> Guns are part of the problem, they are certainly not part of the solution.
You imply an excluded middle. What if they're neither part of the problem, nor the solution (if it's merely that Americans are by culture more violent, removing guns won't reduce crime rates because criminals will simply use other means)? Or, what if they're both part of the problem and part of the solution? Don't be so quick to say that it's simply gun proliferation that's the root of all violent crime. There's nothing more solid than anecdotal evidence either way in most cases, simply because there's a huge dynamic at work and guns are only a part of that dynamic. For example, the proliferation of guns in Israel is large, and the amount of violent crime there is astronomical. The gun proliferation in Switzerland is comparable, but their crime rate is extremely low. Lots of guns in both places, but the difference in cultural attitude makes a big difference, don't you think?
Virg
P.S. You can't possibly imagine that the U.S. has the most violent society on the planet. Does your planet comprise only the U.S. and Europe? Perhaps you've never heard of Africa. Or Southeast Asia. Or the Middle East. Or perhaps Central America. Broad, indefensible statements like this do little to help your case.
Then where do you start? Do you simply assume that you know who did it, and just keep cirling outward until you assume you've enveloped everyone? This makes no sense. If you don't know who's specifically responsible, you're shooting at random.
> This is the same as if a gang of 5 murder someone. Unless one of them turns on the others, the DA doesn't care who is the murderer. The DA tries ALL of them for murder. This is the same thing.
I guess you're not a lawyer or a judge. The DA not only cares who is the murderer in your gang, but although it can try all of them, the court must convict each of them separately. If there's enough evidence to convict three, but not enough to convict two, they don't call for majority and lock them all up.
> About Hitler. You are a bit wrong. Sure maybe the treaty brought
> Hitler to power. But Hitler ONLY started invading and land
> grabbing when no one stood up to him.
The first place Hitler annexed was the Sudetenland, which was part of pre-WWI Germany. Nobody "said" anything (in fact, France "said" quite a bit, but decided it wasn't ready to fight another war) because it was widely seen as an internal matter. When he annexed Austria, many of the allies promptly declared war on Germany. So, he didn't grab any land uncontested that wasn't part of Germany before WWI.
> Ok, we built bunkers, to protect them from carpet bombing, from which they attacked the Soviet Union, then the S.U. invaded?
You're misreading me, and not following history. We financed the creation of the Mujahideen (sp?), which started terroristic attacks against the U.S.S.R., they responded by invading, and we responded to that by financing the weapons and the construction of hard points. It's fairly easy to find fault in that, no?
> Sorry Charlie. Just because the Palestinians claimed the land does not make it theirs.
By your logic, anybody could take over any land they wanted. Not only did the Palestinians claim the land, they lived there. Basically, you're saying that the only claims on land are claims that can be defended by force, and that's exactly what happened. But, that doesn't make it any more right to them.
> This would be the same at the US govt giving land the the Jews in South Carolina and some group living in a county there saying that it was theirs.
There's the slight difference that the U.S. government didn't have any land rights in the Middle East. Few will deny the fact that the U.S. government has some claim to South Carolina, but no such right of territory existed for what is now Israel (which, by the way, was a part of Jordan until we annexed it). This example is the same as the U.S. government giving land in Egypt to the Jews, and local people complaining that it was theirs.
> And as for the Israeli's kicking the Palestinians ass'es oh well. The Palestinians forced that issue a while back the the Israeli's stood their ground and even puched them back. In a war sometimes you win land and sometimes you lose land. The Palestinians have always lost. But they started the war.
Two points: First, the Palestinians were there before the Israelis showed up, so the Israelis didn't "stand their ground", they pushed them off the land. Second, since (by military definition) the Israelis invaded Jordan (remember, this land was part of Jordan on the world map since nearly the 1600s), you can't exactly say that the Palestinians started the war.
> And Arafat showed his true colors last year. He was offered MORE than
> he asked for. And he turned it down. He doesn't want peace and he proved it.
I did some investigative legwork about this, and it turns out you're wrong. What was offered to the PLO was a piece of land that was larger than the parts of the West Bank that the PLO wanted, but it wasn't located on the West Bank. Since the whole reason for the fight is that the West Bank is holy land to the Palestinians, this wasn't by any means more than what he wanted, it was different, and it was unacceptable to them. He doesn't want a peace that involves Palestine displacement from their holy lands, but that's not the same as not wanting peace at any price (for an analogy, think about whether the American people would be willing to trade the grounds of the Alamo for a 600-acre tract of land somewhere near Mexico City). It seems you've fallen victim to spin doctoring. You might want to take a look at the actual treaty papers (they're on the 'Net) before you judge.
> A few decades ago, NO terrorist would attack the USA.
Um, terrorists have been attacking the USA for centuries. They usually reserved their attacks for U.S. military establishments in other parts of the world, but as those targets get harder to attack, they've changed their focus to the relatively easier mainland. This isn't an indication of boldness, it's an indication of A) the relative ease of attacking the U.S. mainland as opposed to U.S. military targets, and B) the general increase in terrorism in the entire world (war has gotten to be too expensive for most nations so terrorism is the only route).
> The only way to deal with terrorist is to out the fear of God into them.
What, the fear of your God? No more likely than you kneeling and facing east every day.
> Fear and only fear keeps terrorists from attacking. This is all they understand.
It's odd that the people who make a living out of studying terrorists don't agree with you, as you've obviously sunk at least a full ten seconds into your ideas about what drives terrorism. But, sadly, the experts have discovered that fear of reprisal is virtually ineffective against most terrorists. What seems to work best is infiltration, but, hey, just because full-scale military might hasn't ever worked in the past doesn't mean we can't try it once again.
> As for understanding them, they do this because we are America.
> We have the best country in the world and our freedom is what they strike at.
Although I agree that we have the best country in the world to live in, that's not what drives the attacks. They are striking at us because we back up their enemies. They couldn't care less about our freedom.
> There IS NOTHING the US did to deserve the attack on the WTC and
> the Pentagon. There is NO REASON to attack civilians like that.
> The terrorists actions alone show that that he is one twisted fuck
> that does not deserve to live.
On this point we agree. However, you should reread your statement, and pay very close attention to the second sentence. As was said by those wiser than me, we need to make sure we don't cast our net so far that we catch innocents.
>I don't give a DAMN who is responsible. Now we have the ability
> to wipe to earth of all of these evil soulless bastards.
