Remember that Tennesse dude that didn't pay his $75 fee, so the firemen let his house burn down? That's what needs to be done here. If corporations feel that they somehow don't need to contribute to the pot for essential services provided by taxes, then they should not be recipients of said essential services.
Consider this: Google got rich because of the INTERNET. And where exactly did the internet come from? It came from TAX MONEY. The internet didn't spring forth from no place, essential R&D had to be done, and most of it was government funded research, i.e., tax dollars.
Now let's imagine for a second that everybody employed Google's tactics, but this idea got thrown through a space-time distortion and landed in the 1950s. So, it's right after WW-II, and nobody in American is paying taxes because we're all looping it through Bermuda.
Guess what happens? There's no internet. There's no space program. Hell, by this time there's no police, EMS, or fire dept. When 9/11 happens, only financial people died because there's no attempt at a rescue. Of course, I wonder how we even have financial people without an educational system.
Oh, and there's no Google either, and no Facebook. Because without the internet, none of that happens.
So go ahead, be a Tea-Bagger and not pay taxes. I hope you've got a gun to defend your property, because when you dial 9-11 for the police, you get disconnected. Assuming we even have a phone system since America would be a completely collapsed society with anarchy and violence as the only law.
Someone else pointed out that if you're this far gone, it's time to stop using the internet then for your traffic.
Not to mention that for the millions of dollars needed, as well as manpower, to put something like this into orbit you could instead "AOL" it, by sending every human on earth a CDROM (or DVD) with pirated warez on it.
Want to make a statement? Use the postal system. Make every human a "evil hacker" by giving them a DVD full of stuff the MAFFIA don't want you to have.
Think: If during prohibition, if Al Capone had given away liquor, Amendment 18 would have been repealed a lot quicker.
There is no police force large enough to arrest every man, woman and child on planet earth.
We're losing more "vertical real estate" due to more and more crap being shuttled to the top and the bottom of your screen. Why does every major website want to add a "bar" to your browser? To make you scroll 40 times before you get to the data you were looking for? Between the added "bars" and the banner ads, there's no web page to see without scrolling a lot.
And the monitors, ironically, get wider and wider, but not taller. We're going to need photoshop-like detachable palettes that we can drag to the sides of our monitors to clear up the vertical space we need to read.
Remember when monitors were made for "desktop publishing" and rotated into vertical mode, specifically for doing newspaper layouts and similar things? But that was back in the day when a company named "Aldus" had the #1 product for DTP.
(sigh)... Is this the part where I have to say 'get off my lawn' ?
If you don't pay up, you don't get the services. If they didn't like that system, the family should have moved. Now they will think twice about NOT paying their fees in Tea Party Land.
This is what kills me about Tea Baggers. They don't want to pay any taxes because that's dirty socialism, and then scream bloody murder when they can't get fire department, they can't get cops, and the roads aren't paved. Dude, that's paid for with the taxes you don't want to pay, so fuck you.
If Sarah Palin actually makes it near the White House, this whole country is screwed like you wouldn't believe.
I can sell you a tablet *right now* that runs some version of Microsoft's "Windows". You just won't be able to do much with it. I mean, Windows CE 2.11 only does so much.
The problem with this promised Windows 7 Tablet is that it won't do much either. Great, you can surf the web..., what else can you do with it? Very few apps support touch interfaces, and Windows in general is not an OS suited to a tablet computer.
What everyone's forgetting is that Apple made a very smart move by NOT putting OS-X Tiger on the iPad, since that OS wasn't suited to a touchscreen system. Instead, they simply scaled up the iPhone OS which was already made for people with fat fingers.
I mean, can't you just wait for the tablet to prompt you to press CTRL-ALT-DEL? Or tell you that if you want to close the app, press ALT-F4?
Find out who the spammers are and firebomb their houses then. Find out what school their kids go to and hold them hostage. Only after spammers start winding up in the Hudson (or Yellow River, whichever is appropriate), with two bullets in their head will spammers ever get the message and stop.
