I'm really sorry, but... you are ignorant, quite literally. You've ignored what people have written to you about neutrino flavor mixing. You're willfully ignorant, I'm afraid, and that certainly makes you appear arrogant.
Your theory (if I'm able to understand) is that this effect is due to coherent flavor-exchanging forward neutrino scattering. Others have replied, myself included, with some degree of clarity as to why this is not the case. The "why" of neutrino oscillation is because their mass eigenstates, which are fixed over time, are not identical to their flavor eigenstates. Therefore, their flavors have an increasing probability of varying over time.
A bit more theoretical: There is a mixing angle in Hilbert space between the mass and flavor eigenstates. (Hope I remembered that correctly. My theory-fu doesn't go much deeper these days. It's been a while.) If this sounds like gobbledegook, get yourself a good elementary book on QED and electroweak interactions and settle in for a new, perhaps difficult, understanding.
Better yet, this looks like a definitive on-point source:
[L]acking any other offer of an actual cause, my opinion is as good as any other.
To get back to the source of this argument, from several days ago: The cause is neutrino flavor oscillation. Your opinion holds no weight.
Why didn't you reply to my last post in this thread, which was addressed to you? Why scream at someone else instead of reading my stuff and asking questions? You come off as someone who isn't gifted with a mind to understand particle physics, and who is really pissed off at the world and especially at people who do understand particle physics because others do and you don't.
When I decided to leave industry to get a grad. degree in physics, I first discovered that there was such a thing as "frustrated physics wanna-bes." I was shocked by this then, and I'm shocked now.
To be fair, he may have meant the cooler period which began around 1770 A.D. that was contemporal with the Dalton minimum.
BTW, the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp%C3%B6rer_Minimum has an interesting graph showing solar activity, as measured by ^14_C, from the Oort Minimum through the Medieval Maximum to today. The Modern Maximum is higher than the Medieval Maximum. Although correlation isn't causation, I wonder if this has anything to do with global temperatures being at or slightly above the Medieval Maximum?
Huh? Hereby nominated for stupidest/. comment ever. So no scientist anywhere ever relies on current knowledge in the least?
Current knowledge (as laid out in well edited and reviewed Wikipedia articles) is the lion's share of "what scientists are thinking." Their work looks to either extend or overthrow current theories, but in all cases is based on current theories and understandings.
Sometimes we learn that old theories are wrong. Far more often we refine theories and understandings. Best example is Newtonian gravitation versus General Relativity.
Apologies in advance, but some knowledge of particle physics is required. Just as it's hard to describe a breakthrough in computer technology to someone who has little understanding of computers....
These two links (given further down in responses to this article) are much better technical explanations than I could write:
(a) I believe this is the first direct observation. Previous experiments have looked at neutrinos produced by the sun and have addressed the solar neutrino deficit, that is, the observation that the sun doesn't produce nearly as many electron neutrinos as the standard solar model predicts. The ones that are missing have oscillated (converted) into mu (and a small portion tau) neutrinos. This is why they seem to "disappear."
(b) You are wrong in stating that the cause is unknown. When the effects of neutrinos were first observed, physicists believed they had zero rest mass, like the photon. I can't recall what the argument for this designation was at the time (been a while since physics classes), but it simply may have been something like, "electrons and positrons are the lightest elementary particles, so these new thingies that invisibly carry away momentum from reactions like beta (and muon) decay, which we have shown have far less mass than the electron, are zero mass particles like a photon." (I dearly hope I'm not way off base on my history of particle physics here.)
In the 80's and 90's the possibility of non-zero rest mass neutrinos was first entertained, as it would explain a few things. This idea was received skeptically, though not with hostility, at first (as I well remember). Theoreticians immediately demonstrated that non-zero rest mass neutrinos would convert, or oscillate, between flavors as a direct result of their having mass. Because they have mass, it is the mass eigenstates of the neutrinos that don't vary with time. This means that the flavor eigenstates *do* vary with time. Therefore, an electron neutrino will have increasing probability of being measured as a muon neutrino with increasing time. (In their flavor eigenstates, the neutrinos have unmixed flavor and are (I believe) massless. In their mass eigenstates (the ones we can measure), the neutrinos have mass and are flavor-mixed. This mixing is what allows them to fluctuate back and forth between electron and muon neutrinos (with a bit of tau mixing thrown in).)
