DerpObvious

Another use of interfering with quorum sensing is keeping bacteria docile, even when they've multiplied to levels where they could be threatening to the host.

Maybe there arose an enormous threat and he was desperate to stop it.

Even an existential threat - an actual one like another nation-state pointing world-ending numbers of nuclear weapons at our country - is less harmful than dismantling the mechanisms of the state internally.

What could even possibly justify this kind of thing?

Obama is Commander-in-Chief of the DoD, which the NSA operates under.

Literally speaking, the president /is/ the highest commander of the NSA.

attitudes about drugs generally don't affect whether an officer will make an arrest (until laws get changed).

This is untrue: officers operating under the same set of laws within my state have disparate policies regarding arrest (and from the DAs, prosecution) based on the local social leanings.

I estimate that it does affect them more disproportionately than the war on drugs disproportionately affect minorities.

According to the CDC study cited in another reply, you'd be wrong.

Men going about their day-to-day business aren't concerned with the threat of rape or related issues;

This seems like it's cultural and about social attitudes, rather than about any actual danger level. (Based on the same CDC report.)

I'm not sure that I buy the argument that because one group of people is afraid of something that impacts a wider group of people, no one can make jokes about it.

Here's a few questions: would your opinion of whether the rape joke was "sexist" depend on if the male author had been the victim of rape and was making jokes about it as a therapeutic device (noting that all the rape jokes in the strip are about "dicks" and male slaves)? how is the joke existing different in this context? should he stop if people are still uncomfortable about it? why is this (not) okay if the author hasn't been raped, but has some sort of anxiety about it? where exactly does it become "sexist" again?

If I had two white characters in a comic strip, with one being a stereotypical "loser" being arrested by the police (let's say in a comical manner, over a single joint) and the other one joking about it, is it racist because the issue of the war on drugs primarily affects minorities?

I would guess, much like another respondent, that such behavior was directed at /both/ genders of critics, and not specific to women.

Do you have any evidence that this response, in particular, was directly solely or mainly at women and not critics at large?

sexism

Wait, wait... how did you get sexism out of this particular issue?

I'm not saying the dude isn't sexist or an asshole, but all of the characters in the offending strip were male, there's not specific reprisal against one particular gender of critics, etc.

So there's lots of assholery going around, but how did you get /sexism/?

Do you see anyone besides techies and the libertarian fringe talking about eternal and perpetual surveillance?

Just last night, I was asked about the leaks by a 50/60ish bus driver after mentioning I worked in tech - who as far as I could tell, had no particular previous inclination towards privacy activism or technology.

They have access to food pantries, soup lines, and other community support.

In many places, these resources don't account for all of the demand and have absolutely no chance of matching it.

US hackers for the NSA have been able to publicly admit to performing offensive cyber actions for years, usually by mentioning they were on the "offense" side of the program when talking about previous employment. They couldn't admit to specific acts, of course, but they could admit that such acts - categorically - happened.

People just didn't care.

I don't know that this automatically follows: lots of companies produce equipment for other companies to use on making profit in markets they themselves don't work in.

It's entirely possible for a company to want to manufacture ASICs/boards and not want to run a server farm and deal with that level of IT for bitcoin mining.

In practical terms this means that any individual or business hosting having a Facebook profile page or blog on Tumblr could be sued.

This just says that they're responsible for the effects of the services they contract, in addition to acts they undertake directly.

Should a person building a bridge get out of the liability because they contracted out parts of the work? No.

Neither should the operator of a website because they opted to use services provided from a third party for part (or all) of their web services.

But they may only use the storage once consent has been given, which can only happen after a warning has been issued.

The two clauses seem to indicate that consent must be before storage, and warning before consent, hence there must be a warning /before/ the storage on the remote machine.

Because having to program a hundred DSLs in your super-language is as (or more) annoying as just learning a handful of different languages (and runtimes) in the first place.

I'd rather see legitimate reasons why removing 20% time is a bad idea for Google's operations.

Technology has a viable lifetime before you need new technology. As a technology company, you therefore need to be invested in creating new technology or be willing to go in to the spiral of customer loss and only dealing with legacy systems before a slow death.

