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We had a conversation on Kuro5hin.org about this very topic. See here for the article.

There's a few things we gathered:

1. It's a "pedo crime" if 2 15 year olds go at it. Yet we consider them as adults in other avenues (that of murder/deadly assault).

2. The recent 14 year old who took webcams of herself is being tried as a kiddie porn collecter (or whatever). It's her own body, yet illegal. Wonderful florida law.

3. Pictures that end up on a school computer that have kiddie porn are ASSUMED to be a substitutes.

4. Prior cultures didnt halt sexuality as our culture has. Many aboriginal groups were sexual right after puberty. As a discussion, why has this changed? Was this change for the better or worse?

Frankly, I can discuss this (and other issues) without coming off as a complete "I HATE YOU BURN IN HELL" idiot as prior posters have. Just understand that your feelings are just that: feelings. I'd rather scientifically examine what was the past trends, current trends, and why things have changed in these ways.

Too bad K5 is hard to get into (rather nastyish clique)... unless you're floridasun. Who knows.

Repost from 2003...
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/2/103735/275

Nice recycling of a previous post from last month

Oh, and here too...not even on Slashdot October 2003

And here

Hell, I'm not going to point out more, go find them yourself

YouTube.

I hit the occasional online comic once in a while (too lazy to add URLs): Sinfest, Order of the Stick, & Penny Arcade.

Google is the launching point for 95% of my other online time, helping me find pages on stuff I'm researching.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2006/12/14/23159/ 956/2#2

if you a kill an animal and:
# of animals alive in species>100,000 = no punishment
100,000># of animals alive in species>10,000 = public chastisement
10,000># of animals alive in species>1,000 = financial punishment
10,000># of animals alive in species>1,000 = short jailtime, steeper fines
1,000># of animals alive in species>100 = longer jailtime
100># of animals alive in species>10 = longest jailtime
10># of animals alive in species>1 = permanent incarceration
# of animals alive in species=1 = execution

conclusion: a human life is worth less than the last living member of a species, but worth more than the life of any other animal member of a species with more than one member

for example, whoever killed the last baiji deserves the death penalty. of ocurse, it's not that simple: the chinese government saw this coming for a long time, and it is their responsibility to manage its lands. it is absolutely inexcuseable that a major, large, culturally, ecologically, and evolutionarily important animal such as the baiji could have been lost to us in only the past 10 years. that the baiji is now extinct, and that that probably happened only in the last few years, is a reprehensible abandonment of responsibility to the world, and to the people it serves, by the chinese government, and serves as a permanent stain on chinese civilization, something the chinese should be ashamed of for generations, and something they should ask forgiveness of to their ancestors for killing off an animal beloved to their ancestors in legend, song, dance, carving, painting, myth, and story. so how do you punish china for this crime? the extinction of the baiji is an act worthy of international condemnation, sanctions, and retribution, economic, and military:

for losing the baiji, i propose all chinese claims to the oil rich spratly islands be denied out of hand by the international community

only then will the chinese government pay attention to its crime and its continuing reponsibilities

only with this kind of attitude towards animal killing can humankind come to grips with and manage its accelerating negative impact on species diversity, which is important to humanity for many reasons: novel biological compounds, knowledge about evolution, simple aesthetics, and yes, cultural nostalgia

for species with very few members, say, the kakapo, where only a handful, about 50, still exist, killing one of them deserves very harsh punishment: permanent incarceration, for example, equivalent to punishment deserving of human murderers

but if you kill a goat? a horse? a cow? if your punishment was motivated by necessity: food, or clothing, for example, then no punishment exists at all. if it was done cruelly and without material reason or benefit, then you deserve some sort of punishment, but not a major one

someone who destroys the pyramids or the taj mahal or the afghan buddhas is certainly deserving of the death penalty. so is it so for he who kills the last of a species

one human life is not worth as much as a cultural treasure or a whole animal species, not even ten or even a hundred human lives

I stopped downloading music when audiogalaxy effectively died (ie, when they removed all copyrighted content). Ah, good days those were when it was active, what a wonderful site that was. Check out the section in this story about why it was better than other p2p networks http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/21/171321/675

Whatever. 5. pshaw. You'll never beat The first Slashdot troll post investigation. While they've gone in and tried to rewrite history, K5 has the juice.

I mean... I came here specifically to see what April 1st rumors Slashdot would try to spread. But they did not get it really right this time.