I'm sure this makes it all clear as mud. Here's a sub-link on eigenstates and neutrino mixing from CERN:
I personally don't understand why parent is modded "Informative."
The process you propose is neutrino scattering: Muon neutrino interacts with an electron to produce an electron neutrino and a muon which decays, perhaps after being captured by a nucleus. This is a well known electroweak interaction with a rather well determined cross-section. The cross-section, or probability of interaction, is *extremely* small. Therefore, even though kinematic/scattering considerations (mentioned by another poster in this thread) are ignored, your proposed mechanism cannot account for the observed changes in neutrinos. I'm fairly certain analysis of this data takes your proposed mechanism into account as a background. Its effect, of course, is negligible.
Such mechanisms, having been well demonstrated and measured, are well understood. Oscillation of neutrino flavor, due to the neutrinos possessing (small) rest masses, is the effect which is observed and measured in this experiment.
The REAL effect is more rapid growth of plant life. In my lifetime, I've seen much faster growth of vines, weeds and undergrowth, as well as trees. This is the greatest effect of the CO2 increase, and it's a good thing which -- provided all the (rain) forests aren't cut down and burned -- provides feedback to help limit increasing temperatures and CO2 in the atmosphere.
What, are you daft? Do you not understand the water cycle, which I was taught in the 8th grade? Sheesh.
Allow me to explain said water cycle. An increase in water vapor at lower altitudes won't immediately condense into cloud droplets, but there's this scientific phenomenon called mass transport (yeah, I know, a chemical engineering concept, but please try to keep up) which means that increased water vapor down low is transported through diffusion and convection to higher altitudes. At altitude, the atmosphere is cooler so this vapor condenses to form, you guessed it, water droplets, which make up clouds. Ever see puffy cumulus clouds "boiling" up from below? That's caused by the convection of warm, moist air into much colder layers higher above the ground where the moisture condenses into clouds. Water vapor also makes it to even higher altitudes via mass transport. Without this there could be no cirrus clouds, for example. How else to explain moisture getting into the atmosphere at 20,000+ feet? What source of moisture, natural or man-made (prior to the jet age), is there at that altitude?
One hopes you see my point.
(Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on cirrus clouds lists them as a positive feedback mechanism. I grant you that they don't provide, as do lower elevation clouds, shadows which cool the surface, but don't those high clouds reflect some sunlight back into space? On first principles, it seems to me that even simple climate controlling mechanisms are confusing. Depending on how you look at it mechanisms could have positive or negative feedback effects....)
You are right. Maunder or Dalton Minimum, little ice ages, and so forth -- no one who's convinced that we are destroying or even changing our climate seems to think the sun has ever had anything to do with climate change in the past or present. No one cares. Because that would be "inconvenient" for their beliefs, proving that they are, even partially, wrong, or worse yet losing them their multi-million dollar research grants.
Just wait another 35 years until researchers start to get grant money to investigate the effect of the sun on the earth's climate and how we can control sun cycles *rolls*eyes*
I prefer Soylent Red with wasabi sauce to give it a hint of green on the side. And that spicy tang that clears the sinuses. Unfortunately, once my nose is clear I can smell the Soylent Red....
Increases in CO2 increase temperature which drives increases in H2O vapor which also increases temperature.
??? Your "model in words" is beyond simplistic and only serves to mislead and confound, not to bring any light to this discussion. You see, more H2O, that is, water vapor, means more droplets of moisture condensing in the skies. You may have heard of this form of condensation, commonly called clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight, shading the land and sea, consequently decreasing temperature.
In the end, these things are really complex. One changing variable feeds into multiple others causing them to change, and so on, and so on, and so on. The models currently proposed predict disaster from anthropogenic global warming. The question is, are the models right? To date they have failed to deliver *the*degree*of*change* they've promised (global temperature plateau, seas not rising as fast as predicted, etc.).
