Because telling Bin Laden the date and time we were coming for him probably isn't a good idea?

Seriously? You think that the NSA had metadata on bin Laden's calls? But not the content of those calls?

From that article:

This renewal is carried out by the FISA Court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore, it is lawful.

Lawful is not the same as Constitutional. I'm pretty sure that our Founding Fathers would NOT have supported this.

As you know, this is just metadata.

If it is "just" anything then why are you so concerned about collecting it?

The information goes into a database, ...

That's even worse. They're COMPILING information about citizens without even having a "reasonable suspicion" about those citizens.

... the metadata, but cannot be accessed without whatâ(TM)s called, and I quote, "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity.

Who cares? If there is "reasonable, articulable suspicion" THEN you go after the records. With a WARRANT. And the warrant IDENTIFIES those SPECIFIC people you have a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of.

As you know, and Iâ(TM)ve pointed out many times, there have been approximately 100 plots and also arrests made since 2009 by the FBI.

Go on ...

I do not know to what extent metadata was used or if it was used, but I do know this: ...

If YOU do not know then who DOES know?

And if YOU do not know then YOU should not be trying to IMPLY that there is any link between collecting this information and cracking any plots.

I do not know to what extent metadata was used or if it was used, but I do know this: That terrorists will come after us if they can and the only thing we have to deter this is good intelligence.

More of our people die when their own family kills them than die from "terrorists" in the US.

If "the only thing" that will protect us from these "terrorists" is collecting information on our own citizens then I am willing to take that risk.

My first question would be WHY do these have to be SECRET? If there's a legitimate need for the government to access them then why not be open about it?

Fascism begins when the efficiency of the Government becomes more important than the Rights of the People.

That is correct for home users.

But for corporate users, a system level exploit allows things like installing sniffers and key loggers so that more passwords can be collected. Including the admin/root passwords.

Which can be used against the computers in the Accounting department to transfer money from the corporate accounts to "money mules".

With 8 people, you get the results of 4 people !

So a basketball team with 4 people will tie a team with 8 people 50% of the time? (all individual skill levels being equal)

Or a tug-of-war competition between two teams (one with 4 people and one with 8) of people with similar physical builds will be a tie.

I always took Ringelmann's findings as support for "work expands to fill the available time" rather than an upper limit on a group's capabilities.

But WHY does it take longer when you add more people? The answer is "communication channels".

And they follow the formula of (n*(n-1))/2
So 1 person has 0 communication channels to maintain.
3 people have 3 channels.
5 people have 10 channels.
And if the EXACT same message is not present upon every one of those channels then problems start.

So the key is NOT to focus on 10 communication channels between 5 people but to focus on reducing the scope as quickly as possible so that fewer people are needed. And the means that your best programmers can spend more of their time programming and less on maintaining communication channels.

But when processes are so amateurish, as in the anecdotes provided in the fine article, ...

Emphasis on that. Crappy data leads to crappy conclusions. And her "data" is extremely crappy.

From TFA:

In another team of seven or eight people, developers were encouraged to do whatever they felt like ... which turned out to include, "Have every developer write code in a different language."

I count at least two WTF's in there. You wouldn't build cars engineered around blind people would you?

Also from TFA:

The best of those indicators? The one that most commonly predicts quality results? Good team communication.

So a baseball team or a football team with good communication should be able to crank out "quality" code. Wrong. And that gets back to the crappy examples she uses. Just because communication CAN be the biggest problem in a given situation does not mean that communication IS the biggest problem for all situations.

Seriously, what programmer would not ask which language was being used? Or not have MORE questions when the answer was "everyone uses whatever they want to".

The weird part is that he keeps posting things like that and they keep getting mod'ed up. Here's his page here:
http://slashdot.org/~SplashMyBandit

Not mod'ed "flamebait" or "off topic".

Is this something on /. to generate more page hits by mod'ing up anti-UN / anti-Islam / conspiracy rants?

However, for those that think the drones should be removed, just what do you propose to replace them with? or are you ok submitting to the Islamic political order under Sharia (which is the stated and published goal of the OIC, if you care to listen:

So you believe that the ONLY alternative to drone attacks is to convert to Sharia law?

Who, exactly, is going to impose Sharia law on the US? And I don't mean who would LIKE to. Who, exactly, has that capability?

The OIC realised it can't get its agenda through sovereign national parliaments - so what it is doing is manipulating the UN and then the resulting treaties will then be applied.

