What's a 'barron'?

If we take this to its logical conclusion, ex-pats should lose the ability to speak the local language whenever they look at their spouse. And Chinese staff in a Chinese restaurant outside of China wouldn't have a hope. This has not been my experience. I suspect that the experiment is not demonstrating what the experimenters think it is demonstrating.

The person who initiates the process by first making the item available does not have the right to give it away in the first place

Sharing information is a basic human right, and no one has any right to use force to prevent a person from sharing information that they have.

you think it is perfectly acceptable to not pay for something that someone else produced because somehow, magically, people don't need to get paid for what they produce.

I failed to pay for access to things other people produced for a long time before the net came around. We called it a "library".

One can believe that it's good for authors and musicians and the like to get paid, without believing that a state-backed artificial monopoly on the making of copies is a useful or even acceptable means to that end.

How do I know how much of it I should believe? (Other than the fact that I read it on the internet.)

Yeah, you'd have to be delusional to think that countries play nice with each other, but seriously, how do we know how much of this is fact and how much is fearmongering (or cashing in on existing fears), or politics?

Are you suggesting that international terrorist organizations, organized crime, and foreign spies trusted their telephones as secure communications until this came out?

All this will catch is small-time operators. Oh, wait - it won't catch them either, because they won't be calling suspicious phone numbers.

Don't worry, there will be a dupe story in a few days. Or maybe tonight.

Like a lot of other businesses, the film industry is averse to risk.

Which, unfortunately, is probably the best business strategy for mass-market products. If you want art you'll have to look for something where big money isn't involved.

IM3 was very entertaining, and I walked out thinking I'd go see it again. But before I got home I was already in "that was just dumb" mode.

8.2 on IMDB right now.

I've never had any use for critics, but OTOH I still haven't heard anything from non-critics that makes me want to go see it.

They claim to have a list of millions of phone numbers, against which they only checked 300 numbers last year.

I want to know what criteria they used to generate that list of millions of phone numbers.

More precisely, I want to know what criteria they used to build the training data sets to train the classifiers that filtered through all our communications metadata (and probably our communications content data as well) in order to generate that list.

What are they looking for? How do they say that a phone call goes into the training set or stays out? That's what I want to know; not the details of Snowden's sex life or whatever the media are pushing now.

This is pretty absurd, the idea that Larry Ellison can own the sixth largest Hawaiian Island.

On the one hand, it means the Hawaiians, on that island at least, have a royal family again.

On the other hand, he holds it due to fictitious numbers in a database, so what this really means is that the United States gave it to him.

The United States will take it back whenever it likes, unless he decides to be a king like Leopold and establish his own military to torment the inhabitants. In which case the United States will take it back after a rather short war.

But I'm sure he'll enjoy pretending to be king for a while.

Maybe they mean "unlimited storage" the same way your ISP means "unlimited bandwidth".

Yeah, but the question is who it works for.

OK, we're placated.