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Comment Re:If whales are engineers... (Score 4, Funny) 64

Beavers are the Koch Brothers. They directly cause global warming by cutting down trees that safely sequester greenhouse gases. When they eat and digest the trees, the greenhouse gases are released again as beaver flatulence.

Beavers build dams blocking our natural beautiful rivers, which make our own hydroelectric facilities less efficient. This makes us more dependent on Big Coal, and forces us to build a nuke In Your Backyard.

Beavers build low-cost sub prime mortgage McMansions, which will cause another Savings & Loan bailout crisis recession.

Beaver rhymes with Bieber, and The Bieber is ripped to his tits on cough sirup most of the time.

Save the whales, nuke The Bieber.

Submission + - New Snowden leak: Of 160,000 intercepted messages, only 10% from offical targets (washingtonpost.com) 5

An anonymous reader writes: Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or âoeminimized,â more than 65,000 such references to protect Americansâ(TM) privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

Comment Re:Wait a minute! (Score 1) 74

Spying on your enemies makes sense, they are after all your enemies.

Spying on your allies makes sense to a degree

. . . if you spy on your allies enough . . . you can make them your enemies.

. . . and if you spy on your own citizens enough . . . read "The Open Society and its Enemies"

Comment Re:I ignore July 4th.. (Score 1) 340

This 4th of July, there might be some impromptu fireworks displays in France . . . or in Germany . . . but not in both. They are playing against each other on the evening of the 4th of July in the World Cup Tournament , and the winner team's fans will probably stage spontaneous celebrations . . . with fireworks.

Submission + - German intelligence employee arrested on suspicion of spying for US on Bundestag (www.dw.de)

Plumpaquatsch writes: Deutsche Welle report:"A member of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency has been detained for possibly spying for the US. The 31-year-old is suspected of giving a US spy agency information about a parliamentary inquiry of NSA activities. During questioning, the suspect reportedly told investigators that he had gathered information on an investigative committee from Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag. The panel is conducting an inquiry into NSA surveillance on German officials and citizens; yesterday an ex-staffer told it the NSA was 'totalitarian' mass collector of data.

Submission + - IEEE Spectrum Ranks The Top Programming Languages (ieee.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Working with computational journalist Nick Diakopoulos, we at IEEE Spectrum have published an app that ranks the popularity of dozens of programming languages. Because different fields have different interests (what's popular with programmers writing embedded code versus what's hot with web developers isn't going to be identical) we tried to make the ranking system as transparent as possible—you can use our presets or you can go in and create your own customized ranking by adjusting the individual weightings of the various data sources we mined.--Stephen "FTC obDisclosure" Cass.

Comment Lauch cheaper than the film Gravity . . . ? (Score 1) 85

the Prime Minister of India noted that the launch was cheaper than Hollywood film Gravity.

That seems like a wacky comparison to me.

Ok, but maybe Gravity made more money than their launch?

Or, maybe they didn't actually do the launch, but just faked it in a film, like those folks who claim that the Apollo landings were fake films made by Stanley Kubrick in Area 51 . . . ?

Submission + - Pablo Escobar's hippos: A growing problem (bbc.com)

schwit1 writes: A wild herd of hippopotamuses that once belonged to a Colombian drug lord are now spreading across the countryside and no one knows what to do with them.

Situated halfway between the city of Medellin and Bogota, the Colombian capital, Hacienda Napoles was the vast ranch owned by the drugs baron Pablo Escobar. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assassinations and bombings that was to almost tear Colombia apart, he built himself a zoo.

He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos – three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Escobar’s first US-bound shipments of cocaine. While Don Pablo masterminded the operations of the Medellin Cartel from his villa on the hill, the locals gazed at the strange animals and even stranger concrete dinosaurs that Escobar built for his son.

When Hacienda Napoles was confiscated in the early 1990s, Escobar’s menagerie was dispersed to zoos around the country. But not the hippos. For about two decades, they have wallowed in their soupy lake, watching the 20sq km (8 sq mile) park around them become neglected and overgrown – and then transformed back into a zoo and theme park, complete with water slides. All the while, the hippos themselves thrived, and multiplied.

The hippos also escaped from the zoo, and because the environmental conditions in Colombia are ideal for these invasive hippos, they are prospering wherever they go.

Comment Re:assume it's dark (Score 1) 304

Well . . . it looks like you solved it then. On the one hand, we have matter that is missing, in the oceans. And on the other hand, we have the cosmos, where there seems to be too much matter. So obviously Occam's Lady-Shave indicates that the plastic in the oceans is being converted into the dark matter in outer space!

Furthermore, since there is much more dark matter than the lost plastic on our planet . . . there must be other planets with intelligent life producing plastic that get's lost in their oceans! The equations should show us how many planets with intelligent plastic producing life are out there.

Maybe.

Comment Re:His choices... (Score 4, Insightful) 194

I even agree that the investigation into him seemed to be heavy handed.

Carmen Ortiz wanted to make a big name for herself with some wealthy media donors in her bid to be elected Governor of Massachusetts.

Things went a little wrong for her, and someone paid with his life for her political ambitions.

She's was waiting for all this to be forgotten, until she can campaign again.

This documentary will make her wait a few more years.

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