What makes you think they took down the criminal mastermind?

Remember this is the government we recently learned abducted a German citizen, beat him, chained him in the Salt Pit where he was rectally violated, only to learn they'd snatched a vacationing car salesman who happened to have the same common Arabic name as the guy they actually wanted. It was like kidnapping and anally raping "John Smiths" until you found the one you wanted.

But our body is our own. Period. We cannot cross this line. If someone conscientiously objects to a treatment, it is their natural right to decline it.

Fair enough.

So, how would you like to phrase the new law... ? "No medical procedures on any individual that has not reached the age of majority or is not otherwise able to give legal consent"?

That's the reductio ad absurdum way of saying that the line has already been crossed. Society inflicts medical treatments on people (mostly children) whether they like it or not, and it's done in the name of "their best interests". Now, whether it's the parents/guardians or the government making the decisions and whether those decisions are "best" for any given person is a whole other issue, but to suggest that it's instead an issue of control over an individuals own body is, in the context of childhood vaccines, pure nonsense.

As Terry Pratchett's "Patrician" is fond of saying, freedom doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Nor does it mean freedom from responsibility.

Saying you have to make your own arrangements for schooling doesn't seem so oppressive to me, so long as the arrangements aren't made in a punitive spirit. Lots of parents do make their own arrangements because of philosophical differences with state-run schooling. Pious parents send their kids to religious schools. Conservative parents send their kids to military schools. Liberal parents send their kids to alternative, unstructured schools.

Schools should make reasonable efforts to accommodate the philosophical preferences of parents, but there simply isn't any way to square this circle. Most parents want their kids going to a school where everyone is vaccinated. If you want something different there's no way to accommodate that preference, unless there's enough of you to set up a parallel program. I have a relative who did just that -- started an alternative school; not for anti-vaxxers, but for anti-regimentation parents who want the kids to go to a school where they do whatever the hell they want all day and where no attention whatsoever is paid to ed-reform mandated standardized tests. And the school works because of the high degree of involvement of the parents, many of whom are high status professionals like doctors and university professors. You *can* have whatever you want for your kid, but you've got to put the effort in to make it work.

Google is leaving russia due to data security and intrusive legislation that harms the internet, but sees no problem maintaining an office in the United States

Well, there's a substantial practical difference between closing a branch office of 50 employees and shutting down your corporate HQ and main data center.

But, more importantly, the consequences of calling out the US government for bad behaviour is tame compared to how Putin handles corporate dissent.

Escape into space is one thing, but also far enough outside of Earth's orbital position that its gravity wouldn't keep the water in an intercept orbit for eventual return? I'm not able to find anything with my naive google searches.

The law applies to all, big and small.

Which jurisdiction or period in time are you referring to? I can't think of a single example where this is true.

Pretending life is the same as fantasy is a sign of mental illness.

If unix permissions are enough, you can max out the zfs permissions and ignore them. Pretty sure I have a post on my blog for that - it's been about three years since I did any Nexenta work though.

Nothing. The Institute apparently thinks he's a scumbag and doesn't want to be associated with him, which is their right.

Looking at the lecture, it doesn't seem to be all that special by MIT standards. Everyone there takes at least two semesters of physics, and Physics 8.01, which almost everyone takes in their first semester on campus, is probably the largest course taught. There's a long tradition of lecture showmanship in 8.01, with varying degrees of success. A friend of mine once saw Henry Kendall almost knock himself out with a bowling ball pendulum. He was explaining how the pendulum would only return at most to the point it was released from, but because he was talking he didn't notice that instead of just releasing the pendulum, he'd given it a little push, which was supposed to be the *next* demo. Kendall had to dive out of the way at the last second.

Some countries place a high premium on memorizing and repeating back the teacher's words. These countries still produce their share of good and bad engineers, but they're sometimes bad in unrecognizable ways.

