Why would I fear the Chinese .gov taking my money? IF you try to move to China, what you have to fear is the US .gov taking your money, first by charging you an "exit tax". Then if you try to put money in a foreign bank acct., charging you 30% witholding' due to FATCA. Then if you fuck up one little thing someday while your retired over there just wanting to hang with your Chinese girlfriends and avoid any trouble, like not filing one of the several required forms that must be sent to the IRS and Treasury each year to report not only what taxes you owe, but also where every penny of your money is in every location on the planet lest you become a felon, they will happily seize all your assets. To top it off, if they add new reporting requirements, you won't even be told about it. So make sure to read every line of every 2000 page bill passed by CONgress each year.

And how do you know startpage.com isn't a foreign shell corp. set up in Denmark by agents of or working for the NSA or something similarly evil? Nothing can be trusted anymore. Nothing.

Thru hole, in 2013? Jeez, I'm even designing mostly SMT for home projects like Nixie clocks. I find SMT easier to work with than PTH.

Drugs like moda. are most effective when one has slept well.

If they don't convict enough people, they won't be punished. They will be rewarded with more funding and power. So, it's a win-win always for the .gov, and a lose always for the citizen.

Heading in the direction of simply a criminal system.

You mean, kind of like what we are already doing?

Why do we need another criminal law? There is already defamation, which may be extended to "public disclosure of private facts" with the intent of causing harm. So the jerks who do this should get sued and have to pay the victim some damages, like a year's salary or so. This would compensate the actual victim.

Instead we create another criminal law so we have another reason to put people in prison, this time for just being an asshole. The offender's livelihood may be damaged if they are imprisoned, thereby reducing their ability to contribute to society and/or to compensate the victim. Notice that the state seeks to punish in a way that benefits the state and the hangers-on of the state, such as the prison-industrial complex, rather than being truly concerned for the victim. Thus, the trend toward the criminalization of everything.

The greatest example of course is drug abuse. Can anyone explain how exactly anyone can abuse a drug? Does a drug care what you do with it? One can abuse themselves with a drug. Then the requisite explanation that needs to be offered is: How exactly is it a crime if I abuse myself? Everyone must answer just one simple question for themselves: Who owns my body?

Crimes should be strictly limited to the following: 1. murder; 2. robbery, theft, and fraud; 3. rape, assault, and reckless endangerment; 4. vandalism or reckless/intentional destruction of another's property (this includes polluting).

In all of these, for an actual crime to occur, there must be both INTENT and a tangible VICTIM. Ie., a human being or a group thereof must have actually been killed, injured, physically violated, or deceptively deprived of their property (the victim may also be a corporate entity in the case of crimes 2 and 4). We'll leave crimes against animals for a separate discussion. Thus, there can be no crimes against "society." Criminal fraud must involve intentionally selling something that is not what it is said to be. Ie., a lie must have occurred to make the customer part with their money. Otherwise, it is civil fraud which is basically a contract dispute.

All other matters are civil, period.

Any deviation from this will result in a spiraling out of control of the state until everything is regulated down to when you can cum, and there are so many crimes that they can find a way to put you in the joint if you don't agree to fuck your customers for the NSA. Ie., exactly the situation we are in or are approaching.

I welcome arguments explaining why anything else should be a crime. But if there isn't both intent and a tangible human person(s) who are harmed physically or deprived of property (including corps.), I'm not listening.

This is what will happen to you if you don't cooperate: http://rt.com/usa/qwest-ceo-nsa-jail-604/

I've hated MS since I started with Linux in '93 due to a Win 3.1 data loss event. Since my last upgrade of openSuse, from 10.3 (really quite good) to 12.3, I can only describe it as "one big bug." I'm really pissed at the state of Linux desktops now, and yes I've tried others. My wife has Mint, and it's fair, but very constraining for me. I'm seriously considering Arch Linux, since their documentation is awesome. But back to the point...

When Windows 8 came out I was sure I'd never use it. I also had no interest in tablets or laptops.

But an unfortunate health situation has left me on a desperate quest for continuous mental stimulation in order to avoid agonizing sleepiness.

I decided there was one program I wanted to be able to run while out: LTspice.

Plus, I just don't have time to waste on Linux desktop shoddiness anymore. And I'm willing to pay money for it. So I wasn't willing to futz around with a Linux laptop. I needed a tool, that works out of the box. Remarkably, I even opened my mind to the thought that if I have to learn a UI and OS that I'm not used to, so be it, if it WORKS rather than being a bug-ridden piece of garbage that reveals 2 or 3 show-stopping bugs within the first few minutes of tinkering.

That USED to be my experience with everything MS. I'd lock up Word within minutes, even though I only touched it for 30 minutes per year to edit a specific corp. doc. Now however, the tide is turning, and it's Linux desktops that I can find hideous bugs in within minutes. Anyway...

