This doesn't make any sense to me. Are you telling me that paying SS and Medicare are optional, that I have a choice in it? No? Then they are part of my total tax burden, just like military spending - and as a self-employed developer, I can tell you that the burden of paying both sides of SS is significant.

This sort of viewpoint of "well, those don't count because they have a separate fund" is the sort of thinking that has gotten us into this situation.

Your concluding statement isn't accurate at all.

The "mandatory" spending on entitlement programs dwarfs military spending: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

We have a spending problem, but it's not limited just to the military budget, and it is simply not true to say that the military spending "dwarfs" the rest of the debt components. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.

This has a nice visual breakdown of federal income and outlay: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Also, refer to the GAO's citizen's report for FY 2012: http://www.fms.treas.gov/fr/12... chart 3 is a nice pie chart representation of spending, please note that for FY 2012 HHS and SSA together ("entitlement spending") were 45% of the total federal budget, military spending was 21%, 30% if you include the VA.

Yes, we need to cut military spending and reduce our involvement in foreign conflicts, but that's just one part of the work that needs to be done. We need to reduce spending in all of these areas.

Brought peace?

;-P

What do you even know about China? Did you know that it was home to the largest and most advanced city humanity would ever see until 19th century London?

It's not just China, East Asia as whole loves to anthropomorphosize things. Jesus... have you seen all the x-tans that come out of Japan?

Well, let's see, they invented movable type printing, a calendar that was as accurate as the Gregorian but developed hundreds of years earlier, percussive cap drilling that was capable of the deepest wells in the early 19th century, paper currency, watertight compartments partitioning ships, dental fillings, dominoes, clockwork escapements, forensic entomology, multi-stage rocketry, pontoon bridges, toilet paper, electronic cigarettes, Non-invasive prenatal diagnostic testing for Down's Syndrome, Synthesis of crystalline bovine insulin, and I know it's cliche, but since you arbitrarily set the period at 1500 years I have to include gunpowder.

You're talking about people who invented the compass. Navigation relative to magnetic fields is kind of a big deal. I'll spare you the litany of other things.

WOOSH.

Not the best example considering a) the US has the highest drinking age in the world, bar none and b) the fact that special rights are being conferred after the age of legal majority for voting and all sorts of other independent actions is ethically incongruent at a minimum.

You should have picked on something sensible, like not allowing tweens to drive.

Now, now Ethanol-fueled, we've been over this before. When you go into a room with a mirror, that's not a different person that you are "meeting".

I guess they could always move everything back out, then rents could be lower so property owners lose money and unemployment could be higher too, surely that's the great solution these brain-dead leftist idiots want.

Exactly who would fall of the turnip truck and believe that one of the most popular web services in China would be rerouted to another service whose main purpose is to undermine censorship by accident? I'll believe that Freedom Software wasn't complicit, it was probably some lone wolf, but to think this wasn't a deliberate hack is naive beyond words.

Just to escape from the politics for a moment, I actually ran into an interesting injection type attack against mongodb and php. The attack exploits the fact that php auto assigns certain variables to arrays, which when parsed my the mongo driver are interpreted as commands.

From here:

you can inject using something like:

I thought this was pretty cool, except for the fact that the project I was involved in was *riddled* with security holes as a result. The devs didn't believe that you could do a sql injection with mongodb until I started logging in with their users in the dev environment using the above trick.

As somebody who has detested Ethanol-Fueled since the time when he posted under his actual account before becoming afraid of his bad karma, I thank you AC.

Crime should be illegal. (That's sarcasm.) The specifics of a criminal's threat are essentially meaningless. Somebody who is deranged enough to use violence or the threat of violence to get money will do so regardless of what specific mechanics are available. What's stopping these people from kidnapping loved ones and sending back body parts until the ransom is paid? That's a pretty classic one. Deranged, violent criminals are going to be deranged, violent criminals no matter what. The merits and detriments of a proposal such as this need to be evaluated outside of a context of law breaking, because, unsurprisingly, law breakers don't care about laws. That's kind of what defines them.