FASCISM is to blame!

For example, he may have worked with Wikileaks, been in contact with Snowden, or have some other non-Snowden issue that caused Customs to be very interested in him.

So he exercised his rights to free speech and he gets harassed and stolen from by the government, and you're OK with this? Shame on you.

I'm pretty sure that New Zealand customs does not randomly target backpackers for confiscation of electronics and this is not an example of a police state gone mad.

Confiscating electronics is ALWAYS an example of a police state gone mad. Electronics contain information. Confiscating information is a violation of our rights to free speech.

I'm sure he knows the real reason they took his stuff

Blame the victim. Shame on you.

Well, yes. As a Russian, I can also assure you that our government is extremely corrupt, and that it is strongly rooted in society :)

The differences usually start to come up when you ask the person about details. What Americans describe as "corrupt", vs what me or my Indian friends can tell them about our countries, is worlds apart.

If they'd done it in the '80s, that would have been a good idea, however even if they did get the North Sea reserves, they're almost gone now, so it's not a good long-term strategy.

You end up with a choice of: 1) wait for the service to come back up; or 2) visit an office in person and talk to a civil servant.

Basically the same choice you have when your bank's internet banking is down. If you need to initiate a transfer, you either wait for it to come back up, or you walk into a bank to do it. If their backend system is down, you can't walk into a bank either, so you just wait in that case. Same here; if you want to register a new corporation and the site is down, you either fill out the registration on paper and submit it the old-fashioned way, or you wait for the site to come back up.

Yeah, I guess that should read, more precisely: The opinion however leaves open the possibility that individual member states could choose to adopt data-retention rules in their national law, unless their national constitution also forbids such a mandate.

Key to the opinion seems to be that it conflicts with existing EU law to mandate data-retention at the EU level. The opinion however leaves open the possibility that individual member states could choose to adopt data-retention rules in their national law... so it doesn't say that data-retention mandates necessarily conflict with rights guaranteed in Europe, either. One of the things that seems to have particularly discomfited the opinion-writer is that implementing this kind of thing as an EU-wide mandate frustrates the ability of individual member states to issue more narrow mandates that keep data within their borders and have stronger privacy protections.

"It is so much less than carbon dioxide, but the important thing is on a per molecule basis, it is very very effective in interacting with heat from the Earth."

There are a number of gases that are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. The issue with carbon dioxide isn't that it has a particularly extreme greenhouse-gas effect, but the combination of two things: 1) it is a somewhat potent greenhouse gas; and 2) we are releasing a huge amount of it at pretty incredible industrial scales. Not a little bit here and there in obscure industrial processes, but through things like coal power plants that literally burn 100 to 200 train cars' worth of coal per day (a typical train car fits ~100 tonnes of coal). The scale is actually pretty impressive, in an old-school, 19th-century industrialism sort of way. The sheer volume of coal these plants burn is such that just keeping it coming regularly is a logistical challenge, and there's a whole industry around technology to unload these 100-car trains in few enough hours that you can get the next one in.

The short of it is that [potency x volume] is the basic issue. Very potent but miniscule releases aren't that important, though it's worth keeping on eye on them.

In this world you cannot be both ridiculously reasonable and neutral on most things.

Don't they know what happens when you fsck a server in the alps?

Already been done

Quite the contrary. In every alternate universe you ended up with a Hollywood starlet. it's just in this one that you suck really, really hard.

Seriously, though, I thought we already knew that you could perfectly describe the contents of a black hole because entropy can never decrease / information can never be destroyed. I thought this information was all accumulated at the event horizon. /Lay man.

The program sounds like it had a nutty origin (like the analogous U.S. programs), but from this part:

Interestingly, the Soviets included non-local physics in this work, such as the Aharonov-Bohm effect in which an electromagnetic field can influence a particle confined to region where the field strength is zero. And they built a number of devices that exploited the effect, although research in this area appears to have ended in 2003.

That sounds like legitimate physics research. Research into the principle of locality is unlikely to produce a mind-controlled teleportation beam, but it has yielded a better understanding of quantum mechanics.

it is perfectly acceptable steal from corporations

It is unacceptable to steal from people. It is impossible to "steal" from a corporation. If you're stealing, you're stealing from a person somewhere along the line.

Corporations are fictive entities designed to provide liability to aggregate capital. They do not enter into my moral calculus in any way.

A good paper is not necessarily a paper that will win a Nobel prize. If you're just sitting there and thinking really hard, hoping for inspiration to strike, then you'll have difficulty doing this. For everyone else, you always have intermediate results that give you something useful and it's incredibly valuable to share these with the wider community so you don't end up with everyone doing the same work in secret. If you can't manage to publish at even this rate, then you are being far too secretive about your work to justify an academic position.

Oh, and it's not once a year, it's once a year on average, over four years. So if you work on a big project for 2-3 years and then get a flurry of papers out at the end, then that's fine too.