Agreed. I am not a Catholic, but even the Protestant churches need to do some house cleaning. However, the fact that someone else is a hypocrite does not absolve you from doing the right thing.

I meant to say that it leads to increased demand. The pervasiveness of pornography only works to fuel the problem, and as men (and women) grow accustomed to instant gratification (not to mention a taste for deviant behavior that most partners would not willingly do), they will turn to prostitution to meet their perceived need. As there are not enough people willing to perform to meet the demand, the market for sex slavery is born.

Yes, child pornography is illegal, but pornography itself leads to demand which fuels sex trafficking (both for women and children) as you can see from the statistics cited.

Also, there are many states currently where the only person who is convicted in the case of under-aged prostitution is the victim -- the young girl. For example, Texas just recently passed a law finally making it a prosecutable offense for pimping an under-aged girl. Before that bill was passed, the pimp would not have faced any charges.

And just because a law is on the books doesn't mean it is enforced. While the number of sex traffickers being convicted is growing, the vast majority of cases have yet to be prosecuted.

Actually a bigger dent (and one that would be extremely unpopular... especially on slashdot) would be to put an end to pornography. The correlation between sex trafficking and pornography is very strong as pornography fuels desire for the real thing. For example, you can read this article for references to many government and private studies linking the two. This interview with a government official who specialized in sex trafficking was also very interesting.

The statistics of sex trafficking in America are disturbing. There are an estimated 300,000 sex trafficking victims in the United States alone. Half of them are children (under the age of 18) and 90% of them are American citizens. The average age of entry into prostitution is 13 with an average lifespan once being trafficked of only 7 years. The average girl caught in sex trafficking is dead before she is even legally allowed to drink.

This is an important issue to me. I even wrote a song on the subject and have started speaking out about this problem to raise awareness. If you start to look into this world, prepare to be very disturbed by what you see.

My clocks took a mild effort, but that is not the real challenge. The real challenge is to get five young boys to figure out that they can sleep in an extra hour now. So far? No such luck. All five were up and running at 5 AM this morning.

We have had an organization charged with the defense of our nation for 370 years. How about we let them do their job rather than fight in overseas wars (and get rid of the expensive and excessive DHP)?

I live in Texas, so ordinarily a major snowstorm in the northeast would have no impact on my personal life. However, I also work remotely with an office in Connecticut that has lost power with no estimate for recovery as of yet. While many of the servers are hosted off-site, some of the critical systems are shut down for the duration. At least half of the people on the project are without power and/or Internet making design meetings impossible. So... definitely impacted at work, but life goes on here at home.

The claim is made for Michigan, but it has proven true for Bozeman, MT some years. The first day upon waking up in Bozeman, there was an inch of snow on the ground. That was August 23rd. A few years later we had another inch of snow... on July 3rd! We even had an 18 inch blizzard on flag day, June 14th. That is what comes from living up north over four thousand feet above sea level (of course, it is much worse when you actually live in the mountains). While snow in the summer is not necessarily "normal", you truly never know what kind of weather any one month will bring.

While I am certain the religious content of this video will not be liked by many on Slashdot, it should be noted that this is not the first time this idea was used -- to mimic social media to explain history. In my opinion, the video was far more creative in the telling of its story as well. It creatively shows the story of Christmas with great insight and thoughtfulness.

A Social Network Christmas

One of the big pitfalls for roundabouts that I saw in Montana when they tried to implement them was not taking into account snow removal (at big deal in Bozeman, MT) and emergency vehicles. They placed large concrete islands in the middle of the intersection, and there was not enough room for the larger vehicles to navigate around it. The snow plows couldn't even see the island after a big storm and would run right over it.

They are not the end-all solution, but in certain circumstances, I can see where they would be beneficial.

So you have no answer to the direct question I asked?, so you just pull the "you are just brainwashed"-argument? OK, thanks for playing.

So, is your argument basically that if we (meaning the West) doesn't actively oppose every single massacre out there, or actively oppose every single dictator there is, we should not do so at all? Either we do everything everywhere, or we do nothing at all?

What would you do if West did nothing in Libya, and it resulted in massacre of thousands?

The biggest threat that Netflix is going to face is the cost of bandwidth to the end users. Someone has to carry the cost of transmitting all of this video data across the Internet, and Netflix is rapidly becoming the biggest hog of them all. ISP's are no longer able to carry this cost and so will be looking to push it back to Netflix or onto their end users with higher prices. There is also the danger of the ISP's becoming their own content distribution centers and shutting out Netflix entirely.

It should be interesting to see how this all plays out.

That might matter to the handful of Linux-users out there who want to use iPods, rest of the world does not care one bit. And your comment has nothing to do whether Apple has "failed" or not. If you look at hard data, Apple has anything but failed. Their lack of Linux-support doesn't seem to be hurting them one bit.

That would result in crappier software. iTunes is really designed for OS X, and it works fine over there. Windows-users are complaining, because it doesn't work as well on Windows. Doing a proper cross-platform app would result in jack-of-all-trades app which would be mediocre on all platforms, as opposed to current situation, where the app is good on one platform, and mediocre on another. Just about all cross-platform apps look weird and alien and they do not seem to fit in with the OS and UI that surrounds them.

Because Windows and OS X cater to about 99.9% of their potential customers, and it's not worth the effort to support Linux.