This sounds to me like a reactionary statement that may be fueled by media hyperbole and exaggeration. Have we really thrown out the constitution? Remember that the US Constitution is a living document and was far from perfect at its inception. I have lots of respect for it but do not worship it. I'd like to tell you to actually read it but I'm ashamed to say that I myself have not done so. I've read some parts of it and found that it's actually very readable and not affected much by "legalese" so I plan to read more of it in the future. I'm just trying to say that going to the source sometimes helps de-fuse our emotional triggers that are abused by the propaganda of our day.

Our tax burden is not crippling. Our standard of living continues to improve. Lifespans are improving. Our income tax rates are lower than most developed countries and our corporate tax rates are on a par with others. Government revenue has been between 15 and 20% of GDP since the 1940's, and in the past 4 years it's gone down and is closer to 15%.

There are a lot of political issues today that I'd love to be able to correct, but I don't think everything is "broken." What I most want is more education in propaganda analysis (deconstruction -- see for example http://propagandacritic.com/), and less two-party partisan nonsense. These are both problems as old as our country. Yes, corporate lobbyists are another way of spelling "corruption" but this too is nothing new. The national debt and CO2 emissions are serious problems that are new to the past few decades, and they both frighten me a little, but they are complex problems that will need to be solved in an intelligent manner without reactionary thought.

And finally, as many people pointed out above, these succession petitions are far from representative of the majority opinion. There's a massive gap between a signed petition (to let off steam mostly) and finding that these states want to actually secede.

I cannot understand why Maine and Nebraska do this! I applaud them of course but I don't see this as a locally-correct strategy.

If you're a swing state, you love it because you get lots of attention, perhaps to your own state's needs, during presidential election season. That's good. If you go to proportional representation that no longer happens. (A friend pointed out to me that this kind of attention is really a bad thing. We live in Colorado and I've had no less then 12 phone calls reminding me to vote during the past week, and sticky notes on my doors.)

If you're not a swing state, winner-take-all is still good for you because if you transition to proportional representation most of your citizens will feel like they have less of a voice in the election -- less impact for their collective votes. If all "blue" states, for example, went to proportional representation while the "red" states did not then it would be nearly impossible for a democrat to win the presidency. The blue state citizens would generally not like this and wish to change back.

So while I'd love to see proportional representation happen, I don't think it can happen unless the constitution is amended to force all states to do it at once. Of course along come Maine and Nebraska -- an ugly disfigurement on my lovely little theory. What stupid states, doing what's best for the good of the country and all that. Makes me sick.

What I think is even more important is going from plurality voting to almost any other system. The grandparent post mentions instant runoff, but I'm starting to favor approval voting. We're so close to doing that anyway. I heard a news report reminding voters that if they mark YES for more than one candidate, their ballot would be invalidated. Approval voting is just like our current system except that voting YES for more than one candidate is allowed. Maybe that's not quite as good as instant runoff, but it's close and dead simple. It eliminates the third-party spoiler effect, and I think that's huge and worth fighting for. I think it would make a noticeable improvement in partisan politics! Yes we'd again need an amendment, but honestly who in their right minds would oppose that? I guess the catch is "who in their right minds."

But what if it's a pro-reality bias as well? What kind of balance are you hoping for anyway? I actually thought the article itself was as unbiased as possible. I read slashdot in part because I am a scientist and I care deeply about these kinds of issues. Also science funding is not strictly a democrat/republican issue. The Clinton presidency (actually the congressional election that followed it) marked the beginning of the end of basic science in the U.S. with the cancellation of the SSC.

I want to hear about our candidates individual science policies before I vote. I'm not voting on the basis of party affiliation. It's very hard these days to squeeze out details of science policy, but this article does a good job. My take on the prospects of the U.S. remaining relevant in global, basic science is:
Obama: bad
Romney: maybe slightly worse?
Ryan: horrible
Expectations given the economy: poor

This matters to me, and if my conclusion is wrong due to a media bias, then please let me know! But balance is not bias. I don't need 10 climatologists and 10 anti-global-warming creationists to get the facts on global warming. To gauge Ryan's stance on basic science funding I need nothing more than a careful analysis of his own budget proposals and voting record. This is great stuff! By contrast, in the 2004 election I searched and searched through platforms and speeches to find any mention of basic science at all. I eventually found very brief statements from Kerry and Bush deeply buried in lengthy platform statements. Kerry said that basic science should remain on a par with applied science spending. Bush said that basic science should be privately funded. Since industry has proven to be irrelevant in recent years (post Bell labs) when it comes to basic science, I voted ... well I got outvoted.

