Let me have a go at explaining this using your framing so that you might understand why other people think estate taxes are just fine.

Lee isn't being double dipped. That's because Lee isn't paying the estate tax.

His family are paying tax and it's at the time they "earned" it. Which is when they inherited it.

There is no double dip.

I'll leave this here.

It then became co-opted by Republicans and enough right-wing extremists to drive away most moderates and all right-leaning Democrats.

Or more to the point: It became co-opted and taken over partially by Karl Rove and his cronies and then successfully painted by establishment Republicans and their Democratic peers as an extremist movement. All this because entrenched Republicans and Democrats neither want to be disrupted from their position of power or ousted by outsiders. Government by and for the government.

While third parties have historically done poorly in US elections, given how little functional difference there is between the two ruling parties, we're sorely in need of change.

Although my voter registration says "Republican," I have increasingly less and less respect for most "Republicans," including Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, many of the establishment incumbents, and dozens of others who happen to be as big (or bigger) spenders as their DNC compatriots they rail against. It's like someone else said earlier in the thread: It's not that either party is opposed to regulation, they just can't agree on what needs regulating.

This is probably true. There are extremists on both sides, but I suspect I'm just in a regretfully pessimistic mood. ;)

So... why single out Whole Foods and compare them with creationists?

Because it works, for the most part. It elicits an emotional response in readers who have an irrational hatred for people who happen to ascribe to creationism. Like most "editorialisms," it's a race for the bottom.

If this is the kind of crap Slashdot is going to keep posting, maybe it's time to go elsewhere.

I quit reading Slashdot regularly about a year or two ago for this exact reason and started reading HN instead. Unfortunately, I've noticed that the left-of-center outgassing from Slashdot and elsewhere has caused many of these other sites to express the same symptoms within a short few months. The tech community is, at large, an echo chamber of Leftist ideology and ideologues who suffer from various degrees of disdain, disgust, or hatred for any who holds beliefs that run counter to majority views. Any suggestion that minority opinions may be welcome is a ruse.

Watch my comment for illustrations to this effect; within a few days, it'll likely have replies confirming my suggestions by denigrating common scapegoats for societal ills (the "extreme right," global warming "denialists," religious believers, etc.) painting them as the most vile of scum. Or observe the sibling comment just prior to my posting that illustrates the condescending pretentiousness that is endemic to these discussions.

My motive in leaving Slashdot was the fault of vitriol I observed directed toward those whose comments I've enjoyed over the years (and friended them). It was depressing, to say the least, and reflected poorly on the Slashdot community. So, packing up and leaving for a while seemed the only option. Except that it's inescapable. You cannot go anywhere without encountering this sort of vitriol. Maybe it's the fault of society in its present state, maybe it's the fault of Internet discussion and what behavior it encourages. I don't know.

Fortunately, with the libertarian revival as of late, I've noticed some Slashdot threads improving in balance. Or maybe it's because of how I left my thresholds configured to filter out mostly the people I enjoy (who are still posting, thankfully).

Seriously, it's too abstract and invisible.

I agree. I think that's a tremendous part of it. I think your first statement hit the nail on the head though. Much of it is because people are too complacent or don't understand the implications of a massive surveillance state and the ills that such a monstrosity can bring upon our society. As long as they can eat and watch television, most people don't care what happens outside their own little bubble, and I think that's a damn shame.

If nothing else, it certainly explains why the US political climate is such as it is and why we continue to elect politicians who uphold the status quo, outright refusing to hold anyone accountable with regards to such constitutional violations. It's probably also at least partially to blame as to why our elected officials fail to agree with the assertion that extensive surveillance is a violation of the 4th Amendment (possibly others).

I don't know what the answer is, but I do think that at least a fraction of this responsibility should rest on the necks of the media giants. But it's almost as if they don't care either. Or maybe they're receiving threats/kickbacks to funnel information into the NSA.

http://mnemosyne-proj.org/ This is an excellent program flash card program. You rate flash cards by how well you know them and it does automatic scheduling. Cards you know well show up less often than cards you don't know. You can include images and sounds. It has a good tagging system so you can mark a card for multiple areas. You choose which subjects you want the cards to cover. For example, you could look at all your cards on coronary arteries regardless of subject, or you could look specifically at coronary arteries for one particular class. The key to getting the most out of this program is to include questions that cannot be answered with memorization. Include flash cards that force you to explain the why and the what.

First time it's happened in almost 10 years of slashdotting. I stand by it with pride.

I hope our pollies' blatant disregard of anything other than what will make them the most popular will contrive to prevent this from being passed!

Also, first.

Yeah I think the headline is a bit lame. It should read "most IT pros don't look at confidential info". I don't really have any interest in looking at confidential files when it's not required for the job. I also just have a personal sense of morality and honour that makes me want to live up to the responsibility that I have being able to do anything I want on the network.