So far, the best one this year was a Swiss website that announced a traffic minister to introduce some new "climate initiative" that would contain partial dismantling of freeways.

The second best one is kuro5hin's Tron story, which I liked:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/3/28/132751/380

But NVIDIA trying to get their cards back? Give me a break. So far, the only company who went to replace hardware WITHOUT BEING ASKED to was AMD who went to replace some Opteron 254s for free. And when the contractor announced it, we thought it was a prank, and did background checks and all, which caused them some trouble as well. Turned out an isolated batch had been gone past some checks and AMD had Siemens fix it before it caused problems, without announcing it through "official channels".

But NVIDIA? They should be happy if they get their stuff out to the customer to begin with. My bet is before that, it will be a particularly cold day in hell, and then, Apple will call back their laptops to "fix" them before NVIDIA goes to get some gamers' xyz coordinates fixed by 0.1 pixels. So let's hear it for Apple callbacks :-) that company makes the whole year look like April Fool's day if you're the customer. Apple Fool's day, 24 / 365.

Maybe we should be aware of the fact that this sort of "jokes" will lead to Slashdot being pulled from the internet and replaced with Web 2.0 applications, most of which will run some sort of framework that will only be compatible with a particular browser version (Mozilla 4.78, I think).

1. An open proxy system which I've described elsewhere as The Electoral Corruption Killer.
2. The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge.

The proxy system didn't seem to appeal to people in sufficient numbers to make any impact on the electoral system. If widely adopted it would form the affinity groups in a public manner which would allow them to seek independence in conjunction with other groups that were disenfranchised. It might also put enough pressure on the political system to represent the interests of the people, although I don't hold out as much hope there.

The Hutter Prize basically depends on the largess of the wealthy (including corporations) which, as it turns out, isn't forthcoming. What the Hutter Prize would do in theory is solve the knowledge problem -- which would allow an objective metric of epistemological merit to be affixed to a given description of the world. This is the sort of thing you need if you are going to "argue" with a theocracy since theocracies insist on "dialog" rather than experimentation. It has the essential weakness of any theory-intensive approach to the problem of knowledge.

Now if you asked if it was worth learning Haskell, that would be a question worth thinking hard about because it'll demand a significant chunk of your time.

As seen on Kuro5hin.org: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/2/103735/275

I can't believe someone posted this AGAIN. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/2/103735/275 If more MAFIAA cases made it to court, there'd be more justice. Judges and juries are better than lawyers. I mean morally better, which isn't saying much I know.

In 2006, Epic records attempted to remaster the first two Boston albums; however, this was done without any input from Scholz, who is notoriously protective of his work. Scholz was astounded that the quality of the remastering was so poor and personally took over the reins of the project in order to ensure that the final product was of the highest quality.

I know it was the stone age but when I was growing up people saved up for a record album, yes I mean vinyl records. If they couldn't aford it they just listened to the radio.

And when I was growing up in the stone age, we all had cassette recorders. We not only recorded LPs and swapped the cassettes we had recorded with our friends, we recorded the damned radio, too!

And since I grew up in St. Louis, home of KSHE, the first FM stereo rock station ("Real Rock Radio"), who played entire albums (and still do, seven of them every Sunday night), we recorded entire albums off the radio.

Where do you come from that you never legally swapped cassettes? This USED to be considered "fair use", later legally codified as such under the 1976 Audio Home Recording Act (the linked article refers to a 1992 change to the law and isn't entirely correct or accurate)

You might want to check out an article I wrote at K5 a few years ago, Birth of a label-sanctioned pirate radio station. Check out the comments, IIRC one of KSHE's original DJs responded.

I'm pretty up on stuff in the automotive world, though not as much as when I was building a race car. I think that you should read this article before you assume that a diesel engine can beat a gasoline engine every time - it is more complicated than that, and Le Mans is a special kind of race.

I happen to think that diesels are fine for daily drivers - but unless the rules are tilted in diesel's favor (as in Le Mans), I wouldn't build a race car with one. In general, more power-to-weight is better, even if the torque is not as nice.

I don't think you understand where Larry is coming from. People on Wikipedia didn't give Larry the suck-up action he felt he deserved; you can read about it in his Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism essay over at The Other Site. Despite Larry's previous position that authorities must be kowtowed to, he's now complaining that Wikipedia provided too much deference to a self-proclaimed elite (though I'm unaware of Essjay actually bludgeoning anyone with his credentials, it's quite legitimate to presume that his claims influenced how his edits were received).

