The important question is and always ought to be, are those whom the redaction laws are meant to protect going to feel safe otherwise? I suspect that the concern is not that a gang member will use a FOIA request to get the video clip, but that a news broadcaster will, will air it, and the gang member will see or hear of it.

The 'magically turn that face into an address' process is something known as 'facial recognition' and 'memory.' You do it every time you recognize somebody and remember where they live and/or frequent.

There's a reason laws against witness tampering and the like exist, you know. It's because people really will do this, and a lot of people believe--rightly or wrongly--that if all the witnesses are gone, the case will fall apart.

Parents do not have the right to neglect their child, nor, through their actions, cause significant harm to their child and/or others. The suggestion that homeschool or private school be options is so the harm to others might be kept to where it's an acceptable risk. Conversely, no vaccine should be required which is not for a disease of childhood which has extensive real world data on its effectiveness. (Any vaccination that can safely wait until 12 or so shouldn't be required, at all.)

That said: my experience with the group you cited is that of the ones who'd care enough to object, it's either due to financial concerns or their poor education, and the latter doesn't justify failure to try to address it.

I don't know, it might be better long-term to have the service life of the battery be Telsa's problem instead of the owners' problem--if I own the battery and must pay them for its replacement, it's in their favor to have it be short, while if I pay to have a battery of a given level of quality then it's probably in their favor to keep any given specific battery be in circulation as long as possible.

Poorly educated single parents on food stamps probably are among those who can least afford to not vaccinate their kids--their children are the most vulnerable to the diseases on the standard vaccination list, among the most likely to suffer complications, and they're certainly not likely to be able to afford the costs involved should their children suffer complications. Spend some money on educating them, and have the vaccines provided cheaply or even for free to qualified individuals via the local board of health.

If you haven't gotten a tetanus shot since 1949, you need to: They're only effective for about 7 years, and you really are best off being vaccinated before you get exposed. They give you a shot when treating you for a wound that might have gotten you tetanus because most people don't keep current on it, and it's one of the ones where a post-exposure can help (some).

Ask nicely and you might be able to get a handy wallet card edition of the record, too.

95% confidence. It depends on what you're testing, the purpose of the test, and the design of the experiment. For example, in some cases you might go with 90% simply because you're doing a pilot study--think of it as beta testing, or perhaps the alpha testing round. These are typically small and, well, simple, and you may go with a higher alpha simply because you're doing rough measurements to see if it works at all before investing the resources into doing a larger study with a lower alpha.

On the other hand, some large medical experiments may even go for a 99.5% confidence interval, due to both the fact that they can due to having a huge sample population and the importance of being as certain as possible.

100% certainty basically translates as "Numbers were pulled from anus."

This kinda is why I just flat-out automatically drift to the other side when 'social justice' and 'radical feminism' start being bandied by one side--I don't disapprove of the goal or anything, it's the failure to self-police and deal with internal corruption that ultimately drove me away. I've been told repeatedly that oh they totally do it, but had to point out that it's absolutely necessary to do it where people can see. If you fail to make sure people know it's done?

Public callouts are essential to protecting against the same sort of thought that produces the 'thin blue line,' where you defend any and all members of your group against what you know are corrupt and may even privately disapprove of entirely.

But this is a problem even with the honest ones: nobody dares tell them what you suggest Karl Marx might do, nobody quite seems to even dare suggest that actually it's getting hard to support either side as they're both coming off as equally bigoted really, and they keep drifting more radical (and less logical) without any apparent awareness that they're in an echo chamber nor that they're basically behaving like a fundamentalist religion that merely happens to be secular--dogma sans theology, with no tolerance whatsoever for even innocent questioning of the dogma.

Yes. Yes it is. A lot of people forget just how close he came to winning, never mind the really nasty details like how people in Eastern Europe actually welcomed him because of just how bad the Soviets were*--which, to bring us back on-topic, I should note is an advantage that Microsoft seems to lack.

Really, the question ought to be how much of this is an EEE attempt? It may be that Microsoft has decided that what they're releasing to open source is worth too much to just end entirely and not bringing in enough for them to be worth doing the maintenance themselves. Releasing it to open source lets them shift the costs to the community, while they get the profit.

Don't assume they're a one-trick pony, learning a second trick is bound to happen eventually.

* They also overestimated how much of an improvement the Nazis might be, another factor Microsoft doesn't have in its favor--they're too well known.

Actually, I gave two options: It could either be reused for future new engines, or it was pure pork from the very start.

That said, the Stennis facility is still in use as a test stand, according to a quick check of the internet, with even some civilian rocket engine testing hosted on-site, likely for a fee. In fact, it's got a number of test stands, and at least some are still in use as such, suggesting that part of the reasons against modifying already-built stands could have been that any suitable candidates were either in full use currently or would need to be restored to their previous configuration later because, well, we weren't done with it's current configuration yet. It's also open to the public, which probably makes it quite unsuitable for some types of engine testing...

Not to suggest anything, of course. Maybe it really is going to sit there unused, instead of quietly (for some values of quietly) testing rocket engines.