Doesn't mean it won't happen, but I sleep well at night. (Likely, IMHO) Been warmer before, and will get cooler again, same as it ever was. And, yes, changes in the sun are the number one factor in the climate of our planet. Anyone who argues that should go turn out the solar light for 24 hours just to see what happens. Bring a winter coat. Only argument is how variable is the output from the sun *of*energy*that*warms earth*.
If I remember some stuff I read a couple of months back, this bump on the tail of this particular distribution was seen in data taken at the CDF detector but *not* at D-Zero, which is a similar, complimentary detector on the other side of Fermilab's collider ring. So I suppose this isn't that big of a surprise. And now one supposes that LHC is back to being the only game in town for the Higgs.
Sad in a way. Does this mean Fermilab will be ramped down and decommissioned before long?
I do criticize WikiMedia publications, but Wikiquote taught me an interesting thing. The oft-quoted statement is:
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
However, its authenticity is disputed. A similar statement was made in a 1914 address at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America biennial convention.
I think the mistake is in failing to comprehend -- or admit -- that there are grey areas in the legal system, as in the reality of life. In a Venn diagram in words, the set of all innocent is a subset of all not guilty. The sets of all guilty and all not guilty do not intersect, and wholly cover the phase space considered.
The hard part, and this is maybe where well-meaning people are confused, is when the legal system errs, declaring someone who is, in absolute fact, innocent as guilty. Then it's easy to confound these various sets, I suppose.
So... Wikipedia editors read a misleading newspaper article, and to fact-check their "research" they did... what...? With this evidence, it's hard to uphold Wikipedia as a true encyclopaedia in "disputed" areas like this.
Frankly, if I were editing on Wikipedia I'd rather be recognized as having a non-NPOV than prove myself an idiot. Wouldn't you?
I don't get it. Do/.ers not understand the basics of the U.S. legal system (a rhetorical question...)?
Not guilty does *not* mean innocent. At least two posters state this, and this is a basic fact. Yet they are modded to oblivion as trolls, etc.
And this guy is *not* innocent, if anyone bothered to read the news, regardless of one's biased point of view. This is a fact. He will plead guilty to lesser, misdemeanor charges.
OK, now I guess I'll get modded to oblivion as a troll, too, eh?
OK, Wikipedia soapbox here. As I've said before and elsewhere, only someone who is, well, naive would believe that Wikipedia editors have a NPOV. Face it, they're not paid. Why then do all the hours of time-consuming work if they're not paid? Because they are paid, just not monetarily; they have a strong incentive to edit. Some do it altruistically, for the good of a community encyclopaedic resource. Others do it to promote a certain POV, namely, one with which they (strongly) agree. These editors are not neutral. From the evidence you present, decora evidently is one of these.
Note to/. system coders: Please enforce a goatse filter on newly opened user accounts. Yikes. dotdotdotter and dotfan are sockpuppets for the same goatse troll.
Good heavens, someone PLEASE mod parent up, +1, Insightful.
Security and privacy of data are affected by where the data is stored.
I may disagree about privacy, assuming encryption is secure within reason. But security of data is meaningless without access to data. "Yes, my data is super secure. It's locked inside a nuclear strike-proof vault inside Mt. Storm. Of course, it is a pain in the ass to retrieve the tapes and disks every time I need to update the database or apply a patch to the git repository or send someone a copy of the documentation." How does that help anyone?
If it's not available as real-time-updated data on media in my possession, what do I do when my company's 'net connection goes down? I'll tell you what, I lose at least man-hours, at most all my contracts.
(I'm not talking of out my butt here, am I? If so, please tell me what I've got wrong.)
[Two axioms: A moral absolute and the value of life.]
I maintain clearly that there is an absolute good and moral right (as in right and wrong). The hard part is living up to this absolute good and moral right. All governments face this incredible difficulty from time to time, it seems to me.
But to call for the extermination of a nation or a people (a la Iran in present times) is wrong. It is evil. A democratically elected government whose stated aim, from their initiation, is to kill or destroy others is a danger to life and should be vigorously opposed, preferably from within.
