No they ground up the composite panels to reclaim the cocaine it was pressed out of.

Heraclitus might agree with you, but I do not.

The US Constitution has some of it's roots in Greek philosophy, but many of them are more directly derived from British Common Law and "The Rights of Englishmen". If you want to understand the purpose behind the Constitution, read Locke. (The Federalist Papers are too focused on the politics of the time to give you a good perspective.)

OTOH, there were disagreements among the "founding fathers", and I think the branch lead by Alexander Hamilton would agree with you. I have scant sympathy for that view however, preferring the branch lead by Thomas Jefferson (in his polemics, if not always in his actions).

Traitor is defined explicitly in the constitution. They betrayed their oath of office, they violated the law, they ignored the constitution. All that is true, and it doesn't constitute treason as defined by the constitution.

Mind you, I feel that they should all be given a decade of extreme solitary confinement. (I.e. *NOBODY* gets in to see them or talk to them except once a month a doctor & their lawyer in a combined visit (the doctor leaves first). And nobody includes guards. I'm thinking of a steel box with a garden lit be grow-lights and food delivered by bellamy tube. If the toilet breaks down they're in trouble...the doctor can order them moved to another cube on his next visit.)

In general Ewan seemed much more appropriate for the role of teenage Anakin than Hayden. Hayden was just cardboard. And no I have not been impressed by him in any other roles either. Whereas some of Ewan's earlier work are spot on for the kind of character Anakin needed to be in the prequels.

Bad acting due to bad direction and horrible writing aggravated by casting that was also bad.

The prequel had too much George in it.

Not only that but he upstaged anyone else that EVER played that role.

Jack Nicholson merely played The Joker. Heath WAS the Joker.

Actually, since this is a salve to be used externally, internal use isn't a consideration for this formulation. People regularly get that amount of copper on their skin from jewelry (including copper bracelets) Some get a minor rash from it or a green skin discoloration, both much better than MRSA.

What people need is medications they can actually afford. The cost of drugs in the U.S. is shameful.

It should be marketed as a cologne of lotion. That way the rules flip-flop and pretty much if the user's skin doesn't actually come off while applying it, it's A-OK with regulators.

I'm not saying the research shouldn't be done, an internal use form would be good. A concentrated form would be good. But none of that should stand in the way of the known effective salve.

That's what brownies and oil are for.

But the point stands even moreso since it was synthetic and still cost more than the black market herb.

oversized salt-shakers shrieking, "Exterminate!"

If you're going do a nerd joke on April 1st, know your material even a little bit better. I read Dune over 30 years ago in college, and I can remember that the capitol of Arrakis is Arrakeen. Even 54 comments later that little factiod hasn't made it anywhere onto the page.

It seems that the head crabs are a side effect of a discovery that Doctor Spock from the USS enterprise made late last year.

Let the OCD nerds start foaming at the mouth!

If it is so easy to do this, why haven't the Russian internet criminals rolled anything out on this scale? It seems to me that a platform like this would be all kinds of ideal for criminal purposes.

They have. That is exactly what I just said - Zeus is also a modular, plugin based malware platform that is developed by Russian/east European fraud gangs. It bears a lot of similarities to the NSA/GCHQ malware platforms in terms of how it gets onto people's systems, general design, etc.

because of the work they do and the requirements that work puts on their infrastructure they were probably into the whole "big data" mindset several years before mainstream commercial, civilian IT companies got there

It's not the case. For instance the NSA scalable data store (Accumulo) is basically a reimplementation of Google's BigTable, and they don't try to hide it. They adopted tech from the civilian space for their own requirements but it wasn't invented there.

With respect to your other points, I never said they don't know what they're doing, only that what they're doing is not particularly interesting and I don't think it will keep the best people interested for more than a few years before they find it becomes humdrum routine. And by "product" you knew perfectly well what I meant - not some crappy in house web app used by a few hundred people who have no other choice, I mean a product that's available in the marketplace which competes for end users, probably consumers or professionals. Something where quality matters.

There were several miracle workers in Judea at the time of Yeshua, some who could even raise the dead by contemporary accounts. The main difference is that Yeshua performed his miracles without monetary charge. If this aspect is similar, and rebellion was a common sentiment (i.e. Sepphoris), then we can assume that Yeshua was familiar with the issues, even if he did not share the opinions of all of them.

After the crucifixion, Paul changed Yeshua radically, abandoning Mosaic law and calling himself the "first apostle." James the Just, the head of the whole church, recalled Paul to Jerusalem twice, and censured him for what would amount to heresy. James then dispatched emissaries to all of Paul's congregations to correct the "flawed" teaching, which was largely successful. There is even a story in the memoirs of Clement (Peter's successor) that Paul threw James down a flight of stairs in a rage on his second return.

Paul's teachings would have been discarded, if James had not been murdered, and Jerusalem destroyed. As it was, Paul's writings were the only existing documents after Jerusalem's fall, and all the later gospels included strong influence from his letters.

The rebellious attitude of Yeshua towards the Romans would not serve a new Roman religion, so it was removed, for practical reasons.

