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How to Be a Lawyer Without Going to Law School
A handful of lawyers practice law in the United States without a law degree, bypassing three years of hell (and thousands of dollars in college debt). Here's how.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 580 posts.
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Happy Little Words – Analyzing the Bob Ross Twitch Chat
In late October the video game streaming site Twitch.tv launched "Twitch Creative" , essentially giving people permission to stream non-video game related creative content on the site. To celebrate the launch they streamed all 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross in a giant marathon.
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Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
Like clockwork, cynical calls to expand mass surveillance practices—by continuing the domestic telephone records collection and restricting access to strong encryption—came immediately following the Paris attacks. These calls came before the smoke had even cleared, much less before a serious...
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A Step Toward Protecting Fair Use on YouTube
Posted by Fred von Lohmann, Copyright Legal Director More than 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Some of those upl...
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Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually.
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California’s DNA Law Violates Privacy Protections Guaranteed by State
San Francisco—Californians who’ve merely been arrested and not charged, much less convicted of a crime, have a right to privacy when it comes to their genetic material, EFF said in an amicus brief filed Nov. 13 with the state’s highest court. EFF is urging the California Supreme Court to hold that...
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Paris: You Don’t Want to Read This
You don’t want to read this, and I take no pleasure in writing it, and no one really wants to hear it right now. But I believe it needs to be said. I join the world in grieving for the dead in Paris. I have grieved for the dead from…
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The Advertising Bubble
A few days ago VentureBeat published an article called The 7 martech buying trends shaping sales & marketing strategies in 2016 , a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity.
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How Filipino WWII Soldiers Were Written Out of History
How hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers fought in the U.S. military and helped win World War II. And how history -- and the American government -- forgot them.
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Reports that Bassel Khartabil has been sentenced to death
Bassel Khartabil, a leading figure in the Syrian Open Source software community, has been imprisoned by the Syrian government since...
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How Finland plans to implement the first nation-wide basic income in the EU
According to Liisa Hyssäalä and Olli Kangas, all Finnish citizens would in some years receive 800 euros from the governement without condition.
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Did the FBI Pay a University to Attack Tor Users?
The Tor Project has learned more about last year's attack by Carnegie Mellon researchers on the...
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Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told yo…
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TPP Text Confirms Massive Loss to Canadian Public Domain
The New Zealand government posted the official Trans Pacific Partnership text today after years secret negotiations and occasional leaks of the text. It is an enormous deal with dozens of side letters between countries - Canada alone has eight side letters on intellectual property with seven TPP countries - that will…
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The Government Uses Zero Days for “Offense”
Little by little, the government is opening up about its use of computer security vulnerabilities. Last month, the NSA disclosed that it has historically “released more than 91% of vulnerabilities discovered in products that have gone through our internal review process and that are made and used...
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FBI Returns Seized Devices to EFF Client
EFF is pleased to announce that our client, Chris Roberts, is now in the possession of all of his digital devices that had been held by the FBI since April 2015. Earlier this year, Mr. Roberts was detained for tweeting about airplane network security. When he landed in Syracuse, the FBI escorted...
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We can't see our culture very well, because we see with it
By Hand & Brain
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The Case Against the Universal Basic Income
On a Universal Basic Income, full employment and avoiding libertarian traps It's the summer of 1986. T...
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TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software
This is a video by Zack Struver about Senator Bernie Sander’s proposal to expand Veterans access to patented medical inventions. The video discusses both the proposal by Senator Sanders to give the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs the authority to… Continue Reading →
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The Mathematics of Paul Graham's Bias Test
A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …