Series of bad choices? The main one is making the public domain articles in JSTOR available on the Internet instead of having to pay a dime a page for a copy (yes, PUBLIC DOMAIN). It was the government calling that a Terms of Service violation and thus "wire fraud" which is a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (a horribly loose law that lifts wording directly from the Espionage Act of 1917, which itself is possibly the worst piece of legislation on the books). According to the CFAA, using the internet is a felony punishable by 30 years in prison if you basically visit any for profit website and use an alias. In other words, visiting /. is a felony unless you're using your real name.

The CFAA was meant for one main purpose - to protect ATM transactions. It was never meant for networked computers like the internet and should not be used as such. This is a blatant abuse of power by the US government, as is the espionage charge against Snowden (sorry, but you can't commit espionage by giving information to your own people - that is really fucked up - it is purely theft).

I can have beer (1 or 2) before bedtime, but I don't more because of the effects on my waistline. Much easier to keep the weight off (lost 30 pounds last year and kept it off with the no alcohol near bedtime plan).

Since Slashdot was founded in 1997 and bughunter is user 10093 and most early Slashdot users were in college, I'd make the guess that he is 35-45 years old. There is, you know, Internet dating and stuff. And even internet stalking for users named Creepy.

jk - uid was named after a computer I received Halloween 1997 because my preferred handles were taken. I also understand this woman thing at night, but mainly because my wife is more a morning person.

I saw the film on TV first, but my memory of it was foggy until I saw it again on VHS many years later. They ran it as a precursor to the TV series the first time I saw it, with the nudity edited out (which is quite significant for a PG movie). I was at an age where I had to beg my parents to let me see Star Wars because it was PG and had "Wars" in the name, so it was well before my tweens.

Except Carousel is at 21 years of age :)

I know, you are referring to the film, though - they extended it to 30 so they could use "known" actors and actresses.

Yeah, it is hard to tell in some cases, too. When you work for a diversified multinational company like I do, you can have 5% women in your IT division and 85% women in your health division. We also outsource far more jobs in India and China than we have in Europe or America, and in both those countries, tech is not taboo for women, so their ratios are vastly higher.

Finding qualified women is less difficult than finding qualified blacks as long as you aren't looking for qualified _white_ women. If I scrap management and QA from my company, we have exactly one white woman in tech. We have as many Hispanic women. To put that in perspective, we have more (at least semi) out of the closet gay and lesbians than either of those (with at least 3 lesbians in management). The only black guy I work (directly) with is native Ethiopian who attended college in the US and then got a green card and eventually citizenship.

When I interviewed prospective employees last, I interviewed 40 (mostly) white men, 0 women, 1 person of color (Indian from India), and one man from Ecuador that spoke English poorly. How are you supposed to diversify when you don't even have diverse candidates? We ended up hiring a white guy and the person from India, even though I recommended against him (most of the white guys were better qualified). Incidentally, HR wanted us to hire a woman for diversity reasons, but that is kind of difficult given that we didn't have any female candidates. We have hired women for my site, but mostly in India and China and then relocated them.

yeah - my thoughts exactly, as well.

Yep, and Netflix has even said that the reason the DRM is there is because the studios require it. Even when Netflix told them some of it is easy to work around (like region requirements), they still required it, and thus we get plugins like mediahint.

First off, let me say that I agree with your point - I am against the business subsidies of low wages.

But I think you're envisioning a very small subset of Socialism, specifically the subset applied to Communism.

I'm a full blown Socialist as far as my own business goes, since each employee owns a full quarter of it and (generally) earns 1/4 of the profits from it. Yep, that form of Socialism is basically Capitalism with joint employee ownership (yes, you still sell your goods and make a profit). In fact, this is the original form and probably clearest form of what Marx meant by Socialism. Where it got mucky is when merged with Communist doctrine where instead of profiting from the goods, you basically barter them for other goods. This got morphed even further with Lenin/Stalin-ism where the state just takes your excess production and distributes it as it pleases.

I also work for a full blown capitalist company with a multimillionaire CEO and peons getting paid much, much less (but still a comfortable amount, since I'm salaried in a tech company).

In any case, people seem to think Socialism just in terms of Communist doctrine and not that it spans between Capitalism and Communism depending on whether the goods are sold or traded for other goods you (hopefully) want. Since Marxism is a total pipe dream, I'd have to say I'm anti-Communism, since the "Socialism" practiced in other forms of Communism means the state takes your goods and redistributes them as it chooses and gives you what it thinks you want.

To employers, the proper wage is the market clearing wage where employees accept the wages offered by the employer. For every employer who pays below the market wage, another pays the market wage, and the worker choses the employer who pays more.

That works until there are no jobs at the other business. I would far rather work for Costco than WalMart, but the Costco jobs fill quickly and have few openings and there are always openings at WalMart. WalMart then uses that as a reason to cut wages further to boost profits and suddenly nearly all of their employees depend on federal subsidies paid by taxpayers.

Boosting minimum wage pulls many of these people off of welfare and may even make them taxpaying citizens. I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing Sam Walton's low prices. We should be paying the actual value of goods including human labor costs, not a taxpayer subsidized number. This is also why I'm opposed to wage subsidies - what a horrible solution - take away welfare subsidies and make wage subsidies and all you've done is move numbers around on paper and not fixed the problem.

It is widely believed (and disputed) that Stalin intentionally caused events such as the Holodomor (Ukrainian famine). I think sending propaganda into the Ukraine saying "don't eat your children" instead of food says it all, though.

Socialism is an economic system and many people seem to think it's a political system. The political-economic system is Communism, which uses a state controlled form of Socialism (but even that is ass-backward according to Marxism - the people are supposed to voluntarily give excess production to the state, not get it taken by the state, but now we're delving into Lenninism/Stalinism).

What people use the term "socialist country" they mean welfare state, because every single one of those countries is, in fact, mostly capitalist (but just like America, there are employee owned businesses which are socialist such as co-ops).

Well currently it doesn't matter - any whistleblowing to anyone that can't legally see the documents is treason by current law, so your only choice is to go through your superiors, which Snowden did and his grievances were ignored. Basically, all this says is now you are obliged to bring these things up with your superiors when you see them so you can quickly be tossed in a tiny isolated cell and be called a threat to national security before you take the next step and tell the press.

What Snowden did was illegal and treason according to the Espionage Act of 1917. Of course, the Espionage Act of 1917 is entirely broken and redefines treason as giving any confidential information to anyone that isn't supposed to have it. Heck, the White House itself committed treason just last week when it revealed the name of the CIA head in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the NSA's charter forbids it from collecting information on Americans, but they've wanted their fingers in that honeypot for a long time. They got bashed on the wrist for illegal wiretapping under Nixon, Carter scolded them for phone tapping again and told them to stop, and then they got in trouble again with Echelon, since it scoops up all information from all satellites, including US communications. The NSA only has jurisdiction when one end of the communication is in a foreign country (and only then because of and since the Patriot Act). Anything else is illegal for them to do, since it is FBI jurisdiction and under tighter rules.