And why is the relevant to this entire story about Verizon? Because if you ask any spammer, he'll tell you he's "just a businessman". Another thread for this slashdot post had someone claiming that no excecutive at Verizon stoops to being 'evil', and they delude themselves that they are just doing business, and they aren't trying to actively screw their customer base, but you see, they are.
They are "businessmen" just like the spammers. And apparently, the be a businessman, you have to be completely amoral. You have to throw every sense of deceny out the window and strive to do everything that we consider 'evil', but in the name of business.
It's like when you're standing on the rubber sheet in front of the mob boss, and he tells you that you're about the killed, but it's nothing personal, it's just business.
Business is war. You against the world. So nothing is not justifiable in the name of business. Therefore, killing a spammer can be justified as "business", if you run an ISP and the spammer is passing the cost of those emails on to you. Or if you bill hourly and are losing money reading spam.....
I had the same issue: I signed up for 89.99 per month, and on month 1 I recieved a $220 bill. Needless to say, after many heated calls to Verizon, it was only after I contacted the FCC and the State Attourney General that Verizon was even *willing* to discuss a renegotiation of the bill.
Before that, all I got from them was "pay the bill" and "the salesman lied to you, it's $220". Verizons reps always believe what the bill says, not what your contract says. I was asking where these extra charges came from, and after they babbled on and on, it essentially came down to "we make shit up", to which I said, "Great, I'll be sending you a $1000 bill for my time, since I can make shit up too."
Verizon is a monopoly and they know it. They are more than willing to screw their entire customer base, as most of those people have no place else to go. I'm surprised the "refunds" they have to apply are so low. That tells me that that's all the goverment FOUND.
I heard this on the radio yesterday, and I live in NYC. For those of you that think this is a lot of money, you obviously don't live in a large city, certainly not one as big as NYC. Usually, every project here runs into billions of dollars. Just patching the potholes is billions. When it snows in NYC, snow removal is billions. 27.5 million is chicken feed. That's what Wall Street Bankers spend on lunch. It's actually a hell of a deal when you consider how many street signs you're talking about. I think it comes down to less than $110 per. And you're paying a union crew for the replacement! So really, not a bad thing. Slashdot, like the NY Post, is sexing up the story to make it look like Govt Waste. But in reality, it's just infrastructure maintenance.
Now if they could just patch up the BQE. In Feb I really had a tire blow out after hitting a pothole. Tire replacement was $85. So, that's almost the price of one sign. So, I wonder what was the total cost of that pothole if even 1% of driving NY'ers hit that pothole?
Congress was working for the people... Is this some kind of sick joke meant to lull us into thinking that every congressman isn't in the pockets of big business? Hrrrmm. It's getting near election time, that must be it...
Sheldon Cooper now has his chance to change the world and be recognized for the genius he is! I predict a lot of episodes written about this revelation!
And the B-2 Stealth bomber has the equivalent of an Amiga 1000 running it. What is the point of this article? Critical systems require reliable, proven, hardened hardware, not flakey netbooks.
If they are not the fastest CPUs, who cares? They aren't playing half-life on these systems they are flying space shuttles, and if you can't tell the difference, do not work in the defense or space industries. CPU speed isn't the prevailing factor here, reliablility and a known/proven system is.
I read TFA and the Blog Post. I am a male geek and I am 45 years old, and have had only one sexual partner in all that time.
Even I am offended by this blog post. Not for what she says about geeks, but for how she treats other women, as brainless fashionistas.
If this is how women speak to other women, no wonder women seek out even the jerkiest of jocks -- even they will treat them better than other women!
Admittedly, I am cynical. I say things often that could be considered offensive or sarcastic, such as my view that "love is only for pretty people". But I assume that anyone reading or listening to me isn't braindead. Even blondes (I kid, I kid!).
Secondly, she assumes the reliationship is one-way. She never assumes that the "geek" might be interested in what music styles, hobbies, interests and worldview the lady brings to the relationship. Believe it or not geeks can have conversations about more than just tech.
I agree with another poster about this: If a man had written and posted this blog on AMD's site, he's have been fired in 2 seconds flat for sexism.
