Um, isn't 175k more then a 100k = hundreds of thousands not tens of thousands?

Straight off the bat, yes that does sound insane but you're not factoring in what they're paying taxes on

From wikipedia

The bottom 25% have no net wealth
the middle 50% (25-75) have 13% of America's wealth
While the top 25% control 87%

From another source, the top 10% control 70% of the wealth while only paying 55% (from your figures) while those holding 30% of the wealth pay 45%

I just returned my Evo. Waiting till december and getting whatever new one is out though sounds like a sound idea. My issues with that compared to the iPhone 1) Battery life was horrible, I had to actively kill tasks with a task manager that mysteriously popped up again (sprint tv etc) 2) The phone randomly didn't charge / the battery heated up (presume that was simply a faulty device) 3) No option for a federated backup. When I called in about the charging issue they asked me to take it in and swap it out but no complete backup solutions made it slightly more involved then it should've been 4) A couple of apps that I use aren't on the Android yet (Skype / RedFin / Facebook.. the current one is shit ) I'm presuming with the speed increases coming down the line with 2.2 the above would be somewhat better and with 3.0 slated for October they'll clean up the power usage more. Also the apps I mentioned should be out (since they're all saying coming soon!!)

Not really. If you're an adult woman and want to modify your genitals its your choice. Forcing someone unable to make that decision (be it a child or an impaired adult) to do so should be legislated against.

Get a copy of the the incoherence of philosophers by ghazali and read it, you'll find gems like fire intrinsically has no capacity to burn - only through divine intervention does the burning effect occur

Go through a list of major scientific figures from the dark ages. They rapidly accelerate till around 1100AD followed by a sharp falloff. Science had all but stopped centuries (1300AD) before the renaissance began. Can't find anything better put together googling @ the moment but - this should give you an idea

Also read up on the mutazilah who dominated the scientific (scholar) community until Ghazali gained popularity resulting in them dying out (including many being killed outright) and the asherite (conservative) school attaining dominance

http://news.cnet.com/Breathalyzer-source-code-must-be-disclosed/2100-1028_3-5931553.html Florida police can't use electronic breathalyzers as courtroom evidence against drivers unless the innards are disclosed, a state court ruled Wednesday.

Nobody is trivializing it - Innocent until proven guilty? If they're actually guilty then you can argue over the merits of this - otherwise it's plain wrong.
Personal anecdote: A friend of mine that was pulled over, passed all the roadside sobriety tests, passed the field breathalyzer and was arrested anyways, he then passed the test at the detention center which resulted in them calling immigration on him (I'd presume because he looked middle eastern :)).

FWIW He was not on a visa and the judge threw out the case and had his record expunged.

I'll second that - had a cheap 30 dollar switch die within a few weeks - they asked for me to send in the CD and the rubber feet , if not they'd charge me an additional $12 for the CD and $2 for the rubber feet ....

For one by knowing what you searched for before and which links you clicked, it can re-sort the results on the same query to show u the prior ones first (it already does this with people with google accounts , with a tag of 'x' times visited). Not to say that I'm pro-google or pro-tracking , it should be opt-in not opt-out

Wondering if there's anything cross-platform. I'm in the process of setting up an OpenSolaris fileserver (primarily to use ZFS/Raid-Z) and have both linux and windows boxes. It would be great to be able to have an index on each that could be read by a client app or a unified index perhaps.