Let him find his own way. At 8 years he has plenty of time to discover what he likes. Of course you want to be sure he has opportunity and access to sample many things.

I have been a SF and Fantasy reader most of my life ( pushing 70 now), but I also remember that I did not really find my way there until I was 10 or 12. Before that I read encyclopedias. First SF for me were HG Wells and J Verne. Then Edgar Rice Burroughs. Those are really old fashioned, but still good reads today.

After 39 years, you likely should be retiring. I retired after a 38-year career, and it was the best thing I ever did!
Go apply for Social Security and begin tapping into those IRAs and 401Ks. You are set.

If, after you retire, you still feel the urge to do something creative, Get involved with an open source project or go help some local community-service organization with its website or something like that.

A very long time ago I was in a work group whose IT guy had decided to name the servers after mountains in the Bay Area. That worked very well in general, but no one could ever spell Umunhum correctly, and it was forever a problem! So be careful when you choose place names.

I live in NZ, a country where tipping is very seldom done. The service is generally very bad because there is no incentive to do better. I am always happy to return to the US and dine where I am treated better.

And on the coinage topic: NZ dropped the 1-cent coin maybe 12 years ago, and the 5-cent coin was dropped in 2006. Prices are NOT written in multiples of 10 cents. They are written as 4.99 or 12.34, or whatever. Tax is not an issue, although every price includes a national tax. Electronic transactions (credit or debit card) are charged the exact price. Rounding happens only when one pays cash, and then on the total amount, not each individual item. There are 2 or 3 approved rounding methods, and the store must publicly post which method they use.

It all just works.

The OP's assessment of "Overly-Restrictive" seems rather naive. During my entire career, just about every job I held had such provisions about intellectual property rights. I would not call it "overly-restrictive" at all. And that said, I found it usually possible to get some "wiggle-room" by up-front telling them exceptions that I wanted to preserve my sole rights in. Renegotiate, though it is harder to do once you are onboard.

This comment is spot-on. Generally no one really cares about degrees or qualifications except that you have some. An advanced degree basically means you have demonstrated persistence, little more. If your job requires some particular arcane knowledge (rare), then you employer should provide the training. (I know, many cheapskates do not.)

What really matters is "can you deliver the needed results?" Make that happen however you can.

Federal judges are not elected. They are appointed for life. But, if you read the TFA you will discover that the court in discussion is NOT a federal court. It is a state court, and judges ARE routinely elected for state courts.

The USA IS the only country which taxes citizens that way. Many (most?) countries do tax the worldwide income of their citizens, but only while those citizens are tax residents of their home country. Most countries stop taxing citizens when they move away from the home country for a period of time. The US is the only country which never gives up. A US citizen is taxed on worldwide income no matter where they live and how long they have lived there.

The $87000 exemption you mention is there, but applies only to earned income. I live offshore, am retired and have no earned income, so that exemption certainly does not apply to me (wish it did). Yes, there are exemptions for taxes paid to foreign countries, which follow generally from the idea of not taxing a tax.

My country of residence also taxes my worldwide income. Thankfully there are some tax agreements between the countries which alleviate potential double taxation, so the bite is not as bad as it could be.

The first article (from Microsoft) says: "While traditional absentee ballots rely on the postal system, LiveBallot gives voters immediate access to a ballot that they can mark online or on paper and return via mail or fax, depending on state election laws."

The second article (from InformationWeek) says: "The system allows voters registered to vote in primaries who live overseas to have access to ballots 45 days before the election. From that time until the election, they can cast their ballot electronically, or print out the ballot and mail it or fax it, depending on the state's election rules." The second article says it derives from the first (see the words "according to Microsoft" which link to the first article), and the first article mentions marking the ballot online, not filing it. I think the Information Week writer injected some of his own bias into his article.

I will stand by what I said.

Now, if I could only find out whether the California county in which I vote is one of the 13.

As I read the TFA, this is NOT an instance of a new online voting system. Apparently is only a new mechanism for providing ballots to overseas voters. The ballot form will be online, and has to be downloaded, marked, and returned in the mail. The ballot has to be signed, and the voting authorities will check signatures against registration lists. Mainly, this is an attempt to eliminate the uncertainty of mail delivery times on one side of the transaction.

Again, according to my reading of the TFA there will be some authentication process on the front end to allow only registered voters to get ballots. I don't see any huge risk here.

Good grief! What a load of bollocks this person is spewing.

I am one of these US citizens living abroad, and I very much appreciate that the STATE governments of the US enable me to continue to vote. As a citizen, I certainly have that right. And as a US citizen, I have a continuing obligation to pay taxes on my worldwide income to the US government AND to the government where I live, and I do so gladly.

This new technology use will likely make the process go more smoothly, and lessen the likelihood that a paper ballot may miss deadlines in the mail. I last lived in California in the US, so I vote in California. When I lived there, I requested absentee ballots for every election because I never knew if I would be present on election day itself. For voting internationally, they use exactly the same absentee ballot process, and send the ballots by ordinary mail. It is neither a big cost item nor can I imagine it being a terribly labor-intensive effort.

I have chosen to live elsewhere, but that makes me no less a patriotic citizen!

And to my mind, that is not as bad as "their", "there", and "they're". I see those misused all the time, and it is an outrage. Spell-checking as the only form of proof-reading that newspapers get is disgusting.

But now we have "texting language", which is exerting a fair amount of pressure for spelling change, I think. And although not changing particularly, there are huge differences in spelling of English between American and British forms.

I have not used Koha either, but it has a reputation of being a very usable solution for libraries, large and small. It is FOSS, too (GPLv2).

Koha originated in New Zealand, and the Maori word koha means "gift", in line with FOSS. Liblime is a US company which offers service and support for Koha.

"illusions of originality"? I merely observed that the international nature of the particular protests had been overlooked by the original poster. No claim to originality that I can see. According to you and the other responder, there are indeed other cases about which I am now informed. Big whoops.