Although oddly enough I've actually seen more traffic going to my Flickr account that was being driven by searches on Flickr. So it looks like they might have tweaked the searching under the hood as well which is nice, but the new UI on the other hand, cluttered.

Realistically the reason that the US cares about the use of chemical weapons in Syria is because there is fear that AQ or one of the other radical groups operating in Syria could get their hands on them for use outside of Syria. If Syria is resorting to the use of chemical weapons then they are becoming more liberal with their transport and they can fall out of their control. If this was a false flag operation of some sort then Syria has already lost control of chemical weapons in which case someone needs to go in their to re-establish control of them. Beyond that the US doesn't want to get involved unless one of their allies in the region pulls them into the quagmire which hasn't been happening. As someone already pointed out, the missiles that hit Turkey gave the US casus belli to attack Syria and even with the war hawks in Congress and the Senate beating the war drums they've avoided doing anything overt thus far.

I'm not sure if that is sarcasm nor not. The education system in Japan is largely based upon rote memorization and is known be counter productive in terms of creativity. The United States are up there on the list of countries with the most working hours and least amount of vacation time taken.

There are actually a lot of reports of the B-2 Spirt being reported as Black Triangle UFOs and there is some plausible evidence out there that there might be another experimental airframe out there that is triangular in shape.

Pointing such things out does not make you appear couth, but rather more of a churl.

On the same token, who said the anthropomorphic being applied aren't unfounded? There is a lot of evidence out there to support the fact that some animals aren't "dumb" so it's not unreasonable to speculate that some of them might be capable of communicating using mechanisms that we could both anthropomorphise and be complete incapable of understanding.

With regards to the argument that the "Language Log" is trying to make about signature whistles not acting like names, well, they are guilty of assuming that dolphin "grammar" would act the same as human languages. For all intensive purposes they are falling for the anthropomorphic as a result. Or to put in another way "Dolphins aren't following the rules of human grammar, therefore, signature whistles can't be names."

Or Snowden might be exaggerating what the software could do because he wasn't actually authorized to use it (i.e. he drew conclusions based upon the training materials on SharePoint) and Rogers is downplaying how poor the security at the NSA actually is.

If Snowden was a system administrator at the NSA then there would have been no reason for him to be using the tools that the intellegence analysts would have been using and I would like to think that he would not have had need to know to actually use the systems even if he had knowledge of them. So he likely was not in a position to be fully briefed about the actual capablities of the systems. Even if he was being truthful about being a "infrastructure analyst" (i.e. black hat) there still wouldn't have been much of a reason for him to the tools of an intellegence analyst.

Don't forget that some of those sites could also just be access servers that allow the relevent software to be run and might not be the servers doing the actual probing.

A lot of the major internet backbone cable go through the United States or allied countries. If you and a tap on one of those it wouldn't be too hard to actually suck large percentages of the worlds daily telecommunications traffic. Some of the earlier slides that were released effectively implied that is exactly what they are going as well.

Odds are enough information has already been released that any analyst worth their paycheck already has a pretty good idea as to how most of the NSA systems work. I'd also be willing to be that most software engineers with a web background out there already have a pretty good idea how they are doing things. This is of course assuming that other people didn't already figure this out before hand.

Plus, all of the NSA systems are apparently vunerable to the good old fashioned dead drop since they can't monitor non-electronic systems. That's also not exactly a secert to anyone either.

Assuming they are telling the truth about 50+ plots being foiled, then another way to look at it is that it costs them around $16 million per foiled plot. That sounds like a big number but in light of September 11 that is comparitively cheap to the $100 billion plus finaincal impact.

I could have been a bit clearer on the logic, but basically, governments historically have a longer continuity of existence than private corporations which allows for the powers of compound interest to apply to build up the buffer. $1,000,000 deposited at 2.5% interest in 1776 with no additional deposits would be $347,981,453.54 today, actual buying power not withstanding.

Very few companies have really proven that they can stand the test of time yet and the list of ones that people thought would and failed is quite extensive. Not that the same thing doesn't apply to national governments but regional governments (mostly cities) can have records that date back hundereds of years as a matter of course.

Massachusetts resident here and the taxes here are actually less than they are in states near by such as New York or Connecticut. Plus, there are a lot of people that regularly do such things as start voter-initiated ballot questions to get rid of the income tax. As far as services go, I've lived in other states that claimed to be (or actually were) fiscally conservative and you got what you paid for when it came to government services.

Which is how pension funds are not supposed to be run in the first place. If you run a pension correctly it should work more like a 401(k) in that the money goes into an account that you then don't touch until a certain date. For large organizations you can calculate out how much you need to fund an employee's retirement long before they even retire. The government would actually be the best suited to pensions since they can build up enough of a buffer over time that they should effectively be immune to fluctuations in the market and could eventually hit a point where they wouldn't even need to pay in to the pension accounts again. In short, bad fiscal management is the problem, no pensions themselves.

Assuming you mean people that are 21 to 29 years old, then the popularity has a lot to do with the fact that "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" stone came out in 1997 and it took ten years for the series to be published. Someone that was 10 when the first book came out would have been 20 when the last one did so effectively the entire generation grew up with the Harry Potter series.