So your work filter blocks Human Rights Watch? Interesting.

"Two men"? You mean two CIA agents, or two torture victims?

It got no meaningful consequences for anyone, either in Sweden or the US. Italy at least had the guts to issue arrest warrants for the CIA criminals, no such thing in lapdog Sweden.

I'm not here to entertain your easy dismissals. I'd say the burden is on you to show Sweden's government has changed character. Got anything?

They used to blindly give the US what they want, even when it violated fundamental human rights .If it was your human rights that were at stake, I think you should be forgiven for not trusting that they have changed.

Instead, what we should really do is improve the drilling techniques to avoid/minimize leakage.

No. In order to say that, we need to know how feasible it is to reduce leakage. It's by no means certain it's easy or even possible.

Try dangling this in front of your nose. After a day or two, you might see it.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/1...

UK is more powerful , and more nationalistic. The Conservatives may be just as deferential to the US in private as Sweden's ruling party, but they would pay a big price with their constituents if they acted like lapdogs in public.

I'm sure you know UK, but you don't know Sweden. The ruling party has close ties to the US. They've used Karl Rove as a consultant, and the foreign minister has admitted to passing on highly confidential information to the US embassy in the 70s - inter-party negotiation positions, stuff he wasn't even allowed to share with his own party.

They would pay a political price for just turning over Assange. But they would do it. They would need only the flimsiest of excuses. To be seen as US' puppets in their own country's eyes? No big deal to them, rubbing elbows with the US is worth it.

Criminal organizations aren't typically as well-run as they're presented in cinema. Organizations with as much violence as the Mexican cartels are going to be a nightmare to manage, with so little trust, so many people worried that they'll get murdered for random reasons, etc.

Government and corporate bureaucracies have a problem with ass-covering, people acting defensively to their own benefit but to the organization's detriment. How much worse isn't that going to be in places where you get killed for making mistakes (or making the wrong enemies - or the wrong friends).

So the level of personal initiative and creativity you can expect from a drug cartel isn't very high. This market is going to belong to the DRPs and McAfees of the world for a long while yet.

The difference is that The Pirate Bay deals in bits, whereas the Silk Road clones deal in physical goods that need to be shipped by post. If all these drugs could be cheaply assembled by a molecular 3d-printer or something, so only information needed to be transfered, I promise the sites would be every inch as resilient as The Pirate Bay.

People desiring religious experiences, but not being able to trust them unless there are hallucinogens involved.

This may have little to do with the Cultural Revolution. Picking wild mushrooms plays a much larger role in some cultures.

A mushroom expert I used warned against picking any small brown mushrooms, because there are so many and they can be so hard to tell apart. They're more trouble than they're worth - although maybe the risk/benefit ration looks different for shroomers.

There's absolutely zero reason to believe anything the NSA says about how Snowden got the documents, or indeed, about anything. They believe they are entitled to lie to congress, so the public isn't even a question.

"If the villagers didn't riot and just left quietly instead then you would still be left wanting better comments."

No, actually. There's more than enough in line to replace your oh-so-high quality comments. Good riddance.

What sank digg was not UI changes, but handing over control totally to advertisers. UI changes are not something to act disruptive in every fricking thread over, even if they reduce features. Slashdot is based on antediluvian perl code and has struggled with it for ages, it's not surprising that some features are disabled - permanently or not - in yet another attempt to modernize it. As long as they keep the archives, and maybe one day even make them effectively searchable, they can do whatever they wish as far as I'm concerned.

And as far as I'm concerned, the beta protesters are just a bunch of bored attention seekers.

There's a reason why you can't just strip out FAT support, a reason those patents are so obscene. It's a de-facto standard, and you need it for compatibility with lots and lots of stuff.

The actual technical worth of the FAT filesystems is zero. They are dumb, slow, they fragment, and lacks essential features. You can have strictly superior systems for free. But due to network effects, it's very hard to get rid of as the lowest-common-denominator filesystem, that can be read on every Windows and OSX and dumb little flashcard-reading gadget.

But can a chat bot plus big data really produce anything beyond a creepy, awkward facsimile?

No, it cannot. Once you're dead, you're dead. Game over.

Sure it can! It can provide notoriety, media attention, and maybe even a position in the ethics faculty.