That is mostly due to Japan being a small nation with few resources. They simply don't have the infrastructure to fight a prolonged battle. It has nothing to do with their desire to fight, in WWII, those guys just didn't give up, which played a huge role in the decision to drop the A-bomb versus having a D-Day type invasion of the homeland.
WWII, if you really think about it, was the triumph of quantity over quality. The Germans were 20 years ahead of us technologically, but they couldn't build enough weapons fast enough. For every Panzer tank they had, we had 20 or 30 Shermans, which were terrible tanks, but we had a lot of them. What America had was lots of infrastructure, lots of resources, and lots of manufacturing capability. Our tech was low-end compared to the Germans, but when they blew up our shit, we just kept cranking out more, and eventually wore them down.
The Japanese had few resources. After we knocked out their navy, there wasn't much left. And yet, it took us longer to defeat the Japanese than the Germans. They were more spread out, and they were more intractable. And, like I said earlier, they did not give up. They fought to the death, and that resulted in a greater causaulty count in the Pacific than in the European theater.
The point is: Don't discount Japan's ability to really show some teeth when they want. To this day, their TV Samurai dramas emphasize noble honor in dying while destroying your enemy. That makes them, to put this in geek terms, more like the Klingons -- and therefore, you should consider them dangerous when provoked.
Because it "trains" us to be passive consumers of media on the internet.
As a result, we'll see more and more, that the internet is going to be controlled by a few big companies, and it will be become TV all over again, where THEY decide what we get to watch, what we get to read, and everything else will be censored, unaccessible, and when "pirates" even try to post their own material (remember when "pirate" radio was about broadcasting? Amazing how big media uses that word for *everything*...), they will be taken down, usually with cops bursting through their door to confiscate their illegal servers.
You think I'm crazy, but trust me, in 20 years, this won't seem so far fetched.
He correctly identified a successful product, the Palm Pilot, that survived well over a decade with few changes to the base architecture, and he identified a product that sold well, the Yugo, but was deemed a failure after people actually tried to use it past the warranty period.
Seriously though... Everyone cranking out a tablet is a MAJOR FAIL. Everyone who wanted a tablet has already bought the iPad. How are all those eBook readers doing in sales? I mean, aside from the market leader, Amazon, with the Kindle.
I saw Sony marketing not one, but three different eBook readers at CES in January, and nearly every other "mayor" hardware vendor also had one, Toshiba, Samsung, etc., and I pointed out to my friend at the show that the market was going to be oversaturated because everyone had jumped on this sinking ship.
So, find out how those sales are, and you'll get a pretty good indication of where the Tablet market is headed. My prediction: Oversaturation leading to a sinking ship.
I'm also reminded of all those failed "internet appliances" like the Audrey, where, in 10 years, we'll look at those tablets as a strange curiosity and wonder whatever convinced CEOs to make these god-awful devices that nobody wanted.
If I recall, this is the same argument slave owners used. After all, the country was very prosperous during slavery. Ending slavery would ruin the economy. So, why didn't you mention bringing back slavery as a way to stimulate the economy?
I say go for it. You've already dug yourself a giant hole with your first rant, I say go all the way, why stop now, prove what a douche you really are!
Except that these days, if Henry Ford paid his employees more, he'd be sued by his shareholders. Business today isn't about stimulating the economy, it's about putting the most in your own pocket.
Secondly you're confusing personal income tax with corporate taxes. TFA is about personal income tax which has nothing to do with hiring employees, unless you count the money Bezos spends on gardeners, pool-boys, maids, and other perks of being a multi-billionaire.
Boo-hoo. He actually has to pay his fair share that might be used to fix the roads he drives his multiple expensive supercars on. Or police protection so that his gated mansion is safe. Or firehouses that might prevent his mansion from burning to the ground.
People who are against taxes should, I guess, live without the benefits those taxes provide. In the meantime, can I vote whether the US goes to war or not, because I don't want my taxes spent that way? You people have such a sense of entitlement it's astounding, like the world revolves around you because you make a shitload of money.
