The answer is 42. Now what's the question?

One of the more entertaining comments about all the NSA, GCHQ, Snowden, Greenwald, Schneier revelations.

So all the information in the entire electronic communications system of the world is now being bugged and searched. We have what is by orders of magnitude the largest data bank ever conceived, giving us Laplacian knowledge about our society at every point in time. I've occasionally speculated on the kind of data cornucopia we could have if we weren't obsessed with privacy - and now we've got it.

And what are we doing with it? If you believe the government, they're looking for terrorists; if you listen to just-proven-correct paranoiacs, they're looking for opposition; in any case, how terribly trivial.

We have a corpus that contains the answers to almost any question about human beings. We have the oracle in front of us. And all we can ask it is "Who is going to plant a bomb where?"

...

why isn't there an industry for thinking up questions?

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/09/the-latest-news.html#comment-1665702
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This is my surprised face. Nope? Okay: This is my ironic face. (Same face. I don't gamble, otherwise it would be my poker face, too.) I am having enourmous trouble resisting the urge to say "v gbyq lbh fb", so, er, v gbyq lbh fb, only you mistook it for pulp/genre fiction.

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[ 09-Sep-13 10:15am ]