Mega has over 100 million registered users,” Lam continued, “over 45 million daily unique visitors, employees of over 70% of the worlds fortune 500 companies have accounts with us.
We host over a billion legitimate files. Documents, backups, photos, everything. If Mastercard turns against Megaupload they will have a problem, not us.

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* 20 American politics is almost broken

Today’s US government is almost completely gridlocked – and astonishingly vulnerable to vested interests. President Obama and Congress cannot get to grips with the scale of the budget deficit, nor the need to contain the threat of a new financial crisis. Corporations write the law. The public realm is hollowed out, and most public institutions, from education to the transport infrastructure, are decaying – there seems little hope of turning the tide.

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While Apptrakr has an absolutely huge database of cracked apps, by no means does it index all apps currently available. However, as millions of Installous users are also buyers of apps from the App Store, most titles will already be installed on their collective devices. But how can they be shared with the world?

“Essentially what will happen is when you’re using Installous you’ll get a little pop up that says ‘Hey, you have an application that Apptrakr doesn’t. We will add the application to a queue in the background (if you say yes) and it will start uploading tiny pieces of it, kind of like a torrent, up to the cloud’,” Dissident explains.

So, unlike BitTorrent, where one starts with a single file that multiplies the more people jump on the torrent, with Mobile Hunt the start point is perhaps hundreds or thousands of copies of the same piece of software, and little tiny pieces of each upload from each person’s device to the cloud in order to make one final copy, which will then become available from Apptrakr. From there it will be available for millions to download.

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It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself. African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion—day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade—exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty.

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It has become a symbol of conformity. “Suit” was the chosen insult of hippies to describe a dull establishment man. The garment has been ostentatiously rejected by Silicon Valley titans like Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Sergey Brin of Google. Yet the business suit has an exciting and mysterious history that should give wearers a tingle of pleasure every time they put one on. It is a garment born out of revolution, warfare and pestilence. The suit still bears the marks of this turbulent past as well as the influence of Enlightenment thinking, sporting pursuits and a Regency dandy. (via Men’s clothing: Suitably dressed | The Economist)

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We’ve worked out that we don’t need shops when we can buy online and we’ve worked out that we don’t need advertising because we can now find anything we want. For the first time, we’re seeing mainstream campaigns that drive no incremental search or web traffic. That’s a first. You can spend millions on TV and not see anything in your search or traffic stats. Why? Because everyone who might be interested in your product is already looking for it and they’re not hanging around long enough to see the commercial in the ad break.

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Melanesians, as represented by individuals from Papua New Guinea. Here, the shared genetic ancestry numbers rose to close to four percent, similar to that shared by Neanderthals and Europeans. So, it seems that, on their way to the Pacific, Melanesians and the Denisova population interbred briefly. Since that isn’t true of the groups that are geographically closest to Denisova, like the Han Chinese, the authors suggest that Denisova individuals probably ranged much more widely than their single site suggests. (via Another case of early human interbreeding confirmed in Siberia)

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