If you don't care who's responsible, who do you wipe out? If you can't identify all of these "evil bastards", you don't have the ability to wipe them out.
> Who many of the fucking liberals don't realize is that these
> terrorists are evil. You can say that violence begets violence and
> you can sing 'Kum-by-ya' until the second coming of Christ but the bottom
> line is that there are evil people in this world and these people DO NOT
> understand anything but force.
And you appear to be one of those people.
> What did the West do to force Hitler to invade Europe?
Bad example. What we did was enforce the Treaty of Versailles, which was written at the end of WWI. Even the French, who drafted the treaty, now universally agree that it was a hugely draconian treaty and because of that it was pivotal in allowing Hitler to rise to power in the '30s.
> What did the West do to force the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan?
Ooh, another bad example. We financed the formation of the Taliban (sound familiar?) and we even built the caves and bunkers that protected them from Russian carpet bombing (and more recently protected bin Laden's troops from our cruise missiles). This group committed numerous terrorist acts against Russian targets, prompting the invasion. Use the FOIA request to get information from the State Department about the Taliban during the Russian invasion. All this is documented in government files.
> What did the West do to force the PLO to continually attack Israel?
Ouch, strike three. The U.S. put the teeth into the creation of the nation of Israel, basically by putting Jews displaced in WWII on shore with American weapons and a lot of money. Since the Palestinians were already there, and claimed ownership of the land, a fight ensued wherein the Israeli forces pushed the Palestinians off the lands designated by the Allies, bulldozed their stuff and built their own settlements. This (for some reason that is only fathomable to sane people) pissed off the Palestinians, who promptly formed the PLO and have been fighting with Israel ever since. So, in answer to your question, we financed a mass displacement of their people.
> What did the West do to force Iraq to invade Kuwait?
Well, finally. Hey, one out of four ain't bad.
> The USA did not start this. The USA is not responsible in any
> way for this. By God, we do need to finish this.
Nice try, but it's not true. I'm even on your side that retributive strikes are necessary to eliminate known terrorists. I'm just not pig-headed enough to think that there's no blame on our side. Understanding why these terrorists do what they do is important because it's the first step in stopping terrorist acts. "Kill them all" tactics have proven ineffective all throughout history, from the British Expeditionary Force that tried it on the American colonists up to the U.S. forces that tried it in Vietnam. There's a better answer, and reining in our collective temper is the starting point. Vengeance is proper in this case, but how we execute that vengeance will determine how effective a deterrent it is.
The idea we thought about was that the flight control system can be comandeered from the ground. If the pilot needs to override the ground control, he needs to enter a code on the panel. With the code, he/she gets control back. Without it, remote control can't be disabled. It's certainly far from perfect (if hijackers want to crash the plane, they just blow up the control panel), but it adds difficulty to any non-suicidal attempts to take over the plane (barring a planted pilot, which is really tough to do, or a pilot who caves under duress, which is more likely) and it's good incentive not to kill the pilot as a matter of course.
Again, it's not perfect, but it could certainly help. Add to it a durable cockpit door that's heavy to inhibit forcing it and airtight to prevent gas or depressurization attacks, and the threat of hijacking can be reduced quite a bit.
I have an rebuttal to your post, but I can't get it past the content filter at work (triggered by "terrorism/anarchy terms", imagine!). Review your posts tonight for my reply.
> I agree with the rest of your response, but I don't think it's right
> to dismiss whoever did this as insane because that simply perpetuates
> the idea that these people are impossible to reason with, which is not true.
I agree, but although I tend to think of fanaticism as a type of insanity, it's not, in the official sense. However, I have found that sectarians (and fanatics, by extension) are indeed very difficult to reason with.
Agreed. Do not, however, interpret this to mean that I agree with your assessment that this was an act of war. I do not. See below.
> Anyone who feels that this attack is short of war is a fool.
Your opinion of what war and terrorism are is not even supported by terrorists, and your assessment that I'm a fool because I disagree with you is unfounded.
> It is now time to stop the practice of government sponsored terrorism.
You're treading on awesomely thin ice here if you're American. For example, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a while back, purportedly to counter terrorist attacks. A group named the Taliban (sound familiar?) sprang up to counter the invasion. The U.S. sent aids, guns and money to them, purportedly to stop the spread of communism. The caves and bunkers in Afghanistan that protected the rebels from carpet bombing (and, more recently, our cruise missiles) were built by Americans, for crying out loud. Guess how the Taliban fought the Russians? That's right, hit-and-run raids (with intelligance fed to them from U.S. sources) and bombings, including suicide bombings against buildings in cities thought to hold Russian military officials, including a hotel at one point. Please note that none of this is speculation, and is documented in government files (that are available under the FOIA). We were quite proud of our efforts to stem the Red tide then. Now, what was that you said about government-sponsored terrorism?
> Perhaps you will mail some flowers to the Taliban in hopes
> that they will see the world your way!
Or maybe the flowers will remind them where they got their seed money. See above.
> The US has tried many things to answer terrorism. It is time
> to give up on the judicial approach and use more effective assets and
> send a stronger message.
We tried that, too. Remember a backwater country called Vietnam? We sent massive military forces to the country, only to find that massive military might doesn't work very well against terrorism. Take another try.
>...the Afghans, for example, have already demonstrated their
> knowledge of "plausable deniability"...
So have we. Review the Iran/Contra scandal documents and Oliver North's (and Ronald Reagan's) testimony.
> With the growing sophistication of terror devices, and the
> mounting death toll, the free nations of the world must treat
> sponsorship of terrorism as equivalent to acts of war.
They already do, which is a large part of the problem.
> The US probably lost more citizens in this attack than in the
> Pearl Harbor attack, and these citizens were civilians of a free and
> generous society.
How very patriotic, and how irrelevant. Does it matter how many people died? As a case in point, many fewer people died in the Murrah building's destruction than today, but that loss is just as tragic as this. This statement serves only to pump up the rage so that it interferes with resolution of the issue, and makes us all want to go out and do rash things that won't help in the end.
> We will respond.
As we should. The question remains how we respond.
> We can only hope that those other free countries, such as France and
> Germany, which have been happy to trade with terrorist countries, will join us.
Again, you need to consider what your own country is doing before you accuse others. See above.
I don't wish to imply that I'm unaffected by these events. In fact, I'm outraged and spitting bile at this point. But I must temper that anger with two thoughts: first, what was it that got us here to begin with, and second, what action will minimize the likelihood that we'll be here again? The "kill 'em all" attitude doesn't seem to fit the second part very well, so I'm left to consider what does.