I once hired a software engineer from a third world country who had an encyclopedic knowledge of design patterns. You could name any pattern in the GoF *Design Patterns* book and he could reel off the UML without hesitation and give a convincing sounding explanation of how the pattern worked. But when I started inspecting his code, I quickly realized he had no understanding of what any of it meant. It was just pictures and words he'd memorized, an impressive and prodigious feat, but ultimately useless to me.

Now I should say I've hired some very good software engineers from this country; it's not that they don't make good engineers over there. For most people the discipline to absorb a lot of information yields many benefits. But this guy was an outlier; he managed to get a master's degree over there in a subject he had no practical understanding of whatsoever.

Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".

The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief pause while everyone else envisions the phonetic spelling of the mispronounced word.

When you hear "drone" you probably are picturing civilian quad copters. While some military drones are that small, others are substantial aircraft. The Air Force's Global Hawk weighs over ten tons and requires a runway 3700 feet long to take off.

Obviously some military drones can be hand launched, but the MQ-1Cs mentioned in the article weigh 2200 lbs fully loaded and requires a minimum runway of 2000 feet.

We didn't let our son play video games at home until he was in second grade -- of course it's nearly impossible to avoid them at other people's houses without moving to a remote village without electricity. Consequently gaming became an obsession with him. When we visited relatives he'd spend all his time talking with his older cousins about games pretty much from the time he could talk. In kindergarten he started taking books out of the library on beating video games. By the time he was in first grade he was the neighborhood gaming consultant: kids would ask their moms to invite him over because they were stuck. But he couldn't play games at home.

Finally I realized that forbidding games was just making him more obsessed (it's a family trait he gets from both parents). We bought a console and it was the best Christmas EVER. He quickly settled down to a pattern where he gets a new game, plays it relentlessly for a few days until he figures out all the interesting ways to beat it, then sets it aside. Now he's a teenager, and gaming is just another thing he does. It's *important* to him, but if you average out his playing time it adds up to maybe four hours a week. The time he plays the most is when his older sister comes back from college. They'll play through a stack of old games, like it's their way of reconnecting.

People worry too much about parenting issues like this. You have to be prepared to be tough if an actual problem arises, but most of the time you're better off relaxing and seeing what happens. Think of it as "agile parenting". You don't have to foresee everything, you just have to be on top of what actually happens.

Well, some kids actually like that -- maybe not talking over the coach, but the practice and camp and such. I had one of each, one who hated organized activities and another who liked them.

And we *did* force both our kids to stick with some things they didn't want to do. In some case it was about commitment -- you asked to join the soccer team, you can't quit just because the team is losing. In other cases it was parental judgment about what's best -- I know you don't like swim lessons but you're going to stick with them until you can swim a hundred yards. And some times it's because kids have to learn to at least make the effort to follow through on their plans. You wanted piano lessons, we bought and moved the piano, so you have to stick with those lessons for at least a year before you switch instruments.

The first step in addressing the question scientifically is determining whether the question even makes sense. You have to *establish that the question is valid* before answering it.

A hundred years ago scientists didn't know about DNA, couldn't characterize someone's genes. They went with what they could observe: skin color, hair, eye shape etc. And they came up with various compelling three race and five race schemes. But we aren't limited like they were. We can open up someone's genetic black box and characterize his heritage precisely. And when we did that all those compelling, intuitively obvious schemes fell apart.

The problem with the question you pose is that it makes no sense to lump all Sub-Saharan Africans into one "race". Most of the genetic diversity of the human race is in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are ethnic groups in Africa that have more genetic diversity than all human populations originating outside Africa *combined*. So we can't answer the question you pose because it's very assumptions contradict the facts.

If we were to divide humanity into five "great races", they'd probably end up being five *African* races, with the rest of the world tacked on in various ways. What's more it would turn out that there were *other* equally justifiable ways to construct five African races.

Race is like constellations. Humans *will* see patterns in complex, random data. Just because Orion *looks* like an object doesn't mean that the stars in Orion are linked by some process. But boy is that pattern ever compelling.