They also stop drawing benefits. I tend to think they're doing us a big favor by not slowly fading away into dementia by dying earlier of smoking related symptoms. Big pharmacy and big medical must be the reason they want us all to live so long. Have you seen how many pills a geriatric needs to take per day?

Never posting doesn't have any relation to the UID. When your account is created, it is assigned. Posting or not posting has no effect on the UID.

And yes, you are also a PETA sock-puppet.

Excellent point. There is a quote running around that apparently tends to be mis-attributed but is nonetheless quite insightful and worrisome.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler#Misattributed
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

I've also see a similar quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin. The source isn't my concern, the politicians on either side of the aisle having the power to but votes and the long term implications for the solvency of the U.S. is.

That's a pretty ineffective CS degree if it can be completed without any sort of practical application of skills. Even the on-line program I eventually finished required all assignments to be successfully completed so you couldn't game the system and just skip past an area you're weak on. Almsot all tests were proctored and proctors had to be preapproved.

Without some basic controls, the degree lacks integrity. This is sad for the guys that did get it, because the dummy you've described is touting that degree and no one that ever works with him will have any respect for that school or its graduates.

Yeah, let's lower our standards so EVERYONE can go to college. I guess that worked for you. Must have been Columbia, noticed your "Patriotism is bigotry" tag line. That one always warms my heart, dear comrade. Healthy patriotism (not xenophobia or racism) instills competition, it's necessary until we have aliens to compete with... Human nature or something...

Most degrees are already nothing more that a metric we must all achieve to get through the automated HR filters. Sure we should all look to improving ourselves after high school but we don't necessarily have to water down the worth of a degree by diluting the workforce with it. Having everyone get degrees entails dropping academic standards (so everyone that wants one can have one - I feel so warm inside), wasting obscene amounts of tax dollars and encumbering the poor sheep with massive amounts of debt to work in menial jobs that likely didn't even require a high school education 30 years ago.

There are other avenues such as tech schools for some.

I don't hate degrees, I finished mine for the sake of career advancement. Doctors, lawyers, architects, most scientists and real engineers certainly need them.

When more people consume bandwidth, more bandwidth has to be purchased by the ISP to increase capacity for the collective need. Otherwise, the existing connection becomes over-utilized and downloads slow down for everyone using that ISP.

Routers have processors that consume more energy when under higher demand. They also generate more heat when utilization is higher, which must be mitigated with cooling systems, also consuming more power. This factor might be small on your home network or even for a small or medium sized business, but it adds up when racks upon racks of networking equipment are being considered.

Power and real-time bandwidth (not what you download per month, what bandwidth is being used right now) cost money. That cost is passed to the consumer. Thinking of bandwidth as being like roll-over minutes that you need to use or you're wasting something is a flawed consumerist notion. If you conserve, perhaps you could move to a cheaper Internet package and save some money for a rainy day or know that you aren't being a wasteful consumer.

I use less than 10 GB per month and I still have room to play on-line games almost daily, view the news, e-mail, corporate remote access and keep my home network up-to-date.

Poor use of Bit-torrent chews up more than it should. Most clients include bandwidth throttling options that could easily be used to get what you need quickly and then control how fast you are going to seed what you've already downloaded.

Your tag line is bizarre, senseless and revolting. "Patriotism is bigotry" How cute. Did your Bohemian friends at Columbia teach you that one? Such ideas are why nations that still embrace patriotism or any level of national pride are going to destroy us economically, if not in other ways. When the U.S. looks like the 3rd world places I have to work in perhaps you'll understand why you should care about your nation, regardless of which nation you belong to.