I'm not only unmoved by your mislabeling of the atomic attacks, but I also find that you're wrong. If you're going to count acts between nations in a declared state of war as "mass murder", the undisputed champion is Hitler, with 11 million Russians killed.
> This is an act of war against the United States.
No, it's not. It's an act of terrorism. There's an enormous difference, a lesson that Vietnam taught us, and that you've apparently forgotten.
> Peace did not stop Hitler; peace did not stop the Axis Powers.
This would be a great analogy if it was accurate, but it isn't. Nations cannot operate without infrastructure, but most terrorist organizations can. You're fighting a different animal, and the weapon that's most effective against one can be entirely ineffective against the other. Think of trying to use an elephant gun (good against elephants, naturally) to kill a swarm of bees, and you'll get the idea.
> If viable proof of guilt of Osama bin Laden is brought forth,
> and the Taliban refuses to turn him over to the United States, then
> they are an accomplice to an act of war and should be dealt with
> appropriately.
What if they aren't really harboring him? Or what if they are? What would be an appropriate response to that? Invasion? Do you really think that the rest of the world will stand idly by and watch us annex Afghanistan? Do you really think that this incident warrants a war against Iran and Iraq? How about Russia? How about China? Both world wars started over annexations of territory, and in both wars nations with no initial stake were eventually pulled in (like the U.S. in WWI, which we entered because of our alliance with Britain and France). The number of Americans that would die in World War III would eclipse the deaths today within weeks.
> There must be a message sent to the world that terrorist actions
> against the United States will be met with such an incredible and
> unimaginably horrific response, than no one sane, fanatical, insane,
> or otherwise would even conceive of the idea.
Get your temper back in check and read that again. Sane people don't use terrorism, and fanaticals and the insane don't care about consequences. So, our "horrific response" will only serve to turn the collateral damage victims into more enemies.
> It is time to obliterate those who would cause this to happen
> using every means at our disposal, including the most destructive
> and horrific weapons ever developed by man. If some civilians die
> along the way, they are unfortunate casualties of war.
It is almost astonishing that your comment reflects very closely the words used by Timothy McVeigh in describing his destruction of the Murrah building. But then, it's not that astonishing after all, in that you're advocating the same sort of terrorism as he was ("if the (fill-in-the-blank) government is going to protect people who commit crimes against the (fill-in-the-blank) people, then I'm justified in killing them and anyone else who happens to get in the way, and I'll call them "unfortunate casualties of war" because it soothes my sense of justice and makes my position less abhorrent").
Until you (and many more like you) realize that fighting terrorism isn't just about brute force, we as a nation are destined to suffer from more of these attacks. Fighting terrorism is a high art form, and it can be done with a high degree of success, but it's never perfect, and it's never about simple military might. Read more about counter-terrorism, and you'll be surprised (and educated) by what you find.
> I for one cannnot wait for the reports of islamic
> people being beaten to death by americans.
You, sir, are the "fscking idiot". Comparing all Islamics to Shiite terrorists is very much like comparing all Christians to the Branch Davidians. Perhaps you should pick up a book or two before you begin tarring innocents with your far-too-wide brush.
> It could be time for us to stoop to their level and kill innocent people.
This is lunacy. Killing innocent people is worse than pointless. If they're innocent, they have no connection to the perpetrators, so (A) the perpetrators won't care if they die, and (B) the innocents' relatives become your enemies as well. Grow up.
>...because despite our emotions, we as Americans
> still defer to reason (thankfully)...
Don't dare speak for me, fool. Your statement above demonstrates firmly that you don't defer to reason at all, instead blowing off impotent anger at people whose only connection to the crime is your deranged sense of community. You, who cannot get outside his own head and his own hate, are a demonstration of the very worst of egocentrism. Now go home, and tell your mother not to let you post again until you're an adult.
> I wonder how much torque that crescent wrench could take before deforming?
That depends upon the material they use. For polycarbonate, it'd be fairly close to steel for hand tool purposes (your hand can only apply so much pressure to any tool). The big problem is wear, since (unless you're using poly bolts, which have their own disadvantages) the tool would be softer than the stuff you use it on.
Oh, fer cryin' out loud, I never said, nor even implied, that !=MP3 is bad and MP3 is good, and I don't want any legal precedent for the particular format for online offerings. That was the point I told the original poster that he/she missed. I couldn't care less what format they offer as long as they say they're doing it. More to the point, I'd rather they just didn't fsck with the CD in the first place, so if I care to I can rip whatever format I please. I don't rip CDs to MP3 to begin with, because I'm an audiophile, but if I went out and bought an MP3 player and then found that a particular CD couldn't be converted to that format (and the company didn't tell me that up front) I'd have a right to be bent out of shape.
> it makes me a touch ill that included in the lawsuit is
> the fact that the encoded version of the CD is NOT mp3.
This is a bit of an overextension of what was said. The gist of the suit (on this point) is that due to the fact that the CD is unplayable in a computer's CD-ROM drive, they decided to provide encoded files that the purchaser can download to listen to on the PC (a good thing). However, their encoding on those audio files is proprietary (a bad thing, since they can't be used on a personal MP3 player) and they require entry of much personal information to get the files (a very bad thing) and they don't bother to tell anyone about this issue before they buy the CD (a very, very bad thing). She's not insisting that the company make the files available in MP3 format. They are (by the wording of the suit) allowed to do just what they did. The reason for her suit is that they didn't notify her that they were doing any of it, and because of it she was unable to make an informed decision about whether she wanted to buy the CD in the first place.
Chuckie is well known in his own field (blues/country, if I recall correctly). This isn't a mix CD or a giveaway, and Mr. Pride himself agreed to be the guinea pig for this CD format a while ago. I hope it costs him dearly in terms of sales.
> Until they came out with the space station sets with the 12' x 12' grey lego grids.
Geez, I hope you mean "12x12"! A grey LEGO grid that's twelve feet on a side would be heaven for building a Moon war, but it would really smart to crawl around on it to build.
Give it a rest. If you're more bothered by someone saying "legos" (although I always thought it was LEGOes) than by the fact that they may be going away, you need a few deep breaths and a Prozac.
