Americans in general are not unwilling to pay for government... they just want less of it.
Unfortunately, I think it's more like Americans in general are not unwilling to have government... they just want someone else to pay for it.

Nah, we are perfectly happy paying our local sales taxes. Everything else we will bitch and complain about endlessly though. I'm of the mind to remove all taxes except sales taxes and have the government come down like the wrath of god on any business that doesn't properly collect it. I'd also want sales tax added into the price of the products/services so that you only have the price. Everyone loves to bitch that's bad for poor. Well so freaking what it's the only one that's sane to collect from everyone. If you are an illegal immigrant or foreign tourist, you'd be paying sales tax if you are here. All other taxes seem to be avoidable in one form or another.

I don't think that the government should be giving out money to individuals per se. The government just needs to stick to infrastructure. Everything else it screws up anyway.

Defense is really the only place where we spend enough money for cutting to make a big difference. Care to raffle off a B-2 bomber?

http://www.federalbudget.com/

This is the scariest website that I've ever seen. If I could, I'd want all of those major government departments to be limited to $1 billion usually year to year, and $10 billion absolute max. All the rest of the "income" would go to "the debt." Yes let's sell china a fleet of anything that they want. Enough of this warmongering making like they are evil. China is our best trading partner and owns a good chuck of the US already. There would be no reason for China to declare war on us. They just need to call in our debts. What do we need to cut? The entire Dod, Health and Human Services, Department of Agriculture, Office of Personnel Management, and heck any federal department that spends more than $10 billion a year. I'd make all those programs bleed.

If I could, I'd get a few billion spent on wind, solar, geothermal and other energy sources based in the US, but that's the only place that I'd go wild with spending. All the rest would be trying to get the federal government back in the black. Then I'd start a program of using taxes to buy annuities and using only the income from the annuities to fund various government projects. The goal would be to long term reduce the needed tax income that would be needed to be zero and have the government just run off investments.

However, Social Security was not conceived as a retirement program, it was conceived as an anti-poverty program for the elderly and unable to work. Looked at in that light, it makes a lot more sense: we (the citizens of the U.S.) achieve a jointly decided on societal goal of trying to keep penniless elderly and disabled fellow citizens from literally starving to death due to hunger.

There are real problems with Social Security as it currently exists, but its very existence is not one of them.

Um, if it was about just keeping "starving" folks from dieing, I don't think anyone would complain about it. It's turned into having those that have retired have a higher standard of living than working college students. Or where a good slice of that college kids income is going to support some one else's grandpa who is surviving better than he is. That's what's wrong with it. If SS was like $50 a year and only going to really starving folks, no one would complain about it. It should also have this big social stigma against anyone actually using it. It doesn't have that though.

I'd much rather see sales taxes abolished since they complicate retail and hurt the poorest people the most (they have to spend most of their income to live and hence proportionally pay way more sales tax).

I'd rather see every tax other than sales tax abolished. My family can control our spending. We are poor due to federal standards and our state standards. I don't actually paying the taxes on stuff upfront or not buying things. That's a simple concept. I hate the government taking money from my check only to give it back in April. That doesn't make sense. Just because I'm poor doesn't mean that I should get out of paying taxes. Sales tax is the most honest tax that we have!

The only place that sales tax is some what complicated is internet/mail sales. If you really want to make it simple, you've got one of two choices, use the tax of where the business is located or use the tax of the ship to address. It would be easier for businesses to just keep track of their local taxes. You know that's not what other states/cities would want though.

I'm just waiting for the day that scientists are startled when they prove "prayer" works on either a quantum or string level.

We spend a lot of our time and money simply moving heat around (which is what they're doing in the article). This would be less of a problem if we were better at insulating things, there's actually no reason that the nearby houses should even need this heat, it's simply poor design.

True, we've had the tech and abilities to build homes with out electricity for oh two thousand years. It takes properly designing your house to make use of all resources though. Something that I didn't know, was that even ancient Romans and Greeks tended to design and build their homes/buildings to make the most of solar heating/lighting. That was the cheapest heating/lighting resource that they had access to.

Electricity, A/C, and refrigeration in all forms has seriously spoiled us. I've read stuff where your average home could reduce yearly electricity costs by about 60% just by being better designed/built.

