But back in reality, the maker movement is growing by leaps and bounds thanks to the information access and communication capabilities of the Internet. It's not like you have to go very far to find this stuff. There are at least a couple stories a week on Slashdot about Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or other random homebrew projects often made by or for the younger generation. There are http://hackaday.com/">blogs that specialize in DIY electronics projects which showcase youngsters regularly. Engineering courses regularly inspire kids to design and build impressive robots and original inventions. And finally, just in the last few years we've seen hackerspaces pop up in nearly every decent-size city in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and other countries. Hate to break it to you, but these places are rarely, if ever, full of puttering old geezers.
If you choose to live in a rural area with low population density, you have to accept that perhaps your internet connexion will not be as fast as if you lived in bustling city.
I'm going to answer this from my own personal experience.
I grew up in a rural area of the midwest United States. It was an hour's drive to any decent-size city. I went to the same school from Kindergarten through 12th grade. The average class size was about 30 students. Most of the area was above the poverty line, but let's just say that anyone who came into money (or aspired do to so) got out as soon as they could. Beyond magazines and broadcast network TV, there wasn't much contact with the "outside world."
I was lucky, however. My father thought that computers were an insanely expensive fad and a huge waste of time, but my mother saw the value in having a computer in the house and (somehow) overruled him. We got the town's first dial-up Internet account at a time when almost all urban Internet users were switching to Cable or DSL. Even with the slow speeds and occupying the only phone line for the house/business for hours on end, I tried to learn everything I could about the Internet and the stuff that runs it. I joined listservs, "surfed" the web, played with shareware, chatted on IRC, etc. I learned to program (poorly, at first), learned about Linux, and eventually figured out how to make the family computer to dual-boot into either Windows or Slackware. Most importantly, I had this window to the outside world that showed me that there was so much more out there than what I was told when growing up. More interesting and inspiring people, more technology, more culture.
Now I'm in my mid-30s and a software engineer making a comfortable living in a nice city with a happy family. Would my quality of life be as the same if I had stayed in rural BFE and lived out my life like everyone else there? I doubt it very much. This is why I lobby for subsidized rural broadband. Maybe it won't greatly affect those who have the ability to choose where they live. But it can drastically improve the future lives of their children.
You're definitely not reading the right dictionary... Only in the most general possible sense does "employee" == "consultant". In the same way that the segway is a motorcycle because it has two wheels and a motor.
In the U.S. at least, the term "employee" is legally (and casually) reserved for someone on an organization's payroll at the non-executive level. Being on a payroll means that the organization pays you regularly and deducts taxes from your paycheck. Consultants (or their employers) must manage their own taxes. One may be both a consultant and an employee, but not generally of the same company.
Florian Mueller is not an employee of Oracle, he is a consultant. He is self-employed and is on the payroll of his own company.
In the U.S. employment is generally "at will." This means that you can be fired for almost any reason, but you can also voluntarily quit your job for any reason as well.
That said, there are reasons why an employer can't fire you. Those mostly boil down to discrimination (gender, race, religious preference, etc) but also include whistleblowing, so the fired TSA agent likely seek a legal remedy in this particular case.
Processors did exist before Intel. IBM, Sperry, Amdal, Burroughs, DEC, Honeywell...
Yes, but they were (usually) designed for only one specific model of computer. And they weren't single-chip microprocessors. This CPU DB seems to be for the latter.
for an "IMDB" of processors, it really needs to include others - ARM, AMD (though that might be covered by the Intel) and still others exist.
I don't see ARM in here (probably because they don't mass produce their designs, they license them to other chip makers), but there is a section for AMD.
I once used the satellite view of Google Maps to look for old train tracks that have been torn up and gone for decades. It's actually pretty interesting. If you go out and visit spots where the tracks used to be, you can't see anything out of the ordinary. But a satellite shot clearly shows the "scars" of where the tracks used to be. Where they cut through forests, the trees are a little shorter. The soil in farm fields is colored differently. Roads bend to intersect the track at a right angle, things like that.
