Well, everyone wants higher pay. But supply and demand always win in the end. The big software companies already have development centers in China, India, Canada, and many other places. They can already hire cheap developers - cheaper than you pay US immigrants! It's not about driving down wages, when you can hire someone for $20k easily enough today if you just want basic competence. Companies want to pay these talented developers more, and bring them to the US because this is where top talent comes. What labor pool do you imagine you're protecting? The work can in theory be done anywhere, and we in the US benefit greatly from being the concentration of top talent.

I can't believe populist sentiment among programmers. This job can be done anywhere. You want to compete with immigrants, who have your same cost of living!

But that misses the most fundament point in all these "they turk or jurbs" arguments. You can't keep the business here by keeping immigrants out. If you want the US to be a center for the good programming jobs, then you must be pro-immigrant, because those jobs will go wherever it's easiest for programmers to legally assemble (it's not like you easily can spot the top 5% - you hire as many "good" programmers as you can, then observe their actual performance). If you want just the shit jobs to stay here, and all the best jobs to be elsewhere, then by all means get your immigrant hatred on!

Ah, the /. 30-second expert. Indeed, the TOR guys did think of that too.

Malicious exit nodes do not per se compromise TOR, though they are in a position to take advantage of some potential exploits (also, exit nodes are irrelevant to .onion servers) It's been known since the start that if an attacker both controlled the exit node and could directly tap your line, there'd be and endless stream of exploits possible - and IIRC the NSA had just such attacks in its arsenal. But that doesn't scale - you have to be actively monitoring a specific target to de-anonimize them, you can't do it to everyone. If the NSA actually got warrants when they did that to Americans [pause for laughter] I think it's a fine system.

TFA seems to be about taking over more than half of all TOR nodes, which can hardly be done in secret, and really makes 0-days in the TOR bundle visible.

Far more worrying, especially for the conspiracy theorist, is the never-ending stream of vulnerabilities in .onion servers allowing the operators to be de-anonymized. It's hard to believe TOR wasn't designed that way. TOR seemed designed from the start as a system to let Chinese dissidents use American servers safely, but not allow Silk Road-style sites (servers illegal in the US) to stay up. That IMO would be pretty cool if the US itself weren't growing ever more repressive.

Presidents can grant pardons at any time, not just as they're leaving office. If only we could somehow elect a president who favored the people over a stronger central government [pause for laughter]. I'm not even sure how the system would need to change to make that possible, but I do think the eventual death of broadcast TV (with the auction system for advertising airtime meaning you can never have enough political advertising budget) will help.

Maybe you've heard of "the cloud"? It lets you do this nifty thing where you rent servers by the hour - quite cheaply, too. Other companies manage to handle holiday surges just fine. Need, say, an extra 1,000 servers for a day? Won't even be that expensive.

I've seen the flag-on-the-truck thing many times - never seen a confederate flag. While there are many in the South that still hate the damnyankees for the War of Northern Aggression, it's mostly pirate flags now. For a while I was confused - why were there so many Raiders fans across the South? But it's just the current generation's Rebel flag, without confusing the Northerners that it was about racism.

I think you'll find most conservatives actually saying "it wasn't so terrible for grandpa, so let's see how this new untested idea actually makes it better". There will always be people opposed to any sort of change, of course, but don't confuse evidence-based (as opposed to "it looks good on paper, let's do it") and outcome-based (as opposed to "what matters is the lawmaker's intentions were good") with anti-progress. Any seasoned engineer will tell you that the way you'll make the best progress is to test before you ship, because it's so much less effort to fix mistakes that way.

The Hobbit movies lost me with Beorn. WTF, PJ? WTF?

I really wanted this to be a light-hearted adventure, focused on Bilbo's character growth, and the point made that adventures can be fun and rewarding, but war just sucks. The book was pretty amazing that way.

Actually, this is mostly done. The lifespan of women and men is quickly converging, as is pay (if you take into account lifetime hours worked - for professional women who haven't had a kid, I believe women are slightly ahead under 35 now).

Does Slashdot have to have a "gender gap story" every 2 Bennett stories or something? I guess it's out with "news for nerds" and in with "Reddit envy".

Not where I am - have things not picked up where you are? This is a slow recovery.

It seems people don't get this, so let's spell it out:

Inflation requires both demand and supply of money. You can't cause inflation simply by increasing the money supply, unless you go totally crazy with it - however, if that supply is there when the economy heats up and demand appears, look out.

Hpwever, 5-10% inflation during a good economy isn't per se a problem: high inflation is a symptom of a bubble economy but may be there without the bubble. And it's the malinvestment associated with a bubble that hurts everyone - "medium" inflation only really hurts people who made the wrong bet on the future value of the dollar.

As long as you don't actually crater the currency, inflation is merely a warning sign of the real problem, and the real problem is people working on things no one wants: from bubbles to government make-work, the stuff we have is just the stuff we make, and if we're not working to make stuff we want or need, we'll all suffer for it.

I wish I knew a good one! Most places are as crazy as ZeroHedge, in one direction or another. I read MarketWatch, but more to keep abreast of market fashion than reality (never read a stock market site for economic news).

The most useful stuff I've ever read on economics was the old-school stuff: on the business cycle, not just boom-bust but which sectors recover in which order - what leads recovery, and what's big when the end of the boom is near, and what survives best during the bust. The history of different kinds of currencies and the problems the had. The various big name economists from the first half of the 20th century, now that we can see the actual economic growth in various countries that seem to follow on or another of them. Everything old is new again.

The dollar is much like capitalism and democracy: it's the worst imaginable choice, except for everything else that's ever been tried. That's really it: the US government is just less effective at ruining the dollar than every other central bank for a major currency. Much of the current value of the euro is simply it's position as "second lest awful currency", a hedge against a reckless Fed.

When the dollar looked rough a few years back, interest in gold perked up, and interest in the Swiss franc bloomed, but the Swiss were apparently uncomfortable with the idea of becoming a reserve currency, and committed explicitly to falling with the euro. Odd choice, but there it was.

If the EU ever finishes collapsing, all the sovereign debt in the region blows up taking the Euro with it (it's only a question of when), and then finally recovers and regains financial credibility, then finally the dollar might be displaced, Or if China has it's inevitable revolution, and happens to emerge as a capitalist democracy, or when India or Brazil finally reach first-world status nation-wide. we might also have other credible currencies. But for now, the dollar is pretty much it.

That's not to say the dollar can't be destroyed if the Fed tries hard enough. But over the past downturn they were actually quite clever: while they were printing ~$2 T in no money via QE, they were removing ~$2T in money supply via bank reserves (while we continue with a 0 reserve banking system, the Fed paid attractive-enough interest that banks voluntarily increased their reserves to unprecedented levels). And the Fed did actually wind down QE. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, when that ~$2T in "Excess reserves" comes back into the money supply and turbo-charges inflation, but hopefully that will just be Carter-like, and not a currency collapse.

The purpose of toilets is to receive DRM. Not sure what TFS is complaining about: your cat comes along and deposits DRM in the litter-box; job well done!