You mean let the invisible hand of the free market work it's magic?

Too bad you never worked a day in your life. If you had you would have noticed that there is a deduction from you paycheck that is marked Fica-Medicare and another marked Fica-Oasdi. ie., the Social Security and Medicare you are so pissed about. IF and this is a big IF FICA-Osadi had not been rolled up into the general budget FICA-Osadi would not be in the position it is in now. However, the libertarian/neocons are so pissed that FICA-Osadi was enacted they have been everything possible to destroy the program, since it was such an cost effective program the libertarian/neocons have been doing everything possible to rot it from the inside. The Bush administrations "let's privatize FICA-Osadi and give the money to wall street" is merely the latest chapter. If Bush hadn't given the Pharmaceutical industry billions from FICA-Medicare FICA-Medicare would be in good shape as well. Do not believe me look at the booklet the IRS sends you every year. It lists exactly how FICA is bring in and spending. A quick look shows in FICA brings in slightly more than it spends. The Congressional Budget office DOD accounts for 41-57% of all tax revenues no where near the 20% you quote.

Then again SMP support was really crappy on linux ten years ago. It worked, but only if you wanted to reboot every day or si

Do you understand the difference between climate and weather? Don't reply because your post documents you don't understand the difference. I bet you think that July temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are colder than January temperatures in the Norther Hemispehere as well right? I guess that's because we cann't predict the weather next week! Geez at least learn a little 6th grade science before you post

Yeah a degree in art history/american studies will get you job right out of college! IF and this is a big IF you view getting a college degree as an apprenticeship AND you choose a field like american studies YOU will not find a job right out of college. IF you view a college degree as a way to become scientifically, mathematically, culturally and socially literate you will find a job soon after graduate. Getting degree from a college/university is not the same thing as going to Kaplan college/National School of Technology

Chapter 1 of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (AR4) will provide with a long list of citations. In the summary for policy makers The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high confidence[7] that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m–2 (see Figure SPM.2). {2.3, 6.5, 2.9} The combined radiative forcing due to increases in carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide is +2.30 [+2.07 to +2.53] W m–2, and its rate of increase during the industrial era is very likely to have been unprecedented in more than 10,000 years (see Figures SPM.1 and SPM.2). The carbon dioxide radiative forcing increased by 20% from 1995 to 2005, the largest change for any decade in at least the last 200 years. {2.3, 6.4}

Wait until she is asked to alter her grades to make sure that nobody gets less than a B and when she doesn't an administrator will do it for her. Wait until she takes a 10% salary cut with the excuse that the fees aren't covering her costs, student tuition rises by 10%, while the enrollment in her classes triple, but the President does not feel that she, her Vice-Presidents, nor her Deans need to change their plans for their regularly scheduled trip to Hawaii in January for three weeks to "consult" with their counterparts. Wait until the community college adminstrators release your home address and cell phone numbers telling your wifes students to feel free to call or stop by anytime since "we committed to our students success". Maybe your wife is one of the lucky ones. Quoting A.G. Monaco, senior human resources official at the University of Akron "Wal-Mart is a more honest employer of part-time employees than are most colleges and universities," I don't like the idea of unionized faculty, but when their is an organized effort to abuse the system by administrators and boards their often isn't any other choice

If Language X makes the job of writing clean efficient code several orders of magnitude harder than Language Y, what purpose is served by learning Language X? The original "Juck Fava" gave perfect example of OO's problems. The single line is niether clean, nor clear, nor maintainable. Think line noise.

A perfect example of why object-oriented programming has convinced engineers and scientists that programming is joke and not to be trusted. Why freshman engineering students who taught themselves to write efficient z80 and 68000 assembly language in high school learn to hate computer science after taking "CS-101A Intro to Object Oriented Programming"

anything from the Heartland Institute is suspect. They have been caught lying so often it isn't funny. Example The right-wing Heartland Institute has been making a big fuss about "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares." It turns out that the scientists on the list did not doubt man-made global warming and were outraged. Some scientists didn't know they were on the list and wanted to be removed.Here's a representative quote, from Dr. David Sugden, Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh:"I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite." University of Maryland's Distinguished Professor Eugenia Kalnay: "This is just another example of lack of scruples that climate skeptics have shown in pursuing short-term financial advantages, and basically condemning the next generations to suffer the consequences of climate change due to our lack of prudent and responsible planning." If Heartland really believes what it claims, why does it have to lie and slander scientists to make the point? Then of course you have Heartland's involvement with PhilipMorse, acting a front organization for the Tobacco Indusry lobby

Is it the developers fault that IT refused to listen when the developer described EXACTLY what the system configuration should be for the software to work, but IT MANAGEMENT changed the specs because IT MANAGEMENT knows more about the developers software than the developer? Sorry about the rant, but I ordered a visualization system using my grant money and IT MANAGEMENT changed the PO into a thin client claiming I didn't need anything more powerful and then said "what's this OpenGL stuff you'r talking about"

Nothing like taking a sentnce from one email and then juxtapositioning it next to a sentence and a few words from another email. Heck I can even do the same with your post. Let's see the mild sceptics are the oddballs and extremists making us even more uncompetitve globally Yes it's sad that sad that people let their political beliefs trump facts.

This is patently false statement. The rise in post 1970's temperatures are much higher than the pre-1940's. Mann (1999), Wahl and Ammann(2007), Huang(2000), Smith(2006), Oerlemans 2005, Esper et. al.(2002) and Moberg et al. (2005) document this. Try plotting the free and publically available HAD and CRU instrumental records with excel

I clicked on "unrest" link and lo and behold it takes me to Monty's blog where he whines about what Oracle is doing to "his" mysql. It seems to me that he sold "his" database to Sun for "approximately $1 billion in total consideration" (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/sun-to-acquire-mysql.html) Seems he wasn't too worried about the foss community when he sold mysql to Sun. Now that he finds that he isn't the center of attention any more he starts stomping his feet and holding his breath until he turns blue. He suddenly is worried about how open mysql is? I keep hearing about how bad oracle is, maybe you better look at just how "open" google is. I find google several orders of magnitude worse than oracle.

Oh you mean like telling him to call Vaisala or iMet and politely asking for a couple of rawinsonde ballons for a science project? No the US is screwed because in the late 1960's and early 1970's the US started listening to the MBA's. Instead of looking for and setting long-term goals for a company, the MBA's told us the only thing that was important were this quarter's profits. Thus, instead of investing in research and development that paid off three to five years down the road, we cut research and development to the bone to make sure this quarters profits look good.