Exactly this. I think the article headline was way too over-sensationalized (then again, this is Slashdot, right?). It could have also been titled "Most IT pros without personal integrity look at confidential info."

Big surprise there...

Beyond simply the moralistic reasons for not looking at information that one shouldn't be looking at to begin with there are also other possibilities including 1) not caring and 2) simply not wanting to know. Although, I do think it's rather disconcerting if an admin's job is to safeguard private info but snoops freely; that indicates to me a disturbing lack of self-control that has the potential to become harmful if not kept in check. While I personally see the privileges of a sysadmin as holding an extraordinarily high honor of trust and integrity, protecting data and assets as if they were his or her own, I realize that not everyone seems to agree. It's a shame, because I seem to remember there being a write up somewhere by one of the technology greats on the system administrator's code of conduct.

Reading through the responses to this article greatly disappoint me. It seems that there are some individuals who genuinely don't care about privacy. I wonder if they feel the same way about the TSA or border patrol check points? You know the type: If you're not doing anything illegal, why do you want your privacy?

I also stick with Steam for their insane and frequent sales, and their growing support for games in the various Humble Bundles. Its shocking the amount of cash I've split on random Steam impulse buys

This is a good reason to stick with Steam, and a good chunk of the reason why I refuse to go elsewhere anymore. The remainder had to so with the availability of indie games. Let's face it, there are a lot of indie developers who sell games through Steam and sometimes Steam alone.

Origin? No thanks, not with its horribly invasive nature, and the fact that it's an EA product. Screw that.

I'd like to see the poster you were replying to show statistics backing up his claim that Steam is losing customers in a "slow trickle," but I think he's simply repeating what he's been told. If anything, Steam is probably gaining sales. Every holiday, I buy up a bunch of game packs for family and friends as virtual stocking stuffers. I know I'm not alone.

Carry a jar of pickled brains.

If that's true, the Chinese government cares more about it's people than the American one.

The residents were probably party officials.

What's annoying about sudo and apt? You don't have to use sudo if you don't want to, adding a real root user is easy. But using sudo is good practice on any Linux system. And apt? Apt is one of the major reasons to use a debian based distro.

Having come from a BSD background as my first *nix-like OS exposure and later migrating to Gentoo for desktop use--and more recently to Arch, which I love--apt and friends seem spread out and feel somewhat inferior. They're not, of course, but given package managers I like, that's my opinion.

Fundamentally, of course, it's all very subjective; what's annoying to you might be reasonable to me and vice versa. I've become exceptionally fond of Arch and single-point-of-reference package managers like pacman (or emerge for those who still stick with Gentoo and maybe yum for Red Hat-based persuasions, though I don't know much about it). Single-point package managers arguably beat the requirement of installing extra apt-* packages for edge cases like reverse dependency resolution or discovering which file belongs to what package. While utilities like apt-file are easy to install, the package name isn't immediately obvious to newcomers, and sometimes the only way to figure out the best solution to a given package-related problem is to trawl forums, blogs, and mailing lists. I admit that this demonstrates the advantage of having everything in a single manpage (e.g. pacman), because it's feasible to figure out everything reasonably quickly without having to Google it; though, the obvious disadvantage for users accustomed to the "one action, one command" mindset is that dozens of command line options can potentially be intimidating. Also, not everyone agrees with the philosophy.

I won't hazard guessing what the OP's implications were, because apt isn't terribly annoying to use. It's just different. It's not the kind of different I like, and that's perfectly fine! apt is a better match for the way some people think; pacman/emerge/yum are better for others. And others still would rather stick with cd /usr/ports/$packagename && make && make install. Again, though, it's fundamentally a personal preference, with the exception of systems under your care. Then you should know everything you feasibly can. ;)

That said, I still blame Red Hat for the train wreck that is NetworkManager.

Don't try to bring climate change denial in here as though it somehow creates support for your viewpoint.

The OP probably included that with the expectation that moderators might not carefully follow his argument and instead offer a positive mod simply on the premise that he's opposed to "climate deniers" and so are they. I conclude this based partly on the fact that he even goes so far as to use very similar language to that echoed frequently in the climate change debates here on Slashdot such as (quoting immediately from his post) "'what is the effect', 'how do we mitigate it', and 'how certain are we of the linkage'." There's no attempt provide evidence supporting the claim that video games might cause ASD (instead, he chooses to indirectly mock anyone who might disagree) and almost coincidentally, neither does Professor Greenfield provide evidence. mevets ought to be modded down for intellectual dishonesty and attempting to implicitly tie causation to something that has yet to be supported by research findings.

Given that his post is currently at +4, Insightful, the tactic of tacking on a statement relating disputes with video game-caused ASD to climate change "deniers" in order to attract sympathetic moderators seems to be working and that is unfortunate.