* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10123 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

Open-heart nerdery: Boffins suggest identifying and logging in people using ECGs

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Terminator

Re: Hold my beer.

Any computer forced to watch me dancing, would instantly turn itself into an AI with the sole purpose of becoming self-aware so that it could wipe out the human race in revenge.

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Especially when you pull the tape off and lose a few chest hairs.

People who use computers a lot will effectively be forced to wax their chests. What's going to go with my gold medallion down at the disco now?

Sputnik? No, comrade, this is Spunknik: Frozen sperm manages to survive zero-grav in this totally realistic test

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In Larry Niven's novels zero-g rumpy-pumy is referred to delicately as "unearthly delights".

Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row?

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Re: Yet another....

I'm not sure the iPad is all that extortianate.

You can get some OK 7" Android tablets for £100-£150. But Google doesn't really seem to have put the same effort into tablets as phones, and nor have the app makers. The useable 10" Droid tablets seem to start at around the £200 mark - and the decent ones start in the £300-£400 range - which is also where the iPad starts.

So I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim they're a rip off. Particularly given they're half the price of a new iPhone, even though the screen is the most expensive bit - and the iPad one is bigger. Plus the decently specc'ed cheap droid phones seem to start around £200.

My conclusion is that phones are over-priced, especially the top-end ones.

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

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Happy

Re: Hydrogen

Alien8n,

Did the company have any Zeppelins?

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Re: Leap Out And Let It Burn

That's one to sneakily call the fire brigade on your own - and watch them crucify management.

Our local telephone exchange had a faulty fire alarm panel. But it was old and the company had gone bust, so instead of being a few thousand quid spare, it was going to have to be a custom manufactured replacement. Many thousands.

So when they had a fire, the brigade turned up to find most people still at their desks and no alarm ringing. The chief fire officer was so pissed off that he said that he'd be back to inspect them in a week, and if their fire system didn't meet regs he'd close down every British Telecom building in the county, until he'd inspected them individually.

It ended up costing them something like £70,000 to get a contractor in to replace half the system in under a week.

Autonomy integration was a 'sh!t show', HP director tells court

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Re: The due diligence report wasn't read

The point about audited accounts is that they only indicate one view of the truth.

You can rearrange the numbers - without lying - to give an entirely different viewpoint, should you wish.

xeroks,

That's not really true. There is only one set of audited accounts, that if you're a plc will be published and issued to the tax man.

It is true that there are often lots of judgement calls in accounting. But they tend to apply to what you book as profits and how you account for costs. So for example you can artificially boost profits by having lower bad debt provisions booked than the bad debt you expect to actually happen. The KPMG report talks about this, and implies that Autonomy had what were probably uncollectable debts on their books as an asset - however it also states that they also had provisions for this bad debt in retained profits - so as long as the two match there's little material effect.

Obviously you can change the books to get different tax outcomes, but that's not really changing the books, so much as changing the company structure in order to minimise tax. And once done, it's a semi-permanent thing.

Another way to artificially boost profits is to book costs as capital expenditure, so that the cost can be spread over several years, thus reducing the effect on profits of current spending. However even this has no actual effect on profit in the long-run, you've spent the money and will either get a return on the investment or not, the difference is having a dip in profits in one year to cover all the costs (KPMG said GAAP and HP's rules don't allow this capitalisation of R&D) or having smaller profits for the next several years to spread it out evenly.

The thing that audited accounts give you very accurately is cash flow. You can play around with profits by booking future revenues into the current year (as many software companies have done), and the above methods. But the cashflow is something there's almost no judgement on. What money went in and out of the company's various accounts. And that's the important thing to judge a company on. If they've got a negative cashflow, but are showing profits, you need to be asking questions.

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Re: The due diligence report wasn't read

Autonomy published audited accounts. Which HP haven't seriously questioned. Their complaint is that large amounts of Autonomy sales were low profit hardware, not high profit software.

The report is much more concerned about tax issues, and accounting differences than anything else. US corporation tax at the time was much higher than British.

I doubt KPMG were asking questions about the products. Their job was finance. HP were supposed to understand the product range and sales potential.

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

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Re: Meh.

I think scepticism is unwarranted here.

Scepticism is far too optimistic. We're going to have to resort to derision.

And even that may be too generous...

