And you'd be hit by underpayment penalties. Income tax is intended to be, well, a tax on income, and you get income throughout the year. If you don't withhold enough and don't pay enough estimated tax, you're paying more.

Yes, but if you withhold at least 80% of final tax liability for the last year you don't get hit for underpayment. So, figure what you owed last year, multiply it by .9, make sure you get at least that withheld (or paid as estimated) and you're good to go.

The other nice thing about a flat tax is that the rich get to pay it. Right now, my wife and I are in the highest bracket for Federal taxes, with our individual incomes near but not over the FICA cap, and negligible income from anything other than working for a living.

Nope; they're not going to jail you for destroying evidence that you had no reason to believe might be evidence. Of course, having destroyed the records, it's going to be harder to convince the judge and/or jury you had them in the first place, and they said what you claim they said.

As a species, we're going to survive any new series of pandemics, or other global disaster that doesn't just wipe out the planet. We've got genetic diversity and a lot of neat tools, including rational thought. We're not at risk of extinction given a standard extinction event. In such an event, what's going to determine survival is not basic health, but wealth. What we would be selecting for in event of plague is availability of good medical care in a major crisis. What we would be selecting for in a climatic disaster is structurally sound houses, the ability to move somewhere else, resources to counter the effects (like air conditioning), stuff like that.

I never used Cfront that much; I'm taking the the compiler designation from Stroustrup's "Design and Evolution" book. I never used PRO*C (my main experience with interfacing is OCI and OCCI), but in the case of Cfront you'd have to parse to determine which parts of C code you could let through. What would be a function call in C could be a member function call in C++, perhaps a virtual function call, and maybe it could be passed through and maybe not. Operator overloading meant that every expression had to be parsed by Cfront. If you're taking source code, parsing it, and producing somewhat different target code based on the parse, I'm going to call it a compiler.

Your first paragraph is entirely true. In writing such code, you'd want to be very choosy about which C++ features you used. That doesn't mean C++ is worse than C in this case, only that it loses a lot (but not all) of its advantages.

Could be; I don't have much experience in low-level programming using higher-level languages.

Binary literals would be nice, yes, but I don't see that as a big deal. I find hex literals almost as easy to read, and easier to type correctly. YMMV, of course, but I'd expect proficiency and ease with hex literals to increase over time.

C++ doesn't have a halfway standardized ABI, unlike C. Name mangling is just part of it. There's a lot of other compatibility issues. This is a problem with the language (not the language standard, but the language in the community). Informally standardizing name mangling would be a start, but only a start. I agree that a reliable ABI would be very nice, but it's more work than you seem to think.

Except that I gave reasons why C++ is superior in security to C. It's easier to write secure code in C++ than in C. Both are difficult to write well, but well-written C++ code is going to be more secure than well-written C code.

C++, properly written, is much more secure than C. It includes memory management, type-safe I/O, and well-behaved library containers.

Modern C++ is a lot more coherent than you suggest. Its main problem is the initial compatibility with C, and attempting to be compatible with bad decisions made along the way (long has to be 32-bit, so we need "long long"?). I have no idea why you think binary literals are all that much more useful than octal or hex. Macros aren't type-safe, but C++ templates are. Name mangling is an implementation detail, and there's lots of variation between compiler output that isn't name mangling. Standardizing it would accomplish very little, and there's no need for the runtime to know the mangled name.

FWIW, Linux started way back when C++ was nonstandard (1990?) and didn't have many advantages over C for kernel development. At that time, C was definitely the right choice, and making it a mixture of C and C++ isn't real attractive. Nowadays, I'd recommend C++, as it can do pretty much everything C can and more besides, and standards-conforming compilers can be found everywhere (pity about Visual C++).

No, C++ is a separate language from C, and far more expressive. It never was a preprocessor for C; Cfront was a genuine compiler that used C as the target machine, and fairly soon became inadequate for compiling C++.

If you think it's basically C with more libraries and a fancy pre-processor, you're using it wrong.

Um, how the hell did you get from what I said to what you said? I was, and am, advocating drugs that have a definite positive affect, without side effects that are too bad. That's basically what the FDA is looking for when they allow a drug onto the market.

I also fail to see the magical thinking. If the FDA requires evidence of safety and effectiveness before putting a drug on the market, then a drug on the market can be expected to be actually useful, without any consequences too dire (or the FDA will rescind its approval). What this has something to do with a guy named Knut who wanted to show he wasn't all-powerful escapes me.

Pharmaceutical companies concentrate on drugs they can legally sell, for some odd reason related to making money or something. If they're prevented from selling useless drugs, they'll try to make useful ones. They don't develop drugs at random, you know.

So the average lion prefers to eat people with weak immune systems? I'm not getting this.

Now, suppose we stopped inoculations, and people started dying of these preventable diseases in large numbers. Would this make the species healthier, or just resistant against threats we've already got handled? Would this select for strong immune systems, and possibly kill people after reproduction age with autoimmune disorders?

If you want me to go along with killing large numbers of children that we could save, you're going to have to have something more specific than "increasing the average health of the herd".