To be taken seriously, he'd have to put Snowden in charge of this new transparency initiative. Obviously that's not going to happen.

If you can't smother the shitstorm in the media, you might as well get all your dirty work done in short order so this rash of privacy and human rights abuses can becomes last week's news as soon as possible.

Genius! Actually... I probably would watch that. :)

I'm actually not a Doctor Who fan (nothing against it... i'm too impatient to watch it) so I may be misunderstanding how "regeneration" works, but imagine for a second a Doctor who's been a man for over 10 generations who wakes up to realize he's now a woman! It might be interesting if they scripted it as if the woman still had the mind of the original male Doctor. "man realizes how some people treat women" angle. "man can't wait to be a man again" "man spends too long in the shower washing his privates" I dunno. :)

It still matters if you care where the species originated. For example, the difference between Europa (a) having originated life completely independently of Earth and (b) having been contaminated by life from earth and then evolved separately is very significant.

I read recently that NASA basically catalogs what bacteria it can't eradicate and if it finds those bacteria on an alien planet will have to assume the source was contamination. I'm not sure how they'd plan to handle centuries from now if they found a descendent bacteria that was mostly unrecognizable from the original, cataloged bacteria.

You might get a couple of freebies with his contact info but I suspect it'd be better policy for an installation this size to set up a paid arrangement with the outgoing sysadmin. I'm not in IT so I don't know what precedents there are around this, but relying on him to reply for free just seems against human nature.

There is 100 percent auditability on what we do.

How does that jibe with the recent story NSA Can't Search Its Own Email

s/idiots/people/
s/intellect/knowledge/
FTFY.

Allow users to specify tags for a story and display the most commonly entered tags. It then becomes a form of commenting, in a way. "upvote" could be just another tag.

Imagine using data analytics to predict what comedy bits might do better. Would it be comedy along the lines of which people have already seen? I don't think so - jokes don't get funnier the more you tell them. Perhaps the same goes for movies? We need more novel story lines.

Kind of scary how shallow they could go. With a sub height of about 21 feet, that's about 15 feet of water above and below which doesn't leave a lot of margin for error.

"The barchan will probably continue on its journey past the city site, which in due course will re-emerge from the sand, but it is anticipated that it will not remain unscathed." Another interesting tidbit: "persons ~ 1.6 m tall atop the dune (~ 35 pixels) act as a scale bar to estimate the dune height (135 pixels) as ~ 6.5 m high". That's a lot of sand.

Given that US politics is controlled by corporations to a large degree, I'd be asking what corporations have a vested interest in making sure they^Wthe USA retains control of the Internet.

It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger

This kind of hyperbole is what makes people ignore warnings.