"She"? Lauren Weinstein is a man. With a motorcycle. A manly motorcycle man.
Who inexplicably trusts Google just 'cause they pay him every so often.

Samaritan's Purse, the employer of the two patients, is an evangelical missionary outfit run by Franklin Graham. My guess is that at least part of this trip is due to the Democrats not wanting to have to explain to the electorate why they let two of God's Favorites expire in some sweaty jungle hut. If it's really "for study," they could have flown a couple of African victims over months ago.

And yeah, it's a really stupid idea.

Yeah, absurdly non-true today. OTOH, Hoover did prefer Mormons in his inner circle, and the FBI agents I had occasion to meet in the 60s & 70s definitely came across as uptight and straitlaced Mormon types. Fun Fact: in the 60s, FBI agents helpfully drove AMC/Rambler sedans as undercover cars and used sturdy but crappy Beseler Topcon 35 mm cameras.

You may well know this, but Tab Mix Plus allows you to set custom tab text and background colors for current, unloaded, unread, read, etc., tabs. Quite handy. My "current" tab is always bright green.

2005: Greek 737 crew succumbed to cabin de-pressurization, plane flew on until out of gas & crashed. Helios Airways Flight 522: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Story of multiple pilot errors on top of ground mechanic's stunning mistake. I suspect something similar happened in this case.

Which makes you wonder how seriously to take his comment. After all, someone apparently found it cheap, easy and effective to use xml-rpc to commandeer 162,000 WP installations.

But then the dogs would end up in a stir-fry and Uncle DNA would end up causing a weird dog variant of BSE and the top leadership would go insane.

Lighten up. He's just fixing linux until it's broken. For you. And money, of course. Hey, fucking with free software 'til you can convince a few people that it belongs to you beats writing stuff from scratch.

Rural Ohio, 35 miles east of Columbus. Our only choice is Frontier DSL, less than 3.5 Mb most of the time, often drops completely if it rains or there is "squirrel activity" on the lines. Netflix works, sorta, on a very small screen. We have DirecTV but soon won't be able to afford it. I read a lot of books.

They shoot unicorns, don't they?

Thousands of contract employees in the past few years have had access to what Snowden revealed. It is likely that all those "secrets" were old news to every major foreign intelligence service. The NSA is like a vacuum cleaner with a punctured bag: they sweep up info and then leak it like a sieve.

And if Snowden were interested in selling info, he would never have gone public.

One of the more significant recent revelations is that the govt uses "parallel construction" in building a cae. If possibly illegal surveillance is used to catch you, they -- after the fact -- construct a legal scenario for how they MIGHT have caught you that will pass muster w/ a judge.

[posted as comment to article] I wrote a book for Random House in 1996 called "The Book Lover's Guide to the Internet." I spent the first half of the book explaining how the net worked and how to access it through AOL, CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, et al. I think I still have a press account on AOL, for what that's worth. Somewhere I even have a pc with Mosaic on it.

I did an author appearance at a B&N in NYC in '97 that was covered by C-SPAN. First question from the audience was "Isn't it true that the government is watching everything you do online?" I think I answered, "Yeah, probably."

[Actually, since it was the Village, the questions veered into computers and mind control a bit later on.]

The man is the real deal. Seriously.

"Shitty Tom Clancy novel" is redundant.

John LeCarre is at the other end of the spectrum. His novels happen to be about "spies" for the most part, but they stand on their own among the finest of 20th century English literature.