Jimbo has GodKing powers over all of Wikipedia, and the people there regard his word as law. People don't trash-talk Jimbo, because they might find themselves unexpectedly WP:OFFICE'd or somesuch. Well, gosh-darn-it, Larry wants some of that sweet dictatorship action. But he can't get it on Wikipedia, because he stomped off and missed the gravy boat. Whoopsie. His k5 essay should have been titled "Why Wikipedia Must Defer To Larry Sanger's Genius".

It's not until we see projects like Citizendium or Conservapedia that we can truly appreciate how much worse Wikipedia could have been. There's a million things they've done wrong, but these attempts to one-up them show how much they've done right.

Really? I was under the impression that patent law was intended to protect intellectual property. In the same way that real estate law is intended to protect greographical property.

Patent law may be this way or it may not be, however patents themself are meant to encourage progress:

USA Constitution:
Section 8 - Powers of Congress
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Thomas Jefferson was originally against patents but then his friend James Madison convinced him patents could encourage progress. Once convinced Jefferson sat down with an actuary table and calculated a patent term of 14 year with one 14 year extension possible was the optimum length they should last.

The US patent system is a well of misery, corporate bootlicking, and "let's crush the little guy" methodologies. Sure, everyone else looks to the US system, because it is a system designed to turn over money, not encourage innovation. The fact that it manages to encourage at least corporations to innovate can be considered a side effect. It certainly isn't the main goal of the system, which is to feed the legal profession a regular set of juicy, meaty bones.

As the patent system in the US is now it is a drag on progress, which it was originally supposed to do, however it has been corrupted. As have copyrights. Thomas Jefferson was originally against patents but then his friend James Madison convinced him patents could encourage progress. Once convinced Jefferson sat down with an actuary table and calculated a patent term of 14 year with one 14 year extension possible was the optimum length they should last.

The number of devices/programs you can actually create without running smack into someone's fool patent is very near zero. So much for encouraging innovation.

That's not the fault of patents, that's a symtom of a broken patent system. More needs to be done to investigate whether a patent application actually deserves to be awarded, whether prior art already exists or if something is actually novel. Also in no way, shape, or form, should patents be issued for either algorithms, business methods, or for software!!!

The trouble is, you have guys like American Idol's musically tasteless Simon Cowell producing records and signing artists. Today's music sounds like the worst of 1950s pop (Paul Anka, Bobby Vinton).

It's utter crap. What they play on the so-called "rock" station here in Springfield (WQLZ) is Cowelized minor key whiney bullshit. I don't want music to make me cry or put me to sleep, I want it to raise my heart rate and blood pressure and put a smile on my face. I want to ROCK. I've only heard one band that originated in this century, Buckcherry (Crazy Bitch, Cocaine etc) that actually plays rock and roll. Hell, compared to today's mainstream "rockers" Little Richard was a macho stud!

You folks might be interested in a Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads, a Michael Crawford piece at K5 from a few years ago, back before Pete Jongular ran me off the site. I think Mike's still there, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I miss the place, did anybody ever shoot that asshat Jongular yet?

But at any rate, Mike did us all a great service by posting that piece. There is a lot of good stuff in there.

-mcgrew

Hmmm you are right. According to this guy the BSD based TCP/IP stack was only used in windows NT versions before 3.5, and was already gone by the time Windows 95 came out.

And as for the other point, what I was saying more specifically was, "Microsoft can not use GPL software the way they want to." Of course I didn't use all those words, I merely implied it, but I thought the meaning would be clear to anyone reading. Apparently not.

according to certain sources, all/most commercial aircraft in the US had/have a system installed which allows the government to control a plane from the ground through a backdoor in the autopilot system

No showstopper? Can you cite references to this back-door into the autopilot system? I could see where a nasty individual on the plane could maybe program some GPS waypoints into the autopilot that takes them to downtown Manhattan, but injection of this from the ground? And without the pilot being able to do anything about it?

That leaves the "replacement planes" theory... Where are all the people that were on those flights? Surely this theory would dictate that the flights were switched and the passengers were spirited away somewhere and disappeared?

Sure:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/5/17/172914/576

That poll shows that 74% of the respondants thought they either had autism/aspergers, or might have it. Only 26% of respondants thought they didn't have it.

