Even the IRS agrees it's regressive (http://apps.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/student/whys_thm03_les02.jsp) - ie. it takes a larger percentage of income from lower income people.

>> 12) Rand Paul supports the flat tax.
> Is there ANYONE other than congressmen and their cronies who don't support this?

I'm not sure what echo chamber you're living in, but a lot of people don't support a flat tax. It sounds good to people who don't think about it, but is actually very regressive.

"proven reserves", especially for fracking, are often not what they seem (and not what most people would consider "proven" to mean). The 96% drop in the recoverable rate for the Monterey shale is a prime example.
The industry has a large incentive to inflate the numbers. So far I've not seen any independent calculations that contradict the rapid-decline rate.
I guess we'll find out what reality says over the next few years.

Err. No.
Fracked gas wells have a very rapid decline rate. You have to constantly drill new wells just to keep up, and those get increasingly marginal.
Current gas prices are too low to pay for the extraction - which is why the push for LNG export, because the world prices are currently high enough. It's not about there being a large supply.
I'd give it five years, maybe ten.
So maybe the life of a new car. Almost certainly not your lifespan, let alone your kids.

For those not following the link, that's four people on roughly 1/10th acre.
It's very intensive and they sell part of their produce to bring in grains, pay taxes, etc.
It's a full time job in a favorable climate (they can grow continuously most of the year, unlike much of the world), but if you can do it on that small a property, scaling up to take over adjacent properties could support people.
You just have even more die-off as people learn how.

Actually a large part of England's deforestation was pre-industrialization - for ship building. One of the largest fleets in the world takes a lot of slow growing hardwood.

There's actually increasing evidence that there are more females on the autistic spectrum than thought, because the diagnosis tests (and those performing them) are biased towards the way males present. (Along with a number of other things, including depression and heart attacks)

(anecdote not data) It's been colder here in PA than it was at a friend's place in central Alberta - so yes.

I run on both windows and linux and haven't had any problems under windows (and with the save-tags-in-metadata feature not using the same db is not a problem).