Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: What would happen if Assange stepped out ?

Charles 9,

European countries have extradited plenty of murder suspects to the US. They have to give a legal undertaking that they won't seek the death penalty, in order for that to happen. Their own courts would enforce that agreement, and if they should break it, no European country would legally be able to extradite on any potential capital crime again. He's just not worth it.

I suggested espionage, because I think he can get out of most lesser charges by claiming to be a journalist. The US have much stronger legal protections for this than the UK do.

Were he in Sweden, I believe he'd be safe from espionage, as it's a political offence the Swedes won't extradite for.

Re: "arguably wrong"

I believe a good lawyer is supposed to advise you that you're being a blithering idiot and wasting your money. Then if you insist, make sure that said wasted money is directed towards their wallet.

Re: Sheltering Criminals.

Charles 9,

Embassies are NOT there to protect their own citizens. They are there to allow communication between governments.

Admittedly they do have consular services, to help their citizens who get into trouble. But, they do not hide you from the police. If a Brit gets arrested abroad, the U.K. embassy will help them get a lawyer, and help their family to get money to them. Maybe make the odd visit, and try to ensure they get decently treated.

But that's it. It's not their job to break them out of prison, hide them in the embassy and smuggle them out in the diplomatic bag. That pisses off the host government, and buggers up communications.

Re: Meanwhile, back in Ecuador

I don't believe there's any statutes of limitations in UK criminal law. Though there are time limits in civil law. So the bail-jumping will never go away, even after the Swedish case is timed out.

Re: Meanwhile, back in Ecuador

The timing's off. The 10 year statute of limitations on the 2 rape charges run out sometime around Summer 2020 I think.

Just had to look it up, as I was sure it was last year that the other charges timed out. But it was actually 2015. Time flies when you're having fun...

Re: Sheltering Criminals.

Absolutely, that's why embassies have their special legal status - to protect the citizens of the embassy country from being persecuted by the host country if they disagree with the host country's policies.

No it's not. Embassies are there to allow communication between governments. Their immunities are provided in order to facilitate that. The Vienna Convention, which is the international law in question, says that they are not to be used for other purposes.

They are not there to circumvent the judicial system of their host country.

Re: What would happen if Assange stepped out ?

Not only have Sweden not dropped the charges against him, they haven't even charged him.

They can only charge him after he attends a formal interview at a Swedish police station. And he fled the country the evening before that appointment was made. Then fled UK jurisdiction a week before he'd lost his last appeal and was due to be sent back there.

They've stopped pursuing the case. If he turns up in a UK police station, all they need do is cross out the charges that have passed the statutue of limitations, change the date, and re-submit the old International Arrest Warrant. He's over 5 years into the 10 year statute of limitations on the 2 rape charges, so he's only got 4 and a bit more years to go to wait those out.

If the US really do want him, they don't have a statute of limitations on espionage - if that were the charge.

Re: "I find arrest is a proportionate response"

Wrong choice of words. He hasn't "locked himself up". He's hidden.

He's in hiding, and should get as much sympathy for "time served" as Ronnie Biggs did for all that time he was "forced" to spend in Brasil.

This can all be over any time he wants. That UN decision was both stupid and offensive, he was given full legal due-process at all times, and I'm glad the judge laughed it out of court.

Re: Schrödinger's Embassy

I think we already know he's a total arsehole. Whatever you may think of his politics - or the rights and wrongs of his worries about the US nabbing him.

I guess we'll learn something very interesting if he waits until the 10 year statute of limitations runs out on the Swedish rape case, and he only then comes out.

Other than that though, I get the impressions he's a bit random, and though genuinely paranoid is also either very lazy, or only paranoid when it suits him. That guy that he brought in to ghost-write an authorised biography, then reneged on the deal once he'd spent the advance, wrote something like that about him. Said that he was paranoid sometimes, but then other times totally lax. As if he wasn't sure if the paranoia was just Walther Mitty enjoying playing at spy games, or genuine. Or maybe a bit of both.

Re: Any flavor you want, as long as it's vanilla

Of course it's about the money. If you like Facebook, then you're getting a service you like for free. Same with Google. But Facebook and Google have costs. And they recoup that from advertising.

Same with TV. There's a difference here though. You have alternatives you can pay for. People like HBO, Amazon, Netflix etc.

The difference is that the internet market doesn't seem to have matured in the same way yet.

But it looks like it might happen in news. We, as customers, have helped to destroy our news media - by not paying for it. Leaving them reliant only on advertising. OK, it's also their own fault for only offering us that route online. Also advertising doesn't pay enough, and so they dropped quality in order to make their costs work out - and that made the problem worse. But people are starting to realise that you get what you pay for. If you want fact-checked (spell-checked) news, you're probably going to have to pay for it.

