They don't need a warrant if they're not trying to gather admissible evidence. See "parallel construction" for an example of what they do with this data.

Not at all useless. Simply decode all possible sequences and rank them, ranking the most self-consistent interpretation highest. You may also have other sources of data to help correlate the interpretation (there was an article earlier this year about measuring sound using the video footage of a mylar potato chip bag's vibrations.) Even if the room is crowded, it might be possible to identify a few isolated words from the audio recording of the conversation.

The next thing you do is throw away those conversations that you're not interested in. Regardless of whether the conversation resulted in "You punched a fish" or "You munched a dish", neither is going to have value when you're searching for criminal activity. But if your streams could be "I bought the ammo so we can rob the bank" or "I mopped the jam up sorry can you mop the tank?" one of those could be valuable.

99.999% of conversations are inane drivel. If this technology is applied, the number of false positives is going to rapidly overwhelm a system. More discrimination and correlation is going to be needed to actually produce intelligence from this data. But never think that data is worthless or unusable.

There is a reason why we die.

It is the very fact, human beings are essentially evil if left to their own devices.

The worst possible outcome is human beings living longer for no other reason except to continue our evil ways.

Something has to change, and it isn't found in simply changing our DNA.

Why did you leave Israel out of that list?

My friend does it as a party trick, he checks where the fingerprints or slide marks are and surprisingly often he manages to guess the the pin or symbol on Android phones.

Yes, longer battery life would be nice but it's the bigger screen size and the fingerprint sensor that are motivating me to trade my iPhone 4S in for an iPhone 6+, I've decided that I want a phablet. It takes more effort to crack the fingerprint sensor than it takes to just sitting in your couch and punching in four digit pin-codes until you unlock the phone. I could put a password on my phone but punching in a password every time I get an e-mail is way too bothersome and I can't read Google maps in landscape mode on my iPhone 4S anymore because the display is just too small. As long as the device has adequate processing power to run the latest apps and games for the next 5 years and gets OS updates (which previous experience with Apple devices tells me it will) I don't really care that much about whether it has benchmarks and a processing speed that trumps those of the latest offering from Samsung, LG, HTC et al. In fact the majority of the features that I really value the most are software features ranging from the 'Continuity' OS X integration, 'HealthKit', App services and Universal Touch ID authorization for all apps to the little stuff you almost don't notice like, the revamped keyboard, built in phone calls over wifi, an overview over which app is using the most power, reply notification for especially important messages, ... the list goes on. Now if they'd only get around to putting a folding bookmarks menu in the little wizard you use when you add a bookmark in Mobile Safari... this is iOS version 8 for Christ's sake and Apple still hasn't gotten around to fixing it.

Excoriated?
"All extended missions were rated higher than "Good""

That is a much repeated statistic and in the short term ... yes, that is true. What is less often pointed out, probably because it does not serve the propaganda purpose of the fossil fuel industry as well as the previous fact, is that their long term goal is 80% renewables by 2050.

I keep hearing people say this and never backing it up with facts. I know renewables have their own environmental issues but why should they be a show stopper? .... soooo: [Citation needed]

Yes, the thread was about Tesla using renewables for it's new factory.

The only thing I would disagree with in this statement is the word "incompetence." It seems to me that any banker who could walk away with millions in bonuses after all that theft is an extremely competent criminal.

You've been lucky. DNC or not, they do not care. They just cycle through every possible number in an area code, and when someone answers, the spiel starts.

A few years ago, it was the car warranty scam. Landline, cell, DNC list....does not matter. Recently, home security scams. I got 2 yesterday. 1 on the landline DNC'd number, one on the cell.

I'm just waiting for one of these virus calls, so I can screw with him.

Climate change is not a belief, there is no faith involved, it is not an opinion that claim that ejecting vast amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is going to have very bad effects on the lives of our descendants and that using renewable energy sources is preferable to that. Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.

Yeah and, how can that judge claim that German Google customers do not have a way to communicate with Google? German Google customers send mail to support-de@google.com and a Google bot tells them to F*** Off! Not only does that constitute communication but the message is pretty clear. Of course, traditionally it has not proven to be a particularly intelligent strategy to tell the Germans to F*** Off! since they tend to react badly to that (read: Invasions, panzers, stukas, u-boats, V-1 cruise missiles, V-2 rockets... etc) but If Google wants to take a shot at it they I say let them try.

And how does that make them different from lala-landers of the politically incorrect christian conservative and occasionally coal rolling variety? There are two things that are almost always true about zealots no matter what their political or religious convictions, firstly they think they're always right and that that gives them the right to walk all over everybody else and secondly they are all stupid idiots.