skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're saying he shouldn't get a fair trial because it's a "clear-cut case" of him being a traitor. That is kind of the point, without a fair trial there is NO "case"; there is just power, blackmail and a whole lot of bootlicking.
Android Testing In The Cloud With Android Studio & The New Gradle Build System
"Degrading" security not "degraded" security. I think the post you are replying to is implying that they would rather take the small risk of being blown up on a train over the certainty of being treated like a terrorist at the airport.
> As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science.

Current cryonics is perhaps too crude to work, or you can cast doubt on the long-term sustainability of the organizations, or whatever, but that doesn't make it an act of "faith", at least not any religious sense.

It's an act of decision making under some very big uncertainties, but it's not unscientific. If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine, that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.
If he failed to show up for work, officers would be sent out of concern for his wellbeing.

The whole point of banning him from leaving the country is to try to prevent him "defecting". Waiting for him to come back is pointless. He's already not allowed "to defect" - so not allowing him to leave the country is stupid if no one is going to enforce it.

Finally, when your employer is the NSA, I figure they'd have different/special rules. Do any non-governmental jobs forbid flying due to "policy"?

defect may not be quite the right word - flee?
RamNode: SolusVM Exploit - Update
In many ways, social democracy was quite a good model that has completely failed to adapt to the existence of the working poor.
Wow, clearly there is a historical quote being born in this text..
Why not have the best of both worlds? Rail based hypersonic transportation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun
I think it's intended more technically than what the other posters are inferring. I.e. the gov't doesn't care if he's dead, disabled, or otherwise unable to continue. Any and all of the above are intended by neutralize, and I think it's being used precisely rather than euphemistically.
I don't think Snowden would have any idea whether the audits were effective or not. An analyst in the position of auditing is likely segregated from the employees whose searches are audited.
Pivotal VelocityConf | Meet Our Experts, Get Tips on RabbitMQ
Credit a small amount to your new customer's account. Then contact them and ask them to tell you the amount. If they stole the credit card they will likely not be able to check account balance and answer your question.

Usually fraud is a problem for physical goods or one-off digitals, not recurring services.

(PS - Paypal fraud detection is horrible)
The author of this essay also has controversial things to say about Bayesians [1] and bronies and masculinity [2].

1. http://plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html

2. http://plover.net/~bonds/newsincerity.html
Vaccines? I don't have an answer, but here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric%E...

I'm not particularly religious (or Catholic), but let's not minimize the positive impact members of the clergy have had on science.
Service to fill the gap in online banking - Mint.com
Damn you Western Europeans complaining about train routes. Here in the US the only remotely usable train corridor is from DC to Boston, and even there the best moment was when they deployed "high speed" trains that only exceed 200kph for very short stretches due to a design error.

[edited to fix 100 vs 200 kph typo]
This actually makes Snowden seem more intelligent. A lot of the speculation has been he's naive and didn't know what he was doing going to Hong Kong.

In contrast, Bradley Manning:
1. Released a bunch of stuff that was mostly embarassing to US diplomats, but not really evidence of criminal actions
2. Didn't really have much of a plan
3. Didn't get a chance to demonstrate clearly that he wasn't just "acting out", releasing everything he had clearance to access.

Snowden comes across here as being principled, deliberate, and smart about what he released, who he released it to, and what his personal plans were not to get black-bagged.
Dell 3007WFP (2560x1600) to the right of a (raised up) 15" retina MBP (effectively 1440x900)
The Green Party is sharpening their axe!
parallax scrolling does not work well on touch devices. People will need to disable it via feature detection or provide a mobile specific version of the site. Usually disabling it should be fine as long as your site does not depend on parallax scrolling to work.
Your privacy is your freedom (2008)
Of course, if you were an American spy and wanted to discredit him, this is exactly what you would say.

We can do this all day...
NodeFly Buzz: Chris Neumann and Datahero
Open source Internet of things framework
I wasn't talking about micro-architecture. What I was imagining were more intelligent peripherals that could better offload a relatively underpowered CPU with specialized hardware communicating between its parts.
Better smart phones and better sensors means you can opt-in to be part of a research study with your smart phone being the telemetry device, providing valuable medical data to scientists and doctors.
You are correct, and a pattern has emerged: there are the airlines that differentiates themselves on service that is tied to their country of origin (Singapore Airlines vs Emirates, both fly A380, but definitely different feel to them), and then there are no-frills airlines.

