I think there is a third, and perhaps more likely explanation: Parts of the Russian military is not under the control of the government. Putin is not exactly stupid, and what is happening in that area is rapidly becoming stupid, so I think it is a reasonable guess that he hasn't got things under his control. Only very few countries are 'terrorist states' - there is something inherently incompatible between level-headed, routine administration of day to day business and hell-bent, wild-eyed terrorism; I can only think of Libya under Gaddafi.

As for IT costs - I have worked in several companies over the years with both UNIX and Windows server rooms. Being a UNIX person, I may be a bit biased, but my personal impression is that supporting Windows servers is a lot more painfil than supporting UNIX/Linux - at one point I supported some 50 UNIXes alone, while the roughly similar number of Windows systems had a team of 5; I had a pretty relaxed daily routine, but they were always overstretched. Not because they incompetent, I learned a lot of generally useful stuff from them, but so many things in Windows seem to require either clicking through graphical interfaces, system by system, or require a specialised, graphical tool, where I would just run a few scripts from a command line. The power of tools like ksh (or bash), ssh, sed, grep, find etc should not be underestimated.

The other thing I have heard increasingly - from Windows admins themselves - is that Windows is just such nightmare to handle. I wouldn't know - I left Windows behind as soon as Linux became viable, and that's a long time ago.

Of course CERN had problems - this is not engineering, but science. The big difference between the two being that you call it engineering, when you know in advance how to do, and science when you don't. No doubt, the first time a simple van-der-Graf accellerator was built, they had to overcome a number of problems; now, it is something you'd let a student do, because all the technical problems have been ironed out. And when/if China builds this new cyclotron, they will run into a large number of technical problems; of course they will. No need to start constructing fables about "all the corruption"; all that says is that you are suffering from petty envy.

Being aggressive is always the first response a man comes up with when he feels insecure or under pressure. However, speaking as a man - that is, an adult, experienced man, not a not-quite-out-of-puberty boy - I think it is always wise to listen to criticism and try to understand it. Objectively, it does not harm you or make you vulnerable, if you are open to criticism; quite the opposite, in fact. If you are doing something wrong, then criticism is your chance to improve yourself and become better, and if the criticism is incorrect, then you can reject it, so no problem.

And I disagree with your comment about 'nice ass' - unless you are complimenting somebody's donkey, this counts as an uninvited, sexual advance. Assuming that you are male and the only heterosexual in the office, just imagine receiving this sort of comment from just about every gay man around you. Even if you are not homophobic, would you like it? Probably not. This is about respect - you earn respect by showing respect, and you gain self-respect by earning respect from others.

So, is this the new standard for scientific reasoning? Run an experiment and draw sweeping conclusions without considering the alternatives? This sort of tripe is simply stupid - it is no better than climate denial or hollow-earthism; I don't think it belongs in a forum of people with an interest in science and technology - or even politics.

What this experiment really shows, is that a group of people who grew up in East Germany "cheated" more than a group of West Germans. We don't hear by which criteria - 'randomly' just means they can't be bothered explaining. There is no explanation of why it is considered reasonable to extrapolate from a small group to humanity in general, or indeed how you get from 'East Germany' to 'Communism' in general, or indeed what is meant by 'Communism'. Being exposed to 'Communism' was hardly the only influence acting on people growing up there, just like 'Capitalism' wasn't the only thing that shaped the lives of West Germans.

A far more likely explanation is that if you live with the fear that your neighbors are informants for an oppressive regime, then you don't have much confidence in the merits of social virtues like sharing and trusting, which are necessary preconditions for fair play: you won't play fair, unless you trust that everybody plays fair. But living with that kind of fear is not unique to communism or socialism; indeed, oppression is arguably incompatible with socialism, which is all about sharing and trusting the society you are part of.

Because, in the criminal court, you are innocent until proven guilty, whereas in the civil court, the standard of proof is much more relaxed. So, in terms of stopping unwanted activity, putting it in the contract like this, is much more efficient.

Your 'silly' idea isn't completely silly. If we want to get people off drug addiction, the way forward must entail winning the trust of the victims; and you can't win the trust of people by treating them as criminals.

Where you get it wrong, I think, is where you assume the addicts will still be homesless wrecks; in countries where you can legally get your daily heroin fix (Switzerland? Holland?), heroin addicts quite often have a career, family etc. The truth is that it isn't the addiction as such, but the criminalisation and the diseases from unclean drugs and needles that destroy lives.

I think the clue is in the name: Mailüfterl: May breeze.

