assume this song is about sex and drugs. otherwise why would candy-eating belgians need to be restrained?
feel that we're far from winning this data revolution not because there's more to be captured, but because even college-educated people struggle with high school math and programming 101. getting government to disclose information isn't half as hard as convincing our population to master a skill with near-zero instant gratification.
confirmed the legend is true.
used to live a few blocks from the national mall, now i live a few blocks from vietnam's version.
read..
(1) iranian nuclear diplomacy
the us and ussr prompted china to go nuclear. china prompted india to do so, which in turn prompted pakistan. brazil and argentina began to cross the line together and stepped back together.
a 'christmas present' for iran
a vehicle for expressing unquestioning support for israel, rather than a deadly serious national security decision for the united states
(2) weed
cannabis is one of the oldest psychotropic drugs in continuous use. archaeologists have discovered it in digs in asia that date to the neolithic period, around 4000 bce
reported use was lowest in the people's republic of china, 0.3 percent, and highest in the united states, 42.4 percent, with new zealand close behind
to put it bluntly, marijuana works
(3) polio in the war
(4) the day after the 2016 election, start the #pardonsnowden campaign
the news story of the year, or the decade: the revelation that america's biggest spy agency, the nsa, has information on every phone call made in the continental united states as well as abroad; that it claims to have direct access to the servers of google, yahoo, facebook and all the other major web companies; that gchq, the nsa's british equivalent, is siphoning off the entire internet and storing some of it for thirty days; that online encryption has been subverted and nothing is safe from government spies
(5) egyptian transitions of power
anyone carrying his picture to their grave would be ensured a safe passage through purgatory
no one suspects him of ataturkism
better to be accused of plotting a coup than be seen as impotent or in league with facists
(6) investor visas
it's one thing to be a prostitute, another to be a cheap one
(7) go back to palo alto
huge corporations are portrayed as agents of the counterculture
the industry came out of military contracting, and its alliance with the pentagon has never ended
the internet itself, people sometimes remember, was created by the military, and publicly funded research has done a lot to make the hardware, the software and the vast private fortunes possible. which you wouldn't know from the hyperlibertarian language of the tech world's kings. even the mildest of them, bill gates, said in 1998: 'there isn't an industry in america that is more creative, more alive and more competitive. and the amazing thing is that all this happened without any government involvement.'
let someone else subsidize all that research
the nsa does it for intelligence, and silicon valley does it to make money
the corporations doing this are not the counterculture, or the underground or bohemia, only the avant-garde of an orwellian future
when a google bus was surrounded on 9 december, it made the news all over the english-speaking world. though what the blockaders wanted wasn't so easily heard. they were attacked as people who don't like carpools, by people who don't get that the buses compete with public transport and that their passengers displace economically vulnerable san franciscans. it's as though death came riding in on a pale horse and someone said: 'what? you don't like horses?'
the google bus was typical of the neoliberal tendency to create elite private solutions and let the public sphere go to hell
(8) intelligence leaks
exploiting the fact that the law has not caught up to technology
manning's and assange's disclosures were for the most part not justified
leakers perform a critical, if troubled, function in deterring secrecy's misuse
(9) a physician in the icu
doctors now spend more time with their computers than at the bedside
in our health system, charges may have little relation to true costs, making such a discussion still more difficult to pursue
5/8