I hate to say it, because it's horribly unpopular from a political perspective, but this payroll tax "holiday" is just disastrous policy. Depending on what numbers and what year you're looking at, anywhere from 81 to 89 percent of the entire U.S. budget goes to two things: defense and entitlements. And of those entitlements, the biggest long-term liabilities and problems that we have are Social Security and Medicare.

When you hear these Presidential candidates talk about how they would fix the budget deficits by getting rid of things like the EPA, the IRS, the Departments of Commerce / Energy / Education, etc., then you know should know that they are not making any sort of good-faith effort at solving the problem, and that they cannot be taken seriously. The dirty little secret is that you could cut out 100% of the discretionary non-defense spending (i.e., everything except for the military and entitlements) and you would have barely made a dent in the problem as a whole.

The whole purpose of the payroll/FICA tax is to provide funds for Social Security and Medicate. Again, these are the two biggest problems that the U.S. has from a budget perspective -- biggest by leaps and bounds. So not only does this policy make the deficit problem worse, it makes it worse in the worst possible way. Politicians can claim that these tax cuts are "paid for", but everybody knows that these types of Washington claims are usually just shell games for political purposes.

For what it's worth, I like the fact that the payroll tax holiday disproportionally benefits those towards the lower end of the income scale. But there has to be a better way to do this, especially at this critical time in history when the Boomers are retiring and we're going to need these trust funds more than at any time in our history.

I don't disagree with this at all, but the cynical side of me fears that there would be a slew of special-interest groups (everybody from law enforcement agencies who are reliant on traffic ticket income to MADD) who would move heaven and Earth to prevent something like this from ever seeing the light of day.

I just want to say- what little I do know, I've always disliked dark-matter. It always seemed to be a case of "we can't explain 'x' - so let's claim there is dark-matter and that will make our hypothesis match what we observe."

But you should realize that this technique has been used throughout the entire history of modern science, and its track record is actually quite good.

Back in the late 1700s, after the discovery of the planet Uranus, astronomers made careful calculations of its orbital elements and published a table the position of the planet in the sky over the years (and decades). As the years (and decades) wore on, they discovered a curious thing: the actual position of the planet was beginning to diverge from what had been predicted.

At this point, there were a few different explanations:

1) Perhaps the initial orbital elements were incorrect.
2) Perhaps our fundamental laws of gravity and motion were incorrect.
3) Perhaps there was a massive, as-yet-undetected eighth planet whose gravity was influencing the orbit of Uranus.

Most astronomers fell into the third camp; after all, the observations of Uranus's orbit had been made with considerable precision (for the time) and there was little reason to believe that the fundamental laws of physics would start to break down as you move further away from the sun. And so they made their calculations and narrowed down the location of this hypothetical planet to a fairly small window in the sky. After that, it was just a matter of pointing a telescope there and looking.

This is the story of the discovery of the planet Neptune.

Astronomers did not find this planet by accident. It was not discovered by a kid in the backyard with a streak of cosmic good luck. (In fact, many observers from antiquity had seen it, but had not realized what they were looking at.) They found it because they knew it had to be there.

Now, you might think that this comparison is a bit of a stretch. But it's just one example; there are countless more. Back in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli was studying beta decay in atomic nuclei. He realized that the process, as he was seeing it, could not possibly be happening unless there were (again, hypothetical) particles being emitted as a consequence. If there were not, then all sorts of fundamental principles of physics were being violated (e.g., conservation of matter / angular momentum / etc.)

This particle, eventually named the "neutrino", remained hypothetical and undetected for more than a quarter of a century until it was finally detected -- in 1956.

I could go on, but the point is that postulating the existence of something hypothetical in order to explain deviations between theory and observed results is part of the best traditions of natural science. It's not hand-waving or charlatanism. And it works more often than most people might think.

When I was 17...
I downloaded very good tunes...
I downloaded very good tunes that I got through P2P
My name was Chuck D...
I stayed up downloading Queen...
When I was 17

Of course, spreading the idea that it is a mainstream Christian belief that the entire universe is 6000 years old does help to make Christianity look silly, which is why this argument is always propped up by non-Christians.

Are you aware that a Gallup poll taken less than a year ago (December 2010) shows that 40% of Americans believe that the Universe and humans in their present form were created by God in the very recent past (less than 10,000 years ago)?

You and I may both wish that this were not the case, but the Young-Earth viewpoint is not a fringe idea that is held by a small number of zealots.

3) We need better trolls. The trolls right now are lame.

The decreased quality of trolls in recent years is directly proportional to the increased presence of the Linux infestation on the Internet. Back in the 1990s, most high-end Internet servers were running some form of proprietary UNIX or Windows NT. (You may recall the Netcraft study that showed that NT far outperformed the popular Linux distributions of the day.) They were respectable pieces of hardware running respectable operating systems. Furthermore, they were administered by intelligent engineers, full of independent thought and imbued with a lust for creativity and self-expression.

