Jews in Space

Personally, I feel some of the best episodes aren't available on DVD either. Seriously, WTF haven't they released the entire series on DVD yet? Just those silly "collections" of themed episodes, leaving most of it out.

Are you seriously comparing Star Trek to Survivor on technobabble?

With the complaint that the writers would just leave "I can't tech the tech core anymore!" kind of language in the script isn't surprising to me, nor am I upset over it. I don't think there are many people who possess the skill to both write an interesting story and come up with realistic-but-yet-nonexistant tech. So if they want to take people who are good at writing stories and have them write a script and then find tech experts to fill in the blanks, good for them. That's one solution the problem and given Star Trek's huge success it's one that worked.

That said, like all TV there's good scifi and bad scifi. Often within the very same TV series. There is some tech in Star Trek that is just so silly sounding it does distract you from the story. "Red Matter" for example...

ROFLS! He didn't go easy on you, they always do that. You fell for it too, you thought the police officer was being nice. Nothing like fooling people into being pleased with getting a ticket!

So when it comes to really really big numbers, we need to rely upon elfs in trees?

It's taxable whether or not you're in the trade or business if you receive $20 for doing some work. If you're not in the trade or business it's not subject to self employment tax. So it would end up on line 21 instead of line 12 of the 1040. Income is income from whatever source derived, and is taxable unless specifically exempted.

You're probably thinking of the requirement to issue a 1099-misc (which is $600/year) or the requirement to pay self employment tax on self employment income ($400/year). There is no "don't have to report if less than $500/year" law. Due to the rounding done on a tax return, you effectively don't have to report anything less than $0.50 (because it rounds to 0) but otherwise you are legally required to report income regardless of amount. Now, despite the fact you're supposed to report all income in practice a lot does not get reported. Anything received in cash where an information document is not filed to the IRS often is not filed simply to avoid paying tax on it. Interest and dividend income under $10 is often not reported because no 1099-int or 1099-div is filed for amounts under $10 (in a tax system where most people just dump all the 1099's and w-2's at their tax person's office people simply don't think about it, it's not intentional tax evasion and most of the time makes no difference anyway.)

Well, most emergency treatment you can get by showing up at an ER. And while they do bill you, they effectively have no way to force you to pay. Medical expenses remain the largest cause of bankruptcy's which means those bills don't get paid. However, it is limited. Broken bones and gun wounds will get treated easily. Organ transplants and some cancer treatments you'll get refused treatment (though they'll probably give you pain meds to help you go out peacefully.) It really depends on how expensive the treatment is and whether it requires immediate treatment or if it just slowly kills you. The cheaper and more urgent it is the more likely they will do it without payment. The more expensive and less urgent the more likely they'll require payment up front. Hence the reason we always have news articles about some insurance company "killing" someone by not paying (because the hospital wouldn't do it without payment.) So basically, if you are without insurance and become seriously ill you're probably going to go bankrupt and you may be refused treatment.

No. Actually taxes are based on both where you live and where you work. That is, you are subject to their income tax rules if you live OR work in the state. Most states have built into their tax codes methods to avoid double taxation between states. The majority of these are via a credit on the resident state tax return for taxes paid to the non-resident state. Or, in other words, the state where you WORK gets the tax money. So for example, if you were a resident of Colorado on a temporary assignment in Texas, you would pay Colorado income tax on that money, because there's no income tax from Texas to generate a credit. If you were a resident of Colorado on a temporary assignment in California, you would file a tax return for both California and Colorado. You would pay the California taxes, and then apply taxes paid to California as a credit on your Colorado return and end up not paying Colorado income tax (so long as California has equal or greater tax rates than Colorado, otherwise Colorado would take the difference.)

There are certain exceptions. For example a few states have reciprocal agreements. As you experienced, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have a reciprocal agreement. What that means is the states have an agreement not to tax each other's residents. So Pennsylvania residents that work in New Jersey will pay only Pennsylvania income tax and New Jersey residents that work in Pennsylvania will pay only New Jersey income tax. But this is the EXCEPTION not the RULE. In fact, Pennsylvania only has reciprocal agreements with 6 states (Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia) - had you worked in any other state with an income tax you would have paid income tax to the state you worked in. And the majority of states have no reciprocal agreements at all.

As a practical matter, agree 100%. Google allows the cell phone networks to place all their usual restrictions on android. This is the same problem we've had for as long as cell phones have existed. The networks take a decent phone with good features, disable 90% of the features and functionality, load it up with their logo on everything and their own crappy software, and sell what amounts to a shiny turd to the consumers.

On the one hand they're claiming XP is obsolete. On the other, they're still pushing it even on yet unreleased devices. My only assumption can be that this Eee keyboard is obsolete and that I should hold out for a linux based one.

The government better keep it's hands OUT OF MY MEDICARE!

Absolutely. If I'm interviewing someone for a programming job and when I ask what qualifies them for the position, I don't want to hear "Well, I took programming classes at school." I mean, yes, that's good and all, but someone who can say that and can also say they contributed to some-major-OSS-project in their spare time is going to look better. If the only thing you can say is you took classes in it, I'll assume you're yet another fool who got sold on the TV commercials claiming millions of high paying programming jobs are waiting for you and has no interest in actually programming.