Assange added 8 years of his own to his sentence.

In reality, he's only done:

April 2019: ejected from the embassy
May 2019: 50 weeks prison for skipping bail
May 2020: everything else starts taking effect

So not even 4 years yet - for a complex, public, international extradition case. BBC News has a story of a rape conviction that took 6 years to get to court only this morning.

That's including a denial of extradition on health grounds, an appeal by the US and escalation to the High Court.

And look... it's about to happen, as the final chance at a successful appeal started in February back at the High Court.

The fact that Asssange himself wasted TWICE AS MUCH TIME AGAIN just to go on the run is his own fault, and self-imprisonment contributed greatly to the mental decline that was later successfully used as an argument in front of a judge to try to avoid extradition and only overruled on appeal.

I learned both early Visual Basic and Java through the sheer fact of reading a) the Visual Basic Language Reference and b) an O'Reilly Java book.

Both had the complete language described, full descriptions of every command, "library", etc. even listing of all the constants.

It seems a really dumb thing, because I'm far from a hard-copy person, but having the entire language in a single book was amazing for reference, and also for flicking through and saying "Ah, that could be useful!". I'd been programming in Z80 assembly since I was a kid years before, and the stand-out moments from years upon years of coding were when I had a complete reference in one place that I could just read and absorb before touching a new language, that I could use as a definitive reference for completeness, and that I could look up syntax and glean ideas from just by browsing it.

Even something like Ralf Brown's Interrupt List was a defining moment - I can remember the first time I got that (downloaded via modem 100 miles away and put onto a floppy disk to bring home) and it was just so useful.

Languages now seem to be in a constant state of flux. Even with code that I'm almost entirely hands-off with, things like PHP change so rapidly that there's almost a guarantee that the code you're managing will break in the next version and need tweaking. C++ has so many iterations it's laughable.

I miss the days when you could describe an entire language in one static reference book (online or not), when a technical writer had spent months of their life describing every available function in detail, it was from an official source you could trust, and it was actually *enjoyable* (with a certain nerdish masochism) to sit and read the documentation.

If only something like that existed for the Windows APIs still, OpenSSL, etc. I would have saved years of my life.

Thought problem for the physics mavens here.

The event horizon is usually described as requiring an escape velocity faster than the speed of light, and anything that falls in can't get out.

Suppose an object came in on a parabolic or hyperbolic course, in the manner of a meteor or comet going around the sun. Ignore tidal and time dilation effects for the moment because that's something the object will experience and I want to view this from a reference frame outside the black hole.

Suppose the orbit of the object goes inside the event horizon at an angle, so that the object wouldn't intersect the singularity at the middle.

Would it come out again?

In Newtonian terms the object would speed up as it approached the black hole and crossed the horizon, and it could never exceed or attain the speed of light, but would get kinetic energy in excess of it's actual speed. Things appear heavier as they are accelerated, and more and more of the energy is put into mass while the velocity only approaches the speed of light.

Coming around the object the same process happens in reverse, so the object isn't travelling at escape velocity but the pull from the singularity takes mass energy instead of slowing the object down. Without slowing down appreciably, the object should pop back out of the black hole and continue on it's original course.

Is there a good reference that points out the fallacy in this argument? I'm just a little surprised that there's this area in space that will grab anything that flies by and suck it in permanently. Especially since the black hole has roughly the same mass as a regular star, so flying around in the vicinity should be no more difficult than flying around in the vicinity of a typical star.

(I've been looking into whether the universe is computable, and the existence of boundary discontinuities 'kinda throws a wrench into those theories.)

Is there a good reference online that explains this?

"It was also nice when everyone confidently knew what a man and a woman was."

Know a redhead? Then you know an intersex person, they just haven't told you about it. And with your attitude, I know exactly why.

And were entirely wrong a minimum of 1% of the time, because naturally-occuring intersex variations appear in that proportion in populations the world over. Roughly the same percentage as redheads, diabetics, etc. It's actually a large factor in infertility, because "X" and "Y" are not the cut-and-dry genetics people believe them to be.

And that's before you even get into those who chose to live their lives differently to their assigned biological sex, which has been happening for countless thousands of years (literally women living men's lives and only ever discovered on their deathbed, etc.)

Modern times haven't changed anything that used to happen at all. My workplace (schools) always have stories of headteachers from the past coming out as transexual, cross-dressers, etc. going back literally hundreds of years. It was often kept quiet but it was always there - and kids were not playing out in nice neighbourhoods without incident either. My dad tells a story where his dad wouldn't let him deliver certain papers to certain houses on his own. Grandad was a policeman through the war and knew where certain types of criminal lived, even if nobody else did.