Raising the tax doesn't help, because it's not going to induce me to pay the higher price for local programmers. What'll happen is just what happened with the company in the article. I'll use a local programming consultancy, but that local programming company will begin using telecommuters from other countries (which is not at this time covered by the tax), which then allows them to underbid their competitors. This highlights a real problem with economic protectionism, in that it must be reactive (proactive laws are laws that protect against economic situations that don't exist, and if you advocate that then you'd need to be willing to, for example, pay tax dollars to an agency to oversee the limitation of mineral imports from the Moon), and every time someone finds a loophole there's a lead time to passing laws to close it. Trying to pass laws that have no loopholes only results in laws that are so draconian that they're quickly overturned or laws that are so generalized that they're ineffective.
The simple fact is that such protective taxes and tariffs serve the purpose of preventing rampant shifting of the means of production, but historically there's always been a limit to their effectiveness, and (for the most part, and in the software industry in this case) that limit has been reached. We're long past the point where raising the tax would stimulate local demand, and well into the area where raising the tax will simply cause those who are newly subject to the tax to find a different way around it. If you think of protectionism as a bucket with a hole halfway up, you'll get the idea. It holds water well at first, but after you reach the hole, more water isn't going to add to your storage capacity in the long term.
> Those $4000 cars would only cost $4000 in America too...What's the point?
The point is that I can't buy that $4,000 car anywhere in the U.S. because they don't sell them here. Since your statement was "cars cost the same..." and you did not qualify it with a model match, the point becomes simple. If I want to own a car (any car) in the U.S., I can't get a new one for $4,000. Period. It's simply not possible. The fact that the same model costs the same doesn't matter. If I want my own new car, the entry cost is higher in the U.S. than elsewhere.
My point is that the availability of cheaper goods is lower here, so the minimum cost of living is higher, which is what the original discussion entailed. If I earn $12,000 a year, I can live comfortably in Novosibirsk, but not anywhere in the states. To draw from the original,
Housing is about the only big/important thing that is cheaper.
which is not true. By my example, transportation is cheaper, by $9,000. I could extend this same example to food and other essentials (like insurance), but I think you get the point.
> By putting tariffs in place on imported software,
> you could take away the economic incentive for software
> companies to move operations to other countries. The
> idea is to make it an economic wash to move jobs out of the
> country. You don't want there to be some kind of tremendous
> financial reward for employing foreign labor over American labor.
Nice thought, but very limited in scope. For example, if import tariffs are put in place on software such that it's financially a wash to sell product X in the U.S., but there's still money to be made by reducing overhead in other markets (like selling to every country in the world other than the U.S.), there's still economic incentive, and not diddly squat the U.S. government can do about it.
> Why do you think that GM, Chrysler, and Ford aren't all having their cars produced at a fraction of the cost overseas? One reason is that there are protective tariffs in place.
Again, only true in a very limited scope. Chrysler became DaimlerChrysler, which is a huge multinational car builder which produces car parts in other parts of the world at a fraction of the cost of building them in the U.S. and Ford and GM offloaded most of the expensive work to other countries as well. In case you're unfamiliar with that market, assembling the cars, which is what happens in the U.S., is only a tiny fraction of the labor cost of building a car, and it's actually cheaper to build a car in the U.S. in most cases (due to factory automation technology and economies of scale) than it is to build it elsewhere and ship it to the states. Most of the labor cost is in making the parts, which happens overseas because even with import duties and protective tariffs, U.S. labor is still far too costly.
But all of this is beside the point. Software is very different from cars, in that the shipping cost is negligible and there is zero cost to getting materials together. Its cost is virtually all buried in the labor cost (with tiny percentages embedded in infrastructure). Since it's not a physical good, software does not play by the same rules, which means that it resonds entirely differently to tariffs, and so any analogy with the auto industry is bound to break down at the border.
Also, your idea of import tariffs only seems to fit for shrink-wrapped packages, and so does not encompass programming jobs done on a custom basis. For example, If I have a corporation that needs a special billing package, and I contract with another company to write it, there's no real transfer of any package that the government can tariff. About the only thing they could do is charge me a tax on using a foreign company for contract work, which is already done, with little effect.
In short, my original challenge is unmet. You still need to provide a workable solution that hasn't already failed and that fits the market in which our discussion takes place. Keep trying.
Your original argument only holds true in the very limited case of direct comparison of models. For an example, I defy you to find a new car, any model or equipment package at all, in the U.S. for $4,000 or less. There are equivalent vehicles in most of Eastern Europe, but the fact is that a car can be had for less there than here (although it'll be a cheaper car than you can find in the states).
You are right. This part belonged to another reply. Damn those cut-and-paste gremlins!
> While economic isolationism does not work for commodity goods like textiles and grains, it can work very well for software.
Bad planning for precisely the same reason you stated. If Microsoft decided to use Russian programmers, and the government enforced some economic penalty on them for it, do you think it would be difficult for them to relocate to Canada or Mexico (or Russia, for that matter)? Unlike companies that make "real" goods, software companies can relocate very easily, and in history even companies that produced "real" goods relocated to avoid such sanctions (which is the driving force behind Ford (or GM, I don't recall which) building most of its engines in Brazil). If it's naive to assume price reductions based on lowering developer cost, it's just as naive to think that heavy governmental protectionism will do anything other than chase away software companies.
> If we don't take action, we will find that our standard of living will plummet
If you can suggest any particular action that works any better than the failures we've seen so far, you would be one up on every economist in the country. It's easy to say "take action", but what exactly do you suggest?
> The cost of living in America is higher, period.
And this fact is the problem of a programmer in Novosibirsk in what way, exactly?
> I need to feed my kids and pay for my house and it costs a crapload to live here. I need a fair wage.
Then move somewhere cheaper. $6.25 an hour cuts it well in Russia (and Mexico and India and quite a few other places as well). Oh, don't want to move? As Gorimek said, why does the fact that you live in the U.S. and don't want to leave qualify you as intrinsically more valuable?
Sorry, but your arguments serve only to prove Gorimek's point. If you don't like competing with foreign programmers, you have two choices. Be cheaper, or be better. If you can't do one of these, you need to find a different line of work.
Slashdot Mirror
> Guns are part of the problem, they are certainly not part of the solution.
