Because support for 7 will drop off to nothing, and you will have no practical choice. Microsoft isn't going to drop another service pack for 7. Thankfully, Windows 10 will be more like Windows 7, and I seem to be managing to skip Windows 8 completely so I'm going to call that a win.

You'd think that...

Many subway trains are now automated. Expect all other vehicles to follow eventually.

This also makes me think, will you need insurance for a self-driving car? If two self-driving cars are involved in a collision, who is responsible for the damages? You could say the manufacturer is responsible - but what if it's a collision between a self-driving car and a human-driven car? Or, will manufacturers be willing to take on the burden of providing insurance for each car they sell?

Sometimes possible, when a study is small enough that the bulk statistics of the population are not sufficient to hide the participants. Yes, when "people who live in Small Town, Alabama who are 43 years old and have the extremely rare disease 'fortunabulosis'" is data in the study, then yeah, you can probably identify the person. But "10000 smokers from the states of Alabama, Florida and Georgia ranging in ages from 30 to 50", no, you are not going to identify the people in the study.

If the EPA is making regulations based on such small sets of data, they need to stop. The problem is not as significant as it is being made out to be.

First you claim that the EPA will have to reproduce the data or it will be illegal, and now this. No, the law doesn't say they have to publish your SSN, and at worst only those parts of your history that are relevant to the study might need to be online. If you think your SSN is somehow relevant to a medical study, you're wrong. And if you think your specific DOB is necessary and not just an approximate age, then you must believe in astrology. I know of no medical issues that depend on a specific age down to a specific day in history. (Were you a Hiroshima survivor?)

No, it does not. It says that the data used to make a decision (not all data ever provided to EPA) must be "publicly available online in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results." All the EPA has to do is make sure the data is publicly available so that someone who DOES want to try reproducing it can. It doesn't even require the EPA to be the data warehouse.

And now you ignore the word "substantial". If the EPA is basing regulatory decisions on one study with one result and this law stops it, that's a good thing. One study does not science make, and one unpublished study with secret data makes for even less valid science.

Yeah, an impossible hurdle of letting the public know the science that is being used to create regulations they have to obey or have the weight of the federal government crash down on them. If the science cannot survive the scrutiny, then it's isn't valid science and shouldn't be used to make regulations.

"Monoblock" or "the primordial monoblock" is a term for the presumed state of the presumed material comprising the presumed universe just before it presumably exploded. Everything, no exceptions, including space itself, all in one tiny... something, (tiny with respect to... something), that did.... something, and then [waves hands] Big Bang! Try this google search.

Science can trace the expansion of the universe backwards quite a ways, within the bounds of our understanding of physics as it stands and it makes sense, albeit some very strange and difficult to swallow sense. But go back far enough, and a point is reached where our physics simply do not serve to describe the previous state. At all.

I liken it to tracing a pitched ball backwards, not having been around to witness the pitch, but analyzing the arc of its trajectory and theorizing that the ball erupted spontaneously from the ground in order to arrive where it is. We can't account for such a spontaneous emission, but after all, hey, there's the ball, right? The immediate and obvious objection is that "but physics tells us that can't happen"... well, physics tells us the exact same thing about the big bang. That's why I consider the comparison apt.

I'm not saying the big bang theory is wrong; I'm just saying it is definitely unproven, and that there are severe and fundamental problems with attempts to prove it at this time. Tomorrow, we have new physics, and that may resolve everything very nicely. But until or unless that happens -- until someone shows how the "ball could erupt from the dirt, spontaneously or otherwise" -- personally, I'm reserving BB theory acceptance.

Did you read the bills? Where does it say this? I didn't see any such requirement.

If the EPA is making decisions based on "overwhelming scientific evidence", what exactly is the problem with requiring that that evidence be available to the public, and that people who advise the EPA not base those decisions on unpublished personal research? That's what these bills require.

The only argument I can see that is valid deals with studies including personally identifiable medical information. Those kind of studies should already be required to remove PII prior to use by the government, and the limited number of such datasets shows that this is another case of the perfect being the enemy of the reasonable. Legislation that covers every possible eventuality is going to be overly complex and still have loopholes based on interpretations.

Larry Niven as well. Was it the third or fourth Ringworld book that went on at great length about various humanoid species fucking?

Hi, welcome to /.! You must be new around here . . . ;)

This is insightful? The FAA has no ability to stop another 9/11. They can't reach out from their radar facilities and stop a nut in a plane from flying into a building. They can issue instructions, but have no way of forcing them to be followed. The controllers who had the flights of 9/11 on radar didn't "let" it happen, they watched it unfold without a way of stopping it.

What DOES happen now is that anything that is deviating in a significant way from ATC instructions is handed to the Air Force for an intercept mission. The Air Force has the authority to shoot down threats, and they practice this mission on a regular basis. But actually doing that means shooting down a planeload of mostly innocent civilians -- an act that cannot be taken lightly.

As a mashup of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, it was admittedly somewhat different in tone than Dick's works but still paid attention to his ideas and created an interesting, thoughfully constructed world to explore them through. And on the typical shoestring Canadian budget, to boot (and with an amazing theme, but that's another story). I think you're right that Big Ideas science fiction tends to flail and fail when squished onto the "big" screen, but TV is where you have enough room to breathe that these ideas can actually be explored.

Hey, at this rate, a post-capitalist, post-currency society is the only chance of Nokia making communicators for folks again anyways.

Honestly, though, if anything Nolan's general failing has been in the emotional department, he's actually pretty good with grand, sweeping ideas. And anything to do with the Foundation series is going to work best as something along the lines of an HBO series, certainly at least in terms of budget and length (and we-don't-need-no-stinking-ratings). So although it certainly could go really badly, I think there's a chance that a Foundation series could work out.