How about you look up who has veto power at the UN. Here's a hint, the US is one of them. If we don't like it, we can veto it.

There is a shadow war for freedom that is going on right now. If you don't stand up and argue for your liberties then the OIC (through the UN) *will* progressively take them away - it may take decades, but they are determined to reach their goal (Sharia) because it is a matter of faith for them.

Exactly HOW is ANYONE going to replace any part of the US legal system or Constitution with Sharia law?

And if it's about "detective investigates X and finds vampire" then there's even more stuff out there.

But it wasn't a real vampire. Just someone faking it for an alibi or an insane guy who believed he was. But it wasn't a real vampire.

Dum dum DUMMMMMM!

Or WAS it?!?

Anyway, how about a list of clichés that you do NOT want to see in a vampire movie? Mine are:
1. Vampires dress normally. NOT like they just left the fetish party.
2. Vampirism that does NOT seem like most of the people in the world would prefer that to their current existence.
3. The vampire "lives" in a place that seems reasonable. NOT a castle or a mansion that looks like a castle. People tend to inquire as to who owns huge estates.

Besides that, one data leak and it's the CEO's who's job will no longer exist.

Maybe. Maybe not. It depends upon how well he (or she) can spin it.

And the easiest way to spin it is to blame you.

So if you're having trouble getting the CEO to support the "NO BYOD HERE" policy then start hunting for a job with a more informed CEO. Leave that job and that CEO to one of the BYOD advocates. Let them deal with whatever loss happens.

... I'll have another job by next week anyway.

Maybe. It depends upon how high profile the loss is. It's easier to get a different job BEFORE the story about how the company lost $500,000 because someone in Accounting brought in an infected laptop and the CxO's and BoD are all claiming that it was your fault. Be proactive.

But Gaiman never claimed that it was "new". And I'm sure that if you asked him he could give you a dozen or more references that he pulled from for that.

The problem is when you take something as obvious (and done multiple times) as a detective story with supernatural elements and call it "new". It shows a lack of research.

There's even a TVTropes page dedicated to the sub-genre of detective-vampire.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VampireDetectiveSeries

From their answers:

Michael Reaves: ... I can't really comment on the "Twinkleteeth" style of vamps, because I haven't seen any, ...

It's only the most successful vampire franchise at the moment.

David Raiklen: It's time to give old myths a new spin.

Look at the book sales and movies. There are easily a THOUSAND different interpretations of vampires out there right now. What will be different about YOUR "spin" that hasn't been done over and over already?

Michael Reaves: Well, how about just plain people, instead of overblown Transylvanian counts?

You mean like in every vampire story EXCEPT Dracula?

David Raiklen: ... And there's nothing supernatural about our vampires.

So you'll have a different origin story for the first vampire and they won't have a problem with crosses and they will reflect in mirrors and so on.

Unless they don't reflect in mirrors in which case you'll have to explain how a non-supernatural (does that make it natural?) breaks the laws of physics.

Just a few points:

Also note that despite the claims of the Muslims that Allah is the God of Abraham, this claim must be false when scriptures are compared.

Except that they both use the same original scriptures. Islam just adds on the words of their prophet similar to what Christianity does.

Similarly, when scripture is compared the Islamic "Mehdi" pretty much has the characteristics given of a Christian Anti-Christ (there is more than one, this one just happens to be the one most detailed in Revelations).

Except that the concept of "anti-Christ" does not exist in the original scriptures. Only in the addendum of the Christians.

I'm an atheist so "have no skin in the game", I'm just giving a comparison of mythologies since that comparison is not known even to most religious and educated people.

The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer. So comparing three mythologies that do not make sense to each other will not result in any insights except that they are different.

From your link:

Are we to assume that just because the Quran states that Allah is Yahweh of the Bible that both Jews and Christians are obligated to believe this to be true?

Are you obligated to consider MY fan-fiction to be canonical? Am I obligated to consider YOUR fan-fiction to be canonical? Particularly when the ORIGINAL material was a "shared-world" effort with lots of individual contributors who dealt with a lot of allegories and parables and such.

Yet, the Quran teaches that Allah is the author of evil:

When you have a monotheistic religion where EVERYTHING was created by a single omnipotent, omniscient god then arguing about whether that god created "evil" or "sin" is kind of silly.

Whomever wrote the link that you linked to has a religious point-of-view.

If you're a spy or diplomat or whatever, don't use Gmail. At the very least it is subject to the US government's laws. Get yourself a secured server somewhere else.