Even more troubling: '"Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."... Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using "parallel construction" may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.'

So it's been accepted practice for decades, with or without the NSA, and yet only drug defense lawyers have ever heard of it. A lot of questions reporters could ask: can defense attorneys get the whole meta-data drop for the phone numbers involved? Can civil case parties get any of this stuff?

The defense data dump would seem to be especially on point, since it would allow the defendant to point fingers in other directions.

Choice parts at the end of the article: 'If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement... Current and former federal agents said SOD tips aren't always helpful - one estimated their accuracy at 60 percent.... "It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."' That last comment is the absolutely most corrupt.

Amazon is still losing money on books, according to the other bookstores. At one time it would have been considered a monopoly and forced to negotiate a settlement. Probably not now. I think dumping is one factor in a legal determination of monopolistic behavior.

And the extension webstore hosts malware. I have reported "Facebook Adblock" several times and it is still there, months later. The negative comments keep getting pushed down by cheerleaders, and the older reviews just drop off the list.

Probably Google Earth.

Much of the science is based on magnetic orientation in rocks and pole flipping at known times in the past. For the rest, just work back from the present plates.

Monitors were huge & somewhat costly then, so it saved you that expense & space. But you couldn't scroll to the right! It just clipped anything wider than 640px (?) off. And the resolution of course was low-res TV. Not sure it was so protected from exploits either.

Well, their calls are being logged (unless Verizon et.al. have filters). At least one congress member was asking about this on C-SPAN, but I haven't noticed it in the news coverage.

Those are all Indo-European languages. This article is about connections to to central, northern and eastern Asia. And Alaska!

Replying to myself a quick googly shows the AAAS has been strongly opposed to teaching creationism, but in some edge cases has been accused of "accommodating" creationists by engaging with them. Or, in a publication for students, telling a little story about a fictional biology student who learns that her Christian faith is compatible with evolutionary science. At the end she is on an archaeology dig, but also prays at sunrise! http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/aaas-also-engages-in-accommodationism/

That may explain the thinking behind the caption, if there was any, but to me it goes over the line. Or is an insulting joke at believers. Bad either way.

What is the deal with the caption on the Tower of Babel in the article in Science News? "Out of one, many. The 'babel' of far-flung languages spoken in Europe and Asia, perhaps resulting from the fall of the Biblical tower, may derive from a single common ancestor."

I though the AAAS was a mainstream scientific organization. Guess they have a prankster on board. Didn't notice it until I read the comments in the article, to give fair credit.

Completely expected that a pain reliever would work on mental pain. Aspirin probably works too.

Classic Shell is the way to go with Win8 by the way. Works like a... *not*charm. I am never in Metro besides a brief instant on startup. And all the edge mouse gestures are gone! I now prefer Win8 to Win7. Thank gawd for whoever is writing Classic Shell. MS should pay them.

Iomega was competitive at pricing a notch below Syquest and getting stuff to market early, probably before it was ready. They were the new kids on the block, well-capitalized from Utah, competing with California and Northeastern companies, as I recall it. (Aggressive marketing, just look at how they co-opted the "zip" name from common usage.) One of several episodes from the Computer Shopper era when customers were just relentless on shopping by price & spec, to the detriment of quality. I think the Syquest cartridges were $70 and the Zip disks $25 (though smaller) at one point, or some such stuff in the trade press that made Syquest look just a bit over the line. In other words, I almost bought a Syquest! When Zip disks became the standard, you had to have one to exchange data anyway. I have a box of those blue drives somewhere, parallel port, SCSI, internal.

CD writers were pretty iffy back then too. I have a stack of CD's that only work in the HP drive that made them. So many useless coasters were made at 1x and 2x speeds on Windows systems that they got that name, coasters. Close all other programs before proceeding! Buffer underrun! Or was it overrun?