Sure. That's a totally reasonable approach for them to take. It's much better than outlawing dangerous activities.

Nobody who is a scientist (except possibly for inflammatory gossip addicts like Dorigo) is claiming anything remotely resembling a discovery. Nature is, in my opinion, highly irresponsible for posting things like this, precisely because it leads to reactions like yours. It isn't screwy instrumentation or glitches, it isn't a discovery, it isn't an exclusion, it isn't a bird or a plane or superman, it's just a result that is not yet conclusive.

Scientific Linux won't, I expect. In my experience, SL has an extreme phobia of updating anything, ever, unless it becomes absolutely necessary. K-splice would fly in the face of this philosophy.

Considering your post as a short essay, I have one general comment: Keep it together. You started out quite coherent and interesting, but as the post continued, you got more grandiose, less coherent, less cohesive, and less comprehensible.

This.

This is why I don't want socialized medicine in the US. Because then one can make the (admittedly valid in that context) legal argument that if I do anything that even might hurt myself, I am creating a cost to society and should be prevented. Then laws spring up that try to nerf the world and stop anyone from doing anything remotely dangerous.

I'd far rather allow people to take risks in the full knowledge that they are responsible for their own insurance (or lack thereof).

Nah, I'm not really that into Pokemon.

Yep. And you know their names. Compare the number of people with successful careers (in fields traditionally pursued by college graduates) after dropping out of college to the number who dropped out of college. Now compare the number of people with successful careers (in fields traditionally pursued by college graduates) after finishing college to the number who finished college. Which probability would you like to have of achieving a successful career?

TFS certainly sounds like Apple desires to pursue that sort of anticompetitive situation, however.

By implication, the writer of TFS believes that Apple would be happier if a significant portion of the TV market was made up of devices that did not work or did not work as well with their competitors boxes.

The technological singularity will occur in 2015, but we won't have human-level machine translation for another 14 years....

You don't need to set oracle to evil, it already has that value. You just need: assert oracle==evil

That was me. In the analysis released on Friday, D0 does not perform the delta R reweighting (this was a specific criticism that they sought to address). In spite of no delta R reweighting, they still do not see the bump. There are some systematic errors that they handle differently from CDF which are quite likely to explain the result. Some of my colleagues at CDF are investigating (and were investigating before this D0 release, because of a suggestion by a D0 physicist at the release of the original bump paper) these systematics and their effect on our ability to model the data well. I can't really comment further until results are released, however.

It is probably more important to note that D0 handles their systematics a little bit differently. This is natural, because their detector is different, so their systematic errors are different. But there appears to be one particular systematic that they handled better than CDF, and CDF's less-good handling produced a bump-shaped mismodeling of the data. I don't want to say too much, but hint: quarks and gluons don't necessarily quite act alike in some important particulars.

These experiments do not share their data openly (while the experiment is still taking data) because if they did, there would not be any data. The only way to get enough physicists to work on the experiment to make it run well enough to get any data is to restrict data access to those who do service work on the experiment. After the end of data taking, the data may be released, but I don't know the time table on which that typically occurs.

I'm also at a major American university as a physics grad student. If your university has a research physics department, chances are good that they have a high energy experiment group, and high energy experimentalists use Linux (for their work boxes) almost exclusively. So, if you can't get university IT to help you out, it is likely to be worth trying to look around and see if there are any research groups that use Linux. They may be able to help.