It seems to me that U.S. is rapidly becoming the sort of country depicted by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash...

Well, even if a guard grabs your camera and delete all the pictures taken, unless he removes the sd/cf/xd/ and confiscate it, you will be always able to recover the deleted pictures via a restore sw like photorescue et simili (you have only to take care of NOT shoot any new picture with the same memory card). You will succeed even if the moron format your entire memory card! So, bring along a spare cf/sd/xd card and you will be able to even continue your photo reportage...

Barham was sunk in 1941, but Duncan wasn't prosecuted until 1944, by which time the further damage from her revelations was likely to be small. And it seems that some of the people involved in her prosecution were indeed credulous. (See Wikipedia, Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books.)

Well, blogs are still strange creatures. Some of us do no more trust official news sources, since their contents are nowadays polluted and contaminated by advertiser.
Blogs were supposed to be immune from this kind of servitude, but things are changing also with this "medium".
When blogging becomes a full time job, you are supposed to be paid for it. But money DO affects the content creations.

Now, BB may assure us that the money they are taking from M$ will not affect their contents, and probably they really believe that.

But truth is, the money has already found a subconscious path in their brain. They won't be supporters of M$ of any of the other sponsores, but their judgment has already been affected.

Post will be less aggressive, less sarcastic, less... something else. They won't do that on purpose, but they'll do it, soon or later, even if they themselves don't like the advertisers.

It's only a matter of time, than blogs (not only BB) will be stylistically different from newspapers, they will be more appealing, more friendly. But will they be still trust-able?

The article notes that during the "clean" phase of interrogation from 2006 onwards the men "were given food whenever they were hungry". Presumably during the "dirty" phase of interrogation (from 2003–2006) this was not the case.

Extracting a confession under torture, and then making the prisoner repeat it, apparently freely, but really under threat of further torture, has been a common feature of oppressive regimes from the Inquisition to the Stalinist show trials that need to pay lip service to the rule of law.

It's worth mentioning that the theology in Larkin's charts is by no means widespread among Christian denominations. The charts summarize the theology of dispensationalism, popular in conservative Protestant congregations in the United States, but little known in other countries.

I just read the italian translation. A very beatiful, disturbing piece of art. Now I'm tempted to delete all my google accounts...

That chart is an utter disaster. Each data point is represented by a 3D object with apparent volume proportional to number of stores × total area² which is both meaningless and misleading: for example, the McDonalds bar looks bigger in volume than the Walmart bar because its thickness more than makes up for its lack of length.

Also the mere stacking of the bars obscures any relationship that there may be between the two variables. Would a scatter plot be too much to ask for?

It's hard to keep secrets in a democracy. Wikipedia describes a similar gaffe from World War II:

Unfortunately, the deficiencies of Japanese depth-charge tactics were revealed in a June 1943 press conference held by U.S. Congressman Andrew J. May ... May revealed that American submarines had a high survivability because Japanese depth charges were fused to explode at too shallow a depth, typically 100 feet ... Soon enemy depth charges were rearmed to explode at a more effective depth of 250 feet. Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood later estimated that May's revelation cost the navy as many as ten submarines and 800 crewmen.

As Eric points out above, the Seussian codepoints have been registered in Michael Everson's informal ConScript registry, and are not (yet!) in the Unicode standard. The ConScript registry also includes the undeciphered syllabary from the Phaistos Disc as well as writing systems from fantasy and science fiction novels, movies, television shows and video games.