You imply an excluded middle. What if they're neither part of the problem, nor the solution (if it's merely that Americans are by culture more violent, removing guns won't reduce crime rates because criminals will simply use other means)? Or, what if they're both part of the problem and part of the solution? Don't be so quick to say that it's simply gun proliferation that's the root of all violent crime. There's nothing more solid than anecdotal evidence either way in most cases, simply because there's a huge dynamic at work and guns are only a part of that dynamic. For example, the proliferation of guns in Israel is large, and the amount of violent crime there is astronomical. The gun proliferation in Switzerland is comparable, but their crime rate is extremely low. Lots of guns in both places, but the difference in cultural attitude makes a big difference, don't you think?
Virg
P.S. You can't possibly imagine that the U.S. has the most violent society on the planet. Does your planet comprise only the U.S. and Europe? Perhaps you've never heard of Africa. Or Southeast Asia. Or the Middle East. Or perhaps Central America. Broad, indefensible statements like this do little to help your case.
> I do not care who is specifically responsible.
Then where do you start? Do you simply assume that you know who did it, and just keep cirling outward until you assume you've enveloped everyone? This makes no sense. If you don't know who's specifically responsible, you're shooting at random.
> This is the same as if a gang of 5 murder someone. Unless one of them turns on the others, the DA doesn't care who is the murderer. The DA tries ALL of them for murder. This is the same thing.
I guess you're not a lawyer or a judge. The DA not only cares who is the murderer in your gang, but although it can try all of them, the court must convict each of them separately. If there's enough evidence to convict three, but not enough to convict two, they don't call for majority and lock them all up.
> About Hitler. You are a bit wrong. Sure maybe the treaty brought
> Hitler to power. But Hitler ONLY started invading and land
> grabbing when no one stood up to him.
The first place Hitler annexed was the Sudetenland, which was part of pre-WWI Germany. Nobody "said" anything (in fact, France "said" quite a bit, but decided it wasn't ready to fight another war) because it was widely seen as an internal matter. When he annexed Austria, many of the allies promptly declared war on Germany. So, he didn't grab any land uncontested that wasn't part of Germany before WWI.
> Ok, we built bunkers, to protect them from carpet bombing, from which they attacked the Soviet Union, then the S.U. invaded?
You're misreading me, and not following history. We financed the creation of the Mujahideen (sp?), which started terroristic attacks against the U.S.S.R., they responded by invading, and we responded to that by financing the weapons and the construction of hard points. It's fairly easy to find fault in that, no?
> Sorry Charlie. Just because the Palestinians claimed the land does not make it theirs.
By your logic, anybody could take over any land they wanted. Not only did the Palestinians claim the land, they lived there. Basically, you're saying that the only claims on land are claims that can be defended by force, and that's exactly what happened. But, that doesn't make it any more right to them.
> This would be the same at the US govt giving land the the Jews in South Carolina and some group living in a county there saying that it was theirs.
There's the slight difference that the U.S. government didn't have any land rights in the Middle East. Few will deny the fact that the U.S. government has some claim to South Carolina, but no such right of territory existed for what is now Israel (which, by the way, was a part of Jordan until we annexed it). This example is the same as the U.S. government giving land in Egypt to the Jews, and local people complaining that it was theirs.
> And as for the Israeli's kicking the Palestinians ass'es oh well. The Palestinians forced that issue a while back the the Israeli's stood their ground and even puched them back. In a war sometimes you win land and sometimes you lose land. The Palestinians have always lost. But they started the war.
Two points: First, the Palestinians were there before the Israelis showed up, so the Israelis didn't "stand their ground", they pushed them off the land. Second, since (by military definition) the Israelis invaded Jordan (remember, this land was part of Jordan on the world map since nearly the 1600s), you can't exactly say that the Palestinians started the war.
> And Arafat showed his true colors last year. He was offered MORE than
> he asked for. And he turned it down. He doesn't want peace and he proved it.
I did some investigative legwork about this, and it turns out you're wrong. What was offered to the PLO was a piece of land that was larger than the parts of the West Bank that the PLO wanted, but it wasn't located on the West Bank. Since the whole reason for the fight is that the West Bank is holy land to the Palestinians, this wasn't by any means more than what he wanted, it was different, and it was unacceptable to them. He doesn't want a peace that involves Palestine displacement from their holy lands, but that's not the same as not wanting peace at any price (for an analogy, think about whether the American people would be willing to trade the grounds of the Alamo for a 600-acre tract of land somewhere near Mexico City). It seems you've fallen victim to spin doctoring. You might want to take a look at the actual treaty papers (they're on the 'Net) before you judge.
> A few decades ago, NO terrorist would attack the USA.
Um, terrorists have been attacking the USA for centuries. They usually reserved their attacks for U.S. military establishments in other parts of the world, but as those targets get harder to attack, they've changed their focus to the relatively easier mainland. This isn't an indication of boldness, it's an indication of A) the relative ease of attacking the U.S. mainland as opposed to U.S. military targets, and B) the general increase in terrorism in the entire world (war has gotten to be too expensive for most nations so terrorism is the only route).
> The only way to deal with terrorist is to out the fear of God into them.
What, the fear of your God? No more likely than you kneeling and facing east every day.
> Fear and only fear keeps terrorists from attacking. This is all they understand.
It's odd that the people who make a living out of studying terrorists don't agree with you, as you've obviously sunk at least a full ten seconds into your ideas about what drives terrorism. But, sadly, the experts have discovered that fear of reprisal is virtually ineffective against most terrorists. What seems to work best is infiltration, but, hey, just because full-scale military might hasn't ever worked in the past doesn't mean we can't try it once again.
> As for understanding them, they do this because we are America.
> We have the best country in the world and our freedom is what they strike at.
Although I agree that we have the best country in the world to live in, that's not what drives the attacks. They are striking at us because we back up their enemies. They couldn't care less about our freedom.
> There IS NOTHING the US did to deserve the attack on the WTC and
> the Pentagon. There is NO REASON to attack civilians like that.
> The terrorists actions alone show that that he is one twisted fuck
> that does not deserve to live.
On this point we agree. However, you should reread your statement, and pay very close attention to the second sentence. As was said by those wiser than me, we need to make sure we don't cast our net so far that we catch innocents.
Virg
>I don't give a DAMN who is responsible. Now we have the ability
> to wipe to earth of all of these evil soulless bastards.
If you don't care who's responsible, who do you wipe out? If you can't identify all of these "evil bastards", you don't have the ability to wipe them out.
> Who many of the fucking liberals don't realize is that these
> terrorists are evil. You can say that violence begets violence and
> you can sing 'Kum-by-ya' until the second coming of Christ but the bottom
> line is that there are evil people in this world and these people DO NOT
> understand anything but force.