The collaboration you speak of are mostly to do with cabin sizes, how many seats, which variants to make to satisfy the majority of customers -- these can all be changed when the main parts of the plane stay the same: e.g. fuselage, engine, etc. Rarely do an airline get Airbus/Boeing to change main parts of the planes: one exception is EasyJet when they bought an insane number (200?) of A320s from Airbus: Airbus made a fuselage specially designed for EasyJet that had more seats and they had to move their doors.
Who has a paid-for LinkedIn?
More efficient than what?
Actually he's coming off as arrogant with delusions of grandeur.
The Orange Chairs of Mint Plaza
Video in Email support (june 2013 update): green light
I'm not necessarily pro or anti sharing, but calling piracy "the good deed of sharing culture and knowledge" is a good way for me to never take you seriously.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=fire+extinguisher+for+electrical+fire
Looks like the kind of app the Kolibri OS (http://kolibrios.org/) would love to see ported to their platform. Is it possible to do?
Thanks, that's a great idea that somehow escaped me.

I agree that using stolen card details to subscribe to a recurring service is unlikely for the purpose of using the service. My concern is that through being able to take out a subscription a fraudulent user could verify that a given set of credit card details are valid.
> If he failed to show up for work, officers would be sent out of concern for his wellbeing.

Right, but it's dishonest to pretend that's the only motivation.

> The whole point of banning him from leaving the country is to try to prevent him "defecting". Waiting for him to come back is pointless. He's already not allowed "to defect" - so not allowing him to leave the country is stupid if no one is going to enforce it.

Preventing defection takes a lot of different tacks (social pressure, education, threat of prosecution, etc.).
The Wire is to The Sopranos as a feed reader is to ______
I was merely saying that I don't feel like arguing the morality of it, whereas he'd need a very clever lawyer and a sympathetic judge to get out of the treason charge should he ever stand trial.
Is it all a spiel?
This should be titled "Why I am no longer part of the skeptic community".

I find many of his claims absolutely ludicrous, with broad generalizations, personal attacks, and failure to recognize what he criticizes in his own argument. The angry tone of the piece doesn't make it particularly enjoyable to read, either.
A horrid, ignorant and painfully hypocritical article. The author is clearly still a skeptic (if we are using the actual definition of the word) and is also guilty of the same kind of ignorant hate speech towards skeptics as that of which he accuses skeptics of towards religiosity and feminism.
Not kidding at all.

Inevitable death awaits while we throw ourselves into the business of living. When a loved one dies, that breaks you down, melts the ice block of arrogant I-know-what's-up thinking.

That is absolutely a gift to the living, and his wife and kids are getting that gift deeply, in their bones -- I've heard it called, eating Buddha's rice.
Sad to hear. Latest models look very good, though. I will wait a bit until they have stock and there are some reviews out.
Being willing to ignore the Constitution and do as your told seem the main prerequisites.
There's not a lot of solid data on what degree of Vancouver's housing speculators are overseas investors or local, but there is certainly is a lot of non-resident owners.

Non-resident occupancy approaches 24% in certain neighbourhoods of downtown, and these empty neighbourhoods are becoming ghost towns, an awful business environment for local retail.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/real-est...
"How do we know it's Snowden?"

Because if it was found out that it wasn't, the Guardian would be finished. Faking this would be a scandal on a level with journalists "phone tapping". Literally, the news paper would be shut down. Not by some judge or government evil, it would become a laughing stock and its readers would abandon it.

"If yes the the former, why can't The Guardian do an all-out dump instead of piecemealing it?"

You publish a small amount. Let the accused say what they want to say. As they have done, they seek to minimize everything and covering their backs. Then you hit them with more, hopefully the next set of information will contradict what they have already said. Potentially they get caught lying "directly" in public.

So, simply: (Leak 1)I saw you at the pub. You deny it. (Leak 2)I offer the evidence of a witness. You claim the witness is wrong. (Leak 3)I produce CCTV footage. I prove my case (assuming in this example we accept the CCTV as "fact"), and you lied twice instead of telling the truth at the first opportunity. You are then well and truly fecked.
When asked for a flat-out answer whether he gave classified information to the Chinese government:

"No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists."

Perhaps he should rephrase that as "no direct contact." Apparently, by handing over classified information to journalists, he believes he's absolved of any responsibility where it eventually winds up, whether on the desk of Chinese officials, or in the morning paper.
Nice spotting! Glad to see my district MP taking an active interest. Here is a direct link to the comment for people who want to upvote it(apparently no registration necessary)

http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/24386768
LinkedIn Builds Its Publishing Presence
Dave Carter: Our New ExDir at the Innovation Factory
> but it's not unscientific.

It's totally unscientific! It's pure pseudo-science.

> If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine

...okay...

> that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.

Well, no. We don't know what the mind is, nor how it works. We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it. (http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-...) {With interesting video clip}.