It maybe impossible to do this with a social network. How do you compete with free? But if you want to be the customer, and not the product, you'll have to pay.

Re: Effective Ad campaigns

Shouldn't that be good? From the point of view of Unilever's marketing department at least. If you're a campaign designer it might be bad, but as the people commissioning campaigns, Unilever can then turn to their ad agency and say "our viewers thought your ad was shit - buck your ideas up or we sack you."

Re: Advertisers only have themselves to blame

I disagree. Only some viral marketing can work. People only have so much time and space in their heads to waste on that kind of stuff. Plus it's really difficult to do.

You don't even need to be funny to succeed. The Gold Blend "soap opera" will-they-won't-they thing in the 80s/90s worked, even got on the front page of the tabloids, and that wasn't funny. Or Ronseal's: It does exactly what it says on the tin. Which has now become part of the language.

So some ads can do that. Some can succeed by just being ubiquitous and annoying, eg Daz + Mr Motivator. Tactics can differ. But in the end, it's all about being noticed. I don't believe the audience has changed.

I think the problem is all about delivery. TV audiences aren't actually smaller, they're just more fragmented. No longer to 30% of the population watch the same program at the same time. Except for big sporting events sometimes.

Also TV and Radio had independent metrics. Companies that tell advertisers roughly who's watching what. Google and Facebook "mark their own homework". And have been caught lying (e.g. FB with 10m fake US teens, or Google with fake clicks). So the advertisers have to spread themselves over a wider area to attract fewer people and can't trust their delivery platforms. Hence their complaints.

Re: What's worse?

What do you mean by child workers?

In the UK we now make school compulsory until 18. And regard anyone under 18 as a child.

The leaving age was 16 when I was growing up. And working from age 16 was normal. Are 16 year-olds children?

In the late 50s my Dad left school at 14, and went into a job as an apprentice electrician. With 2 days a week at college. By the time he was 16 he was doing week long jobs around the country and him and his crew often slept in the back of their van so they could keep the room expenses they were paid by their company. Was he then a child at 14?

100 years ago most British people didn't go into secondary education. And so started working around 12 ish.

So Western companies shouldn't go into developing countries and take the piss. But on the other hand, those countries are going to develop by growing their economies in order to be able to afford to educate their kids for longer, and to have decent healthcare, pensions and the like. A balance needs to be struck here.

It's nice and easy to use emotive language about child exploitation, but to take an example if you have 14 year-old workers in a factory that do limited hours and get an hour of schooling a day and that's better than prevailing conditions in their society - are you doing something immoral? Even if you don't do the schooling, but are giving their families cash, and therefore the choice of paying for the healthcare/schooling/whatever that they think they need - there's an argument that even that isn't wrong.

Re: Money Talks - This is all bullshit!

Anon,

It could be that they're just in the middle of price negotiations, and Unilever are giving FB a public kicking to get the fees down. But this is a funny way to do it.

There's a tradition in the US to go after the advertisers. If you think there's too much nudity/swears in a TV show say, you can complain to the TV company - but you can also write to sponsors. No advertiser wants to be pissing off their potential customers - or to look bad. So they threaten to withdraw, and the TV company backs down. I've noticed quite a lot of campaigners recently trying similar tactics. If you can make something look like bad PR for a company and it's only a small amount of their business, it might look too expensive to be worth doing.

Re: Erosion Of Trust

To be fair, the article mentions that. And says that the speech was handed to journalists beforehand with specific mention of Facebook. This is often how politicians work. You're less specific on the record, in the speech, but brief the meaning to the journalists who're going to cover it.

This obviously means you have to trust the journalists in question, that they're not just making shit up. So you'll have to make a judgement on how reliable you think El Reg are.

But as the Beeb and Guardian (that I've seen) have also taken the same line, that is a further confirmation that El Reg are on the level - if you still feel you need it.

I'd say that makes it look pretty clear that Uniliver are firing a shot across Facebook's bow. Of course this could just be part of some price negotiations currently going on, trying to get a bit of extra leverage. Or it could be a genuine comment from a huge advertiser that's getting pissed off. I've heard a lot of late about "brand safety" from advertisers - they don't like the idea of their ads being shown next to ISIS beheading footage on Youtube for example.

Also I remember one of the big car companies (Ford?) left Facebook 3 or 4 years ago, because they said the advertising seemed to be useless - plus they didn't like their ads being shown next to Russian brides ads and "win a free iPad" scam adverts.

Yes. For some reason I find that toast doesn't work as well for bacon butties. Though it's great with a fry-up. Fresh, soft white rolls, lightly buttered, and bacon that's been cooked so the fat has crisped up but the bacon hasn't. Personally I don't really want beer with it. A big mug of tea that's just dropped to perfect "guzzling temperature" is all-important, maybe with a glass of orange juice on the side.

Re: What to do with an Echo?

