Old and busted: It's a cross between the virtual and the real.
New hotness: It's a cross between Project Xanadu and the Segway.

tl;dr: They saw something funny there at high frequencies. So it's news that they don't see anything funny at lower frequencies.

We're talking about it. And a politician in favor of a little more freedom has a little more visibility. That's enough.

Treat it like a tiny room add-on. Frame it and drywall it, sealing it from the crawl space. Ventilate into the house to share the inside weather.

The technology of distributed version control should be applied to legal text much like it is to code. A proposed law is pull request. An enacted law is an accepted pull request. Various jurisdictions can fork and merge laws.

And while we're at it, let's build domain specific languages for laws with with well defined syntax, in order to disambiguate law at least as much as politics will allow.

> So, do you tend to embrace or eschew recursion in your programming?

"To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” -- L. Peter Deutsch

Since the guy who has to debug and extend my code is human (me), I take pity on him and recurse only as needed.

> How is the government not concerned about corporate espionage, terrorism, and other criminal activity, you'd think from a security standpoint, they would want encryption to be legit.

Because such measures limits the capacity of the government to conduct corporate espionage, terrorism, and other criminal activity?

If these parents preferred in-game geegaws to their children then even going to Fujian child traffickers there's a fair chance that the children would end up in more caring homes than they started in.

I heard another theory on the way that violence has influenced our evolution. It was suggested that opposable thumbs were favored because they make some apes like ourselves capable of forcible rape, unlike most animals. The success of forcible rape as a breeding strategy led to the differential survival of more violent, impulsive men and more submissive (more likely to survive rape) women who ovulate monthly. And this male aggression has led to homo sapiens becoming earth's dominant megafauna. So if true, on evolutionary time scales the optimal amount of violence to promote species survival is greater than zero.

This is depressing in proportion to its plausibility.

It could be as easy as a credible threat that he must play ball or they'll have one of his daughters (add nasty bits here). Does anyone think that's beyond the moral capability of an intelligence community willing to indiscriminately kill anyone near a drone target? Based on such recent actions I think that there are plenty of such people in the permanent bureaucracy who would consider that to be an act of courage and patriotism.

My old abacus is giving me splinters. I asked my boss for a new one and he said "cào n zzng shíb dài". I'm not sure what that means but I'm hopeful.

> That means that we're 90 percent microbial and 10 percent human.

That's very eukaryotecentric of you. Given the proportions, why assume that only the cells with nuclei are human rather than the other way around. Maybe we're 90 percent human and 10 percent new weird stuff. Dude, let the prejudice go and embrace your inner prokaryote.

This isn't about giving power to animals. It's about giving power to guardians of animals. Just like organized religion is about giving power not to God, but to priests.

Those charts are data. They're representations of time series. Do you think it only counts as data when it's numbers in columns? Then measure the chart, write down the numbers, and make yourself happy.

> Right now I am planning a 'round-the-world-trip and my ship (an 18 meter Skerry Cruiser sailing yacht) ... What kind of hardware would you recommend as necessary for a trip of this kind?

#1 Balls of solid brass.