"Leftist" indeed. Not leftist though. The social democrats and the moderates were traditionally the biggest parties for left/right politics, but now they are both moving towards a middle point somewhere to the right of where the old center used to be. (Moderates are changing their rhethoric to be more appealing to workers, while still running a policy that's a lot better for people with high incomes, while the social democrats are copying the moderate ideas and recently said that they must stop trying to be a voice for unemployed or too-sick-to-work people)

Oh yeah, cause we Swedes care so much about not turning over people to countries where they might be killed or tortured (1). And Sweden will surely stand up to the US when informal requests are made to handle the issue (2).

Can't seem to paste in the links for some reason, but for (1) Google for "extradition egypt torture sweden". As for (2), remember what happened to the Pirate Bay servers here in Sweden?

This has more to do with the power imbalance between the individual and his/her government than the exposition of moral wrongs. Today's societies work by the state holding a monopoly on violence. To make up for this imbalance, the individual person has a much greater right to secrecy than the state does. While there is to a large degree an unfortunate mixing of public and private regarding e.g. politicians not paying taxes for their housekeepers, the government should be held to a higher standard than the individual, because when it steps outside its boundaries, the government can cause much more damage.

It's not rape because he didn't have a condom, it's rape because he had a condom on that broke during intercourse, the woman claims she told him to stop, and he didn't. In my book, if the woman tells you to stop and you don't, then yes, that does qualify as rape. Of course to this date only Assange and the woman in question know what actually happened that night, but there's definitely grounds for the police to suspect him of rape.

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In this particular instance, I do believe that this has more to do with his connection to Wikipedia than his connection with these two Swedish women, but rape trials are hard enough on the defendant without that kind of stories being spread around.

Wasn't that why you invaded Iraq?

This is so that when the fire trucks come, they can be told how many people are still inside. It's not only to not risk your own life, but to make their job easier and safer.

Nice try, but it's fairly common knowledge (ie, taught early in algebra) that the square root breaks equality. Ie, sqrt(x^2) != x but sqrt(x^2) = |x|. Add that to your proof and no contradiction occurs.

No, what you really need is one cable running down the street, operated as a government utility like the road itself is. Then you let anyone set up shop as ISP and run traffic over that cable. Individual cables mean it's more expensive to startup a competing business, which in turn gives you as a customer a higher price for less service.

Yes really.

E=mc^2 works both ways, you know. The high-energy bonds in gasoline have a greater mass than the bonds that plop out the other end.

Easy, when you include the costs of living as well. Someone making $100k a year has a lot less money after rent/housing tax and food than someone making $1m, even if the first person pays 20% tax and the second person pays 40% tax. A roof over your head and food on the table is not an optional expense or some kind of luxury that you can forego when times are lean.

And despite what some people here on /. seem to think, the US is not willing to let its people starve to death in the streets (at least not en masse), so with a flat tax you would simply have more people depending on welfare, meaning the flat tax rate has to be made higher to pay for that ... Spread out over the entire population, you'd have a group that owes more in taxes than they have left after food and rent is payed.

Net effect: people who earn more money would pay more than the original percentage in tax anyway, so why not use a progressive tax rate from the start and at the same time have fewer people dependent on the government for their daily survival?

Disclaimer; it's been a while since I hung out on the fan forums, but here's my impression of why SoDs are unpopular: it's the AI handicap.

Sure, on lower levels (noble, prince, monarch) it's not a big issue, cause the AI only gets a small bonus. But when you get up to emperor or immortal, it's very hard to keep up. Not only are the AI armies cheaper to build, they are cheaper to maintain as well. Trying to keep up with Monty or Shaka past the medieval age is a good way to see your economy grind to a halt.

Worth noticing is that the 100 hours mentioned in TFS was on a 81-box cluster. They estimated it to be about a year on a 2.4GHz CPU. Of course, for the purposes of cracking DRM keys, it is not unreasonable to imagine a distributed network cooperating.

More interesting, in my opinion, was that it has 50% chance to guess the key in O(n * log n) time, and their example needed only 650 faulty messages (extrapolating from a 12% single-bit-error rate, it should work with a bit over 5000 total messages generated).

From TFS:
"reduces the computational complexity[...]by two orders of magnitude[...]
Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required"
Well, duh, what's so shocking about a computation taking 1% of the time previously needed now only takes 1% of the energy as well?

Modded funny for some reason ... of course, I'm not sure this still holds true for today's cars, but what used to happen when you shift into neutral is that the engine gets disconnected physically from the wheels - it can keep accelerating all it wants but the car will slow down.

[quote]Let's say you and the plumber are both paying 25%. Then, you initially earned $133; the government taxed you 25%, which is $33.33, and now you have $100 left. Now you give that $100 to the plumber, who in turn has to give $25 of that income (25%) to the government. $75 of your $133 has arrived in the plumber's hands, actually paying for the plumbing work. Your actual tax rate here is 75/133 which is about 56% - not the 25% that it initially appears to be.[/quote]

But in that scenario, the plumber is paying 0% tax. You can't count the $25 he sends to the IRS as taxation both for you and him. Your personal tax payment to the government is exactly the 25% they say it is. I'm not a big fan of sales tax either (it's far too heavy a burden for people with low incomes), but since the alternative would be heavier taxation of properties and wealth, you can guess the odds of that happening ...

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Why yes, I _am_ a card-carrying communist!