I'm starting to wonder if perhaps the best thing we could do for the public health is to start a project analogous to Apollo, but for autism: massively fund studies to nail down what causes autism (and, ideally, how to cure it) within ten years.

My reasoning here has very little to do with autism itself, though finding the cause and (if possible) a cure would certainly be nice. My reasoning is that even though most antivaxxers don't find the no-proof argument ("there is literally no reason to believe that vaccines cause autism") to be compelling, most of them should find a counter-proof argument ("vaccines don't cause autism, because this other thing causes it") satisfying enough.

The nice version of the consequences of this is that most antivaxxers should finally accept that they have been duped, which should boost the voluntary vaccination rate. The not-so-nice version is that with a counter-proof in hand, it should be possible to take those parents who still believe, deem them incompetent to decide on this issue, and administer the vaccinations anyway. Either way, the vaccination rate goes back up.

No, they didn't. At our current level of understanding, you can't even test for autism at the ages when the MMR vaccine is typically administered, so there is frankly no way to trace the date that quickly.

But even if you could trace the date, it wouldn't matter, because autism simply does not develop that quickly. If these children did indeed "turn autistic" within a day of receiving MMR, then the cause must have occurred weeks or even months prior: in other words, long before MMR was ever administered. There is no link here.

The religious communities which object to vaccination also tend very strongly to isolate themselves from the public at large. For that reason, they do not present the same sort of threat to the public health that your typical antivaxxer (who typically still wants to mingle with the general public) presents. Without that threat, there is no compelling interest to violate religious freedom.

It seems to me that the real solution here is to require that if someone wishes to present a philosophical objection, they must also present a defense of the philosophy on which that objection depends. A discredited objection is not allowed to stand, and the state steps in.

Because you'd have to do it in realtime, or whatever passes for it when dealing with relativistic effects on this scale. Otherwise, microscopic shifts in the Earth's crust will soon change the slew rate, and then you're back to square one. But calculating the slew rate will inevitably take longer than one tick of the clock, so you can't do it in realtime either.

Though this property isn't entirely useless. For example, you could use two of these clocks to build extremely sensitive seismometers: first you would need to calculate their slew rate at rest, but then whenever that changed, you'd know that their relative position had changed. Then you'd have to calculate the new slew rate, to establish the new baseline, but the temporal resolution of such a device would depend only on how quickly you could do that.

The Bible, and even the Old Testament, paints for us a God with many sides to His personality. We see him cracking puns, playing games, quoting references, and occasionally straight-up trolling people: a far cry from the solemn graybeard that many people, believers and otherwise, like to paint Him. In some aspects, the God of the Bible isn't so different from a modern geek.

I bring this up because the verse you mention is one of the very first times that He swipes a reference, and from the serpent, no less (see Genesis 3:5). I take this to be a note of bitter sarcasm, more than anything else. He had been painted into a corner by the very system He had set up (and the work of yet another master of trolling), and the only way out was straight through. But that meant doing some things that He clearly was not happy about doing.

I don't see what a compiler's ability to do with other formats/languages has to do with a different format/language.

Ordinarily, it doesn't. But the thing is, there are two things called GCC: the GNU C compiler (which handles C) and the GNU Compiler Collection (a set of compilers which, though they share the same backend, are still separate entities).

GCC, the C compiler, cannot handle Fortran. GCC, the set of compilers, can handle it via g77 (the old compiler) or gfortran (the new one), but the C compiler can't. This is considered the traditional way of doing things.

What makes C++ different from many languages is that its maintainers insist that C++ compilers must be able to handle C code. It's not enough to have a different compiler in the set, the way GCC does: it must be doable with the C++ compiler itself, in the same application. And so g++ can do it too, because that's what the standard requires of it.

That's what makes the difference. Ordinarily, as you say, a compiler's ability to handle multiple languages shouldn't affect any of the languages in it. But C++ was defined in a way that not only makes those effects possible: it makes them mandatory.

The only Tetris movie that ever needed to be made has already been made. Any further attempts will necessarily pale in comparison.

The problem with being obvious about it is that there's a very large overlap between the populations of people who would spike someone's drink and people who turn psycho when they see drinks being tested. Without the ability to be discreet, merely performing the test puts a person in danger.

It's more discreet than using a special straw, which seems to have been the predecessor (at least in spirit) of this new method.

What you see at that link is only the last panel. The story was revealed frame-by-frame over a much longer period of time.

I do think it would be nice if xkcd made the whole thing available, but others have managed. The Wikipedia link above can point you at some of them.

This is Vine we're talking about. Wouldn't you need like six of the videos just to capture the announcer shouting "GOOOOOOOAL!!1!!!"?

What effect does the userland have on the TCP/IP stack?

Give me something that opens from the side into a nice, wide QWERTY keyboard, like LG's en-V or Octane, or Pantech's P7000. None seem to be in production at the moment, which is going to make me really sad when my current one dies.

Google has deliberately killed more technologies than Microsoft ever just let wither and die, and Mozilla has been burned by this more than once. At this point, I'd say it's quite reasonable to demand that Google provide some assurances that it's not going to flake out this time.

I don't. But if you seriously think that that's all there is to even rudimentary programming, then either you've forgotten far too much about your own learning experiences, or you're a prodigy (in which case you shouldn't be generalizing your experiences at all).

I don't have to reassure people that it takes too much time and energy. They convince themselves of that easily enough, and frankly, the widely-available evidence favors them quite strongly. If you want to convince them otherwise, you're going to have to prove to them that this is easy to pick up. Good luck with that. I certainly haven't managed, and I've come to a conclusion as to why I can't prove it: it's simply not true. Your arguments aren't very compelling either.