another-one-off

So my answer to that is below; just in closing the wikipedia article insinuates [1] that the reason that any of this was reported to the police was because the women involved wanted Assange tested for STDs, not because they wanted him prosecuted for rape. The Chief Public Prosecutor didn't think it was rape at the time.

This seems pretty reasonable, and to me says that rape in Sweden is potentially about as serious as a traffic violation - there was potential, if other things had gone wrong in a somewhat unusual conjunction of events, for someone to have been harmed. An unsavvy woman (potentially those involved) would have been completely unaware that she had been raped.

I'd need to see something new, but while Assange may have committed a crime in Sweden he shouldn't be stigmatised. The word rape, in this very specifc case, is being used in a very technical manner and is clearly a slightly arcane legal term. Maybe discipline is required, but it isn't clear-cut what sort of penalty is needed. Again, I think an apology and some time with a doctor seems in order. Maybe a fine. Possibly this could be handled outside the courts. An extradition is uncalled for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_...

Later in the paragraph:

> After a while Mr Assange had asked AA what she was doing and why she was squeezing her legs together. [...] Mr Assange let go of AA’s arms and put on a condom [...]

I can read this as being not that great at sex. Depending on how long "a while" is, he might just be in the habit of grabbing his partner. This doesn't seem malicious.

I'm being quite specific, saying that this extradition order for these specific charges should be ignored, because USA.

If they had solid evidence that he was dragging women off the streets and threatening them with a knife then this is all reasonable. No-one is alleging anything like that.

I'm also throwing in an uninformed opinion that people are throwing 'sexual assault' and 'rape' around expecting a strong reaction, but I don't see the justification for getting worked up here. Setting aside any STDs (basically, assuming Assange doesn't have aids), the issue is that he did something that didn't hurt anyone, doesn't appear calculated to humiliate, was in circumstances where he might have misunderstood as having consent (given he was already having sex with these women), and can be rectified in 24 hours with drugs and a doctors visit. This would be grounds to discipline him, but not grounds to get worked up.

The first 3 dot points read more like a case of a broken condom than exceeding the scope of consent. A lot of the evidence is what she thinks he was thinking - this is not high quality evidence. He seems to have done everything she asked him to do.

The last dot point is from the other set of charges (SW rather than AA). That one is a fairly clear case of straight up exceeding the scope of consent. If it happened like that, it is bad behavior. He could reasonably be unwise rather than malicious. A formal apology and a moderate fine for any medical expenses seems appropriate to my moral judgment, although the courts would know what is appropriate legally.

At any rate, the two cases here are rather minor compared to the suspicion that the US government is setting him up with a smear campaign. The forces against him include a government which apparently has a secret court and a spy network that was being run by the executive without the apparent knowledge of the American congress. These charges may not exist in a vacuum. Lots of people are not perfect, the issue is that he deserves some freedom from persecution for his political actions. Someone obviously agrees with me here that these charges were politically motivated, because the Ecuadorians are granting him asylum.

They would be meaning playing DOtA since age 7. The original DOtA has been played since pre-2005 under various guises. Dota 2 is largely identical to the original dota as far as gameplay goes.

Exactly where DOtA starts and ends can be a little bit fluxy. It has evolved in a rolling fashion over many different patches that often tweak gameplay in large ways.

One way of looking at this is the legal system keeping a clear distinction between patents and copyright.

It is almost certain that the old appetites are still there. The big changes are probably that democracies tend to be less expansionist (democracies don't like needless wars, voters die) and that all the countries that aren't the US basically imploded in World War II.

Most of history isn't a great guide for what happens next because of technology changes. Up until "recently" wars were won by logistics, numbers and training. In the modern age, logistics requires a very complicated industrial system capable of producing, eg, nuclear weapons and satellites. So far, only the US has pulled this off and only the EU has come close to (maybe they have managed as well, I don't know).

Life may get more tense when a new challenger to the US emerges. Maybe China.

Mathematics is completely distinct from physics; it just happens that if you use mathematical ideas to model physical reality then the predictions are startlingly accurate.

It is entirely reasonable for mathematics to have no basis in physical reality. Mathematics is all about relations between things (if this has that property; it follows that...) and this has implications far beyond physics (eg, statistics and probability have implications for physics, but applications almost literally everywhere - these ideas are bigger than physics). This essay is relevant to teaching mathematics to people who are more comfortable with physical examples than with abstract logic. Fair enough, realise that this is calling for 'mathematics for physicists' rather than a better way of understanding maths.

Making the connection that all the mathematics we do is done in the context of reality doesn't make mathematics a subset of physics any more than history is a subset of physics. If every theory we have about the universe was proven wrong tomorrow then physics people would need to get very busy indeed - but mathematicians wouldn't even notice.

For me, the fun part of articles like this is convincing myself it could never work, then re-reading the article a few times and discovering that it does.

That being said, when they talk about the marriage problem I wish they wouldn't talk about it in terms of "at most 100 candidate spouses". Not even mathematicians start life saying "I will have 100 potential partners in life".

