Also, why isn't Hogwarts warded somehow against Portkeys?
When Snape and McGonnagal travel to Mary's, they have to take the Floo to Gringotts first, and remark that this is the fastest way out of Hogwarts. Presumably a Portkey would be faster (since it could take them directly where they wished), so either Dumbledore doesn't have Portkeys prepped for major locations like Diagon Alley (which would be stupid), or MoR!Hogwarts is warded against leaving by portkey.
Either that or Portkeys take some difficult preparation and have a limited lifetime in which they will work. Requiring a trip to the target location with a lifetime limit of as little as a day would not stomp over any of their uses in cannon or in MoR up to this point IIRC. This would of course preclude Dumbledore from having Portkeys on hand to go to Diagon Alley.
Just because corporations don't have a nuclear arsenal at their disposal doesn't make them all that less dangerous if they get to the hyper-optimizing arena. Just look at the various megacorps in scifi. A sufficiently powerful megacorp can make just as much trouble by conventional means through standard demolition, police (and para-military) action, and through environmental oversights (look at the fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico).
Overall you did a great job explaining the mathematics of unsupervised categorization but you missed one point in your end-matter.
The initial Monera classification was not a bad category at the time because when it was created there wasn't enough data to split out different subcategories. All the researchers had were a bunch of fuzzy spots wiggling under a microscope. You touched on this in the Amazon.com example. Just because the categories you have now are good for your current data doesn't mean that they will remain the same with further data.
It seems most of the "Hazards" outlined in the article are caused by the information causing the Doublethink machinery that maintains the receivers' social model to have to work harder. This isn't so much the information being harmful in of itself as the internally inconsistent models being harmed by factual information.
Ch. 57-58: I'm finally forced to abandon my original misplaced expectations about the fic. I thought it was trying to be realistic in the Watt-Evans sense, but now I see that awesomeness is more important to Eliezer than plausibility. (Scaring away twelve Dementors who approach close while the Patronus is down? Building a rocket from memory?) Okay, this kind of fiction makes for an enjoyable read too.
Now that I think of it, the plan has been doomed since Ch. 56, and possibly earlier. Harry's idea of dealing with McGonagall involves using the Time-Turner again. This means a version of Harry must leave Mary's Place before Harry and Quirrell begin their elaborate precautions, and maybe before they even order their food (Ch. 51). Whoops.
To be fair, building a solid-fuel rocket from memory wouldn't be too hard as it's all of 2 materials and rather simple in shape. Depending on how much knowledge of the subject free transfiguration takes he won't need anything more than his making of buckystring.
Ugh, he's exactly bright enough to do just that, complete with justification that he can't trust anyone else to both be safe (Quirell, Dumbledore, Draco all too dangerous) and effective (Hermione wouldn't exploit enough).
He could time-turn himself to allow for self-monitoring of the experiment.
(Chapter 58)
Harry, once again, plays (or is played like) the fool. He places his life in obvious danger by going with Quirrell, and trusts Quirrell. Again. Agh! Here's what a suspicious Harry would think: Harry is the only one who knows that Quirrell is responsible for break in. Harry plans on staying behind. Quirrell can't stop Harry from staying behind with magic, and can't convince Bella to stop either. One choice left for safety -- manipulate Harry into making the vastly more dangerous choice and leaving.
I feel like the Harry of these past 8 chapters is a lot more human than the Harry of the previous 50 chapters. Much too trusting, much too simple-minded.
On the other hand, Quirrell's stated plan explains Bella's rescue. Bella is a symbol of Voldie, Voldie is needed as an antagonist to create the 'mark of good.' Downside? I don't see Harry agreeing to use Bella as a tool.
EDIT: Which isn't to say I'm particularly dissatisfied with the novel. No, I'm just agonized. I'm sure Eliezer has some grand plan and I, the common reader, am just blinded by my biases.
The more trusting Harry may be an artifact of his being terrified. He got played on his dislike of the Dementors to get him in there. Once the shit hit the fan he was running terrified and taking whatever solution appeared to him. In this case Quirrelmort sounding even slightly reasonable (remember he's been talking to himself to keep the dementors off) would be accepted. I'll be interesting to see what happens when he gets back to civilization.
(ch56)
Somewhat trivially... I hadn't realized that Patronuses (Patroni?) could be sent on remote missions, or that they were able to track down individuals whose location the casting mage didn't know (as Professor McGonagall seems to do here).
I'm trying to figure out why, given that, anyone would break into Azkaban to give prisoners temporarily relief from Dementors, rather than just send a Patronus (or hire someone who can send a Patronus) to do the same thing.
So far I can't think of a plausible reason. Admittedly, Patronuses can't bring chocolate, but that seems inadequate reason to take the additional risk of breaking in personally.
Am I being dense?
It seems that messenger Patroni don't have quite the anti-dementor effects that a local Patronus does. This would make sense both for the reason people go into Azkaban and for the reason that Harry didn't feel any different from the sending being around.
Of course, in a dating context, it's at least as important to know the answer to the Shadow Question: "What do you want?"
Depending on your philosophy on dating the Shadow Question could be more important. Lorien's First Question "Why are you here" would also be a good thing to know in reference to the dating site itself.
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My take on this is that it's just an illustration that wizards really don't understand science, and they'll be unsuccessful at implementing their anti-physics charm.
Who knows, free Transfiguration works but seems to conserve mass, broomsticks work, but have effects similar to the standard reactionless drive+inertial dampener (and you can make a "reactionless" drive if you can shake masses about fast enough in curved spacetime paper)