Posts by DiViDeD 1403 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2007
Actually, he LEFT the country before the summons was issued, after his lawyer had obtained an assurance from the state prosecutor that he was not required for interview.
And he's not 'wanted' for anything. The Swedish prosecutor's office want to interview him regarding a complaint which has been made. You have to be charged with something before you can be 'wanted'
for it, surely?
Seriously, the original accounts are easy enough to find. What's with the communal memory loss?
".what he is accused of is questionable enough that it represents a danger to members of Swedish society.."
if "I had sex with him that night, but when I woke up the next morning he was trying to have sex with me again" is the worst danger the Swedish people have to worry about the I think they have it pretty bloody easy.
Even if we hear nothing more from Philae, we still have Rosetta circling round for who knows how long. Like I've said before, some days you can do without the flying cars and personal jetpacks while we can still achieve shit like this.
That is all, except, a beer to all concerned.
I can only thank doG that other countries haven't adopted the impenetrable bloody maze that is american sales tax. There's federal tax, state tax, county tax, city tax, bit of the city tax, I wouldn't be surprised if there's an 'alternative tuesdays if you have a beard' bloody tax!
And none of it appears on the supermarket shelf price. You can try to keep a running tally in your head, but for most people, they don't know how much their shopping will cost them till they add all the taxes on at the checkout.
Just one of the quaint local customs that infuriated me while I was there.
I'm not so sure they're not.
I (and an increasing number of acquaintances) use a number of devices for video viewing, and they all interface with the TV in the media room (remember when it was simply the living room?), bedroom, etc.
The tv is simply used as a video terminal, with audio piped to the nearest convenient sound system. The only reason the various tv u its haven't been replaced with flat panel monitors is that nobody seems to make 55, 65 or 80 inch monitors at anywhere near the price of a tv set.
I may be unusual, in that we haven't had an aerial or cable point for at least 10 years (ok, we DO have a Foxtel IQ HD box, but it's wired into the network like everything else, so if I wanted to watch Big Brother live on my android tablet, I could, but then I'd have to kill myself), but I do see a definite trend away from using the tv as anything except 'another display device'
Sorry, you lost me at your opinion that, in some way, the governing of merka by a few corporations who have bought the politicians and are now engaged in trying to ensure the rest of the world acts exclusively in the interests of those same corporations is an expression of the purest Communist ideal?
Where did you do your extensive research into the ideals and aims of Communism? Same place George Dubya studied the meaning of terrorism, at a guess.
Mine's the one with the copy of the Communist Manifesto (sponsored by Halliburton - The Peoples' Reconstructors) in the pocket.
I am ashamed to admit that, in getting on for 60 years in which I've had pocket calculators, little hand held 'pocket' games (think Game & Watch), PCMCIA cards, slot in notebook floppy drives (not forgetting the floppies themselves) and now various mobile phones, I have never, ever, sat on any one of them. I apologise for not taking part in what appears to be a very popular pastime.
In other words, who the FUCK buys an expensive and complex piece of hardware and thinks 'Oh goody - now I have something to sit on'?
"The only winning move is to put everything important out of reach"
The initiative I found most useful was, believe it or not, to turn the door handles to certain rooms upside down. It meant, until they were 4 or 5, even if they had worked out what I'd done, they weren't tall enough to get the handle to the top of its swing.
Led to a few 'senior' moments on the part of their mother and I as we tried to work out what was wrong with the door, mind.
On a related door handly note, whose bloody stupid idea was it that locking doors (bathroom, toilet) should be easy to open from the OUTSIDE? The first time my daughter walked in on me in mid sh*t was a terrifying and traumatic experience (for me, that is - she seemed to regard it as a terribly clever trick)
My eldest boy was around 3 when he discovered he could 'share' his big sister's fruit pastilles with daddy's (very expensive!) motorised load cassette deck. Place it in the tray, press down, and the deck 'ate' it and opened it's gob for another.
Wll the thing about leccytronics in those days was they got hot. And the thing about fruit pastilles when they get hot is ... the tray comes back empty. He was delighted that he managed tp get it to eat a whole tube before the screaming started.
Bandwagon firmly jumped on, with no recorded terrorist attack on Australian soil, that nice Mr Abbot has informed us that we'll just have to give up 'some' of our freedoms in order to shift the 'delicate balance' more towards security, for a time. What was it someone said about deserving neither?
Fuckers. But that's just an opinion, which will soon become a criminal offence in the name of protecting us from the terry wrists
Stop listening to shit music then.
