No Nobel prize

Which at this point is surprising to me. He did pioneering work on the physics of black holes, and was the first to theorize on what is now called Hawking Radiation. That seems like a pretty good accomplishment. Do you suppose the relative lack of experimental confirmation keeps him from it?

I think that's more or less it. BH thermodynamics and evaporation are cool ideas, and Hawking has been fundamental in finding links between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. But it's still just an idea, and impossible to verify any time soon, unless something cool happens at the LHC.

a theoretical mathematician

as opposed to an experimental mathematician?

As opposed to an Applied Mathematician.

Yes, but special relativity is a special case of general relativity (the case where spacetime is flat), so if something screws up SR, GR gets screwed up into the bargain.

Only if (a) your equals sign is approximate (since you're neglecting terms in p^4 and higher) and (b) your "m" is the rest mass, which I would denote "m_0".

Jesus wrote the bible with his own hand, neigh, with both hands writing at the same time, and he's still PISSED OFF over losing the whole "sun is the center of the universe" debate.

Jesus was a horse?

What they did is like killing a chicken, looking at its entrails, and then declaring that because of the intestines, they are confident that 2 + 2 = 4.

More like killing a chicken, looking at its entrails, and then declaring that because of the intestines, they are confident that the chicken is not too healthy.

He represents the minorities. You know, the same minorities that get offered scholarships based on their race or gender; the minorities that get hired in order to fill a quota, with no regard for their actual qualifications; the minorities that can say whatever they want and play the discrimination card when someone calls them out, while the rest of us are told to shut up and be tolerant; the minorities that never seem to be at fault for anything, always shifting the blame to the persecution of the majority.

The affirmative action policies I've encountered only state that minorities should be preferred only when two or more job candidates are equally qualified. How badly this is abused is, of course, open to debate (and liberal use of anecdote).

Credit scores are actually a pretty good example. Information that the credit companies collect about you, which can affect you greatly. In the US, they are considered important enough that laws have been written to require the credit reporting agencies to provide you with your score on a periodic basis (if you ask) at NO charge.

I don't think that's true. The agencies are required by law to provide you with your credit REPORT yearly at no charge. The credit SCORE -- that single number presumably distilled from the report by whatever arcane algorithms they use -- is still privileged information that you have to pay for.

I thought the point of printing them out was to allow for effective redacting of sensitive information? I read recently that the Alaskan officials didn't think they could properly redact in the original electronic documents.

Of course, they could print out, redact with Sharpie, then rescan the page image to PDF (making it much larger than it should be, of course), but that last step is time-consuming.

(No, I haven't yet RTFA)

I think you're ignoring part of the parent's point (which may not have been explicit). It's not just that the Supreme Court's decisions can be predicted beforehand, it's that the specific Justices' -votes- can be predicted beforehand.

If the law were really like a computer code, and the Supreme Court Justices were all rational, knowledgeable and honest, we would them to render identical opinions on every question; in fact, there would only have to be -one- judge. Since we may not trust one judge to be sufficiently knowledgeable, we have nine instead, and take a majority opinion.

But if you know that certain issues are going to split 5:4 or 6:3, with the -same- justices on the majority side each time, then there's a real problem. At least one of the sides is pushing a bias that has nothing to do with the law. At least one of the sides is failing in rationality, knowledge, or honesty; I suspect both are.