Here's a good example in Washtenaw county. You can see the "ghost tracks" going southwest/northeast. If you follow them northeast, you'll see that a new subdivision was built on an area of land that they used to cut through. Curiously, the developers built no houses where the tracks were. Instead, they added footpaths, gave some houses larger backyards, and left "gaps" where houses could have been built. (I'd love to know why this was done. Any developers in the audience?)
You can follow the tracks southwest as well, but eventually you get to a region where the images were taken with a different satellite at a different time of year and the loss of contrast makes the tracks impossible to follow any further.
It should be simple: what the research funded fully, or even partially, by the public? Then all the results from it should be fully available to the public. If researches don't like that, they can be free to seek private funding,
I agree with this.
in which chase a reasonable restriction would be that all privately funded research becomes available to the public after ten years, since knowledge is a public good.
But I don't agree with this. If I'm tinkering away in my garage for decades to perfect a new kind of engine and accept private funding or donations toward that cause, am I obligated to share my engineering and testing results with the world after a set period of time? I don't think so. What if I don't consider my work to be finished by then? What if I wanted to start my own company around the technology developed? By doing what you propose, I'd simply be handing over my work to the commercial auto industry for them to exploit for profit while receiving nothing in return.
And two, enforcing things with little more justification than the "public good" is a slippery slope and at the bottom lies countries like China.
Hell, Apple does have something to the whole sealed battery thing. [snip] just get a new phone.
There we go, fixed that for you. Remove all the fluff from the middle of the paragraph and we get to the truth of the matter.
I bought an iPod Touch (gen 2) over two years ago. (There were no decent non-phone Android-based media devices at the time.) I still use it daily for music, podcasts, email, web browsing, and games. I'd like to keep using it for quite awhile longer, but it seems that the battery is dying a gradual death. When it was new, the thing could go for days without charging. Now, I'm lucky to get 24 hours and that's with having the wifi/bluetooth off most of the time.
So now I have a perfectly good device that does most of what I want, except soon it will be completely unusable because I can't just buy a new battery off eBay and stick it in. Caveat emptor, I guess, since I knew this going in. But I don't have to like it.
Right on. A big thing these days is UX (user experience) designers. It used to be that some subset of the development team got assigned to do the UI work, but more development shops are looking for dedicated people for that work.
It probably helps to have some artistic education and/or experience, but I would think that a psychological background would be very helpful. My understanding is that a lot of companies do user testing with multiple mockups to find out the best interface for a certain task, which is basically the same thing as psychology experiments.
This is true advice only if you plan to advance within a company that cares more about educational qualifications than demonstrated experience and leadership skills. Which is not all companies.
This line from the summary was written by someone who doesn't understand the slightest thing about modern encryption and password security:
of course any password whatsoever is going to be insecure against offline attack
Look up the concept of key stretching. In a nutshell, you basically take a plaintext password and then apply many thousands of rounds of encryption or hashing to it and then store the end result in the password database. The idea is that you incur a few seconds of computation time every time the password is set or retrieved, which is a very minor inconvenience in normal use but is a humongous amount of overhead to brute forcing even a single account.
With this technique, a dictionary attack on one account can take days to work through the whole set of words. So if you're using a dictionary word for your password, you're screwed no matter what. But a halfway-strong password that doesn't appear in any dictionary can be completely immune to an offline attack if the hashes were computed securely. The only way for an attacker to get around it would be to find some fatal flaw in the encryption or hashing algorithm. (In which case, the NSA would probably like to speak with him.)
You keep saying "real prices," "real money," and "real value." As if what the market chooses to pay for things isn't the actual value of those items. What is your benchmark for "real" exactly?
and they are not producing anything, because manufacturing left the country
The U.S. is a mixed economy. Manufacturing hasn't been the dominant economic sector in a long time and it's only going to fall further behind. We will never be a significant world power in terms of making physical things again. We would do better to focus our efforts on sectors which are growing, like information (technology), finance, and services.
and manufacturing left because money is not good
No, manufacturing left because Americans demanded lower and lower prices on physical goods and the businesses were (rightfully) more than happy to shift production overseas so they could meet those lower price points and keep more profit at the same time.
inflation is killing savings and investment
Inflation is basically lower than it's been historically and it's trending downward. (source)
and taxes are historic high.
