I realize you're cherry picking the NASA buy, but I'm pretty sure Google is acting on self interests alone. Even if you choose to believe that NASA picked up the phone one day, and a bunch of politicians on the other line said, "Hey NASA, buy this thing from Canada, cause that would be awesome!" I bet that kind of simplistic worldview makes their scientists and mathematicians feel awesome.

I guess D-Wave's Google Ads campaign (Buy a 10 million dollar computer! Click here!) wasn't getting good sell through rates, huh?

The government is spying on our codebase! It's so cute.

More importantly, why should you be on the defensive? Isn't it good to know both things? Is it somehow a binary choice between wanting to know about the two issues? Snowden is the messenger, not the message, and you probably have a higher likelihood of impacting domestic policy than raising awareness to the 'scandal' that is foreign governments trying to disrupt or influence local politics. Especially since it doesn't take any tinfoil whatsoever to discuss USA's storied history of doing the same. This strawman of somebody who thinks that China would never stoop to what the USA stoops to all the time is pretty hilarious. This is what governments do, the world over. The idea that the USA isn't doing this, or wouldn't do it in the future is downright silly given the history of unilateral foreign interference by all world super powers.

Your best bet would be floor monuments that enclose power receptacles, and if you wanted you could put network jacks too. Of course, this is only available if you have a floor that can handle this installation, so it may not be for everyone. It's very unlikely that furniture manufacturers will ever want to wire up their products. As you stated, the fire hazards could be a disaster. If the furniture is sold worldwide, it's also unlikely they'd want to deal with the hassles of the various different voltages and regulatory approvals. They're much more comfortable with you stringing your power adapters through the couch and taking all the liability off them.

Password safes would be a better solution. A central authentication service is useful, but it also has a big target on it for all the hackers out there. One big score and the hackers could have access to millions of accounts on thousands of sites. If it's worth their while, hackers will keep at it until they get the prize. To keep you safe a better choice is a password safe. You have random passwords for every site and store them in the safe. Then you put a strong password on the safe that you won't forget. Your accounts are as secure, if not more so, than using a centralized sign-on, and the hackers can't access millions of user accounts all in one place.

It really is cute when home hobbyist guitar players think they know how to play music, though.

Of course I played Battlefront. I guess I should have specified: Battlefield on Frostbite 3: Star Wars.

Ok, I'm formally trained on piano, saxophone, and drums. You couldn't knock out a rap song in about 1/2 an hour. I can't tell tell you how many smug guitarists I've met who don't know any music theory who think they're qualified to write a hiphop song.

So just for fun, what are the notes in E melodic minor? And haha, Smoke on the Water ... man, you'd have been better served to pick a tune that was more than a few chromatic power chords chained together.

Make it happen.

Tribe Called Quest? Jurrasic 5? J-Live? Curren$y? Drake? Jay-Z? Jungle Brothers? De La Soul? Pharcyde? Kanye? ... fuckit, that took about 5 seconds and I'm bored already. I'm even too bored to google for delicious metal lyrics. As an intelligent, employed, classically musically trained white guy from the burbs, I feel sad for folks who really think they're "above" rap. You don't have to like it, but it's no smarter or dumber than any other genre.

That's called a confirmation bias. I think you'd have to be pretty ignorant to ignore the social conditions that drove the birth of gangster rap, and the fact that the rise of gangster rap in the 90s was actually thanks to the purchasing power of the white suburban class who wanted to be bad ass. I'm fairly confident in saying that you haven't any credibility on the history of rap anymore than I have any credibility in speaking about metal.

Well, it's not like you guys ever taught the American Revolution to begin with in so far as what actually happened.

The first rule of underground stage theater is don't post about underground stage theater.

I'd say what the submitter considers to be obscene is ... well, it's not obscene. Based on the description and the video on his website, the commedy is largely based on the juxtaposition of the blueness of the material and the persona of being a 1500's poet. I found the video rather amusing - I imagine it'd be fun to see live.