The "marriage" problem is a strategy for selecting the best item amongst k items. The strategy for finding the best item full stop hinges on how the k items are selected. Both in marriage and hiring (the two obvious places to apply this sort of thing), where the pool is drawn from has a much bigger impact than getting the best person in the pool.

Take hiring as a better example than marriage (because with jobs it often the case that there are a known, finite number of applicants). Most of them will be people who are difficult to employ, floating around in the job market. If you wanted the real 'best', you need an aggressive poaching strategy rather than a best-in-the-pool strategy.

It is debatable whether the Australian government got that right.

The Australian government has set up a single corporation to roll out a broadband network to every house in Australia. This is something that the government has no special knowledge of, and no demonstrated ability to do. Governments have no business doing this thing. There is a very real risk that ideological differences between the Liberal and Labor parties will see NBN Co. mired in a similar situation to Telstra - a privatised monopoly with massive and unrivaled infrastructure funded by taxpayers with terrible customer service.

What should be done is for the government to maintain an inter-town and inter-city fibre backbone, and cover the cost at taxpayer expense, then let local council and small business wire up individual towns and suburbs. Then let consumers hire an ISP who also handles maintenance of the fibre cables. Maybe give the installer of the cable a 10- or 20-year monopoly on maintaining the cable to allow them to recoup their cost.

Granted, technically the government would want to retain official 'ownership' of the cables, and would still need some sort of administrative group to oversee who was responsible for which cable, but this would be a big improvement over how the rollout actually came together.

Creating new government-backed corporations to own the infrastructure is not a winning formula. The entity building and maintaining the cables needs to be exposed to market forces, and it isn't difficult to see how it could be done.

The government can handle the expensive parts like satellite connections for rural Australia and the inter-town links, if the market isn't likely to provide those things.

Given that the target audience is still using XP and presumably happy with it, I'd say it is poorly designed and risks looking smug and unhelpful. "We’re here to help" is woefully unhelpful - they are actually here to get you to pay for an upgrade.

XP has had a really good run by software standards and there is no shame in dropping support. From outside the ecosystem this page doesn't sell an update at all.

Bit of a red herring to say this matters to individual investors though - compared to income tax it is meaningless, and if the share is expected to pay long term dividends it is not big.

It discourages day-trading on stock, but it won't do too much damage to mid/long term investors. It might actually encourage companies to make good mid-long term decisions.

EDIT and the two endpoints can trade directly with a spread smaller than 6 bps if they are that price sensitive.

Making money from pure trading revolves around information asymmetry, and ability to store goods - most of the time this is really good, because it helps to motivate people with clever ideas to put them into practice.

The problem with HFT is that practically speaking, the value of a company can't change in timeframes shorter than a couple of hours (barring exceptional circumstances like a big announcement). So a HFT firm is not actually benefiting from information asymmetry about the product of the company being traded or real-world conditions, it is benefiting from information asymmetry about the conditions at the exchange. In theory this is transferring money from subject-matter experts to experts in how exchange servers & the local fiberoptic grid works.

I'd be alone in a room of HF traders, but this isn't useful economic activity vs. subject matter experts making money.

I don't understand all the arguments about 'liquidity', I don't see why a slight price spread is a bad thing; provided that I can sell stock in an hour or so. There isn't a magic 'efficient price' determined by the gods of the market - it is whatever the buyer is willing to pay.

> if two competing companies do their marketing in an optimal way, it will leave the customer in the same state as if no marketing effort ever occured

Marketing covers more than this. It isn't just how the pie is divided up, it is also about increasing the size of the pie.

In fact, if it increases the number of potential consumers, marketing can be rational and profitable even if it reduces the market share of the marketing company (50% of 10 consumers is less profitable than 40% of 100 consumers). There is a real rising-tide-raises-all-ships effect, especially in discretionary goods (eg, jewelry, many electronics, financial services, the list goes on).

True enough, but the difference between FTTN and FTTP is currently sitting at numbers like 25mbps vs. 100mbps. That isn't even an order-of-magnitude improvement. It isn't worth the cost. If you want to argue that gigabit connections have a great use case, I'd appreciate examples - there should be some in Korea if they exist. Given that I'm all about taxpayer savings, I'd prefer educational/industrial rather than entertainment ones.

If it comes with a profitable business plan, it is a good time to leave it to private enterprise. I'd happily invest in a fibre-laying company if someone offered me the chance. I don't want the Federal government to choose for me.

(edits: clarity) I divided $43 billion [1] by a population of 22 million, although now I see now that $1,500 would have been better (I read the wrong cost :[). Anyway, it was meant to be a per person, not per house, figure.

The NBN would be a good piece of long-term infrastructure, no argument there. It is better than a cash handout.

I don't think it is sensible to divide up-front cost by years of service. $100/year for 20 years is much cheaper than $2k up front (as a Net Present Value).

