Are all left-leaning people advocates of authoritarian communism? Are all right-leaning people advocates of fascism? Of course not, to suggest so would be just as ignorant as suggesting that "libertarians" are all advocates of anarchy. You are painting anyone you disagree with with an extremist brush, and this is why I facepalm every time a self-righteous prick shows how ignorant they are.

What are you trying to say here? Many countries in Europe do in fact have a hybrid public-private schooling system, most also have a hybrid public-private health care system, public utilities in Europe are among the most expensive on earth, and "the infrastructure business" is almost completely privatized (unless there are state-owned construction companies that no one has ever heard of...). Privatization doesn't mean what you think it means.

As opposed to you doing the exact same thing? You offer no evidence to back up what you're saying, but have no problem calling out people you disagree with... pot, meet kettle.

The stupidity of this statement speaks for itself.

My Apologies, I'm not familiar with the inner workings of this website, I only casually use it... don't really know what "karma" is, nor do I really care (this is a website, not real life, I hope you don't base too much of your self worth on the karma level of your slashdot account or the opinions of internet strangers).

That said, you are a sad piece of work, and I expect in real life you're not nearly as tough as you are on the internet. So internet warrior, continue your crusade of uselessness, spouting idiotic platitudes about your idyllic society.

Like I said before, if you honestly consider yourself to be part of a movement towards a better society, with your ignorant and hate filled postings... well you are living proof of why your proposed system has collapsed into misery every time it has been attempted. You don't want a better world, you feel powerless and you want more power at the expense of those who you perceive to have more power. Once you achieved power you wouldn't share it equally (it has *never* happened), you would oppress just as badly (historically, much more brutally) the people below you. A basic study of history would make this painfully evident to you, but it is obviously clear that you don't have even a basic knowledge of the systems you propose to change.

Really?? I seriously doubt someone is going to blow a mod point on this comment, within mere minutes of you posting it.

You can't let your actual message speak for itself so you have to artificially inflate your score with duplicate accounts... well pathetic is as pathetic does and you just proved it!

Okay, you're obviously angry and it wasn't my intention to further your rage. (by OP I meant khipu, I apologize for my egregious error...)

I've got to say that after reading this latest rant I realized I'm not dealing with a rational adult capable of critical thinking. Typical Marxist garbage, why has it NEVER worked? Why did all the "worker's paradises" turn into hellholes of human misery? Your belief in an ideal world ignores reality and ignores human nature, that's why it has NEVER worked. Why is it that every single system who's main premise is to build an idealistic organic national community results in massive human misery?

Go read a history book you little shit, start with:
- Equality of Means Vs. Equality of Opportunity
- State control of the economy Vs. private control of the economy
- East Germany before and after capitalism
- Capitalist Countries (North America, Western Europe, Australia/NZ, and some Asian countries) vs. The Soviet Union, Mao-ist China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc.

Your ignorance of history and human nature is disgusting. People like power, it is innate. It is also why leaders "for the people" eventually ALL becoming autocratic thugs that live luxurious lives while their people suffer. There is an obvious problem with the current state of affairs and I can agree that reforms are needed, but what you suggest is pure ignorance.

If the world could be the ideal paradise that you wish it was, it would be, but it's not... To think that someone as ignorant and hate-filled as you claims to be a member of this new "ideal society" for "community good" kind of proves my point... and not to invoke Godwin's law and destroy my whole rant, but the Brownshirt's, Italian Fascisti, and Soviet Partisans thought they were noble young geniuses fighting for an ideal society. (I imagine your ideal society would eventually turn out like theirs did, history would agree with me)

Leaving aside all the immature rhetoric and petty name calling, your comment doesn't even make sense. The current system is obviously flawed, but you don't add to your credibility by rudely portraying an ill-thought out populist idealism.

In theory everything the OP said is 100% right on the money, in practice there are too many loopholes for it to function the way it should, but don't confuse the system's current disfunction with the capitalist system that has brought more wealth and more prosperity to an enormous amount of people than any other system in human history.

Corporate taxes are in theory meant to encourage reinvestment in a company, making it cheaper to reinvest than pay yourself. The problem is that it's possible (and totally legal) to do a huge number of things which effectively allow you to "pay" yourself at the corporate rate, like loaning yourself money from the corporation or buying yourself property and then leasing it to the corporation, etc. etc. etc. The solution is to ensure that if actual people take money from a corporation (they make a financial gain), that this money is taxed at a fair rate and then be done with it. People don't have problems with companies reinvesting in themselves (it's the reason I support low corporate tax rates in theory)... people have a problem with some rich jackass rigging the system to pay way less than his fair share of taxes. Tax code reform is the key, anyone going on about tax rates for the super rich clearly doesn't understand how the system works, they don't really care if you raise their taxes as they'll find a way around them anyway.