For the past few decades, the average effective tax rate has waffled between 20-25%. (source) The U.S. has lower tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than many (most?) other first-world nations. (source)
It's somehow the (free) operating system's fault because printer manufacturers design their hardware around yet another half-baked printing protocol instead of just using a standard that's been around for decades?
The results were that people high on marijuana were safer than when sober.
overcompensate for their impairment
That's not how it works. Either your judgement and motorskills are impaired or they are not. If MJ affects either or both of those, then your driving is simply less safe, end of story. It may be the case that since they were more paranoid that they were more careful (e.g., drove slower or were more attentive to the road), but there are dangers on the road that require quick thinking and reflexes for the sake of your life and others. You cannot compensate for physical and mental impairment by simply being more careful, a mistake many drunk drivers make as well.
At least in the US, where our BAC limits are 25% of what actually impairs driving.
25% of impairment for you might be 125% for someone else. The limit is low because no two people are affected by alcohol the same way. Line up people with the same weight, body fat content, etc and feed them alcohol at the same rate and they will all end up with different BAC numbers. Or, take two people with the same BAC and test them. One might be appear to be horrifically drunk while the other seems perfectly sober. Or repeat the experiment and find that one person's overall judgement is sound but his hand-eye coordination is in shambles while it's vice-versa for the person sitting next to him. Alcohol also tends to severely destabilize people's emotions, which is yet another hazard.
I'm looking forward to the day that the law simply says you cannot drive if you have any alcohol in your system that could have gotten there from drinking. It's a far simpler rule and neatly does away with all of the guesswork surrounding what an appropriate BAC is. Easy to enforce, easy to obey.
I'm probably in the minority, but I see it like this: Drinking and driving are mutually exclusive activities. If I'm at someone's house and I'm planning to drive home, I simply don't drink. Even if I'm below the legal limit, I need all of my facilities about me if I'm to drive safely. (And defend myself against the real drunkards on the road.) On the other hand, if I know I'm going to be there overnight, then there's no harm in getting sloshed.
I know, I know, it's a very radical thing to apply reason to such a controversial subject. But hey, I like to live on the edge. (Rather than die on it.)
- Mandatory (lower) speed limit depending on the BAC. Wanna drive after 1 scotch? No problem, but you're not going over 35MPH - Actively training drivers to driving while impaired.
I nearly asphyxiated from laughing so hard, but SWEET JEEBUS, it was worth it.
That was the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in years. Thank you, sir.
Has anyone in the history of the world ever paid for a RapidShare account to use it for downloading non-pirated content?
These guys are no different than the ones who offered newsgroup access for X amount per month (and by the way, here are all these great tools for managing large binary downloads should you happen to need them).
Rapidshare's business model has always been about making the free download option as obnoxious as humanly possible. "Pay us money and you can download this random file which may or may not be copyrighted at full speed instead of playing capcha games and waiting all day for your file to download and then have it stall at 98%" This is nothing new or unexpected.
âoeRapidShare has been faced with a severe increase in free user traffic and unfortunately also in the amount of abuse of our service ever since, suggesting that quite a few copyright infringers have chosen RapidShare as their new hoster of choice for their illegal activities,â the company explained.
IANAL, but that seems like a refreshing admission of legal liability for being willful accessories to copyright infringement.
Cars now are junk, even very expensive cars. The "product cheapening department" has found new ways to lower the production costs for cars, and this will come back to haunt anyone who owns a car for more than a couple of years.
