I heard something very interesting recently about the separation of church and state. Many of us may already know that the US constitutional support for that separation comes from the first amendment, specifically the establishment clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". This in itself not a separation of church and state, and never was until about the beginning of the 20th century.

But it isn't the timeline that's interesting. It's who supported the change, and why. The historical record tells us the primary supporters of the separation of church and state were Protestant Christians. Why? Because they hated Catholics. The Catholics had all these schools and hospitals, and Protestants didn't want any government money going to them. Protestants didn't want Catholic teachers making religious statements in public schools, either. But for quite a long time, Protestants were allowed to engage their classes in school prayer and bible study even after the Supreme Court definitively established the separation of church and state. This was because it was commonly believed that while Catholics were merely mouthpieces for their Church and ultimately the Pope, Protestants are individually-minded. As long as you're only teaching the children your personal faith, it's not government respecting an "establishment" of religion. Not like spreading the teachings of a particular "establishment" like the Catholic Church.

The great irony of this situation comes from how much Protestant Christianity has changed over the last 200 years. Certain sects now are obsessed with absolute truth in the same way that made 19th century Protestants deeply suspicious of Catholics. While it may have been true at one point that Protestant teachers could preach their individual faith, now there is a set doctrine set by the church. Anybody straying from that doctrine would almost certainly be railroaded out of town, religious freedom be damned. Most Christian organizations now require staff and participants to sign a statement of belief that would have offended our founding fathers. Or confused them. A lot of the ideas 21st century Christians believe didn't even exist 200 years ago.

Tragically, the pursuit of absolute truth tends to also lead to historical revisionism. Soon the only history taught to our children will paint our country as a monolithic Christian establishment. The ideas that didn't exist 200 years ago have become founding principles of our nation. And like every group that has turned towards rewriting its own history, we will gradually forget the foundations of our greatness and fade into nothingness.

The pointless political argument reaching back centuries is only part of the confusion. A lot of the confusion about Common Core is that since it's happening everywhere in America at once, it seems like it's the federal government trampling on our individual rights, and because President Obama is a Democrat, it's one more way that Democrats are supposedly attacking personal liberty. Except it's not federal at all and Obama has nothing to do with it.

Old fashioned network cables are nice, but the infrastructure is almost never in the building. There was such a narrow window of time when ethernet was useful to consumers but Wi Fi was not available. Only housing built in that time frame has ethernet in the walls; older houses have nothing, while newer ones might just have a single port to connect your Wi Fi router.

Of course if you own your own home, you can put in all the ethernet you want. And I envy you.

So this is clearly an environmental story. Methane is Bad News for the Earth. But it's also useful as a fuel; it's the primary component of natural gas. So why don't we have energy companies go out to where the leaks are and harvest them? I know that deep ocean extraction isn't exactly easy, but there must be at least some money to be made. And hey, it would just so happen to prevent this deadly greenhouse gas from contributing to climate change (as much, as it would still contribute some if burned for fuel) and ocean acidification.

Mod parent up.

As always, when something gets hacked, we find out it was for the stupidest reasons. You can just log into a Wi-Fi network and dump the entire memory of the traffic light through a debug port that was left open? I mean sure, everything can be hacked, but this is just handing the entire system to the hackers. Just like nearly every other "hack" that goes on in the real world.

This is just like when a web forum gets "hacked" because somebody with an axe to grind guessed the admin's password was actually "PaSsWoRd".

The question I posited is biased because it assumes that only a mediocre American is available. That assumption has not been proven. There are plenty of highly skilled Americans who've been recently laid off through no fault of their own (and that's generally why "laid off" doesn't mean the same thing as "fired"). And if you'll take a look at what I quoted, you'll notice that the supposed response he's gotten from "tech engineers" supports the assumption that you can only get top talent if you look outside of the United States.

I don't know about you, but I find that sentiment highly un-American. Next thing you know the company will relocate its base of operations somewhere with lower taxes while still enjoying all the benefits of living in America

Why are only employees hired on merit and not executives? Because employees are hired by managers who at least have some experience judging fitness for the job. Executives, on the other hand, are hired by board members and shareholders who have absolutely NO experience hiring effective executives.

Corporations are like little countries and their management structure is like government. In an effective government, laws get made by people who have incentive to benefit the tax base. In a democracy this is the citizens who want a better life (and a better life leads to paying more taxes). In an autocracy this is the leaders who either act out of genuine patriotism or who get to skim some of the taxes for their own private treasury.

In a publicly traded corporation, policies are set by a completely different set of people whose only incentive is how much money they can squeeze out of the corporation. This is more like a colony than a country. Colonies have a tendency to remain poor and unjust because the rulers - who live far away and often aren't even be the same race as the citizens - just want as much tax revenue as they can get, as fast as they can get it, with as little work on their part as possible. America and India are both doing much better as countries than colonies. So why must our employers act as colonies of their wealthy investors?

Be careful AC. You're treading too close to racism. Any argument that "we need to do X because Y people are superior to Z" is very easily struck down in public policy.

"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."

I guarantee you that "the vast, vast majority of tech engineers" would not assume that "other countries" automatically meant "the very best". The general consensus in my neck of the woods is that engineers of foreign origin are about on par with our native engineers. The consensus I've seen in pop culture is that the foreign engineers are generally much worse. I can only imagine the question that would lead to the response above:

Q: If faced with a choice between a top foreign engineer or a mediocre American one, which would you hire?

A: The foreign one. I'd want to work with the very best.

Mod this one up! The idea that we need to import tech workers because US tech workers aren't good enough isn't just wrong. It's blatantly un-American. "Oh yes, we're laying off all these high skilled workers, but what we REALLY need is more skilled workers from other countries. Our American college graduates just can't compete anymore with Bangladeshis (at least they can't compete on price, o ho ho)!"

Wouldn't it be great if we could recognize that every person is different, and that shouldn't give any of them fewer rights? Sadly that's not how the human mind works. Sure, you might be smarter than that, but hey, think about the guy next to you. That driver who won't stop riding your bumper and doesn't seem to know what a turn signal is. Hell, we have a divided government and I'll bet you wouldn't trust both Republicans and Democrats to have this figured out. Political correctness is the set of taboos we inherit from our ancestors who, in the absence of those taboos, did things like slavery and the holocaust. There may be more to it than that, but do you trust all of those other people to understand anything more complicated?

Correction: where's the good video? I guess I was expecting to see a horde of the things coming down the street, or at least something better controlled.

I clicked the link hoping to see a video of "the guy with the battle spiders" but was disappointed. Why would you advertise robot spider mind control and not put up a video? Now I have sad face :(

I saw this article and thought, "I've really wanted to find out why I can't get a slide-out keyboard." Nevermind the poster. Too bad the thoughts consist of a bunch of rambling. The only actually new information consists of two things:

• 1. A seriously flawed poll suggesting more than 50% of people want slide-out keyboards, but since there were fewer than 100 responses and the crowd is biased towards techies, who's to say he didn't actually find the only 27 people in the world who want what he wants?
• 2. When asked about a specific kind of phone, Sprint sales guy spouts marketing crap, and AT&T store manager says lots of people want it but it's expensive to make and breaks more often.

If by some happy accident you read this comment before the article, don't bother to read the article. It's a person of probably average intelligence trying to draw insight from those facts, so by definition about 50% of the readers should be able to come up with something better on their own.