higher

This is excellent. I would have preferred a title like "US Navy drops frozen, dead mice in Guam to feed Tylenol to snakes."

The essential nature of Social Security accounting is such that FICA tax is unrelated to FICA spending. At the moment, much of your FICA tax is spent on general fund items. In the future, much of your income tax will be spent on FICA items.

I see I have been rated down for posting the truth. If you would like to read about the truth, you can find it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)

"Congress invested these surpluses into special series, non-marketable U.S. Treasury securities held by the Social Security Trust Fund. Under the law, the government bonds held by Social Security are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government."

"According to most projections, the Social Security trust fund will begin drawing on its Treasury Notes toward the end of the next decade (around 2018 or 2019), at which time the repayment of these notes will have to be financed from the general fund."

All social security revenue that is not paid out in benefits is replaced with unmarketable treasury securities and spent as part of the general fund. When social security ceases to run a nominal surplus, the money to pay for those securities will come out of the general fund. As you can see, social security is essentially part of the broader budget, and the divide between its budget and the broader budget is strictly imaginary.

As such I think it is appropriate to calculate FICA spending exactly as the author has.

The federal government actually only has about 58-59 cents of revenue for each dollar it spends. It would be slightly more accurate (if extremely inflammatory) to make an applet that generates a receipt for only entitlement spending, as entitlement spending has come within 2% of revenue recently.

Agorism is a political philosophy dedicated to the idea that free markets (and a more free society) can arise out of a trend toward disregarding governments in commercial matters. It comes with all the typical and commonly rejected anarchist ideas like "any state is inherently unjust and arbitrary," but isn't altogether unreasonable.

The author seems to think that financial reform has done anything to harm the ability of big banks to extract dollars from productive humans. It has not. Among other things, it has granted FOIA-immunity to the SEC, so that in addition to failing to regulate the industry, it can now ensure that nobody knows for certain that it fails to regulate the industry.

Ask a broker, but be careful.

AAPL is among a lot of stocks that have a long way to fall before their prices can be called reasonable, but it's difficult to know when they will do it.

It is pretty easy to distinguish DRM from net-enabled features. You simply need to ask "Could the feature exist without an internet connection?" You claim that users will conflate the two regardless, but I doubt this.

Imagine an alternate dimension in which StarCraft shipped with LAN support but never supported online play over Battle.net. The StarCraft community would be based on gamer-oriented VPNs, and would likely be about as healthy as it has become in our dimension. If, when StarCraft II was announced, players learned that LAN play would still be supported, but play over Battle.net had been added, I don't think very many people would complain that the product had been deliberately crippled.

In our world, StarCraft supported LAN play and Battle.net play, while StarCraft II does not support any type of multiplayer other than over Battle.net. Battle.net play has resulted in half-second latency for all players and several days of downtime since release. Additionally, it is known that a "Professional" version of StarCraft II exists that supports LAN play - the feature has simply been removed from the retail version.

I think it is pretty clear which of these is a feature and which is not.

6729466257235539554569001718687588373666448683224383231337026 019905073400751018156318144951134485894311062056319984854259 302060891437370381162512635651087373408262536857317506536147 186872170494090165706190665926457868924827595159015446360281 183010218745193464862049820311770912960304161135038871621506 701864534740543956506706066808523426942838251657370223868436 844466943532116866437404057835199710326105051910979218083463 184098377866657027576548215047851405584797025622487788995491 356686114689049989434173534898442252175036069087582093616931 342900502171436833896077813785678367742565874503193480565584 90906414

Yes. It should be fairly simple to generate a program that generates all strings of length 20 that will be accepted by Wells Fargo's login page. I would consider such a program a compressed version of a string containing my username and password. If you want to generate a shorter output, you might try the De Bruijn sequence.

edit: I should warn you, though, Wells is likely bankrupt, along with FDIC. If you want to plunder my accounts, you should get to work before accounting fraud becomes illegal in this country.

Not at all. The reasoning is that it is simply impossible to "steal" a non-rivaled good, and it is absurd to claim ownership of an integer.