I don't doubt for a second that car companies are always trying to find ways to produce their cars more cheaply, but I don't think that correlates to "cars are now junk." The average lifespan of a car these days is over 150,000 miles and is going up (source). My father is a retired mechanic and he's amazed by the longevity of today's vehicles. In his day, it was basically unheard of to get 50,000 miles out of a car before the engine needed a rebuild or the body rusted itself off.
the cars you can buy today are more of a disposable item than cars built a decade or more previously. Argue against this if you like, but you will be wrong.
I don't see how that can ever possibly be true until you've shown us your sources or original research.
My story starts with the infamous slapping incident of April 2001. While putting my four year old daughter to bed, she began licking my hand. After giving her three verbal warnings I slapped her. She got a cut lip. My wife asked me to leave to calm things down.
I'd say he got what he deserved based on this act alone. I will spank my daughter after verbal warnings, but you don't hit a child in the face, let alone hard enough to make her bleed. Ever.
And I have to doubt that these circumstances all fell into place exactly as told. Why would his wife call a social worker for "advice" if it was the first time something like this ever happened?
It's also odd that he goes right from this incident to being a victim in the machinery of divorce. What? Wasn't the original arrest the result of a misunderstanding of her call to a social worker? He totally left out all of the details surrounding what led up to the divorce. I'm going to go out on a limb and suppose that he wasn't entirely blameless here.
I'm sorry, but the whole of this thing is just your average fast-paced twisted-logic anti-government rant. If anyone else bothered to read this whole thing, I'm sorry for you.
Point being? Capitalism and democracy have thus far worked better than anything else for improving overall personal freedom, quality of life, and peaceful relations with other nations. It's not the system that's broken (in the U.S.), it's that we don't yet have enough safeguards in place to prevent people in positions of power from gaming the system to the detriment of the less powerful.
There are so many things wrong with this comment that I don't know where to start. I'm 90% sure it's a troll, but I'll bite anyway:
The problem is that we live in a society where everyone expects success to be handed to them. In the U.S., the poorest of the poor have a standard of living that outshines the majority of the rest of the world. We're all taught to get straight A's through high school, get a four-year degree while amassing crushing amounts of debt, and then after that we'll be able to land a job with a six figure salary and join a union that will keep us from getting fired no matter how little work we actualy do. When that doesn't happen, we complain that the government isn't creating enough jobs for us and then sit back to enjoy nice free unemployment checks while waiting for an opportunity to fall in our lap. What. The. Fuck.
When (not if) China supercedes the U.S. as the new world superpower in the next decade or two, I sincerely hope my fellow Americans will get off their butts and realize that we need to *work* to maintain our standard of living and our place in the world. Even if it's unpleasant, even if it's not what we really want to do at the moment. Otherwise, I fear that I'm going to live to see the fall of the U.S. democracy. Given our history of foreign policy, I'm certain that the rest of the world will celebrate it much as we celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, nostalgia aint what it used to be.
But back in reality, the maker movement is growing by leaps and bounds thanks to the information access and communication capabilities of the Internet. It's not like you have to go very far to find this stuff. There are at least a couple stories a week on Slashdot about Raspberry Pi, Arduino, or other random homebrew projects often made by or for the younger generation. There are http://hackaday.com/">blogs that specialize in DIY electronics projects which showcase youngsters regularly. Engineering courses regularly inspire kids to design and build impressive robots and original inventions. And finally, just in the last few years we've seen hackerspaces pop up in nearly every decent-size city in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and other countries. Hate to break it to you, but these places are rarely, if ever, full of puttering old geezers.
I'm going to answer this from my own personal experience.
I grew up in a rural area of the midwest United States. It was an hour's drive to any decent-size city. I went to the same school from Kindergarten through 12th grade. The average class size was about 30 students. Most of the area was above the poverty line, but let's just say that anyone who came into money (or aspired do to so) got out as soon as they could. Beyond magazines and broadcast network TV, there wasn't much contact with the "outside world."
