"Hide your wife, hide your kids, 'cause they're rapin' everybody up in here."

...and another star is born.

You mean, pay for it yourself? WTF?

it depends on how big your lot is. You're going to need enough land to construct a pretty large mirror array, and then you'll need a power tower to collect all that heat. If you can't get away with building a tall structure, you could use a parabolic trough. The main reason you wouldn't want this on a small scale is you can't shut it off. If the salt cools into a solid, you'd never get it flowing again.

For your safety, as well as the safety of your neighbors, I'd say it's best to leave that 800-degree (Celsius) salt out in the desert where it belongs.

I read this story ages ago. It won the first Hugo award for best novelette. "The Darfsteller" tells of a time when actors sell their likeness and are replaced by robots (apparently, Keanu Reeves did this early in his career).

George Lucas must've dusted off his copy of this story and said, "Hey, I can do this!"

implant that provides...stimulation. Battery operated? I hope they're rechargeable.

I just called my broker. This is one IPO I don't want to miss.

Since the "no way" vote is only getting 7%, we could send the other 93% of you on your way ("yes, round-trippers - there will [not] be a return trip" and "sorry, chickens, you voted YES, now get on the ship!"). Imagine what a tranquil place earth would be after that. Until we all died from unsanitary phone receivers...

Dear China,

You have a unique and valuable natural resource. You have been selling it at a deep discount so you could get a firm grasp on the balls of every modern nation on earth. Let's call that mission accomplished. You can now start raising the price, and using the increased profits to clean up your country before you kill off the very resource that has created all this wealth. Sure, some bottom-feeders will go elsewhere, but those who stick with you will pay more, and allow you to actually improve your country.

Don't do it all at once - just practice boiling a frog by slowly warming the water. A small increase every quarter will do. However, don't let me catch you pocketing the profits. If you don't start buying scrubbers for your smokestacks, and water treatment plants, I might have to come down and smite your ass.

With Love

God, Buddha, or whatever higher power is in style this week

How is this smoother?

If I can run Win7 (or another current OS of my company's choosing), I get the new browser on my system. This allows the folks who wrote the browser-based app to update it so it runs natively on my new platform. For those apps that aren't migrated, I can run XP in a VM and access it through IE6.

If all the workstations are running XP, what incentive is there to update that app? If they update the app, then migrate all the desktops, what happens when something goes wrong? Using the old OS in a VM is a great way to ease into a migration.

I keep XP on a VM on my personal system for those times when I need to run an app that doesn't work on my current OS. I don't think I've used it in a couple of weeks, but it's nice to know it's there (along with a Vista VM - for laughs, and even a couple of OS/2 VMs).

...for some other browser maker to work with these companies to create a compatibility module that would let them use a NEW browser with their old applications. If Mozilla wasn't so busy on Firefox 4.0, they could probably get something coded up to help these companies put IE6 where it belongs (trash bin).

Has anyone from these companies tried running XP in a VM to maintain compatibility, while giving them an avenue to load a new OS, and start rolling out new applications? It would seem like the smoothest way to get over this problem.

Once the power was cut, the missiles were supposed to interpret that as an attack, and carry out their last orders (launch toward Russia, North Korea, and David Hasselhof). So why aren't we sitting in a post-apocalyptic wasteland right now? I want an inquiry started immediately!

You looked at the article, but did you watch the video?

The video includes several images of cars, showing suspicious cargo. No pictures of a scanned house, however.

I think I already covered this, but it's an important economic lessen, so I'll say it again.

It's called competition. If you try to raise your prices just to make more profit, your competitor is free to undercut you, and your customers become their customers. If the government taxes your industry, both you and your competition get hit, and not wanting to lose money, you both raise your prices. It's called market equilibrium.

Great post, but I'll take a stab at a rebuttal anyway...

The FairTax can claim (and rightly so) that it is progressive because of the prebate. Each family gets a check from the government monthly that pays for the tax on necessities. Why do that? To keep the tax SIMPLE. If we try to untax milk, bread & other "necessities," we open the floodgates for lobbyists and manipulators. It's much easier to tax EVERYTHING, and give you back what you pay on necessities. For a family of 4, that would be about $525 per month. A family of 4 making $50K per year could live in the U.S. and pay NO tax (just keep your retail purchases of new goods/services below $2300/month, and your tax burden is 0). Compare this to our current system. A head of household (family of 4) with an income of $50K pays ~$3600 in FICA/Medicare, plus the employer pays another ~$3600 for that employee. Even if that wage earner gets a refund of all income tax, he starts with ~$44.4K, even though nearly ~$54K was set aside for his income.Compare that to someone making a million per year - the FICA/medicare tax would be around $20K....in % terms, way less than our $50K/year worker.

By the way, your use of the term "billionaire" seems to refer to someone with an annual income of over $1B, not someone with a net worth of $1B. Steve Jobs may have enormous net worth, but his paycheck shows his wages as $1/year (not including stock options).

For most people, taxes aren't negotiable. You can't decide to not pay taxes (even though Harry Reid says taxes are voluntary). Under the FairTax, average citizens would have a choice. Don't want to pay tax? Buy a used car instead of a new one. Save your money instead of spending it. It would be a very different attitude amongst consumers.

What does the FairTax want to accomplish with taxes?

• Income for the Federal Government
• Transparency of taxes, so those paying the tax see how much
• streamlining the taxation process (no invasive 1040 forms, corporate tax, payroll tax, expensive compliance).
• freeing the poor from taxation
• Taxing those who currently don't report income (unregistered aliens, drug dealers, etc)
• making the federal government PART of the economy (if they want more income, they'll have to entice us to spend more of ours, which we'll only do if we are happy!)

Let me fix that for you.

There, that's better.