OK, let me explain. Fifty years ago, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid their workers an inflation-adjusted average of about $50/hr. They were also taxed about twice as much as we are now. That average person would pay 25% of their income in taxes. In the end, you'd take home about $75k/yr in income (again, adjusted for inflation).

Today, the largest employer is Wal-Mart, and they pay $11/hr on average. This person makes 22k per year if they manage to work 40 hours a week, and get taxed at 15% and thus brings home about 19K/yr.

75k vs 19k. It's not the taxes. Seriously. In fact, taxes are good when well-utilized by the government. Not only do they pay for the kinds of things that lift all boats (roads, education, etc), but they serve as a way to keep wealth from collecting at the top. In 1965, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. That's right 70%. That's how much the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburgs paid in taxes every year back then. You know who benefited from that massive tax on the wealthy? The middle class, because the government spent money on crazy things like going to space or public works projects the employed millions and fueled the economy.

You're an idiot. The middle class isn't being drained via taxation. Taxes are lower right now than at any point in the last century. It's the stagnation of wages that's causing the middle class to have problems. It's amazing how people will assert something as true that can be debunked with five seconds of Google searching.

The Siberian Traps were supervolcanoes. They paved over an area the size of Europe with molten lava. Nothing today compares.

And hey, we shouldn't worry about meteor impacts because all life on Earth now is descending from life that survived the one that killed the dinosaurs! Bring on the meteors! Also, did you know that many people in Japan are descending from people that survived having nuclear bombs dropped on them, thus rendering them immune to radiation?

I notice TFA doesn't mention competing theories, like the ocean acidificaiton is being caused by the natural cycle of sunspots. This is a serious theory, put forth by me the other day when I was looking up at the sun and thinking that no one probably has done any research into how sunspots could affect ocean acidity. This is just anther example of the mainstream media not giving equal time to competing theories! Instead, they just focus on those that come from scientists doing studies!

And if it's not sunspots, it's probably volcanoes or something. I'll figure that out if someone disproved my first theory.

Because no super-volcanoes have gone off in the last century (we'd have noticed!) and that's not what's driving the rapid carbon increase in the atmosphere.

Ocean acidification is a huge deal to environmentalists - I'm not sure where you're getting your information. And as it's driven by the same thing that causes Global Warming, dealing with carbon in the atmosphere is a twofer.

Oh, come on. This is the good kind of April Fools story. The stories that could be true are pretty annoying when they come from real news sources, but this is firmly tongue-in-cheek.

And it's way more generous than Java. Microsoft is promising it won't sue for anything developed on a .NET runtime. Not their .NET runtime. Any .NET runtime, even those not developed by Microsoft.

".NET Runtime" means any compliant implementation in software of (a) all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of Standard ECMA-335 – Common Language Infrastructure (CLI); and (b) if implemented, any additional functionality in Microsoft's .NET Framework, as described in Microsoft's API documentation on its MSDN website. For example, .NET Runtimes include Microsoft's .NET Framework and those portions of the Mono Project compliant with (a) and (b).

So, basically, they're explicitly promising not to pull the shit that Oracle pulled with Google over Java. But because Microsoft killed their Pappy some people are developing elaborate conspiracy theories over how, really, their promise not to sue is somehow a bad thing.

http://pastebin.com/wJuWeAiN

In-Memory takes .1 seconds.
Writing to Disk takes .4 seconds.

I can't control it. It's "flipped" for me three times. I've tried to do different tricks like viewing angles or imagining it one way before I look, but nothing works.

Blue and black. I don't know why it doesn't trick me, I usually fall for optical illusions. It's not like I have particularly good color perception or anything.

It's not just that. It flipped for me. I saw it Friday morning abd, saved the pic to my PC so I could open it up and use a color picker to see it was actually blue when it looked white/gold to me. Later that day, I was going to show it to a co-worker so I opened it up again. But now it was blue/black. It'd flipped twice more for me since then.

Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.

I mean, even without this, they were performing man-in-the-middle attacks on their customers. Doesn't something like the DMCA apply when you're hijacking banking websites?

As opposed to the people changing the climate now with no code of ethics?