Come on, just makes sure he buys a couple 8 GB USB flash drives or 1-2 external HDs size hardly matters. Just tell him to copy everything to the key drive, then to the HD, then at the end of the day disconnect it all and toss it into the safe. Problem solved.

The problem would be if he is running something older than Win2000 or WinXP. Then it would be painful to just plug in a usb flash or HD. At that point, I'd tell him to bite the bullet and spend the $600-900 on a decent laptop from walmart. Question him first. Odds are 90% of what he does are word 97 docs or whatever other off brand word processors were around back then. If you are into OO, install that for him. If not, make him buy Office 2007. Just make sure whatever is on it opens his old stuff that's the only important factor that he'd really care about.

At first, I was going to moan about how awful that you have 10 different numbers to keep track of. Then I thought a bit about it. That actually makes more sense and should in theory be more secure than our system of just using the SSN everywhere. In the US, we are only really required to have a SSN, DL, Birth Cert, Marriage Cert & tax records to get by in life. The SSC has no real useful info on it. Your name and a number. The DL is the most dangerous one, it has you name, address, and physical info. Our birth certs are kinda of joke as an id medium. They've got like name, a baby foot print, and parents name, or and doctor/medical place that you were born. You can't really use that to ID an adult, but we pretend that's o.k. ;) Marriage Certs don't really give much info. It tells the names of two partners, the religious person/government official that performed the ceremony, the place, and witnesses. You'd almost think that photos of all involved and other tracking numbers other than a name would be on the document, nope. Tax records, have your name, address and how much you've made from various sources. That's the other dangerous one, but it is kept private as far as I'm aware of.

Here it seems like dozens of places that you need to hand out your SSN as a form of ID or to be entered into their private little DB because they are too lazy to make their own key number for you!

I have an really weird private idea that /. would utterly hate, but I think would solve all these data breaches and privacy concerns. Require all these various DBs to be publicly available and search able by anyone through the internet. It'd basically be everyone living in a glass data box. My case for something along those lines is that you and others claim criminals or others that shouldn't have any access to the data already do. So what's the theory behind trying to hide all this data that only the government and criminals know? Oh, yes to keep the citizens in the dark. Basically, I think of a lot of this stuff as sort of like the phone book. It's more useful if we all had access rather than only the folks at the phone companies and a handful of government employees.

While the study of our relationship with the bacteria and other microbes that live inside us is interesting and valid its kinda dumb to talk about ourselves as ecosystems. We are another life form, that has a symbiotic relationship with those microbes in a larger ecosystem.

We don't need words like symbiotic if we are going to think of ourselves as an ecosystem. Also just about any animal or plant made of more than a few cells is going to be an ecosystem under this implied definition. I am not sure how exactly we want to define ecosystem but something a little more complex than "any thing which something lives inside" seems appropriate.

This reminded me of Blood Music. Basically the plot of that book was mad scientist guy creating a way for cells to communicate and think at a level that reviled normal human thought. This is at the cell level. Now, idiot injects himself. It takes a few days to go through his system. From their POV, they didn't even notice humans. They thought of the individual as their total universe. It was a huge surprise to them when the guy hooked up and started reproducing with a female. They colonized a whole other universe! Then they start what we do and improve their environment for their best benefit. The guy started to become healthier and in general better overall shape.
Diseases and such were only vaguely mentioned. They were viewed some where between terrorists/barbarians/criminals/stupid war culture that expanded in ways that harmed everyone. Let's just say they, took care of the threats.

Actually, ecosystem makes a good description if you are talking about just the internal biological stuff of the human body. We don't have to think of how the trillions of cells get along, they just do. We don't know what kinda of government that they have only when factors adversely affect our health. To them, we may not exist as an individual per se. We would be like a literal god actually physically moving the universe around. It's sort of like saying the entire galaxy is alive. Sure it doesn't directly matter to us because it'd barely be aware of our existence. It might take constructing dyson spheres on a massive scale across the galaxy or moving stars around for a galaxy to notice us.

Curious. I was told about exactly the same thing happening at the place where I went to university, but the tone of your post makes me think you may be American and there weren't very many Americans on my course in the UK.

