It seems about as strange as vi competing with emacs, or gnome with KDE. I think it's great that there will be a whole bunch of wikileaks organisations, it should scare the hell out of our corrrupt and self-serving bureacrats. Or as Obi-Wan put it, "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

Ecuador recently unilaterally defaulted on their own debt. It's one of the crazy club with cuba, venezuela and argentina. They might offer Assange asylum and then make an offer to the Americans to lock him up - either when the government changes, or before.

Yes. Or if you poured mercury on yourself while using it, you might electrocute yourself.

Explanation 1) Assange is clearly damaged goods. It looks like the girls he's been having sex with are also damaged goods, it's hardly surprising for a couple of them to get together and start boiling his bunny. And I'm sure the CIA will be happy to lend them a few kroner to hire a top lawyer. Hilary Clinton has $100k she made "trading commodities", perhaps she could lend them some money.

Explanation 2) He did actually rape them, the lawyer is doing it for free or they are rich.

Explanation 3) The CIA persuaded them to lie and raise a case, or they are CIA operatives.

Most people agree that the legal system exists to protect society (among other things). If setting an example discourages others from committing crimes, then by setting an example the legal system is doing it's job. In this case, I think they should not pursue Manning, but that's not relevant.

Perhaps drones are a good thing compared to the Taliban - I don't recall them being great friends of women, they tended to aim their ordinance at them rather than hit them by accident. I do like wikileaks, I think it makes the free west stronger, but it doesn't seem to be possible to leak much information out of regimes like Venezuela, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea or Iran which I think in some people's minds reinforces a prejudice that somehow America is the biggest villain in the world. America is a great country and wikileaks is built on American (actually - whisper it - DoD) technology. Reading their website, I get the impression wikileaks might agree with me.

This is bullshit. There are 4 causes of climate change - manufacturing, heating/cooling, cars, and planes. As long as people keep flying, driving and buying stuff they don't need we'll keep heading down the abyss. Blaming the oil industry is like blaming Hitler's chef for WWII, they may provide the chemical energy, but we are the ones that fuck up the environment with it. Biofuels won't make a significant difference to the environment - about 6% of our current energy use could be made up with them, according to this expert.

I agree BG is a nicer guy than Jobs - wouldn't surprise me if Ballmer was too. I just don't think these guys are any different than us. I don't particularly care about Apple's staff, I'm sure they don't care much about me. If I had to run Apple, I'd probably try my best for a while, but I'd doubtless mess up. I agree it's a terrible shame what Ellison is doing to Sun, but I don't think he's any more evil than my old sports teacher. His punishment will be the damage he will do to his (and Oracle's) reputation. From fighting MS to being considered more evil than them in 10 years, isn't bad going.

So it seems you are saying that the powerful are more abusive than normal people? But I don't yet understand how this works - how can Gates and Ellison get into these positions of monopoly power if they are constantly abusing people, given that they started with so little power? Is it a master-slave sadomasochistic relationship between the normal people (masochists) and the powerful (sadists), where the normal slaves deliberately elevate sadists like Gates to positions of power? Or is it that by becoming powerful a normal person begins to become sadistic?

Imagine what would have happened if the bomb had been armed with its fissile capsule, and it had blown up at the intersection of the Hayward and San Andreas faults - it could have sunk the entire eastern seaboard!

Aw don't ruin the fun. This is a kdawson story - the whole point is that the government is trying to kill you.

Adverse selection applies to all insurance. What do you think is so special about health insurance? And I don't see how a government is better set up to pay "no price" than an insurance company - instead of paying a premium to a company, you pay it in tax. The only advantages I can see of moving insurance to the public sector is that you force everyone to pay for insurance, and you can apply progression to the premiums - i.e. you can charge the rich a higher premium solely because they are rich. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to cut to the nub of the argument.

Sorry for picking on your comment - but I wanted to say - I feel the same way as this PC Mag guy. He's not a troll. I've seen a huge migration of users (like 30%) from XP to windows 7, completely bypassing linux which has not gained any market share above its 1% level. I had hoped that we would see linux overtake Mac - on the desktop PC. I know linux will win out on the tablet, smartphone etc, that a mac is BSD anyway - but I hoped to see linux get a decent marketshare on the desktop too. I think a lot of people who matter (IT people) must still be using windows, which bewilders me. Anyway...

so kind of apple to let me know what is and what is not optimal.