The rich don't pay 35% of their income as taxes. That's the highest Federal marginal tax rate on ordinary income (e.g., salaries). For 2009, that rate applied to each dollar of ordinary income earned in excess of $372,951 for the year. The thing is that the truly rich avoid this 35% on most of their income by receiving most of their income as long term capital gains, which are taxed at 15%.

What you want to compare is effective tax rates, which is the true percentage of income paid as tax after all the math is done. Over the past few years, the 400 highest-income Americans have had an effective federal income tax rate of about 17-18%. For comparison, I make low six figures, and my effective tax rate is about 21%.

Well, let's tackle the first piece of this: trolls have in the past created "mod farms" by creating a few hundred accounts to collect mod points and software to manage all of these accounts and easily use them for posting and modding. I know this because some guys I knew on IRC built one back in 2003 or so. Their modus operandi was primarily trolling; they'd post outrageous stuff looking to provoke posters into unhinged responses, use the mod farm to mod themselves up so that their comments were among the most prominent, and downmod folks who figured out that they were trolling.

So no, it wouldn't be a Vast Right Wing conspiracy; it would be a handful of guys with programming skills who built it for the lulz, but at least one of which also happens to be teabagger who just wants one side of the argument to "win."

So the real question is: if there is such a thing out there, active, how could we detect it? GP claims to have detected it by observing a pattern where an inordinate number of mod points were used to moderate comments ideologically. Well, then the question becomes whether there were really 300 mod points used that way (can we replicate GP's claimed observation?), and whether this is really inordinate, or just usual mod behavior on Slashdot.

The one I'm describing back in the day was detected because one of the dumber users decided to get into a modding match with the site admins. The admins have unlimited mod points, so apparently if you keep upmodding to 5 comments that they modded to -1 they will get suspicious, look at who's modding and what IP address they come from, and figure out what the game is.

The problem is that for the professional market, the "temporary downgrade" strategy, if it can be pulled off at all, can only be done so when the vendor offers visibility into the roadmap and continues to support the older, fuller-featured version while the new one catches up.

And Apple are pretty bad at this, not just with FCP, but also with Aperture, which I've experience first-hand. Want to know when Apple is planning to add support to Aperture for a new camera that was just released? Good luck; it could be next month, or it could be more than a year, and no indication from Apple on which is more likely. In the meantime, Adobe will have at least limited support within a month, with an explanation of the roadmap to full support.

Um, because they perceive that spending those resources on something else will have a higher return?

No. The conspiracy to make Barack Obama the first non-citizen President of the USA started around the time of his birth, in the early 60s. The Bushes only started the 9/11 conspiracy in 1990. Get your facts straight, you dumbass...

This response begs the question. The claim that "there is no difference between micro and macro evolution" is equivalent to the claim that all biological diversity is the result of natural selection from a common ancestor. And guess what, that's precisely what GP is questioning: the claim that, for all putative ancestors A and descendants B, natural selection could realistically turn A's into B's in the time scale claimed. Pointing out examples of "observed speciation events" helps, but not as much as you make it out, because (a) you're defining "species" in a funny way the creationist doesn't have to accept, (b) you're trying to defend a universally quantified statement ("for all x, P(x)") by pointing out individual instances where it's true, while it just takes one counterexample to refute it, and the creationist will find an example you can't respond to.

Evolutionary theory has weaknesses; there is the difficulty of demonstrating that there is some sequence of small, viable, inheritable mutations that can, over hundreds of millions of years, slowly turn fish into elephants. And then there's the impossibility of doing that over and over for all of life on Earth. This means it's easy to cast doubt on the whole edifice; there will always be cases where somebody can raise the question whether natural selection really could've done what it's been claimed to do, and some of those cases will turn out to have been wrong.

We teach this stuff in schools not because it's bulletproof and perfect; we do it because it's scientific, which creationism isn't.

What's not OK, however, is logically invalid responses to creationist claims, like you have done by assuming the conclusion. If you try to pull that off with a smart creationist (and yes, they exist), you're gonna get ripped apart. The correct answer to objections like GP is to point at the large body work that's constantly being done exploring intermediate stages for big evolutionary changes, both works that attempt to explain how they can be useful (the serious answers to the question of what good is "half a wing") as well as the slow but gradual growth of fossil specimens and how the fossil gap is actually decreasing over time. Then there's the responses that simply amount to recognizing that some of the auxiliary sciences are still very weak (e.g., fossils tell us phenotypes, fossil DNA tells us genotypes, but we still don't have a detailed enough science of gene expression to fill a lot of the gaps).

Well, duh. I'm not a Muslim, and I know that much. The Koran has a lot of passages about fighting wars with enemies of Islam, who were a combination of pagans, Christians and Jews. However, it also has passages about treating Christians and Jews fairly and allowing them practice their religions, and passages stating that they can achieve salvation (or whatever the Islamic equivalent, not sure here). And more generally, it has passages about not picking fights with people who don't pick fights with you.

So, well, the straightforward conclusion here is that the Koran says a lot of different things about the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, and that the context in which each of those things is said needs to be weighed to see which of them best match any given situation. As, well, every single damn book ever written to guide human behavior.

