A tax on consumption hits those hardest who consume the most: the middle and lower classes.

Not quite ... they consume the most relative to their income.

So, if Bill Gates buys a $50 million dollar home and a $200K car ... the amount he gets taxed relative to his net-worth is trivial.

The problem is many people view economics as saying that the goal of capitalism is to ensure as much income inequality as possible.

Because, apparently, that's the whole point.

Taxing consumption is stupid. It encourages people to save and hoard till the day they die, which defeats the purpose of money. The rich are the most capable of doing this, which big trust funds and investments. Also, the idea of a progressive consumption tax is mind-boggling. How can a sales tax be progressive? Right now, sales taxes are collected on point of sale, which is a flat (actually regressive) tax. Do you have to fill out everything you buy on some IRS form?

A better idea is to tax wealth. That will encourage people to spend, and drive the economy forward.

People don't listen to that preflight announcement stuff because they've heard it a hundred times before. People who've flown even a couple of times before don't need to listen. People who are on their first flight, where it's all new and exciting are paying attention.

So, no - I know how to wear a seatbelt and that my seat cushion can be used as a floatation device and to check where the nearest exit row is...yadda yadda yadda. I can stick my nose into my phone and I won't miss anything important.

What's needed is either to make those instructions INTERESTING (like the Southwest Airlines people often do) - or to only give the routine instructions to people who need it. That way, when something truly important comes up, people will pay attention.

You need to be all over Verizon's ass about this till it's fixed. Contact the BBB and take it public if need be. They obviously are screwing over Netflix users if other streams are fine.

Precisely. Women tend to call for help or say comments hurt their feelings or otherwise give the EXACT reaction the trolls want.

They do the same thing to most men and... no reaction.

This is what is causing the focus on women. Not that the trolls are against women though I'm sure some are... but that the women often do not know how to deal with bullies.

Men are taught how to deal with bullies from a very young age. You toughen up or you're a weakling. The boys will literally call you "a girl" if you complain.

To not be "a girl" boys must hide their feelings and laugh off abuse. And then at some later date... taking some revenge is generally considered par for the course.

Women need to understand that they can't rely on men or society to come to their aid on the internet. They're going to have to take care of themselves and toughen up a bit. Crying foul just causes a troll feeding frenzy.

Libel and slander are civil offenses. The government does not prosecute them.

Heh, just the thing every business and school should run all the time :-)

Oh sure, some student can argue he's downloading history references that he can only reach through bittorrent .. good luck with that :-)

So what they are saying is that anyone outside the US can freely hack US servers without a warrant too. Surely they don't expect special treatment?

Now consider this: China and/or Russia might consider hacking their servers an act of war. The question can now be rephrased to "Does FBI have the right to declare war on other nations."

Dealing internationally it could be wise to go through official channels that are legal in all involved countries. Failing to do so can have ramifications far beyond your internal politics. Assuming that other nations won't react to anything your government does to them is naive.

they can hack me without warrants, can I hack them without warrants?

point being, they're breaking the law in the country where the servers were in... they're going to slip up some day and hack someone that sues them abroad and in usa...

the way usa runs it's justice spying system, it's a wonder any country still hands over any suspects to usa..

It's very hard to find affordable routers, with the latest-gen tech (802.11ac, USB 3.0, etc) which support flashing and have decent driver support on Linux or *WRT, though. Many routers have such anemic SoCs that they barely run with the built-in firmware, let alone something custom that isn't hand-optimized for the device.

I'm close to resigning to the fact that every router I have going forward is gonna have to be an Intel NUC. Even a Celery processor is many times faster than those MIPS pieces of crap they ship in most routers that cost under $1000.

NEVER use a router that you haven't loaded third party firmware onto.

Which leads to not buying hardware that won't run OpenWRT.....

Which means, nobody but you controls with the router upgrades its firmware or decides to phone home. ALWAYS be the master of your own network.

It depends on the state. In many states, an employer can fire you for any reason or no reason at all (with exception of legally protected statuses that cannot be used in hiring/firing decisions such as race, age, gender, etc).

Macs have never been immune to viruses.

the reason windows needs AV protection to run safely is because one account can overwrite critical OS files replacing them with malware infested fake software, and everyone by default starts out with ability to install any program including malware that later will get the special administrator privileges (on a reboot) needed to permanently infect the machine.

heartbleed and shellshock are nasty but a well hardened install will not be a problem, as the users dumb enough to install bad software generally need to ask someone to do that for them. and yes i realize they can run any command and possibly as root with shellshock if your cgi-bin is running things as root. seems to me that with Apache needing to run things as user Apache or httpd it was quite the oversight to let cgi-bin run as root in the first place!