Comment Re:Real Nerds don't BBQ (Score 1) 149
You can do both. I've spent today running back and forth between my grill and RStudio.
Through lifelong dedication, a craftsman can align a car with a string, or smoke BBQ in a trash can, or whatever it is he or she does. But their activity doesn't scale beyond what they can personally produce. And if they end up smoking 100 pounds of meat per day to run their restaurant, that's it. There's little time left in the day to innovate. Craftsmen don't scale well, unless they industrialize their processes, (and then you risk ending up with a product with all the qualities of Budweiser.).
The rest of us are dedicated to other things: jobs, families, other hobbies. Does our inexperience mean we can't enjoy products of similar quality as the craftsmen produce? What's wrong with distilling the essence of their wisdom into a PID controller and an Atmel chip? If my BBQ-bot fails, I'm certainly not going to fix it with string - but that's not the point. The point is I could occasionally enjoy a high quality smoked brisket, thanks to a machine that knows more than I do about the process.
I don't have anything nearly that bad - my worst only cost me data. A friend taught me (while I was still learning Linux) a trick, how you could play music with dd by outputting the sound to
The posting specifically mentions a 4kg model flying 15 feet over a crowd. That's not a "toy" sized device, that's an untethered Cuisinart.
How about handing a friend a video camera, and you with a fishing net on a long pole. Show it flying unsafely, take it down on video, and hand the footage to the cops telling them you feared for your family's safety.
To me this sounds like the not uncommon hype that seems to follow the release of indifferent 'horror' movies. Like the one called something like 'The Human Centipede', which was supposed to be the most incredibly extreme horro movie ever. Only, it turned out to be a flop, hardly worth a shrug, something that could have been thought up by a couple of teen-agers and filmed on a smartphone.
I don't know, maybe I've grown too critical with age - I've stopped having night-mares because I tend to wake up and think "What is this crap?" because the story is too thin and the effects are unrealistic.
Back to TFA: molestation isn't rape. Without reading the article, I'd guess based on the sentence that the offense of the guy in question was pretty small. Maybe a grope on the train or something, happens pretty often on those crowded Japanese commuter trains. Is that also worth murder?
Well, without reading the article, you don't know if what they call molestation would be called child rape in our part of the world. To enlighten the debate a little: "The Japanese Penal Code sets a minimal age of consent of 13" (from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) - which to means that the court would be biased towards assuming consent, unless the girl was very young. Japan is also a society that still has a great deal of sympathy towards the rights of men is realtion to women.
From the article:
"He harbors remorse over the incident and is leading a new life. The search results prevent him from rehabilitating himself," the man's defense counsel claimed, adding, "Publicizing past criminal information with a person's real name doesn't serve the public's needs, and is therefore illegal."
Google had earlier refuted the plaintiff's claim, saying, "It was a vicious crime exploiting a child in order to satisfy his own sexual desire. The crime has attracted much criticism from the international community as well as a great deal of interest from parents."
What is interesting here is Google's statement; they are normally very competent when it comes to covering their own arse, so they would not come out with such a harsh statement unless they fellt sure it would stand up to scrutiny. The defence lawyer's statement, on the other hand, is vapid nonsense, as far as I can see. Just imagine anybody else getting away from their past with that excuse, even if all they had done was shoplifting a bottle of cheap wine. When we do something wrong, it stays with us; criminal cases are public: justice must be SEEN to be done.
There is one thing where the UK would have had a role even if he hadn't fled bail, in that the UK would have been the EAW "sending state". Under an EAW surrender, the sending state has certain rights and responsibilities - for example, if a request comes for extradition to a third party, it has to not only go through the receiving state's judiciary system, but also the sending state's judiciary system; the receiving state can't just hand off someone that they received under an EAW at will. Which is one of the things that makes the whole thing even more ridiculous - Assange had so much faith in Sweden's independence against the UK (such as their ban on extradition for intelligence crimes and 2006 Swedish special forces raids to shut down the US's rendition flights secretly moving through their territory) that he called it his "shield" and was applying for a residence permit there. But suddenly, practically overnight, Sweden transformed into Evil US Lackeys(TM) when he was accused of rape. So then he went to the UK where he talked about his great respect for their independence and impartiality and promised to abide by whatever rulings their judicial system made. Until he ran out of appeals, wherein the UK also turned into Evil US Lackeys(TM). Funny how he felt just fine walking around freely in both of these countries all this time, having only one of the two countries as barriers against US extradition, but adamantly fought the situation that would make them both be barriers to extradition.