PS: Muslims do not generally consider Christians and Jews to be "infidels." Rather, they consider them to be people who believe in the same god as Muslims, received the same teachings that Mohammed did, but then lost or distorted them. You will of course find plenty of counterexamples to this rule—"Christian = infidel" is an Islamist terrorist theme—but it's by no means a majority opinion. So I'm not interested in responses that document Muslims who have labeled Christians as "infidels"—I know they exist, and I know it's a minority opinion.

PPS: The fact the the Koran periodically has nice things to say about non-Muslims doesn't mean that all Muslims in general will have a good opinion of Christians and Jews; I'm not interested in responses that document cases of Muslims saying bad things about non-Muslims, mistreating them or showing prejudices toward them. In fact, the Koran's nicer statements about non-Muslims often seem like attempts to correct early Muslims' pre-existing prejudices and ill will against them. Take, for example, the Koran's statement that the food of the Peoples of the Book (Christians and Jews) is OK for Muslims to eat. Why would such a rule need to be stated? Well, some early Muslims must have seen some forms of physical contact with Christians as taboo. Similar comments apply where it says that you should not fight or kill non-Muslims who haven't tried to do the same to you: "Don't kill Christians and Jews" must have been a teaching that needed to be taught in Mohammed's time as much as in ours. Religion exists in a harsh, often brutal world of people who adopt it more as a tribal identity than as a moral guide.

No, there are well-documented things that governments can do about this. For example, the government can enforce separation of the companies that provide the last-mile connection, the ones that connect that to the internet, and content providers. Because while the first one is a natural monopoly, the other two are not, yet right now the companies that own the last mile use it to stifle competition for ISP and content.

Quick googling finds what the Apple guidelines say about double-clicking: "Because not everyone is physically able to perform a double click, it should never be the only way to perform an action."

Apple have since day one insisted that everything in their computers be usable with single-button mice. Why? Because of user friendliness towards people who aren't comfortable with computers. This may seem quaint to you and me, but "Which of the two buttons do I click?" is a significant stumbling point for a lot of people. (And it wouldn't seem so quaint if you spent some time with disabled people with limited finger dexterity; some of them can operate a one button mouse, but not a two button mouse!)

So Apple's UI guidelines insist that every application must expose all of its functionality to users with one-button mice, and Apple's shipped one-button mice on their computers for nearly forever. In fact, you could say they've never switched to multi-button mice; they came up with what's effectively a "no button" mouse with software-configured behavior on a per-user basis, so that you and grandma can share the same mouse, but she doesn't have to be confused by multiple buttons just because you want it that way.

No, actually, just for the monitor; you get Ethernet through a USB adapter.

You're missing an additional 30% of subprime loans that were made by uncovered affiliates of CRA-covered institutions. So yes, about 80% of subprime loans had nothing to do with CRA. And it's also been documented that the subprime loans made by CRA-covered institutions were more affordable, had more conservative credit standards, and have performed better than the average subprime loans from this period.

Oh, there was plenty of deception going on. For example, clients being hooked up with subprime loans even when they were qualified for prime loans. And there are lies still going on—the Robo-signing scandal, with banks foreclosing on homes without proper documentation (which, BTW, they're still doing).

Well, the article isn't completely clear in this regard, but I think the author just didn't actually look for examples like those. So their absence in the article doesn't tell you anything about their frequency.

Well, I'm no longer at a serious risk of dying from a kidney infection. What do you think? And you know, it would've been nice if somebody figured this shit out and treated it when I was a child. It'd have been nice to grow up to have two fully functional kidneys.

You don't describe precisely what's the boy's condition, but hey, you're missing the point, which is that medical conditions that are minor at birth, if left unchecked, may compound over decades and threaten your life (or just outright kill you!) in adulthood. We are now increasingly able to detect, monitor and treat such issues early in life. This does lead to a lot of children receiving minor treatment for issues that wouldn't even be in the radar 30 years ago, but hey, better safe than sorry.

I'm going to quote from a reference page on what I had:

So, 0.06% of children born (presumably in the USA) show some evidence of antenatal kidney problems similar to what I had. In the end only about half of those in the end are diagnosed with the condition. Most of these are monitored periodically to make sure that complications aren't developing, and given conservative treatment, with an eye on whether the issue corrects itself—and it often does as the child grows.

All this shows is that today we can detect a lot more than we could 30 years ago, we can detect it earlier, and we can better keep an eye on it. Where's the bad?

Well, when I was 29, I had a major health incident. The first warning was a serious kidney infection. The doctors had sent me to get my kidney scanned in a few different ways (ultrasound, nuclear, CAT) and discovered that I had a "stricture in the ureteropelvic juncture": i.e., the junction between my left kidney and the tube that connects it to the bladder was deformed and narrowed, making it hard for liquid to drain from it. This stricture most likely was there before I was even born, and 29 years of living with that had caused my left kidney to become an infection-prone rock garden that was only about 25% as functional as the healthy right kidney. Thankfully with today's tech they didn't have to open me up to fix me; they stuck a tube into my kidney (without anesthesia!) and then shot it with lasers (with anesthesia during the lasers bit).

But guess what? Today they discover this sort of stuff prenatally, with routine ultrasound scans during pregnancy, and thus can treat it during childhood before it becomes as complicated as that.