Yeah, that's what i mean ... Poor stuff. ;-)

But basically, Power Rangers is nothing more than an excuse for showing off basic moped stunts; and covering the actors (and I use the word in the most liberal sense) in full leathers is not only sensible, it's also handy when you want to replace them.

... completely ignoring things like historical background, common knowledge and elementary logic.

Being Danish, it has always irked me, that this cartoon 'Thor' is portrayed as a tall, sledge-hammer wielding body builder with lanky, blond hair, full body wax and a placid temperament; the traditional thunder-god, son of Odin and married to Sif, was red-haired and -bearded (and generally hairy as a man would be), foul-tempered and wielded a hammer, mjolnir, that was famously short-shafted. I suppose a busty, female 'Thoretta' isn't really all that much further from the original. It just another American, plasticky product, like 'He-Man' and 'Power Rangers'.

I always feel vaguely amused when people say that you 'just' or 'simply' do so and so. I'm pretty sure the Germans know that these things can be done - they are clever people, you know.

Of course it is possible to penetrate whatever security measures are put in place, but using simpler technology has advantages:

- simple technology is easier to screen for spying devices; there is no networking, no firmware with backdoors, etc
- it is less easy to make copies on an industrial scale, when things are typed on paper instead of being stored electronically
- it is riskier to try to steal information, when you have to be physically present

And of course, just because it is possible to guess what a person is typing from the sound emitted, that is probably only true for a subset of typewrites, and in any case, it only works when somebody is typing something. The typewriter can be moved around, so you would have to plant microphones everywhere; and then, of course, you'll have to record everything in the hope that you'll catch something useful. All in all, you'd have to make a significant effort, which would then be more easily spotted. Possible is not the same as feasible.

Ah, but you forget that it potentially habitable.

This reads like the voice-over for one of those embarrassingly poor 'documentaries' you sometimes see, where the producers have tried to sensationalize a fairly standard, scientific subject, and draw it out to fill a whole hour, when it could have been adequately explained in about 10 minutes. A shame, really, because the subject is in fact quite interesting.

However: waves don't move patches of water half-way around the globe; the actual water more or less stays in place. A wave is simply energy propagating through a medium, and it is quite astonishing to hear that an ocean wave can travel that far without dissipating, because the expectation is that it would spread out in a circular pattern and thus grow weaker with distance. I would have been interested in hearing what the explanation is.

Hmm, let me see; during this recent exchange, how many Israelies were killed or injured? You mention 1 elderly lady, so that is 1 that I have heard of so far. You also mention 20 civilians in Gaza, but in the same breath imply that it is probably their own fault. Now, if you step back a bit and look at what you are saying, can you understand why so many people in the rest of the world feel less than convinced of your sincerity?

You guys enjoy the protection of the US, you have overwhelming, technological advantages over your opponents, you have throughout history shown little to no interest in finding peace with your neighbours, and a large proportion of people outside of Israel feel that you are engaged in shameless landgrabbing, apartheid and collective punishment of the Palestinian population. And as your own words demonstrate, you don't actually give a sh*t about it; but you still expect the rest of the world to feel sorry for you.

This is what I think should happen: the US should withdraw all military and economic support from Israel with about a year's warning. Then you guys will have a bit of time to try to find another way to deal with your neighbours - I suspect you will become really nice and open to sincere negotiations and find a solution that is sustainable in the long term, instead of being the bully hiding behind America's skirts.

As a side note: I am not an anti-Semite. For one thing, I don't think the state of Israel are worthy representatives of Judaism (just like 'Islamists' are not Muslims), and any way, Jews are not the only Semites.

I think the summary rather overstates the case. This virus, if a virus it is, doesn't so much hint at the origins of life as it puts a new perspective on the origins of viruses. The origin of life probably lies much further back in time than the emergence of viruses, certainly if viruses are 'degenerated' life-forms, evolved from cellular life.

Seen in this light, this new virus could be a primitive virus; but it rather begs the question whether 'virus' is actually a well-defined, mono-phyletic group. It seems quite reasonable to think that viruses have evolved many times during evolution. Firstly, although life is said to have begun when certain things came together and formed cells, there must have been a period when life or proto-life was more like a diffuse soup of components that would be part of cellular life, and while some of these combined to become cells, others may have become viruses. They may have evolved again at a slightly later stage from plasmids, pieces of genetic material that move between cells (or plasmids may have evolved as an extreme form of viruses, who knows?), and they may have arisen once more from bacteria or similar.