Be honest. Climategate is the only example you can think of.

I'll go ahead and hop on past the probable distinction between what you think "climategate" was, and what actual negative behavior was revealed to have occurred in that particular incident and move right on past to the fact that even if I give climategate to you, it does not support your premise. Your claim wasn't that there exists some instance of corruption in the scientific community. It was that there was more there than there is from parties funding warming deniers.

I don't claim to be a high priest of anything. I just know that morons like you tend to be perfectly happy latching on to whatever anecdotal evidence matches your "humble opinion" and assuming that means your belief is backed by some sort of empirical process. You've more or less made my point for me.

Sounds great. Where do I sign up?

You don't have to silence anybody to solve the problem. The Koch brothers can say whatever they want. There is a whole lot of room between letting some random billionaire tell people that global warming is a hoax and letting that same billionaire secretly fund organizations designed entirely to trick people into thinking there is a global conspiracy of people who go to school to become climatologists in order that they can destroy our freedoms for some extra grant money. I bet we can draw a line someplace in between. I'd personally start by taking away the word "secretly" and demanding that the whole process be more transparent so that people can more easily see the conflicts of interest. Unless you can show me the part of the first amendment that guarantees the right to anonymous donations to propaganda organizations?

There is obviously bias in the scientific process, but you aren't talking about some amount of bias inherent in the system. You are talking about a vast international conspiracy of climate scientists, all with different funding sources and backgrounds, nearly universally colluding to manipulate their findings and their stated beliefs to manipulate the system to get more some more grant money, even though it has been repeatedly shown that they could get more income by flipping and taking funding from fossil fuel companies.

The whole issue has definitely become political football, but it definitely isn't the science that's leading us there.

Luckily for me, there is actual data to examine, so I can safely ignore your humble opinion.

Unluckily for me, there are millions of tools just like you who are perfectly happy to eyeball it and trust their gut reaction when there is perfectly good data around to examine, and you all get to vote, too.

Here's the problem. There have been thousands of societies that at one point had the sort of "Liberty and Freedom" that you are talking about, where there was little or no government to "nanny" people. Do you know what happened to all of those societies? Power centralized, and freedom went away.

The thing that historically has made our country great is specifically the government. We fill the power vacuum with a democratically elected government so that some rich cabal of people can't take power and use it so their "freedom" is maximized and yours is minimized. The problem is obviously that if you let said cabals get enough influence, with mass media and the internet being what they are, they gain a new route to that tyranny anyway: buy enough public opinion and you can directly manipulate a democracy.

So every single person in this country should give much more than a rat's ass when stories like this come up, because they directly relate to people trying to break the system that has protected your liberty and freedom for hundreds of years. And this isn't really about parties. I think that the conservative movement in this country has some properties that make this sort of action happen more frequently from their direction, but we should be vigilant against similar manipulation from anybody.

I agree that Liberty and Freedom are what makes this country great. But right now, you are defending the Koch brothers' freedom to try to steal your freedom from you.

That's funny, whenever I do this sort of thing, the police keep calling it "fraud".

How about making up random bullshit narratives, we look at what information we have in front of us. They are closing down messenger and wanting people to move to skype. The Xbox currently has messenger integration. Ergo, that is going away and getting replaced with Skype, just like we already know it is on PC. I see nothing here that indicates anything at all is happening with party chat, the current messaging, or anything at all besides removing messenger integration and adding Skype integration.

I mean, really, what seems more likely to you: the obvious consequences of replacing messenger with Skype apply to the Xbox just like everything else, or some shitty gaming site I've never heard of and which has an alexa rank of 8,429 is breaking the news that party chat as we know it is getting replaced?

Maybe you should quit having people who have no understanding of a job try to manage people doing it?

I think movie production is a fair comparison. GI Joe: Retaliation got delayed nine whole months, so when I delay my projects at work get delayed by 3, by that metric I am doing a great job.

No, you haven't. You've just been a carefully selected slurry of lies and disinformation for so long that you no longer have any grasp on reality. It is a common syndrome among his listeners.

Okay, I almost feel like you are some evil pointy-haired-boss pretending to be an engineer so that you can try to speak as "one of us" and convince us to commoditize ourselves out of existence. Like somehow you think that programming is hard only because engineers are stupid and haven't bothered to make it easy, and you think that posing as a coder on Slashdot and whining about it will get us off our asses.

I'll skip the long drawn-out explanation for how ridiculous you are and just state that what you are asking for is not possible, the Turing Machine isn't just some paradigm that we can toss out the window because you don't like it, and that the industry is already churning out too many retards that only know how to do their job by screwing together buzzword frameworks without you helping us along.

Also, I should have read more closely, as you clearly stated income up above. Sorry.

Ah, here's the confusion. A Fair Tax has a very specific meaning: it is a consumption tax. I had no idea you were talking about an income tax. None of what I've said applies to you.