Atty. General Holder made the position of the administration quite clear in his letter to Sen. Paul.

Congress? AUMF?

i work at a major medical research institution. A few years ago, our CIO showed us a graph of data they'd gone through showing a large spike in heart attacks in otherwise healthy men. The spike then dropped a few years later. Normally someone wouldn't be looking at this data, so it wasn't until after the spike was gone that this was investigated. Turned out that Vioxx had been put on the market about a year before the spike started, and was pulled off the market about 6 months or so before the spike dropped off.

Getting massive amounts of data (anonymized of course) can show trends in public health that can give us a lot of information and save lives and money.

(and yes, I hate the term 'big data'. No sense of scale of how big it is.)

So you're saying that security through obscurity works?

Stacks at your desk are on you. But if I'm running a meeting that runs around lunchtime, I buy (from my own pocket) a collection of trail mix, dried cranberries, nuts, etc.

How so?

^ This

That depends on how literally you take your religion. Much of the voices you hear in the press and in places like the Creation Museum believe that the Bible was written directly by God and every word is the literal truth. In that case, you're right.

I'm religious(I'm not a minister, but I do attend services regularly along with serving on the governing body of the local parish). To me, there's symbolism all over the place in the Bible, so why isn't much of the Bible itself symbolism?

Absence of proof doesn't mean it didn't happen, but proof of something happening is pretty darn convincing. I can say God exists and Jesus rose from the dead, but I can't prove it. But I'm not going to try and convince you I'm right about that. There's plenty of evidence that the Big Bang happened and the universe is 14ish billion years old and monkey and humans share a common ancestor. There's plenty of things that science doesn't explain (yet): what happened before the Big Bang? What caused the bolt of lightning that caused the amino acids to come together? What caused humans to evolve the way we did? Those are all things where God acts within the laws of nature He created to make us the way we are.

Disagree? I'm cool with that. This works for me. I don't expect it to work for everyone.

I work for Harvard (but not FAS, another school), but getting into FAS is no longer strictly about having money or connections. A large portion of the students that go there get some sort of financial aid, and a family making less than $120k gets a massive amount of financial aid if they are accepted.

FAS Financial Aid Office

Yeah, I'm a bit curious about this too. I've had two Thinkpads since the purchase and both have been as good of quality as when it was IBM.

There's nothing preventing you from buying a phone at the unsubsidized price and then modifying it. You're making a deal with the cell phone provider: You agree that you'll honor the contract you signed, and they give you a phone at a discount. Hopefully this is going to be a bit easier over time as everyones moves to LTE (does this mean that CDMA finally bites the dust?) and phones become standardized like the rest of the civilized world.

For one thing, were the programmers paid for the work they did and was it clearly understood that their work may not be released as open source before they started (IOW, who holds copyright on the code?)

For another, that code could come back into play in 2014 for the midterm elections. Or it could be used sooner depending on how quickly 2016 starts to heat up.

Pretty poor assumption.

Yes, and the next time some Hospice official thinks about not encrypting their data, they're going to remember this event and think better of it.

HIPAA violations are serious. People have likely lost their jobs over this. Even though I'm not in a position to routinely work with patient data, my employer requires that my laptop is encrypted - in the case of my Linux laptop I was able to convince them that using encrypted LVM was sufficient.

and cooking. Though you could file that under physics and chemistry too. Hrm...