Your best bet is a fuse box installed before the main breaker panel. These things have to be replaced if/when they blow up, but will save your electronics in case of a massive surge.

A lightning strike can literally destroy everything that's plugged in; your fridge, stove, a/c, etc. are all vulnerable, so investing in a reasonable fuse box is a pretty cheap insurance policy. Your electrician should mount the box near the breaker panel, so easy access shouldn't be a problem if you need to replace it.

P.S. Why would this possibly be installed behind a wall? Please use a licensed electrician, its not worth dying over trying to install, or burning your house down if you do it wrong.

I don't see how your position is any less childish or black-and-white. You make blanket statements about people you couldn't even name and you take complex economic issues and simplify them to the point of "itz all cauzed by teh greedy banksters!". Do you honestly claim to understand the complexities of the events you just listed... or are your "facts" based in populist sentiment? (it's a rhetorical question, the answer is obvious).

So what is the solution? Do we put the government in charge of distributing wealth? If you think that rich greedy people are a problem now, just wait until their money/power is controlled by a bureaucrat who not doesn't care about wasting huge sums of money, and has even less consequences for wrongdoing.

Isn't it interesting that you have so much hatred for people with more money than you... do you care about the 98% of the worlds population that has far less than you do? How would you feel if someone told you that you had to give up 75% of your property to make society more fair?

I'm not defending the super-rich here, just pointing out that the threshold for how much is too much is conveniently above what *you* think it should be.

Oh please, I seriously doubt you understand the true complexity of the world around you. I know it's much easier to understand a half-truth that appeals to emotion than to put in the effort required to really understand something. The idea that the "elites" must be overthrown to get "justice" for the "people" is not new, it has been tried many times but always fails miserably. As soon as group X overthrows group Y, group X then becomes just as greedy and selfish (many times more so) than group Y was.

The altruistic utopian world view where everyone is equal *and* prosperous is a fantasy that has never existed.

The problem with this is that there are literally thousands of other "harm-reduction" strategies that could be implemented that would certainly result in a lower future cost to society. Should the federal government mandate coverage of liposuction? gastric band surgery? nicorette? condoms/spermicide? weight-loss drugs? trips to the dentist?

The truth is that the poorest don't have insurance to begin with... they have to go to planned parenthood as they can't afford a doctor and prescription costs. Subsidizing the personal sex lives of the middle-class lucky enough to even have insurance is a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere IMHO.

If we are concerned with the poor's access to contraception, then address that specifically... but please don't tell me that we need to do this to help the poor, because it doesn't help them at all.

I strongly disagree. Having people who are clearly biased and acting on their own self-interest are not the type of people that should be used to inform decisions regarding the law. This would be like asking welfare recipients their opinions on welfare, or asking corporations their views on corporate tax... the bias is clear and needs to be considered.

Besides, Sandra Fluke's arguments were weak at best, giving anecdotal evidence of the importance of birth control pills for medical reasons other than pregnancy prevention. She gave an example of a woman who had a clear medical need for these pills, yet then extended this to include all uses of contraception. There are many women (my girlfriend included) who are 100% pro-contraception, yet believe that you should pay for your own sex life.

When I did this as my summer job last year (at an accounting firm) I can assure you that all the receipts, legal invoices, correspondence, notes, business cards, etc. associated with an account were all scanned into the file.

You can use photocopied documents for an audit, so it's not like the originals are actually required. As long as everything that would have been in the paper file is in the electronic file there is literally no difference.

When someone needed a file that had been scanned, they simply printed it out from file. These print-outs are essentially the exact same thing as photocopies, and would serve the same purpose to an auditor.

I did this as my summer job last year. We were tasked with converting many (hundred) bankers boxes full of files into electronic format.

We used the Canon DR-9050C, which I believe runs about $10k retail. This is considered a "production" scanner, and so is top of the line for its class. It was generally a great scanner, scanning about 100 ppm with good resolution. That being said, even this scanner had occasional problems with taking multiple sheets in at once (especially for files older than 4+ years, and light-weight paper). The hassle involved with organizing, de-stapling, taping receipts to paper, lining everything up for the scanner, etc. is really the biggest drawback with this sort of operation.

Depending on how many files you have to scan, it may honestly be worth your time to contract this out (look for 'document management' companies), if your time is worth money and you have a lot of files it is probably a better option. If you don't want to contract it out, look at renting a production grade scanner because anything less will see you go insane with frustration. Our scanner came with excellent software that scanned directly to various formats, we scanned to PDF. Many of these production scanners also allow you to use OCR, which obviously takes longer to scan but is pretty damn cool.

