I can assume anything I choose to: It sure seems awfully convenient that just a few weeks after Wikileaks exposes war crimes by the United States that two women affiliated with the CIA file accusations of rape against the leader of the group.

Bottom line: The prosecutor closed the case in Sweden prior to his release and being allowed to leave the country. He turned himself in and was already questioned and released. What probative value does the prosecutor believe will emerge here from this re-opened investigation? Zero new details have emerged: What purpose (other than setting up the accused for extraordinary rendition to the United States) would it serve? They were offered a number of options to interview him in England and they declined. He declined to voluntarily travel to Sweden after they refused to guarantee he would not be "extraordinarily rendered" by the United States.

So I guess I'd say: If these people were really interested in "justice" and "Getting the facts" they'd have gotten on a plane and interviewed him in London.

And I'd say you're naive if you think prosecutors don't negotiate terms for voluntary interviews--they do it all the time. It is standard procedure for getting people to answer questions. Don't like it? Too bad: That's life.

How, exactly, does one "skip bail" on a case that was already closed and wasn't re-opened until after he left the country?

Perhaps it should be added: They're clearly functioning as an instrument of a government interested in punishing somebody over free speech that they don't like.

"Wanted for questioning" and "fugitive" are not the same thing. Further, what he's "wanted for questioning" about isn't a crime in the United Kingdom (no, he's not been accused of "rape" in the traditional sense, he's been accused of continuing consensual intercourse after a condom broke after having agreeing to use one,) nor the US, nor most other countries on earth. And it gets better: A male is still liable for this "crime" even if neither party notices the break and neither party withdraws consent! The female can retroactively withdraw consent if she notices later the condom broke! 100% of all risk relating to consensual sex in Sweden is conferred onto the male by law, apparently.

It is too cute, by half, to suggest he's a "fugitive." An INTERPOL warrant was issued on a basis that has, historically never even once been used in the history of INTERPOL: That Assange is wanted for questioning over a misdemeanor crime. That he hasn't even been charged with.

That Sweden won't guarantee him safe passage (i.e. "We won't extradite you to the USA") you can surmise that extradition to the United States is the sole purpose of getting him to Sweden in the first place. If it wasn't, they'd have long since agreed just to end this stain on their reputation: Already most Europeans see them as a tool of the Americans. Ditto the UK. I mean, most people saw them that way before this, but this has only cemented that image in their minds.

And no, it isn't remotely uncommon for attorneys to set conditions for voluntary interviews with police. Or even involuntary ones... (i.e. "My client won't answer any questions unless he's unshackled and given some water to drink.")

Ahh yes, the classic Slashdot false-equivalency... there's just a couple minor details you're missing:

1) Nobody "took away" their Playstation 3--a firmware update that was offered turned off a feature they liked. Don't want to lose the feature? Don't update the firmware. Done and done.
2) A car-radio would be my actual property so nothing they can do after the fact would alter that ownership. If they offered a firmware update that changed the performance of that radio, I might kvetch, but my only real option would be to not-install-the-upgrade, just like the Sony whiners--nobody forced them to install that firmware upgrade.

Sorry, but this is childish nonsense. You weren't forced at gunpoint to upgrade your firmware: And unless you can show me a clause in your user agreement taht says "all features will remain available forever in every future iteration of this product forever" I have little sympathy for you: You relied on "Sony's honorable intentions" in a buying decision, except that corporations don't have honorable intentions, they have profitable intentions. And continuing to develop that feature obviously didn't make sense to them--so they didn't.

Don't like it? Don't by Sony.

Our 17 trillion dollar debt has everything to do with under-taxing rich people and corporations, overspending on outrageous military adventures that provide zero additional security, and overspending on inefficient delivery systems for health care. When you factor in our current fetish for "private" national security spending (hundreds of billions flushed down toilets named "Booz Allen Hamilton" and EDS) and the fact that such "privatized" spending is beyond most oversight and you've got the recipe for our debt.

Your comment about feudalism is spot-on: Low-taxes for rich people lead to mass poverty.

And how "fucked up" is Europe, really? They seem to me to have their priorities a lot straighter than ours.

How is that positive? These applications monitor (and take as gospel) Twitter: That's fucking stupid. They created a brief crash in the market when somebody got control of AP's Twitter account and sent out a fake "Bomb at White House, Obama injured" tweet. Computers are wonderful, but they are aids to humans, not replacements for them.

Another thing about HFT: It's existence dramatically limits the average investor (John Q. Public) from profiting on these differences between share price and perceived value: Even if he logs into E-trade the moment he has the idea, the HFTs have had the data for 10 minutes or more and have already profited 10,000 times and killed the average investor's profits.

And although HFT can't manipulate supply, it absolutely can manipulate demand: One of the "features" of HFT is millions of trades entered, some percentage of which are cancelled before being executed. But during that time frame between entry and execution other HFT's know about those orders and respond accordingly. A malicious person wanting to manipulate demand for a certain share to give himself a price-bump so he can unload his shares for a better price would merely need access to the person with the password to control "which trades to cancel" functions...

Why not just introduce a relatively-random amount of "wait time" to all trades submitted to the exchange? You, in effect, make attempts at HFT manipulation basically worthless because they can't guarantee the speed of execution on the trade. Make it on the order of 5-25 seconds--normal investors and long-term investors will neither notice nor care: They're investing for the long-horizon, at least several years, so they don't care if the trade executes in a nanosecond or 30 seconds.

It obviates the need for a new tax while ending a truly nefarious practice.

They made some unfortunate choices, but "changing their mind" is the prerogative you gave them when you bought their proprietary hardware/only-as-open-as-we-say-it-can-be model in the first place. I'm sure it was disappointing, but how old are you that you really weren't expecting that ability to be taken away?

If what they say here is true, why the world weren't they more honest about what they were doing all along and in the first place? In Europe, government access to phone records is codified in law in such a way that protects the privacy of everybody who isn't a suspect in an investigation, and does so in broad daylight. There may be violations, but the persons whose privacy is invaded also have recourse there. They have no such recourse against the NSA that continues to argue, even as it releases details of this program, that it is "secret" and thus would compromise national security to reveal the details.

One more example of where honesty and truth-telling would be preferable to obfuscation and lies.

Define "big government"? The United States has among the lowest taxes in the first-world and has among the shoddiest safety nets in the first-world.

To me educational publishing is a sham, and you hit the nail on the head as to why: The insanely high prices breed a huge secondary market, so the publishers simply call each new printing a "new edition" and labels the old ones obsolete, which allows the book stores to pay next to nothing for the books used because "they're out of date!"

That's the thrust of it: You get service into these communities and they can bury their own media, whatever they want it to be. Or redistribute on a different wireless band to neighborhood homes via Wi-Max...

Give this man a cigar!

Hopefully it will not rely on any "proprietary" tech so it can't be priced at $5 million per radio or, (cost of building fiber - 10%).