The source you quote frames this as total paid as opposed to percent income paid, which is not the frame of reference people usually use when considering a fair tax. A toy example:

There are 10 tax payers in a pretend country, 9 make $100 per year and 1 makes 1,000,000 per year. Each of the low income earners are taxed 50% of their income and together contribute $450 to the total tax collected. The high income earner is taxed 1% and contributes $10,000 to the total tax collected. Here the top 10% of earners are paying over 95% of the total ammount taxed, so it's more than fair to those in the bottom 90%, right?

I wonder how the tax structure of the 1980s would look if income distribution were taken into account in the analysis. Perhaps more similar to the common "misconception" people have about the time period?

As it turns out, Japan has a history of and continues to be very active in speech and language research. The very first International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) was held in Kobe, Japan. If you are interested, you can take a look at the academic affiliates and corporate sponsors of the International Speech Communications Association's 2010 science and technology conference (held in Makuhari, Japan) for a list of several Japanese (and non-Japanese) organizations currently active in speech science research and technology development (http://www.interspeech2010.org/Sponsors.html), since I am too lazy to list them myself.

While I won't argue about these religions' contributions to science, they did make direct (as in money) and cultural contribution to the arts. Are we using civilization as a synonym for science, or do you believe it reasonable, as I do, to count contributions to the arts among contributions to civilization?

I didn't RTFA (this is /. after all), but, playing off the idea in your post and the idea in an above post (on skimming), one might hypothesize that controlling for motivation would demonstrate additional results-- people motivated to learn the material will learn better from easy fonts and layouts, and people less motivated will learn better when prevented from skimming by the harder to read fonts.

Maybe you wrote it for ironic or comic value, but you parenthetical statement reads like a class warfare talking point.