I was lucky, however. My father thought that computers were an insanely expensive fad and a huge waste of time, but my mother saw the value in having a computer in the house and (somehow) overruled him. We got the town's first dial-up Internet account at a time when almost all urban Internet users were switching to Cable or DSL. Even with the slow speeds and occupying the only phone line for the house/business for hours on end, I tried to learn everything I could about the Internet and the stuff that runs it. I joined listservs, "surfed" the web, played with shareware, chatted on IRC, etc. I learned to program (poorly, at first), learned about Linux, and eventually figured out how to make the family computer to dual-boot into either Windows or Slackware. Most importantly, I had this window to the outside world that showed me that there was so much more out there than what I was told when growing up. More interesting and inspiring people, more technology, more culture.
Now I'm in my mid-30s and a software engineer making a comfortable living in a nice city with a happy family. Would my quality of life be as the same if I had stayed in rural BFE and lived out my life like everyone else there? I doubt it very much. This is why I lobby for subsidized rural broadband. Maybe it won't greatly affect those who have the ability to choose where they live. But it can drastically improve the future lives of their children.
Poster 7) Thanks to multi-core CPUs and vast improvements in modern graphics processors, KDE 4.96 is finally usable on many modern systems
You're definitely not reading the right dictionary... Only in the most general possible sense does "employee" == "consultant". In the same way that the segway is a motorcycle because it has two wheels and a motor.
In the U.S. at least, the term "employee" is legally (and casually) reserved for someone on an organization's payroll at the non-executive level. Being on a payroll means that the organization pays you regularly and deducts taxes from your paycheck. Consultants (or their employers) must manage their own taxes. One may be both a consultant and an employee, but not generally of the same company.
Florian Mueller is not an employee of Oracle, he is a consultant. He is self-employed and is on the payroll of his own company.
In the U.S. employment is generally "at will." This means that you can be fired for almost any reason, but you can also voluntarily quit your job for any reason as well.
That said, there are reasons why an employer can't fire you. Those mostly boil down to discrimination (gender, race, religious preference, etc) but also include whistleblowing, so the fired TSA agent likely seek a legal remedy in this particular case.
Yes, but they were (usually) designed for only one specific model of computer. And they weren't single-chip microprocessors. This CPU DB seems to be for the latter.
I don't see ARM in here (probably because they don't mass produce their designs, they license them to other chip makers), but there is a section for AMD.
Ah! That makes far more sense than my ghost train tracks story. I guess I was thrown off by how "wide" the scar appears to be in some places.
I once used the satellite view of Google Maps to look for old train tracks that have been torn up and gone for decades. It's actually pretty interesting. If you go out and visit spots where the tracks used to be, you can't see anything out of the ordinary. But a satellite shot clearly shows the "scars" of where the tracks used to be. Where they cut through forests, the trees are a little shorter. The soil in farm fields is colored differently. Roads bend to intersect the track at a right angle, things like that.
Here's a good example in Washtenaw county. You can see the "ghost tracks" going southwest/northeast. If you follow them northeast, you'll see that a new subdivision was built on an area of land that they used to cut through. Curiously, the developers built no houses where the tracks were. Instead, they added footpaths, gave some houses larger backyards, and left "gaps" where houses could have been built. (I'd love to know why this was done. Any developers in the audience?)
You can follow the tracks southwest as well, but eventually you get to a region where the images were taken with a different satellite at a different time of year and the loss of contrast makes the tracks impossible to follow any further.
I agree with this.
But I don't agree with this. If I'm tinkering away in my garage for decades to perfect a new kind of engine and accept private funding or donations toward that cause, am I obligated to share my engineering and testing results with the world after a set period of time? I don't think so. What if I don't consider my work to be finished by then? What if I wanted to start my own company around the technology developed? By doing what you propose, I'd simply be handing over my work to the commercial auto industry for them to exploit for profit while receiving nothing in return.
And two, enforcing things with little more justification than the "public good" is a slippery slope and at the bottom lies countries like China.
There we go, fixed that for you. Remove all the fluff from the middle of the paragraph and we get to the truth of the matter.