And you appear to be one of those people.
> What did the West do to force Hitler to invade Europe?
Bad example. What we did was enforce the Treaty of Versailles, which was written at the end of WWI. Even the French, who drafted the treaty, now universally agree that it was a hugely draconian treaty and because of that it was pivotal in allowing Hitler to rise to power in the '30s.
> What did the West do to force the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan?
Ooh, another bad example. We financed the formation of the Taliban (sound familiar?) and we even built the caves and bunkers that protected them from Russian carpet bombing (and more recently protected bin Laden's troops from our cruise missiles). This group committed numerous terrorist acts against Russian targets, prompting the invasion. Use the FOIA request to get information from the State Department about the Taliban during the Russian invasion. All this is documented in government files.
> What did the West do to force the PLO to continually attack Israel?
Ouch, strike three. The U.S. put the teeth into the creation of the nation of Israel, basically by putting Jews displaced in WWII on shore with American weapons and a lot of money. Since the Palestinians were already there, and claimed ownership of the land, a fight ensued wherein the Israeli forces pushed the Palestinians off the lands designated by the Allies, bulldozed their stuff and built their own settlements. This (for some reason that is only fathomable to sane people) pissed off the Palestinians, who promptly formed the PLO and have been fighting with Israel ever since. So, in answer to your question, we financed a mass displacement of their people.
> What did the West do to force Iraq to invade Kuwait?
Well, finally. Hey, one out of four ain't bad.
> The USA did not start this. The USA is not responsible in any
> way for this. By God, we do need to finish this.
Nice try, but it's not true. I'm even on your side that retributive strikes are necessary to eliminate known terrorists. I'm just not pig-headed enough to think that there's no blame on our side. Understanding why these terrorists do what they do is important because it's the first step in stopping terrorist acts. "Kill them all" tactics have proven ineffective all throughout history, from the British Expeditionary Force that tried it on the American colonists up to the U.S. forces that tried it in Vietnam. There's a better answer, and reining in our collective temper is the starting point. Vengeance is proper in this case, but how we execute that vengeance will determine how effective a deterrent it is.
Virg
George Washington was called a terrorist by British generals.
That said, your post is great. It deserves to be modded up.
Virg
The idea we thought about was that the flight control system can be comandeered from the ground. If the pilot needs to override the ground control, he needs to enter a code on the panel. With the code, he/she gets control back. Without it, remote control can't be disabled. It's certainly far from perfect (if hijackers want to crash the plane, they just blow up the control panel), but it adds difficulty to any non-suicidal attempts to take over the plane (barring a planted pilot, which is really tough to do, or a pilot who caves under duress, which is more likely) and it's good incentive not to kill the pilot as a matter of course.
Again, it's not perfect, but it could certainly help. Add to it a durable cockpit door that's heavy to inhibit forcing it and airtight to prevent gas or depressurization attacks, and the threat of hijacking can be reduced quite a bit.
Virg
> Make it two more sides. I want to be able to call it the Sexagon!
No, no, that would be the Septagon. The Sexagon is the new proposed name for the White House.
Virg
I have an rebuttal to your post, but I can't get it past the content filter at work (triggered by "terrorism/anarchy terms", imagine!). Review your posts tonight for my reply.
Virg
> I agree with the rest of your response, but I don't think it's right
> to dismiss whoever did this as insane because that simply perpetuates
> the idea that these people are impossible to reason with, which is not true.
I agree, but although I tend to think of fanaticism as a type of insanity, it's not, in the official sense. However, I have found that sectarians (and fanatics, by extension) are indeed very difficult to reason with.
Virg
> What works in war is to wage war.
...the Afghans, for example, have already demonstrated their
Agreed. Do not, however, interpret this to mean that I agree with your assessment that this was an act of war. I do not. See below.
> Anyone who feels that this attack is short of war is a fool.
Your opinion of what war and terrorism are is not even supported by terrorists, and your assessment that I'm a fool because I disagree with you is unfounded.
> It is now time to stop the practice of government sponsored terrorism.
You're treading on awesomely thin ice here if you're American. For example, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a while back, purportedly to counter terrorist attacks. A group named the Taliban (sound familiar?) sprang up to counter the invasion. The U.S. sent aids, guns and money to them, purportedly to stop the spread of communism. The caves and bunkers in Afghanistan that protected the rebels from carpet bombing (and, more recently, our cruise missiles) were built by Americans, for crying out loud. Guess how the Taliban fought the Russians? That's right, hit-and-run raids (with intelligance fed to them from U.S. sources) and bombings, including suicide bombings against buildings in cities thought to hold Russian military officials, including a hotel at one point. Please note that none of this is speculation, and is documented in government files (that are available under the FOIA). We were quite proud of our efforts to stem the Red tide then. Now, what was that you said about government-sponsored terrorism?
> Perhaps you will mail some flowers to the Taliban in hopes
> that they will see the world your way!
Or maybe the flowers will remind them where they got their seed money. See above.
> The US has tried many things to answer terrorism. It is time
> to give up on the judicial approach and use more effective assets and
> send a stronger message.
We tried that, too. Remember a backwater country called Vietnam? We sent massive military forces to the country, only to find that massive military might doesn't work very well against terrorism. Take another try.
>
> knowledge of "plausable deniability"...
So have we. Review the Iran/Contra scandal documents and Oliver North's (and Ronald Reagan's) testimony.
> With the growing sophistication of terror devices, and the
> mounting death toll, the free nations of the world must treat
> sponsorship of terrorism as equivalent to acts of war.
They already do, which is a large part of the problem.
> The US probably lost more citizens in this attack than in the
> Pearl Harbor attack, and these citizens were civilians of a free and
> generous society.
How very patriotic, and how irrelevant. Does it matter how many people died? As a case in point, many fewer people died in the Murrah building's destruction than today, but that loss is just as tragic as this. This statement serves only to pump up the rage so that it interferes with resolution of the issue, and makes us all want to go out and do rash things that won't help in the end.
> We will respond.
As we should. The question remains how we respond.
> We can only hope that those other free countries, such as France and
> Germany, which have been happy to trade with terrorist countries, will join us.
Again, you need to consider what your own country is doing before you accuse others. See above.
