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.

Greed makes you stupid.

And rural backwaters are full of stupid, greedy people. I knew because I was forced to grow up in one.

Smart guy, but a bit of a windbag. Expressing himself clearly obviously isn't one of his strong suits.

And TBH, betraying a confidence and humiliating people in public also rates as unethical. I normally don't give a damn about muslims, but that's pretty rude.

Nice to see the good guys get ahead for once. A world run by the likes of Russia, China or the Muslims would be hell, and we need to be prepared.

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.

Fuckwit OP is big-noting himself.

Only a minority of practicing developers truly get good enough at concurrent programming to brag about it.

You haven't ever been forced to use ClearCase, have you?

I am slightly irritated with the stupid barely-graduated Dunning-Kruger dimwits out there, who seem to think that if you're old enough to have accumulated the responsibilities of an adult (as opposed to burning yourself out and wasting your youth working 70-hour weeks for stock options), then you're some kind of shirking cunt.

The Peter Pan syndrome is alive and well, it seems.

The OP quotes a single data point of somebody with a few years under their belt (and a bad attitude), and then with very broad brushstrokes, paints anybody who isn't junior and wet-behind-the-years a waste of space.

Accumulating know-how in pointless brand-new hipster technologies when you're a graduate (and have nothing better to do) is one thing. It's quite another to have the experience to know how to most efficient devote your limited time and energy.

I'm quietly rooting for the Assads.

The reason is that while both sides of that squalid little war are a bunch of murderers, the Syrian government are the good guys. They are secular, non-sectarian, believe in women's rights and the rights of minorities.

The other guys are a bunch of terrorists with big filthy dirty beards, who take money from Wahhabi extremists in the Gulf states, and would rape and/or cut the throats of anybody who does not live up to the utterly extreme brand of conservative Islam.

They're both fighting like animals. The secularists are fighting like animals because their lives depend on it. The other side are fighting like animals because of their religious fervour and political ideals -- they ARE animals. Our enemies are Al Qaeda, the EXACT same monsters Assad is fighting in Syria.

Frankly, I think we're backing the wrong horse. I think that nerve gas and cluster bombs is too good for the dirty bearded terrorists they're fighting, and we should be thanking Assad and kissing his arse for taking out this Wahhabi trash for us.

Why are we backing the terrorists in this war? Because a bunch of undereducated, illiterate idiots in the "Arab street" root for the terrorists? Fuck the Arab Street, let's not bow to cheap populism, and just do what's right for a change.