The Higgs discovery was done by two groups, working independently and doing different experiments, although using the same accelerator, so that's a good start.

I would not call the Higgs discovery well confirmed, though; not yet. You definitely want to keep on doing experiments to nail this one down more confidently.

Yep. That's why you want independent confirmation. Replication is what makes science.

Never rely on scientific results until they're independently confirmed.

In general, this is correct: you can prove a scientific theory false, but never prove it true. (You can prove mathematical theories true. But mathematical theories require assumptions, called postulates. To prove that a mathematical theory is true in the real world, you would need to find a way to prove the postulates true.)

Physical theories are confirmed by evidence, and well confirmed by large amounts of of evidence... but confirmation is not exactly the same as proof

The summary was wrong: Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert did not win the Nobel Prize for discovering the Higgs Boson. They (along with some others) predicted it, but didn't discover it. (More accurately, they won the Nobel for elucidating the Higgs mechanism of symmetry breaking as a means for massless particles to acquire mass).
This was a deduction (deducing that a particular field would lead to symmetry breaking with particular properties, from the mathematics of field theories), not an induction (fitting a model to theories).

Well, this is mostly an article about using paraffin wax instead of polymers as the fuel for hybrid rocket engines; it's only in passing talking about SpaceShipTwo. It's a little misleading to highlight "SpaceShipTwo" in the headline.
But it's an interesting article. I do like the wax propellant; it's a useful approach toward increasing the thrust of hybrids.
As I've been fond of saying, the good news is that hybrid rocket engines combine the best features of solid engines and liquid engines. The bad news is that hybrid rocket engines also combine the worst features of solid engines and liquid engines.

The point is that, in terms of voting for governorship of their state, the poorest ten states don't vote Republican. They vote equally Republican and Democratic.

That would be wise... except you apparently didn't consider the source; you just were looking for an excuse to say "I don't believe these numbers". Did you even read the source material? The source was an organization with the explicit objective "to find the uninsured around the country and persuade them to sign up for health insurance." Quoting from the article: "the groups have little incentive for bias because skewed numbers would complicate efforts to find the uninsured and target outreach resources."

Well, you were the one making up anecdotal stories-- I was just listing what I'd heard from people I know. Except you didn't even have actual anecdotes from real people-- you were just making up a hypothetical, "maybe people did not want or feel they needed health care." Yeah, right. Maybe some people do prefer to rely on emergency rooms, paid for by taxpayers, if they get catastrophically sick. I do not consider this an optimal solution.

To the contrary. When presented with numbers, your response was "Its not that hard to play with numbers to make any point you want. "

Translation: any time you see numbers that don't support what you already have decided, you say they're not 'objective'. Great strategy: ignore anything you don't like.

I personally know several people who were able to get insurance under Obamacare but didn't have it before. Not one says that they "did not want or feel they needed" insurance. What they say is, "Thank God, this is saving my life."

However, even if what you said was true: what you are implying is that there is a body of people who previously were saying "I don't want or need insurance, because if I get sick I'll go to a hospital that is legally is not allowed to turn me away, and the taxpayers will pay for it," -and they are now paying for their own health care. That's a win for the taxpayers.

That's not the way the number of uninsured is counted. That would count as a wash: neither an addition nor a reduction to the number of uninsured.

Sorry, the belief that poverty is an urban phenomenon is another myth. It's a myth that's pervasive among liberals and conservatives, but simply not true. There are actually more poor and underprivileged people in rural America. You're right about urban areas being liberal and rural conservative, but wrong about being able to attribute that to "dependent populations of truly underprivileged": the greatest use of food stamps, as a percentage of population, in poor rural areas, not urban areas.

But you don't have to do that, because it's even easier to simply say "Those numbers don't support my political bias, so they are wrong."

The final sentence of the summary is misleading.

The link is to a 2011 article, which states the following:

Most of the 10 poorest states in the country are Republican. Mississippi is the poorest... followed by Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama and North Carolina.

The economics of a state is more impacted by what party holds the governorship and statehouse, not by what party they voted for for president. Looking at the governorship of each of those states
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
you see that the parties of the governors of the states listed are, respectively, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Republican.

I would assert precisely the opposite. "trade-offs to preserve compatibility and interoperability" do not cripple the functionality to users-- failures to engineer compatibility and interoperability is what cripples functionality.

The number of times that there's been a new feature and I've said "oh, excellent, it's true that my old files no longer work, but this is so wonderful I don't care" has been very close to zero. The number of times there's been a new feature and I've said "those assholes, I have twenty thousand files that don't work any more, what in the world were those idiots thinking?" is decidedly not zero.

The Tesla Roadster made electric cars cool, in that it was a car for the ultra-top end market, people who otherwise would be buying a Lotus or Ferrari. So, it was an existence proof that you could make an EV that contended with top-end sports cars.

Actually, Leaf is the top selling EV on the market right now. If you count electric cars with gasoline backup, Volt would be on the list.

Tesla doesn't make a mass-market EV yet; their Model S right now is rather a luxury car rather than something for the average buyer. While I'd love to have one... I don't think Tesla comes anywhere close to being "the first" in the way of mass market EVs. There are a lot of electric cars out there, both mass-market and otherwise.

no, that was the M2-F2.

Spectacular video of the crash, though.

http://www.airspacemag.com/ist...

I would too, but they haven't been given the budget to do so. In fact, congress has been demanding the opposite: it had previously been very insistent that NASA needs to downselect to just one.

It's quite a victory that they managed to keep on funding two options.

Interesting! I first heard that idea from David Brin, who was proposing it as something to be used for disasters.
http://davidbrin.wordpress.com...
Maybe the governent of Hong Kong qualifies as a disaster.