Interesting. What do you suppose the word 'gifted' means, then?

Or does that not exist, either?

So if you and your spouse both made $175k pre marriage, just getting married increases your tax rate by 5%.

Your marginal tax rate increases by 5%, the effective rate (in your example) increases by 1.9% ($6.65k) - not great, but not exactly ruinous.

What's 'slashbi'? Some kind of plush mascot? (in which case, I want one)

No shit.

Last year's Nobel in Physiology and Medicine went to the discoverers of the Toll gene and Toll-like receptors (as well as dendritic cells), which play a major role in immune response activation.

You're right, what a fucking joke.

At the current rate, dirt's looking pretty good to win that one.

I disagree, XP, to be useful with all of the fixes and service packs applied, running software that has also had fixes and service packs applied does NOT run on 11 year old machines. It needs at minimum 768MB of RAM, 1GB to be comfortable. Not many machines had that 11 years ago.

To run it on an 11 year old machine you need to either disable some functionality or upgrade the machine. You can do the same with Ubuntu. ...in fact there is probably more leeway to do that in Ubuntu as there are more things that can be safely disabled and still have a functional machine

I have not seen an out of the box XP SP3 system running in less than 512MB without major complaints from the user. Microsoft can claim 64MB minimum requirement still applies, but reality shows it is simply not true anymore.

Since they are the only ones "allowed", and the only ones who *can*, then yes, they SHOULD be required to continually support a platform they hold sole control over.

What a ridiculous thing to say. It's their product, they can do, or not do, anything to it that they want.

My reading was that they already had similar rules in place for flights crossing US airspace (which, fine, sort of makes sense), but now they want to extend them to all flights going to the specified cities.

The "steer clear" and "over-fly US airspace" in your quotes are in different contexts - they were specifically emphasizing that the new rules are about flights that don't enter the US airspace.

Really, "trust in science" - turn that around in your head a few times.