An important note: I didn't and don't intend my statements to address Palestine. There are well-known governments in history, even democratically elected ones, that have had official policies of extermination, of genocide. They were morally wrong and monstrously evil. This is true today and will be true at all times in the future.
This point is not one of U.S. hypocrisy or self-interest. It is one of good versus evil.
"Democracy is a dangerous, and deeply flawed idea. It is suitable in conjunction with other systems...." In conjunction with what other systems? How are they formed? How do they operate? How can they prevent a people or a nation from going down "a path to a very dark place?" I see many deep and deeply principled assertions here, but with nothing of substance to support them, only wishes and dreams:(
This is precisely why "[m]any forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (If not familiar, be sure to look up this quotation.) The Founding Fathers of the U.S. well understood this more than two centuries ago.
"People, as a whole, can, and will choose what benefits them, even if it as at the expense of someone else." Difficult choices usually come at the expense of someone, either self or others. That's why they're difficult. An altruistic choice is generally a noble and a moral one, but such altruism can't be enforced unless one denies a person his or her freedom to choose their own self-interest.
I note sadly that your idealistic view blatantly ignores a moral and political conundrum. Stated simply:
What do the US and her allies do when a couple of these newly minted democracies follow the path of Iran? Do we do nothing, save applauding them from the sidelines for their democratically free and fair election of a hard-line government which immediately threatens us and our allies in the region with extinction? Do we decry their militaristic threats while filing protests, motions for censure and import/export embargoes at the UN? Do we secretly begin planning a mid- to long-range military option to neutralize their stated threat to our country and her citizens, as best we can?
I hope it's clear that sometimes "actual democracy" can lead to nearly insoluble problems. Democracy is the "only" way, but it's not the panacea which you believe it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really sorry, but... you are ignorant, quite literally. You've ignored what people have written to you about neutrino flavor mixing. You're willfully ignorant, I'm afraid, and that certainly makes you appear arrogant.
Your theory (if I'm able to understand) is that this effect is due to coherent flavor-exchanging forward neutrino scattering. Others have replied, myself included, with some degree of clarity as to why this is not the case. The "why" of neutrino oscillation is because their mass eigenstates, which are fixed over time, are not identical to their flavor eigenstates. Therefore, their flavors have an increasing probability of varying over time.
A bit more theoretical: There is a mixing angle in Hilbert space between the mass and flavor eigenstates. (Hope I remembered that correctly. My theory-fu doesn't go much deeper these days. It's been a while.) If this sounds like gobbledegook, get yourself a good elementary book on QED and electroweak interactions and settle in for a new, perhaps difficult, understanding.
Better yet, this looks like a definitive on-point source:
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2005/reviews/numixrpp.pdf
from LBL by a FNAL author. Enjoy!
[L]acking any other offer of an actual cause, my opinion is as good as any other.
To get back to the source of this argument, from several days ago: The cause is neutrino flavor oscillation. Your opinion holds no weight.
Why didn't you reply to my last post in this thread, which was addressed to you? Why scream at someone else instead of reading my stuff and asking questions? You come off as someone who isn't gifted with a mind to understand particle physics, and who is really pissed off at the world and especially at people who do understand particle physics because others do and you don't.
When I decided to leave industry to get a grad. degree in physics, I first discovered that there was such a thing as "frustrated physics wanna-bes." I was shocked by this then, and I'm shocked now.
To be fair, he may have meant the cooler period which began around 1770 A.D. that was contemporal with the Dalton minimum.
BTW, the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp%C3%B6rer_Minimum has an interesting graph showing solar activity, as measured by ^14_C, from the Oort Minimum through the Medieval Maximum to today. The Modern Maximum is higher than the Medieval Maximum. Although correlation isn't causation, I wonder if this has anything to do with global temperatures being at or slightly above the Medieval Maximum?
The "mini ice age" had really nothing to do with the state of the sun.
Are the correlations between the Maunder and Dalton minima and the contemporal cool/cold periods both coincidental? Just curious.
Huh? Hereby nominated for stupidest /. comment ever. So no scientist anywhere ever relies on current knowledge in the least?