Digg is dead.

FOAD.

Ich Bindawalross (London) - GNAA (NYSE: GNAA) President timecop released a statement today regarding the immediate Internet release of MacOS X for the x86 architecture, available on many BitTorrent networks. After making the statement, timecop yielded the stage to a second speaker at the press conference, Apple Computer co-Founder and CEO, Steve "Rim" Jobs, now fully recovered from his recent gender reassignment surgery to field questions from attending press members.

"We here at Apple Computerth [sic] have decided on a slightly different path for the upcoming version of the MacOS X," Jobs states before bursting out into high pitched giggles. "We have replaced our overpriced and bloated software with an efficient and easy-to-use interface. I would like to take this opportunity to announce a merger larger than a Zimbabwe nigger cock: GNAA and Apple Computer."

Returning to the podium, timecop began speaking again, while Steve Jobs submitted to orally pleasuring his ten inch nigger cock. "Dedicated faggots have been loyally purchasing the homosexual software and hardware abomination that is Macintosh computers. Apple has been striving to provide software customers with the most flambouyantly homosexual combination available. However, in recent days, this hasn't been enough.

"There has been increasing pressure from the disgustingly obese Lunix nerds and the socially well-adjusted and popular Windows users to convert, as well as pressure from OS X emulators to provide consumers with increasingly gay products. Apple Computer has decided to merge with GNAA in order to broaden the appeal and better serve the interests of all those who buy Macintosh products. Furthermore, we will adopt Apple's "Step 2 ???? PROFIT!" marketing model. This will also stop Apple from going out of business, which they probably would have otherwise."

At this point, timecop paused and deposited a quart of Gaynigger seed into Steve Jobs' mouth.

"GNAApple is committed to our new OS X86. Rather than give the user the difficulty of finding pornography themselves, we provide them with the classic hello.jpg, redundantly archived and brand labeled throughout the 950 MB DVD image, as well as a bundled copy of GPA (Gay Porn Avalanche). Now, greater efficiency in masturbatory pursuits can be provided to all."

"As Slashdot users, many of you might have been exposed to the pirated release, and information pertaining to it. We would like to thank Rob "CmdrCocko" Malda for running the first article, leading to the release of information about our upcoming merger. We would also like to extend our gratitude to thepiratebay.org and XiSO for helping us spread the release over the 'underground scene.' We thank you, the IRC channels who put it on their hacked .edu xdcc bots and fserves who hosted it on your dialup connections.

Steve Jobs, recovering from the large dosage of AIDS from the variety of syphilitic, festering sores of GNAA members, rose to his feet at this point during the press conference. "Our previous versions of OS X were released prematurely, and as a result the operating system was unstable and fragile. Our team of software engineers have also decided to abandon the weak and inefficient UNIX backside in favor of a more efficient and robust alternative: WinNT. The pirated version of our new operating system has had record acclaim from users of the Jewish-based internet news organization known as "Slashdot".

"Those doubting the superiority of our new release need only read user testimonials."

"The Torrent going around as: Mac OS X Tiger X86 READNFO-XISO It's a complete fake. When the image is booted it shows a picture of a guy showing off his Bu** H**e." - Anon Coward

"if you unrar, burn, and boot like the .nfo file says, it just boots it to a very lovely goatse image. no joke, wast

Actually, I think you'll find this site had that little thing going first... ;)

And if you include the copyright factor, your interesting question becomes a bit ironic too.

There was an even more interesting CNN article (copy here) that outlined how even the families involved had started looking at ways to cash in on his long-exploited notoriety.

Posting anon, because this could be construed as being a little off-topic (but only a little)...

A poster on Kuro5hin was questioned by the secret service after a post. Here's the article.

> Or perhaps overbearing or maybe victimized?

Maybe the fact that he's physically scarred over half his face, his whole neck, and his right hand has something to do with it.

The story was posted on k5 early in '06.

It's a perfect case of someone who's fallen through the cracks of our perfect government here in the US. He doesn't qualify for any sort of disability, his employers have always denied his unemployment (after running him ragged in circles and then kicking him out the door), he's highly educated, but the fact remains that his high intelligence and his physical appearance (coupled with his unofficial training in psychosocial warfare) make others feel ill-at-ease when forced to work side-by-side with him in the workplace. Due to the inherent method with which people treat those like him in society he's now been typecast as inflammatory, prone to flying off the handle, and in general undesirable for a stable mind-numbing workplace. Under his former online alias "maximilln" (Maximillion Photon) in the late nineties he also managed to make some fairly substantial enemies who used their priveleged positions in their respective industries (some with security clearances) to make his real life hell.