Cyber-IOU notes. Voucher hell on wheels. However you want to define Facebook's Libra, the most ridiculous part is its privacy promise

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Headmaster

Re: Did they not check the name?

Benson's Cycle

To pedant upon your pedant...

Gresham's law doesn't state that fiat currencies lead to devaluation.

Gresham's law is usually stated as, "good money drives out bad." The original meaning was that if you debase a commodity coinage, the bad money will circulate while people hoard the good coins. So when Henry VIII did this with England's silver coinage he got the nickname "Old Copper Nose" as apparently the thin layer of silver rubbed off his nose first (assuming that story is actually true). But the debasement was definitely true and since Henry VII and previous coins had a higher silver content and the same face value, they were hoarded and people would try to only spend the crappy modern coins. You could even melt down the old coins, and sell the silver to someone for more than their face value in modern coins and make a handsome profit. If you didn't get caught and executed...

It's since been used in analogous situations. So for example if the Italian government print their threatened miniBOTS (small denomination government debt instruments with no expiry date and no interest rate), they'll have created a parallel currency to the Euro that they can print, without technically breaking the treaties. Though I'd love to see the ECJ rule on that - and it won't be in favour of Italy, even if they have to make something up...

But anyway it's not commodity money, they're both fiat - so Gresham's original law doesn't apply. But what will happen is that transactions in Italy will increasingly be done in miniBOTS. Because you can use them to pay taxes, and buy petrol from the state oil company petrol stations. At face value. So Euros will be hoarded for spending on foreign stuff, because if this happens Italy is almost certainly on it's way to the Eurozone exit door. And the Italian currency will be expected to fall. But people will take payments in miniBOTS at a premium over euros. Especially if they've got a tax bill coming up.

Of course this isn't all bad. It'll increase the Italian money supply, something that's been desperately needed - but they can't because they were stupid/unlucky enough to join the Euro. And Italy has had deflation (or been on the edge of it) for a decade now. And it allows the government to pay its suppliers on time, also boosting the Italian economy. Also, giving people a currency that encourages them to pay taxes could be a really good idea in Italy...

As it's technically legal, it might even be just enough to keep Italy in the Euro without the desperately needed Eurozone reforms that just never seem to happen (as nobody can agree on what to do).

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FAIL

We have failed!

The Register collective have failed! Us commentards should hold our collective heads in shame - as should the subbies what write the headlines.

The first reply to that absurd Twitter post linked in the article about how digital and crypto currencies will be more stable than national ones (tee fucking hee!) - well they got it. To quote them:

"Libra? They should have called it Cancer."

Is there anything more to say on the subject of Facebook after that?

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Re: What is the 'stable asset backing' ?

J4,

It's true that a lot of government detb is earning very poor returns. That was actually the whole point of QE. To force down the interest on government detbs and push money out along the risk curve in order to, for example, lower corporate borrowing costs. There's lots of AAA rated corporate debt that pays a return.

You can also do what pension / insurance companies do and have a mixed portfolio of investments. Because obviously the plan is for this currency to exist forever, so you can have a pool of stuff invested in the stock exchange to make you long-term profits, and other assets in corporate bonds and only some in the safest and most liquid investments like government debt.

It's still a shit idea, but this bit would be the easy bit. If Facebook were trustworthy, rather than greedy, incompetent scofflaws.

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Stop

Soooo, to sum up...

A financial service from a "disruptive" Silicon Valley megacorp, provided at a random exchange rate guaranteed to fuck over its victims (I mean customers), with privacy guaranteed by Mark Zuckeberg, coded by Facebook in a brand new programming language also designed and written by Facebook.

Hmmm. Lemme think about that for a second.

I don't know whether to run away screaming in terror of the inevitable doom-fail - or run towards them screaming abuse and carrying a very large axe.

Fuck me! What an absolutely hideous idea! Normally I'd do the line about "what could possibly go wrong". But in this case the real question is what will go wrong first?

Samsung reminds rabble to scan smart TVs for viruses – then tries to make them forget

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Happy

Re: Oh, well, that's okay then...

My TV is connected to the internet by two tin cans and a piece of string...

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Re: On another note...

big_D,

The right to be forgotten is specific to search. Or actually isn't specific to search, it's just that the search engines were ignoring pre-existing law until forced to comply by the courts. And that judgement got given a shorthand name.

