>He would be sent to USA to respond of his alleged crimes in front of a public court of justice.
Haha, no. He'd be sent to a secret FISA Star Chamber. There's no way he'd be tried in public.
And if the Swedish authorities wanted Assange to answer for alleged crimes in Sweden, all they had to do was publicly declare that they wouldn't extradite Assange to the US. That was the sole requirement he had made of the Swedish authorities in exchange for his willingness to return to Sweden. The fact that the Swedish authorities refused even that is deeply suspicious.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review only are empowered to handle foreign intelligence surveillance warrant process.
Criminal charges are handled in US District Courts, and are Constitutionally guaranteed to be public.
>Criminal charges are handled in US District Courts, and are Constitutionally guaranteed to be public.
If you think that the US DOJ hasn't spent a million man-hours to find some way to keep everything as secret as possible, you haven't been paying attention to their actions thus far. They will find some way to kangaroo-court him out of the public eye. They do it with foreign nationals all the time.
> If you think that the US DOJ hasn't spent a million man-hours to find some way to keep everything as secret as possible, you haven't been paying attention to their actions thus far.
I'm pretty sure that they have neither spent that many man-hours nor would get much value from spending anywhere close to that, because the parameters of “as secret as possible” are, while always subject to further litigation around the borders, not so mysterious or difficult to assess that it would take that much work to get a solid idea both where the boundaries were and what the relative risks of various ways of probing the areas where there is remaining uncertainty.
> They will find some way to kangaroo-court him out of the public eye. They do it with foreign nationals all the time.
Not with foreign nationals subjected to formal criminal extradition they don't. Foreign, allegedly unawful, combatants detained by the US military or transferred to their custody by America’s cobelligerents in the context of military conflict, all completely outside of the civilian criminal justice system, sure; foreign parties where the government covertly intervenes with overseas regimes to detain them without involving the US criminal justice system to, that too. But none of those are applicable here.
Strangely enough, there's the same sort of renewables-only electricity choices in oil-obsessed Alberta, Canada. The city of Calgary's rail transit system runs solely on electricity purchased from wind farms.
In fairness to Asimov's laws of robotics, he invented them as a device to illustrate how fundamentally flawed those sorts of rules can be. His robot stories are about how unforeseen situations create unexpected behaviour, despite apparently simple and rigid rules. He wasn't really trying to promote those laws as a practical solution to future robotics problems. He wanted a source of conflict as fuel for stories.
Perhaps I've misrecalled but I thought Asimov said something to the effect that the reason he did the 3 laws was because all robots stories were about robots going amok and making war on humanity which he found unlikely to happen because of course robots would be programmed not to do that.
KDE these days seems like configurability-overload. I appreciate the flexibility but it just feels excessive to me. I think a lot of the options should be tucked away into an equivalent of Firefox's about:config. For me, something like XFCE has the ideal config panel complexity. (Of course, it's all subjective.)
There are ways that the configuration can be done for you, however. There's a "Use Desktop Layout From Theme" that would pull in any layout changes from a theme you install.
When I found out that you could apply a theme and, with a few clicks, have KDE fashioned into something that looks indistinguishable from Unity, I almost switched to it just for the novelty.
KDE could use some work in the design department, with a lot of the menus and UI stuff getting an overhaul, but without actually removing functionality (just moving it around to be more sensible, and not overloading new users with too many options at once).
The recent extension-disabling problem made me realize how awful the unfiltered web is. Trying to use mobile Chrome for the first time ever was a dreadful experience. I legitimately had no idea that mobile Chrome doesn't have any extension capability whatsoever. I always assumed it was a Firefox-style unified experience where the same desktop extensions worked on mobile. I was horrified to discover otherwise.
Ads ads ads everywhere. How do people actually live day-to-day with mobile browsers that have no true adblocking capability? Using mobile Chrome is like taking a stroll through a plague ward.