Current knowledge (as laid out in well edited and reviewed Wikipedia articles) is the lion's share of "what scientists are thinking." Their work looks to either extend or overthrow current theories, but in all cases is based on current theories and understandings.
Sometimes we learn that old theories are wrong. Far more often we refine theories and understandings. Best example is Newtonian gravitation versus General Relativity.
Apologies in advance, but some knowledge of particle physics is required. Just as it's hard to describe a breakthrough in computer technology to someone who has little understanding of computers....
These two links (given further down in responses to this article) are much better technical explanations than I could write:
http://bit.ly/NuBlogT2KNuE1
http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/electron_neutrinos_muon_neutrinos-80012
(a) I believe this is the first direct observation. Previous experiments have looked at neutrinos produced by the sun and have addressed the solar neutrino deficit, that is, the observation that the sun doesn't produce nearly as many electron neutrinos as the standard solar model predicts. The ones that are missing have oscillated (converted) into mu (and a small portion tau) neutrinos. This is why they seem to "disappear."
(b) You are wrong in stating that the cause is unknown. When the effects of neutrinos were first observed, physicists believed they had zero rest mass, like the photon. I can't recall what the argument for this designation was at the time (been a while since physics classes), but it simply may have been something like, "electrons and positrons are the lightest elementary particles, so these new thingies that invisibly carry away momentum from reactions like beta (and muon) decay, which we have shown have far less mass than the electron, are zero mass particles like a photon." (I dearly hope I'm not way off base on my history of particle physics here.)
In the 80's and 90's the possibility of non-zero rest mass neutrinos was first entertained, as it would explain a few things. This idea was received skeptically, though not with hostility, at first (as I well remember). Theoreticians immediately demonstrated that non-zero rest mass neutrinos would convert, or oscillate, between flavors as a direct result of their having mass. Because they have mass, it is the mass eigenstates of the neutrinos that don't vary with time. This means that the flavor eigenstates *do* vary with time. Therefore, an electron neutrino will have increasing probability of being measured as a muon neutrino with increasing time. (In their flavor eigenstates, the neutrinos have unmixed flavor and are (I believe) massless. In their mass eigenstates (the ones we can measure), the neutrinos have mass and are flavor-mixed. This mixing is what allows them to fluctuate back and forth between electron and muon neutrinos (with a bit of tau mixing thrown in).)
I'm sure this makes it all clear as mud. Here's a sub-link on eigenstates and neutrino mixing from CERN:
http://choruswww.cern.ch/Public/textes/english/node4.html
and here is Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino
HTH.
In the U.S. system of government, this is called "checks and balances."
I personally don't understand why parent is modded "Informative."
The process you propose is neutrino scattering: Muon neutrino interacts with an electron to produce an electron neutrino and a muon which decays, perhaps after being captured by a nucleus. This is a well known electroweak interaction with a rather well determined cross-section. The cross-section, or probability of interaction, is *extremely* small. Therefore, even though kinematic/scattering considerations (mentioned by another poster in this thread) are ignored, your proposed mechanism cannot account for the observed changes in neutrinos. I'm fairly certain analysis of this data takes your proposed mechanism into account as a background. Its effect, of course, is negligible.
Such mechanisms, having been well demonstrated and measured, are well understood. Oscillation of neutrino flavor, due to the neutrinos possessing (small) rest masses, is the effect which is observed and measured in this experiment.
The REAL effect is more rapid growth of plant life. In my lifetime, I've seen much faster growth of vines, weeds and undergrowth, as well as trees. This is the greatest effect of the CO2 increase, and it's a good thing which -- provided all the (rain) forests aren't cut down and burned -- provides feedback to help limit increasing temperatures and CO2 in the atmosphere.
What, are you daft? Do you not understand the water cycle, which I was taught in the 8th grade? Sheesh.
