The top tax rate on personal income has never been lower, anytime in the past 50 years. Furthermore it was deliberately set lower than necessary to fund current spending levels, back in 2001. So raising it is only a sensible move. You would think from the outcry against it that it was some radical move to kill off rich people, but it is neither radical nor would it cause a catastrophe. It will not by itself greatly alter the distribution of wealth. But it will start getting us closer to having tax revenue actually fund what the government spends. (I do not think just cutting government spending is a reasonable alternative - although that can be done too - it was a combination of spending and poor tax policy that got us into this, and fixing both those things is a reasonable way to get us out of deficit).

Last I checked Libertarians were real big on property rights. And I don't think abolishing copyright is in their platform.

Digital photography differs from film photography and one of the differences is that some adjustments that you used to do in the camera are now commonly done in the computer. White balance is one, so to some extent is exposure. Large sensors can also give you the ability to crop the image if that's desirable. I don't regard this as manipulation of the image in a bad sense of the term. Not that you can't spend the time to do it all in the camera at the moment, but why do you think everyone should do this, all this time? (I'm not a pro but a reasonably competent amateur with a couple of decades of photography experience).

People with Asberger's and more generally autistic spectrum disorders may "just not get" the effect their actions have on others. They don't read social cues or understand/accept feedback very well. And they can have a tendency to break social rules (or even laws) that other people respect - they either don't see the boundary they are crossing, or (at least temporarily) don't care. The solution though is not to "hurt him back." You can to some extent teach someone to understand people better, recognize and follow social rules better, regulate their own emotions better. That is part of treatment. Most people learn this fairly easily and at a young age but Asberger's makes it much harder. That is not an excuse for behavior that breaks laws. But it is a mitigating factor.

You may want to have your economics unconnected to politics, but that is unrealistic. Economic theories can imply political actions, and political actions can alter how economies function.

Maybe that would help But I think Jerry Yang owned a lot of Yahoo, and when Microsoft offered a lot of money--too much money, really--for the company, he turned them down. I don't think a lot of shareholders are thanking him for that decision now.

Before Turbo C was Turbo Pascal. And before that, Niklaus Wirth wrote a number of influential books, including "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", which includes a lot of the material that an intro CS course still has. But Pascal is not a popular language anymore.

I just checked a book out of the library and practiced. It was boring as all hell but I did learn to type. It was well worth the time since I've been using that skill daily for the past 40 years.

You do know that us older guys invented the pony tail and tie-dye look, don't you?

There are several solar technologies and you can lose by betting on the wrong one, which it appears was a factor here. A lot of companies with advanced technology have low profit margins (or no profits). The tech may be good, but it doesn't guarantee you a profit when others can sell an equivalent at a better price/performance ratio.

Solar companies have also been affected by the withdrawal of subsidies for installation of solar, especially in Europe. If your business model is based on assuming a level of subsidy on the consumption side, you are in trouble if that changes.

If by "calc3" you mean 3rd-year calculus, that makes sense. Otherwise, not. I took 3 years of calculus at Caltech, and differential equations were in year 3.

B&H is the bomb. It is the newegg equivalent for camera gear: they have practically everything, ship fast, competitive prices, no hassles. But generally they don't offer any warranty except what the manufacturer provides. And for some equipment that is rather limited (for Canon it is 1 year). Not a problem for me but YMMV.

> Not saying it couldn't possibly happen, but at this point the need to break away from x86/x64 is vanishingly small

This was true a few years ago. It is not true any more, now that so much is being done on portable devices.

US military and diplomats already use secure networks so it's not completely infeasible.

But for commercial transactions there are some issues. It is hard to require a separate machine for secure access so privilege escalation (insecure->secure) is an issue. Plus if you store the credentials you need to access the secure internet on the machine that is doing the access, then all you know for sure is that the machine initiated a transaction, not that a specific individual did. In particular, a hacked box allows impersonation of the user. If you require some kind of token to be plugged in, PIN to be entered, etc. then you have more security, but it becomes difficult to do automated transactions, which are very common and useful.

Oracle doesn't charge for developer use, not even of their high-end products. If you put in production then you need to pay.