In the intervening years, the landscape has been polluted with low-cost commodity Intel boxes running some damnable variant of the Linux virus. With cute names like "Gentoo", "Ubuntu", and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", this operating system has hijacked the once-vibrant Internet community. The afore-mentioned Windows and UNIX administrators have been sent packing and replaced with soulless, hive-minded drones from the Linux gulags. And once this happened, the high-quality trolls were nowhere to be found.

Let's be perfectly clear about one thing: The Linux "community" is a liberal slaughterhouse of the mind. The goal of this community (rarely stated out loud but none the less obvious) is complete totalitarian Communism and an end to Western civilization. They see our dreams of prosperity and a high standard of living for our children and our grandchildren. They want to replace these dreams with a nightmarish reality: burning trash barrels on every corner, mile-long government bread lines, and children in burlap sacks drinking water out of discarded automobile tires.

This is what Linux has wrought. This is where they intend to bring us.

While we're on the subject of trolls, why do modern trolls utterly suck? In the 90's, trolling was high art.

The decreased quality of trolls in recent years is directly proportional to the increased presence of the Linux infestation on the Internet. Back in the timeframe that you mention (the 1990s), most high-end Internet servers were running some form of proprietary UNIX or Windows NT. (You may recall the Netcraft study that showed that NT far outperformed the popular Linux distributions of the day.) They were respectable pieces of hardware running respectable operating systems. Furthermore, they were administered by intelligent engineers, full of independent thought and imbued with a lust for creativity and self-expression.

In the intervening years, the landscape has been polluted with low-cost commodity Intel boxes running some damnable variant of the Linux virus. With cute names like "Gentoo", "Ubuntu", and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", this operating system has hijacked the once-vibrant Internet community. The afore-mentioned Windows and UNIX administrators have been sent packing and replaced with soulless, hive-minded drones from the Linux gulags.

Let's be perfectly clear about one thing: The Linux "community" is a liberal slaughterhouse of the mind. The goal of this community (rarely stated out loud but none the less obvious) is complete totalitarian Communism and an end to Western civilization. They see our dreams of prosperity and a high standard of living for our children and our grandchildren. They want to replace these dreams with a nightmarish reality: burning trash barrels on every corner, mile-long government bread lines, and children in burlap sacks drinking water out of discarded automobile tires.

This is what Linux has wrought. This is where they intend to bring us.

I hope this answers your question.

For what it's worth, I've used Norton 360 on my Windows machines since mid-2010 and am quite satisfied with it. I've never tried to uninstall it, so I can't speak to how well that works (if at all) but my experience has been that it's very unobtrusive.

Have you actually used a Norton product (e.g., 360) in the last couple of years? They used to have a bad reputation (and a well-deserved one at that) but their recent offerings are leaps and bounds better than the bloatware of the past.

The example that I always like to use is the Big Bang, which was first formulated by Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest. At the time that it was proposed, it received significant disdain from the astronomical community, since most astronomers at that time believed that the Universe was eternal and static (the so-called "steady state") -- they felt that a beginning of space and time at some point in the finite past crossed over into the realm of religion and philosophy. On the other hand, the religious community (by and large) welcomed the Big Bang with open arms, since it was in accordance with the creation accounts of their particular belief systems.

But in the 80 years or so since the advent of the Big Bang theory, a funny (and depending on your point of view, sad) thing has happened: The two camps have almost completely switched sides. As the evidence came in, most astronomers and cosmologists came to accept the Big Bang. They saw the confirmation of Hubble's observations regarding the redshift of distant galaxies, the discovery of the CMBR, the evidence that the distribution of baryonic matter in the Universe is consistent with what is predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, etc.

Unfortunately, for those segments of the religious community that have been hijacked by the rise of fundamentalism / fanaticism in the last 50 years or so, the Big Bang was no longer "good enough". The idea that the Universe came about in a dramatic cataclysm ("in the beginning...") became unacceptable since the timescale called for billions of years, rather than the six thousand or so that are dictated by a rigid literalist interpretation of the appropriate holy writ. It's not good enough that the prevailing scientific theory on the origin of the Universe calls for a beginning -- it's not fundamentalist enough.

The idea that science and religion are incompatible is poisonous and civilization-threatening. Getting back to the example, the idea that religious folks, of all people, should be opposed to the Big Bang theory is completely baffling. If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never understand it. There's no shortage of beauty in modern science or ancient teachings; the conflicts (such as they are) are largely manufactured. And as you mention, the rising fundamentalist movement is a major player in this enterprise.

There's a difference between a troll and a crank. Ludwig was a crank.

The concept of compos mentis has been around for centuries. As it pertains to medicine, it is almost always a decision made by an individual's doctor.

The only role that "the government" has in the realm of assisted suicide is to establish the legal framework under which it operates. That's it. The decision to initiate the process must be made by a terminally-ill person of sound mind, and it must then be concurred with and carried out by medical professionals. Doctors, not bureaucrats. You're suggesting that "the government" will initiate and carry out the process on people that it considers to be (for whatever reason) undesirable, and that puts you squarely in the black helicopter and tinfoil hat camp.

Welcome to 1996, Tennessee!

Why do you assume that our "present models of the world" are insufficient to explain the existence of extraterrestrial life?