My school district (mid to late aughts) taught math under a system whereby we weren't allowed to do something on a calculator until we had shown we could do it by hand. Graphs were taught to us both as a "you're going to start plotting points and connect them" and "here's a list of 70-something basic graphs for you to memorize and then you'll learn how to modify them." So much time spent taking speed tests to recognize basic graph shapes and standing up as a class and making graph shapes with our arms as the teacher called them out.

Sure enough, when I took the ACT, I forgot my calculator (or the batteries were dead? I'm fairly certain I'd left it at home but I know I didn't have one) and was able to more or less re-derive or recall all of the basics that the calculator would have just sped up, and I still had a math score in the 30s.

To this day I prefer to teach people that way. "You're doing this by hand until you can prove to me that the tool is going to help you do it faster instead of replacing your ability to do it."

Specificity

Jargon may be obfuscating to anyone not in the field, but it's concise and, more importantly, precise. We could all do the "use only the n most common words" thing, but we'd lose all of the nuance that the rest of written language can provide. Enjoyment and entertainment are less important in academic writing that getting your point across in a way that minimizes obfuscation to others in your own field, which means using the language common to your damn field.

As I understand it, if the Secret Service wanted to go and start stingraying everybody, there's nothing really historically stopping them other than "anything they picked up wouldn't necessarily be admissible in court," and all that's changed is that a few more situations would make any collected evidence admissible. This goes for any method of evidence collection. There was some discussion a few days ago in another thread about police needing a warrant to use FLIR to look at possible growhouses, and it's the same situation: they can still do it, but the evidence would be inadmissible and if they'd have some legal problems if they hit the house.

All that's changed here is that they can go straight to the stingray if (1) there's a threat to the president, (2) they have probable cause, and (3) there's demonstrably no time to get a warrant. If they wanted to start collecting your cell phone data without any practical use for it, it's already being done. The technology cat is out of the proverbial bag, and if you really don't want to be tracked by phone then you might just have to stop carrying one everywhere.

Basically: why are you any more worried now than you were when the technology was invented?

Oh, and because it could fall under 5th amendment right to not incriminate yourself. The conversation would be:

"Unlock this."

"Haha. No."

"Oh... well, then..."

but with more legal jargon.

Because legally compelling someone doesn't mean that they will unlock it, just that they'll face further punishment if they don't unlock it.

I think it's a bit more like "we didn't bother to further secure our home past a pin and tumbler lock because we didn't think anyone would bring a bump key."

Then you'd still be 10 psi short.

I'm in a similar boat. Been reading on and off for several years and finally made an account recently. Still learning how the moderation system actually works. Thanks!

Don't know why parent is modded to 0. That's exactly what happened in the first 60ish pages of the book.

The title character specializes in mechanical engineering and botany, and so should know the necessary science. He starts with whole potatoes, cuts them into pieces with at least 2 eyes each, plants the pieces, and figures he can live off of meal packets (apparently only eating 3/4 of a packet at a time, except on days with a lot of caloric expenditure) long enough to go through enough grow/replant cycles (and enough doubling of his viable soil through use of martian dirt, his own waste, and water made by splitting hydrazinium under a crude hood and doing a controlled combustion with the ambient oxygen) to cover the floor of his habitat. He knows it won't get him enough calories, but it's at least a start.

I'm skeptical. I know some games are getting bigger than the discs they ship on. For example, Halo MCC came with my XBONE as a download and is installed at about 75 GB (and wasn't too much smaller, maybe 65 GB before the ODST DLC). There's no way that could've all compressed onto a 50GB dual-layer blu-ray. Then again, it might have, but I don't know because I don't have a disc.

http://i.imgur.com/GSa9vHg.jpg (not quite, but you get the point)

It's an expensive hobby when you don't have a lot of excess income. Besides, I'd be willing to believe that "brown shooter of the week" and "sports game of the season" are less often resold because by the time next year's sequel comes out, the games resell for less than the cost of the gas to get to the used games shop.

True story. I live just over 10 miles west of downtown Minneapolis and work just under 10 miles further west. Minneapolis has a population of 400,000ish; the suburb I live in has a population around 70,000; the town I work in is about 6,000 and my office is quite literally next to a farm field (I stood in the building and watched the hay baler out the window a couple of weeks ago). My commute goes from reasonable suburb to cornfields in about 7ish miles. By comparison, the house I grew up in 35 miles north of downtown Chicago is in a town similar to where I live now about 10 miles from downtown Minneapolis.

Actually, high-level motorsports do require some pretty impressive physical conditioning. In cabin temperatures often lead to exhaustion just from dehydration, but add on the physical strength required to resist the g-forces in a turn and it gets pretty ridiculous. I've heard of F1 drivers whose training regimen includes weight exercises for their necks just so their heads don't flop around every time they corner. There's also a reason the steering wheel is so close to the driver in a NASCAR car: they get more leverage to keep their hands on the wheel and to be able to turn it when they aren't stretched out.

I can't dig up the actual text, but I'm fairly certain that it's a federal requirement to have windows on a motor vehicle.

Well, at least the lyrics about getting sued would likely qualify as parody and thus fair use.