As pointed out by others, you can't intercept an email on its way to tax it, but you can always catch it at its final destination. Here is an idea that doesn't involve a government tax.

As you rightfully point out, I bear some cost for each message I receive, so I could pass on this cost to the sender by demanding a fee for reading the message. Essentially this would need a credit system where my incoming mail server can silently drop any message that doesn't come with a small electronic payment of some form.

For any person with whom I have a normal, symmetric communication, this just cancels out, but those who want to spam me would have to pay for that priviledge.

Obviously, implementing such a credit system to be both reliable and inexpensive is a major technical challenge, but certainly something that I'd like to see explored.

It makes some sense to me, if you just cut it a little slack for being an old phrase. I can hear a difference between asking a question and begging it, in that just asking it leaves the answer open. There is something more insistent and less honorable in "begging", it doesn't leave people much of a choice. As in: "Would you rather help me feed my hungry child or be a heartless bastard?", which is definitely begging, and not exactly begging the question, but close enough.

I think the classic phrase is, Reiser's razor.

That's correct. First, about half of it is exported, and 80% of the rest is animal feed. What remains is used mostly for starch (not all of it for eating). The sweet corn eaten in corn form is a tiny fraction.

The arguments for a very short copyright were all out there in 1841, in a powerful speech to the British House of Commons by Thomas Babington Macaulay:
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

Every single argument is still valid today.

Good point about medical research: that is a sizable exception. The difference with the model prevalent in the US is that those organizations typically collect many small donations, as opposed to large single endowments by wealthy donors.

Here, I think "Western institutions" should be understood as "mainly in the US, and to some extent the UK and the English-speaking world". To the best of my knowledge, in all other countries the situation is closer to that in Japan than in the US: the bulk of academic research is performed by public institutions using public funds.

You might want to try Mageia 2 when it comes out. They (Mandrake - Mandriva - Mageia) have had consistently good KDE support since the dawn of time (1998).

Which tells you that people who most dislike evangelicals don't know much about them. It's a very common pattern, to be honest.

Easy: because they are client states of the US.

That won't work: most textbooks are printed in China these days. And of course you can just forget about the globe.

I suspect that liking pink is innate to boys and girls alike. I have seen little boys (less than 3yo) go for bright pink objects over any other color. I am led to assume that pink just feels like a vivid, yet soft and pleasant color to us - that is, before we males duly acquire proper male tastes, and grow a strong, healthy distaste for it.

That said, I am quite convinced that there are, on average, innate psychological differences between men and women. It's just that these differences are much less pronounced than the differences between conventional male and female behaviors, and can only be appreciated in a fuzzy, statistical way, not with statements of the form "men prefer A, women prefer B".

Yup, the amount of atheist bigotry and unpleasantness here is incredible. Now in their defense, these people are probably Americans who endure a lot of religious bigotry in their daily lives. They are just trying to fight back, but this doesn't really help at all.

Actually, some of the more reasonable /. readers would probably find this a lot less objectionable if it was a case of Microsoft making money by selling Microsoft products.