These types of people (and they're still people, always remember, and literally just a type you disapprove of) have always been there. You just didn't know. Same way that you didn't know (and still don't) someone's political affiliation unless they told you. The reason you "never saw them" was because they never told you... and there's a reason for that.

(For reference, not that you deserve to know: I'm biologically and outwardly male, heterosexual).

Scan & Go actually works really well.

You just have to remove the side cases where it doesn't - like loose products as you say. But loose products are, by far, not essential to anyone's shopping. I don't buy cornflakes by the flake or by the gram, there's no need to buy pears individually by weight either.

Since those scan & go technologies come in, however, my shopping is now utterly predictable, far more accurate, less impulse buys, and I'm in and out of the store in half the time. Mainly, it has to be said, because I don't have to unpack my goods onto a conveyor, have a spotty teenager scan them by hand, then repack them back into the exact same place I just unpacked them from. That, alone, makes it worth it for me.

Being able to see the exact price while I'm deciding on the product is another bonus. Whether it's labelled or not, I can see the price and know immediately whether I've picked up something that's part of a deal or not... which I imagine quite a bit of profit was made by companies before by "mistakes" on the human's part. I first started using it when I had no money, and it was great to ensure I was inside a strict budget. I could scroll back and remove that product from 4 aisles ago that would give me just enough money back to stay under my limit, as well as having a running total in front of my face at all times. I'm guessing that doesn't help profits either!

And I simply don't bother with loose goods. I can be in and out of the store in under an hour with an entire month's shopping in one hit, for cheaper than I ever could. I don't even bother to become a member of their special loyalty programmes, because increasingly they were becoming paid-for and because of my single-trip mentality, they actually weren't worth it after a while. I was paying, say, GBP9 a month, in order to get 10% off two shops. So if I spend GBP90 a month, I was profiting. But the programmes got more expensive, applied to less products, and increasingly the terminals wouldn't easily read my codes, discounts, vouchers, etc. and it became a nuisance. So I just cancelled it and actually saved money by doing so because occasionally I go to a different shop instead - their loyalty programme basically forced me to become "disloyal".

Manual checkouts ALWAYS queue. Self-checkouts there's a small queue but it moves fast as there are always more self-checkouts than manual staff. Scan & go never has any queue at all for me. Repeatedly, month after month, I just literally scan-and-go. Along with the packing/unpacking it cuts my shopping time in half, and even the time lost to typing in barcodes, etc. for vouchers and discounts is such a factor still!

Self-checkout is a nonsense outside of tiny few-item purchases - it's for people buying lunch in a store while they are out of the office, that's what it's for, and it works fine for that.

Scan & go is great, but it's for buying a certain subset of things (i.e. no loose items, nothing that requires verification, etc.) and keeping an eye on the bulk.

But manual-checkout... I can't find a use pattern for any more. It's just slower, more expensive and less useful every time I'm forced to use it. I'd rather avoid it and do those bits some other way and somewhere else. If my local supermarket was just scan-and-go, or like these Amazon stores, I'd actually be happier. Even delivery isn't as efficient because they insist on making constant substitutions (what happened to accurate stock control?), and then I have spend ages making the shopping list, be in at a given time (or "click and collect", which is actually less efficient than just scan-and-go), pay a fee for delivery, deal with trying to not delay the driver by getting everything into the house quickly, etc.

Of all the options I want in my future when I get old and infirm and want to just take my time and buy stuff I want without extra nonsense (or unpacking repeatedly), scan&go and home delivery are the options I want, and home delivery will still cost money.

Because that all crawls towards universal basic income (of which there has never been an unsuccessful trial, and which always results in people being better humans, spending wisely, etc. basically).

Universal basic income means that you are no longer tied into generating profit in order to then spend your wages generating profit. UBI means that someone has to pay a robot AND you.

You're just a product, and governments have no interest in treating you otherwise (tax, etc.) . Even those places with universal healthcare - it's there to keep you in the workforce longer and put off paying out your pension. Because that generates a profit, and nothing else does.

Amazon are no different in this regard, and never have been. There are huge amounts of stories of how they exploit their workers and treat them like machines built for profit.

You won't have anything like your ideal while things like "taxes" and "jobs" are even a thing. Not until all the price tags disappear from stores, and stores disappear from being the places to exchange goods, and goods are produced without human input.

