You should realize that he is also benefiting from the US government more than either of us as well. Without the infrastructure and legal system of the US government he wouldn't have been able to accumulate all that wealth. No one would like to go back to the era where you needed your own private army to protect your wealth.

I'm not seeking to "punish" anyone, I am just pointing out that people who think that the wealthy are actually providing the vast majority of the funding for the US government are wrong.

Actually it's both. There is a portion of the payroll tax that is taken out of your paycheck for both Social Security and Medicare. There is also a portion of these taxes that is paid by the employer.

However these taxes are capped to approximately the first $117,000 of earned income, not income from capital gains or dividends. So for someone like Mr. Ballmer, they are just round off error.

Need to stop with the idea that 100% of the government's revenue is from income tax. You should realize that the amount of money from income tax is roughly on par with the amount of money from payroll taxes - revenue breakdown.

Now realizing that since payroll taxes are capped, meaning they are essentially round off error for the top 1%. So realizing that the top 1% with their 28% of the total income in the US are really only paying about 20% of the actual tax revenue doesn't sound quite so unfair anymore.

Allow the government to install back doors on our crypto only after the same back doors are installed on all the government crypto systems.

It is only fair that if the government thinks they have a need to monitor the people for criminal activities, that the people have even more of a need to monitor the government for malfeasance and criminal activity.

You are correct, that should be Mbit. Must have been too early in the morning to post. An extra $50 = 50Mbit, down to an extra $20 = 20Mbit. Still wasn't worth it even for the 20Mbit. Now if the 50Mbit service was an extra $20/month I may have taken it. But can only deal with what's offered.

I had the option of upgrading to Time Warner's new top tier of 50Gbit download speed and passed. Of course, they wanted an additional $50/month for the upgrade, so roughly a total of $100/month for the service.

At that price it wasn't worth it. If the upgrade were more reasonably priced, I would consider it.

Except UPS doesn't charge a flat rate to ship a envelope sized package to anywhere in the country. There are distinct rates for business addresses, and also escalating charges based on where the destination is.

Compare the cost to send a small package via UPS to a business in a major city near to you with the cost to ship something to a residence in Nome, AK and note that there is a significant difference in price between the two. That is something the Post Office is not allowed to do.

Actually in that article the "American Letter Mail Company" did exactly what UPS, FedEx or any other private company would do if allowed to compete - pick large cities and only serve that market. USPS has the mandate of serving any address in the country for the same cost, regardless of whether it is the middle of Alaska or downtown Manhattan.

It is easy to undercut USPS if you only serve New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.

I work for a large corporation and we have several in production. It almost always boils down to vendor A supports a few different OS's. When none of the Unix versions comply with corporate standards, then you deploy Java applications (including Tomcat) on Windows.

Did anyone actually RTFA?

I know it is nice to bash McAfee and Norton all day, but Firefox's rapid release/upgrade cycle appears to be at fault here as well.

The next question is what exactly are these people going to do for a job out there? While the population density may be similar to Manhattan, there is no easy way to go anywhere away from where you live/work. Especially when you consider what it would take to make a floating runway capable of supporting commercial airliners. So it may be really hard to find enough people who would be able to tolerate living on these floating communities for any length of time.

I'll take issue with that, at the college level at least. Go back and look at your college texts, how many of them were written by some professor at the school? If institutions didn't insist on using using the textbook from "their professor", you could have significantly larger printing runs of the textbooks which would greatly reduce costs.

Not saying the publishing companies aren't making a profit, but both sides are responsible for gouging the students.

Yes they do. They were paid quite well for them. Of course why take the risk of selling them to a terrorist organization when there are legitimate agencies ready to buy them as well.

Yes, the cost of nuclear power has gone down since the 1990's because those decommissioned nukes are much easier to de-enrich to civilian nuclear power plant levels than it is to enrich normal uranium ore.

Actually the current version of Websphere is 7.0 (about 4 months old) and it runs on a Java 6.0 JVM (which is IBM's for the Windows and AIX versions of Websphere).