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The Man Who Writes His Dissenting Opinion in All Caps
Terence Faulkner wrote 1/3 of the opposing arguments in this year's SF voter guide. And large chunks of them read like he's yelling at you.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 515 posts.
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Government Authority Intended for Terrorism is Used for Other Purposes
The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law...
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Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
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Engelbart's Violin (2012)
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
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Hey Paypal, why do you need access to my microphone, camera and photos?
Who actually checks the permissions of applications they’re installing? A little while ago a Paypal update stalled because it required extra permissions. This is what happens if an app you have already installed wants more power. I was more than a little surprised with what I found.
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Case law is set free; what next?
The next article in our 10th Anniversary Series is by Thomas Bruce. He is the director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. He ...
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Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women, by major (1970-2012)
Randy Olson charts out the percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women (by major) and makes some startling findings.
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Troubling Arguments from the Government in Smith v. Obama
We’ve filed our reply brief in the appeal of Smith v. Obama, our case challenging the NSA’s mass telephone records collection on behalf of Idaho nurse Anna Smith. The case will be argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal on December 8, 2014 in Seattle, and the public is welcome to attend....
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India’s Downward Spiral
How India is losing its footing on free expression. The world’s biggest democracy is a formidable power in the IT sector. With software exports comprising approximately ten percent of India’s total GDP and a technology sector that employs more than 2.5 million people, India is poised to become a...
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China collecting Apple iCloud data
Fighting censorship with technology since 2011. We use AI to monitor censorship and expand free speech worldwide.
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How Big is Email?
Estimating the size of the world’s communications.
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Latest TPP Leak Shows US Still Pushing Terrible DRM and Copyright Term Proposals
Today Wikileaks published a new draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s intellectual property chapter. This draft text, from May 2014, gives us another look into the current state of negotiations over this plurilateral trade agreement’s copyright provisions since another draft was leaked...
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Holy War on Sites That Demand Pinboard Passwords
Over two years ago I introduced an API authentication method so people could authorize outside third-party websites to add things to their Pinboard account without sharing their Pinboard password.
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Clean Coder Blog
Peter was showing the relationship between age and reputation on stack overflow. The correlation is unmistakable. The older the programmer, the better the reputation, by far. He also shows, in the following graph, that the reason for this correlation is that the older programmers answer far more questions than the…
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The problematic culture of “Worse is Better”
Our industry has been infected by a dangerous meme, and it’s one that hasn’t been given its proper scrutiny. Like many memes that explode in popularity, “Worse is Better” gave a name to an underlying fragment of culture or philosophy that had been incubating for some time. I point to C++ as one of the first instances…
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A veteran teacher turned coach shadows two students for two days
Hear from a veteran HS teacher who just became a Coach in her building. Because her experience is so vivid and sobering I have kept her identity anonymous.
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What makes for a stable marriage?
Randy Olson reviews a research paper that outlines what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S.
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The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014
The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education"
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Trouble at the Koolaid Point
토토사이트가 새로이 출시되고 있습니다. 신규 인기 플랫폼에서는 페이팔, 넷텔러, 신용카드, 한화 계좌 이체, 암호화폐 등의 결제 수단을 이용할 수 있습니다. 또한, 라이브 스트리밍, 베팅 빌더, 배당률 부스트 등의 혁신적인 기능을 제공하여 더욱 편리한 스포츠 베팅을 할 수 있습니다.
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AIs are now re-writing history
Dr Robert Smith is a technologist, complexity scientist, entrepreneur, writer and sought-after public speaker. He is an artificial intelligence (A.I.) expert and has worked with clients, companies and institutions across the private and public sectors. Having grown up in Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights…
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YouTube's joke of a fair-use appeal process
Remember last month, when I was working on a screen saver and I reviewed all nine Hellraiser movies and made a supercut of every on-screen appearance of the Lament Configuration? As soon as I posted it, it was immediately blocked with seven content-ID matches. So I filed a DMCA fair-use counter-claim, because this…
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Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
Recent news headlines have made a big deal of Apple encrypting more of the storage on their handsets, and claiming to not have a key. Depend...
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Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
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The Man Who Smuggles Trader Joe’s into Canada
Michael "Pirate Joe" Hallatt and his unmarked white van are Canada's number-one supplier of Trader Joe's items. And, so far, Trader Joe's hasn't been able to stop him.