Parent is just a right-wing nutjob who'll blame *everything* on Obama. His car didn't want to start this AM, so it must be Obama's fault... because he's black! Or a democrat. Or a muslim. Only Glenn Back can make everything right by.......... what is the Glenn Beck can do? Or Palin? Or any of those other teabaggers? They have no plan. Other than get elected. Or make noise.
I really, really hope that Obama *doesn't* win the presidential election next time around. Heck, if Obama is as smart as I hope he is, he won't even run. Because the Republican who gets in, in 2012 will face the same problems Obama did, and that guy isn't going to make a miracle happen either. And then you people, who blame everything on Obama will finally have to admit that the turkey you voted for aint any better.
Transparent airplane? I guess that makes sense given security. After all, they are scanning, probing, looking at our internal organs before we board the plane. No one can stow away anymore, you can't hide a bomb. Is the bathroom transparent too? I mean, we might as well fly naked at this point.
Any don't bring any luggage onto your transparent plane as it'll block the view. Unless your luggage is transparent, which security would prefer. And can we see all the way into the transparent cockpit? There's just about nothing about this that makes the least bit of sense. I call bullshit.
Look at history. Whenever a "new world" was discovered within our own planet, missionaries came across the oceans to teach "the heathens" about their god, whether those godless barbarians wanted it or not.
People take a vast journey usually for one reason: Money. The church comes along because it's politically fortuitous to do so.
Chances are, any beings from outer space are going to be similarly motivated. They are going to come here to take our natural resources, make slaves of our people, and of course, convert us to their one true religion, whether we like it or not.
And unless we've got some hideous super-virus (like the common cold), but we don't get wiped out ourselves by their version of The Flu, their technology will be far more advanced, and therefore, they will rule this planet, and for the next 20 generations we'll all talk about how the green man is keeping us down.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that Tennesse dude that didn't pay his $75 fee, so the firemen let his house burn down? That's what needs to be done here. If corporations feel that they somehow don't need to contribute to the pot for essential services provided by taxes, then they should not be recipients of said essential services.
Consider this: Google got rich because of the INTERNET. And where exactly did the internet come from? It came from TAX MONEY. The internet didn't spring forth from no place, essential R&D had to be done, and most of it was government funded research, i.e., tax dollars.
Now let's imagine for a second that everybody employed Google's tactics, but this idea got thrown through a space-time distortion and landed in the 1950s. So, it's right after WW-II, and nobody in American is paying taxes because we're all looping it through Bermuda.
Guess what happens? There's no internet. There's no space program. Hell, by this time there's no police, EMS, or fire dept. When 9/11 happens, only financial people died because there's no attempt at a rescue. Of course, I wonder how we even have financial people without an educational system.
Oh, and there's no Google either, and no Facebook. Because without the internet, none of that happens.
So go ahead, be a Tea-Bagger and not pay taxes. I hope you've got a gun to defend your property, because when you dial 9-11 for the police, you get disconnected. Assuming we even have a phone system since America would be a completely collapsed society with anarchy and violence as the only law.
Someone else pointed out that if you're this far gone, it's time to stop using the internet then for your traffic.
Not to mention that for the millions of dollars needed, as well as manpower, to put something like this into orbit you could instead "AOL" it, by sending every human on earth a CDROM (or DVD) with pirated warez on it.
Want to make a statement? Use the postal system. Make every human a "evil hacker" by giving them a DVD full of stuff the MAFFIA don't want you to have.
Think: If during prohibition, if Al Capone had given away liquor, Amendment 18 would have been repealed a lot quicker.
There is no police force large enough to arrest every man, woman and child on planet earth.
Come on, Eve from Megazone 23? Anyone? Sheesh, I must be too old for Slashdot already... Get off my lawn!
We're losing more "vertical real estate" due to more and more crap being shuttled to the top and the bottom of your screen. Why does every major website want to add a "bar" to your browser? To make you scroll 40 times before you get to the data you were looking for? Between the added "bars" and the banner ads, there's no web page to see without scrolling a lot.
