Have you seen our tax code? When I took Federal Income Taxation in law school, I had to get a copy of the tax code, and it was about six inches thick. (I don't remember, or care, if or how much it was annotated.) That's a mighty long list of exceptions to consumption tax.

But consumption taxes will never take on, because the tax code is really about control. If I grant tax favors for certain preferred behaviors, I can exercise a phenomenal amount of control over what you do. If I'm a power-grubbing statist anywhere on the purple spectrum, that's much better than merely influencing what you buy.

My problem with the Fair Tax proposal is the rebate checks.

It teaches stupid people that the Government gives them money every month. They can prove it too, waves rebate check

All food bought in stores, not restaurants, not taxed
All clothing items that cost less than $100, not taxed
All health care, not taxed.

Everything else, taxed. Who cares if someone has $20 billion in the bank, if every time they spend any of it, it gets taxed.

"Speaking as someone who wants to see the NSA dismantled, I hope these shooters died painfully if they were doing it as a political statement."
Yea and since both statements are pretty much crazy we can now dismiss you.

To hope for someone to die painfully in this case is unethical at best. These people had to be stopped. The best result would have been for no one to be injured but to seek others to die painfully is nothing but revenge and in this case unwarranted.

Geothermal is location limted.
Solar is not useful for baseload because of the state of storage technology. And yes I have read up on molten salt thermal storage and I work with battery technology everyday. Pumped water storage and solar are a poor match because it is very rare to have a lot of water and elevation change in areas with good solar potential.
 

The carbon footprint according to a NASA study including all mining is a small fraction of natural gas and more than an order of magnitude less than coal. Oil does not count since almost no oil is used for electric production in the US.
BTW maintenance is not carbon free of wind turbines.

Bzzzzz.....
Wrong answer.
It is not and Studies by NASA and the UN both support a large increase in nuclear power to reduce pollution in general as well as carbon emissions as does one of the founders of Greenpeace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Of course Greenpeace says he is a paid toady of the nuclear industry.... Vilification of those that disagree with you is the first rule of propaganda.

That Greenpeace makes a lot of money off anti nuclear? That should be pretty obvious.

Anti-nuclear is the same as Anti-Vax.
All the science says it saves a more lives that it takes.
And not doing it will end up taking a large number of lives and will impact the poor, old, and very young the most.
The only difference is that not using more nuclear power will do a lot more harm than not vaxing.

The amazing thing is this is only at a -1....
1. No.
2. No.
3. No.

I do not think it is possible to have a post on slashdot that is less true and more inflammatory.

I've read some good criticisms of systemd by another init system developer. He had valid things to say and put them on his blog in a nice point by point way that can be responded to and rebutted.

Rather than bad-mouthing Red Hat on slashdot, why not put up a direct, technical critique of systemd on your own web site (or post it here). I know many people would appreciate having a point by point critique. You say their code is a "mess" but what does that even mean? Please provide examples (such examples can only benefit everyone). Otherwise it's FUD. I know you probably feel like it's not worth your time, yet you post a half dozen or more anti-systemd posts here. So you clearly have the time.

Your mistake was going to Best Buy to find a cable. You're better off going to Princess Auto of all places to find cheap ethernet patch and HDMI cables. No hard drives though. And everything smells like smokey rubber.

Home Depot carries the best little set I've owned:

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Hus...

I have probably bought half a dozen of them as they are super handy. If you take out the little plastic insert in the handle, you can put all the bits in the handle also.

As someone else pointed out far above, there is actually a variety of legal uses for flamethrowers. I've seen them used by landowners to conduct controlled burns to keep underbrush down and help prevent wild brush fires.

The vast majority of people who have accounts get hacked aren't getting physical visits from the attacker. Hell keeping your pass phrase on a sticky note under your keyboard isn't that dangerous either unless you are specifically protecting against an insider threat.

How do you know their code is dangerous? Have you reviewed it and published your results? Systemd is bloated? Have you even looked at the code? You do realize that systemd-init is not much bigger than sysv init was.

Furthermore, I don't think Red Hat would support systemd if their best engineers (and I know several of them; they are very smart people) doubted it. In fact if you read up on systemd you'll find that initially Red Hat was hesitant to pursue systemd. The systemd devs proved their case and won people on technical merit, especially as Linux has been moving into new areas like virtual machines and containers. And other distros are picking it up because it addresses major shortcomings that were starting to really impact Linux.

Interesting you should feel systemd is the worst of the lot when every commercial Unix out there abandoned sysv init years ago. Solaris, HPUX, Apple. You name it. They all did for the same reasons. init scripts are error-prone, clunky, hard to audit, and a maintenance nightmare. You couldn't even move an init script between systems. Have your worked with modern systems that employ containers, storage pools, logical volumes, hotplugged ethernet, storage, etc? I have, and it always was a bit kludgy before. Just consistent naming of ethernet devices is a nice benefit of systemd. Back in the dark days of Linux I would often put in ethernet cards from different manufacturers just to make sure I could map names to them in a consistent way.