I don't think so.

1) You don't see ads on Facebook.com if you aren't logged in, and DATR isn't sent for social plugins around the web.

2) They have already said they don't do that.

So we have both their own statements and technical evidence.

OK, so we have an article claiming Facebook is tracking everyone for evil advertising purposes, even when logged out. Facebook denies it and says it's garbage.

Let's go do 30 seconds of digging and see who is right, shall we?

1. Open an incognito window. Open Chrome developer tools.
2. Load a Facebook "page" (i.e. a product page for some third party product or service)
3. Be amused by the giant "STOP!" warning printed to the console, apparently people are being tricked into copy/pasting stuff into the developer console to get their accounts hacked.
4. Observe the cookies that are set.

There are three cookies set. Two of them appear to simply encode the loaded URL and have no ids or other interesting info. The last is the "DATR" cookie. What does DATR do? Well, we know what it does because last time this garbage blew up in the press Facebook explained what it does:

We set the ‘datr’ cookie when a web browser accesses facebook.com (except social plugin iframes), and the cookie helps us identify suspicious login activity and keep users safe. For instance, we use it to flag questionable activity like failed login attempts and attempts to create multiple spam accounts.

(link from here)

So it's an anti abuse and security feature. Nothing to do with advertising. Also, guess what - such cookies are common across many websites. They are quite useful for detecting spammers. Presumably Facebook tried to explain this to the Belgian regulator in question, but it's just so much better politically for said regulator to pretend they caught some evil company in their terrible advertising habits red handed, than learn how large websites work.

The problem is the more time the media and government regulators cry wolf over this stuff, the more inclined I am to believe they're all harmful idiots who want to break the web.

Yes The Equation Group [arstechnica.com] really seemed "2nd rate" and they sure didn't "make" anything.

TAO is what you would expect to see given a sufficiently large budget spent exclusively on hacking everything possible. The hacks are impressive in the sense that they take a lot of resources and time to develop and it wasn't previously obvious to what extent governments were committing resources to infrastructure subversion. They are not especially impressive from a technical perspective: it's basically a more professional and larger scale version of the types of malware produced by Russian banking fraudsters. Working from that down into BIOS hacks and the like is the inevitable result of spending billions on hackers year after year - they need to keep finding new things to exploit. Interesting, but only because it reinforces the idea that everything seems to be hackable.

But, what kind of people find this work interesting? I can imagine it would be interesting for a few years, especially if you're young and trapped inside a heavily propaganda controlled environment where you're told daily you're the Forces of Good in an epochal struggle against the Axis of Evil. But the amount of technical design work involved is minimal. The level of new technology is minimal. The "research" is simply finding ordinary bugs and flaws in other people's code. People oooh and aaah about the fact that these state malware platforms use a plugin architecture, whilst simultaneously finding the same thing in Photoshop entirely mundane.

Even the data analytics stuff is essentially just an A-B-C application of big data tech originally developed elsewhere, like at Google.

And the advanced maths the NSA is supposed to be famous for hardly shows up in the Snowden documents. It's pretty clear that their success against even crappy crypto is fragile at best (RC4), probably non-existent at worst (AES/strong RSA or anything past it). Their botched attempt to back door Dual-EC DRBG smells of desperation. They wouldn't build huge infrastructures for storing and obtaining stolen private keys if they had the mathematical tools to undo modern ciphers. So I suspect there are a lot of mathematicians at the NSA feeling kind of obsolete these days and wondering what they can contribute.

I'd say the only genuinely technically interesting work the FVEY guys are doing is the way they've been combining passive intercept with active, automated exploitation. QUANTUM is a pretty interesting thing and I'm not aware of anyone discussing anything like it before Snowden's leaks. However, it's also now a done deal. Beyond incremental improvements, there don't seem to be any obvious further directions for that project.

So as a programmer, developing hacks and malware can be entertaining for some years, but eventually I think most skilled people will want to flex their muscles in other ways. They will want to build something instead of break something. The best people will have a broad span of interests. In an organisation like Google or Facebook that's OK - you can work security for a few years, do some exploit research, then go on and transfer to some other project. Or leave but keep your work on your resume. At the NSA? There it's more limited. You can't easily leave the classified world because your work experience is a gaping void. They don't do product development. You will never make something that your family uses. You will never even develop the skills needed to do that.

Stories like this give me some hope that despite it's apparently bottomless budget, the NSA can still be beaten technically. They discard most of the qualified people because they aren't US citizens and the ones that are left would be well advised to take a career at a Silicon Valley firm where they can do very similar sorts of work, but for things that are unquestionably useful. If you go do big data analytics or security work in order to fight spam on Gmail (like I did), you don't have to worry about the moral impact of your work - spammers and hackers are unquestionably bad, so booting them off the platform is unquestionably good. If you go do the same work at the NSA you have to worry that the "terrorists" might just be random unlucky guys in Pakistan who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or that the targets are simply foreign politicians or CEOs .... much murkier stuff.