I'm basically a religious person, but a scientist by training. From one point of view, science is a way of dealing with a lot of the uncertainty in the world we live in. The scientific method is an art -- general guidelines that have been proven to be successful at improving our knowledge and understanding of the world. I don't buy into the absolute statements from others saying "Science says ..." or "Science is ...".

I carry much of my scientific skepticism and open-mindedness to studying the Bible. I find that when I study it with historical context and probable authorship in mind, there is a lot of insight and wisdom to be found. But there are (at least) two distinct creation legends incorporated into Genesis, and I can't understand how or why so many people insist on glossing over that fact and trying to just accept (blind belief) some kind of amalgamation of these stories and the genealogies that follow as a literal truth.

I don't think that science and religion really need to be at odds. They are two different approaches to knowledge of course, but neither one is absolutely the best approach for every situation. Where there are apparent contradictions between the two, I increase my uncertainty and hope that in the future I'll understand things better.

With religion, I try to respect my past experiences and beliefs while at the same time being willing to change my beliefs when it seems reasonable to do so. I don't like to think of works like the Bible as an absolute authority, but as a collection of writings that have long been recognized as profound, helpful, and inspired. I think that any philosophy that's more rigid than this would make me more susceptible to influence.

Now that we're way off topic, I'll go back to Santorum. He's just spouting propaganda of course, willing to say whatever is necessary to get votes. He's preying off of people's desire to feel safe and comfortable with a status-quo, and the desire to be smug and feel in-the-right. What's true or is not true has (apparently) nothing to do with politics. An honest politician is like a sickly gazelle in the Savannah. Evolution has weeded these out in the U.S. long ago.

You've hit the nail on the head with that link. Glad you were modded up!

My take on this is that alternative theories to dark matter are always welcome but they have a lot of explaining to do. If there is no dark matter then how else can we explain the galactic rotational velocity profiles, gravitational lensing maps, AND cosmic microwave background fluctuations fitted to cosmological models. For me the strongest evidence is found in the lensing study of colliding galaxies. The mass (dark matter) distribution has separated from the visible light distribution.

In science, it's particularly exciting when new theories are proposed that not only explain previous observations but predict new, unknown phenomena that can be tested. Sure that doesn't always happen even with good, valuable theories but this dark matter alternative theory falls well short of the "exciting" mark because it fails to explain the bulk of the existing evidence for dark matter. It also smells strongly of computational error. Being able to investigate and rule out or reveal computing errors is probably what best separates mediocre scientists from great ones these days.

I'm way behind on this discussion but it looks like people are misinterpreting this report. The CDF experiment at Fermilab had reported last April on a possible observation of a new particle. They say that it is *not* a Higgs candidate, but could be something else (even more startling than a Higgs, such as a supersymmetric particle). Something with a mass of about 140 MeV/c^2 appears to be decaying into W and two quarks. This report is here: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2011/today11-04-07.html

TFA is a report from the D0 experiment that they do not see this same thing. They should have been able to see it if it were real, but they did not. If D0 had also seen the same kind of signal that CDF did, then things would really get exciting! But for now I guess one could say that results are inconclusive on whether or not there is new physics here.

1) This is (probably) not about the Higgs at all.
2) This is not (yet) about CERN/LHC. D0 and CDF are the two collider experiments sitting on Fermilab's main ring, and they share a healthy kind of rivalry. The LHC at CERN hosts six experiments: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/LHCExperiments-en.html . The beams at these accelerators are designed to intersect (collide) at certain points around which various impressive arrays of detectors are built. Hence we have multiple experiments with independent data sets and their own unique strengths and systematics running in parallel at the same lab.

Disclaimer: I'm not really current on any of this but I can at least point out that all this discussion is off-topic and even the /. post title, "Data Review Brings Major Setback In Higgs Boson Hunt", is completely off the mark.