He'd be perfect for a leadership role on a high intensity research project but nobody wants to take the bullet and admit that they've been fuc|<ing him over, royally, for their own amusement for so many years. Let's face reality: his former managers (and those who derived amusement from trolling/taunting him online for years) have families, careers, agendas, public image, and social positions of their own to protect.

"The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few" doesn't say a darn thing about whether or not the many created their own nemesis.

other idiocies:

1. the nickel itself is worth more than a nickel for the same reason the penny is worth more than a penny. the penny should just be gotten rid of
2. bills are the same color (the salmon pink $10 bill is a recent relief from that) and size so they are hard to tell apart easily, and impossible to tell apart for the blind... who in fact recently sued and won the us govt over this fact
3. a dollar coin you can't tell apart from quarters easily (still, i am talking about the sacagawea: same approximate size/ weight)

the usa is the largest important economy in the world, but its currency is designed worse than the coinage/ bills of some third world countries. i wrote a story about it recently on kuro5hin. i think australia has some of the best designed currency in the world (different colors/ sizes for the blind, made of plastic, not linen, etc.)

the us should do a dramatic rethink of the design of their bills and coins, what we have now is depressingly outdated, archaic, and not very user friendly

put out a remix album awhile back

i found some info on it

those tracks blew me away, and i would have NEVER have found that music had i played "legit" and not pirated

i didn't even know what the armin van buuren/ ayumi hamasaki album was until i looked for it just now, even though i've playing songs from it for years and i deeply dig those remixes. i'm utterly beyond the notion of albums. i haven't bought a cd since 1999, and i never will again

i don't think i'll ever go to itunes either, because i'm too into the idea of "following my nose": start with a track i like, find out what else is related to that song/ what else is hosted by whomever is sharing it, and download hundreds of those songs, throwing out 98% of them. this shotgun search approach gets very expensive on itunes, but not on emule. after a few rounds of "following your nose", starting with a song very familiar to you that you love, you "fall down the rabbit hole" as the original poster says, and you wind up in a universe of foreign recorded/ underground music you hadn't the foggiest idea existed, and yet you absolutely are ecstatic about

however, i recently found a "legit" way of the shotgun approach i've mentioned above: http://pandora.com. i read an article about them and they apparently hire people to listen to music all day, categorizing it. besides being notable as what sounds like a dream job for a music lover, it's kind of sad that pandora has to do manually what the internet can do automatically, as i've already discovered, years ago

say what you want about piracy, but in terms of a music lover's experience, it is the garden of eden compared to being "legit". i don't know how to be legit anymore, i don't think i ever will again. the experience as a music lover renders it impossible for me to consider something so stone age as the itunes paradigm of buying individual tracks. i want to inhale 1000s of tracks based on search words, throw out 900 of them in rapid succession, and find bizarre gems of world music/ underground music there is no way in a million years i would ever have found through any legit copyright addled mode

i'm a lifer, there's no way i'll ever buy music again, and before you holier than thou a@@holes lecture me on stealing from starving third world musicians, consider the fact that if it weren't for piracy, i wouldn't have been listening to them in the first place. solve that paradox, then get back to me with your attitude. i'm not downloading justin timberlake and beyonce knowles. i'm going after esoteric (to me in new york city) tracks i can't get my hands on any other way. i'd like the music industry or copyright wankers to address what i really am interested in (foreign and underground esoteric and exotic tracks) before they find some way to consider me an enemy. they can't

i wrote an article about it a long time ago, in 2003, that, bizarrely, i keep find being cited around the web

If you have a few hours, check out The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect at k5 http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/ .

Scary scary story by baldrson.

See also KDB from kx.com.
It's the database used by most large financial institutions (Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, UBS, etc); and stores all it's variables on the global K stack.

For thy types of database work stock traders do, it's orders of magnitude faster than the Oracles, etc of the world.

http://kx.com/
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2002/ 11/14/22741/791

private\mvdm\wow32\wcntl32.c: // These undocumented messages are used by Excel 5.0

While I agree with you that the current Office developers are simply good and talented coders and aren't simply leeching off of some undocumented API for their spiffy graphics, it's long been alleged that Microsoft has used undocumented APIs for Office. While I can't find the cite, I believe this was a key part of the anti-trust lawsuit.