There is no requirement to delete data. But for things like spent convictions you're simply not allowed to keep mentioning them. So they've always been in newspaper archives, but because the newspaper industry has generally complied with the law for the last half century they didn't keep mentioning them on their front pages. But the info was alawys still there to find in old copies and archives.

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

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Re: A new name you say.

Change the name to Windscale. Job done.

HP CFO Cathie Lesjak didn't even read KPMG's Autonomy due diligence before $11bn biz gobble

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Management did substantially meet US standards. GAAP accounts for capitalisation of R&D differently, US tax rules are different to UK ones (though the report says that most US taxes could be offset against UK ones anyway) and the report states that Autonomy accounted for deferred income in a way that HP rulles (and possibly GAAP) don't allow.

That doesn't mean those things are wrong, just different. For example the report states that Autonomy don't write-off revenue that they believe may still be collectible - and leave it on their books at full value, rather than a written-down fair value. However they also have a bad debt provision on the books.

So long as the provisions cover the bad debts - this is a perfectly legitimate way to account for the uncertainties of collecting them - and your balance sheet will add up to the same amount either way.

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Re: Necessary?

If you've read the document, you might have proper reasons to oppose the takeover. Which then can't be dismissed by anyone else who hasn't read the report. And as CFO, on an $11bn takeover - I'd argue it's your job.

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Re: Still reading the document. You are evil.

To be fair, the report isn't saying anything scary. It's saying that UK takeover practise normally means that the buyer gets less info than in the US - something I assume KPMG know, as I didn't. But it's not flagged up anything material, they're just talking about differences in tax treatment, capitalisation of R&D and booking of future deferred revenues - which is treated differently under GAAP and in HP's accounts.

Also, they're not suing Autonomy's auditors - so the reported figures can't be that badly wrong.

The claim is that profit margins were actually lower than claimed, because Autonomy were mixing hardware (low margin) and software sales - but they had the profit margins for the overall trading - so that doesn't seem to hold water.

The only thing I noticed from the report is that Autonomy had sold a bunch of permanent licences, and were trying to move customers to a cloud SaaS model - for lovely ongoing revenues.

So the only thing I can think they might claim is that Autonomy had made almost all the sales it was ever going to, and there was no more money to make from the business. But that mix of licenses is in the report, and surely HP understood the market for the products they were buying Autonomy for?

Atari finally launches its VCS console. Again.

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Devil

Re: How to choose a gadget...

Can't you buy the console game, and fashion the plastic case into a temporary pair of shoes?

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

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Re: "he man wore a costume to a fucking fancy dress party! "

Not the Civil List anymore. They now get a proportion of the profits made by the government from the Crown Estate.

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Re: "he man wore a costume to a fucking fancy dress party! "

Senior civil servants in Brussels have a lot more power over your life than does Prince Harry. As do local councillors or civil servants in London for that matter. The Queen has almost no power, and anyone not heir to the throne as near to none as makes no difference. Being a celeb gives you a bit of influence - someothing for example he uses for service charities and his mother's old landmines and AIDS campaigns - but I wouldn't go so far as to describe that as power.

The royals aren't funded by taxpayers either.

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Re: "hysterical shit about Prince Harry "dressing as a Nazi","

LDS,

For fuck's sake, the man wore a costume to a fucking fancy dress party! He's nothing to do with the history of the monarchy in this country and little to do with the future of it either. He was (at the time) the spare to the heir to the heir. Now he's the heir to the spare to the heir of the heir to the heir.

He has done other things, as well as going to a fancy dress party. Including fighting in the army, as a forward air controller - which is not a job given out lightly given the opportunities to fuck up and get your entire unit killed.

Also military people tend to have a very robust sense of humour. There was great wailing and gnashing of teeth after Germany sent troops to Afghanistan (against much traditional opposition) and those troops were photographed by the press with t-shirts they'd had printed that read: I got further East than Grandad.

Whether you find that in poor taste or very funny is a matter of opinion. I suppose it could be both... I remember laughing a lot when I read about it.

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Pint

Re: On the bright side

Now try saying epidemiologists 3 times, after imbibing a few of said fermented barley concoctions...

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Devil

Re: On the subject of The Handmaid's Tale...

