Give me a break; I call BS on the whole "punished for success via progressive taxation" meme. A punishment would be if they lost something, if their quality of life were somehow reduced by the tax. That's not the case at all; even with progressive taxation, when someone earns more money they take home more money. End of discussion. Progressive taxation does mean that as your income reaches further and further beyond the cost of living, you receive diminishing returns on that excessive money.

Want to see something amazing? Look at the discrepancy between a CEO's pay and an average worker's pay (Scroll down to Figure 8 at http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html). Historically, CEO's made a modest (in the Jonathon Swift sense of the word) 50-100x the pay of the average worker. Over the past 10 years, that number has soared between 350x and 500x the average. Does that CEO's family eat 350 to 500 times the food that an average worker eats? Does he need a house that is 350 to 500 times larger than an average family's house? Does that CEO put in 350 to 500 times the labor that the average worker puts in? Is he producing 350 to 500 times more than the people who are actually building his product or providing his services?

Progressive taxation enables average workers to take home a livable wage while still collecting taxes from people who can afford to pay them. They even have a twisted benefit for the CEO - since his minimum wage workers get to keep a larger portion of their income, the CEO can feel less guilty about giving out crap raises and maintaining a barely livable working wage for his employees.

Since x/x = 1, shouldn't 0/0 equal 100%?

What does that even mean? Does that mean that for every 100 people who get in their cars in the morning, one of them will die during their daily commute? Or will 1 in 100 drivers die after a year's driving? After a decade's? After a lifetime's? Where do these statistics come from and over what timeframes are they descriptive?

Take it one step further - be blatantly aroused during the frisking.

While that is the correct definition of evolution, it does not describe the leap from inorganic to organic cylons. As the show presented it, there was no transformation from inorganic to organic. Instead, a few members of a species of organic machines (the "final five") came across and subjugated the cylons. While it's true that this conquering species did take on the name of the conquered species and they did share their biological tech with the cylons in a limited capacity, there was no evolutionary link between a Cylon Raider and a Number 6. The cylons never evolved to a point where they looked human.

This solution of relying on sales tax only works if the rich spend a proportionate amount of their income within the country. All of those luxury cars/watches/shoes/yachts/villas are not putting money into the system. The top 1% could easily live outside the US while still making their money here.

I'd advocate the opposite; only have an income tax. If I make 100k per year, I have significantly more disposable income than my friend who makes 25k per year. Even if I'm paying 50% of my income as tax and they're only paying 10%, I get to live a 50k lifestyle vs. their 22.5k lifestyle. I think that we should have an aggressive income tax without exemptions/credits/loopholes and no other taxes. A person is taxed on the money that they make and, if they have been clever enough to be prosperous and earn a lot of money from our countrymen, they can afford to give some of it back to the country that offers services and support to those same people. The common argument against this of "why penalize me for making money" is a fallacy as there is no possible way that earning more money could result in less in your pocket.

Add to that a sliding scale like we currently use (where a basic cost of living would be taxed at 0% and scaling up from there) and we have a solution that ensures that the people may afford a basic lifestyle while still funding the government and rewarding those people who work hard to be successful.

A 10 Gb connection is an incredible amount of bandwidth, even when we're discussing storage. Disk IO will run out well before bandwidth becomes a consideration unless we're talking about data that is striped across 100+ disks.

Bandwidth used = IO/s * size of transaction.
or, basic algebra can reveal how many drives it takes to fill a given pipe by the following formula:
IO/s = Bandwidth / Size of Transaction

Most file systems use relatively small blocks and as such an average disk transaction tends to range from 4KB to 16KB. 15k SAS drives can realistically sustain 180 IO/s.

1 Gbit ~= 120 MB (allowing for some overhead) of bandwidth = 122,880 KB

So, dividing our available bandwidth by our transaction size (and in this case, we'll assume high at 16KB... 8KB average is much more common in the wild) will reveal how many IO/s we'd need to fill that pipe. Dividing that number by 180 (the IO/s of our SAS drive) will tell us how many drives are needed in a RAID 0 (in order to optimize for performance).

122,880 KB / 16 KB = 7680 IO/S =~ 43 SAS Drives. With no redundancy, we'd need 43 of these drives to saturate even a single gig-e connection.

