution Free Cities" blog

For those who do not have the time to read this quite convincing 31 page paper, here is one quote from the introduction confirming that credible sources cite second hand smoke as a risk factor for lung cancer:

Second hand smoke (SHS) is also an established cause of both lung cancer and cardiovascular disease (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2004, 2006, 2010).

Right now, the focus seems to be on the UAV market. If the technology is ever used for manned flight, this will not be for a long time. Whether the technology is truly a major advance for UAVs in constrained spaces (the current objective) we shall need to wait and see. From the company website:

The current status of D-DALUS D-DALUS is currently in prototype stage. Over recent weeks IAT21 have conducted extensive constrained flight tests in a specially prepared laboratory near Salzburg, including the transition from vertical to forward flight, and are now ready to move to an open test range for free flight tests. In trials to date D-DALUS has met the performance criteria placed upon it and appears to be scalable, becoming more efficient and less complex as it increases in size. It will therefore be ideally suited for applications that range from maritime search and rescue, through the carriage of freight, to operating alongside and within buildings during fires or, for example, nuclear accidents.

If everybody posting on YouTube is to be considered a candidate for going crazy with guns, and suspended, then schools are going to become a lot emptier.

Dilbert's take on Internet logic

The "hack" proved that databases with huge amounts of sensitive data (not just users, passwords, and personal private information by the way) were easily accessible via an SQL injection attack. In theory, they could have downloaded the lot, but it would have taken a huge amount of time and resources to do so using remote SQL injection. Their objectives were not criminal use of the data, but to embarrass Sony, and probably massage their own egos. They did not need everything to do that. Be thankful that this group launched the attack, and hope they did so before a criminal enterprise grabbed all the data. The damage from exposing this small sample, especially with the content available to assist in mitigation, will probably be pretty limited. That would not be true if the mafia silently acquired the data, and used it before the data breach came to light.

I really like the idea of an open source, community content, translation system. Maybe, at some point in the future, Apertium might develop to the point it can be compared with Google Translate. Right now, it is no near.

Google supports nearly 60 languages, including all the most important languages worldwide. It can usually automatically identify the input language and provide understandable translations in any of the 58 supported languages. Apertium supports a handful of European languages, and cannot even support translation of some permutations of the languages it does include.

Apertium needs a huge group of contributors, similar to that enjoyed by Wikipedia, as well as linguists and engineers from around the world. Given that, maybe the need for proprietary translators can be assigned to history. Today, they are essential.