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\m/

4 days ago on The Classics: 'The Downward Spiral'

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Because of the way the story broke there’s a credibility gap – no one is going to believe what the government says unless they match that initial expectation (in this case, universal surveillance). It’s a tough story to do right; Snowden obviously had an agenda and wanted to portray the program in a certain light, and there are only so many different ways a journalist could conceivably verify that information – or more importantly, garner additional information to put the program in the proper context. It’s not like they could just call up the NSA and ask them to comment.

4 days ago on Facebook, Microsoft rolling FISA national security request numbers into transparency reports

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Yes, but can it filter the brown cloud?

4 days ago on Floating public pool that filters New York's East River seeks crowdfunding

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Nilay – Anything we can do to bully Quinn and de Blasio into showing up?

4 days ago on Keys to the city: NYC mayoral candidates debate tech policy tonight at 7PM ET / 4PM PT with Nilay Patel as moderator 1 reply

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90,000 DEAD, ABOUT 150 FROM CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Probably the most poignant block quote anyone’s used in a story about Syria in the last 18 months. Hats off to Nate and The Verge editorial staff. If the situation demands intervention, it’s not because of this nonsense about chemical weapons.

5 days ago on White House says chemical weapons used against Syrian rebels 1 reply

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right? that’s what I don’t get. or have some kind of background process monitoring any externally mounted drives.

6 days ago on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden used banned thumb drive to smuggle documents 1 reply 1 recommend

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Right, so if a GMO cross-pollinates in the wild with a non-GMO, does the patent holder have any rights to the genetic material from the offspring? Or from a legal perspective I suppose an even more likely scenario would be a farmer (by which I mean multinational agribusiness) trying to breed expensive proprietary GMO seeds from a competitor with their own cheap non-GMO seeds to get the positive traits – would that negate the rights of the patent holder?

6 days ago on Supreme Court rules that natural genes aren't patentable, but synthetic ones are

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“It’s in everybody’s mutual interest that we are protecting the ecosystem in a way that continues to keep the value of that programming that we have and the way it’s delivered to our subscribers today,”

Is kind of just an overwrought way of saying “we’re artificially inflating the price of this product to protect our bottom line”

6 days ago on Time Warner Cable reportedly paying producers to keep TV off the web (update)

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#not #yet #youguys

6 days ago on Time Warner Cable reportedly paying producers to keep TV off the web (update)

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yeah….i mean, they must’ve considered this, right?

6 days ago on Yahoo will reset inactive accounts this July to free up the user ID you've 'always wanted'

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So that’s sort of the problem with this whole situation. I think I’d actually be ok with a system in which the records are automatically cached in a database somewhere under 512 bit encryption or something, and can only be decrypted with a court order (and maybe the court orders have to be subject to FOIA or whatever). But even if that’s the exact situation the government has/had in place, it’s incredibly hard to believe them right now because of the way the story broke :-/

6 days ago on NSA director says agency will release full number of terror plots foiled by surveillance

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Wait – Android like:

Or android like:

Or is it more like this kind of thing?

7 days ago on Dmitry Itskov wants to help you live forever by swapping your body for an android avatar 4 recommends

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I agree, although I kind of wish they’d waited to go all “we could start construction tomorrow” until after they had ramped the LHC up to it’s full 14 TeV. It’s kind of hard to make the case to the public that we should build a new one before we’ve even really finished this one.

7 days ago on Scientists release plans for new largest particle accelerator, designed to find dark matter 2 replies 1 recommend

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Better get both just to be safe.

7 days ago on Airbus A350 XWB, rival to Boeing's 787, could fly for the first time this week 1 recommend

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“You have to get on Twitter.”

9 days ago on Hillary Clinton joins Twitter, embracing memes and pantsuits 1 reply 9 recommends