There are no "rape charges". Never were. He's wanted, by order of a single right-wing prosecutor which our intel boys carefully selected, to answer questions about not using a condom once during a threesome - a session be conducted only on a particular spot next to a convenient airport for the US to snatch him up and drag him to a kangaroo trial wherever they care to hold one. If they even bother to charge him. They refuse to ask the questions anywhere but where the US can snatch him. For this he's been in a single room in an embassy for half a decade while the Brits spend millions of pounds to watch the doors, at the behest of the English-speaking intelligence nations little club. The fact that he exposed their crimes seems to be a bit pertinent. They're the charged, and convicted, and yet they have the guns ready to shoot him. No one is waiting for them to leave their holes.

BTW, one of the women has departed this "case" in disgust, because she figured out she's being used by the US. What Assange did, if he did it, was to not use a condom during a night of three-way sex. They said. It's a crime only in that country; nowhere else in the world can this "crime" be charged. And the "crime" isn't rape. Let's put it out there: US intelligence used its NSA superpowers to track down every woman Assange ever slept with, contacted them, and twiggled and wiggled until they found something, somewhere, to start an investigation on territory they could use to grab him. Even then, they had to shop until they found a rightwinger that hated him enough to start the process. Other prosecutors had refused to gin up a crime. Simultaneously they used their widespread network of tame journalists and news companies to spread the "rape" accusation far and wide, to destroy his credibility and blacken his name. And as the HB Gary emails showed, there is software sold by HB Gary and others used by people employed by corporations and the government to set up networks of fake personas to splatter newsgroups such as this with horseshit that they want to promulgate. Truth may just be getting its shoes on while lies run around the world, but now they have paid groups of fake people shooting the truth before it gets out the goddamned door.

Robot cars won't need them. Are you against progress, grandpa?

Crayola needs to make a crayon color called Indoor White Boy.

I think I may have responsed to the wrong post. Abject apologies.

Don't worry, a billion self-driven cars will never make an error. We've thought of everything. Because that's how engineering works. No errors, all the time. Unless it's turning a corner or something--

I read the article. What I mostly took away is this: genetic disorders are about to become repairable as a matter of routine injections, in an increasing number of cases. We took a ten year detour because of Bush and his fetal position, and that idiot pair of parents who sued a research line into a ten year hiatus and ruined one of the best researchers in the world. But it's coming back. Stupidity can stop this only so long, it seems. The age of wonders is coming. We need this hope, as so much else is being ruined that we can do nothing about.

The 20th century has been repealed. It's over. Back to kings, merchant princes, and ghostly immortal power structures.
Kind of glad I'll be dead soon.

Greenish-purple. The colour of magic.

Ah, Fox News. Incapable of detecting humor. Especially when you're the joke.

The future is finally coming. Damn.

Here's a thought: would it work on dogs? We could test it by color coding the box with food in it, figuratively or literally.

The words were pronounced differently in different parts of the English speaking world, so the spellings matched the different ways. Dictionary writers nailed down their own preferences, so we're stuck with it.

And the correct pronunciation of "buyed" is "bawt". Today. Four hundred years ago? "Bawgkt", as it is spelled. Fight was "figkt. The English language spells out exact how stubborn and irrational the main British culture (that would be Planet America, too) is, when you strip the paint off and stare at it for a while.

English usage froze almost solid the day they started printing dictionaries. It won't change much - the past is no longer prologue when it comes to pronunciation drift. We also have audio recordings, so pronunciation is pretty much what is was a hundred years ago.

yuz = use.

We can't recognize our own words if spelled phonetically!

Ben Franklin had a crack at this during his own lifetime, trying out a phonetic alphabet. He corresponded with his son that way, for a bit.
In the 70's, there was Unifon, I believe, one letter for each unique sound. And there are so many more.

I have to say, learning English spelling would take about two days instead of seven years. We really do waste a hell of a lot of our kids' time with idiotic adherence to learning past mistakes. And no, I have no idea if it could ever be corrected.

However, we *could* adopt phonetic spelling as an alternative, secondary spelling, the way the Japanese language can be spelled using three different sets of characters. But using real time translation apps will kill such needs, I guess.

But if you sync to the cloud, that is, transmit your incriminating video from you registered phone through a cell provider who has your credit card information to a storage provider who also has your credit card information, the cops can show up at your door, follow your car, and get "in your face" until they find something to hang you with. The method of your "empowerment" is the means of your destruction by those who can access the unanonymous information embedded in the file, the video stream, the phone company, the NSA, and various app companies whom you agreed to share your location data with who in turn sell your location to thrird parties who sell it to anyone, including the cops.

All this doesn't factor in the Homeland Security efforts (coming soon) to grant authorities such as the police the ability to transmit a Kill All Cameras command in a geofenced area. That's coming soon, and the police really, really are looking forward to that.

The person may be keeping quiet, but the ID of that phone or camera is embedded in the video file somewhere, and if no one else can access that information, certainly the police can figure it out. If it is a phone, it is designed to identify the owner. For terrorism prevention, we've made it impossible to hide from the cops. Sucks if its the cops who are out to get you.