Freezing your brain is as scientific as stitching corpse-body-parts together to create a living human.
For me, this was a really unsatisfying answer. Maybe the question should have been more specific, but I took it to relate to the PRISM programme and the specific technology that provided direct access to data at the companies involved. His reply seemed to focus on the policies (or lack thereof), with an example relating to call logs (which I already assumed would be provided by some (S)FTP feed from the carriers and bulk loaded into a database anyway).
Vote Snowden for President in 2020
When I recall starting to investigate Go it was made pretty clear to always use "golang" for Googling. This seemed an odd gripe to me.
A Catalogue of Journalistic Malfeasance
RBS in the UK provide an industry-standard XML dump for each of your accounts. There are several online service that will take that file and categorise your transactions and forecast your cashflow for you. https://www.mint.com is one such example.

I evaluated several a while back, but found them all to be lacking, especially with respect to accurate cashflow[1] and budgeting[2]. I also wasn't very keen for a company to have access to my financial data. I now have a homemade app that uses the XML file to get the info I want out of the transactions and display it how I want.

[1] Cashflow was generally not fine-grained enough for me, my account would show as being fine over the month but there would in reality be days where it would be overdrawn.

[2] Budgeting was very naive. Budget £200 for groceries, it would budget you £200/days_in_month every day. Not very useful if you do a weekly shop.
"This country is worth dying for."

Hats off to him.
I just want to point out that those car CO2 figures don't go to very high fuel efficiency rates. I have a prius c (high on the efficiency scale, I know) and I just calculated about 290 grams of CO2 per mile (about 50mpg). Still not amazing, but a good bit better than 390g CO2/mile. That's just for one passenger as well.
I hope somebody breaks it to him gently that phoenix aren't real. ;)
It's imprecise to link that to the NSA, it's standard procedure for anyone who holds TS clearances.

From the NSA's ever so slightly less sinister sister, the USDA: http://www.dm.usda.gov/ocpm/Security%20Guide/S4self/Intro.ht...
Dude, you don't know anything about me and I don't know anything about you. One of the reasons for my original post was to prevent this thread from turning into an unnecessary flame war.

I would ask that you consider, for a moment, that it is possible for someone to hold simultaneous opposing views. I also would ask for you to go back and re-read Brooks' essay about accidental and essential complexity. I believe that the choice of framework and the difficulties associated with a specific framework fall into the accidental complexity category. If after reading the essay you believe the same, then you would conclude that both choices in this thread have similar inherent merits. Such an opinion wouldn't be wishy-washy or a cop-out, but, perhaps, closer to a deeper understanding of our craft.

Every MVC framework I've used in production (Catalyst, ASP MVC, Cake, Spring, Rails, Rails with Spine, this batch of JavaScript frameworks) has had warts and frustrating moments just as all of the web languages have frustrations (Perl with maintainability, PHP with amateur hour inconsistencies, Python with tab/spaces that different IDEs will autocorrect, Rails with too much 'magic' that leads to serious bugs, Java with too much verbosity, Spring with too much XML, C# with too expensive support, Django with too many required add-on libraries, Rust with too few libraries, Go with too new, etc, etc).

Ember was not any harder than Angular to get going (ever try to untangle the service/factory/module/controller mess?). And I have no shame in admitting that I took at least three full workdays to learn each. At the end of the day the two frameworks were just different, in the same way that writing an app using JavaScript MVC is just different than how I used to write ASP MVC apps. The reason I use the newer stuff is because the newer stuff is more fun, I can be more responsive, and (in some cases) I can host an entire webapp on s3 (managing servers can be a headache). Despite some clear advantages, none of these different frameworks is inherently better. They all have tradeoffs. If Microsoft were to come to me and (with a large check) demand that I use ASP MVC, I would do so.

My first response reading your comment is that you have less experience than I do with software engineering. That may be untrue and unfair, but rash responses are correlated with inexperience from my career. I would ask you to consider your strong, aggressive reaction as unhealthy for merit-based engineering decisions. Learning and respecting that most decisions in software are about tradeoffs and not black-and-write-strictly-better-or-worse I believe will help you in your career. Furthermore, I hope you eventually come to point where you realize many of these different languages and frameworks all look the same after a while :) It's not until we can tell a computer what we what and it figures out how that our productivity will massively improve.
I think in this case he means something akin to Skeptic with a capital 'S'. Wherein they identify themselves as Skeptics in order to identify themselves as belonging to a particularly vocal group of people who are skeptical about religion and other super-natural stuff.