And the monitors, ironically, get wider and wider, but not taller. We're going to need photoshop-like detachable palettes that we can drag to the sides of our monitors to clear up the vertical space we need to read.
Remember when monitors were made for "desktop publishing" and rotated into vertical mode, specifically for doing newspaper layouts and similar things? But that was back in the day when a company named "Aldus" had the #1 product for DTP.
(sigh)... Is this the part where I have to say 'get off my lawn' ?
If you don't pay up, you don't get the services. If they didn't like that system, the family should have moved. Now they will think twice about NOT paying their fees in Tea Party Land.
This is what kills me about Tea Baggers. They don't want to pay any taxes because that's dirty socialism, and then scream bloody murder when they can't get fire department, they can't get cops, and the roads aren't paved. Dude, that's paid for with the taxes you don't want to pay, so fuck you.
If Sarah Palin actually makes it near the White House, this whole country is screwed like you wouldn't believe.
I can sell you a tablet *right now* that runs some version of Microsoft's "Windows". You just won't be able to do much with it. I mean, Windows CE 2.11 only does so much.
The problem with this promised Windows 7 Tablet is that it won't do much either. Great, you can surf the web..., what else can you do with it? Very few apps support touch interfaces, and Windows in general is not an OS suited to a tablet computer.
What everyone's forgetting is that Apple made a very smart move by NOT putting OS-X Tiger on the iPad, since that OS wasn't suited to a touchscreen system. Instead, they simply scaled up the iPhone OS which was already made for people with fat fingers.
I mean, can't you just wait for the tablet to prompt you to press CTRL-ALT-DEL? Or tell you that if you want to close the app, press ALT-F4?
Find out who the spammers are and firebomb their houses then. Find out what school their kids go to and hold them hostage. Only after spammers start winding up in the Hudson (or Yellow River, whichever is appropriate), with two bullets in their head will spammers ever get the message and stop.
And why is the relevant to this entire story about Verizon? Because if you ask any spammer, he'll tell you he's "just a businessman". Another thread for this slashdot post had someone claiming that no excecutive at Verizon stoops to being 'evil', and they delude themselves that they are just doing business, and they aren't trying to actively screw their customer base, but you see, they are.
They are "businessmen" just like the spammers. And apparently, the be a businessman, you have to be completely amoral. You have to throw every sense of deceny out the window and strive to do everything that we consider 'evil', but in the name of business.
It's like when you're standing on the rubber sheet in front of the mob boss, and he tells you that you're about the killed, but it's nothing personal, it's just business.
Business is war. You against the world. So nothing is not justifiable in the name of business. Therefore, killing a spammer can be justified as "business", if you run an ISP and the spammer is passing the cost of those emails on to you. Or if you bill hourly and are losing money reading spam.....
I had the same issue: I signed up for 89.99 per month, and on month 1 I recieved a $220 bill. Needless to say, after many heated calls to Verizon, it was only after I contacted the FCC and the State Attourney General that Verizon was even *willing* to discuss a renegotiation of the bill.
Before that, all I got from them was "pay the bill" and "the salesman lied to you, it's $220". Verizons reps always believe what the bill says, not what your contract says. I was asking where these extra charges came from, and after they babbled on and on, it essentially came down to "we make shit up", to which I said, "Great, I'll be sending you a $1000 bill for my time, since I can make shit up too."
Verizon is a monopoly and they know it. They are more than willing to screw their entire customer base, as most of those people have no place else to go. I'm surprised the "refunds" they have to apply are so low. That tells me that that's all the goverment FOUND.
I heard this on the radio yesterday, and I live in NYC. For those of you that think this is a lot of money, you obviously don't live in a large city, certainly not one as big as NYC. Usually, every project here runs into billions of dollars. Just patching the potholes is billions. When it snows in NYC, snow removal is billions. 27.5 million is chicken feed. That's what Wall Street Bankers spend on lunch. It's actually a hell of a deal when you consider how many street signs you're talking about. I think it comes down to less than $110 per. And you're paying a union crew for the replacement! So really, not a bad thing. Slashdot, like the NY Post, is sexing up the story to make it look like Govt Waste. But in reality, it's just infrastructure maintenance.
