The tax idea doesn't make sense. It's not likely to happen. Corn is already subsidized and used to sweeten soda.

The idea that discouraging people from drinking diet soda is going to stop them from binging on a box of chips ahoy or fig newtons is stupid. Does soda stimulate the appetite? The miniscule amount of caffeine would suppress the appetite, if anything, and the liquid in the stomach would make you full sooner. Is not drinking soda gonna stop people from eating twinkies or a bag of doritos? No.

Flat taxes put more burden on the lower classes. The majority of us can afford whatever stupid tax they decide to levy; I feel bad for the poor people who are already having a hard time scraping together enough for food, clothing, gas and rent. The rest of us will have to listen to their kids whining at the store because they can't have soda due to some stupid tax they can't afford.

Whether or not you can afford another tax, it's not going to happen and it wouldn't help with anything except raising tax revenue.

I work for a Fortune 500 company. We use MySQL with J2EE and Hibernate in a production environment. Postgres would be our fall-back option if MySQL ever stopped doing the trick for us, but it scales well to thousands of users.

MySQL can easily be configured for use as a production-quality database. We also use Oracle and DB2 on an i5 for certain purposes, but our biggest app (in terms of company scope and $$) employs MySQL in the back-end.

That's why :-P

Unless its virus defenses have been upgraded, I'll have a hard time recommending Windows 7 to the people getting new computers.

The US computer market is saturated right now; there are almost 0 "first time buyers". As a generalization, the only people who are getting their first computer are the elderly and a few middle-aged people. Even with virus protection, spyware protection, and a firewall, the last two people in my life who bought PCs needed a "quick restore" due to viruses or worms. This is unacceptable.

I use Linux, but it's not for everyone -- I understand this -- and many fixed-income customers don't want to shell out the extra money for a Mac -- or perhaps they feel the "cool" thing is not for them. The elderly I've talked to aren't sold on "trendy" things; they tend to think they're impractical.

"Home" version of Windows would be better off if their security were indeed targeted towards the general public. They could ship Windows 7 with no open ports, like the default Ubuntu install. They could rebuild IE with security in mind; it needs a complete overhaul. It seems like these two "improvements" would prevent many headaches. I remember plugging my Windows XP computer in at college; within 7 seconds, I had the sasser worm and skynet (or whatever it was called). There's no reason for that sort of worm infection to be prevalent nowadays.

Business versions could have services running with open ports... corporate security can deal with that. Home PC users shouldn't have to suffer the wrath of 1000 vulnerabilities just so system administrators can use home versions in a corporate setting.

I apologize for the unrealistic idealism.

We can test this scientifically. What happens when the Juggernaut (can't be stopped) charges into the Blob (can't be moved)?