Maybe he realizes that this is part of how we got rid of "export grade" encryption in the US. Everyone was just writing software in a foreign country and people were importing it. Once you have the Internet, you can't realistically regulate software imports. Not if you're the US and the software is free. So export-grade encryption became simply a penalty for US businesses with little practical effect. At that point, you might as well accept it and change the laws to get rid of the business penalty.

I respectfully disagree re: safety, for various reasons, but it's a moot point. To my knowledge, the backscatter has been completely eliminated now (it was done gradually), as has the "nudie" mode of the microwave scanners. I've seen that cited as justification for this policy change. Which seems fair to me -- those were legitimate concerns that one should be able to use to opt out, but those concerns have been eliminated.

The microwave scanner system actually seems pretty decent. You can see the monitor that they see. The only problem I've had is that it's really sensitive -- not only do you need to completely empty all pockets, but moderately baggy jeans will easily set it off, virtually guaranteeing a pat-down.

They've removed all of the backscatter devices already.

Hill had the ability to pay her taxes and didn't. They will jail you for choosing not to pay them. They can't jail you just because you don't have the money to pay them. They can, as you point out, take all your stuff, plus your future stuff, which is ugly.

We eliminated debtor's prisons in this country, actually. While individual states and smaller jurisdictions are, recently, pushing at the borders of this principle, the Federal government still follows it. You can be jailed for cheating the IRS, but you can't actually be jailed just for owing them money.

It's immigration (and emigration) whenever a group of people migrate from one region to another, regardless of what the reason is or how they're treated.

It's a little bit of a tricky word territory because it would be inaccurate to call them "immigrants". That word is usually used in modern English to refer to non-forced migration, so could make the reader draw inaccurate conclusions.

It is, though, completely reasonable to put the event under a discussion of "Patterns of Immigration", because that is clearly referring to large-scale movements of people with important sociological and historical impacts. Historically, many major human migrations have been the result of slavery, exile, genocide, and other such unpleasant and rather non-voluntary reasons. They're still called migrations.

According to this article (okay, okay, the summary), GPS error causes measured distances to be systematically overestimated.

What you're talking about -- a different but noticeable factor -- is that GPS polling frequency causes measured distances to be systematically underestimated. Because it's only sampling once every N seconds and then, because there's quite a bit of noise, applying a smoothing function to the result, it cuts the corners off of paths. It can cause pretty substantial underestimation, even when moving relatively slowly along gently curved paths.

They'll probably call it CyberUL.

Neither visible light nor RF at the cm-wavelength scale are ionizing, and so cannot cause DNA damage.

Ultraviolet light causes skin cancer because it is both ionizing and has a short penetration depth.

Bullshit. Wavelength is not a dose.

Long-wavelength RF, below the ionization threshold, does not cause cancer because it lacks the energy necessary to "randomly change DNA". You're right, the dose doesn't matter -- sub-ionization RF doesn't cause cancer.

I order quite a bit from Amazon, including things that split shipments (ship different days or are a mix of Prime and non-Prime). The "Your order [...] has shipped!" e-mails list an amount charged for the items that actually shipped, and these are the same values that appear on my credit card. While the default "Your Orders" view on the website groups things by order (which is not the same as shipment or credit card charge), the "Invoice" link on each order breaks down the order correctly (by shipment, with separated charges). These also match up with credit card charges.

Good call.

I know the Slashdot trope is that n is always too small in any study, regardless of the actual size of n.

The sample size you need to demonstrate statistical significance (or, conversely, the level of statistical significance achieved for a given sample size) depends on the behavior you're measuring. If you're measuring a small change in a rare occurrence, you need a very large sample population. If, on the other hand, your hypothesis is "black sheep exist" or "this vaccine reduces the mortality rate of a disease that has an untreated survival rate of 1 in 100,000", then a single occurrence (black sheep, surviving subject) is significant at n=1, and two occurrences out of even a tiny n is excellent.

No. "Specific" and "catch-all" are pretty different.

Dark energy, for example, is essentially the discrepancy between the observed expansion rate of the universe and the quantity of detectable matter in the universe.

Dark matter is not some astrophysics catch-all explanation. Dark matter and dark energy separately refer to a specific observed discrepancy for which we don't have an answer yet.