Thanks. That clarifies things a bit and you also raise an important point regarding the difference between diplomatic asylum and other cases of people seeking refuge in an embassy.

Before we all get too worked up about the US not recognising the concept of diplomatic asylum (too late I guess), there's less here than meets the eye. Diplomatic asylum is a concept that has long been accepted in Latin America, and it developed there in part because of some periods in which there were many coups and people trying to escape from new regimes found refuge in foreign embassies. Diplomatic asylum is however not the same as Chinese dissidents seeking refuge in the US embassy in Beijing or the Cold War cases, as parent points out, and this reflects that outside of Latin America, the concept of diplomatic asylum is not accepted under international law. That's why it's sometimes described as regional international law. Chinese and other dissidents are rather making use of the diplomatic immunity that these places enjoy, which prevents the authorities of the host state from exercising their jurisdiction on the premises but doesn't mean they can leave.

So while Ecuador sees the Assange case as a one of diplomatic asylum, the UK only accepts the immunity of the embassy (and if the story about threats is to be believed, not even that - but that would be a violation of international law). Had the UK accepted the notion of diplomatic asylum under international law, it could also grant safe passage to Assange to leave for Ecuador upon recognition of the diplomatic asylum granted by Ecuador. In any case, both UK practice and the US position reflect longstanding positions of international law, regardless of what we think about all the other aspects of the case.

I'd like to say at this point IANAL, but I can't, since I'm actually an international lawyer.

Funny - I noticed the same mistake (and posted it before I noticed that you did). And then I thought of the same joke, but didn't bother to make it.

The summary misstates the person responsible for using Comic Sans in the Higgs boson announcement. The full quote:

I was already wondering why a Harvard physicist would be making the announcement of a discovery by CERN.

I doesn't seem that anyone was claiming that MIT were the first, but as long as we're looking at prior art: the first Tetris-on-a-builiding was done by electrical engineering students in Delft, the Netherlands, all the way back in 1995, as you can see on this archived webpage. Futhermore, students at Brown University did it in 2000 (BBC article here). Both prior projects, but not Blinkenlights, are mentioned in an article about the MIT project here. It seems to me that each of these projects has something the others didn't, so no need to be competive about it - it's all in good fun.

Did anyone notice the unintended irony of the word "groupthink" in the Global Times article?

Cool. It's like a new and improved version of the prank involving the lengthy name of the new German Foreign Minister last year.

For such a short summary, it sure contains a lot of errors. Kojima is not even a founder of Konami - the company was established in 1969, and Kojima was born in 1963. He only joined Konami's MSX division in 1986, when the company had already been making video games for a while. He did go on to become a VP for a while. And this error isn't even in the original article.

Apologies for the reply to self, but I tried a few more links which did not resolve, but the current IHT landing page says it all: "The most recent IHT articles can now be found by searching NYTimes.com. We are in the process of moving IHT articles dating back to 1991 over to NYTimes.com. Thanks for your patience as we complete this transition."

Interesting. I got quite upset with the IHT-NYT change a while ago for exactly this reason: many bookmarks and links to news articles that I had made throughout the years evaporated overnight, making me regret not printing or saving the text of those articles when I had the chance. But apparently the NYT has fixed it now. Crampton links to two articles of a scoop he had a few years ago, and they resolve to a new page. And a bookmark that I have on the computer I'm working on now has the same thing, suggesting that they must have transferred their news archive to the new site.

The original bookmark: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/24/opinion/edcardenas.php now resolves to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24iht-edcardenas.1.20395821.html

I'll try it later with my other bookmarks, but it seems like they have responded to the criticism well.

Thank you for this and obviously for the work you put into the EEE PC kernel, which I am using on my 901 in the unfortunately named Easy Peasy. I'd just like to add for information that even though my wireless card works fine on WPA and other networks, I have not been able to get LEAP or PEAP working, and therefore assume that something is still not working properly even with 1.7.1.1. People who need this kind of authentication may be better off getting a netbook with a different chipset.