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I'm curious why you think low-income people shouldn't pay taxes. Don't they owe a responsibility to the state? By what right do they *deserve* a free ride? The right of being poor? Under your system, if everyone could get a free ride off the rich by being poor, I think I would remain poor too, just so I could loaf around and do nothing on the rich man's dollar.

I don't have too many objections to your proposed sales tax scheme, since you exempt basic necessities from it, but I do want to comment on this attitude. I'm not sure why you think low-income people "owe a responsibility to the state," when it sure isn't doing much for them. Public schools? Yes, shitty inner city ones. Highway maintenance? Uh, they don't have a car. Military defense? Well, they are the group most targeted by recruiters. In any case, there is certainly a lower limit on income below which someone needs all of it just to survive, and can't afford to pay any taxes, "responsibility to the state" or not; hence the standard exemptions in the current tax code.

Gosh, how nice it would be to sit around and let the rich man work for me. Boy, the world owes me a living!! LOL.

Yeah, those damn lazy poor people all have it as good as Lucky Ducky.

Doesn't Scientific Progress Go Boink ?

I believe you mean something like this Foxtrot?

See this week's Foxtrot.

Although, if that Stephen Hawking shoot-em-up he's working on ever gets released, maybe whether or not we have Doom3 on Mac will be a moot question.

Jason Fox is interested:
http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2004/11/01/

Did you notice how much a show broadcast 28 years ago parodying the ongoing election paralells the current?

The Republican candidate was stupid, abortion rights were an issue and the Democratic candidate was considered a "flip flopper".

The only diference is apparently, the media didn't let politicians get away w/ sidestepping the question, which reminds me of this:
The Media Then and Now.

When you link to "Today's" Foxtrot, please link to that day's Foxtrot, and not just the front page.

Although, today's Foxtrot is even more apropos, because now Jason's porting Half-Life over to his iFruit.

When you link to "Today's" Foxtrot, please link to that day's Foxtrot, and not just the front page.

Although, today's Foxtrot is even more apropos, because now Jason's porting Half-Life over to his iFruit.

It seems so many American's are sick and tired of the 2 party system. I am one of them. I voted Nader in 2000 simply as a rejection of the false dem/gop dichotomy. And the unlikely and unfortunate happened: Bush won the electoral votes, but not the popular votes. American democracy failed. And what did we do about it? We egged Bush's limo during the inauguration (Boondocks nails this one).

Would the response be any different if it happened again? I think people are more ready for it, prepared to act, and certainly dissatisfied with the results of letting it slip out of control last time.

So here is the plan to push america to the point of dissatisfaction (insert Fight Club quote here): If you live in a state that will go to Kerry (the current/likely electoral winner) by a significant margin, vote Bush. That will help his popular rating, without hurting the electoral breakdown. If you live in a swing state, vote Kerry, so he can be sure to get the electoral win. If you live in a pro-bush state, vote Bush, even if you don't like him.

I'm really hoping new and useful changes will come to the electoral and representative system.

For now, all i know is: Bush Sucks

Considering this foxtrot strip ran in thousands of newspapers on the day that this story was slashdotted.

Amazing how this cooresponds so well with today's Foxtrot comic. (If you see this when it's no longer the "today" one, make sure to view the Nov. 1 one.)

I gotta come clean. I stole that joke from Aaron McGruder, author of Boondocks. He did that joke four years ago, and it's nearly as funny today.

A high-tech voting system that is properly designed and deployed should be easier to use and more secure then a paper solution.

I put bold tags around your enormous qualifying assumption, which you seem to gloss over as if it's a given. It is extremely difficult to create a properly designed high-tech voting system. The network of bluescreening touchscreens that lie in wait for many of us don't even come close.

Paper ballots have problems with hanging chads (if they're the punch-out type) or improper erasures (did he intend to erase "A" and vote vor "B", or did he vote for both of them?) or faint markings that may or may not have been intended to be votes.

Feh. These are sources of random error, which although undesirable, affects the outcome nowhere near as much as systematic error. In general systematic error has partisan effects, whereas random error in general does not- it mostly cancels itself out. 10000 votes affected by random error affect the election about as much as 200 votes affected by systematic error.

See this post and the reply to it for details. I don't want to keep repasting it in every thread. Maybe I'll start a journal.

And you're going to have errors when you start to count millions and millions of paper ballots by hand.

Like I said before, unless you hire outright partisans to count votes, these will be sources of random error.

Any candidate who lost by a narrow enough margin is going to demand a recount,

Good. I hope they do.

A recount for the Presidential election would have to be completed before January 2nd. Limited time means people rushing, which means more errors...

Not if your Daddy appointed a few Supreme Court justices. They can stop the recount and choose you as president before the outcome is even known.

The void for me has been filled somewhat with Mutts and Non Sequitur. Mutts in particular I find to be just as, if not more, funny than anything Waterson produced.

In the 10th anniversary Calvin & Hobbes book, Watterson mentioned (in Susie's Introduction) that a strip about a little girl, from Susie's perspective, would be great.

Here it is.

Old news. Foxtrot already announced that this morning.

The book's websitehas a video of a monkey "hacking" e-voting software. It must've been seen by Bill Amend, creator of the comic Fox Trot, as seen in his recent strip.

You mean that if Kerry votes for one version of a bill and votes against another version of that bill he is not really a flip flopper?

Let's hand this one to Wiley: Best flip-flopper comic ever!

Calvin and Hobbes on W (from a strip 11 years ago this week):

http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/09/21/

You can't apply one standard to the group you agree with, and then apply another standard to those you don't. That's just hypocrisy.

