Think back a little further--the post that makes you so mad isn't talking about 2009. It describes when income tax, medicare, and social security were founded--long before Obama or Bush.

With income tax, when the 16th amendment was passed in 1913, it was sold as a tax on the rich. If you made $100,000 in 1913 you were mighty wealthy:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/02/05/original-income-tax-form-from-1913/

I presume the post is also talking about Medicare's original passage in 1965. And if you don't understand the profound mission creep social security numbers have endured, then you must be very new to /. and the entire IT world.

If only people like you would occasionally shut off your outrage generators--and recognize that not everything is about modern partisanship.

Oh Come On! You will never be elected by being soft on crime! We must INCREASE THE PENALTIES!

Take money out of education, social programs, health care, rehab, and PUNISH THE CRIMINALS!

I've heard of the issue. If you were truly interested you would have gone to Google. Another one is whites born and raised in South Africa wondering if they should check the "African American" box on forms here in the States. Blacks immigrating from Haiti or elsewhere in the Caribbean run into a similar puzzler.

Except Mac OS X kernel is not a microkernel. The following talk given a few years back, even though slightly out of date when it comes to discussing 64 bit support in the kernel, is still relevant

http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2303.html

Why would a lack of typos suddenly be the feature that makes you plunk down the cash?

It's not a given... not to mention that such batteries don't last a long time (i.e. only hours or a day or two - not a week). The HyperDrive RAM Drive requires a DC adapter to keep the DRAM running and uses it's battery only in case of powerfailure to backup the DRAM to Compact Flash.

> Nuclear power has a far lower cost of operation.

Only by spreading their costs to the rest of society!

The nuclear industry gets huge payments from the federal government to deal with their radioactive waste because they created the idea that society should be responsible for dealing with it. Even my house insurance has an exclusion saying I get zilch for losses caused by nuclear power accidents. Neither of these is a problem for coal, gas, wind, or hydro power.

How would an addon deal with Netflix's pending deletion of hundreds, if not thousands, of disc ratings for each profile?

Netflix is going to take entire families and give them a single ratings and recommendation pool. "Because you liked 'Teletubbies' and 'Aliens', here's our suggested film..."

The only way around that would be to create a plugin that lets you delete every one of your ratings, and then re-create a different set, whenever a different user wants to log in. Hmm... if someone did that, maybe Netflix would notice the load on their servers wasn't so bad with profiles!