"had" being the past participle. You had a way to get data from SWIFT without consent but it's likely that particular doorway is now firmly closed. It's possible that the NSA could attempt to penetrate SWIFT again, but the heightened security measures likely to be in place and the political risks of getting caught again so soon after being caught once mean that's a long term op which is unlikely to be approved in the near future. Realistically though it is unlikely SWIFT data access will actually be cut, and even if it were, they'd still be able to access it through friendly agencies such as SIS and DGSE. The point is it's embarrassing and it slows things down.

We deal with the result of a explosives test by searching for explosives, and if the person has no explosives on them it is not reasonable that the person has explosives on them. Every test has the potential for a false positive and a rational person recognises that and adjusts their beliefs accordingly. If you continue to believe someone you've searched has explosives after you'd searched them then you're more irrational than they are. You're denying the evidence of your own eyes because of a pre-existing belief. What are they going to do? Pray the explosives into existence?

Irrational thought is not just confined to the religious.

Assuming that any explosives test is 100% specific is the kind of error I'd expect an untrained fool to make, not a supposed expert. There are lot of substances which are chemically similar enough to explosives and are also household chemical which many people come into contact with and thus trigger a false positive. A test like that is supposed to be to help you decide which people need further scrutiny, not as a definitive stop this person from flying tool. Even then if you assume that someone has come into contact with explosives if they don't have any on them then they are not going to explode through magic pixie dust. Hell if I walk through one of my wet labs on the wrong day or perform a magic trick I'm likely to end up with nitrocellulose dust all over my clothing and hair. Once they had determined he had no explosives on him he should have been free to go (whilst filing a report with Homeland Security to follow up); further detention served absolutely no justifiable purpose. If he were a terrorist for example doing a dummy run, as long as he had no explosives it would be more useful to observe him than spend hours questioning people.

As for Jet Blue they have absolutely no excuse, if someone allegedly has explosive residue on them today but no explosives then there is no rational reason to prevent them from flying today or tomorrow or any other day. If he doesn't have any explosives on him, the results of the test are irrelevant because it's far more likely that the test gave a false positive than not.

It used to take days, and still does if funding is short but an Illumina HiSeq 2500 can produce 150-180 Gbases in 40 hours in rapid run mode [1]. Most labs still run it in high output mode because of the reagent cost but the option is there. This means that if I was prepared to pay the extra and I sent a sample into "core sequencing" where I work, they could potentially return mapped DNA in a week. After that there's still some improvement tools we'd need to run to clean up artefacts, followed by calling and filtering variants, those bits can take weeks. Whilst it is true that the bottleneck is currently the physical sequencing process of things but pretty soon that is going to shift to the informatics.side.

[1] http://www.illumina.com/systems/hiseq_2500_1500/performance_specifications.ilmn

If not at Milan then elsewhere, the research will be done as long as there are still diseases to be cured. There's pretty much no other way to model the complex system that is life, except with more life, computers can't cut it.

Using this word to describe animal experimentation as a whole is a deliberate deception. Actual vivisection is actually pretty bloody rare because it doesn't often tell us much, instead an animal is usually euthanised and then dissected instead. A lot of the time the research involves simple phenotyping, aka mutating a gene and then testing animals to see the effect. E.g. whether it makes them faster or slower; live longer or shorter; stronger or weaker; etc. There isn't much cutting a live animal open, that cutting a dead animal open doesn't tell you (which is far far easier). There are exceptions, but vivisection is a rarity not the norm.

How do you propose she or any other PM does this? A lot of outsourcing outfits are independent Indian companies which are paid by overseas companies to fulfil a contract. You'd have to stop or make more expensive the Australian companies doing business this way, and aside from the issues this would cause with free trade agreements it would be damn ticklish to define.

I disagree, I think software companies would love to pay a competitive salary, as long as ALL of their competitors are paying it too. Your problem is that your competition is now international, and Australia has a very high cost of living. In the late 1990's the internet hadn't properly taken hold in CEO's brains so your competition for software was still mostly domestic (international companies like Microsoft, IBM, etc were the exception).

Politicians don't seem to get is whilst high tech jobs are the future, they're not subject to the same geographical constraints that low tech jobs like farming are. Why would a company want to pay an Australian developer a high rate of pay when he can pay an Indian developer a lower wage and the Indian guy gets to live in the lap of luxury? Why would a company or consumer want to buy software developed in Australia, when Indian, American or European software can be bought cheaper over the net? (Region locks have plusses and minuses in this case)

The causes of the high cost of living needs to be tackled, but this is probably going to involve low-skilled immigration and they've sealed that exit off.

If you have an industry who is trying to compete solely on cost then the work is going to be done by the lowest bidder via H1B or outsourcing, take your pick. The tiny advantage of H1B being slightly more jobs and dollars manage to stay in the US. Unfortunately software companies have demonstrated that if they can't bring the workers to them then they have already demonstrated they are willing to send the whole kit and caboodle overseas. The US software industry can only compete with this by competing on quality and the ability to understand a client's needs and write software for it rapidly, on time and to budget. You've got a cultural advantage in that a US based employee is more likely to understand how a US business process works than someone used to a different business environment but it seems few companies are setup to take advantage of that. The other problem being that management culture needs to be encouraged to reward look at long term balance sheet rather than saving a few bucks on buying rubbish software and paying hundreds of bucks to make it work for you.

You go to all the trouble of catching the asteroid, mining it and it turns out to be Veldspar... Either that or some Goons turn up and steal it from your hauler when you try and take it home.

Not for overseas students they pay the whole whack.

The problem with this is that it creates a new barrier to entry that wasn't there before. If prior to this I wanted to set up a French language news aggregator site, it wouldn't cost me much more than the hosting, the spidering and the other regular overheads of running a website all of which I could recoup by selling ads. However with this law in place I'd have to spend a lot of time and money making sure the news sites got paid. It means you can't set up a French news aggregator without some serious startup capital.

Amusingly many of those bungling explorers were the "experts" of the time. Also in order for archeologists to know there's anything worth digging up, someone has to make a chance discovery. Proper archeology takes a lot of time and resources, and thus sites are only excavated if there's reason to suspect there's something to look for in the first place.