Now I've graduated and know a bit more about networking, part of me wonders if this kind of thing is an urban legend banded around by lecturers to make sure students think before blindly configuring things they may not

I don't know what he configured wrong, but that's the story that got relayed to me for what happened. Time frame this was 1996-1998 and he was just happy to get a linux desktop up and running back then. It was easy to believe that he misconfigured something, but it was odd that it some how hijacked the campus e-mail. I'm wondering if it was actually limited to hijacking just our dorm e-mail. That would have made a bit more sense, but I never heard specifics. This is what he was told that was going on. Now, he and the dorm head had no idea if this was actually true. The campus cops went along with what the campus IT guys said though.

I don't know the time frame it took for him to get his computer back though. I do know the event happened, I don't know the actual details that the cops were told, or if any of it was actually true. He did have to go through campus IT to get his dorm room even on the network. They pretty much told him from there just to plug the network jack in, and it should autoconfigure stuff. Who knows what actually happened?

Reminds me of some one I knew from college. He was running linux and had mixed up two IP addresses. Apparently most of the mail of the campus was running through his dorm computer. The dorm manager, the campus cops and the campus IT folks all got involved. It wasn't that violent though and I believe that he got his computer back shortly.

What was disturbing was that could have been cleared up by campus IT folks alone. They could have just locked down his port made a phone call and told him to his port wouldn't be unlocked until his machine was correctly configured.

Heck, knows what they'll be thinking of these dangerous netbooks running around.

I hate to actually bring it up, but the only place GPA really matters is getting a scholarship and keeping it. What the actual number is at the end of your program rarely matters. What does matter is your "networking" with others to get yourself a job. I'd think that the facebook crowd could in theory have better work related networking going on. It depends on if you socialized with various recruiters or folks from your major a couple of years ahead of you. Both sets could put you slightly ahead of others.

What I had to laugh at is that this thing makes a 3.0-3.5 seem like the end of the world. I'd actually think that the bulk of the grades in college would fall into that range! 3.25 was the cut off GPA for the scholarship that I had.

"Hours spend studying" is a useless metric. Teachers want to see 5 hours of studying multiplied by the number of classes that you are taken for you to get an A or B. I can tell you there were times that I spent that much, but I rarely needed to spend more than 5 hours a week total studying in college. I made it out with a 3.5 at the end. I can't tell you how much Quake, Red Alert or just time wasting that I spent back then. I'd actually want this divided up into smaller slices, and to see if this is actually true. I recall many folks flunking out after a single semester of college. If you made it through 3 semesters with your scholarship, you were likely to make it through all 4 years of college.

So what's next? Are we going to have a ratings tax for movies? If it's PG-13 add a $5 tax, if it's R add a $10 tax on to it?

Geez, for some reason....there seems to be an almost inherit distaste for anyone with any type of wealth in this country these days. You almost seem to feel some level of vitriol anytime someone mentions people who make over $100K/yr and can afford something slightly 'nicer' than the people living in the projects.

Are we at the beginning of a race to the bottom...where no one can have an advantage no matter how hard they try?

Nah, that's just us folks on slashdot. Those really rich folks have their own private facebook like place where they go and have to pay like $50 a month fee just to keep us off it. It all works out. We like to be snobbish on how they waste money when they could get some of those things for free/cheaper, and they look down on us for wasting all that time doing something ourselves rather than just paying someone else to do it for you. Everyone is happy as long as they can have someone else to frown upon.

I don't find this as evil/bad as most of slasdhdot does. Why? Because I make use of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Raise your hand if you make use of that or any other government handouts? Now, when you go to your tax person or use your tax software, do you try to find every means possible to reduce your taxes or get money back? Damn straight that's what we all do! How can I possibly complain because others try to do the same?

Does it make a damn bit of difference if they are an educational group, a religious group, a business group, or a nonprofit group? Nope.

This is just complaining. It's like complaining that the sun is bright, hot, and produces tons of energy. Yeap, and there ain't anything we can about it either.

Actually, I don't think that the paper industry will be "punished" or allow this thing to be reduced. Didn't you read the sentence that the entire paper industry was in trouble? Well, finding a nice federal tax income will help that problem. There is nothing more dangerous than allowing a government agency/law to be established. Once it is there; it'll only be expanded.