It's the same reason I won't usually go around calling myself an Atheist, because while I am an atheist, I do not wish to be associated with the people who go around crying about every nativity scene or commandment stone that shows up in the public sphere. Granted I'm not about to go write a blog post listing my reasons for why I don't identify with the more vocal group of Atheists/Skeptics.
Owncloud does have mobile clients. I'm using the Android version and it works fine.

https://owncloud.com/products/mobileapps
Brain Scans Can Reveal Your Decisions 7 Seconds Before You “Decide”
Looks like he became a plain old hater instead, for one the bits on sexism in XKCD are completely ridiculous...
It's funny, I actually agree 100% with the author on skpeticism being blind to the fact that we only understand reality via mental models (all models are wrong, but some are useful, as they say), and science being more of a social process with it's own biases and ossified traditions than a grand search for capital-t Truth.

And yet, I also disagree completely with his politics. I used to be both a skeptic and a progressive. Now I'm spiritual and a reactionary. I believe that drugs, meditation and religious experiences can help us access aspects of reality that are normally invisible. I also believe that democracy is an outdated system of government, and the particular brand of feminism the author defends is just another batshit crazy ideology. (I'm all for the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world, but when people start talking about patriarchy and privilege they might as well be talking about sin and Satan for all I care).

Also, why are people on the left so keen to defend Islam at the drop of a hat? Is it just an "enemy of my enemy" kind of deal? (We hate America, Radical Islamists hate America, hey, these Muslims seem pretty smart doncha know!) I have respect for FEMEN and other second-wave feminist handouts who at least try and keep their worldview consisistent and criticise the treatment of women in Muslim countries.

I don't know what that makes me, other than "odd".
Thanks a lot for the suggestion and resource. My parents have a problem with security at a camp they're building so I figure it may be a good fit. I was thinking a raspberry pi could handle the events while connected to an arduino with a GSM shield to send a text message when a door, window, etc. is opened. I have not decided how exactly this will be handled but I'm looking into it at the moment.
At least you could completely disable Flash. The new CSS animations and effects are baked right in.
Sigh:

"So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate?"

"Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history."

:(
You are right to worry.

> what if they were to perform covert MiTM attacks?

Then you would be pwned.

However, active MitM attacks are generally targeted. They can only get away with so many for so long before they are detected. Their scope can be quite large however. The entire country of Iran was MitM'd for some weeks before a single Chrome user reported seeing a cert error in Gmail. The Flamer malware MitM'd unattended systems apparently for years.

So if I were the target of the NSA, I'd expect them to get me with drive-by malware. A bit of malware is much easier to replace than backbone fiber access if the capability is 'burned'.

However, there are an unlimited number of other attackers out there in the world, most with 'catch as catch can' capabilities. That public Wifi or hotel internet could easily be hostile and the attacker may not have much to lose.
Or perhaps he has some secret knowledge that has been hidden from us!
The slippery slope in all of this is the application of the law.

Sure, if the government was going after someone like Steve Muller (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/04/gsm-researcher/) you'd want him to be able to keep his stuff from prying eyes.

What about a Suadi National accused of plotting terror attacks in NYC? Would you want the same laws applied to him? Or would you want to able to force someone like this to de-crypt their files in order to stop an attack?

I really don't know what the right answer is, but sometimes laws intended to keep us safe, also give shelter to bad guys.
They are, but he wasn't (and probably isn't) specifically banned from flying.
"The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed." - Snowden
What would you say to others who are in a position to leak classified information that could improve public understanding of the intelligence apparatus of the USA and its effect on civil liberties?

"This country is worth dying for." - Snowden
You need a passport (or other form of government issued-ID), you don't need a visa.
Assange: Google's just an arm of US government
This is my belief as well. A few years ago I worked for a company that sold packet capture appliances to unnamed government agencies. The higher end appliances were capable of 10Gb/s packet to disk streaming. I helped write a search interface for the resulting data capable of the type of filtering and data reconstruction described. If organizations directly, indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly allowed the NSA to tap Internet links, they could theoretically provide full data access, while at the same time publicly deny direct server or backdoor access.
Machine learning + Cognitive science = The future
UK Internet providers reject default porn filters
Basically mandatory vegetarianism?
First of all, thanks for the nice article, Patrick!

Feel free to ask us at makandra anything you'd like to know about Rails LTS.
No problem, as long as you're not an ethnic or religious minority.
I do think it's pretty important to talk about this here, as it is "Major Tech Companies" that get pushed into this thing.

The more we know about avoiding it, etc, the better we are
Keep Kosher by Eating Pork Through a Hole in a Sheet
Coding Challenges for Engineers Stuck on the 101 Freeway Today