I ruled out ultrabooks because I want something flat so it's not obvious when I'm at a restaurant with my wife that I'm looking at a screen instead of her. She is Ok with whatever I do, but I feel more comfortable NOT using a laptop in that situation. Plus, a CAD-like program with a laptop touchpad sucks. I started thinking that a touch tablet with an optional keyboard might be a workable solution.

After reading about countless options, I went to Best Buy to look at the Surf. Pro, and the guy there actually let me install my program on their demo!

I wound up buying one at the MS store in Palo Alto. What an experience! They sure treated me nice. They threw in Office Home+Student for free with the extras I bought. I don't mind having that despite all my docs. being in OO.org format, since many Word docs just don't work well in Open/LibreOffice.

To sum it up, the thing is completely satisfactory. The build quality seems superb. The digitizing pen is kick-ass. And I can do just what I wanted, which is to be able to do everything CAD-ish in tablet mode, with the keyboard as a backup in case I need to do more extensive typing. The MS touch keyboard on screen implementation is very good, including handwriting recognition. It is also plenty fast.

Windows 8 at first seemed completely incomprehensible. I could write plenty on how stupid MS was for the way they went about releasing this. For a desktop without touch, Windows 8 just doesn't make sense. I'm still planning to have nothing to do with it on my desktops. But on the tablet it is actually Ok, and kind of fun to be using something new that's also understandable (once you begin to "get it.")

Unfortunately, my wife's Android tablet touch screen just doesn't respond to my dry fingers. It's the strangest thing. I just can't get it to "go" at all. No such problems with the Surface Pro. I'm extremely happy with it.

There are some things I don't like, but they are mostly avoidable, such as MS's desire to tie everything in to a "Microsoft account." Well, in today's Orwellian age, I wouldn't plan on putting much personally relevant info on ANY mobile device, except maybe a Blackberry.

So, still no MS fanboy here. But they won the sale because they had the tool that best met my needs, albeit somewhat niche ones. I'll probably buy a Surface Pro 2 if the price is reasonable, and give my wife the original, or just have a spare. We'll see. I'm also eager to upgrade it to Win 8.1 when that's available.

If I could tell MS what to do it would be: dump the stupid Win RT, and simply have two tablet offerings: an 8in Win8 Surface with a lower-powered Intel processor (or maybe a full Haswell CPU), and the Surface Pro II. It's the Intel CPU and ability to run Windows programs that is the differentiating feature of the Surface. Win8 RT is just pointless.

Now back to battling my bug-ridden openSuse 12.3 KDE desktop...

If you understand anything at all about "democracy," you shouldn't be surprised when totalitarianism results.

The first time I saw some advanced mathematical equations, I said "what the f*ck is that jibberish?" I knew at least that it was a type of math I never saw before, and quickly became obsessed to find out what it was. I proceeded to copy a whole bunch of it onto my notebook cover. My Vo-Tech Electronics instructor informed me that it was "calculus," and gave me an introductory text. After struggling a bit to get it, I finally began to understand derivatives, and proceeded to obsessively hand differentiate pages and pages of expressions the hard way, by taking the limit after algebraically manipulating the expression substituted into the fundamental definition of derivative. Then I proceeded to work through all the standard derivative form proofs. This was while being a stoner, and coming darn near dropping out of high school. Finally, my maturity caught up to my inherent potential after age 21, and I was able to succeed at college after the 3rd try, and land a respectable career as first a Chemist, then a Laser-Optical Technologist, then finally an Electronics Engineer.

The ability to learn calculus on my own planted a crucial seed of confidence in a person who had little self-esteem. This seed would later blossom into a strong autodidactic tendency which was a major factor in helping me get my act together.

Point being, you can never predict what will inspire people to discover something good about themselves which may ultimately lead to a contribution to society. So it is better to just let them have the truth.

Also, ignorance is not knowing that you don't know. At least if they are shown the equations, they will realize that they don't know what the heck it means. If that disturbs the egos of 0.0001% into wanting to learn something, then that is good.

Finally, raising a child has taught me that people behave according to the expectations placed on them. Within the constraints of their inherent ability, of course. But even that is somewhat plastic! I'm convinced a large element of our societal troubles stems from attempting to absolve people of responsibility for themselves.

Yes, why not? Or don't you think women own their own bodies?

Ie., just another version of "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

This is false. As an example (sorry I can't cite), the ATF sent a package containing a firearm component which can be used to manufacture a machine gun to someone they didn't like. When he signed for the package before learning what was inside, they arrested and charged him with some felony firearm law violation.

The fact of the matter is, if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have a great deal to worry about. If you are law abiding, you are much more likely to victimized by the government today than by criminals.

Rich != member_of_power_elite;