It's been my experience that Russians do not trust Western media at all, and consider it to have a strong anti-Russian bias.

There are a number of reasons already mentioned in response, including the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. One more is that if you have proof of some wrongdoing by the government, the government can take action to ensure no one else sees said proof.

Care to provide a citation? Actually there is a very good economic reason why carnivore meat is not widely consumed: you will need to grow, say, 1,000 kg of grain to raise 100 kg of herbivore meat; for 100 kg carnivore meat, you will need to grow 10,000 kg of grain to feed 1,000 kg of herbivore to raise 100 kg of carnivore. Jared Diamond - whom I am paraphrasing here - claims to have tried lion meat and found it delicious.

I have to agree with everything except point 1. We do not know what information China and Russia got out of this, and may never know. In my book, he is at least part hero on account of point 3. He probably gave some (relatively) harmless information about hacking of Chinese universities as a bargaining chip to get safe passage. But if he brought any really sensitive information that should be kept secret along with him, he acted either very foolishly, since Russia and/or China would find a way to obtain it, or he acted treasonously in giving it to an unfriendly foreign government.

The paper ballots introduced a few years ago really left a lot to be desired. You filled the things out at a desk with a visor that just about anyone can look over, and would be in plain sight to anyone who happened to be walking behind you. You put the ballot in a manilla envelope that would only partially cover it and walked across the room and fed into a reader, that was out in the open. Not one iota of privacy. With the voting booths, you pulled a lever and a curtain closed around you. You could probably change your clothes in the thing without anyone noticing.

you don't eat softshell crab?

NK has a very strong IT sector - http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/for-outsourcing-it-have-you-considered-north-korea

So an employer if needs X person-hours of work to be done, but only has $XY in his pocket, where $Y minimum wage, the Treasury will simply print up some extra cash to give the employer to make up the difference?

Just don't got to any of the kids sites, and problem solved. Mine (pre-K and K aged) spend no time whatsoever interacting with a computer, and are the better for it IMHO.

Also, time travel as used in sf (though I really don't have a broad survey of the literature to make a general pronouncement) never goes beyond the most simplistic assumptions, that time is a linear, deterministic process; i.e. you go back in time you better make sure your parents fall in love or else you will cease to exist, or you accidentally step on a butterfly, which causes through the compounding of changes ultimately leading to a fascist winning an election. The idea that the act of time travel induces a fork in reality or that the changes need time to propagate up towards the present, or any of the other possible implications seems never to be explored.

My wife *knows* it is caused by exposure to cold weather :)

Unfortunately I don't have the points to mod you up for pointing out something that is true, though it seems the majority of slashdotters can't figure that out. But I will say that, although corporations can't buy elections, they can and do buy the politicians.

Wrong comparison. Most programmers don't write for textbooks, and those that do I would think are exceptionally good coders. A more apt comparison would be between the code written for CS students for academic projects and that written by working professionals in the field.

It's been a while since I read _Code Complete_, but I believe it does cite a number of studies suggesting productivity increases with certain coding conventions. But not all conventions are created equal. Having everyone use the same indentation is essential, and does hurt productivity when it isn't adhered to. Naming conventions make code tidy and more predictable, but in my experience does little or nothing for productivity. Others are just nitpicky and useless - for example in a previous job, the expression in all return statements was required to to be enclosed in parentheses - or even just plain stupid, as Hungarian notation in Java code (all objects have an "o" prefix, integers have an "i", and so on), this also in the same company.

Obviously you don't read all the news, AC. The UK refused to hand over Gary McKinnon. Ditto for Switzerland and Roman Polanski. The EU will not hand anyone over to the USA in cases where the death penalty may be sought.