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While Khamenei is ultimately still in charge, over the weekend Iranians took to the streets dancing/chanting/celebrating the win of moderate reformist presidential candidate Hassan Rowhani.
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In the past, I think, mathematicians with a Ph.D. either stayed in academia or went to work for the NSA but now there's Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

The big data revolution is a fairly recent...

Let's say for the sake of argument they have a supercomputer cable of 100 petaFLOPS (roughly twice the combined capability of all the known supercomputers) it would still take 1 x 10^17 years (a...

— Properly secured, the data is encrypted an cannot be decrypted, except by brute force or an unknown algorithm that contradicts known number theory, without a key. Snowden and Greenwald appear to...

I don't think it necessarily makes sense to compare discontented democratic Turkey with the dysfunctional Middle East in the sense that Turkey has been a lot more successful economically and a lot...

I've read similar stories but a lot of it is unsubstantiated. There is also the possibility of unpublished exploits in commercial software that the government, but not the public, is aware of. But...

True, but HTTPS (SSL) should also secure the data stream from the NSA as well so whether the contents are encrypted can be incidental without endpoint access.

Hugh's point is also valid that a...

If a person uses standard freely available 128-bit AES encryption, like many companies already use, to "lock their e-mail in a box" then it would take every computer on the planet working on nothing...

Meh. It's a big story and there's more to go on than people here seem to think. The original claim that the NSA has direct and unilateral access to anything it wants on Big Techs' servers is an...

Hopefully, as a result of public outcry, the gulf will be narrowed. Part of the problem is that the tech companies are legally prevented from disclosing more information by government secrecy laws...

I'm just here to challenge prior beliefs.

Huh? What Party? I've posted before all this that I don't like Google's real name policy et al. because that's Big Data too. Don't mistake wanting to know what's actually going on with defending...

I read that too and even his interpretation is distinct from Greenwald's claim that the NSA were given "direct access" to the servers. The issue is compliance with FISA orders, including orders...

By wrong I mean that the NSA does not have direct access to the major internet companies as originally reported. The technical gap in the middle is a formalized legal process. People should still...

While the NSA phone spying program and the FISA courts are cause for alarm, none of the big tech companies ( Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple) appear to be...

If the reporting on the information provided by the leaks is accurate then the government is not permitted to further investigate the data until they have a warrant signed off on by a judge and PRISM...

Bayesian Inference can help explain why profiling is not very effective.

Bayes' law calculates the probability that something is probable or an event will happen, given a certain set of...

I agree, never, is to cavalier.

But the reason why they are collecting everything is because there's no way of knowing what information has value ahead of time. This is essentially an enormous...

There's good chance these classified programs will hurt the U.S.'s tech industry. For the big dominant players like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook foreign customers are something like 50-70% of...

A system that rewards arrests with funding dollars abetted by a public accepting of profiling stereotypes creates a system where even though blacks and whites have similar levels of drug use, blacks...

I appreciate you heroically hurling yourself into the breach between Jennifer Rubin's agenda and a misapprehended reality but if you want a world where America isn't rushing into picking fights then...

— Taking a tougher stance on Russian and Chinese human rights violations is a valid point but as a result of better relations the United States managed to pass the strictest UN sanctions against Iran...

Huh? Please clarify.

That doesn't change the fact that some crimes are committed at roughly the same rates across the population while the actual arrests can be up to ten times higher for certain segments of the...

The possibilities are endless. I'm excited by the potential for drugs that can be customized to the individual. I'm excited by the possibility of postponing aging related to DNA degradation until...

I'm not sure about the exact numbers but you're right in a certain sense but in another sense it depends on how a person characterizes false arrests. For example, whites and blacks use certain drugs...

What would you do with the information? Neo-eugenics?

Did I say there were wide spread abuses taking place? No. What I wrote is that, "It's probably not a very common scenario but as DNA evidence becomes widely used by police and accepted by the courts...

You need to include parts one and two, too. What she basically set up is a framework for invading Iran similar to the framework for invading Iraq. Just think about the ramifications of her...

Or, in parallel with Hugh's point, recognizing that DNA is no panacea.

That's the crux of the matter, the being able to fabricate it without first obtaining a sample. Advances in technology making it easier to do along with expanding databases would explain why it...

Not that I'm aware of but the issue is that an over reliance on DNA evidence would trump a factual alibi. With access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match...

In addition to setting the innocent free, there's also the potential for imprisoning the innocent because while it's very hard to plant or fake a finger print, it's relatively easy for someone to...

Jennifer Rubin's agenda is so bad that many GOP'ers repudiate it too. RedState.com take:


Jenn Rubin, when not pushing out Romney talking points is in favor of freeing traitors, claims to be a...

There are numerous examples of Jennifer Rubin pushing for military action in Iran, Syria and Iraq. In the blog post you linked to the "status-of-forces agreement" with Iraq is a euphemism for a...

More like a blog post by neocon writer Jennifer Rubin making the case that Hillary did not follow the neoconservatives agenda by intervening in 1) Iran 2) Iraq and 3) Syria. Rubin also wanted more...

That's a mistake on my part. Defensive medicine and malpractice costs are often thought to be much higher than the studies indicate they actually are. Many times people think solving just those two...

It's only "astounding" if you drop context. The issue of whether or not GWB is a conservative is a matter of opinion (or maybe it's simply the fallacy that no failed candidate is a conservative.) ...

— It's not so much "my employer pays $9k a year for this, I'm going to start using it" as it is they don't know the cost to begin with, they don't know how much their premiums are increasing every...

It could also be a step towards lowering costs and overconsumption. Currently, employer provided health care is a heavily subsided benefit, subsidized by the government through tax deductions for...

You know the old Jer routine has become so-so when every post becomes a blind fumble to phone it in like a no-show mob union worker.

Eh? Don't worry, you're the little canary canary in coal mine, too, Candy. You’re in our thoughts, ILC, so you don't need to feel threatened by different points of view, or in this case, not even a...

In the age of the internet, why don't the losers here do a 5sec search before posting? Homers like Ripz and Mott are the canaries my the coal mine. The problem is they rarely post anything that's...

No you're lying. Deedee never said Martin was "at his house." She said martin was right "by his father house" [in the corridor] when Zimmerman walked right past him so yes your statement,...

Be aware, it's less virgins and more The Office. There are also troubling management & HR issues and some of your colleagues will lack professionalism :

The letter, signed by the group's...

The logs are publicly available and they indicate that Schumann was not regularly meeting in the West Wing but instead he was meeting staffers in the office building adjoining the White House...

In spite of denials that Bachmann's exit was driven by polls or reelection chances the abdication of the Queen of the Tea Party, along with her unique perspective, means that the GOP stands a much...

If you're livening up your narrative with Futurama memes, you might consider being a little less unctuous and self-satisfied.

Now the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!

It makes it neither more true nor less true. For example, your belief that life begins when your sister gets drunk is not less true or more true no matter how many idiot children are left screaming...