Yes, I often have to resort to using my motorcycle's licence plate, at least that's pretty unique as it's not a vanity plate. :-)

I use "Bill Gates".

richie@joindiaspora.com , thanks to kimvette. :-)

I can't really say why publicly, but I'm in a position to say that you're most likely correct in your analysis. The women's behaviour just after the alleged crimes is suspect, to say the least. I do not believe they were actively and knowingly acting as proxies, but the prosecutors saw the opportunity and took it.

There's a lot of shit happening around Assange that does not happen in normal cases. One example that's made the rounds is two Irish musicians who were videotaped assaulting a Swede, including kicking him in the face while he was lying down. They have even confessed to the crime but no international warrant for their arrest has been issued. Quote the prosecutor in charge: "We only do that for serious crimes, like murder." This was just a few months prior to Assange's fateful visit in Sweden.

Our (Sweden here) political right pundits try the same line. Problem for them is, it's pretty easy to show them wrong. While we do tend to cuddle immigrants to the point of trying very hard to make them dependant on welfare, most immigrants want to work, and do. They take low-paying jobs, live in the run-down 'burbs and pay their taxes. Since they are not used to welfare from their homelands, most of them are actually pretty cheap, speaking from a strictly national-economic POV. Immigrants help keep minimum wages down, enabling us to mass-manufacture stuff like fridges, cars and telephone exchange systems, keeping our export rates high.

Of course a few of them misuse the system, creating an illusion of parasites that the right-wingers find very profitable to exploit in the media, but their actual impact on the welfare system as a whole is minimal. OTOH, we also get a few highly trained professionals escaping political, religious or other types of persecution in their homelands. In average we, as a country, break even and start to profit from an immigrant in about two years' time. Sure, a sudden and large influx might put a temporary strain on the economy before the positive effects kick in, but if you suffer from that in a national economy you really had much bigger problems to begin with.

Oh and BTW, the values of patents and other IP is very much exaggerated since their true costs are never calculated. Those summing up the gains tend to be dependant on the system itself and has an interest in making it look good. In reality, most inbound royalty checks are balanced against cross-licensing costs, effectively making it a zero-sum game for everyone except the patent attorneys. I suspect we'd be better off scrapping the system altogether and focus on letting first-to-market and "real" transaction costs sort things out - but that's a different discussion. :-)

Of course there are. They're just $4.99 a month away.

My favorite band is the Dead Kennedys, you insensitive clod!

Sounds a bit like American Psycho, and that worked just fine with rich brats in "mergers & aquisitions". So why not some place like Boston? Or the burbs outside DC? I've worked in the Reston/Chantilly area and Virginia seemed to offer a pretty broad spectrum of races and classes.

Much too lenient. Halon gas.

Cool game, but I don't have time to be stuck in it right now so I just looked at it, clicked once to understand how it worked, went "uh-oh" and closed the tab. :-)

If you want more images, help yourself at http://www.p-i-x.net/ .

The next time there's a stabbing in your region, expect the Police to book you for the murder. After all, you're a registered user on slashdot, so you must be a knife murderer.

All Google Nexus 1 phones are, regardless of carrier. I don't know if there are more models that are, or what percentage of the market they have, though.

Please note that it would be perfectly possible for a carrier to lock down a Maemo phone if they wanted to. Or, a phone vendor to use Maemo as the OS (I don't know if Nokia's licensing would allow this, but let's assume so for the sake of argument) and place a lock-down layer on top (Sense, Timescape, whatever). And, in both cases it would be possible to incorporate automatic OTA updates and install functionality. Yes, having root does theoretically enable you to find and stop such attempts, but what percentage of users could and would actually do that? I suspect we'd be in the other part of your 99,x% number again.

That is a function of the phone vendor, not the OS. On my Android phone, with a plain jane vanilla Android OS, root is just a command away. I get a screen telling me that if I root it, Google can't be held responsible for what I might mess up while being root. That's it. No additional software, reverse engineering or tricks required.

I think it is a little unfair to bash Google for what HTC, SE or Samsung does.

Which is just about the same as Android, then. Google releases the Android source so you could patch the install mechanism if you wanted to. I'm root on my Nexus 1 - that is basically just a command away.

The thing is, just because I am root and has access to the source code doesn't mean there aren't backdoors that hasn't been detected yet. I don't see how Maemo is different in that regard. Or say, Ubuntu. There COULD be a hidden backdoor somewhere, cleverly obfuscated for when Mark Shuttleworth wants to take over the world and reveal himself as an alien (his trip into space was him being homesick). I'm not saying there is, I'm saying there could be, and you being root can not realistically prevent that scenario.

Sometimes, you just have to go with a best effort, say "fuck this" and actually trust someone.

They fit in well with his other servers, still running Windows 98 Advanced Server Edition.

But seriously, migrate to LVM already.