I handled it by simply not installing Flash--if there's something embedded in Flash that I want, I use VLC or MPC, and I have YouTube set to give me the HTML5 versions.

As far as I can, Flash is as much an infection vector as ads, regardless of if the Flash is an ad or not.

Though, really, what we need is somebody going after an ad company for their ads being used to distribute malware: as I recall, we actually do have laws already on the books which say that deliberately infecting a computer with malware is a crime. Simply holding the ad companies liable--as we may already be legally able to do--might well push the bottom line towards where they will be acceptably paranoid.

I'd not be complaining about the pork of merely finishing the tower: if it was designed in a non-wasteful manner it ought to not matter that the program it was designed for was shut down--it ought to be usable for testing any rocket needing to operate in roughly the same environment. Thus, if it isn't, it was pork regardless, while if is properly designed then we have something to use later which will also hopefully cut down on time (and opportunities for budget cuts to strike) for future programs.

Therefore, either its entire existence is pork, or we simply have a stage (and some expense) removed from future engine design projects...and it's only wasteful if we don't plan to ever need to test such ever again.

So, really, it is either end-to-end pork or infrastructure we hopefully want regardless.

From what I understand? It's how they handle the numbers--a computer will use a decimal value, which produces issues of the significant digits sort when the decimal value is an approximate one, and this can make a difference. This is actually what floating points are all about, and they have known problems with accuracy.

Have a thought experiment: You are traveling from from Earth to Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light years away, and to keep the math relatively simple your ship travels at the speed of 4 light years per hour. Assuming that the nature of your FTL drive means you basically need to point it at the destination and run the engine for the correct amount of time (ignoring anything in the way), how far off course will you be if you have an error in the thousandths' place and do not realize it until 64 minutes later when your FTL drive shuts down? (For the purposes of this, a thousandth in either direction will do the trick, and you're only calculating deviation from the correct course so the correct heading is unimportant. Use 0 if that makes the math simpler.)

Calculation errors in courses increase with time/distance, and this was well-studied in many senses of the term back in the age of sail...not to mention every so often even now when an airplane has the problem I just outlined above. This is also why people are still learning the old-fashioned navigational techniques, because sometimes your navigational computer doesn't announce its failure to work properly by a nice honest crash-and-burn but by giving you wrong numbers--and you need to be able to both cope with it no longer working and to tell when it is giving you nonsense before you get into too much trouble.

And yes, this is actually a social change we can pretty much predict and guess with some accuracy should manned space travel outside the solar system become a major issue: It's only a scaling up of a problem which humanity has had before and solved before...repeatedly. (We like reinventing the wheel, here, it seems.)

Really, mostly this has just served to ensure that regardless of how attractive I find the covers (front and back) for his books, I'm not going to spend time or money on them.

It's actually from social science with the meaning "the process by which an individual adopts the behaviour patterns of the culture in which he or she is immersed." Typically it applies only to when you're gaining your native culture, with acculturation used for later cultures. (There are differences between the two.)

That said, I'm not sure I'm not sure Mr Stross knows what the word means, which is actually kind of ironic given his complaint here...

Actually, I've heard that computers are merely faster, while slide rules are more accurate, which might actually make doing those calculations at least in part with slide rules (using a computer to set them up) a very good idea with FTL--accuracy probably will be more useful than speed, and you might also train people still to do the calculations by hand even when computers can handle much of it, much like how people still learn celestial navigation.

If your navigational computer going down doesn't strand you (a nightmare in and of itself), then being able to figure out which direction to point yourself and how long to run the engines so you can reach a place where it can be fixed is vital. And remember, its problem may not be that it's merely needing a reboot...

Actually, at the time people honestly believed that Mars, Venus and/or the Moon really did have perfectly breathable atmospheres and Earth-like gravity, so it's not really social commentary as much as it's what TV Tropes calls Science Marches On.

It's called 'social science fiction' and my experience is that it tends to anger people and be poorly written, though on the whole there isn't a complete overlap between the two and the first can be due primarily to the latter. It's one of those places where having an actual idea of how society and cultures actually work makes a huge difference, and the majority of writers seem to try backfilling from the culture they want the future to have regardless of how likely it is, in fact, to ever happen--the purpose, ultimately, is wish fulfillment and to try to push their own sociopolitical ideology, though it's not necessarily their authorial intent.

I'm really not sure how Charles Stoss might have failed to be aware of the genre's existence and its problems, though I can easily and cheerfully say that he's certainly wrong about the amount of culture shock a switch from 2014 to 1914 (or the other way around) would be. People don't change that much; the main changes would be in what technology is in use, and what things we consider appropriate in public. (For example, Western culture has lost a lot of the distinction between public and private behavior.)

More importantly, though, is that social science fiction tends to date itself quite swiftly, especially if the story is one of the wish fulfillment types and how the ideology works in practice has become better known. Then there's examples like 1890's Caesar's Column, which is set the 1980s...

Honestly, what might be more interesting is a science fiction novel exploring the possibility that things like the internet could result ultimately in the primary stream of culture not changing as much anymore, and the consequences of stabilization of the primary culture...