Don't people study Barbara Cartland in English nowadays? What is education coming to!

Not forgetting her amazing contribution to music.

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Re: Bah!

Mark Kermode says that he went to see Apollo 13 with Radio 1's other film reviewer, as in one aged more in line with their demographic, him and Mayo being the very old hangers-on soon to be dispatched to Radio 5. And she said afterwards how exciting the film was, and how she was always in suspense about how it was going to end...

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Re: Bah!

I had a conversation with someone in about 2005. She's not well educated, but not stupid. But definitely very busy, 2 jobs and 2 kids in their later teens at the time. I think non-work time would not have been wasted on such petty fripperies as the news.

Anyway the subject turned to the mighty Tony Blair for some reason or other (the election?). And she said, "but isn't he unpopular because of that foreign story a few years ago?"

Me, wonders what she's on about and tries a wild guess, "What you mean the war in Iraq?"

"Oh yes, that was it." She said.

Every time I read about the internal dissent within the Labour Party, and see/hear some Corbyn fan spitting about the evils of Blair, I always remember that conversation. Sure Iraq had an impact on Labour's popularity, but not as much as some people might think. It easy for political anoraks to forget how little impact the things we obsess about have on normal voters.

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Happy

Re: Influencers ?

But that's a bit long to fit on a business card...

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Re: Sacrifices Must Be Made

Coal power kills and has killed way more people than nuclear. It also releases more radiation than nuclear power. And that's ignoring the climate change issues that are causing us to close down coal fired plants. If climate change starts killing millions, that'll be down to previously burnt coal, not the nuclear industry - so the clean-up costs are probably worse too.

Gas is better than coal on pretty much all counts - but still has climate change implications. I think oil would come between the two. As far as electricity base load, that leaves nuclear and hydro, which both have their own problems and limitations

Currently we do not have an ideal base load generation technology. Nuclear is one of the better options, and might be better still if we did more work on thorium. Otherwise we can always hope for fusion or a breakthrough in storage or carbon capture.

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Happy

Re: Alternative titles ...

Two heads are better than one

Geiger Countdown

Core Blimey Flash Bang Wallop What a Picture

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Re: Throw a party for influencers at Chernobyl.

An alternative would be a pool party at Fukishima.

So I'll pot the glowing green in the top left pocket and the black doubles into the centre.

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Re: iPhone?

Like the joke:

Q. How do you know if somebody is a vegan.

A. They tell everyone.

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Re: Can someone explain...

Interestingly a new person has joined our company. I approved of her highly on day one, as she told me taht she hated Facebook and all its works, and had given up her account - because it was all about making people miserable.

But then on day 2, I was sad, as she told me about this famous (not to me though) Instagrammer she follows. I think she's a wellbeing blogger. Which seems to involve lots of stuff about how great her life is and how shit yours is. And everything you like is awful. One morning's post was something like bacon is as addictive as crack. And there's all sorts of cod-science claims on there, like reboiling the water in a kettle is bad for you. And bacon is bad for you. Lies! Lies, I tell you! But the usual crap about if you feel you're getting a cold take echinacia and that'll cure you and diet fads and the like. All terribly depressing.

One friend told me confidently that my sources were rubbish, when I was pointing out to her the dangers of not taking the MMR vaccine. My go-to source on measles symptoms being the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta - given I wanted to Google a credible source to give actual stats, without having to do much checking. Fuck me! Her source was less credible than the Daily Mail! That fucker Wakefield has a lot to answer for! As do the wankers in the press who went along with him for so long.

US can try extraditing Julian Assange next year, rules UK court

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Re: why the remeote video link ?

There could be two reasons for the video link. It has been done to save money, as transporting prisoners around and stopping them from runing away does cost money. Or in his specific case it could be because he missed his last hearing, and the reason given was that he was ill. So take your pick.

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Re: What 'crime' does the USA want him for ?

Some of the sources from the Afghan war logs were just ordinary people living in villages who were giving info about Taleban minefields they wanted clearing so their kids didn't get their legs blown off. The logs gave names and GPS coordinates of their houses. Which Assange didn't bother to redact, "because it was too difficult".

Those darn users don't know what they're doing (not like us, of course)

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Pint

It's a poorly conceived, hissing crater of failure.

