If my son really wants to go to a fast food place and get a toy, I tell him "no" and explain to him why. He understands, we eat something healthy at home and then go buy a toy at the dollar store.

perhaps, but i do like machine tools figures, so i googled machine tool manufacturing decline and here is the first url i looked at.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/labotz240709.html

I did not look but i seem to recall picken's texas adventure involved chines turbines, because the usa did not manufacture them big enough

and i did look at at a wikipedia article, maybe wind turbine, that said the manufacturers of the biggest wind turbines are in germany.

you seem to have some sense, but look at some patterns and see if you are whistling past the graveyard. patterns can change and all that i do agree, but there is some effort and wisdom involved. at the moment, even sanity would be a nice change.

Can it make me a sandwich?

No kidding. The me-too-ism is too much in this case. There are plenty of useful and novel ideas out there. Even a Lego Roomba-like vacuum would be interesting because it hasn't been done in Legos yet, and the technology may kick off other Lego robot servant crazes. The talent could be put to better use than Rubiks++ in other words.

They don't seem to get that the officer is either not fulfilling his oath as a police officer (having seen a crime and did nothing about it),

Ah, but you forget "discretion." The police have fought and won the right to not have to respond before a crime is committed (a woman called in and said "my husband said he's coming over at 7 p.m. to kill me, and I have an existing restraining order, can someone drop past at about that time and arrest him if he's in violation of that order" and the police did nothing until the neighbors reported the murder, and the police won in court that they don't ever have to go when they know a crime is going to be committed). They have also won the right of "discretion," primarily used for pulling over blacks in white neighborhoods, but also great for the situation you describe, where a crime is required for their response, but no crime was actually listed anywhere. They claim there was a crime they weren't required to report or stop, but that they took actions like they were going to arrest someone for it and didn't.

So, lets see. The police have fought for (and won) the right to not have to respond to any crime in progress if that were to put them in danger. They have the right to not prevent any crime they know will be committed. They are not required to "protect" anyone for any reason. They are not required to enforce the law. For all the grandstanding about how they have a crappy job and put themselves out there for our protection and safety, every chance they get, they fight in court for the right to be able to do nothing. As far as I can tell, they are never required to act at all. As history has shown, this means the freedom to get out of the way and let you get murdered. This means the freedom to pull over blacks in a white neighborhood for breaking the law when all the whites cars are doing exactly the same thing.

I'm not sure what oath police take anymore, but it has an asterisk on the end *void where not required by law.

My appartement building has fiber to the basement from Telia and we can all go ahead and have a consumer 100mbps connection. Now, it must be mentioned that I only get full 100mbps downstream when downloading linux distro packages from a local univerisity mirror, you can forget downloading anywhere near max speed from overseas, but still, 100mbps really is nothing strange here in Sweden anymore. If you live in or close to a city then that's a very real option now.

I think you mean, Apple has banned using geolocation for ads.

C and C++ are perfectly acceptable.

People are easily confused into acting against their own best interests. The phenomenon is common in every large collective action. Happens every election cycle also with the fantastic reelection rates.

I can't understand how anyone...

Sure you can. It's plain old crowd psychology. Some people know how to work it.

And this would be relevant if the person had been charged with an actual crime. He wasn't - his arrest was for not IDing himself just because the "nice officer" asked.

They do not. They have a higher ppi than 24" 1920x1200, but only just. Compare them both to my laptop's 17" screen at 1920x1200. It looks so crisp and detailed in comparison.
2560x1600 30" = 100ppi
1920x1200 24" = 94ppi
1920x1200 17" = 133ppi
800x480 3" = 310ppi (my phone)
(see ppi)

I hate how there are no affordable high-dpi displays, because everything looks so much nicer on them. You don't need to have tiny text or images, modern OSes can scale everything according to the pixel density, you just have to tell them to (which a lot of people don't seem to realise).

High-dpi displays would be more common if more people knew how much better they are. It's another case of "you don't know how much your current equipment sucks until you try something better". If they were more common, they wouldn't be so expensive. Obviously not as cheap as your standard ~96dpi display but still, cheaper.

I wouldn't mind 2560x2048 resolution. I'd even love twice as much as that. It would help greatly with my digital photography. My digital negatives are typically 2852x4304, and I pixel peep heavily when developing my shots in post. But, again, my usage is specialized and you can probably lump me in there with graphic artists and drafters.

For document viewing, I've always liked really high resolution. I used to use as 1280x1024 resolution on an old 15" Trinitron. I was never one who enjoyed seeing type at higher than 16pt. I often have PDF ebooks open alongside web pages and an IDE, so higher resolution would make it easier for me to display full page documents side by side, allowing me to work faster (hopefully). I think I would still need something larger than a 24" screen to take advantage of that though.

We discuss it in kilograms instead of pounds, though, so they usually take it as a compliment.

That's fastest ever. I don't think Google is really a monopoly though, plenty of other search engines, bling/yahoo, just because 90% of choose to click Google, doesn't make them a monopoly. Likewise there are plenty of ad market place companies on the web, though I don't think there's any as good a adsense/words right now.

I love they way they hold themselfs out as some legit authority by calling themselfs a watchdog, when they are infact nothing more then an anti google mouth piece for google's competitors.

bring it on I say, this "watchdog" is a bunch of lawyers, how about they put their time and money where their mouth is and take google to court, or are they too frightened?

They're isolated from family, financially dependent on their employer, and trapped in a society that's alien and frightening to them.

And whose legal and cultural system they don't understand. There's a quote from movie, where a factory owner in London is trying to get one of his workers, a woman illegally immigrated from Turkey, for a sexual favor. He basically says, if you don't do it, I'll report you to the government, and they'll throw you in jail. "And British jail is not like your Turkish jail, where the men and women are kept separate. If you go to jail you will be raped every night, over and over again." 100% bullshit, but 100% effective.

"For people who are supposed to be intelligent, it never ceases to amaze me that developers are amazingly ignorant of the way the economy really works."

It ceases to amaze me that an intelligent person like yourself is not aware of tax law and fixed costs such as a head tax on hiring American workers.

A few years ago, I read that it costs about $14,000 a head in taxes for most fortunate 500 companies. With an H1B1 its about $0.

So if they can hire an entry level system administrator for $15,000 a year (about the going price for a fresh student in India) then I would have to work for $1,000 to match it. Can I do that under minimum wage laws?

Either get rid of head tax or apply it for foreign hires. Then we have fairer capitalism.