I have at least half a brain, so here it is:

1. Kansas City's Subtropolis and nearby areas are host to a large number of data centers. The next closest data centers of comparable size are in Chicago, Dallas and Colorado, quite some distance away. And it's not clear that Kansas City isn't bigger.

But while the area is dense with data centers, it's not dense with communications pathways. The customers aren't in Kansas City.

2. It is notoriously difficult to assess whether two network services you wish to buy will ever use the same physical path. Not only are there too many levels in the supply chain, the paths change as companies at each level renegotiate contracts and reconfigure their networks.

I subscribed to Netflix DVDs because I could get the latest movie releases, all of last season's TV shows and a bunch of other stuff. I added streaming because it added to that value.

Then Netflix canceled my DVD service and with it, many of the latest movie releases and most of last season's TV shows. Which was the core reason I wanted Netflix in the first place.

Netflix's CEO said, "the goal is to become hbo faster than hbo can become us." Congratulations. There's just one problem with your success: I was never willing to pay for HBO. And I'm still not. Stay on this path and the days of my subscription are numbered.

While I'm sure the new tax software is wonderful, I don't particularly want the IRS to see any of my numbers until I'm *done* calculating them. With tax regulations as complex as they are, I don't trust my intermediate work to be correct. And I definitely don't trust the IRS to not hold that against me.

Technically excellent. Great effects. Wonderful loyalty to the source material. Acting is acceptable. The plot... well, it's 8 hours of a video game. Not 8 hours of a show set in a video game universe. And that's unfortunate. The characters are caricatures and the plot runs at a video game cadence. No emotional investment in any of it.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Multiple courts have considered and disagreed with that assessment, including the Cox court. The last non-anonymous entity in the chain is the one responsible for enforcing the DMCA takedown notices.

Did I say otherwise? I did not.

Again, the treaty says the inverse: that the U.K. can refuse to extradite if the the U.S. fails to provide such an assurance. Nothing in the treaty, nor anywhere else in U.S. law, grants anyone the authority to provide such a sweeping exception to U.S. law.

Article 7 of the treaty says the inverse of what you claim: extradition can be refused for failing to provide assurance. It does not require any such assurance to be provided and does not provide a mechanism by which such assurance can be lawfully provided.

As you point out, the judge in a specific case can impose any sentence it wants within what the law allows regardless of what anybody else promises. How exactly do you propose that a judge in a case where the judge has not even been selected yet make a promise to a foreign nation that he won't impose the death penalty in a case where the law allows it? Have you even begun to think it through?

Finally, once the accused is in the U.S. states can file any charges they want under state law regardless of what the federal government does, so long as they're under state law. For example, if they decide that someone was killed in their state because of wikileaks, they can charge Assange with murder. And there's nothing the Federal government can do about it. The President can't even issue a pardon because it's not a Federal crime.

The treaty says they don't have to turn Assange over unless we waive the death penalty. But neither it nor any other U.S. law actually grants anyone in the United States the authority to irreversibly waive the death penalty for all crimes with which the extradited individual might be charged.

The practical effect of the treaty clause is that if the crime carries the death penalty in the U.S. but not the U.K., the U.K. is not bound by treaty to extradite.

No U.S. law specifies who is authorized to waive the death penalty associated with this treaty. Including the treaty itself. Even if there were a law separate from the treaty, it would not be binding on the states over state crimes.

However, the Constitution grants the Senate the authority to ratify treaties, so if they specified who could waive the death penalty *in the treaty* then it would be binding on both the federal and state governments.

As the treaty is written now, the only consequence of the death penalty clause is that the U.K. can refuse extradition without breaking the treaty.

If you make the case that you're not an participant in the activity then you can't be a participant. Cox was shielding the identities of the offending customers. That made them an active participant.

In other words, if you get a DMCA notice you can respond, "No, that should have gone to so-and-so with this contact information."

When you say, "Sorry, we're not the right people to contact. And no, we won't tell you who is paying us for that IP address," that doesn't work out in court. It obstructs the process. Bye bye liability shield.

1. Federal law enforcement has no jurisdiction over state matters. If a state A.G. finds something to accuse Assange of that's a state crime, the DoJ can't do anything about it.

2. Any decision by the DoJ is reversible by the President. Except for Trump, Presidents try to give the DoJ autonomy, but that's tradition not law.

3. Any decision made by the President alone is reversible by the President or the next President.

4. International treaties ratified by the Senate are enforceable on everybody, including the states and the next President.

5. The current extradition treaty with the U.K. does not authorize anybody to waive potential criminal penalties as a condition of extradition.

Sum these five factors and you get the result I posted above.

If they catch you in a friendly country, yeah. That's how espionage works. Bear in mind that the United States does not have an extradition treaty with China, so they'd have to catch you in a country which does.

Coerced, cajoled, encouraged. However you want to put it, Assange was an enthusiastic participant in espionage against the United States which was not mitigated by any journalistic targeting of some particular wrong. It was literally, "Information wants to be free and I want to be the hero who frees it!"

We can't actually make that promise. We can promise that the current administration won't seek the death penalty, but that promise would bind neither the next administration nor would it prevent any state from filing charges that carry the death penalty.

To make that promise, we would literally have to rewrite our extradition treaty with the UK and the Congress would have to ratify the new treaty.