You can see "documentation" for many of them on the Sysinternals site. One thing I'd warn against is actually using these calls in production code. Undocumented means unsupported -- MS could decide tomorrow to yank these in their next XP hotfix, and your code would be left hanging high'n'dry. Not that they're likely to do it, but what if one of these had a worm come along exploiting it? The quick and obvious fix would be to simply remove it.

Here's an example of a netizen who was 'interviewed' by the secret service after having posted a comment. Follow the link in his story to read the comment which attracted their attention. Then realize: Your comments are public.

I've never drunk a jolt in my life....

Oh, and, here's another good discussion of the issue: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/16/143616/593

To be fair, Bill Gates denied saying it, and nobody has come up with an original cite or witness to the quote. That doesn't mean that he didn't say something "wrong or stupid" (which he admits to doing on other occasions). Not like he hasn't been wrong in the recent past (SPAM predictions, for example - it's been two years, Bill, and it's getting worse.

While it's possible he's innocent of saying something that funny, Intel for instance has it on their web site in a 2004 article:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/ge lsinger20040219.htm

Sounds like the following like may shed some light on this (presuming it's true):

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/6/18/171425/218

So it possible Bill is innocent. Still it's dang funny to say :-)

To supply Windows preinstalled is a choice they have made to, theoretically, make their customers happy. Why is OS selection any different then choosing which vendor made the chipset?

They why is it that in terms of software they only supply the product of a single software company. Is there anything in the OEM contract that compells this.

'Microsoft Corporation forces contracted Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), who receive significantly lower prices on Microsoft's Windows operating system, not to install any operating system besides Microsoft Windows'

was: Isn't an HP a bundle of 3rd party products anyway

Why stop at biology. I suggest an alternative to physics.

There is a strong physiological underpinning to burnout, as years of constant stress and little sleep take their toll on the brain (in fact, the last stages of burnout are very much like those of a clinical depression). It is possible to recover, but it can take *years* and it's a difficult process.

A while back I wrote an article for Kuro5hin on this same subject, and that got plenty of positive responses. It was later expanded and wikified into a Wikibook which you might find interesting: Demystifying Depression

(Yeah, sorry for the shameless plug, but this is important stuff that all of us in IT should be aware of. Besides, the link is to a public wikibook, not to my personal blog or anything.)

Maybe, but why do the people in poor countries accept and even welcome the sweat shops, horrible working conditions, repression, etc? Perhaps, because it's better than what they had before?

Noam Chomsky points out in >Class War: The Attack on Working People (a talk given at MIT in 1995 or so) that "people in poor countries" used to do just fine as farmers. But then they got their legs cut out from underneath them by subsidized grain imports from the United States (and other countries with highly mechanized agriculture). So they started abandoning the countryside for the cities, willing to work for cheap. Western companies have been taking advantage of this new source of cheap labor by firing their "expensive" western labor.

The only people who benefit from this setup are the already-wealthy. Even though the cost of "stuff" has gone down tremendously since the push for so-called "free trade" got started some 14 years ago, 'our' (we, the masses) incomes have gone down even more. Found a copy of The Screwing of the Average Man recently, and it advocates the CATCH-85 rule: "The fallacy in youtooism. Under Catch-85, the number of people who benefit from a special privilege is limited to no more than (usually the wealthiest) 15 percent of the population."

"YOUTOOISM: 1. The belief that whatever applies to the rich applies to the average man, too. 2. The strategy for seducing people into accepting their own screwing. It consists of giving the average man just enough of a break to convince him he's benefiting from the system."

I'm amazed at how many people in this story are defending their own screwing, because they've been tricked by that "15%" that they benefit too.

I got modded "flamebait" recently for pointing out that the United States is bankrupt (and can't afford another Apollo-style moonshot). I'm sure someone with modpoints will be tempted to give this comment the same treatment. But before they do, I hope they consider first whether they are part of the 15%, or part of the 85%.

Chomsky's talk is good; I found it as a .torrent with just a little searching...

