“It was a big mistake,” said former British ambassador Oliver Miles. “It puts the British government in the position of asking for something illegitimate.”

Britain passed the law in 1987, after a deadly shooting in 1984 in which a Libyan diplomat opened fire on demonstrators from within his country’s London embassy, killing a British police officer.

Experts say British threat against Ecuadorean Embassy over Assange was a diplomatic blunder - The Washington Post

The government of Ecuador is prepared to allow Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to remain in its embassy in London indefinitely under a type of humanitarian protection, a government official said in Quito on Wednesday night. Seeking asylum, Mr. Assange has been holed up for two months in the embassy, where police arrested some of his supporters on Thursday.

Its one of those situations where I'm disgusted with everybody.

Assange is most likely guilty of abetting Bradley Manning in violating his agreement to keep the information he had access to secret - cracking NTLM hashes is not "journalism" and if Assange did that he was not merely a conduit for information.

I'm tired of the masses who see him as an innocent victim in all of this, although I suspect that some don't care about his actual guilt or innocence because they support doxing "the man" for ideological reasons that can largely be characterized as the oversimplifications of youth. Whatever you think about the idealism of Manning and Assange, doxing "the man" is not and should not be legal. You incur certain risks when you do something like that, and the only way you should expect to be free afterwards is if it turns out to be so important that everyone thinks you're owed a Presidential pardon.

Everyone doesn't think that in this case.

Assange may also be guilty of some sort of sexual assault. I am just as sick of hearing people talk about the "most likely legit rape charges" as I am of people who claim the allegations are "obviously bogus." I hate how people prejudge criminal allegations based on their personal feelings about the nature of the allegation and the person accused. I really would like to see that matter resolved by the legal system in Sweden to shut people up about it one way or the other, but I suspect the partisans of that question to be just as unpersuaded by an actual court ruling as the partisans of the "journalism" question are about the testimony in the Manning hearing about NTLM hashes.

I don't understand why a state that does not really support press freedom is keeping this guy from facing justice in either case, but I presume it is a diplomatic bargaining chip. Both the UK and the US have shown absolutely no backbone in their zeal to tear apart both the Internet as well as fundamental norms of International Relations in an attempt to get this guy. As appalling as it is that Ecuador is allowing its embassy to be used to hide an accused criminal from justice, it is equally appalling that the UK has threatened to dissolve the Ecuadorean embassy over it. I'd line it up next to the preemptive invasion of Iraq on the thinnest of rationales, the indefinite detention of people without charges, and the illegal wiretapping program in the US as further examples of the disdain that the powers that be appear to have for the general structure of the rule of law that is the fabric upon which our entire civilization has been built.

If the UK makes good on its threats and marches into that embassy it will be a dark day, indeed. Assange will have done more harm through provoking that action then he ever did by encouraging Manning.

I'm personally tired of this Assange non-sense.

Marissa Mayer, the new chief executive at Yahoo, ordered that the stock ticker be removed from the company’s internal home page. “I want you thinking about users,” she told employees, according to The Wall Street Journal.

That’s progress.

Down With Shareholder Value - NYTimes.com

This handout photo, released Tuesday, shows a healthy adult pale grass blue butterfly (top) and a mutated variety (bottom). Severe mutations were found in butterflies collected near Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Study: Japan nuclear disaster caused mutated butterflies - World News

In an article from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne describing the research, Pinto explains that his team’s method could also be used for everything from identifying the source of a computer virus to determining the blogs most likely to make web content go viral to preventing the spread of an epidemic or chemical attack by learning how it’s spreading.

An algorithm for tracking viruses (and Twitter rumors) to their source — Data | GigaOM

The internet bubble of 2000 was the worst point of overvaluation for the S&P 500 in its history. Having averaged 16 times cyclically adjusted earnings since 1881, the market soared to 44 times, well over twice normal levels. The losses and forgone returns since then have caused many investors to question whether the long-term history of equity returns is relevant any more. While this is an understandable reaction, it is the wrong one. The last 12 years have been part of an essential healing process for U.S. equities, and have brought valuations down from 44 times normal earnings to 21 times. As we analyze equity returns, this means the healing process is not yet done, and the U.S. equity market is likely to continue disappointing investors for a few years longer.

Reports of the death of equities have been greatly exaggerated!

Much of the debt will have to be written off. Whether this done by inflation (1945-1952) or default (1930-1934) will be the great political battle of this decade. Pick your side. Pick your history.

This essayist lays the smack down.

Five years on, the Great Recession is turning into a life sentence - Telegraph

In the United States, consumer confidence improved to 65.9 in July of 2012 from 62.7 in June of 2012. Historically, from 1967 until 2012, the United States Consumer Confidence averaged 93.3 reaching an all time high of 144.7 in January of 2000 and a record low of 25.3 in February of 2009.

United States Consumer Confidence

On Sunday night I hosted a live broadcast with contributors from CTTechJunkie.com and NASASpaceflight.com to watch the landing live.  We brought in footage provided by NASA, including their live feed of the landing. NASA footage is released into the public domain and can be freely used by anyone.

I just came home to my inbox filled with dispute claims from no less than FIVE news organizations claiming this footage as their own.

Remember kids, there is absolutely no problem whatsoever with fraudulent claims of copyright theft on the Internet. The people who opposed SOPA didn't do so because of a legitimate concern about fraudulent claims of copyright theft, they did so because they hate artists and they are making a living off of stealing from them.

Lon Seidman - Google+ - Wow now I'm really getting angry over this Content ID…

For purposes of SF vitality, and as a kind of promotional move, I’ve decided to put a full copy of my Complete Stories online as a free HTML page.

Rudy Rucker's Complete Stories Online | Rudy's Blog