I don't wish to imply that I'm unaffected by these events. In fact, I'm outraged and spitting bile at this point. But I must temper that anger with two thoughts: first, what was it that got us here to begin with, and second, what action will minimize the likelihood that we'll be here again? The "kill 'em all" attitude doesn't seem to fit the second part very well, so I'm left to consider what does.
Virg
I'm not only unmoved by your mislabeling of the atomic attacks, but I also find that you're wrong. If you're going to count acts between nations in a declared state of war as "mass murder", the undisputed champion is Hitler, with 11 million Russians killed.
Now go away.
Virg
> This is an act of war against the United States.
No, it's not. It's an act of terrorism. There's an enormous difference, a lesson that Vietnam taught us, and that you've apparently forgotten.
> Peace did not stop Hitler; peace did not stop the Axis Powers.
This would be a great analogy if it was accurate, but it isn't. Nations cannot operate without infrastructure, but most terrorist organizations can. You're fighting a different animal, and the weapon that's most effective against one can be entirely ineffective against the other. Think of trying to use an elephant gun (good against elephants, naturally) to kill a swarm of bees, and you'll get the idea.
> If viable proof of guilt of Osama bin Laden is brought forth,
> and the Taliban refuses to turn him over to the United States, then
> they are an accomplice to an act of war and should be dealt with
> appropriately.
What if they aren't really harboring him? Or what if they are? What would be an appropriate response to that? Invasion? Do you really think that the rest of the world will stand idly by and watch us annex Afghanistan? Do you really think that this incident warrants a war against Iran and Iraq? How about Russia? How about China? Both world wars started over annexations of territory, and in both wars nations with no initial stake were eventually pulled in (like the U.S. in WWI, which we entered because of our alliance with Britain and France). The number of Americans that would die in World War III would eclipse the deaths today within weeks.
> There must be a message sent to the world that terrorist actions
> against the United States will be met with such an incredible and
> unimaginably horrific response, than no one sane, fanatical, insane,
> or otherwise would even conceive of the idea.
Get your temper back in check and read that again. Sane people don't use terrorism, and fanaticals and the insane don't care about consequences. So, our "horrific response" will only serve to turn the collateral damage victims into more enemies.
> It is time to obliterate those who would cause this to happen
> using every means at our disposal, including the most destructive
> and horrific weapons ever developed by man. If some civilians die
> along the way, they are unfortunate casualties of war.
It is almost astonishing that your comment reflects very closely the words used by Timothy McVeigh in describing his destruction of the Murrah building. But then, it's not that astonishing after all, in that you're advocating the same sort of terrorism as he was ("if the (fill-in-the-blank) government is going to protect people who commit crimes against the (fill-in-the-blank) people, then I'm justified in killing them and anyone else who happens to get in the way, and I'll call them "unfortunate casualties of war" because it soothes my sense of justice and makes my position less abhorrent").
Until you (and many more like you) realize that fighting terrorism isn't just about brute force, we as a nation are destined to suffer from more of these attacks. Fighting terrorism is a high art form, and it can be done with a high degree of success, but it's never perfect, and it's never about simple military might. Read more about counter-terrorism, and you'll be surprised (and educated) by what you find.
Virg
> I for one cannnot wait for the reports of islamic
...because despite our emotions, we as Americans
> people being beaten to death by americans.
You, sir, are the "fscking idiot". Comparing all Islamics to Shiite terrorists is very much like comparing all Christians to the Branch Davidians. Perhaps you should pick up a book or two before you begin tarring innocents with your far-too-wide brush.
> It could be time for us to stoop to their level and kill innocent people.
This is lunacy. Killing innocent people is worse than pointless. If they're innocent, they have no connection to the perpetrators, so (A) the perpetrators won't care if they die, and (B) the innocents' relatives become your enemies as well. Grow up.
>
> still defer to reason (thankfully)...
Don't dare speak for me, fool. Your statement above demonstrates firmly that you don't defer to reason at all, instead blowing off impotent anger at people whose only connection to the crime is your deranged sense of community. You, who cannot get outside his own head and his own hate, are a demonstration of the very worst of egocentrism. Now go home, and tell your mother not to let you post again until you're an adult.
Virg
> I wonder how much torque that crescent wrench could take before deforming?
That depends upon the material they use. For polycarbonate, it'd be fairly close to steel for hand tool purposes (your hand can only apply so much pressure to any tool). The big problem is wear, since (unless you're using poly bolts, which have their own disadvantages) the tool would be softer than the stuff you use it on.
Virg
Oh, fer cryin' out loud, I never said, nor even implied, that !=MP3 is bad and MP3 is good, and I don't want any legal precedent for the particular format for online offerings. That was the point I told the original poster that he/she missed. I couldn't care less what format they offer as long as they say they're doing it. More to the point, I'd rather they just didn't fsck with the CD in the first place, so if I care to I can rip whatever format I please. I don't rip CDs to MP3 to begin with, because I'm an audiophile, but if I went out and bought an MP3 player and then found that a particular CD couldn't be converted to that format (and the company didn't tell me that up front) I'd have a right to be bent out of shape.
Virg
> it makes me a touch ill that included in the lawsuit is
> the fact that the encoded version of the CD is NOT mp3.
This is a bit of an overextension of what was said. The gist of the suit (on this point) is that due to the fact that the CD is unplayable in a computer's CD-ROM drive, they decided to provide encoded files that the purchaser can download to listen to on the PC (a good thing). However, their encoding on those audio files is proprietary (a bad thing, since they can't be used on a personal MP3 player) and they require entry of much personal information to get the files (a very bad thing) and they don't bother to tell anyone about this issue before they buy the CD (a very, very bad thing). She's not insisting that the company make the files available in MP3 format. They are (by the wording of the suit) allowed to do just what they did. The reason for her suit is that they didn't notify her that they were doing any of it, and because of it she was unable to make an informed decision about whether she wanted to buy the CD in the first place.
Virg
Chuckie is well known in his own field (blues/country, if I recall correctly). This isn't a mix CD or a giveaway, and Mr. Pride himself agreed to be the guinea pig for this CD format a while ago. I hope it costs him dearly in terms of sales.
Virg
> Until they came out with the space station sets with the 12' x 12' grey lego grids.
Geez, I hope you mean "12x12"! A grey LEGO grid that's twelve feet on a side would be heaven for building a Moon war, but it would really smart to crawl around on it to build.
Virg
It's ANAL.
Not anals
Not anal's
ANAL.