I bought an iPod Touch (gen 2) over two years ago. (There were no decent non-phone Android-based media devices at the time.) I still use it daily for music, podcasts, email, web browsing, and games. I'd like to keep using it for quite awhile longer, but it seems that the battery is dying a gradual death. When it was new, the thing could go for days without charging. Now, I'm lucky to get 24 hours and that's with having the wifi/bluetooth off most of the time.
So now I have a perfectly good device that does most of what I want, except soon it will be completely unusable because I can't just buy a new battery off eBay and stick it in. Caveat emptor, I guess, since I knew this going in. But I don't have to like it.
Right on. A big thing these days is UX (user experience) designers. It used to be that some subset of the development team got assigned to do the UI work, but more development shops are looking for dedicated people for that work.
It probably helps to have some artistic education and/or experience, but I would think that a psychological background would be very helpful. My understanding is that a lot of companies do user testing with multiple mockups to find out the best interface for a certain task, which is basically the same thing as psychology experiments.
This is true advice only if you plan to advance within a company that cares more about educational qualifications than demonstrated experience and leadership skills. Which is not all companies.
This line from the summary was written by someone who doesn't understand the slightest thing about modern encryption and password security:
Look up the concept of key stretching. In a nutshell, you basically take a plaintext password and then apply many thousands of rounds of encryption or hashing to it and then store the end result in the password database. The idea is that you incur a few seconds of computation time every time the password is set or retrieved, which is a very minor inconvenience in normal use but is a humongous amount of overhead to brute forcing even a single account.
With this technique, a dictionary attack on one account can take days to work through the whole set of words. So if you're using a dictionary word for your password, you're screwed no matter what. But a halfway-strong password that doesn't appear in any dictionary can be completely immune to an offline attack if the hashes were computed securely. The only way for an attacker to get around it would be to find some fatal flaw in the encryption or hashing algorithm. (In which case, the NSA would probably like to speak with him.)
You keep saying "real prices," "real money," and "real value." As if what the market chooses to pay for things isn't the actual value of those items. What is your benchmark for "real" exactly?
The U.S. is a mixed economy. Manufacturing hasn't been the dominant economic sector in a long time and it's only going to fall further behind. We will never be a significant world power in terms of making physical things again. We would do better to focus our efforts on sectors which are growing, like information (technology), finance, and services.
No, manufacturing left because Americans demanded lower and lower prices on physical goods and the businesses were (rightfully) more than happy to shift production overseas so they could meet those lower price points and keep more profit at the same time.
Inflation is basically lower than it's been historically and it's trending downward. (source)
For the past few decades, the average effective tax rate has waffled between 20-25%. (source) The U.S. has lower tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than many (most?) other first-world nations. (source)
Incorrect. "man sudoers" for enlightenment.
It's somehow the (free) operating system's fault because printer manufacturers design their hardware around yet another half-baked printing protocol instead of just using a standard that's been around for decades?
That's not how it works. Either your judgement and motorskills are impaired or they are not. If MJ affects either or both of those, then your driving is simply less safe, end of story. It may be the case that since they were more paranoid that they were more careful (e.g., drove slower or were more attentive to the road), but there are dangers on the road that require quick thinking and reflexes for the sake of your life and others. You cannot compensate for physical and mental impairment by simply being more careful, a mistake many drunk drivers make as well.
25% of impairment for you might be 125% for someone else. The limit is low because no two people are affected by alcohol the same way. Line up people with the same weight, body fat content, etc and feed them alcohol at the same rate and they will all end up with different BAC numbers. Or, take two people with the same BAC and test them. One might be appear to be horrifically drunk while the other seems perfectly sober. Or repeat the experiment and find that one person's overall judgement is sound but his hand-eye coordination is in shambles while it's vice-versa for the person sitting next to him. Alcohol also tends to severely destabilize people's emotions, which is yet another hazard.
I'm looking forward to the day that the law simply says you cannot drive if you have any alcohol in your system that could have gotten there from drinking. It's a far simpler rule and neatly does away with all of the guesswork surrounding what an appropriate BAC is. Easy to enforce, easy to obey.
