This is exactly right and it is intentional. This is just like withholding taxes that hide from people the true cost of their tax burden.

The power-hungry politicians WANT to keep people ignorant of the true tax burden. Complaining about "corporate taxes" just confuses the ignorant and uninformed which serves only politicians. It is useful to them also to divide and conquer so that there are fights just like this. Where one side is arguing for higher corporate taxes "for fairness" while not understanding that THEY and everyone else are going to be the ones paying.

It is a great ploy from Washington (and other world capitals) to keep the un-educated upset and ready to follow them over a cliff.

The best solution is as you said - people pay taxes, and there is no withholding. There is no masking of the size of government and the tax burden. No hiding behind ignorance while allowing yourself to be manipulated.
   

Useful to whom? The racists who care about skin color in Washington?

Skin color is about as much use as eye color or hair color, except to racists.

So much for Martin Luther King's wanting to be judged on the content of the character instead of the color of your skin.

Wear?

How big an effort is that to do in, say, WebKit? Firefox? Why isn't anyone working on it? Or are people? What are the benefits?

Forgive my ignorance, I truly didn't know. Is it something that a few thousand dollars of programming time would buy?

If YOU are the one looking for him, he is surely safe, oh geography master. ;-)

Now all I need is a portable sun to read in my mom's basement.

Fixed that for you.

I haven't seen it discussed, but transcription is one of the most important features to Google and it is a large reason why they are willing to offer Google Voice for free. Why you ask? Training. Google voice's free transcription is a huge voice to text training database.

I have been using it since before it was Google Voice (e.g. grandcentral) and this was an important reason for Google to acquire it.

Google gets a LOT of value from every voice mail that comes in, is transcribed, and then is rated by users as to how useful it is.

Yes, it is good already, but not nearly perfect and they are working on it for one reason - voice search. And voice search is an up-coming Google killer-app that Bing/MSFT and Yahoo have no answer to.

(Neither does Apple, yet.)