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Comment: More than meets the eye (Score 2) 37

by benjfowler (#43775023) Attached to: Cyber Attack From Inside India Hits Pakistan Government

Maybe Pakistan are just bunging on an act as a pretext to attack non-Muslims again?

Or maybe they're telling the truth for once, but it's the Chinese hacking their fair-weather friend? The Chinese have the market cornered on immorality in general, and criminal hacking in particular, so it wouldn't surprise me.

Comment: Journalists are stupid (Score 1) 1058

by benjfowler (#43752375) Attached to: 97% of Climate Science Papers Agree Global Warming Is Man-made

That's because journalists, as a class, are simply not very intelligent people.

They're children of rich kids who are too stupid to do something more socially useful -- and being rich -- they gravitate towards people who wield power, and are usually the most irresponsible when it comes to wielding their own power. Only rich kids can afford to become journalists, since only people whose parents can pay them to do wage-free internships and cadetships can make it through.

There's nothing wrong with the science. They're something wrong with the privileged, clueless swine who purport to be the gatekeepers of our democracy.

Comment: Coconuts for cryocoolers (Score 1) 212

by benjfowler (#43734149) Attached to: Possible Graphene Alternative Made From Hemp Waste

Reminds me of a story from ITER (giant tokamak being built in the south of France), where they used low-tech coconut shells to solve a really high-tech problem. Sometimes Nature provides us with solutions that work better than anything man-made.

They need to build cryocoolers to remove helium and contaminants from the reactor, and the best material they've tested so far, came from burnt shells of coconuts imported from Indonesia. So the EU has been busy stockpiling enough coconuts to last the lifetime of ITER...

http://www.iter.org/newsline/116/1681

Comment: Re:The best part of the article is at the bottom (Score 1) 554

by benjfowler (#43720461) Attached to: N. Carolina May Ban Tesla Sales To Prevent "Unfair Competition"

I think saying that something unethical and clearly criminal in nature shouldn't be illegal, because it's hard to detect and prosecute, is a bit like putting a cart before the horse. You don't respond by making it legal: you keep it illegal and prosecute it vigourously, but you also look at how the incentives work, and fix those.

There are approaches to fighting corruption which work: Singapore is a model case of clean government, in a part of the world absolutely rotten with corruption. The trouble here is that paying politicians and public servants properly would be vulnerable to attack by populist political movements, who are ignorant of the way the real world works -- some politicians have as much responsibility, and far more accountability than C-suite executives in the private sector, but get paid nowhere near as much.

Comment: Re:Not your problem (Score 0, Flamebait) 188

Bah!

Let the goddamned savages murder each other, and then Allah can sort them out. The more they're fighting and slaughtering each other like animals, the less they'll bother us. We should only intervene to keep the fighting going, and to ensure that no faction gets overwhelmingly strong than another.

Syria is currently perfect -- it's a self-cleaning oven.

The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters. -- Jean-Paul Kauffmann

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