A surplus situation will never happen with a government growing at 7 percent a year. You can't tax enough revenue out of an economy growing at 1 percent a year to sate the fed monstrosity.

If i recall correctly, the 'tax cuts' were actually 'not increase tax rates to some previous level' which should not cause stimulus but would avoid crushing a slow economy.

Accounting for "taxes not collected" as "spending" is a sickness.

I agree there was a bump from the stimulus but every other policy enacted was in opposition causing uncertainty, fear of hiring (and impending costs) so it mostly ends up being more debt.

Maybe that could be the Dems campaign slogan for 2012. Good luck with that.

Okay, you dislike corporations. I understand. With all their wealth, sometimes the people at the top manage to skate out of responsibility for accidents or malicious behavior. Now imagine a corporation so large and invasive that the only way to escape it is to flee your home country, it can change the very laws at a whim, has agents in every state that can imprison you or forcibly confiscate your property and even has a standing army. That "corporation" is the United States Government. Money is power. Fuck no I don't want to give them any more.

I am adept at sums and governments have killed a lot more people than corporations. It's an orders of magnitude kind of situation.

According to the government office of acceptable thoughts and sayings.

Are you claiming the average American doesn't know what a slug is? ;)

I have enjoyed working in both systems and personally, my only problem with switching to the metric system is that some of the units aren't as friendly to the world we actually live in as in the Imperial system. The foot is a damn nice unit of measure and there isn't a nice analogue in the SI because of that power of 10 thing; you jump straight from the useful centimeter straight up to the meter. It's also a petty gripe but I hate to lose some of the interesting unit names like Slug, Pound, Ton, Inch, Foot, Mile, Stone(!). Joules and Newtons sound pretty sweet though.

Direct2D is for Vista and Win7 only. Which begs the question: what the hell was GDI for?

Would someone like to disabuse them of the belief that you can hand locked content and content keys to the consumers without giving them the unlocked content? (My reverse engineering of flash apps just isn't up to snuff). Then there would only be legitimate technical considerations like injecting advertising streams and site controlled caching before moving away from flash.

Holy fuck, you think that electing a massive douchebag who campaigned with the slogan "I drive a truck!" is people waking from their slumber?

Holy fuck, you think "I drive a truck!" was the centerpiece of Brown's campaign and not just giddy disbelief at the fact that his opponents thought that pointing out that he drove a truck might disqualify him from the "governing class"?

Apple keeps using that phrase. I do not think it means what they think it means.

Welfare is a really tiny portion of our total expenses.

Let me demonstrate how wrong you are. A reasonable definition of Welfare is the government giving you money that you did not earn to ensure you fare well in life. Social Security had an unfunded obligation of $13.6 trillion in 2008. That is the shortfall between how much Social Security has agreed to pay people and how much money they have on hand plus are planning to take in from taxes. That means that without economy crushing increases in payroll taxes Social Security plans to give people $13.6 trillion more than people pay in to ensure their welfare. The US gov is going to have to pick up that tab otherwise people won't be getting "their" retirement. That makes a large chunk of Social Security meet my reasonable definition of Welfare. And that leaves aside the subtle wealth transfer (Welfare) inherent in SS due to pay-out not being proportional to pay-in. While that 13.6 trillion is over many years I have no doubt that the yearly Social Security Welfare is quite a large number. No wonder Social Security is kept "off budget". It makes sure defense is that scary big chunk of the budget pie.

While Social Security is a behemoth, it is just one program I decided to pick on. Any government program that helps select people by giving them something they did not earn is in essence Welfare.

In the case of high-res monitors the web browser should virtualize the pixels and treat them the way units like inches and em's are until the web specs realize the futility of using pixel offsets (maybe they already have?) to do layouts across the range of devices web pages are to be viewed on. It might work to redefine 1px to be a whole number of pixels closest to 1/96th or 1/72nd of an inch on the output device. Then sites that use px for layout and font sizes would still align in most cases but would scale up for hi res monitors.

Now that I think about it, I'm fairly sure Firefox must virtualize the px value to do it's entire web page zooming thing. I don't think Firefox is picking up and using the system dpi value to change the default px value and font size "un-zoomed" though, which would be nice.

If you choose a dpi setting that a "reasonable" multiple of the windows system standard 96 dpi the icon scaling is "acceptable". For instance, windows suggests 120 dpi as a next step up which is 1.25 * 96 dpi. I would try 1.5 * 96 or 2.0 * 96 for a very hi res monitor and the guys with the coke bottle glasses because things definitely look better with a font drawn larger at the screens native resolution.