Which is, of course, false. AA has accused Assange of lesser sexual crimes, and SW has accused him of rape. There are no counts of rape against Assange concerning AA on the EAW, only three lesser counts (2x molestation and 1x unlawful sexual coersion). There is one count of rape on the EAW (count #4) concerning SW, in line with what the women have accused him of and also in line with what the Svea Court of Appeals has found probable cause for. Both women sought and retained legal representatives who have pushed the case forward for them (initially, both of them retained Claes Borgström, who was the one whose appeal got the closed portion of the investigation re-opened. More recently AA fired Claes because she thought he wasn't doing a good enough of a job with the case and was more focused on self aggrandizement; her new legal representative since started a new push to get Assange handed over to Sweden).
There's a lot more detail on these topics and more here.
The Assange-echo-chamber meme "Neither of the women involved have ever accused Assange of rape" is based on a simple distortion of a key element. SW (the one who the rape charge is concerned) didn't want to have to file charges - she only wanted to force Assange to take a STD test. She didn't want the thing to turn into a giant media circus that basically ruined her life and forced her into hiding from angry Assange fans. But there's a difference between not wanting to file charges and not accusing Assange of rape. She did accuse Assange of rape - first in conversations with her friends while coming to grips with what happened, and then went to the police station, where they told the officer on duty that they wanted advice on how to report a rape (see the statement by Linda Wassgren, the on-duty officer on the 20th). They were then interviewed separately where she described being raped, and after the interview she took a rape kit and sought a legal advocate (getting, ultimately, Claes). Since the leak of the Memoria file (a scummy act on Assange's side, I should add, as it's full of identifying personal details about his accusers and their families that have been used to harrass them - and we know it came from Assange's side because the cover page has a note to Assange's attorney telling him that it's confidential and must not be released), there have been a number of other followup interviews and investigations, and at no point have any objections from AA or SW been recorded. There is absolutely nothing in the record supporting a claim "Neither of the women involved have ever accused Assange of rape". SW has pretty much had to disappear after the event; AA went into hiding for a while but has since resumed taking part in some of the old forums that she used to; last fall she mentioned the case for the first time since the one brief statement she had given to the press after going to the police, mentioning offhand in an unrelated thread that a couple years ago she was the victim of a sex crime and that the perpetrator still hasn't been brought to justice, but rather she's still attacked by his fans for daring to report it. She didn't mention Assange by name, but it's obvious who she was referring to.
Most people who are raped don't want to file charges. They don't want the viscious attacks that come with it and want to shove the event in the past and not have to keep reliving it. A hundred times over when the accused is someone famous who has a lot of loyal fans. But claiming "not wanting to file charges" means "wasn't raped" is a massive distortion.
One of the things that immediately puts me in alert mode is that name 'Liquid Metal', capitalised, no less. Understanding of what a glass actually is, is realtively new, of course, and something that is likely to become very useful in the future, but why make a phone with frame made of it? If it is indeed as good and durable as all that, is it actually going to be relevant? Smartphones are 'old' almost as soon as they go on sale, since the technology is still developing quickly, and unless the hardware etc can be upgraded easily, having an expensive phone like this is no more than a toy for the rich and stupid.
I think we are facing a real problem, and I don't think we can solve it by waving lofty ideals about from the comfort of our armchairs. Fundamental right like privacy and freedom of speech are too important to be used frivolously. If they get pulled out again and again as a knee-jerk reaction every time somebody can't have it all their own way, then they will get watered down to the point where people in general get sick enough to allow them to be taken away completely - or at least severely restricted.
So, instead of automatically whining, try to come up with a better way tol solve the problems: organised crime and terrorist organisations, just to mention two, are very good at using communications that are difficult to trace, and our best weapons are hampered by having to follow the law. Shall we simply roll over and take it on the chin, let internal gangs do what they like and terrorists organise ever bolder attacks on civilians?
Amongst the readers of Slashdot are some, at least, who aspire to be clever and able to solve problems; so contribute constructively, if you think you can.
Hey, let's not forget the Wikleaks Funnies while we're at it, such as when they presented a Nigerian scam email as proof of US military corruption.
It's not an "IF" as to whether Assange cherry picks things for political reasons. He does. There are lots of things he's deliberately kept back with threats to release if certain things happen that he doesn't want (unredacted cables, files against NewsCorp, etc). The most famous was his "insurance file" which was to be released "should anything happen to him", which was left vague enough that it wasn't clear whether he was talking about "being killed" or simply "being sent to Sweden" (the statement being made during his fight to avoid surrender to Sweden). The scummiest blackmail on his part, IMHO, was his threatening to release unredacted documents that could get various aid/human rights organizations' employees killed if said organizations didn't provide him money (most famously his $700k shakedown of Amnesty International).
He refers to the leaks in Wikileaks' possession as his "property", and made all Wikileaks staffers sign an onerous NDA imposing ridiculous fines if they do anything to reduce the monetary value of said property, such as by leaking it.
Speaking of stopping Morales's plane, that was actually Assange's doing. Largest "SWATting" prank in world history.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
