A keyboard, how quaint.

Controversy over AGW aside, this means nothing. The world can warm while some regions gain, lose, or maintain ice. It's GLOBAL climate change so what matters is the GLOBAL ice pack.

...if you use dots.

IMHO, rich people earning N times more without producing N times much isn't a problem. OTOH, when income and wealth disparity reach certain critical levels (value for N may or may not be the appropriate measure) then some redistribution is necessary.

Once again it's a balance. Absolute redistribution is bad because you end up with the people at the lazy poor people as you describe. On the other hand, holding to the fiction that wealth is always deserved leads to oligarchy. IMHO that's where the US is now.

Another problem is that the political system tends to be adversarial. Anybody who argues for moderation is looked down upon from both sides. In the legal system that works out OK. Opposing lawyers argue in absolutes, you reach a verdict, and after appeals are exhausted it's usually right. An adversarial political system is more problematic. If the fascists or the communists win, we all lose.

There's a subtle point here that needs elaborating. I fully embrace the notion that a concentration of wealth is bad. I fully embrace the notion that special privelege based on station at birth is bad.

The problems come when we try to guarantee equality of outcome, rewarding those who have no talent or discipline equally with those who have talent and discipline.

There's a balance. Absolute privelege is bad. Absolute redistribution and leveling is bad. If you understand that balance then you should see how I appreciate and even applaud your narrative; yet continue to prefer equality of opportunity with a safety net as opposed to equality of outcome.

1. The rich always have it better.

2. If you try to change rule no. 1, you just make things worse.

In this case, if the tax system were based on something other than realization the middle class people with small capital gains would probably get screwed over with tax bills they can't pay and/or tricky tax filings that would increase the already severe time and money problem of complying with our complex tax codes. Meanwhile, the rich would only pay a small portion of their wealth to find accounting methods to optimize their taxation under the new regime.

Also, nice try at stirring up class warfare on Slashdot.

What's stopping me from selling numerous copies of my MP3s and retaining my original copies?

The increasing odds with each transaction that you will be observed conducting illegal activity.

Thanks. I've seen that site pop up in Google results before. I always thought it was just a dump of the fortune file that comes with bash. It looks like it's dedicated to quotes and not the bash shell, which is kind of odd since it seems like that would be a useful domain. Then again, maybe not enough people care about bash anymore. Not much of a shell hacker myself...

Awright, if achieving a fraction of c large enough to make the trip non-generational for the astronauts isn't practical then maybe the poem is spot-on after all. Break the light barrier, or forget about it.

You're quite right that you don't need to exceed C. I decided to take the lazy way out to analyze this problem. Please note, that site has a crappy interface. There are probably better relativistic trip calculators out there.

What's interesting is that you can subject both the earth and the ship to a fairly long wait time (we're both in it together) or you can give the ship a reasonably short wait time if you can get to 0.99c. The aforementioned lack of sync with Earth is still a problem of course. Single digit years on the ship, multi-decades go by on Earth. I don't know if that calculator takes into account the fact that you have to accelerate to some fraction of C and then decelerate to orbit. Having the deceleration fail would be a world of suck too, not to mention the kinetic energy of a dust particle at relativistic velocities.

Anyway, it was a bit of doggeral I banged out on a whim. If you can come up with some good rhyme and meter that's also good physics, have at it.