The DOJ criminal division hasn't done a thing to prosecute any of the heads of Wall Street firms that have destroyed the lives of millions by engaging in fraud but is willing to destroy the life of a promising young men for a victimless crime.

See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

Thankfully, Lanny Breuer resigned after this documentary came out but it seems like the DOJ is rotten to the core. Eric Holder needs to go next. Obama should get someone in there to clean out the stables.

You are focused too much on the absolute value of the dollars. The moral justification is that beyond a certain number those millions of dollars have less value than your $50,000. In other words basic necessities take up a far larger percentage of your income than Romney's. The additional tax revenue from people like Romney helps pay for the social costs of company's like his that force other companies to pay their workers substandard wages and benefits and thus turn to the government for help in order to increase profit margins to give people like Romney even more money. Do you see how this cycle works? If companies paid their employees a more reasonable wage, a so-called living wage, I could see the case for lowering taxes.

As for the rest of your post, competing on taxes is a downward spiral that leaves governments unable to take care of their people in order to export wealth out of the country. A certain amount of tax competition help keep things lean but it's better to compete on things like education and infrastructure that hard to replicate. The reason tax competition is so popular is that it just takes some paper shuffling rather than real investments in a country's future.

governor's race now. If she had any hope of running for governor, as many claim that she does, this kind of PR should put an end to it. Bullying a 26 y/o until he commits suicide isn't going to play well even if the average person doesn't understand the case. And if what has been said so far about the case (i.e. ambitious prosecutor trying to make a name for herself over-zealously pursues disproportionate punishment for a victimless crime when she probably doesn't even understand how a network operates or what JSTOR is), then she is even more screwed. It's a small consolation but at least it's something.

it's a hybrid OS that makes enough compromises on both sides to make both mediocre.

reinforcing. People take every fact that it is consistent with their view and add it to their collection. They ignore the ones that are not consistent. People do it all the time to preserve their sense of identity. There need be no other motive (economic or otherwise). Karl Popper ridicules this kind of thinking in scientists. If scientists do it, it must be far more common for the rest of us to do it.

they had an OS that would work with a touchscreen on a laptop. OS X isn't really a touch OS. As OS X and iOS merge look for the story to change to: "We've cracked the interface problem with touchscreen laptops! Now go buy our latest laptops with touchscreens!" I am not knocking Apple but that's the historical pattern.

That's actually the best advice I've read on this topic. Nice.

Believe it or not there are thousands of people we'd call prodigies... and not many of them ever become geniuses. And conversely not every genius is a prodigy. As the article says it's a combination of determination and above average intellect. Obviously that doesn't have the sizzle and flash of a Good Will Hunting but seems to be accurate. I think the article is a little over the top in emphasizing the eccentric aspects though. Everyone wants to ascribe a little madness to genius but I think it's more a matter of communication being difficult due to a vast gap between the way they see the world and the way everyone else does. The real geniuses are able to bridge that gap.

It's really unlikely that we'd find artifacts of our own simulations in our simulated universe since the simulators likely would have encountered the same artifacts and accounted for them in our simulated universe. Far more likely is that the fundamental constants of our universe are likely an artifact of their simulations.

You assume I was talking to you. I suggest you follow your own advice.

LMAO

provides little details on how it was done. I suspect an incremental but important improvement being hyped as revolutionary.

kernel. Linux could be running by default on every Mac sold over the last decade.

I hope not but it seems like every time someone becomes a poster boy for something it turns out to be a fraud.

It's not like the oil just "goes away". It gets transformed into other materials. Are those hazardous? Is the Gulf now a giant cesspool of bacterial waste?