Its easy to build a very competent gaming rig for less than $500. Tom's Hardware has a regular feature about how to do it. Heck the $500 gaming PC I built more than five years ago still plays modern games with high graphics with only one graphics card upgrade in that time. And I still haven't even bothered to OC the CPU.

I'm rebuilding one now that would have come in under $500 but I wanted a high efficiency totally silent PSU and so I splurged on that component, otherwise I was easily under $500.

Actually they didn't. Like Microsoft 20 years later, IBM got dragged through the US's anti-trust system for years and in the end nothing happened.

+1 Best AC post of the thread. I LOL'd.

An embryo that dies due to natural causes hasn't been murdered. Murder requires both knowledge and intent: I knew my action was going to result in death and I specifically took that action in order to cause death.

As for when life begins, conception is the logical point to choose because it is the least arbitrary. You've specified operating brain as a criteria for your definition of the start of a human life. Define operating. I'm going to assume that you mean a brain that's autonomously controlling at least some of the autonomic functions of the child but that's just an arbitrary point you picked. Is that any more or less valid than the point of recognizable self-awareness; a point which it might argued doesn't come until well after birth?

**Spoiler Alerts**

Ender's Game is a great work of fiction because of the relationships, not because of the technology (which was for the general public visionary at the time) or because of the loner hero with latent superpowers (which he didn't have). Ender became great not because he was a genius but because of the deep bonds he formed with the other students, because of the community he built up around him that was greater than the sum of its parts. The climax of the book isn't beating the final boss, it's the betrayal of one of those relationships and the fallout that defines Ender's Game.

Ender changed the Battle School through his empathy and his relationships. It's why Ender was selected and not Peter. If you missed that the first time around, it's worth re-reading the book in that context.

I dunno, I got a Dyson vacuum and it really sucks.

You mean the Executive Branch that originated the idea this time around? Or maybe you mean the one that signed it into law? Perhaps you're thinking about the Executive Branch that encouraged its allies in Congress to kill a bill that would have allowed the Executive Branch greater leeway in how the sequester was implemented.

"Weasels, all of 'em."

At least we can agree on that.

First of all, the hidden wealth doesn't make your argument stronger, it makes it weaker. If the money hadn't been hidden the imbalance in the the amount of the total income tax paid would be even more disproportionally allocated to the rich.

Secondly, most minimum wage workers are still dependents or are supplementing their income, not trying to raise a family of four.

Finally, congratulations: at $160K annual earnings YOU are just short of being in the top 5% of all income earners in the US (starts at $186K). Your combined salaries also put you comfortably in the global 1%. You greedy scumbag, you.

So please tell us: if capital and management add no value to production, why don't the laborers just give them the boot and go into business for themselves? Think how much richer they each could be individually if they weren't paying for all that useless overhead? Maybe this is just the first time anyone has thought of it, in which case, you're welcome.

-1 Disagree. Your quoted text indicates who released the information but does not include the identity of the person or persons who leaked the information in the first place. In fact, had you only quoted one more paragraph (the one directly above your excerpt) you could have saved everyone a lot of time:

"The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ exploration of the secretive world of offshore companies and trusts began after a computer hard drive packed with corporate data and personal information and e-mails arrived in the mail."

25% of 100K = 25K
10% of 2M = 200K

The multimillionaire is paying nearly 10 times as much as the couple making 100K.

In what way is this retrogressive?

To play devil's advocate: why are we not penalizing the 100K couple for FAILING to make $2M and thus depriving society of an additional $175K in tax revenue! It's unfair that this couple should be able to get away with only paying $25K in taxes when they're enjoying the rich benefits of our society!