Now if they could just patch up the BQE. In Feb I really had a tire blow out after hitting a pothole. Tire replacement was $85. So, that's almost the price of one sign. So, I wonder what was the total cost of that pothole if even 1% of driving NY'ers hit that pothole?
Congress was working for the people... Is this some kind of sick joke meant to lull us into thinking that every congressman isn't in the pockets of big business? Hrrrmm. It's getting near election time, that must be it...
Sheldon Cooper now has his chance to change the world and be recognized for the genius he is!
I predict a lot of episodes written about this revelation!
We've got the answer, I googled it myself... 42.
Now we just need to build a bigger computer to understand the question!
And the B-2 Stealth bomber has the equivalent of an Amiga 1000 running it. What is the point of this article? Critical systems require reliable, proven, hardened hardware, not flakey netbooks.
If they are not the fastest CPUs, who cares? They aren't playing half-life on these systems they are flying space shuttles, and if you can't tell the difference, do not work in the defense or space industries. CPU speed isn't the prevailing factor here, reliablility and a known/proven system is.
I read TFA and the Blog Post. I am a male geek and I am 45 years old, and have had only one sexual partner in all that time.
Even I am offended by this blog post. Not for what she says about geeks, but for how she treats other women, as brainless fashionistas.
If this is how women speak to other women, no wonder women seek out even the jerkiest of jocks -- even they will treat them better than other women!
Admittedly, I am cynical. I say things often that could be considered offensive or sarcastic, such as my view that "love is only for pretty people". But I assume that anyone reading or listening to me isn't braindead. Even blondes (I kid, I kid!).
Secondly, she assumes the reliationship is one-way. She never assumes that the "geek" might be interested in what music styles, hobbies, interests and worldview the lady brings to the relationship. Believe it or not geeks can have conversations about more than just tech.
I agree with another poster about this: If a man had written and posted this blog on AMD's site, he's have been fired in 2 seconds flat for sexism.
Way to go double standard.
That is mostly due to Japan being a small nation with few resources. They simply don't have the infrastructure to fight a prolonged battle. It has nothing to do with their desire to fight, in WWII, those guys just didn't give up, which played a huge role in the decision to drop the A-bomb versus having a D-Day type invasion of the homeland.
WWII, if you really think about it, was the triumph of quantity over quality. The Germans were 20 years ahead of us technologically, but they couldn't build enough weapons fast enough. For every Panzer tank they had, we had 20 or 30 Shermans, which were terrible tanks, but we had a lot of them. What America had was lots of infrastructure, lots of resources, and lots of manufacturing capability. Our tech was low-end compared to the Germans, but when they blew up our shit, we just kept cranking out more, and eventually wore them down.
The Japanese had few resources. After we knocked out their navy, there wasn't much left. And yet, it took us longer to defeat the Japanese than the Germans. They were more spread out, and they were more intractable. And, like I said earlier, they did not give up. They fought to the death, and that resulted in a greater causaulty count in the Pacific than in the European theater.
The point is: Don't discount Japan's ability to really show some teeth when they want. To this day, their TV Samurai dramas emphasize noble honor in dying while destroying your enemy. That makes them, to put this in geek terms, more like the Klingons -- and therefore, you should consider them dangerous when provoked.
Because it "trains" us to be passive consumers of media on the internet.
As a result, we'll see more and more, that the internet is going to be controlled by a few big companies, and it will be become TV all over again, where THEY decide what we get to watch, what we get to read, and everything else will be censored, unaccessible, and when "pirates" even try to post their own material (remember when "pirate" radio was about broadcasting? Amazing how big media uses that word for *everything*...), they will be taken down, usually with cops bursting through their door to confiscate their illegal servers.
You think I'm crazy, but trust me, in 20 years, this won't seem so far fetched.
He correctly identified a successful product, the Palm Pilot, that survived well over a decade with few changes to the base architecture, and he identified a product that sold well, the Yugo, but was deemed a failure after people actually tried to use it past the warranty period.
