>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

Community Colleges are highly subsidized. You view the price to be "right" because you don't see what it costs you in taxes.

So, without federal aid of this sort, higher education wouldn't exist at all then?

Let's see China pull this off without constantly manipulating their currency to boost the manufacturing while keeping pollution half of what it is currently over those same 10 years. It's okay, because when inflation hits, the sh*t will hit the fan in China (look up the economic trilemma and see where China's weakness is... for the USA, we choose not to peg our currency to fix our trade gap).

Here is the actual data (just a few years old though)
http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2010/AvgFedTaxRates_Summary.xlsx

If you make only 30K (in pre-tax income) a year, that places you roughly in between the bottom two income quintiles.

You can clearly look that the bottom 40 percent pay no income tax as the numbers for the bottom two quintiles are negative for their share of tax liabilities. This means your refund at the end of the tax year more than offsets the federal income taxes you had to pay over the year. That said, you are correct about having to pay other taxes, but in terms of the federal dollars (since that's the focus, and some states have no income taxes and others have low sales taxes), there is no national sales tax - just excise taxes and safety net taxes.

Based on the numbers you cite above and the data provided by the CBO, your numbers don't match up. Your 2K seems to be in the Social Insurance & Excise taxes part, not Income tax. And in the offshoot chance that I'm wrong, I'd recommend getting a new tax accountant.

I like watching some Street Fighter 4 (or SF3) matches. Some of the things these guys pull off are amazing.

And there is always the famous Daigo vs Justin Wong match.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeM0rH_4ung

This further proves AC's point... the only way have extra dollars can affect anyone other than yourself is if it is used to twist the system (i.e. - buying advertising to get your candidate voted in), and you are back to the original point that government and corp. are in collusion.

If I buy a new pair of gold plated shoes at $15,000 ... this doesn't impact you in any fashion. Let's say I make 4 times the average salary compared to any random slashdoter... how would my purchasing patterns have affects you at all today? How would you even know what the typical slashdoter did today other than browse the website?

His analogy doesn't break done when you look at some of the services government often provides. Take Amtrak, the government owned railroad... last time I looked it up, they have only had one profitable year. If they cannot provide a service at a price people are willing pay, how do you suppose they make up the difference? If Comcast cannot do the same thing, how do they make up the difference?

Answer? Comcast closes it's doors (bail-out jokes for the banks and auto-industry aside)... the government does not. It is an effective waste of resources. That's not to say there is no use for government. It should uphold laws when individuals or companies try to steal, etc...

What do you mean you "can't switch away" ? You can always go _without_ !!

A month of PSN Plus? All they have to do is take the deals of the month away to make that deal worthless.

It's a good thing I already changed my credit card number and all of my passwords, just in case.

By the way, I just happened to use the same login and password on the PSN as I did for my GMail account. Gmail informed me the other day that someone had accessed the account from an IP in China. That when I started changing EVERYTHING and started watching my accounts like a hawk.

I claim the iWeb!

Enrollments are up because unemployment is up. Pure and simple. People lose a job, they go back and get retrained. Enrollment is up across the board - not just in Comp Sci.