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Comment Re:Hypothetical question (Score 1) 26

My thought experiment is, what if two black holes were approaching each other very rapidly on a not-quite-collision course, so that the sides of their event horizons briefly overlapped as they passed. Would they stick together?

ISTM that if anything was inside the overlapping area they'd have to stick, since otherwise that thing would be escaping from one of them. But is there anything there? Maybe something that just now fell in and hasn't had time to fall to the center? Or, is there quantum foam inside a black hole, and if so, would that count as "something" that would force the black holes to stick?

Comment Re:Treat with extreme skepticism (Score 3, Interesting) 188

The most recent story on the Havana Syndrome before this was that there was no evidence it was caused by any physical damage. The conclusion was that its not actually a "syndrome" but random symptoms with no common cause.

Whereas the correct conclusion would have been that it is not caused by anything that causes physical damage that we can detect.

Submission + - Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance While Profiting From It (theintercept.com)

SonicSpike writes: TEN YEARS AGO, the internet platform X, then known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users. X’s court battle, though, clashes with an uncomfortable fact: The company is itself in the business of government surveillance of social media.

Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.

In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”

The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.

However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.

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