Their idea is clearly idiocracy, but the implementation is brilliant. Not only is it impossible to vote for science, its also impossible to leave a comment without voting against it... so if you want to explain why a grant is worthwhile, you have to do so by voting against it. They may be idiots, but they're damn good at it.

If non-US citizens participate in this vote, they'll probably vote according to their values. The Republican party's values and policies aren't exactly popular in the rest of the world, and (for the most part) the rest of the world likes science. Remember - basic scientific research is a public good; we all benefit from it, so everyone would rather wait for someone else to do it.

On a side note... do you honestly think the rest of the world is out to get you? You seem to be projecting (perceived) national and corporate political interests onto individuals... as if those individuals had no personal values of their own. That's like believing Swedish fathers are thinking "oh man, the US is beating us in nuclear weapons research... I need to switch professions and donate all my extra income to funding nuclear weaponry!".

S3 isnt the only option, and you dont need to have everything in the cloud to benefit from the lower costs and overhead... and there are options that will reduce your admin costs as well. The most important thing is to understand how people will use the solution... for an NGO you're probably relying on a lot of communication outside the firewall and would benefit from a SaaS model for storing documents and collaborating within the team and with other associations and stakeholders.

I'd point you to some of the more document-heavy enterprise social software suites... a lot of them can handle your public website and intranet as one solution. Sharepoint is overkill for 20 people, but there are some smaller options out there. I personally work for IGLOO Software (www.igloosoftware.com), which is definitely worth a look.

What's with all the hate? Lots of sites have a bounce rate between 30 and 50% [citation needed]. If seeing a half-loaded page is enough for 50 to 70% of people to
decide to leave, isn't it reasonable that a preview would be enough too?

I'd have to use it to decide if the interface is more annoying than useful (obviously)... but there's at least potential there. Heck, depending on whether google caches or optimizes the preview, this could reduce wasted bandwidth as well.

This may not be a popular opinion here, but why did you decide to go with open source solutions? If you aren't already familiar with drupal and are an expert at designing corporate intranets, you're probably going to spend several months of the next year building and maintaining your site. I won't try to guess your salary, but there are a lot of good solutions in the $5-10k range (some that use drupal) that could be more cost effective and give you access to people who do this every day. Drupal is an amazing product when it's in the right hands, but you shouldnt allow your corporate intranet distract you from your core business. Full disclosure: I'm a developer at IGLOO Software

I agree, but you seem to be implying that this law would decrease liberty. The original article in the NEJM explains that sugary drinks externalize their costs to the health industry. If we can agree with the science, then the fact is that everyone with health insurance is currently being forced to cover the costs of other people's consumption decisions. That is lack of liberty. The proposal will make people pay for their own decisions, so you don't have to. That's liberty.

Whether a person deserves what they get is never so clear-cut. You picked an extreme example, and many people would agree that we shouldnt have to pay for an obese two-pack-a-day smoker's health bills from a common pool... but who is going to decide whether he lives or dies? That sounds like a a death panel to me... one that is much, much worse than the so-called death panels that were recently proposed. So, stop thinking through your arguments half-way. Complete personal freedom doesnt work. You dont have the freedom to kill, cheat, abuse, or pollute. Accept that, and lets try to make the best of it from there.

"stop ruining things for those of who manage to eat right, but still enjoy the occasional culinary sin." The problem is that things are already ruined. Medicare and Medicaid pay billions of dollars of your money to pay for the externalities of culinary sins. The proposal to tax the culinary sins directly, instead of paying for it through income tax, simply puts more of the tax burden on the sinners instead of spreading it equally across all tax payers. The added bonus is that the increased cost of sinning will deter a handful of people, so our GDP can be spent on something other than healthcare. Of course, you could argue that the real problem is medicare and medicaid... and that's a valid argument if that's the kind of world that you want to live in, but I certainly don't want to live there.

Shai Agassi's business model is to lease the battery, so the cost of the battery is distributed over the life of the vehicle. This also means you can drive for a few hours, swap out the battery for an equivalent one, and keep driving (45 seconds later)

This will require some skill on your part, but MATLAB can be an amazing teaching tool. A university Professor of mine used it to create animations and other visualizations.

Imagine being able to demonstrate trigonometric identities with animated sin waves, or geometry with 3d surfaces. As a programming language, it will give you incredible flexibility to demonstrate difficult concepts without putting emphasis on how pretty it looks.