It's not about shit music, it's about shit post production. Today's sound engineers seem to have only one aim - make it LOUDER. This results in digital 'remasters' that sound like they were recorded on a 70s cassette recorder with ALC, every breathy cymbal becomes an explosion, all the instruments disappear into noisy audio mud.
Digital recording promised us a dynamic range way above 100dB, but the music industry decided to just use those two at the top.
I had the misfortune to run into a public showing of the Kardashian woman* pouting and whimpering at a local shopping centre. Nothing I witnessed made me want to see any more of her, clothed or no.
* I really need to check the local events listing before leaving the house.
"So if I want more science in my viewing diet I *have* to look elsewhere."
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but don't try looking in the direction od Discovery Science Channel. It seems the term 'science' only applies to weapons, gadgets and 'did you ever wonder how they make baseball bats?'
Of course when science content is determined by admen and arts graduates we're stuffed before we start.
Direct funding by the government might be considdred fair. However, here in Oz we have the dear old ABC, either a hotbed of right wing neanderthals, or a den of thinly disguised communist sympathisers, depending on what colour of government is currently cutting its funding and demanding job cuts, better programmes and a better press for our current gov.
ABC homegrown programmes are generally dire (with a few surprising exceptions), and the only way they can fill the schedules every night is BBC programmes supplied at reduced rates by Auntie.
Having seen how government funding can stifle a tv channel, I have to give my vote to the Beeb.
Sorry to sound like a Samsung fanboi, but Gear Navigator is brilliant for navigation in the car. The map is right there in your line of sight, with enough detail to point out which way next.
Samsung, Nokia, whatever, I can't help feeling Apple have come to the party VERY late and brought nothing new or distinctive. Apart from the usual "Ah, but Apple has done it RIGHT" we'll be hearing from the fanbois
"..to stop and search every black man with baggy clothes."
Or as was the case for a neighbour of mine, pull over a young black barrister 134 times in 18 months when he was driving his 7 series BMW, yet strangely, not once when he was driving his wife's 5 year old Honda Civic.
The authorities are already happy to profile people as criminals when they want to, let's not give them another excuse.
Oh, and the harrassment of my neighbour only stopped when he refused to speak to the officer and was hauled before the beak for 'obstructing the police in the pursuance of their duty'. It helped that, as a barrister, he had access to records of the previous tugs.
"What if... ebooks with almost zero storage and distribution costs were cheaper that the hard cover edition?"
I regret to inform you that I've already had this conversation:
'Yabbut with an ebook, you can take it anywhere. You can be reading it on your phone and then you can fire up your tablet and you're on the same page you were last time, even if you were reading it on a different device, and......'
Even after I'd picked my jaw up off the floor I couldn't think of a response which didn't include the word twunt
"..system needs to change from this knee jerk mob mentality and offer help to these people before they can do any harm."
Too right. It's accepted that an overwhelming majority of actual paedophiles (ie not those simply moving on to the next bit of depravity because they haven't tried it yet) were abused as children. We have enormous sympathy for the abused child right up to the time when that child becomes an adultpaedophile, at which point our attitude changes from 'poor dear' to 'sick fuck'.
Nobody could advocate that child abuse is right, but as the AC says, it isn't something they can talk to their GP about, nor is it, generally, something for which a judge would recommend treatment (or at least any treatment beyond 'a damn good kicking in the showers while the guards look the other way').
And the current legislation which means you can go to prison for being in possession of a cartoon or a photograph of a grown woman who looks a bit like she might be under 18 takes away any possibility of release for paedophiles other than actually abusing a child.
I understand that, these days, the video quality can be quite reasonable, given the improvement in low light capability of the cameras. Often they are shot from the projection booth, avoiding the problems of people getting up and down, large hats and other such hindrances to free enterprise.
I also understand, from .. somewhere.. that a large number of bootlegs these days use the FM or induction sound transmission being broadcast for wearers of hearing aids, or even a direct jack into the cinema's sound system (suggesting there are a lot of differently principled projectionists out there)
Although for most people, the DVD screener, where available, is the preferable course for both video and audio quality.
or so I'm told
"...thief.. blah blah .. stolen .. blah .. stolen goods. How much would you ask if someone robbed you?"
Actually, more like, how would you feel if you were selling photos of your house, and he came along, took his own photo and started selling that.
Theft involves depriving somebody of something. He didn't nick the cinema screen, he just took pictures of it.
