Would you also feel weird about people experimenting on the exact same human for 63 years and counting, with no end in sight?

And that is precisely what's so special about the whole Snowden affair. Lots of people claim outrageous things all of the time. Conspiracy theories and stunning revelations are a dime a dozen. Without any confirmed sources or any kind of acknowledgement by the involved parties, the impact those stories have is about par with urban legends. The documents leaked by Snowden are different because their authenticity has been confirmed by the NSA itself (I'm still not sure exactly why they did that, seems like a bad move on their part).

Please add one more item.
I need to know if you're actually counting in octal or not.

A dead man's switch automatically triggers an action when the person in charge can no longer prevent it, because he's dead, detained, or otherwise disabled. (Examples: let go of a hand grenade's handle, send out documents if the person don't check in at least once a week, etc). What this article is talking about is more appropriately called a "canary" (referring to the canary in a coal mine). It does the exact opposite. CJ

"... and by the way, in order to prevent such brilliant people from exposing us like that in the future, we've just told all the sysadmins with the same access level that 90% of them will be fired."

Brilliant, indeed.

Because I was curious, and don't know how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head, I was about to enter "90 Fahrenheit" in Google. But after seeing the most recent NSA story on the front page and I just used KDE's krunner (Alt-F2), with nice standard-y, but somewhat unexpected results.
By the way, 90 Fahrenheit is 32.2 Celsius.

You think so?

FTA: Statistics says that if you take enough samples of data, regardless of the distributon, it will average out into a Normal distribution.

News to me.

Only in the UK, as far as I'm aware. The rest of Europe has far fewer imperial relics in everyday life (maybe because they were never part of the British Empire in the first place). But even on the continent you'll buy your Subways by the inch, and you could buy "5-1/4 Zoll" and "3-1/2 Zoll" floppy disks. Our yard sticks tend to be a bit longer and marked in both inches and cm. Almost every (physical) thermometer I've seen has Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. The pound as a weight unit is still informally used in parts of Germany, but it's getting rarer now.

I feel for the people in the US who understand how much more practical the metric system is, but I also know how hard it can be to convince a majority in a democratic country to do the right thing. Maybe you need a dictator? Europe can help with that, too.

Very interesting, but I'm having a hard time making sense of the numbers - not an expert. All the figures stated are relative, and not always relative to each other. What I would like to know: what percentage of the combined global warming potential (or CO2 equivalent) of all greenhouse gases can be attributed to livestock? Not in % of methane, % of CO2, % compared to transit pollution, etc.

I did try to find that information in the source you linked, but failed. I also downloaded the "full report" from 2006, which is inexplicably cut off just after the executive summary. For example: it's interesting that N2O is 296 times as potent a greenhous gas as CO2, but what if its percentage of overall emissions was just 0.01%? (That number came out of my derriere, but since the actual report is unavailable, who knows)

I'm not a policy maker, but I like to know what I'm talking about. The related news items are all quoting each other, or the executive summary from the FOA report. They're not making this easy for me.

CJ

Those 680 million drives are hard drives; exabyte systems use tape drives (the high capacity ones can store about 5TB).
"Only a few thousand drives" ... you're off by three orders of magnitude.

No, he pulled out that old canard that people shot dead are more dead when they are killed multiple times.
Per capita means per person (literally per head). Any number over 1 would be very impressive (barring Zaphod Beeblebrox taking two shots to the heads).

Mod this man up.

From the space.com article, here's what Uwingu's CEO had to say...

"They basically said we're conducting a scam, and nothing could be further from the truth," [...] "They basically put us out of business, and they've ruined our reputation."

"To claim what they claimed — that we're somehow misrepresenting that these were IAU names — has just about put us out of business," Stern told SPACE.com. "It's unbelievable."

"They've spent 18 years with no forward movement — ask planet hunter extraordinaire [and Uwingu adviser] Geoff Marcy," Stern said. "Then somebody else comes along and does something harmless, fun and engaging, and now they're slandering us."

Oh cry me a river...

CJ

Come on, that's harsh.

Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing
...after they have exhausted all other possibilities.
-- Winston Churchill

CJ

Better make sure you're not travelling in a car (or airplane, etc) with two or more of your keybearers...

Why not give all of them the complete key and trust them? Thats what I do (minus the gf).
I know nothing about your friends or family, so YMMV.

CJ

Please don't mention plutonium, half spheres and screwdrivers in the same sentence.
I've had nightmares about this.