If we save the taxpayer $20 billion? Yes, that is a much better deal. Everyone gets 25 Mbps ADSL2+, and people who want fibre (happens to include me, but not the rest of my family) can pay for the last bit of cable work themselves if it makes sense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network#Expe...

Hurrah, someone who cares about the actual policies. Nikcub has provided an excellent summary of the technical detail of the situation (which I will be relaying to many of my friends).

There is a huge amount of ignorance in Australia regarding broadband policy. I enjoy talking to people about the NBN, and I came to suspect that no-one in my sample payed any tax. Or they are just really bad at accounting.

Very, very few Australians would/should actually trade the cost of connecting their premise for the speed upgrade from ADSL2+ to fiber (edit: which is in the range of about $2k/person or $8k for a 4 person family unit according to the back of my nearest envelope). There aren't enough uses for speeds >=1MBps. A typical household is YouTube, Skype, gaming (and I don't think a fibre has any special implications on gaming that ADSL2+ doesn't have) and downloading stuff illegally.

There are more important research/infrastructure projects than a broadband network. Basically anything transit related for a country like Australia - the money could easily have gone into public transport.

I was stuck in a situation where I could only get dial-up speeds in a rental property. My theory was that Telstra (the local owner of all the network infrastructure) weren't going to invest in any upgrades that would be wiped out by federal spending - but the upgrade wasn't going to be for years. 12 months on mobile broadband is very, very unpleasant if you are a heavy Internet user. Speed of rollout is much more important, and the new policy can be enacted very, very quickly.

I live in a MDU now, as it happens, so the liberal policy is great news for me.

Avatar the 2009 movie? A real mining company would have gone through local government and just have set up an underground mine, and tunneled under the tree-thing. Maybe done a study or two to assess the impact of mining tree roots.

A project that big would go through quite some effort to appease the locals - otherwise the mine (basically inevitably) gets written off.

It wouldn't all be unions, there are other factors. Not least of which being the autonomous trucks will produce more tonnes more quickly, with less costs and better safety performance.

The OH&S benefits alone would have justified the project in the long term, and not parking the truck up justifies it in the short term - even without any existential threat from the unions.

As an aside, was there any threat of union activity? I haven't followed WA industrial relations in the last 5 years, but I though the operators have been too busy wallowing in cash to worry about pay.

I understand what the parent is saying, I just disagree :).

My day job has large elements of mining haul truck performance. Currently most mines would probably be in the 40-70% utilisation band (for practical purposes), automating the trucks would probably add ... 5% utilisation? Maybe 10%? Both guesses, but they aren't likely to break 75% (I doubt they would break 65%, but I'm wiling to be surprised by evidence).

Practically speaking, the trucks would be more reliable due to automating, and in economic terms, truck hours/dollar would increase (*edit, said drop initially). Supply/demand theory tells us that mining companies could reasonably respond by buying more trucks.

I am referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

The salary of the driver is mostly inconsequential - in Western Australia, they have trouble getting people out there for any price. So autonomous trucks are good because they solve the risk and delay associated with finding an operator.

Autonomous trucks will get to the stage where they simply don't stop. Human operated trucks need breaks, and make mistakes. So it doesn't matter if they cost more - they also produce more.

Finally, autonomous trucks don't cause OH&S incidents nearly as easily. This is a huge issue, especially for a company like Rio Tinto. In Australia at least, OH&S issues can shut mines down. This alone would probably be worth any price premium in the million dollar order of magnitude.

No, not by very much. Computerised dispatching systems tell trucks where to go, even with human operators, and a human is probably a little better at driving than an automated truck. The gain is that the trucks no longer park for any reason other than maintenance, while humans have to stop to embark/disembark. And will frequently have, eg, a fatigue break during night shift.

If anything, supply/demand curve logic suggests there would be more trucks overall.

Hey. I'm an Australian Mining Engineer, (co-incidentally employed by Rio Tinto, although obviously I'm no spokesperson and have no idea what the higher-ups are doing, or even blokes on other sites). While I don't have any knowledge of the autonomous truck project, pensions & workman's comp have basically nothing to do with it.

The mining industry in Australia is on the tail end of the biggest expansion in living memory, and it turns out it is near-impossible for love or money to move Australians out into the desert to work in mines.

It was not unreasonable to have trucks parked up because there simply was no human to drive them, and the salaries for a truck driver were in the $150,000+ Australian dollars, plus food, lodging and plane flights. This doesn't represent a scary cost for a mining company - it represents a scary lack of worker supply. A parked truck is an unhappy truck.

In addition, we have very strict OH&S laws and the site mangers can be raked over the coals for the wierdest things. Eg, if I saw a light vehicle parked on non-level ground without wheel chocks, it would probably be escalated to the site Manager (not a pit supevisor, not the Manager of Mining, but the person responsible for the entire site) and someone being sacked would be an option on the table. Getting rid of the humans is a huge benefit from a safety perspective, which we take very, very seriously.

Finally, automated trucks will provably do the right thing, all the time, without getting fatigued or taking breaks. Humans just cannot compete from a utilising-the-very-expensive-asset-properly point of view.