I've had a similar experience as the GP, and I find it awful that autoplay videos will follow you around the page, pop-up modals will interrupt you in the middle of reading something, and ads will take up 40% or more of the page, loading between paragraphs while reading. It's hugely distracting to me.
We could make the same argument: you've spend years without adblock, and they have worn you down to the point where you accept active mental blocking of highly distracting ads. And even then you say sometimes it's bad enough for you to leave the site.
I've had a similar experience as the GP, and I find it awful that autoplay videos will follow you around the page, pop-up modals will interrupt you in the middle of reading something, and ads will take up 40% or more of the page, loading between paragraphs while reading. It's hugely distracting to me.
Why would you ever spend time on a site that did these things? Even if you have an adblocker, why would you use such a site on purpose?
I guess you got used to it. I also had the chance to re-discover how many ads are everywhere on the web thanks to firefox addons outage, and I was very surprised. Honestly, smartphones screen are already quite small (even more when the keyboard pops out) and with all the ads the actual useful surface of the screen gets ridiculously tiny.
I couldn't imagine that chrome on mobile doesn't have an way to block ads, and still has such a huge user base.
Exactly. Technology exists to solve problems. One of the greatest problems in today's world is the metaphorical tsunami of advertising sewage flooding our mental shorelines. Browser-based adblockers neatly solve that problem.
As for the "But how do we pay for all these free things then?" counterargument, I'd suggest voluntary restraint on the part of website creators. I can live with a few modest JPEG-only banner ads hosted directly from the site I'm visiting. If a site promises to not use animated images, streaming video, streaming audio, any sort of trackers, any sort of third-party content, and if they keep the screen-real-estate ratio of ads to content relatively low, then I'll whitelist them in a heartbeat.
> If a site promises to not use animated images, streaming video, streaming audio, any sort of trackers, any sort of third-party content, and if they keep the screen-real-estate ratio of ads to content relatively low, then I'll whitelist them in a heartbeat.
I just don't think this is a workable model for most users. "You want me to do extra work so I can see some (admittedly nonintrusive) ads? No way, figure out your own business." Honestly, if I started using an adblocker I'm not sure I could force myself to make that effort per website.
I really wish uBlock Origin at least had the option to enable a blacklist model—ie, no sites ever have their ads blocked by default, but as soon as a site annoys me, I can go into my adblocker and disable their ads.
>I really wish uBlock Origin at least had the option to enable a blacklist model
It effectively does have this capability. Just disable all the standard filter lists, and manually add one's own entries to the "my filters" section.
This method has the added benefit of enabling other useful privacy features that don't directly relate to display advertising, like killing off the nastiness of hyperlink auditing, CSP reports going to 3rd parties, prefetching, and remote fonts.
Is this per the ad network / server, or per domain like the whitelist? I would have assumed the former, but if it works like the whitelist that's great!
It's not so much ads being annoying as ads completely blocking the content. A lot of sites are completely unusable on a phone; a malicious ad redirects the browser to a scam almost immediately. That's how looking at a link from the Facebook application works, but opening it in Brave gets you the site you want minus malvertising.
It’s, uh, really not that bad. I rarely notice banner ads and the like. If a particular site gets really egrigious, I leave the site.
Yeah, I never understood why people purposefully visit sites full of ads and then complain that the sites they visit are full of ads. It seems like a pretty simple problem to solve. And yet, even among the tech crowd, people seem to struggle with it constantly.
The way I see it, without an adblocker there is the potential that I will notice an ad. With an adblocker, that potential is completely gone. That's a big difference.
Again, not trying to convince anyone here, I just don't feel comfortable with it personally.
Haha, no. He'd be sent to a secret FISA Star Chamber. There's no way he'd be tried in public.
And if the Swedish authorities wanted Assange to answer for alleged crimes in Sweden, all they had to do was publicly declare that they wouldn't extradite Assange to the US. That was the sole requirement he had made of the Swedish authorities in exchange for his willingness to return to Sweden. The fact that the Swedish authorities refused even that is deeply suspicious.