AKA "Politics As Usual". ;-)

Consider, for example, those doctored photos showing John Kerry and Jane Fonda on the same stage. When people with a bit of photo experience pointed out the evidence that they were forgeries, the media just chuckled and went off on the next goose chase. No agonized re-examinations, no discussions of ethics. Just "Oops" and a quick change of subject.

Probably the best comment on this particular flap is this Stuart Carlson cartoon.

If outsourcing jobs creates jobs, where are they?

Heh, reminds me of the logic in Sunday's "Boondocks" comic

1. John Kerry doesn't like President Bush
2. Radical Islamic terrorists don't like President Bush
3. President Bush fights terrorism
4. therefore, John Kerry supports terrorism

Damn funny

Very good. And here's a related Doonesbury Sunday cartoon from back in '89 that you might want to bookmark (or copy ;-).

Are you refering to this wonderful comic from only a few days ago?

"I wonder if the person who coined the term INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY was being ironic."

From that one story you have hosts of other authors refering to "butterfly effects" and "quantum butterflys".

And of course, there is Chaos Butterfly.

Well, as a slighly more silly aside: http://www.ucomics.com/misterboffo/2004/04/27/

Didn't he invent the vacuum cleaner?

(Also see http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2004/04/18/.

Wow, this perfectly parallels today's Doonesbury strip. Couldn't fit better if they'd planned it.

I too use firefox to load up six different pages. Just scroll through to visit all my standard pages every morning:
Pooch Cafe Get Fuzzy Sluggy Freelance Megatokyo User Friendly Slashdot BYU
Then I usually go to cnn, nytimes, bbc, and deseret morning news for the second set of tabs. I love firefox

...today's "Foxtrot" touches on the same subject! He just needed to change the very last speech bubble (Jason's) to say "Maybe there will be...."

(3/11/04 if you need to look through the archives)

Here's why your machine is crashing

Indeed my friend, Martian face has returned.

How about this one?

"I'm very fond of the quote--I don't know who said it first--'The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.'"

Arthur C. Cleark quoting Bill Watterson....

Very cool.

Your approach is not unlike Calvin's approach to shoveling show...

I am more intrested in an approach that can rank the level of attention that I should pay to e-mail. I'd like to have a white list that allows me to set different priority levels based upon the sender. I'd like to give a higher priority to mail that has a valid signature. I'd also give a higher priority to mail from people in my address list.

By the way, which e-mail clients meet your criterion for a "real mail clients"?

I am still trying to figure out where I can purchase the Monty Python E-Mail Client.

Right link

Now, before you hit that "troll" button, I suggest you read the moderator guidelines, specifically the part which says you should not moderate to promote or discount specific viewpoints.

I'm not trolling(trolling= looking to get responses; I could care less if anyone responds)- I'm expressing what I believe to be a perfectly valid viewpoint/opinion, shared by many, many other people(that we have no business exploring space until we've solved more basic problems here) that is reasonably on-topic(the article is about mars exploration, its costs, and so on).

But, of course, feel free to mod "troll" or "offtopic", because then you'll get meta-moderated "unfair" by people like me, and then you won't get to moderate anymore- I aggressively meta-moderate, and I look out overuse of moderation, on both sides of the fence- stupid stuff modded "insightful" and unpopular viewpoints modded "troll".

That's not all- the images are clearly composited, which is why they look so stunning(yes, the huge, low-noise ccd helps, as does a great lens). The very first image released(the 8mpixel one) had a very very obvious stitching error right smack down the middle, which is pretty bad, considering that with a robotic rig and known lens characteristics, you should be able to stitch the image exactly(most errors in stitching software comes when you didn't shoot the images perfectly overlapping, or at different angles, or you took a step forward/back, etc.) You can buy software off the shelf that does a better job than NASA's job.

"How much so a man can walk on mars?"

Obligatory Fox Trot reference.

Come on, people. Are you really this gullible?

Not being a literature geek, even I was able to deduce that this was an trailer for a movie and not an actual robot product.

While there was several mumblings in the audience after the trailer ran; enough for me to shout out to the confused that it was a movie instead of whatever they thought. It didn't have me fooled for a second. It reminded me of Bicentennial Man, and sadly I didn't even get the Asimov correlation until later.

It's understandable. This is probably what happens when most of the movie going public is seeing RotK for Liv Tyler and Orlando Bloom. That's why I tell people that I was there to see Viggo.

5th Wave

Here's one that gives a good example of C&H wit.

It's not a hard copy and there are ads on the page, but this might be the comic you are looking for.

Yes, and then there's Sunday's Doonsebury which makes a valid point.

After the uproar over the last batch of lawsuits, however, they're not (yet) suing the people in question, but intend to allow them to settle out of court, first.

The intention was always to make people settle out of court. Even the RIAA knows people won't stand for hundreds of lives ruined finacially, so they just want to scare some into settling, and more into abandoning p2p.

Oh, and here's a comic on the subject.

.. but I thought the Slashdot audience would appreciate Foxtrot today.

Again, sorry to be off-topic.

1. Violence is a good way to end violence.
2. Americans should kill Iraqis to make them more peaceful.
3. Before Saddam Hussein, there was no violence in Iraq. When Mr. Hussein is no longer in power, Iraq will become a peaceful place.
4. Killing Iraqis and destroying the infrastructure of that very poor country will have simple consequences. Killing people is an entirely clean social event, like on TV. Killing people has no effect on future relationships, or on the trust people put in those relationships.
5. Americans are superior people who should decide the way the world should be run.
6. Private oil companies should be allowed to take on unprofitable operations if U.S. taxpayers can be convinced to pay part of the cost so that the oil companies can make money.

Cartoons are so insightful:

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/2003/ga030916. gif