As I have learned through many painful lessons, anything language X can do, Perl can do too - in an unnecessarily confusing manner.

Wouldn't it be easier to just abolish all of the taxes and do a simple national sales tax? Then any business done in the US is taxed here and cannot be escaped. Any business done abroad is done abroad and isn't taxed by the US.

That seems pretty fair to me, extremely difficult to avoid, and solves the problem of 10,000 pages of law that nobody can possibly comply with 100% all of the time.

Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.

That is precisely what a control freak is - someone who believes that things should be a certain way and refuses to compromise. Everything must bow down to the vision of that person. You can try to spin it as a "passion for perfection" but ultimately it's exactly the same thing.

Good to know. Where I live (semi-rural area) there's probably a half dozen junk yards within a 15 minute drive of me. Cars just go there and... sit around... Sometimes people will run in there and yank a part out for nominal amounts of money, but most of the time they just sit and rust away.

What struck me as the most interesting part of this article was the concept of taking your car to the shop, removing the drive train, and melting the rest down to be used to print a new car.

This would be fantastic. All of a sudden, getting into a crash doesn't mean you have to junk the whole car. You can salvage the body and a lot of the parts (in theory). Wait a week or two and voila, you have a brand new product.

In theory we should be doing this with existing cars, but they just don't seem to be built for it, or there's no facilities that will take them for recycling. If you start out with this as part of the life cycle of the vehicle, well, that could be really cool. This could drastically reduce the price of a vehicle if people are recycling their car parts since you don't have to source nearly as many new materials.

Questions about safety and durability can be addressed over time, I'm sure, and hopefully they won't be so lightweight that they can't be driven in the winters up North.

That was my immediate reaction as well.

"I don't agree with the political / religious / philosophical point of the article, so I am going to flag it as false, even if I know that it is true."

Just what we needed, yet another tool to promote drama and division among people.

So you're complaining that it isn't open to everyone because it doesn't support a browser that you like to use, even though you have complete freedom to use a browser which is supported by the site at zero cost to yourself. Zero.

As an alternative you can just use the Steam client itself, which supports everything you need.

That isn't Steam locking people out. That's you locking yourself out for no reason other than pure stubbornness and a need to bitch about a free service.

And you're prohibited from using Chrome because...?

In my younger, more vulnerable, far more gullible years, some representatives at Primerica asked me to sign up with them. They told me it would be a great Summer job in between college semesters and that I'd learn a lot.

Learn a lot I did.

They did pay for me to go to to state-required classes to become a licensed insurance salesperson. They were right, I did learn a lot about insurance there. The theory, how it works, lots of legal stuff and ethics, etc., etc. I was happy about that. It's good stuff to know.

I also learned about the company.

It didn't take long for a giant red warning sign to pop up in my head: "WARNING!!! PYRAMID SCHEME CULT. WARNING!!!"

That's exactly what it was. You see, the way Primerica worked was like this: You go out and sell an insurance policy and maybe a few other things. You get a commission. So does the person who got you to join. So does the person who got THAT person to join. And then the person above that person, all the way to the top.

I, being something like the 6th or 7th generation, would be feeding cash to the founder of that local chapter. Looking at the commission rates it soon became clear: If you're just working to sell insurance, you won't make much money. But if you can get 100 people under you then you don't have to sell insurance - all the dumb grunts would be doing the work for you. All you have to do is have weekly meetings and buy food and play music and do bizarre "team building" exercises and hire the occasional motivational speaker...

And then I thought, "So, people who are buying insurance and securities through this company are not only paying for my time and the service, but also all of this other crap... Including the person at the top who is just jerking off all the time at this point."

Well, it took all Summer to take all of the classes - passed with flying colors - and they even paid for me to take the state exam and get the license. I did both. By then it was time to go back to school and, though I was supposed to get back in touch with The Cult, I never did. I took my knowledge and ran for the hills.

Thanks for the education, Primerica, not only on how insurance works, but also what a truly abusive freak show your corporation is.

You were right. I did learn a lot.

I bought one of these a few months ago. It's pretty spacious, adjustable, and is regularly on sale for $450 or so.If you're in the market for one and don't want to spend lots of money for something fancy, this might be a good option for you.

I wasn't familiar with the Reid Technique, but once I learned what it was, it struck me as an incredibly unfair and abusive interrogation technique. It's also the technique we see often on a lot of those police investigation television shows: There's a presumption of guilt, all of the questions are loaded. I never knew it had a name, I always called it, "The Asshole Interrogation Technique," because you have to be an asshole to use it.

For those who are interested, the Wikipedia has a short article but The New Yorker has a much more interesting one.

It's also important to remember that being offended is a choice. In a sense, there's nothing you can do to offend someone, even if you want to, if that person doesn't find your actions as offensive. So the responsibility of being offended really does lie at the person who feels the offense.

No, this isn't a "blame the victim" argument, because there is no victim here. There is no harm done. Someone printing a cartoon of Mohummad having anal sex doesn't hurt anyone. The only reason people get all pissed off about it is because they decide that they should be pissed off.

One always chooses one's reaction to any situation (unless you're of the school of thought that none of us have any choice in anything that we do because we're completely molded by genetics and environment, in which case one can argue that nobody is really responsible for anything that they do).

And then there is context to take into account, which is a whole other discussion.

Because when one single man has the ears of 1.1 billion people, what that man says has importance.

It doesn't matter if you are Catholic or not. 1.1 billion other people are, and many of them adjust their thinking and therefore their actions and their lives based on what this one man says.

Unless you find the politicians to be so pathetic as to be funny, if only unintentionally.

Do you know how much better you could make the world if you go volunteer instead of post on Slashdot?