Allow me to explain said water cycle. An increase in water vapor at lower altitudes won't immediately condense into cloud droplets, but there's this scientific phenomenon called mass transport (yeah, I know, a chemical engineering concept, but please try to keep up) which means that increased water vapor down low is transported through diffusion and convection to higher altitudes. At altitude, the atmosphere is cooler so this vapor condenses to form, you guessed it, water droplets, which make up clouds. Ever see puffy cumulus clouds "boiling" up from below? That's caused by the convection of warm, moist air into much colder layers higher above the ground where the moisture condenses into clouds. Water vapor also makes it to even higher altitudes via mass transport. Without this there could be no cirrus clouds, for example. How else to explain moisture getting into the atmosphere at 20,000+ feet? What source of moisture, natural or man-made (prior to the jet age), is there at that altitude?
One hopes you see my point.
(Surprisingly, the Wikipedia article on cirrus clouds lists them as a positive feedback mechanism. I grant you that they don't provide, as do lower elevation clouds, shadows which cool the surface, but don't those high clouds reflect some sunlight back into space? On first principles, it seems to me that even simple climate controlling mechanisms are confusing. Depending on how you look at it mechanisms could have positive or negative feedback effects....)
You are right. Maunder or Dalton Minimum, little ice ages, and so forth -- no one who's convinced that we are destroying or even changing our climate seems to think the sun has ever had anything to do with climate change in the past or present. No one cares. Because that would be "inconvenient" for their beliefs, proving that they are, even partially, wrong, or worse yet losing them their multi-million dollar research grants.
Just wait another 35 years until researchers start to get grant money to investigate the effect of the sun on the earth's climate and how we can control sun cycles *rolls*eyes*
I prefer Soylent Red with wasabi sauce to give it a hint of green on the side. And that spicy tang that clears the sinuses. Unfortunately, once my nose is clear I can smell the Soylent Red....
Increases in CO2 increase temperature which drives increases in H2O vapor which also increases temperature.
??? Your "model in words" is beyond simplistic and only serves to mislead and confound, not to bring any light to this discussion. You see, more H2O, that is, water vapor, means more droplets of moisture condensing in the skies. You may have heard of this form of condensation, commonly called clouds. Clouds reflect sunlight, shading the land and sea, consequently decreasing temperature.
In the end, these things are really complex. One changing variable feeds into multiple others causing them to change, and so on, and so on, and so on. The models currently proposed predict disaster from anthropogenic global warming. The question is, are the models right? To date they have failed to deliver *the*degree*of*change* they've promised (global temperature plateau, seas not rising as fast as predicted, etc.).
Doesn't mean it won't happen, but I sleep well at night. (Likely, IMHO) Been warmer before, and will get cooler again, same as it ever was. And, yes, changes in the sun are the number one factor in the climate of our planet. Anyone who argues that should go turn out the solar light for 24 hours just to see what happens. Bring a winter coat. Only argument is how variable is the output from the sun *of*energy*that*warms earth*.
If I remember some stuff I read a couple of months back, this bump on the tail of this particular distribution was seen in data taken at the CDF detector but *not* at D-Zero, which is a similar, complimentary detector on the other side of Fermilab's collider ring. So I suppose this isn't that big of a surprise. And now one supposes that LHC is back to being the only game in town for the Higgs.
Sad in a way. Does this mean Fermilab will be ramped down and decommissioned before long?
I do criticize WikiMedia publications, but Wikiquote taught me an interesting thing. The oft-quoted statement is:
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
However, its authenticity is disputed. A similar statement was made in a 1914 address at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America biennial convention.
I think the mistake is in failing to comprehend -- or admit -- that there are grey areas in the legal system, as in the reality of life. In a Venn diagram in words, the set of all innocent is a subset of all not guilty. The sets of all guilty and all not guilty do not intersect, and wholly cover the phase space considered.
The hard part, and this is maybe where well-meaning people are confused, is when the legal system errs, declaring someone who is, in absolute fact, innocent as guilty. Then it's easy to confound these various sets, I suppose.
So... Wikipedia editors read a misleading newspaper article, and to fact-check their "research" they did... what...? With this evidence, it's hard to uphold Wikipedia as a true encyclopaedia in "disputed" areas like this.
Frankly, if I were editing on Wikipedia I'd rather be recognized as having a non-NPOV than prove myself an idiot. Wouldn't you?