I'm typing this response using a Colemak keyboard layout. I'm still really slow at it since I only started learning it two weeks ago. But I decided to (temporarily) sabotage my typing speed because I want to be the kind of person who is willing to make the effort to break out of this kind of vicious cycle. My fingers are putting up a good fight - they really long for the old days - but screw them!

Qwerty is a "bad" layout for lots of reasons, so why does nearly *everyone* still use it even some 130 years after its beginnings? One reason is that Qwerty is not actually "awful", because most random layouts are a bit worse. But the main reason (after Dvorak came out in the '30s) was that schools taught Qwerty because businesses bought those typewriters, and businesses bought them because schools taught to them. These days Qwerty is still ubiquitous simply because it is.

Machine shops and hardware stores buy and stock tools designed for the US customary system because stuff needs to be made compatible with all the old stuff that's in inches & feet. Well, that and many other reasons that are similarly circular. It's like a function minimizer that's gotten stuck on a local minimum because it cannot find a downhill path to the global minimum. Sorry that's an obscure analogy, but free markets act kind of the same way, and are unable to pop themselves out of a local optimization. The US takes great pride in being a slave to market forces, no matter where they take us.

MS Windows and Office are popular for the same kinds of reasons.

I don't know what the solution is, but I also have to point out that the US equivalent to the kilogram is the slug, not pounds or ounces. Technically we should ask for food boxes to give a net mass in slugs (yummy!), not a net weight that for all we know could have been measured in a centerfuge. Fluid ounces are a stupid unit, but technically a measure of volume and are used correctly AFAIKT.

I liked parts of the letter too, but I can't easily judge how much wisdom (or lack thereof) is being expressed. There seemed to be a lot of exaggerations but to some extent that's the norm for corporate management-speak. A couple easy examples:

This strikes me as a particularly desperate statement that struggles against reality.

How dramatic? Isn't outsourcing done (like it or not) to reduce costs? Distributed software development can be made to work fairly well. Multiple R&D sites allow you to attract talent from a wider pool of applicants.

Big corporate shakeups like this are a sign of a struggling company. There are enormous costs involved in doing this. In some cases it works well, but it may also be posturing by some few investors that are hoping to dump the company later on for personal profit. If I were a shareholder I'd need a lot more convincing, more details, real data, and some independent confirmation of the data before I went along with it.

I think you're right here. "Relatively" is the key word. The trick to the standardization of SI units is that one cannot measure anything in units that involve mass to greater accuracy than the kilogram itself is known to. As technology advances we bump up against these standards every now and then, when certain other kinds of ultra-high precision measurements become possible.

Yeah, the density of water depends on composition, temperature, and pressure. Atmospheric pressure changes naturally so much, I'm sure that measuring and reproducing any kind of average sea-level air pressure is going to be one of the limiting factors in defining the kilogram that way. It's fine to define mass in terms of fundamental constants, but one has to be very clever and choose this constant to be something that is not only easy to measure, but something that can be measured more accurately than any other mass-related measurement or constant.

I know just enough to see why high precision measurement science is extremely tricky stuff, and how it often comes into direct contact with the definitions of standard units. I also think it's a big deal that the two different experiments to tie the new mass definition to the old one disagree. One cannot just average the results -- that's meaningless. One of the two experiments is wrong, if not both, and so the average result is guaranteed to be wrong. Picking one result at random at least has a chance of being correct, but clearly that's not satisfactory either.

This kind of statement is why I'm an independent. I have views on many issues but they aren't exactly one party platform or another. I think that partisan politics of all sorts in the US are based on us-vs-them thinking and attempt to substitute anger and conflict in place of discussion about important issues.

I never thought of Fox News as libertarian however. More of a GOP mouthpiece, though really the bias is simply against anything center or left-of-center. Most politics is antagonistic. Don't vote for that guy because blah blah blah. If you take a stand on anything then you're more open to attack. Libertarianism is a stand for something. Fox News is a stand against a lot of things.