Statistically speaking, if you know most of your staff is intelligent and has experience in your market, you're more likely to get an outlier idea (one that is way off on the end of the bell curve, ie, actually really good) by casting a wide net, and listening to the bulk of your employees.

The problem is that to go anywhere, ideas need time to gestate and develop, so you have to give all those employees a little bit of time to develop new ideas for your company.

It's been a while since undergrad, but if you want, I could try to bust out an equation modeling (and predicting the expected value of) the likelihood you hit a really important idea in the wide-net situation versus the "dedicated research staff" one.

But if you're trying to stop mass car theft by people simply opening the doors and driving off, taking the keys out and locking the door is pretty effective.

Sure, professionals could still target specific cars, but it would cut in to their potential for mass theft, by simply making each one take longer.

I see a problem with collecting information without probable cause or a warrant. Though I may not agree with drug laws, I do not see the problem with convicting individuals who are committing crimes regardless of how that information was collected unless the act of collecting the information affects the information (like confessions under duress).

You effectively contradict yourself: you can't say "no", reward them for doing it, and expect it to stop.

So effectively, your first sentence carries no weight, because you don't believe in enforcing it... you believe in rewarding law enforcement for doing the exact opposite.

You have to remember what we mean by 'size': there are four things in the set {ball, kite, hat, glove} because we can line them up one-to-one with {1, 2, 3, 4}. For an infinite set, they're the same 'size' if we can line up everything in one set with everything in the other.

For a bigger circle and a smaller circle, consider lines through their mutual center (if you line them up concentrically). You can take a ray from the center out to the first circle, and then out to the second circle, and this will line up all the points exactly one-to-one between the two circles. There are no points on the outer circle which don't get hit by some ray, so it can't be 'bigger'.

For the set [1, 2] versus [1, 10], you just use the function f(x) = 9 * (x - 1) + 1 to map everything from the first set to the second. There's nothing in [1, 10] that f doesn't map to, so it can't be 'bigger'.

What's really interesting is that there are as many even integers as integers at all - you just multiply everything by two, and you line them up one-to-one!

(Hint: the definition of being infinite is that you have a proper subset of yourself that's the same 'size'. That's why we get this weird behavior... infinity is nothing like the counting numbers we're used to!)

The top comment is even relatively insightful.

I have a tough time taking moralizing about the rule of law from an administration (likely illegally) massively spying on their civilians while firing missiles at cafes from remotely operated vehicles, following an administration that did the same things, but also got caught kidnapping and torturing people.

Clean house, then whine about how dirty other people are.

I'm not interested in arguing how far the response to 9/11 was from some policy ideal. I'm trying to dispel the notion that as long as "only" a few thousand people are dying annually, then the rational response is to treat terrorism with no more seriousness than anything else that kills a few thousand people each year, such as ladders.

My point is that treating it as any other spree or serial killing is rational - we already have mechanisms to deal with these kinds of events, including laws about the use of "weapons of mass destruction", etc.

The whole point of terrorism is to provoke a reaction outside of that normal process and get people to react to the terror... causing an allergy-style overreaction from the populace, much like we saw from 9/11 in the US.

So the rational response IS to simply go "ho-hum" and treat it as just another criminal act. Taking the cowardly path of "something scared me, spite it with full power phasers!" is what the terrorists wants, and is ultimately self-defeating.

Comparing it to more dangerous things - things that are statistically more likely to kill you - is a way to fight against our animalistic panic to smash! kill! destroy! the thing causing fear, and demonstrate that it is just fear we're responding to, rather than a rational danger.

tl;dr: Spending the privacy and civil rights we have on stopping the fear caused by terrorism is the height of cowardice and irrationality.

it's not because Americans are irrational

One thing our society values highly is justice, and that often requires a disproportionately expensive response to an unjust act, and not solely to buy deterrence.

A disproportionate response of the kind seen on 9/11 is mind-blowingly irrational, even if you call it pursuing "justice".

If you are so in the pursuit of "justice" you inflict a worse injury to yourself than you originally suffered, I'm not sure I can call it "rational" behavior anymore.

Especially if you're not doing it for deterrent effect.