I live in Hawaii, at 21Â 18' north, so we don't really GET four seasons, only two. Fall only counts for football and retail...

What I CAN do is do one task then jump to another task while I wait for review/inputs for task 1, and so on, and fit trips to slashdot and reading email and websurfing in the gaps too. All done one at a time, with my full attention on that task at that time.

I recommended people mark their packages with something like "Danger- Live Fish"...

While I am completely against this as a bad precedent for internet freedom, I am also completely in favor of sending Zuckerberg to Pakistan for possible beheading. Hmmm... bad precedent, beheading... this ones tough to call.

A case-in-point on this is the new "Making Work Pay" tax credit."

Why do we need Tax Credits based entirely on income? Well, its not based entirely on income. People with anuity/pension income do not recieve this credit.

The game is revealed. Rather than hit retired people with a new tax aimed directly at them, they instead give a credit to everyone else but them.

Tax credits should not even exist. They are wholly dishonest/disingenuous.

I just finished my first US tax return since buying a house. The biggest hassle for me was the itemized deductions. I spent far too long tracking down receipts etc so that we could claim it. Before moving here five years ago I lived in New Zealand. The equivalent tax to Federal/State taxes is a graduated pay as you earn (PAYE) system that is simply a percentage of your income. There are a few deductions for childcare, donations etc, but as far as I know most people don't even file an IR3 (Individual tax return). The IRD (Inland Revenue Department) sends a statement once a year, if you agree you do nothing, if you want to claim deductions you add them in and send it back. I'm sure it's more complicated for the self employed and those with a lot of investment income. The key point is that there is only a limited number of deductions and that your employer automatically reports your income (no W2's!). Items like student loan interest are automatically handled by the IRD because student loans are managed by the IRD.

Did you go to public school? Do you have public drinking water? Do you use electricity? Do you call the cops if your house is robbed? Do you use a public road? Do you eat meat out of a grocery store? If the answers to any of these is yes then shut up and pay your taxes. Your argument makes no sense.

Why do you only ask "what makes us think we can hear them?"

Part of the point of the Fermi Paradox is that the galaxy should be filled with evidence of interstellar civilizations. A civilization sending out Von Neumann pobes could "exhaustedly explore a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Alien_constructs

There should be wave after wave of civilizations expanding into the galaxy, each leaving behind self-replicating probes, interstellar networks, and the heat signatures of their civilization. It would be hard not to notice them. Yet there is only the Great Silence.

If they converted a small percentage of their Von Neumann probes to Bracewell probes, which actively seek communication with other civilizations, we should have seen those by now. While radio may be a primitive form of communication for these civilizations, it is by far the easiest and cheapest method. To think that they would neglect radio and only use something like neutrinos or gravity waves is silly.

If we're not the only technological civilization in the galaxy then the only rationale is that they are avoiding us, perhaps for our own good. Still, I think we'd be able to spot a Kardashev Type II civilization from a long ways off, and a Type III might be impossible to miss from anywhere in the galaxy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Robots?

Obviously, you've never dealt with their unions. The expenses for hookers and blackjack quickly gets out of hand.

I'm assuming that was a serious question.

It was, as I stated in my post there is more than one scientific theory about the universe and it's future.

The explanation is too long for a post on slashdot, but I highly recommend you watch 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss for an explanation of why the universe will end with a whimper.

Here's one, by the same person you cited, Lawrence M Krauss. The End of Cosmology?. And a video of it. Now it's not playing in my browser so I don't know if it's the same video as the one you link to however it's subtitle is "An accelerating universe wipes out traces of its own origins". Now that does sound like a whimper. Oh, yea at more than an hour the video you link to is too long.

Falcon

Motion is a strong cue for 3D. Furthermore, stereo vision doesn't really work beyond a few yards anyway.

The real problem with these kinds of setups (and why you don't see them more) is that they only work for one person at a time.

You are an idiot. Taxation is no more theft than paying your cable bill. You're a citizen, you benefit from clean water, not getting blown up terrorists, the internet and a crap load of other things the government either pays for directly or has subsidized for development. Unless you like brown water and having the rent cops and firemen, stop whining. Please get over your Ayn Rand fantasy -- even Jesus told his disciples to pay their taxes. Roads provide voluntarily? By who? Whose gonna pay for the asphalt, upkeep or to make some knuckle head doesn't cause a 10 car pile-up because he's doing 110 at rush hour? And seeing as UNIX and ARPNET were both military (read government) creations, Slashdot wouldn't have existed with US taxpayers money.

I live in Russia now and I lived in the USSR for long enough of my childhood to remember how things were. I hope this satisfies your curiosity. I know that the idea of building anything resembling Marx's communism died with Lenin and Trotsky but that was not the point of my post. I was commenting on the silliness of the 'good' sharing and 'bad, commercial' sharing. You know from my experience workers in the USSR free from commercial exploitation did not go on to create a variety of amazing things, most just took the situation as a chance to seat around idly most of the work day. Anything consumer, more complicated than a loaf of bread was sold broken right at the store, was not uncommon at all to come to the store and find every TV set in stock to be non-functional, then buy it anyways and then spend weeks or months procuring electronic components to fix it yourself. Sound a lot like Free Software, doesn't it? IMHO Free Software has run out of steam, beyond several high profile projects (that land actual paying jobs or fame) Free Software just does not provide enough motivation for people both to do interesting tasks (If I am good at something that is interesting to me, I'd rather do it at a place that pays me money for it) and for mundane tasks (who wants to do testing and good support with actual ETAs for free?).

Russian General: They can't launch their missiles. They signed the agreement!

Seriously though, IMHO this move is to make the Russians feel comfortable with the US and ease their feelings about a missile shield, etc. As crazy as it sounds Russia really does think the US could strike first and try to take out it's old foe. It's not crazy to the people in charge. They feel a bit weak and are trying to make a come back in strength. You can see this with increased force strength, updating weapons, and the military probing of it's enemies cold-war style by flying bombers into places they shouldn't really be, unless they want to send a message. That message is - we're a strong Russia and we're still here.

The second benefit of this is to simply ease proliferation. The idea that we'll be at our knees if we cut our nuclear forces is incorrect. Our conventional forces might get bogged down playing policeman in the desert. But total war? You better buy your coffins in bulk because war is all the US is good at. If the battle goes asymmetrical, we have plenty of capabilities that area now, from fighting wars since the 50s.

So eliminating the nuclear weapons now, while they are still under control, is a good thing. Imagine a collapsed US due to some disaster. Those nukes would then be up for grabs. Just like when the USSR collapsed. Never a good thing.

Besides, do you really think that is the ace up their sleeve these days? I can't imagine what insane weapons they have stashed away awaiting Armageddon

I work for an extended warranty company

How do you sleep at night?