What he did was not right, but it isn't something we should be wasting the court's time with, ffs.
Actually, imprisonment is inevitable for ANYONE leaking information at the level of Secret or above. That's how the law stands in the US. I was amused to hear John Kerry suggesting that Snowden should 'man up' and come back to the US to defend his actions when, in reality, there is NO DEFENCE. If you reveal priviliged information about National Security (and bot does that cover a wide range these days!), you are automatically guilty and subject to the full penalty. it really doen't matter whether that leak exposed traitors or corruption at the highest level, or that providing the information was in the public interest. The very admission that you were responsible for the leak allows for no defence and no extenuating circumstances, it's simply an automatic 'Go Directly to jail' card.
In law, there's actually no defence you can offer at all.
"country where he has an arrest warrant out in his name "
No he doesn't!!
There is no arrest warrant issued in Sweden because he HASN'T BEEN CHARGED WITH ANYTHING THERE.
The EAW that was issued is an EU legal instrument issued by one EU country requiring any and all other EU countries to hold a suspect on their behalf. It was originally intended as a method of dealing with serious criminals and terrorists, not as an excuse when the state prosecutor has a change of heart, but there you go - it's legally binding. It's also the only warrant issued outside of the UK. There certainly has never been a warrant issued in respect of the rape of two women. Anyone who believes that 'we were having consensual sex when the condom broke, and although we continued to have sex, some three days later it was suggested to me that he might have allowed the condom to break on purpose' is the same thing as actual rape needs to take a serious rethink.
I don't hold much respect for Assange, but I can't subscribe to the current medimob driven exaggerations and outright lies about the case.
"I'm pretty sure that you _can_ be locked up for rape in Sweden."
Yes, you can. But nobody is talking 'rape' here (except the UK tabloids and certain commentards).
You cannot be locked up for sex by surprise in Sweden, and this is the offence with which he MAY be charged after any interview with the Swedish authorities. Unfortunately, sex by surprise (fairly literal translation) is not a crime anywhere else in the EU (or the world as far as I know), and as such has no direct counterpart in UK law. because of this, the media, at the start of this affair, went through a whole spectrum of euphemisms, from 'indecent behaviour' through 'a sexually related offence' and 'sexual assault' until finally settling on the term 'rape' as being both acceptably understandable to viewers and listeners, while maintaining the correct air of shocked melodrama to attract eyes to screens and bums to seats.
to my mind, the description of what, even in Sweden, is considered a minor offence, punishable by a maximum fine of ~7,500kr, as 'rape' is both misleading and an insult to the victims of real rape.
.. and breathe
"Rear 2 - wouldn't bother again. Hardly ever find material that makes effective use of them"
Might I respectfully guide you in the direction of Peter Gabriel's Secret World BD, with special attention to 'Shaking the Tree'?
Actually, another one, which surprised me greatly, is Antiques Road Show, where you can often hear people having an unrelated discussion behind you.
"Where would I put the crap that lives on top of the speakers?"
Oh I am so glad I'm not the only one. My woman sees a horizontal surface and immediately thinks "Hmm, I know what would look nice on there". Me being a bit of a vinyl junkie, this means I have to find a home for the lamp/ candle holder/ stuffed warthog she's decided to adorn my turntable with before I can use it. Same goes for me 'classic' (read: old) Naim CD32. Speakers are adorned with flowers, digital photo frames, amusing terracotta stuff - anything that will rattle nicely when they're running.
Best so far was the active sub with the bowl of scented floating candles that exploded during a showing of 'The Dish' causing smoke fuelled electronic merriment for all. After that incident she vowed never to put anything on top of a device with a hinged lid or that plugged into something else.
And true to her word, she didn't. At least, not for the 10 minutes it took her to find another bowl to put the floating candles into.
I so hope she never starts reading the Reg.
"In the last three years we have seen that change and we think that's down to tablets"
Leaving out the obvious 'Can I get these tech savvy tablets on the NHS?', did Mr Obvious of Blindingly not consider the fact that the demgraphic has changed its profile, with a lot of the older ones popping their clogs and being replaced by people who were 62 when they did the last survey?
It's like the twit on TV a couple of weeks ago saying 'In the last 10-15 years we've noticed that over 50s have become far more willing to understand and embrace the technology'
What she meant, of cours, was 'Over the past 10-15 years, we've seen a lot of over people who understand and embrace the technology become over 50s.
Defeats me why we pay these pontificators
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