Mayor hardware vendor?
Seriously though... Everyone cranking out a tablet is a MAJOR FAIL. Everyone who wanted a tablet has already bought the iPad. How are all those eBook readers doing in sales? I mean, aside from the market leader, Amazon, with the Kindle.
I saw Sony marketing not one, but three different eBook readers at CES in January, and nearly every other "mayor" hardware vendor also had one, Toshiba, Samsung, etc., and I pointed out to my friend at the show that the market was going to be oversaturated because everyone had jumped on this sinking ship.
So, find out how those sales are, and you'll get a pretty good indication of where the Tablet market is headed. My prediction: Oversaturation leading to a sinking ship.
I'm also reminded of all those failed "internet appliances" like the Audrey, where, in 10 years, we'll look at those tablets as a strange curiosity and wonder whatever convinced CEOs to make these god-awful devices that nobody wanted.
No no, it should be "640kb per sec should be enough for anybody"....
If I recall, this is the same argument slave owners used. After all, the country was very prosperous during slavery. Ending slavery would ruin the economy. So, why didn't you mention bringing back slavery as a way to stimulate the economy?
I say go for it. You've already dug yourself a giant hole with your first rant, I say go all the way, why stop now, prove what a douche you really are!
Except that these days, if Henry Ford paid his employees more, he'd be sued by his shareholders. Business today isn't about stimulating the economy, it's about putting the most in your own pocket.
Secondly you're confusing personal income tax with corporate taxes. TFA is about personal income tax which has nothing to do with hiring employees, unless you count the money Bezos spends on gardeners, pool-boys, maids, and other perks of being a multi-billionaire.
Boo-hoo. He actually has to pay his fair share that might be used to fix the roads he drives his multiple expensive supercars on. Or police protection so that his gated mansion is safe. Or firehouses that might prevent his mansion from burning to the ground.
People who are against taxes should, I guess, live without the benefits those taxes provide. In the meantime, can I vote whether the US goes to war or not, because I don't want my taxes spent that way? You people have such a sense of entitlement it's astounding, like the world revolves around you because you make a shitload of money.
Parent is just a right-wing nutjob who'll blame *everything* on Obama. His car didn't want to start this AM, so it must be Obama's fault... because he's black! Or a democrat. Or a muslim. Only Glenn Back can make everything right by... .... ... what is the Glenn Beck can do? Or Palin? Or any of those other teabaggers? They have no plan. Other than get elected. Or make noise.
I really, really hope that Obama *doesn't* win the presidential election next time around. Heck, if Obama is as smart as I hope he is, he won't even run. Because the Republican who gets in, in 2012 will face the same problems Obama did, and that guy isn't going to make a miracle happen either. And then you people, who blame everything on Obama will finally have to admit that the turkey you voted for aint any better.
Transparent airplane? I guess that makes sense given security. After all, they are scanning, probing, looking at our internal organs before we board the plane. No one can stow away anymore, you can't hide a bomb. Is the bathroom transparent too? I mean, we might as well fly naked at this point.
Any don't bring any luggage onto your transparent plane as it'll block the view. Unless your luggage is transparent, which security would prefer. And can we see all the way into the transparent cockpit? There's just about nothing about this that makes the least bit of sense. I call bullshit.
Look at history. Whenever a "new world" was discovered within our own planet, missionaries came across the oceans to teach "the heathens" about their god, whether those godless barbarians wanted it or not.
People take a vast journey usually for one reason: Money. The church comes along because it's politically fortuitous to do so.
Chances are, any beings from outer space are going to be similarly motivated. They are going to come here to take our natural resources, make slaves of our people, and of course, convert us to their one true religion, whether we like it or not.
And unless we've got some hideous super-virus (like the common cold), but we don't get wiped out ourselves by their version of The Flu, their technology will be far more advanced, and therefore, they will rule this planet, and for the next 20 generations we'll all talk about how the green man is keeping us down.
Are you sure Beck is serious? I think it's all an act he figured out to sell snake-oil and get rich.
I mean, that's like saying that Stuttering John from Howard Stern was "serious".