advice4u

What companies do you have in mind?

It may be coincidence, but both Edgehill and Bull Run are locations in Virginia, where I imagine a lot of the DoD resides. I'm not saying they weren't named after the battles, but it's not like those names are exclusively related to civil wars.

*Bothans

Banthas are the large beasts-of-burden on Tatooine. Bothans are humanoid aliens with cat/dog-like faces. Why do I know that? I play a lot of Star Wars video and card games :)

EDIT: just googled for the quote. The full one is "Many Bothans died to bring us this information."

What do you mean? As far as I can tell, it is freely available on NSA's website:

http://www.nsa.gov/about/_images/pg_hi_res/nsa_aerial.jpg

To troll means to fish. In fact, looking up the definition of "trawl," it means "to troll"

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/trawl

We have reached a point where, no matter how few violations occur and no matter how innocuous they may be, the average person will always believe the NSA is doing things that are much more extreme than what is reported. The secret nature of the NSA (and all intelligence gathering) simply means rational people will always be able to justify fears of conspiracy, tyranny, and Big Brother (now that the Snowden revelations have come to light).

What would it take for people to stop fearing an encroaching surveillance state? The complete dismantling of NSA and the government-intelligence complex? Even then, intelligent people would have reason to doubt that secret facilities did not exist somewhere.

I cannot see how any of this can be resolved.

EDIT: I'd like to add another "meta" remark about NSA discussion on the internet.

Anyone who frequents HN, or reddit's r/technology, or similar boards, will be familiar with the universal bashing of NSA and rampant speculation of what they may be doing. Invariably, snarky and profoundly cynical comments are at the top: these do not help. Instead, they react to the new sensationalist headline about how "NSA has done something else!!" by bashing the NSA, American government, Obama, or all three. In effect, every thread about the NSA is our version of the daily "Two Minutes of Hate", the ritual from Orwell's 1984 where workers get up and scream, releasing their ire and accomplishing nothing but self-pacifying catharsis.

We do not need that. Instead of beating the dead horse to make ourselves feel better and go back to "normal" life, we need to do something productive. Let's say something new and thoughtful, rather than cynical witticisms.

If you succeed in your endeavor, they probably would want to hire you.

This is something I would really love to do. Where do you work (in academia, I presume)?

I have the programming background, and a bit of the bio background... but I am weak on statistics. How much of statistics and probability theory would I need (beyond a basic 1st-year college level)?

The level of discourse here is shockingly low.

Ever since the Snowden leaks HN has seen a massive increase in skepticism, which is healthy, but along with that has come rampant cynicism, unfounded assertions of insidious malign actions that solely cite the fact "we don't know" as evidence. There is a point at which "assuming the worst" goes too far and becomes an echo chamber for conspiracy theory. It did for Michael Hastings, and it does here -- at the very least until we know more.

A man has just died, for crying out loud, and I'm sorry to hear it. Let us use wisdom and reason to assess this, not snarky, dismissive comments.

Can you cite an example of the NSA killing someone?

Why do you think they do not do that?

...or if he is a spy for the Chinese.

And how do most of these "personal details" actually have anything to do with his credibility?

The parent's second paragraph addresses that. He may have misinterpreted or not have understood what he was looking at. As the above noted, some of his remarks already seem questionable.

rubber-stamping by the FISA courts

Sorry to go slightly off-topic, but what is the evidence that the FISA courts are rubber stamps rather than really doing their job? I'm not being snarky, I just haven't seen any (but I have heard FISA called that a lot)

They cant even make good slides, how can anyone be sure they're keeping the data they collect...

When I was in university, my professors made and taught from slides of roughly the same quality. Does that mean they cannot do their jobs? Obviously not: they have proved important theorems, published significant papers, worked on interesting patents, and successfully trained their students (all the while updating and reusing shoddy slides for years and years).

I am a little surprised at the surprise/snobbery over the quality of NSA's slides, as if it mattered. In my mind, blustering about colors and fonts in a case of this import only serves to highlight the triviality of designers: they are a luxury.

Alexander Karp was interviewed by Charlie Rose[1]:

"Most of our business is in government, and it all involves both sides of this equation -- finding people who are up to essentially bad things..."

"So, let’s say you go to the market and you buy something. You talk on your cell phone, and you send an SMS. You send every little -- you write a report. All those are data, and massive scale, it is very hard for you to see that as a pattern.

So what is the pattern of Charlie Rose? Each Charlie Rose interacting with people that are up to no good?

And then it is very hard for me, the citizen of America, to look at the government and say, did they look at Charlie Rose because he was up to no good or did they look at Charlie Rose because they didn’t like his hair color?

And by the way, did they use Charlie Rose as a way to look at Charlie Rose’s audience and find out who is in the audience?"

[1]http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10549

[2]http://www.charlierose.com/download/transcript/10549

Which only makes it more remarkable that its popularity continues to grow. That fact suggests there is a special timelessness to the film, since as you say most classics are either prototypical, unconventional, or artistically innovative (like, as was mentioned, Citizen Kane).

The closest analogy I can think of while remaining in the realm of the arts is Vermeer, who was a fairly typical Dutch genre painter unrecognized in his time and ignored for two centuries. Nowadays he is popular and beloved, but unlike Rembrandt who is held as a great master or van Gogh who is held as a quixotic genius, Vermeer himself is taken as wholly mundane; his works simply have some "je ne sais quoi" that resonates with the average person.

I liked it very much, but I believe I encountered a bug(?): http://i.imgur.com/TwwnLRy.png the part I'm referring to is "You needed 4 bullets, but only had 4"

A suggestion I had is to consider changing the text when someone leaves, "we'll probably won't see him again", to simply "we probably won't see him again", which is less awkward.

Overall, great idea and execution. It was fun, challenging, and evocative.