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.

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.

Agreed, tax increases should be considered, however we have also lost a lot of jobs, and the consumer debt in America is very high. What this means is that there are fewer people who can actually afford to pay taxes. There comes a point where you can no longer increasing taxes because the damage caused to the economy due to lack of available capital actually results in less revenue for the government. We are dangerously close to that condition.

When you find yourself unable to increase revenue, you must cut back on your spending to balance your budget. I wonder if people would be more willing to pay more taxes if they felt they could trust government to use it wisely. Given the government's track record, I would rather have government cut back than to give them yet another loan to waste on their excesses.

Here is a chart of the spending by department.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?get_gallerynr=172

In my post, I may have overstated the size a bit. So I guess we have one additional option -- instead of eliminating two programs, we can eliminate one and then all other government spending. :-)

Here is an article placing the current US deficit at $1.5 trillion:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aNaqecavD9ek

Another interesting site is ShadowStats which shows a more accurate representation of government figures that they have been manipulating over the past three decades.

http://www.shadowstats.com/

The sad thing is that all of these budget cuts don't even come close to addressing the problem. Nearly all of the government spending comes down to four programs: 1) national defense, 2) welfare, 3) Social Security, and 4) Medicare. If you eliminated every other department in the government, I think you would come to about half of any one of these programs. Our deficit (the amount of money we spend more than we bring in every year) is over $1.5 trillion.

The four programs are all basically the same size. For the sake of convenience, let us call is $750 billion each. In order to eliminate our deficit (we'll work on the actual debt later), we have two options:

1) Cut all four programs in half.
2) Eliminate two programs -- take your pick.

That is what it has come down to, plain and simple. But no one has the courage to do what it will take to steer the ship aright.