If Holder knew about Breuer's decision not to prosecute any bankers -- he did -- then he should fired for that alone. Unfortunately, Holder is in his position precisely because he did know this, and because he will uphold the law in as dysfunctional a manner as the administration desires.

Sometimes I think the only reason they are getting away with this is because Obama is the President and liberals and progressives are unwilling to challenge him, and conservatives are secretly cheering the whole thing on. But secretly, deep down, I understand that this is all just fallout from September 11th 2001, and that the United States of America will never be able to go back to the way it was.

Which is a big problem for the rest of us.

It really is blackmail. This is a threat with menances in order to get someone to comply with the sender, and it is not a reasonable way of enforcing the request. If they simply send out the letters, while questionable in other ways it is not blackmail. These threats however are genuine straight up blackmail. I'm not sure whether this is criminal or civil offence in the US, but in the UK you'd be in a lot of trouble for this.

So in both absolute terms and per-capita terms, the richest 10% pay the most tax.

Since you seem to have all the figures, what's their effective tax rate then?

The top earners are also the most mobile and "international" members of society, so the unfortunate conclusion is that countries have to retain those top earners, and one way they do that is to give them a fabvourable tax position. While they pay lip-service to stopping evasion, most countries would prefer to have the richest paying some tax rather than losing them and getting no tax at all.

Why bother. These people are giant hoovers-up of wealth. Their mentality, greed, and influence on politics destroys societies. Most societies would reap the benefits of these people leaving in droves.

Slashdot: Where no energy source can be allowed to pass unmolested.

What exactly is the non-racist explanation for that lack of proportionality?

The BB gun kid was excercising his American right to hold arms; The science student was engaged in an act of Godless, materialist alchemy.

The UK has not made any friends by passing this law.

Well, the media companies are delighted with it.

We are Reagans children!! We are the Masters of the Universe!!

Uncle Reagan promised us money! Why is the Government getting in our way!??! This Dysfunctional world is our God given Birthright!!

Looking back over your career throught most of the 20th centruy and into the 21st, have you ever observed certain knowladge, techniques or disiplines fade away over time?

Are there ways of doing or thinking about physics and mathematics which were prevalent in the past, but which are no longer common knowladge? How do you compare the abilities and backgrounds of modern professors and graduates to those of the past?

Running a business is a skill entirely different from engineering.

Indeed. But do you extend that to the point where the majority of the board members of the world's largest computer software company cannot actually read, write or understand software?

If I was offered a board position in a company called MicroSoft, "Microprocesser Software", and I didn't know anything about software, I would decline the position on the principal that I was unqualified to represent the shareholder's interests. At least I would; I'm not naive enough to believe that such concerns apply in contemporary boardrooms.

Forget Sinofsky. He was one guy and W8 has been coming down the tracks for what, four years now?

The blame here lies with Microsoft board of Directors. Windows 8 wasn't some backroom project, hardware spinoff, or specialised division. It was the company's flagship product, its core product, whose success literally makes or brakes the company.

And the board has fubbed it; Bigtime. The whole project was a disaster since its inception, and despite the recession it's very clear that the entire iDink paradigm Windows 8 attempted to hoist on users is so bad, so awful, that ordinary users are literally giving on on buying PCs full stop. A competent board would have been on top of this, foreseen the problems, and had them resolved before launch. We are now 8 months into launch and Windows 8 is a beached whale leading the whole PC industry pod onshore in its wake.

The first thing that needed to turn this around -- before any resigns, Service Packs, interface revamps, or marketing campaigns -- the very first things is that a swathe of the board needs to go. There's a cohort of bankers and industrialist there who probably have no idea how to run their own industries, let alone a computer software company. If my experience with Ireland is any indication, I imagine these directors are serial board hoppers anyway, so they won't be missed.

Microsoft is a software company. It needs software people on the board. Engineers, programmers, computer scientists, etc; with management experience, but who actually know what software actually is, and how it is developed, sold, and used. If MS puts qualified people in charge they can begin to turn the boat around; but they stick with the current shower of corporate BSers at the helm, this whale will stay dying on the beach for a very long time.

Banks.

Thanks for the detail - interesting.

Anti-Trust is a joke in this country, and a sad one at that.
Actually, I should say Anti-Trust was a joke back when we had it.
Now we have Too Big To Fail.

With the incentives in place now, we are well on our way to having One Big Company, invulnerable to laws it doesn't bother to follow even though it wrote them all, and paid for all the votes.

"A bit of a Palestinian"??

Seriously, Anonymous Coward, that doesn't help clarify things at all. It's going to mean vastly different things to different people. Personally I find your analogy's implications offensive, but I won't go into detail because that would be following that distracting path further out into the woods.

Second, you have a typo missing a pretty important word - it should be "Linus does NOT want to do this in ideological grounds".

Also it's not so simple as it being an ideological objection. Linus argues that a major kernel addition that only runs binaries specifically and individually approved by a commercial entity with a history of actively trying to destroy linux, is perhaps a bad idea. He even uses the phrase "requires a lot more thought". Sure, later on he gets more angry and forceful in his arguments, but I agree with his decision here.

Trust and past behavior matter in human and corporate behavior - especially in the installation of a new system to manage trust at the very lowest core level of the operating system. Microsoft is has not proven to be, in my experience, technically competent or worthy of trust.

Yeah but there's no reliable search engine for reliable people who can do the work from the other side of the planet, and there tend to be issues involved with international hires, including paperwork, time differences, and language/accent interpretations.

Besides what has an office got that isn't available on the other side of the planet too? They do have offices there.