There were 2 of us scanning, it took us about 6 hours to scan 4-5 bankers boxes, this includes the organizing, destapling, taping, etc. So to give you a metric, this 10k machine allows 2 people working diligently to scan about 1 bankers box of files every 1.5 hours. If you are scanning a bunch of small files it can take significantly longer, a bankers box full of 80 personal tax files took far longer to process than a box full of 150-400 page corporate files.

Lastly I'll say good luck, this can be a pretty mind-numbing job, but the end product is well worth it :)

I was raised in a Catholic household, and went to Catholic school growing up, so I know the comfort and sense of community that religion can bring, it can be a powerful and spiritual feeling. That being said, if you look into the history of Christianity, it is extremely hard to accept that there is anything 'divine' or 'real' about it. The creation myths are rooted in Abrahamic tradition, the Holy days (Easter, Christmas) are rooted in pagan traditions... Jesus wasn't even considered a deity until 300 years after his death at the council of Nicaea.

I agree with you that Religion can bring a serious sense of comfort to people, I have witnessed my devoutly religious Irish family members get through the death of a loved one with remarkable strength, because they actually believe that their loved ones are floating in heaven with the angels. Although this comfort is nice in a way, it is firmly rooted in delusion, and that's where the problem lies.

If some group of people have wacky believes, but those believes give those people comfort and they're not hurting anyone, then I can't really object... I believe they should have the freedom to believe what they want. Now when your cult (Christianity) is so big that it actually does hurt other people, with outdated ideas about contraception, homosexuals, morality etc, then I do have a problem with it. Christian theology DOES influence non-Christians, whether you'd like to admit that or not.

So to you, and other religious folks out there... please feel free to believe whatever you want, but please respect that many of us see your beliefs as man-made delusion, and want no part of it influencing our laws or way of life in any way. As a former Christian, what worries me most about religious people is the break down in critical thinking and acceptance of "faith" with no proof. Religion doesn't teach you to think, it teaches you to follow... it always has and always will.

This is book is worth every penny and more (~$18 on amazon).

Like the submitter, I come from C/C++/Java background and always despised Javascript whenever I had to deal with it. I picked up this book a few months ago and can confidently say that this book completely changed my view of Javascript. Javascript is a quirky language, and has some really bad parts (the book has a chapter dedicated to the bad parts). This book clearly explains common misconceptions about the language, as well as all the things a programmer used to a more traditional language needs to look out for. The book explains how Javascript works under the hood in great detail (the prototype-chain, functional scope, type conversion and equality, first class objects/functions ,closures, etc.)

This is a book for programmers, it's not a cookbook or how-to, and you need a good understanding of programming for it to be useful. That being said, for programmers coming from more traditional languages to Javascript, this book is exactly what you're looking for. I can honestly say that in a few short months Javascript has gone from one of my most hated languages to one of my favourites. The language is incredibly powerful and expressive once you get a good understanding of how it works and why.

I investigated going with TekSavvy as they certainly had good deals on paper, but after realizing I'd have to lease a phone line at $10/month, rent a modem for $10/month, place a security deposit (???) etc... It quickly didn't seem like quite a great deal.

We ended up going with Rogers, free installation within two days, $44/month for the "express" (something like 6down/1.5up), and 250GB/month bandwidth cap (The rogers guy hooked up our cable TV for free as a move-in gift).

I'm not trying to promote Rogers here, I have had numerous horrible experiences with them, but I believe credit should be given where it is due. My experience with Rogers in Toronto has been fantastic (so far). When you say you pay $62/month for TekSavvy, what are you getting for the price? I understand that some have greater speed/bandwidth requirements than my two-person household, but for $20/month more than I'm already paying I would expect the difference to be substantial.

This isn't meant to be a troll, I would (and will) switch to Teksavvy if I can get better value for the money... As I said they were my first choice until I actually compared the total cost of each, and for my needs Rogers was by far the best deal going. YMMV.

The larger part is that most of these songs have lyrics and intentions to protest against common GOP policies and political positions.

What lyrics would those be exactly? I suggest you google 'eye of the tiger lyrics'... maybe I'm completely missing the meaning, or perhaps you are just pulling s#it out of thin air to support your political biases...

I'm sure that if he were still alive, the sculptor who crafted the Statue of Liberty would be aghast at the racist GOP's stance towards immigrant latinos today

Wow, you really don't know your history do you. The designer of the Statue of Liberty (Frédéric Bartholdi) was a Frenchman living in a time when France was horribly subjugating people all around the world. During Bartholdi's life France was in control of vast sections of Africa, a few countries in the Caribbean and South America, and large possessions in Asia and the Western Pacific.

I'm not trying to justify racism or discrimination of any kind. I am simply pointing out that the designer of the Statue of Liberty was almost certainly a racist himself, as were most people of that time. I don't know if you were being sarcastic or are seriously naive enough to believe that people in 1886 weren't horribly racist, either way, I think the hyperbole detracts from any valid arguments you might have had.