Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the CAs make money from all the new certificates?

Posting this to undo bad moderation.

I think the Anonymous Coward is talking about the United States, which has a considerably higer ratio.

There is an obvious reason the government has such a large reach: they think they can fix everything with just the right laws, programs, and agencies. For the most part, it seems most citizens agree with them. Think about any government program or agency and there will be someone who doesn't want it to be cut. It's easier to add more things to make people happy than to remove some and anger people. It seems that the longer a government exists, the more bloating it will become, which would probably be why most countries only last for about a maximum of three hundred years. Seems the United States is past it's expiration date.

One could also argue that religion is not lack of applied thought at all. Maybe, it's just a different conclusion people come to after considering everything they know. Maybe, just maybe, it is a valid conclusion. Because, honestly, no one has all the information to say that all religion is objectively true or false.

Tolerance only runs one way.

More like: input == password or re.match('^ +$', input)

What if your pin is a palindrome?

No, but he was pressured to quit, by people who didn't think he should be able to express his own views (and only what's popular this decade), despite the fact that he made them known out of the workplace and that he promised never to associate it with his job. Frankly, this "Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech" is crap. When did Eich ever supress other people's views at Mozilla, or even elsewhere?

Inflation is a big part of it.

a. Less than 90% of Americans claim to believe in God (and even less actually do)

b. You're assuming everyone on Slashdot thinks God is a myth. Rather than just claiming, "God is a myth," tell us why he's a myth.

"Regular the hell out of it" and "Let it be" are contradictory.

Just because you don't like his signature doesn't mean his comment is bad. For the record, I like his signature.

AFAIK, the tenth amendment prevents the federal government from making such a law: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The constitution doesn't seem to say anything about teaching finance in public schools.

No, the less government crowd wants people to make a company and gain money. There is no, "Let's make it so that only some people have the chance to create a corporation." It's more like, "Let's let everyone start pretty much in the same spot, then allow them to fail or succeed based on their own merits." This is in contrast to the progressive, "Let's make sure everyone finishes in the same spot, we don't care where they started or how hard they worked. You succeeded? Great! Now give away all your work." Also, there is not a "delicate balance of free enterprise". The whole idea behind conservatism is that "capitalism will find a way to make it work".