What does media exposure in America really do for them, though? Their base of power is over in the middle east. The only way they can possibly relish in our horrified reactions is if they open up access to American news media and the internet. That's the opposite of what they seem to want to do, however -- they are shutting down the internet and other outside sorces of information.

The way, I see it, these videos must be really for the benefit of their internal politics. They can't exactly brag that they've taken down an American aircraft carrier, but they can at least brag that they have done something horrific to an American hostage which paints them as having some kind of power.

An open media exchange would play to our advantage, not theirs. A world in which all the terrorists are posting their misdeeds on youtube and jeering us is a world where they are one or two clicks away from seeing how much more enjoyable our society is and hearing our counterpoints.

How do you to prevent your friends from posting the same information? Ordinarily, I wouldn't mind shouting from the rooftops that I am going to a party. I wouldn't even care if cops heard me. But if the cops are going to survey my friends' casual posts -- "Going to a party at Brent's!" -- and guarantee flashing lights out front once their algorithms pinpoint where it is, that a bit different. It's less like having a cop reading information you have put up on a flyer and more like the cops having wiretaps on all of your associates. Which would be fine, with a good reason and a court order. But I don't like the idea that by sharing our days in a normal way online we are all effectively spying on each other on law enforcement's behalf.

Welcome to 2006: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

Welcome to 2012: http://www.amazon.com/Actionte...

I don't think you understand, they want to stop storing explosives on ships. The ships will be carrying the explosives whether they are to be used or not. Will better diplomacy change how chemistry works? Unless you think a few stunning diplomats could render maintaining a defensive force unnecessary. In which case, you may want to check up on whether there are any other big military and/or economic powers with extra-territorial ambitions right now.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...

why would you even want to stay here, right?

FAA can do anything they fucking want; nobody else in the world will give a shit. Do you really think if the Russian, Indian, or Chinese equivalent of the FAA pulled this that the US would take it in stride? Of course not. We'd claim they still don't have any right to reserve property on the moon.

And it would come down to who had the guns and is willing to use them. Which, to be honest, is all property rights really is anyway.

$20k a day, or $20k, once, on sales for a particularly timely topic?

$20k a day sounds great, $20k, once every 2-4 months, less costs and overhead, sounds pretty pedestrian.

They did NOT show that, from 3-4 transactions, they could provide your name, address and phone number, or even that if you have 3-4 transactions in a million transaction anonymized data set they can find out anything about you personally *unless they know you first*.

What they did is show that if they know that you, personally, had 3 to 4 types of transactions on specific dates (you went to a grocery store and a gas station today, and a restaurant yesterday), they could identify which anonymized data set you belong to. Their discovery requires specific outside knowledge not contained in the data.

This only matters if, say, a third party could identify specific purchases and dates - they could then comb the records and find the rest of your transactions on that specific card. IOW, someone has to be looking for you, and know at least something about you, to even start the search.

That's kind of the issue. There are people on the roof with significant firepower to take something like that down. Most of the incursions onto the lawn have been at night, when nobody of value is in the vicinity.

You'd be better off with a mortar mounted to the truck bed and lobbing a shell onto the lawn. It will be moving a lot faster and be harder to hit when incoming, and could deliver a larger payload. 50mph really isn't that fast.

Are you sure that includes all of DC and some of the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs*?

*25km is 15+ miles. DC proper is 10mi x 10mi, minus the part across the river that VA took back.

"Hey, you notice some odd grammar, word choice, and spelling variance in this code?"
"Oh yeah, must be Maxo-Texas. That's his anonymization software."

I would agree, but only if we can let all the people who get stuck in a predictable storm die of hypothermia on the roads. Except, of course, nobody will let that happen. We'll spend millions of dollars and possibly endanger rescuer's lives to save them.

"Charge them the cost," I hear you cry? Yeah, that's not really going to go over well, and the lawyer's fees will dwarf anything we might recoup - not to mention pretty much guaranteeing whomever is in charge will never be elected to office again.

No - you (and I mean both you, personally, AC, as well as most of humanity) is too fucking stupid to stay safe, so the government is doing it for you. If you weren't so stupid in every. single. disaster. it might not be necessary. But utterly braindead humans show up every time. So stop blaming the evil gubmint - blame yourself and the dumb bitch next door. You're the reason these bans are put into place.

Do we really need to establish a cult of science in which the gods are displeased if we don't use enough syllables in our word for "guess"? The words can be used interchangably. A "scientific hypothesis" does often catch more suggestion of testable, derived predictions, but it's also frequently used in a more general sense, just as "guess" can be used in a more noble sense.

I am all about respecting the scientists who invest a lot of work, but the fact they've done a lot of work doesn't make them more likely to be correct in a discussion of novel facts. There's no way to assign a probability to it and say "There is a 25% chance this explanation is correct because of this much work we put into it." In any case, the work is in testing and verifying the hypothesis, which is the science part, not in coming up with it (although work put into testing does of course put the researcher in a position to make further hypotheses).

Anti-science folk should be ignored. We don't need to scheme and manipulate to make sure our presentation of science leaves them on the poorest footing to rebut us, because, unless they are using science, their rebuttal is irrelevant. IMHO science teaches us to be humble about we have to say. Acknowledging the fact there may be flaws and we can and should be proved wrong is the whole difference between science and wild speculation. I don't think we should be provoked into saying otherwise just to try to entice the crackpots to our side.

One of the beauties about 140 characters is you have to think about what you want to say and how you say it. Editing for brevity often makes it punchier and better phrased. Many are the occasion when I have written a joke or insight for facebook, modified it for twitter, and then posted the twitter version in both cases because the twitter version was just better.

300 characters is not almost as quick to read it is quite clearly twice as long to read. For me, that would mean that instead of having time to follow 100 people on twitter I would only be able to follow 50. (Another of the other main features of twitter is allowing followers to interact with popular figures with their fans which I imagine also benefits greatly from a terser format.)

Personally, I think twitter has the potential to be one of the social media that survives in the long term. Yes it has obvious limitations but I get much more bang for my buck reading those condensed updates than I do using any other media platform. Sometimes when life gets busy I will quit other sites but twitter remains perfectly manageable and useful. It's great for news, politics, humor, and interacting with relatively large numbers of people. If you have an essay you need to share, you can link to it.

Some examples of how much you can pack into “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” -- Albert Camus

By 98 to 1, U.S. Senate passes amendment saying climate change is real, not a hoax

Personally, when "the senate just voted" is linked to something in the summary, I would expect the link to tell me more about the outcome.