**Online anonymity prosecutable? Nails from China? An et cetera post

A recent prosecution of a woman who posed as a young male on a website and then allegedly got a young girl to commit suicide is being prosecuted in an apparently novel manner. The following is from a story in the Sunday Rapid City Journal May 18, 2008.

Beware: Anonymity may not protect you online Think twice beroe you sign up for an online service using a fake name or [fake] e-mail address. You could be committing a federal crime.

Federal prosecuters turned to novel interpretation of computer hacking law to indict a Missouri mother on charges connected to the suicide of a 13-year old MySpace user.

There is more in the paper story, but the case is raising questions since it gives a business contract the force of a law thus violations of a web site's user agreement could now lead to criminal sanctions.

In short, those anonymous posters who use that anonymity as a shield for their own outrageous, misleading, and insulting posts that most would not ever post under their own names with a real address may not feel quite so cocky if this prosecution leads to conviction and is not overturned as some kind of prosecutorial excess.

In a whole 'nother bag...how can China make common nails cheaper than US companies a few miles away from the actual steel sources? I can't believe there is even a dime's worth of human labor in a ton of nails. In the same vein, how can china plates be made cheaper there. They appear to be made by machine with I assume nearly zero human labor.

What has gone wrong? Why are our local stores importing so much stuff from China when the shipping would seem to eat up any labor costs compared to US made products?

I don't really know, but this all seems totally wrong unless it is entirely related to obscene executive salaries and unrealistic profit expectations of Wall Street and stockholders. Anybody out there actually know?

And, just to fill out this mixture of stuff, check the SD Magazine and see if you can identify the mystery photo apparently taken around 1914 by F. W. Byerly. Has google or anybody else put together building recognition software that can compare thousands of images for similarity?

SD Mag identify the "Mystery Building"

Maybe it is something for the "History Detectives" on Public TV.

**Stay tuned even if you just hate your vegetables and meats mixed together in a casserole which converts perfectly good food into an inedible meeting dish edible only with help of Pepto Bismol---Doug Wiken