While I disagree with you about where the bottleneck on a SAN is likely to be, the SAN is only one cost to consider. Backups and replication can easily triple the cost of the SAN's storage itself, as reliable bandwidth is an expensive recurring cost to the IT organization.

That said, the IT organization should be able to provide much more affordable storage to you ($1 per GB is reasonable) if it is sitting on a SAN that is built primarily for space rather than for speed.

For the record (and the innocent), a "non-pharma drug provider" would be that guy down the street who runs the recreational pharmacy from his back porch (until the cops catch him).

NPR - I assume - stands for National Public Radio, which is an important service in Americ.

Just download the zip and copy the contained GIMP folder over your existing GIMP folder (that way all of the scripts, etc. go to the right sub folders). Hell, if you're using 32 bit windows (and kept your install paths at the defaults), you can just unzip the zip file onto your C:\ and you're good to go (as the zip actually contains a Program Files root folder).

What I don't get is why you're singing such praise for it. Sure, I was able to remove the UFO from their example picture, but most of the time it just seems to pull pixels from the upper right corner of the image and glue them over the section that you want removed. I suppose that it's possible that I'm not using it right (going to Script-Fu -> Enhance -> Smart Remove Selection), but the only variable that it seems to present me with is the radius from which to take pixels, and regardless of my value (I've tried 7, 100, and 500) it has not yielded successful results reliably.

I agree completely about Episode One being a kid's movie. But, I also feel obliged to point out that some fans have fixed it with a version called "The Phantom Edit". If you google it, you should be able to find a copy. Be aware that there are multiple copies (I've seen at least 2 versions); the one that I really enjoyed was made by MagnoliaFan78@hotmail.com and is titled "Episode 1: Balance of the Force (in the opening scroll). It tells a much darker story (in addition to cutting out the Midichlorians and all of the "yipee"s), by reversing the audio for most of the aliens and subtitling them. I was shocked to, by the end of the movie, find that I had actually enjoyed Jar Jar's contributions.

Funny... this is what I hear whenever a user asks me for help...

I second this; credit reports have a distressingly high chance of being bullshit. My Experian report (I wonder if it's Experian that tends to have the most problems?) got merged with another man's (who happens to have the same birthday/birth city as I do). Everything that either of us did went onto this monster credit report and it took literally 6 months and many letters to sort out. I started by simply pointing out that all of that other man's activity was not mine and requested that they remove it from the report. They countered with the statement that I did not exist. News to me.

In the end, it turned out that our monster report was under the other man's SSN (which they happily sent to me, as well as every detail of his personal information I could ever not want). After I pointed this out to Experian (and explained that they had merged two people onto one record), only *then* was their crack team of investigators able to determine that they had merged two people onto one record. And by that point I was so exhausted at the system that I was just happy to have it fixed, regardless of the fact that I had had to do their damn job for them.

Wow, bitter much? I've been happily married for 5 years now and disagree with every one of Sycodon's points.

Sex does not stop just because you get married; if you had a strong sex life while you were dating, you will have a strong sex life whilst married. You'll still have time to game and to pursue your interests, just as she will still pursue hers. Marriage, when it comes right down to it, changes nothing. It's merely a symbol that two people, who already know that they love each other and want to spend their lives together, use to let the rest of us know those facts. Marriage changes nothing.

Kids, on the other hand, change everything...

Your "changing rule set" option could be automated, to a fair extent. Make it so that NPCs are also patrons of shops and they have certain needs (the NPC population of a city needs to buy X baked goods, Y smithed goods, etc.). If one profession (say smithing) gets unbalanced and too viable, more players will migrate towards it. This will create a glut in the market and a shortage in the other professions. As there are always NPCs who need a certain amount of resources from those other professions, those items increase in value and thus the market is corrected. I hope.

It's not always a question of abandonment. As so many people have said, if the addict doesn't want to change, nothing in the universe will change him. At a certain point, it becomes a matter of protecting *yourself*. Seeing someone I love hurt herself is probably the single greatest pain that I've ever experienced. You can express your feelings, love and support them, but if they don't want to change they're not going to. If you have to experience that pain enough times, it will break you. "Abandoning" them is not about callously leaving them to their own demons; it's about ensuring that you're still standing and able to help them, when they are ready to accept that help.