Sorry, to be clearer I should have said: "On point in this particular case, this guy is not innocent, if anyone bothered to read the news...."
I don't get it. Do /.ers not understand the basics of the U.S. legal system (a rhetorical question...)?
Not guilty does *not* mean innocent. At least two posters state this, and this is a basic fact. Yet they are modded to oblivion as trolls, etc.
And this guy is *not* innocent, if anyone bothered to read the news, regardless of one's biased point of view. This is a fact. He will plead guilty to lesser, misdemeanor charges.
OK, now I guess I'll get modded to oblivion as a troll, too, eh?
OK, Wikipedia soapbox here. As I've said before and elsewhere, only someone who is, well, naive would believe that Wikipedia editors have a NPOV. Face it, they're not paid. Why then do all the hours of time-consuming work if they're not paid? Because they are paid, just not monetarily; they have a strong incentive to edit. Some do it altruistically, for the good of a community encyclopaedic resource. Others do it to promote a certain POV, namely, one with which they (strongly) agree. These editors are not neutral. From the evidence you present, decora evidently is one of these.
Note to /. system coders: Please enforce a goatse filter on newly opened user accounts. Yikes. dotdotdotter and dotfan are sockpuppets for the same goatse troll.
Good heavens, someone PLEASE mod parent up, +1, Insightful.
Security and privacy of data are affected by where the data is stored.
I may disagree about privacy, assuming encryption is secure within reason. But security of data is meaningless without access to data. "Yes, my data is super secure. It's locked inside a nuclear strike-proof vault inside Mt. Storm. Of course, it is a pain in the ass to retrieve the tapes and disks every time I need to update the database or apply a patch to the git repository or send someone a copy of the documentation." How does that help anyone?
If it's not available as real-time-updated data on media in my possession, what do I do when my company's 'net connection goes down? I'll tell you what, I lose at least man-hours, at most all my contracts.
(I'm not talking of out my butt here, am I? If so, please tell me what I've got wrong.)
[Two axioms: A moral absolute and the value of life.]
I maintain clearly that there is an absolute good and moral right (as in right and wrong). The hard part is living up to this absolute good and moral right. All governments face this incredible difficulty from time to time, it seems to me.
But to call for the extermination of a nation or a people (a la Iran in present times) is wrong. It is evil. A democratically elected government whose stated aim, from their initiation, is to kill or destroy others is a danger to life and should be vigorously opposed, preferably from within.
An important note: I didn't and don't intend my statements to address Palestine. There are well-known governments in history, even democratically elected ones, that have had official policies of extermination, of genocide. They were morally wrong and monstrously evil. This is true today and will be true at all times in the future.
This point is not one of U.S. hypocrisy or self-interest. It is one of good versus evil.
"Democracy is a dangerous, and deeply flawed idea. It is suitable in conjunction with other systems...." In conjunction with what other systems? How are they formed? How do they operate? How can they prevent a people or a nation from going down "a path to a very dark place?" I see many deep and deeply principled assertions here, but with nothing of substance to support them, only wishes and dreams :(
This is precisely why "[m]any forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (If not familiar, be sure to look up this quotation.) The Founding Fathers of the U.S. well understood this more than two centuries ago.
"People, as a whole, can, and will choose what benefits them, even if it as at the expense of someone else." Difficult choices usually come at the expense of someone, either self or others. That's why they're difficult. An altruistic choice is generally a noble and a moral one, but such altruism can't be enforced unless one denies a person his or her freedom to choose their own self-interest.
I note sadly that your idealistic view blatantly ignores a moral and political conundrum. Stated simply:
What do the US and her allies do when a couple of these newly minted democracies follow the path of Iran? Do we do nothing, save applauding them from the sidelines for their democratically free and fair election of a hard-line government which immediately threatens us and our allies in the region with extinction? Do we decry their militaristic threats while filing protests, motions for censure and import/export embargoes at the UN? Do we secretly begin planning a mid- to long-range military option to neutralize their stated threat to our country and her citizens, as best we can?
I hope it's clear that sometimes "actual democracy" can lead to nearly insoluble problems. Democracy is the "only" way, but it's not the panacea which you believe it is.