I really appreciate the Windows-in-VM and Windows terminal server suggestions. I'll pass those along. We do actually have a terminal server set up, so this seems like the easiest way to go. Unfortunately one could not integrate outlook-on-a-TS with a Linux desktop, with new email and meeting notifications. Still all things considered this would be a better way of working for many if not most people here. My office is about 90% R&D.

I still don't think this would fly since the IT is outsourced, security is such a big deal, and so on. Expanding users' choices is always more expensive if you look at IT costs all by themselves. I just chalk this up to the inertia of a large corporation.

We're using Office 2003, and Vista 32-bit, SP1. They migrated from Windows 2000 a couple years ago.

For years (at other jobs) I would regularly organize my email, but I found that this never helps when I go searching for an email. I have never come up with an organization system that is fast, simple, and unambiguous. I like gmail's approach a lot, and I guess I kinda treat Outlook the same way, moving the inbox into an archive folder every few months because of server quotas. But this relies on good and fast searching. Outlook 2003's search capability is neither fast nor complete.

I also don't like how Outlook composes email. It's modal, effectively deciding between plaintext, html, and RTF based on what I'm replying to. New emails seem to pick a mode depending on the phase of the moon. Some modes are buggy and limited. I personally don't feel comfortable sending RTF emails since that's in no way a standard. I want to be sending emails, not "Microsofts".

I'm at a kind of satellite office for a big telecom company, and we all have "managed" workstations -- PCs running Windows, exchange server, lots of 3rd-party security software, internal websites with ActiveX, etc. So we're heavily entrenched in a Windows computing environment.

But ironically almost all of the equipment we're working on is running a Linux kernel. We have to do development on remote *nix servers. So ssh, Xwindows, telnet, scripting with Perl/Python/Tcl/whatever, ... these are the tools for most of the actual work done around here. Windows is a complete disaster for this environment! Some folks install their own Linux in a VM, others use Cygwin a lot, and others struggle along with software like Exceed and Putty. Either way it's very awkward.

So every couple days someone asks "can I _please_ switch to Linux on my desktop? Please??" I can't even pretend to know the whole scope of the answer, but MS Exchange (especially calendaring) and liberal use of Word and Excel documents factor in heavily.

I'll echo the sentiment that Outlook is a horrible, nasty email client! I don't hate anyone with enough savage intensity to recommend Outlook to them. (Just try searching for that email you vaguely recall reading 2 months ago.) But we even use Exchange to schedule our conference rooms! I don't know any other client that works well enough with Exchange to be an adequate replacement.

So my conclusion (if I'm not just ranting) is that if you abandon multi-platform support at an early enough stage within a company (probably starting with an Exchange server) then you can become locked in subtly and deeply. Divorcing Windows on the desktop at my workplace is like pulling a thread on a sweater. Pretty soon the whole thing unravels.

Book burnings now are entirely symbolic. There is widespread access to knowledge, publishing is relatively cheap, so burning books accomplishes exactly nothing. But originally it was much more dramatic, both strategically and emotionally effective at stamping out schools of thought. The pyres probably also symbolized burning clothes and possessions of someone who was infected with some plague -- these books contain contagious ideas that taint the reader in some fatal way.

I think a Quran-burning party is a kind of hate rally. It serves to attack the religion, but also to dehumanize Muslims themselves. It's an early step toward radicalization for those involved in the burning.

For me, this comes the closest to identifying the problem with what rackspace did. If they can justify themselves, it comes down to how precisely one can define hate speech. If that's easy to define, then they aren't supporting the content they host, they are just subjecting it (or doing random spot-checks) to a predefined filter.

So I wonder if I can find a precise definition. I don't think you can consider satire or criticism as hate speech, but most politicking these days is mud-slinging, which is essentially hate speech. In this you promote falsehoods as the truth and present them in an emotionally-charged way. But what's true and what's not is impossible to know. ...

Even if there's a lot of grey area, I think anyone would have to agree that advertising a Quran-burning event is definitely a kind of hate speech. At best it's an attempt to strengthen the bonds of church members by celebrating a common hatred. Again, a whole lot of partisan politics is this same thing.

Sorry about the stream-of-consciousness post. I think rackspace has discredited themselves here by having a uselessly-vague qualification in their AUP, combined with the stupidity to actually enforce it.