fnorder

If you ask to see their badge and they show you a metal one it's probably a scammer, most real cops these days carry the plastic ones you can get at a Halloween store because budget cuts. IANAL etc etc

I agree with you, but every reason you just listed is a positive from the perspective of their customers.

I think it's practically guaranteed that Palantir is, or will be, blackmailing officials. Even if they never do, any lucid official will be very conscious of stepping on the toes of a private intelligence company.

This would be a cool project for a Uni Humanities Department and would lend some credibility to the finished product. Get them rolling with some basic infra; a site, wiki, bugtracker and git repo.

I'm petty sure that Ray Kurzweil was working on this very thing when Google brought him on.

Yeah but consider you're likely heating the entire building with wood fires.

Imagine the heating bill.

Well the Illuminati wouldn't be using something you could crack, unless they wanted you to think that you had cracked something, which may or may not have been made so you think that it was or wasn't the Illuminati.

"To access content, please click 'I relinquish all my rights and expectations to privacy, and my right to challenge this agreemment.'"

Why not both?

If you have a wristwatch with hands you may not want to identify the exact minute (this can be a little difficult if it has a smaller face), but if it's 5 minutes either way then a "quarter-to" is close enough.

This sounds like something straight from descriptions of the Aurora Project that I heard decades ago.