Sounds pretty horrible and not surprising:
“Mission after mission was always just getting eight-inch dredgers, six-inch dredgers … and food supplies, quads, jeeps, out to the diamond dredging operation outside of Kamonia,” Hinkle told the film-makers.
What it’s like living in a “free” country:
I hope that makes it clear why I can’t continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere.
AVClub one-ups the Onion:
Sadly for Card, we may not yet have reached that more enlightened era, when homophobes are allowed to live freely without fear of their movies suffering a slight dip in profits. Nevertheless, Card is here, he hates queers, and he suggests you get used to it in time for the movie’s premiere.
It’s always difficult to separate the art from the artist. I still enjoy Ender’s Game but OSC sounds like a jerk.
A sobering look from Salon at the militarization of the average police force:
In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost for hosting charity poker games. Players said the tactics were terrifying. One woman urinated on herself. When police raided a San Mateo, California, poker game in 2008, card players described cops storming the place “in full riot gear” and “with guns drawn.”
From the The Daily Kos:
It gets worse. For those who seek to preserve their privacy by encrypting their communications, in effect shielding themselves from the ominipresent “Eye”, the gloves come off and they can be declared non-U.S. citizens for purposes of sidestepping any pesky “Constitutional” restrictions
I think this is just the beginning of the privacy arms-race. Get ready for a very long cat and mouse game.
That Maciej guy is super smart and very reasonable. This is how I want to argue on the internet.
But Simon is not a fogey who doesn’t understand how powerful computers have become (though I feel that there are such people in positions of oversight in the House and Senate). I believe his error is in assuming that the analysis of these ‘computer-runs’ is any kind of bottleneck. There are powerful techniques for surfacing interesting features in any comprehensive list of interactions between human beings.
Bloomberg:
The justices unanimously issued a mixed ruling on Myriad Genetics Inc. (MYGN)’s patents on genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. The majority said that some parts of Myriad’s patents improperly covered natural phenomena.
I am so glad that the Supreme court made this ruling. In my opinion natural phenomena should not be proprietary. Now, if only we could fund the USPTO well enough that they could prevent this ridiculousness from happening in the first place.
Funny, I’ve been collecting and reading references for a very different article than this. But yesterday I deleted all of the words because The Guardian changed the story.
The danger of ad companies like Google and Facebook isn’t that they are selling aggregated personal data. The danger is that they are aggregating unprecedented amounts of information. I applaud Google for fighting against the Justice Department but the problem, as The Guardian has shown, is that Google will lose much more than they will win.
Sometimes the Onion is not fiction:
You—folks who think the Second Amendment is outdated, the families of various shooting victims, and the President of the United States—are the losers. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I absolutely fucking walloped you.
Disgustingly accurate. Anyway, what time are the militia drills?
The former Treasury director lays out the legal authority and implications of the Treasury Secretary to strike a trillion dollar coin:
The Secretary’s authority is derived from an Act of Congress (in fact, a GOP Congress) under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8). What is unusual in this case is that the law gives the Secretary discretion regarding all specifications of the coin, including denominations.