Mr Dabbs,

Thank you. An excellent addition to the lexicon on an annoying Friday.

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Re: "entire OS had rotated 90 degrees"

I've seen it done with a laptop. They were using a plug-in keyboard to allow them to still type on the laptop - which at least still worked as a convenient stand - for the now portrait mode screen. Actually an improvement on some widescreen laptops...

A friend phoned me yesterday. The computers frozen. All I can see is this picture of a waterfall. Not one I've taken, so it must be one of the ones built into the OS. No buttons do anything. The answer being to press CTR+ALT+DEL to get the login prompt. Obvious when you know, completely baffling when you don't.

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Re: Focus follows intent

Arthur the cat,

My reading glasses are 5x magnification and are the same thing that you see surgeons using to do detail work - small telescopes glued to a normal glasses frame.

So focus follows eye detection shouldn't be a problem for me - though of course it would be given that it's such an unusual situation and won't fit the sytem design. Face recognition on phones and tablets can't cope with it either, for obvious reasons.

Although I'm actually happy with focus being where I fucking left it! Rather than messages and/or other programs stealing it halfway through me doing something. I was fixing the office's spare laptop the other day. And when a computer's not been run for a while, everything needs updating. Which is fine. But. Every. Single. Fucking. Piece. Of. Fucking. Software. Demands that you stop. Right now! And change focus to this pop-up box with some "oh so important" message or other.

Sometimes with computers, swearing is the only answer.

Gonna be so cool when we finally get into space, float among the stars, work out every day, inject testosterone...

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But what about the small blue furry creatures from Alpha Centauri?

Get this: Mad King Leo wanted HP to slurp two other firms alongside ill-fated Autonomy buyout

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Re: So many stupids

Judges don't generally toss out cases, unless there's no evidence at all. And this being a civil trial, the standard of proof is "on the balance of probabilities", not "beyond reasonable doubt".

On the other hand, their judgements can sometimes make exremely painful reading if they find against your case, and your case happened to be a pile of poo.

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Re: Thumbs up for Lesjak then..

Well she did her job in the sense of quietly objecting. But as the CFO I'd say that it was her duty to resign, if she thought the deal was that bad. And it sounds like there were a couple of people on the board who objected, but they failed to force the rest of the board to wait on the decision - and the non-exec members of the board failed to hold the board to account as they should have done, in the case of a major disagreement between CEO and CFO. That's supposed to be the chairman's bloody job! It's why having companies with a joint Chairman/CEO role is such a bad idea.

So I'd say it's 3 out of 10 for her, and none for the rest of the board.

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I think the defence is that Autonomy was doing great when HP bought it, but they then ran it so badly that sales collapsed, and everyone left.

From reading El Reg's summaries that seems to be doing quite well. Also we've had barely any evidence of the supposed fraud of all these hardware sales to boost turnover. Which surely isn't fraud anyway, if a company reports its sales and profits accurately? It's just if HP weren't checking when they did their due dilligence and didn't notice that not all the sales were highly profitable software.

There'll be a whole bunch of written evidence, that if it comes from the accounts both sides will agree, and so therefore will get less discussion in court - but obviously the judges will have in front of them.

But of course we haven't heard the testimony and cross examination of defence witnesses yet - so I suppose it's possible that they'll sound even more dodgy and incompetent than the HP ones? Hard to imagine, but possible...

UK Home Sec kick-starts US request to extradite ex-WikiLeaker Assange

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Sadly the Swedish court appears to have told its prosecutors that they can only interview him with his permission - and that they can't have an arrest warrant, even though they had one before. Don't ask me why, I don't understand the Swedish system. The reports on that case in this country didn't say why the court ruled the way it did, so I guess our press know as little about the Swedish criminal justice system as me...

What was the point of showing all those Scandi-noir detective shows on BBC2 - that's what I want to know!

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Re: Good Luck, The Extradition Agreement Was Negotiated By . . .

I believe the US have extradited more people here in that time than we've sent back to them. Not that I don't agree, it's a pisspoor excuse for a treaty, and we should cancel it and replace it with the perfectly fine previous one.

But then I'd also cancel the European Arrest Warrant system. I've no problem with trusting the Swedish legal system, but I'm not so happy with some of the others. So I think our courts should get to assess the quality of the evidence first, and the Home Secretary have a veto as well.