My brother's family have a full-fat Echo (much more useful as you can use it to play music), so I'm going to give them my Echo Dot. Then they can use it as an intercom between the kitchen and sitting room, and to stick stuff on their Amazon shopping list.

That's if they're still using it. They'd signed up to the trial for Amazon groceries in London, but last time I checked had pulled-out as Amazon kept getting their orders wrong, or just missing a bag from the delivery. Which of course they only noticed once the driver had scarpered.

Not sure if that's useful to you - unless you want to give yours to my brother as well... But it's the only solution I've come up with for the one I was given for my birthday last year.

Re: Easy

Just like John Marshall.

When he reneged on a deal to surrender his castle to King Stephen he was told that if he didn't carry out his promise his 6 year old son (whom he'd given as a hostage) would be killed. Spoiler alert: he survived to be the famous William the Marshal).

His answer (either as the kid was being strung-up to be hanged in front of the walls (or loaded into a trebuchet - I think they did both at different points - "I still have the hammer and the anvil with which to forge yet more and better sons!"

I guess that was the fate of 4th sons in mediaeval times...

Re: Gravy/Chips issues.

Biscuits and gravy is very nice though. Just horrific for your poor little arteries.

But then when I was a kid I used to eat bread and dripping. It was lovely! But the thought of it now, over 30 years later, makes me feel queasy.

Re: Northerners...

When I was about 7, I went to a friend's house for sunday lunch And for some reason was further shuttled along out of the way by his parents - we walked over to his granny's house a few streets away. I was absolutely delighted to be served proper deep fried chips (oven chips back then were truly awful), sausages and baked beans. Mum believed in feeding me a bit more healthily, sadly. So a properly good meal, to this 7 year-old.

Even better, she'd constructed the appropriate dam of sausages, in order to protect the chips from the encroachment of de-crispifying baked-bean-juice. Perfection.

But no! The horror! His granny was a northerner. She then proceeded to pour gravy over this magnificent culinary creation! Chips with gravy is already an abomination - that's why I build the sausage-dams in the first place! But gravy mixed with baked-bean-juice. Ugh! Bleurgh!

As I was dragged up to be polite, I had to eat every soggy mouthful of ruined deliciousness.

Gravy on chips is wrong!

Hmmm. Better don the flameproof trousers after posting that. But this is the ditch I will die in. The ditch dug to protect chips from being needlessly decrispified by the erroneous application of extraneous gravy!

Re: Pics, or it didn't happen!

It was the 80s. Of course it did.

I had light grey leather shiny slip-on loafers, with tassles. Because, erm, I... erm, had no taste? Oh, and wore them with white socks, naturally. At various times I had white jeans, yellow jeans, and wore purple and orange shirts.

Although I refuse to apologise for wearing flourescent yellow socks.

[note to self: Must remember to hit anonymous button]

Re: the good old days

Mum got one of those videos that you could program with a barcode scanner. But I don't think they ever caught on, so the papers didn't print the barcodes with their listings.

So you had this plastic card that you could scan to set up your recordings that was even more user-unfriendly and hard-to-use than just programming the thing by kneeling in front of it and pressing buttons.

I've used some shockingly bad technology over the years!

My CD Walkman was pretty good though. It had enough memory that it neve skipped, but conversely you could skip tracks in a way that made your tape walkman look positively archaic. Came with rechargeable batteries, which was just as it was hungry for power. And came with a case that held 10 CDs. It was far less of a problem than my various knock-off tape walkmen - and didn't destroy any of my CDs in the way that ate tapes.

I'd forgotten that. As a teenager I did sound for my church - and we had a proper tape copying machine - as sermons were recorded, copied and sent out to people who couldn't make it to church to share the boredom in person. This was dead useful for making good copies of tapes. It had proper inch square coloured buttons that lit up when you pressed them - and stayed lit until the process was finished. Did a C90 in just a few minutes.

The world needs more light-up buttons and glowing dials. Controls on computer screens just don't cut it. Give me a big old panel full of chunky glowing buttons and toggle switches any day.

Re: Oh my...

Dad bought one of those Amstrad "HiFi" things in the 80s. It was about 1.2m tall and came in a glass case, with space to shelve your records at the bottom. It also had a radio and twin casette decks. So my music copying and mix-tape making tasks were pretty easy.

Although you couldn't turn the sound off while you copied, so trying to pirate computer games was incredibly unpleasant - you had to leave the room, and it upset the dog.

I remember trying to tape Radio 4's Lord of the Rings adaptation on Sunday afternoons, but this plan needed 13 weeks uninterupted access - which was foiled by family visits.

I still remember one mixtape with The Reflex (Duran Duran), 19 (Paul Hardcastle), Cricketers 19 (parody by Rory Bremner), I Like Driving in My Car (Madness) - though heaven knows why I made it.