But not that far from New Caledonia.

I was very surprised when I ran into French speakers while working in a supermarket in Surfers Paradise. There are quite a few French speakers around the Pacific Rim, and French isn't as useless as one would be lead to think.

Agreed. The language du jour is just that -- a fad.

When I was going through school in Australia (and experiencing it's utterly stupid and incoherent foreign-language system), the fad went from French and German, to Japanese, to Indonesian to Chinese. Education types have just as many dumb, pointless industry fads as IT.

Pick one useful language and stick with it. And try and have the system reformed to support that.

All the libertoons I know think Australia is a police state. And spending any length of time in the UK or the US will convince you of that.

Libertoons are a whiny, irrational lot anyway. Moving from the US to Australia to escape "teh gubmint" is like jumping out of the frypan and into the fire. Something your typical rightwing libertoon fuckknuckle would be too stupid not to do.

YM Portuguese?

(Not saying that Spanish isn't useful; there seem to be Spanish-speakers everywhere, and it's still growing. Better yet, it's a good starting point for learning any Romance language (including French and Portuguese), and it's one of the easiest languages to learn for native English speakers).

This is an American site, so maybe a lot of Americans think "wetbacks and coolie labor" when thinking Spanish and are prejudiced accordingly.

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.

Even allowing for a "power law" access pattern for the videos (and perhaps, Google optimizing storage of frequently-accessed video in RAM or fast disks...), I do wonder how the hell you can access any video in their archive virtually instantly. Their data centres must be MASSIVE.

Nothing like vaccine stories to get the loonies going, is there?

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.

LOL, Randroids and their snarl words... are you still 13 years old?

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

... is this bloke some kind of amateur Walter Mitty type, or is he for real?

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.

The difference here, is that in rural areas, you have a Dead Sea effect... anybody with any brains and talent leaves. Guess who stays behind?

Nobody I grew up with with any talent or prospects whatsoever, bothered to hang around for long.

Looks like a pretty blatant act of political corruption to me.

The only REAL problem here, is that in the US, this kind of corruption is perfectly legal.