By that reasoning, why would they bother using Equifax in the first place? Credit agencies like Equifax help lenders assess who is good risk and who isn't. If the government is going to bail them out any time they lose money, their "risk" is exactly zero.

Those institutions can't just slash the amount of credit they extend, because that's their bread and butter. If they just stop issuing credit for over half the population, their business model collapses.

Yes exactly; it only becomes the burden of the various banks and institutions AFTER you've convinced them that you are a victim of fraud. It's a nasty loophole that lets them assume you're guilty until you've proved yourself innocent.

In the short term - yes, lots of identity theft and fraud. Long term? The whole premise of there being such a thing as meaningful credit monitoring or useful/reliable credit checks is, arguably, already undermined - possibly for decades. They're saying over half of the credit-using US population are compromised. That means that businesses that extend credit now will have to either greatly curtail the amount of credit they extend, or else risk extending credit even to people whose credit ratings are tarnished by possible fraud. Either action could have substantial economic impact.

Half a god. A creator, but not a law-giver.

Some billionaire has watched The Matrix too many times, and foolishly assumes he has a flesh-and-blood body floating in a tank in some greater, exterior reality. Riddle me this: if we're in a simulation, why assume that the "parent" reality bears ANY similarities to the one in which we live? There might not even be - planets, stars, with great swaths of space in between... people... matter, even? If our universe is a simulation, then NOTHING we observe about it - including its fundamental laws of physics or large scale structure - can be assumed to apply in the parent universe. To whatever entity constructed this simulation, we might seem utterly abstract and even crude; like that 2D character-based cell-division program that seemed so awesome back in the day. Us breaking out into that greater reality might be as absurd as the letter A peeling itself out of the dictionary and renting an apartment.

... in forests, to determine if unobserved trees make a sound when they fall.

Because he's real and we aren't.

I'm not a Hillary fan. Really, I'm not. Still - let's look at this objectively. The two criticisms about Hillary's email server: 1) Not secure enough for the sensitive State Department emails it carried. 2) Wiped with extreme prejudice before any so-called "good guys" could look at it. Now ... if the servers DID contain sensitive data that mustn't be leaked, wouldn't it be a GOOD thing to wipe them thoroughly when they were no longer to be used? What's more, if that data actually WAS leaked - then even melting the hard drives to slag would do nothing to un-leak it. If those emails ARE "in the wild" then they CAN still be recovered. If they WEREN'T leaked - then concerns about the server's security were unfounded. What's more, every email has, after all, both a sender and a recipient. If Hillary was the ONLY one using a non-government-approved device, then copies of her emails should all be preserved on the devices of the people with whom she corresponded, no? Lastly: everyone who reads Slashdot knows **perfectly** well that hard-drive scrubbers are widely available, inexpensive, and ROUTINELY used to purge the contents of media whose "secrets" are no more sinister than the original user's credit card numbers and their nude selfies. I never discard media without doing a multi-pass wipe; reading any meaning into the specific software used for the wipe is REALLY reaching.

If "the weight of evidence" is a bias - then sign me the hell up. I am biased against things unproven and unprovable, and it's a bias I'll wear with pride. If there were an "evidence bigot" flag I could paint on my car, I'd be first in line to have it done. Tyson said not one word about experts. He said not one word about science telling people how to live (although if anyone were going to "tell me how to live", I'd take a scientist over a holy man any day. ) He said only that policies should be based on the weight of evidence, as opposed to (say) ideology or emotions or beliefs. Take "abstinence only" sex ed. The weight of the evidence shows it is absolutely, categorically worthless in accomplishing any of the goals it sets out to accomplish. Yet because it embodies (although it utterly fails to INSTILL) the values many parents want to impart to their kids, support for it continues to be strong in some spheres. Guhin makes unsupportable inferences from what Tyson says, and his conclusions are garbage.

Past tense of mislead is misled. The word pronounced like "led" that's spelled "lead" means element 82.

...it takes for a Proton to decay.

String theory is a mathematical model that attempts to unite all of physics. String theory has many attractive features that make it SEEM promising as a way to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics - it's not at all surprising that, at least at first, it generated great excitement among researchers. Yet one of the key criticisms of string theory is that for all the effort spent trying to prove it, it has made virtually no testable predictions - leading to the suggestion in some circles that it isn't even quite a science. For string theory to be a viable description of reality, it requires supersymmetry to be true. Supersymmetry predicts that there are a whole slew of as-yet-undetected subatomic particles with certain well-defined characteristics. Each time the LHC ramps up to a higher energy level, string theorists get their hopes up that some of these particles will be found. So far, nada. If supersymmetry can be decisively DIS-proven, it may mean that string theory must be abandoned. This is a much bigger deal than you might think. The amount of time and effort spent trying to advance string theory has been staggering. String theory has dominated theoretical physics for decades. Anyone wishing to find gainful employment in theoretical physics any time in the last several decades has basically had no choice but to embrace string theory and slave away at the horrendous mathematical challenges it presents. There has been virtually no interest in - or funding for - research into other approaches to uniting physics since the 90s at least. Anyone who seriously advances a non-string based unified theory is openly mocked and derided; string theory has become a virtual cult in the world of theoretical physics, to the detriment of any other theory. For string theory to be exposed as ultimately worthless would be a seismic shock to the scientific community; generations of physicists will have spent their entire careers crawling determinedly down a rabbit hole that leads nowhere. It'll be as if they'd spent their time researching the biology of dragons or unicorns.

Tradition is not a defense. Not even partial. If their traditional vocation were rounding up people and carving them up to sell their organs, then their tradition would be one the world would rightly seek to eradicate. This is morally equivalent, and I don't give a crap whether anyone agrees.