I couldn't disagree more. First of all these people ARE paying taxes...just not income tax. They pay payroll taxes, often sales taxes, often property taxes etc.

I've had others including a close friend make this "everyone should be paying some income tax" argument, but I'm sorry. A working family that has to choose between buying their kids shoes or food should most certainly not pay income tax.

This whole thing about people who aren't paying income tax always seems to imply that this is something new. These people under similar circumstances wouldn't have paid income tax at any time in our history, because making them do so is just plain wrong. If anything, the big difference is that decades ago the same people would have been much more likely to be making enough money to exceed the tax threshold, which if you ask me has much more to do with this new Gilded Age the so-called "free markets" have given us than anything else.

Sure, parents don't necessarily need to let their kids eat this stuff (assuming they actually can control that all the time), and of course nobody needs to eat it at all....but here's my problem with the knee-jerk personal responsibility argument:

If we choose to believe the obesity epidemic is all about personal responsibility (or lack thereof), are we saying that in the last few decades, Americans have somehow lost all will power and sense of responsibility?

If so, how do you explain that in that exact same time period, all three of drug use, alcohol use, and smoking have declined radically...with per-capita smoking being the lowest it's been since the 30s? Where's all that lack of will power with those? It wouldn't have to do with the fact that we're discouraging those, rather than marketing them to kids, let alone subsidizing they're production as we are with corn and the fast food industry.

Sure, in theory, nobody has to eat any of this stuff, but in practice that do...and like it or not policy does play a big part of it

You hit the nail on the head when you say "a minority of extremists".

That's what blow my mind with this "all Muslims are terrorists" mentality. Let's do a little math: There are 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. If, hypothetically, even one tenth of one percent of that number were terrorists, a large portion of the rest of the world would likely be dead already, because their numbers would equal the entire active U.S. military.

A while back, out of curiosity, I checked the numbers and discovered that the percentage of Islam represented by al-Qaeda was the same (down to several decimal places) as the percentage of Protestants represented by the Klan...it was 0.0013 %

When you have a group that huge, the fringe is going to be very visible, and neither religion should be held accountable for the actions of a tiny minority.

Speaking of the primary buffer, I can't live without my parcellite copy history app. There are others like it of course, like Klipper etc....but I use parsellite because it's nice and lightweight and works well with fluxbox. On the increasingly rare occasions that I use windows, I have a hard time getting used to NOT having my highlighted text copied automatically.

One thing I love about X has always been the ability to run gui apps remotely via ssh using your local X via X11 forwarding. For those who haven't tried (or haven't tried lately) it's even pretty easy to get a shell running within X in Cygwin and run remote gui 'nix applications under Windows...too cool.

Yea I stand corrected...obviously because people in other countries have ugly racist stereotypes we have to also right? Sure, America's diverse and all that, but it doesn't excuse bullshit like that whole "Ground Zero Mosque" bullshit. Anyone who wasn't ashamed about that in a country that's supposed to be about freedom is dead from the fucking neck up.

Agreed. This is just one of those many threads that bring out all the folks that'll start quoting that Godless piece of bigotry that is www.thereligionofpeace.com, and get modded up by others who insist on believing that all 1.4 BILLION Muslims around the world are terrorists, which makes about as much sense as equating all Protestants with the Klan. I'll probably get modded down just for posting this, but I really don't care...that sort of crap makes me ashamed to be an American.

I posted this link on a related story some time back. This is a must see if you think you know how bad forensic science (or lack of science) really is:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/

I couldn't agree more. No matter how well you code there are always reasons for comments...especially when the nature of what the code is trying to accomplish is complex. Even if your code is perfectly structured and understandable by any good programmer, making someone else reverse engineer that is inexcusable. Another example is when your code needs to do something in what may appear to be round about or unusual manner for some specific reason...because, for example, a more obvious approach causes some sort of problems...that is, so someone doesn't come along and try to "fix" it.

People have a lot of weird ideas about comments, and I don't get it. It seems pretty clear to me what parts of my code require some sort of explanation...and not just for someone else, but for me as well. I can't tell you how many times I've read my own comments to remember why I took a specific approach to something.

My take on all this sort of stuff, including all the supposed evidence about the evils of sitting down etc, is that it's all just a big unnecessary distraction from the simple fact that life is bad for you if you DON'T EXERCISE...very deliberately and very regularly...BOTH aerobic exercise and weight training. As a programmer I work sitting down for very long stretches with no problems, and I'm almost 59. I attribute that (and the fact that I feel at least as good as I did in my twenties) totally to the fact that I do 20 minutes of intense (but low impact) aerobics three times a week, and significantly heavy weight training twice a week. There just is no replacement.

It makes more sense when you say "$1 million" using a Doctor Evil voice.

Yes by all means, the Boomers were the first Americans to "break the rules", like those rules preventing unions from occupying factories as was done early in the 20th century, and hundreds of other examples anyone could name. For fucks sake...civil disobedience is breaking the rules and frankly we could use more of it right now. Where is this fantasy land were everything would be OK if only the Boomers didn't rock the boat??

As others have pointed out here...do you really think that, for example, the scumbags on Wall St fucking things up for all of us are all over 50 or something?? I swear, this Boomer bashing going on here (and the way it's getting modded up) is nothing short of fucking astonishing.

I no...I didn't mean to imply that you were. The GP sure was however.

...wish I had mod points. I'm stunned at the Boomer vitriol here, and that fact that "We should take their pensions and health insurance off them, let them die in the gutter and use the pay to pay off the deficit" can get +4 Insightful(???)...for fucks sake...really??

I'd argue that the primary reason for that gap is that the older group came from a time period when people below to top few percent weren't treated like worthless pieces of shit in some huge global job market. Are we going to blame the Boomers for that as well?? There are a lot of people behind all that inequality, and plenty of them sure as fucking hell aren't from my generation, I can tell you that.

This argument reminds me of this current trend to blame the worlds problems on civil servants and unions... that "They weren't treated like shit the way I am, so it must be their fault" sort of crap.