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Re: Is it only the "hacking" charges extradition request that is moving?

Sadly not. Accoring to the Guardian piece there were about 18 counts, with both the hacking and the stuff under the espionage act. I've no problem with him going down for hacking, if guilty - but since the US added those charges to their extradition request I'd personally like to see the Home Secretary refuse it.

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Re: "Assange is understood to be claiming that he is a journalist"

teknopaul,

I have seen "collaterol murder". That's the video that Wikileaks edited to remove the weapons that the alleged victims were carrying. Admittedly Wikileaks did eventually publish the unedited version, but they lost all credibility by doing that. There was no warcrime there anyway, because the journalist who got killed was with a group of armed people, which was who the helicopter engaged. The gunner shouts "RPG" when he sees the camera poking round the corner of the building, and that's why they fired, which was withing their rules of engagement. If you are a journalist on the front lines, that's unfortunately the risk you take.

So Wikileaks edited the video to make the helicopter crew look guilty when they weren't. Admittedly they also left in the intercom comments, which were in pretty poor taste, but then these were people in a high stress combat environment - it's pretty hard to judge that behaviour unless you've been there. Proper journalism would be to get an experience war correspondent to tell you if that behaviour is normal.

For example an ex US Marine that I know was hit by friendly fire in Afghanistan. And he says that as the first 1,000lb bomb hit near their bunker (and the second was about to hit it) the last thing he remembered was shouting, "They nuked us man! They fuckin' nuked us!" I'd say that line of dialogue came from an over-written action film, except I know it actually happened...

To "add" to Wikileaks journalistic credentials, they also edited out the end of that video for 'Collaterol Murder', as they thought people would be bored. I once read an interesting piece by a US lawyer - who argued that if there was a war crime there, it happend at the end. I've not bothered watching it, but she said that it shows some of the armed people the helicopter crew had engaged going into a building, and the crew firing on the building. She argued that this would be a disproportionate use of force, as they didn't know who else was in that building - and they didn't know those people were going to attack, they might just be hiding. I'm not enough of a lawyer to know how that would stand up, it sounds more like a breach of rules of engagement than rules of war to me.

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Re: Sweden

I agree. He should have gone to Sweden, and I don't approve of their judicial system having let him get away with hiding. Which seems to me, admittedly as someone very ignorant of Swedish due process, to be what's happened. Their Supreme Court ruled that continuing to pursue him when in the embassy was "disproportionate", and so forced the prosecutor's office to reverse the EAW. Which looks to me like endorsing his tactic of running away.

I also don't approve of statute of limitations on rape cases. On minor crimes, I'm fine with it. But I don't see why we should reward criminals who successfully evade prosecution for a few years by letting them off if they can wait long enough. Seems rather tough on the victims. Although I admit that evidence gets less reliable as it gets older, so I can understand the reason for it.

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teknopaul,

No politician makes the law here. Other than the MPs who voted for it 15 years ago. Extradition has a political element. Which is basically allowing politicians to block extradition if there's a reason to - the Home Secretary doesn't have the power to make anything happen or cause anybody to go to prison, but they do have the power to stop the whole process. Which is a good thing in my opinion - and in both the cases of the US extradition treaty and the European Arrest warrant system - I woulld argue that we've taken too much power out of the hands of politicians to stop foreign courts from gaining access to our citizens.

Also, in these cases, the Home Secretary is acting in a quasi-judicial role, which means that their decision is subject to lots of legal process that they, and the civil servants advising them, have to strictly follow - or their decision will be subject to judicial review.

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Is this actually a news story? I'm no expert on the legal process, but it doesn't look like the Home Sec has actually made a decision at all. He's just OK'ed the case to proceed to court. His final decision is after the court case and inevitable appeals have finished.

Own goal: $280,000 GDPR fine for soccer app that snooped on fans' phone mics to snare pub telly pirates

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Re: Data Spoof

That's because Apple make their money by selling you phones - and Google make their money by selling advertising. Even with Android totally dominating the mobile space, Google still make over 90% of their revenue from selling ads - and barely anything from apps, music and all their smart home gubbins.

Apple did try to run the iAds platform, but it didn't really succeed - so they've less incentive to data-mine all their customers in the way Google do.