He wasn't being disrespectful because he thought my post was technically inaccurate, he was being disrespectful because a lot of people don't like me on slashdot because I have strong opinions and mercilessly club their favorite things, which they feel deserve special treatment. Whether it's mac, linux, windows, open source, copyright, left, right, obama, palin, tea partier, communist, and the list goes on... any opinion I state winds up pissing off some fanboy. That's why I put it as my tagline --

Not only do people downmod me for telling them their favorite band sucks, but they also upmod people who put down the evil heretic that is me. That's the only reason this guy got any points: It's GIT hate mail and a lot of lurker mods just eat it up.

And terrible news for encryption experts. Enabling TRIM tells your adversary which sectors contain data and which don't. It's a great asset to cryptanalysis and also destroys plausible deniability that there's a filesystem present on the drive, and how much data is present in it -- thus eliminating the "shadow volume" option of Truecrypt and others.

I said software engineers, not software engineers at google. So you can knock about 10 grand off right there. And until you provide a citation about how much Google pays its employees, we're going with the state average. $95k a year comes out to $45.67 an hour. This is actually more than San Fransciso lists for the profession -- $40.66. We'll go with the more generous figure here.

So you're making $45.67 an hour. Woo! Big time money now. But Uncle Sam just showed up, and he wants his cut. Your biweekly was $1,826.80. Now it's $1,376.72 if you take a single deduction and are single. That's $688.36 per week net. As it turns out, taxes in California are a bitch.

MIT has created a Living Wage Calculator. I linked it directly to San Francisco for you.

They estimate that you need to net $1,929 to be above poverty. You're making about a third more than that. Coincidentally, most financial experts will tell you that having about 25-35% of your income as discretionary is the ideal case: Less and you can't really save any money for retirement, etc.

So as you can see, $95k might seem a princely sum to you, but it's not really. Especially when to get it you're working 80 hour weeks so your net per hour is about $8.60.

So no, if we're gonna mod people up or down on the basis of factual statements, you're going to -1 land, bud.

Houston is leaning more center-left these days (I'm from Houston), especially in local politics. The last Republican to occupy the mayor's office left it thirty years ago. Even in national politics it's slightly D-leaning, by a few percent: Barack Obama and John McCain almost exactly tied in Harris County (Obama won by 0.1%), but McCain outperformed in unincorporated Harris County, with Obama winning the city by ~5%.

PACER charges far more than the cost of operating the service; their goal (as instructed by Congress) seems to be to fund the entire court system's electronic infrastructure out of PACER fees, not only PACER itself. As a result, the service itself generates more than $100m annual surplus.

So, umm... who's the idiot(s) here?

It's you, hillbilly.

Cutting up Texas doesn't really resolve most of the political issues, though. There isn't a huge regional difference in attitudes, but more of an urban/suburban/rural split. The big Texas cities (Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas) are all center-left to varying degrees, while the suburbs are center-right, and the rural areas are hard-right.

I'm not sure it was due to political orientation so much as the more basic "There's more people in these here hills, and we ought to have representatives for them to talk to less than a week away by horse."

That isn't to say your premise is invalid -- those people's interests are going unrepresented and splitting them off may better address those needs. But to be honest, New York and California both need to be punched in the face repeatedly by the feds, then bent over and hammered in the ass until they stop trying to force the rest of the country to acceed to their fucked up laws.

How about c) you're using a false dichotomy after already having your pants dropped over the use of circular logic. Don't double down on stupid -- there's more than two ways to approach the problem. Pop open your wallet. Flip over the dollar you got in there. What does it say on the back?

E Pluribus Unum.

That is not latin for "Roll over and play dead."

There's a simpler explanation than bribery: What's the average age of a US Senator? 57 years old. Average. Google to them is like space aged rocket science. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. A lot of the government's actions can be explained by simple senility -- these people aren't just out of touch with society, in many cases they're in a phase of life marked by significant decline in cognitive reasoning, and studies have been done suggesting that the elderly are far more trusting than they should be due to biochemical changes in the brain. Put another way: They're easily suckered.

This is an exceedingly obvious thing to have to point out, but it seems to be forgotten all the time by people who, were they to just divorce themselves from their own political views for a minute and contemplate the problem objectively, they'd realize that there is an organic element to the problem which far better explains the current circumstances than the radical ideas of conspiracies, bribery, and back room deals. I'm sure those happen, but they are far into the minority...

A split that puts Marin in a different state from SF doesn't make a lot of sense, considering how much commuting goes across the Golden Gate. The greater SF Bay Area should at least be in the same state.

There is a really small but similar sentiment in Illinois too. The people who live in rural Illinois feel like the people who live in Chicago and the suburban areas surrounding Chicago disproportionately affect Illinois politics. They feel that the state would be better without Chicago.

I can actually understand that sentiment. But the California equivalent would be Central Valley or far northern secessionists. Silicon Valley can't really make the same kind of argument, because it is already very influential in California politics. Of course, it shares that influence with Los Angeles rather than having it entirely to itself, but the Bay Area is one of the state's main political power bases.

Of course not. Then we'd both be wrong.

Circular logic works because circular logic works because...

Sigh. If only there were some historical document written, perhaps by the author I quoted that explained other remedies available to citizens... maybe then I wouldn't have to spoon feed the truth to people and they could infer from the quote the course of action needed. Or, I don't know, maybe just not falling asleep in civics class...

Replace "tech guru" with "cotton plantation owner" and suddenly it all makes sense.

Wrong. Thomas Jefferson, please excuse me waking you from your long nap, but I need an opinion. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Thank you Mr. Jefferson. You can now go lay down again. "Brrraaaaiiinnnss...." Yeah, I know. I miss 'em too, sir.