Absolutely backwards, the "marriage penalty" is a carefully crafted lie. The fact is, a childless married couple pays less than a widow with a child who earns the same amount of money. Yeah, if all three of those adults earn the same amount of money the married couple will pay almost twice as much in taxes, but that's because they're earning twice as much.

I guess YMMV in other parts of the world, but in the US singles are taxed at a higher rate.

We'll probably end up with situations where investigators ask, "Is that life, or just an obscenely complex self-maintaining chemical process?"

Life IS just an obscenely complex self-maintaining chemical process. It isn't like bacteria are sentient.

I wouldn't really call that a fake advertisement. It sure is an actual advertisement for Audi. It didn't come from Audi, though.

It was way back when slashdot was new and much of the internet was powered by hobbyist equipment.

I'm really pulling for the soylent guys and hope my lack of faith is misplaced.

Apparently almost anything except an iPhone. I've only broken a single screen, and that was a cheap throwaway phone I slipped in the ice and fell on. But my daughter's an iPhone user and breaks all of them. I've seen other iPhones with cracked screens, but no other brands..

I suspect Apple uses thinner glass to make the whole phone thinner. I know of no other phone so delicate.

Unions didn't kill themselves by asking for too much money, corporations killed the unions by buying "right to work" legislation in many states, then moving there. And there's no way any American can compete with someone who can get by on two dollars a day, so the "American" companies shipped jobs where pay was nothing and regulations were nonexistent (leading to poisoned baby formula, China's horrendous pollution, etc). Union labor? Minimum wage can't compete with China when it comes to cheap labor.

Yet another reason for me to like mine better. Dial in the temperature you want and that's the temperature you get, summer or winter. In the summer mine starts kicking out cold air quickly (takes a minute to cool the pipes).

UID.

Wow, where did you get all that misinformation?

Over population is the cause of most of our current misery

No. Most of our current misery is caused by greed and selfishness. There is enough food and other resources for everyone, except that less than one percent of humans have 99% of the Earth's resources.

The need to feed the mutitudes [sic] has reduced our oceans to near death.

Agriculture isn't killing the oceans, energy companies and chemical (mostly plastics) companies are. Farmers hate runoff, it's money they spent that was wasted. They don't wantonly dump stuff, and our lands are NOT exhausted... where did you pick this bullshit up at, your local astrologer?

You and the guy you responded to are victims of your own culture. We are the weirdest people in the world. This ape-like chest thumping needs to evolve out of our species, along with selfishness and greed. And the thing is, it isn't genetics that need to evolve, it's our sick culture.

Birth rates are declining in the developed world. When you're in a place where half of all children die from disease, people have a lot more kids.

As to resources, I guess you haven't heard the news that there are plans to mine the moon and asteroids. Now that we've reached space, there really ARE unlimited resources.

In the fifteenth century, yeah. Not today. Lack of a dick does not make you a woman and the presence of one does not make you a man. As yet we cannot change a person's gender, only their appearance. Whether you're a man or a woman depends on whether or not you have a Y chromosome.

That said, there are a very few folks with some strange DNA; two Ys, Two Y's and an X, three Xes, etc. However, these folks have far worse problems than gender identity.

Are you three guys here or on strike this week?

There are a lot more than three, someone started building an alternate slashdot, which was immediately slashdotted. I was one of the protesters, have changed my mind; as long as classic is here, I'm here. Why I'm not joining the slashcott.

I am keeping an eye on the alternate site, because Dice seems to want to attract the kind of people I hate reading comments from -- barely literate luddites who hate science and can't tell their from there from they're or lose from loose. I'm already starting to get sick of reading comments in a NASA thread about how that tax money is all wasted, about how climate change is a hoax to make scientists rich, and the awfully offensive "Pshaw, first world problems."

However, even if I stop reading comments in front page stories I'll still be reading and writing journals. Oddly, lately that's where you find the best comments, in user journals.

Man, I don't think I was aware of that. So now I have to add Linksys to my list of brands to never purchase? This is getting too confusing.

What's the matter, kid, did your grandpa molest you or something?

Entitlement? I'm certainly entitled to what I pay for. As to selfish, I see that more in the kids. We did NOT grow up in unprecedented prosperity you ignorant twat, the fifties when we were kids and seventies when we were young adults were both recession periods, and the seventies were inflationary DURING a recession.

Selfish? Sorry, kid, that's YOUR cocaine-addled generation, not mine. Also, methinks you're confusing social classes with ages.

Our generation was thrown into a useless war in southeast Asia by the "Greatest Generation" who ran things back then. If not for my generation, Bush would have drafted you kids to die in Afghanistan and Iraq.

My generation fought against the Vietnam war and won, fought against pollution and got the Clean Air and water acts passed... my generation's protests were all effective. How's your "occupy" movement coming?

My generation brought you PCs and cell phones and file sharing. Meanwhile, yours killed the unions.

Fuck off, you nasty little twit.