CONCLUSION

There are 77 million baby boomers now ranging from age 41 to age 59. All are hoping to collect tens of thousands of dollars in pension and healthcare benefits from the next generation. These claimants aren't going away. In three years, the oldest boomers will be eligible for early Social Security benefits. In six years, the boomer vanguard will start collecting Medicare. Our nation has done nothing to prepare for this onslaught of obligation. Instead, it has continued to focus on a completely meaningless fiscal metric--"the" federal deficit--censored and studiously ignored long-term fiscal analyses that are scientifically coherent, and dramatically expanded the benefit levels being explicitly or implicitly promised to the baby boomers.

Countries can and do go bankrupt. The United States, with its $65.9 trillion fiscal gap, seems clearly headed down that path. The country needs to stop shooting itself in the foot. It needs to adopt generational accounting as its standard method of budgeting and fiscal analysis, and it needs to adopt fundamental tax, Social Security, and healthcare reforms that will redeem our children's future.

(emphasis added)

I wrote an article a couple years ago called Useful Dead Technologies. One was the "gravity furnace", 1930s tech. I had one in an old house I rented. There is no blower, and the thermostat works from power the furnace generates itself. It needs no electricity and isn't hooked to the power grid.

I was wishing I had one Friday after the ice storm took out Springfield's power. Thank God for my gas stove; an old one with the old fashioned pilot lights.

The U.S.-China economic relationship is a highly unusual one between a First World and a Third World country. Moreover, the U.S. trade deficit with China in manufactured goods and advanced technology products is growing rapidly. What explains the U.S. dependence on a poor country for First World products?

The answer, and the key to China's rapid development, is that corporations in First World countries--American businesses chief among them--use China as an offshore location where they produce for their home markets. More than half of U.S. imports from China, and as much as 70 percent from some of China's coastal regions, represent offshore production by American firms for U.S. markets.

What economists overlook is that when we speak of the Chinese economy, we are speaking in large part of the relocation of American manufacturing to China. Those millions of lost domestic manufacturing jobs were not lost. They were moved. The jobs still exist, only they are not filled by Americans.

In a world where capital and technology are highly mobile internationally, these critical factors of production flow to countries with the lowest cost of labor. China has attracted manufacturing, and India has attracted professional services. This has left the American work force with job growth only in lower-paid domestic services, which provide no export earnings.

-Who Owns the Dollar? (emphasis added)

Most Americans live in a media-induced Never-Never Land, where the American economy, stockmarket and military machines are invincible because they always have been. Never mind that this is demonstrably false (great depresion, 1970's inflationary recession, Vietnam, Iraq, etc) - we're conditioned via compulsory government schooling and the idiot-box (television) to have a short memory.

More on the Screwing of average folk...

I gave people $1 (1 ounce) silver coins last Christmas. Think I traded around 10 or 11 "Feral Reserve Notes" for each one. Silver is now up to $13.75 or so, so I'm looking at having to put out about 50% more funny-money paper if I want to do the same thing this year (coin dealers typically charge spot + $2, iirc). Inflation at work.

If I had another $10k, I'd split it between metals and Euros... As it is, I'm sitting on a couple hundred ounces of silver and a couple ounces of gold. Not a sure thing, but the economy we know is doomed. The stock market is terminal too, but the big money will be sure to get out first, in keeping with the traditional screwing of the masses (that's 'us' - me, you, and everyone who reads this comment who doesn't pull in $1million/year).

Actually, I'd buy more Earthboxes, potting mix, and fertilizer (already have plenty of seed). $10k could get me two pallets worth (200), and all the potting mix and f

... And Sam Walton is surely turning over in his grave. I found an article in my Grandmothers house where Walton played up buying "towels" from an American producer rather than one in Hong Kong. After he died, WalMart lost any semblance of principles the collective company once might have had.

See Patrick Buchanan's New Deal For U.S. Manufacturers for one take on how the "market" is rigged to screw american workers.

(I always thought cosmopolitan was just the name of a magazine, then I looked it up...)

If they did that, they'd have to outlaw half of the open source apps and 99% of the closed-source ones. Including one obscure Microsoft product. =)

Actually, since the laws generally just codify existing rational practices (or at least that's what they're generally supposed to do), it'd make much more sense to pass a law requiring the kernel source code comments to include profanities, as keeping the profanities confined to places where they matter leads to friendlier development environment.

That's a good question. This link has some interesting info: Happy Birthday

Here is one reference: http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/ 6/19/05641/7357