I'm probably in the minority, but I see it like this: Drinking and driving are mutually exclusive activities. If I'm at someone's house and I'm planning to drive home, I simply don't drink. Even if I'm below the legal limit, I need all of my facilities about me if I'm to drive safely. (And defend myself against the real drunkards on the road.) On the other hand, if I know I'm going to be there overnight, then there's no harm in getting sloshed.
I know, I know, it's a very radical thing to apply reason to such a controversial subject. But hey, I like to live on the edge. (Rather than die on it.)
I nearly asphyxiated from laughing so hard, but SWEET JEEBUS, it was worth it.
That was the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in years. Thank you, sir.
Has anyone in the history of the world ever paid for a RapidShare account to use it for downloading non-pirated content?
These guys are no different than the ones who offered newsgroup access for X amount per month (and by the way, here are all these great tools for managing large binary downloads should you happen to need them).
Rapidshare's business model has always been about making the free download option as obnoxious as humanly possible. "Pay us money and you can download this random file which may or may not be copyrighted at full speed instead of playing capcha games and waiting all day for your file to download and then have it stall at 98%" This is nothing new or unexpected.
IANAL, but that seems like a refreshing admission of legal liability for being willful accessories to copyright infringement.
I don't doubt for a second that car companies are always trying to find ways to produce their cars more cheaply, but I don't think that correlates to "cars are now junk." The average lifespan of a car these days is over 150,000 miles and is going up (source). My father is a retired mechanic and he's amazed by the longevity of today's vehicles. In his day, it was basically unheard of to get 50,000 miles out of a car before the engine needed a rebuild or the body rusted itself off.
I don't see how that can ever possibly be true until you've shown us your sources or original research.
I'd say he got what he deserved based on this act alone. I will spank my daughter after verbal warnings, but you don't hit a child in the face, let alone hard enough to make her bleed. Ever.
And I have to doubt that these circumstances all fell into place exactly as told. Why would his wife call a social worker for "advice" if it was the first time something like this ever happened?
It's also odd that he goes right from this incident to being a victim in the machinery of divorce. What? Wasn't the original arrest the result of a misunderstanding of her call to a social worker? He totally left out all of the details surrounding what led up to the divorce. I'm going to go out on a limb and suppose that he wasn't entirely blameless here.
I'm sorry, but the whole of this thing is just your average fast-paced twisted-logic anti-government rant. If anyone else bothered to read this whole thing, I'm sorry for you.
Point being? Capitalism and democracy have thus far worked better than anything else for improving overall personal freedom, quality of life, and peaceful relations with other nations. It's not the system that's broken (in the U.S.), it's that we don't yet have enough safeguards in place to prevent people in positions of power from gaming the system to the detriment of the less powerful.
There are so many things wrong with this comment that I don't know where to start. I'm 90% sure it's a troll, but I'll bite anyway:
The problem is that we live in a society where everyone expects success to be handed to them. In the U.S., the poorest of the poor have a standard of living that outshines the majority of the rest of the world. We're all taught to get straight A's through high school, get a four-year degree while amassing crushing amounts of debt, and then after that we'll be able to land a job with a six figure salary and join a union that will keep us from getting fired no matter how little work we actualy do. When that doesn't happen, we complain that the government isn't creating enough jobs for us and then sit back to enjoy nice free unemployment checks while waiting for an opportunity to fall in our lap. What. The. Fuck.
When (not if) China supercedes the U.S. as the new world superpower in the next decade or two, I sincerely hope my fellow Americans will get off their butts and realize that we need to *work* to maintain our standard of living and our place in the world. Even if it's unpleasant, even if it's not what we really want to do at the moment. Otherwise, I fear that I'm going to live to see the fall of the U.S. democracy. Given our history of foreign policy, I'm certain that the rest of the world will celebrate it much as we celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union.
Um, no? Since when is deleting a user from a system the same thing as giving them your personal passwords?