You're talking hundreds, if not thousands of years away, and that has absolutely no guarantee.

As other people have pointed out many times - we're now automating art and music and literature (things that humans are better at, and do for leisure and enjoyment), while the actual humans are still working jobs that kill them. Because there's no profit in you being allowed to have a hobby that makes you feel human. Better to crush all that out of your soul, monetise it and then sell a poor imitation back to you.

I could be replaced by a script in an instant - all that has to happen is Microsoft has to make self-managing networks that people can deploy with a few clicks, and believe me they're trying to remove people like me already.

All that would happen when they succeed is I'd be out of a job, the networks wouldn't be what people actually wanted (only what was granted to them), and there'd be no help for anyone to cope with that situation.

Inducing the power in the RFID tags of a whole basket full of items causes them all to (very, very rapidly, before they run out of power) transmit their message on the same frequencies as everything around them.

You simply don't have time for them to hold-off and retransmit as they're only induced for a fraction of a second as the field moves past them, and so you don't really have time for retransmission, verification, etc.

With commodity scanners, you just get a load of noise talking over each other, you would need to design a specialist scanner that can repeatedly reactivate them, and for every item to have a unique code (so, unlike a barcode, every individual item would have to be programmed differently) and some way to check that you haven't missed anything in the basket.

It also means literally tagging every product with a unique code before it gets on the shelf. Not just a barcode for the product type, but a per-item, RFID tag containing metal, a unique serial, a unique ID for database lookup, etc. That's really quite simple... but also quite time consuming, labour intensive and expensive however you look at it. I bet even Amazon warehouses don't label every individual product like that, just what product they are / bin they were in / a 2D thermal-printed barcode. It's also the case that no manufacturers I'm aware of label, say, every one of their packets of cornflakes with such a unique RFID code out of the factory.

It's all "possible", but nobody has ever bothered to get that far because of the sheer logistics and expense. Even at a penny per item, deployed by robots, with a backend database with already-absorbed costs, you're looking at SO MUCH work. And then you have to have special scanners in every single store, costing way more than just an ordinary RFID scanner if you want them to be vaguely accurate.

As always, the market dictates what's acceptable and what's not - and it's apparently cheaper to hire thousands of Indians watching dozens of video streams each than it is to bother with the above, and that's in a "pioneer" of that kind of technology in mainstream use.

I wish you wouldn't dox people like that.

He writes a comic, it's funny, and he pokes fun at your team. Lighten up, allow other people to say things, and respond.

The only purpose for doing it is to cause him suffering.

For any people here with a background in philosophy, this meets the definition of evil: doing something to someone else that, if it were done to you, would cause you suffering.

Just stop. Instead of suffering, try causing more good in the world.

You are technically right, in that this is a warning rather than an error. In fact, you used compilation flags no one ever uses to make your point (no warnings at all). That goes back to a core ideological, and quite purposeful, difference between the languages, where C++ wishes to help the programmer avoid errors whereas Rust wishes to prevent the programmer from making them.

In practice, I think this is a distinction without a difference. The tools Rust provide you on that front are available to you with C++, with the only practical difference being that they are not mandated by the language.

The fact in my code I achieve the exact same effect in C++, using the precise same tools. If you want an example, check out a FOSS project I built, add an enum case for the tokenizer (under lib/tokenizer.h), and try building. You will get precisely the behavior the speaker claims is impossible in C++: you can't build warning free until you've handled all of the cases, with the compiler telling you where you're missing cases all the way until you're done.

That's exactly the behavior of enum classes in C++ (since C++11).

I am getting the distinct feeling that these arguments are just people who don't know C++ well and people who don't know Rust well shouting at each other.

I'm not familiar enough with Rust. In the timepoint you linked the guy talks about using enums to replace flags being ORed. I have not found what Rust construct was used. Can you please provide a link?

In particular, how are Rust enums different than C++'s newer enum classes?

Faxing is better. Powders and simple devices can be sent by letter, and politicians have to watch out for that.

Faxing means you're likely to be in a place that has a fax, ie a business, and if you put your thoughts on a letter with corporate logo then that's even better.

And yeah, faxing is very old school, but it's still used in a lot of down-to-earth places, the kind of grass-roots companies that politicians like to cultivate.

My brain said NFC and wireless the second it was mentioned.

Sure, if you use the right software you can keep the power usage to a minimum in the box so heat isn't an issue, but we can already wirelessly charge devices, instruct them to wake from sleep, and send data to them. It's not even unusual on modern phones to have all those features.