Give it a rest. If you're more bothered by someone saying "legos" (although I always thought it was LEGOes) than by the fact that they may be going away, you need a few deep breaths and a Prozac.
Virg
Raising the tax doesn't help, because it's not going to induce me to pay the higher price for local programmers. What'll happen is just what happened with the company in the article. I'll use a local programming consultancy, but that local programming company will begin using telecommuters from other countries (which is not at this time covered by the tax), which then allows them to underbid their competitors. This highlights a real problem with economic protectionism, in that it must be reactive (proactive laws are laws that protect against economic situations that don't exist, and if you advocate that then you'd need to be willing to, for example, pay tax dollars to an agency to oversee the limitation of mineral imports from the Moon), and every time someone finds a loophole there's a lead time to passing laws to close it. Trying to pass laws that have no loopholes only results in laws that are so draconian that they're quickly overturned or laws that are so generalized that they're ineffective.
The simple fact is that such protective taxes and tariffs serve the purpose of preventing rampant shifting of the means of production, but historically there's always been a limit to their effectiveness, and (for the most part, and in the software industry in this case) that limit has been reached. We're long past the point where raising the tax would stimulate local demand, and well into the area where raising the tax will simply cause those who are newly subject to the tax to find a different way around it. If you think of protectionism as a bucket with a hole halfway up, you'll get the idea. It holds water well at first, but after you reach the hole, more water isn't going to add to your storage capacity in the long term.
Virg
The point is that I can't buy that $4,000 car anywhere in the U.S. because they don't sell them here. Since your statement was "cars cost the same..." and you did not qualify it with a model match, the point becomes simple. If I want to own a car (any car) in the U.S., I can't get a new one for $4,000. Period. It's simply not possible. The fact that the same model costs the same doesn't matter. If I want my own new car, the entry cost is higher in the U.S. than elsewhere.
My point is that the availability of cheaper goods is lower here, so the minimum cost of living is higher, which is what the original discussion entailed. If I earn $12,000 a year, I can live comfortably in Novosibirsk, but not anywhere in the states. To draw from the original,which is not true. By my example, transportation is cheaper, by $9,000. I could extend this same example to food and other essentials (like insurance), but I think you get the point.
Virg
> By putting tariffs in place on imported software,
> you could take away the economic incentive for software
> companies to move operations to other countries. The
> idea is to make it an economic wash to move jobs out of the
> country. You don't want there to be some kind of tremendous
> financial reward for employing foreign labor over American labor.
Nice thought, but very limited in scope. For example, if import tariffs are put in place on software such that it's financially a wash to sell product X in the U.S., but there's still money to be made by reducing overhead in other markets (like selling to every country in the world other than the U.S.), there's still economic incentive, and not diddly squat the U.S. government can do about it.
> Why do you think that GM, Chrysler, and Ford aren't all having their cars produced at a fraction of the cost overseas? One reason is that there are protective tariffs in place.
Again, only true in a very limited scope. Chrysler became DaimlerChrysler, which is a huge multinational car builder which produces car parts in other parts of the world at a fraction of the cost of building them in the U.S. and Ford and GM offloaded most of the expensive work to other countries as well. In case you're unfamiliar with that market, assembling the cars, which is what happens in the U.S., is only a tiny fraction of the labor cost of building a car, and it's actually cheaper to build a car in the U.S. in most cases (due to factory automation technology and economies of scale) than it is to build it elsewhere and ship it to the states. Most of the labor cost is in making the parts, which happens overseas because even with import duties and protective tariffs, U.S. labor is still far too costly.
But all of this is beside the point. Software is very different from cars, in that the shipping cost is negligible and there is zero cost to getting materials together. Its cost is virtually all buried in the labor cost (with tiny percentages embedded in infrastructure). Since it's not a physical good, software does not play by the same rules, which means that it resonds entirely differently to tariffs, and so any analogy with the auto industry is bound to break down at the border.
Also, your idea of import tariffs only seems to fit for shrink-wrapped packages, and so does not encompass programming jobs done on a custom basis. For example, If I have a corporation that needs a special billing package, and I contract with another company to write it, there's no real transfer of any package that the government can tariff. About the only thing they could do is charge me a tax on using a foreign company for contract work, which is already done, with little effect.
In short, my original challenge is unmet. You still need to provide a workable solution that hasn't already failed and that fits the market in which our discussion takes place. Keep trying.
Virg
Your original argument only holds true in the very limited case of direct comparison of models. For an example, I defy you to find a new car, any model or equipment package at all, in the U.S. for $4,000 or less. There are equivalent vehicles in most of Eastern Europe, but the fact is that a car can be had for less there than here (although it'll be a cheaper car than you can find in the states).
Virg
> The purchasing power in Kiev is irrelevent.
You are right. This part belonged to another reply. Damn those cut-and-paste gremlins!
> While economic isolationism does not work for commodity goods like textiles and grains, it can work very well for software.
Bad planning for precisely the same reason you stated. If Microsoft decided to use Russian programmers, and the government enforced some economic penalty on them for it, do you think it would be difficult for them to relocate to Canada or Mexico (or Russia, for that matter)? Unlike companies that make "real" goods, software companies can relocate very easily, and in history even companies that produced "real" goods relocated to avoid such sanctions (which is the driving force behind Ford (or GM, I don't recall which) building most of its engines in Brazil). If it's naive to assume price reductions based on lowering developer cost, it's just as naive to think that heavy governmental protectionism will do anything other than chase away software companies.
> If we don't take action, we will find that our standard of living will plummet
If you can suggest any particular action that works any better than the failures we've seen so far, you would be one up on every economist in the country. It's easy to say "take action", but what exactly do you suggest?
Virg
Avoiding the ickier parts of the etymology, "cornholing" is slang for anal sex.
There, wasn't that tasteful?
Virg
> The cost of living in America is higher, period.
And this fact is the problem of a programmer in Novosibirsk in what way, exactly?
> I need to feed my kids and pay for my house and it costs a crapload to live here. I need a fair wage.
Then move somewhere cheaper. $6.25 an hour cuts it well in Russia (and Mexico and India and quite a few other places as well). Oh, don't want to move? As Gorimek said, why does the fact that you live in the U.S. and don't want to leave qualify you as intrinsically more valuable?
Sorry, but your arguments serve only to prove Gorimek's point. If you don't like competing with foreign programmers, you have two choices. Be cheaper, or be better. If you can't do one of these, you need to find a different line of work.
Virg