The bigger question is whether its actually worth the effort. Next month there'll be another update anyway. If you updated in the background just while the user goes through the first-time-setup, you could do exactly the same without requiring infrastructure to every store at all. And without potential security problems of being able to power, wake up, and communicate with a device that's "turned off" or has never once been turned on.

The only real use of this might actually be far more simple. Have all phones in the shop deactivated, and only when they go through the genuine purchasing process do they get remotely activated by the shop's system. Basically eliminates theft without requiring having to trace literally every device produced and its current status. Just ship them to stores in a deactivated state where they won't work, and they only "turn on" once they've been through an Apple store till.

But it seems to me that the costs purely for "updates" are totally not worth it. Just have the device check for updates in the first-time setup and refuse to offer services like Bluetooth, etc. until it's done that (so there's no window of vulnerability in the meantime).

Here's the thing:

- Government will always regulate currency to combat things like this, and money-laundering (because it can facilitate things like this), and avoidance of tax.
- To do that, they need to identify users or require them to identify themselves. That's the rules that pretty much all EU and US banks operate under.
- Cryptocurrencies that don't allow that automatically fall foul of money-laundering and these identification rules. So banks in the EU and US are stopping transactions to cryptocurrency exchanges and preventing their transfer. I've have transactions to very well-known and legal Bitcoin exchanges blocked by banks, for even tiny amounts, with that reasoning.
- Even buying a house, I have to prove the origin of the money and money-laundering checks are a mandatory part of that, including into the origins of any money that parents, etc. give you for deposits. They literally have that money traced.
- The above is only going to get more strict while black markets and money laundering continue. Especially when billions are involved.
- So anonymous cryptocurrencies will always be a black market. And black markets attract black market transactions. Like this.
- Therefore although Bitcoin might get around this, Bitcoin transactions are like an screaming alarm that goes off when people start looking at your finances. And that's going to make them take notice - maybe for years monitoring what you do - and when it comes to actually putting you under the thumb, they'll have all they need because using a cryptocurrency to generate or transfer any significant sum that you're not recording, claiming or going through legitimate avenues to process is just going to raise red flags everywhere and they'll nail you for it.
- And Bitcoin, on its own, is useless because it needs to be converted to something to become useful and THAT'S the part that governments are regulating and watching. How it gets there is almost irrespective (and has been traced ending in convictions before now, even through mixers - a.k.a. devices literally intended to launder money according to the law)
- Bitcoin use is therefore just going to actually make it MORE obvious to the agencies who actually do this stuff. And those places won't care for a bit of weed or some guy gambling online illegally. They will only actually show their hand when it's, say, billions to a sanctioned Russian outfit, and then it'll be kept under wraps because they also want to catch the next guy too.

If anything, not using Bitcoin probably made them evading detection a bit easier. I've never even heard of Tether. And if they managed to transfer billions via it they stood more chance of going under the radar, by far. Except... they didn't. They got noticed, as per this article.

There's a line where the local police aren't going to do fuck all about someone using Bitcoin. The state police aren't going to care much. The federal agencies might and have certain convictions in their history with billions of Bitcoin attached to them which they were tracing and following and even able to convert later to put back into the country's treasuries. And then there's a whole other level of military intelligence, tracing illicit military and guerrilla funding, international sanctions evasions, and such like.

And at that level, far more is going on than you'll ever see on Slashdot stories. Far more is invested in tracing things. Literally billions of dollars just watching certain individuals. And far more is happening that wouldn't be "legal" for police to do - like knowing exactly who it is in Russia that's receiving this money and monitoring every move and hacking every device they have for decades without detection to establish every method, trick, source and destination of the money.

These kinds of transactions were going to get taken down no matter what they used, it's merely a function of time. The trick is to not be involved with any of the services or people performing such so you don't get caught up in something far larger. Any US citizen or corporation involved in these transactions, or any in allied countries where people like GCHQ etc. have powers, is a damn idiot to facilitate it. The method of that facilitation being "more difficult" to trace or shutdown doesn't help their case one bit, in fact it literally makes it worse, especially if they know or have cited that as a reason to use those facilities.

This isn't your local cops being baffled by computer stuff that you used to buy a graphics card on the black market. This is the US and allied intelligence agencies stopping Russia receiving significant funding enough to buy arms to potentially use against NATO allies. Bitcoin ain't gonna save you, and anyone in the path of that who can't claim genuine ignorance that that's what was happening is in for a real bad time, even if that takes YEARS to actually happen or come to a public court.

I've heard of it, and they're reinventing Slackware.