Given this reality, doesn't that ethically justify using only pirated copies of TurboTax to do one's taxes?

Definitely do your research before making a decision on this one. We considered it, briefly, with our daughter -- but ultimately decided it was just too much to tackle.
One thing I didn't even really consider, initially, is that "homeschooling" doesn't even necessarily have to mean you're keeping your kid at home all day, acting as their full-time teacher.

In at least some areas where there's an active homeschooling community, it's possible to work out arrangements with other people so you teach a subject or two that's your own area of expertise, and then you let your kid learn from other homeschooling parents who are teaching other subjects they're best at teaching. There are lots of possibilities here, up to and including parents who are willing to teach your kid most of the school day in exchange for you bartering for something they need like transportation and fixing meals for them.

At some point, I think this starts to blur the lines enough to where you start asking how much different it *really* is than just putting them in the public school you're already paid for via your taxes anyway? But there are a lot of ways to do homeschooling when you work with others in the community doing the same thing.

I've heard multiple parents who did home school comment that they felt it was easiest and most effective for younger kids though. By the time their kid(s) got to grade 6-9, they often put them back in a standard school. (Probably makes sense as middle school is when kids really begin valuing things other than just the learning process itself. Peer relationships start becoming important, and I think for many kids - it's actually the peer pressure to look intelligent or to "keep up" with one's classmates that provides motivation for them to keep working. With home schooling, part of that is lost or weakened.)

But I've also read a fair bit of commentary (mostly from libertarian types who see some red flags about government taking Silk Road down), claiming the murder for hire claims are completely fabricated by the Feds, in order to get a stronger conviction.

That would seem to be a possibility worth considering, at the very least. (It's not too difficult to see some parallels in the lengths they've gone to, trying to punish Kim DotCom as severely as possible.)

Personally, I maintain that, really, the only big issue with Silk Road (both 1 and 2) was the effort made to create item categories that clearly proved the site operators knowingly/willingly facilitated transactions that would be illegal in the country they lived in. I rather like and support the idea of a big, anonymous marketplace -- but I think you have to approach such a thing so you're essentially a "common carrier". Nobody files charges against the phone company for providing a number to someone using it to make illegal drug deals, right? And nobody files charges against the mailman who actually delivers the illegal goods that someone purchases online. That's because we understand they're just doing a job of moving content around, and have no reasonable way to know what that content consists of.

The quote from that Time article says it all:

"Taxis are pretty much a public utility. Like subway and bus systems, the electric grid or the sewage system, taxis provide an invaluable service to cities like New York, and the government should play an important role in regulating them."

If you're the type who supports public utilities thinks an expansion of them would be a benefit to society, then sure -- you're not going to be a friend of any services like Uber.

I'd have to 100% disagree. Taxi service is *not* equivalent to a public utility by any stretch of the imagination. Public utilities won a monopoly status primarily because they were trying to distribute a needed service (like water, natural gas or electricity) where a large infrastructure was required, which had to terminate at the endpoint of each customer's residence. If you allowed competing power companies, you'd suddenly be facing problems of companies wanting to run their own lines everywhere, cluttering everything up (or being hugely disruptive if the cables were buried underground and one company or another was always tearing up a road or yard to access them). At some point, you'd even reach a point where new entrants would be physically prevented from selling their service due to lack of space. (How many water or sewer lines can you fit in a given neighborhood?)

Taxi drivers simply operate standard sized motor vehicles, along with every other licensed driver on the roadways. If each taxi company had to build out their own road and highway infrastructure to operate on -- then sure, you'd have an argument for a regulated public utility. It's not like that.

My local Radio Shack still has these things too (thankfully!). I needed a couple of non-polarized capacitors recently to change the frequency cut-off for dome tweeters in my Jeep - and sure enough, they had 'em, and on a Saturday afternoon too.

I think the problem is, they got rid of most of the other gadgets and electronics we came to know and love R/S for -- and the substitute inventory isn't worthy.

For example, I remember when you could count on R/S for a whole line of voltmeters. Everything from a pocket-sized analog cheapie to fairly nice LCD digital models. Now, I'm not sure if they carry more than 1 or 2 and they're likely not to even be in stock in a given store. And how about soldering irons and accessories? Again, they might have a tube of solder for sale, but not sure they have replacement tips or several models of pencil type irons and guns of various wattage?

And what happened to the car audio stuff?! I know people never did really respect Radio Shack branded car speakers or amps. But you know? I'd sure like to be able to drop by and pick up an amplifier install kit with all the appropriate cabling and connectors, or various noise filters. And as long as they're carrying everyone else's gear these days anyway, it'd be a great opportunity to "one up" the big box retailers who have increasingly limited car audio offerings in stock. Carry the items you normally can only get via mail order right now, like the Asian GPS stereos designed to look and fit in place of specific factory originals.

I once had a CB radio stolen out of my car, while it was in my *driveway*. Called the cops and they didn't even want to be bothered.... Could barely get the guy to write a report, and he sure as heck didn't want to waste time checking for fingerprints or any of that.

During a messy divorce, many years later, my ex and some of her friends/relatives ransacked the house while I was out. Came home to find the front door wide open with the A/C running full blast in the middle of summer, and pretty much everything gone from the house that wasn't nailed down. The cops were called immediately. They just laughed at me and walked around whistling and making comments about how "She sure screwed him over good, didn't she?" Nothing useful was done.

So when my portable GPS was stolen out of my truck in a smash and grab several years ago (all while I was picking up a to-go food order from a Chipotle), I didn't expect the cops to be of any help whatsoever. Surprisingly, an officer showed up who was friendly and eager to try to help out. He got out a whole fingerprint kit and went over all the possible places the thief might have touched the truck, took a detailed report, and gave me several contact numbers to reach him or other officers about the case. They never did recover the GPS ... but I was truly impressed that they actually did their job trying to help.

So yeah, results vary. By and large, the police disappoint me -- but I'll give credit where it's due.

Yeah.... wild and crazy guy I am, right?

But seriously, we had major issues with our VMWare ESXi server on Friday night and when they finally got it back up and running properly, it wouldn't communicate with the FreeNAS server I set up as iSCSI storage for it.

I knew SuperBowl Sunday would be a nearly optimal time to take down servers and work on all of this without interrupting anybody, since normally - we've got people doing work via VPN over the weekends and at random, odd hours. Server or network maintenance is a huge pain for us....

Well, the big disconnect also comes about because government leaders learned LONG ago that any time you offer to do something new, you start talking about tax increases to pay for it. People get to the point where they accept that's "just how it is", so the debate, each time, turns into one of asking if it's worth paying that much MORE out of your paychecks for whatever proposed improvement or benefit is on the table.

In *reality*, government sits on so many resources, we should probably be at the point where the right question to ask is one of redistribution of their existing budget.

As just one example, up here in the DC area right now, there's a big debate raging because the National Park Service wants to start charging a fee to use the C&O canal "towpath". Basically, this is a 70+ mile long stretch of land that runs along the side of the Potomac River that people use for biking, hiking, jogging, etc. Nobody's even really sure how the heck they'd enforce charging a fee to use it -- but the park services people are all gung-ho to do it anyway. The claim is that with Federal budget cuts, they just don't have the funds to maintain the towpath without enacting fees.

But woah! Wait a minute here! If you look over at the Bureau of Land Management, those folks own a HUGE chunk of the entire West Coast of the U.S. right now, claiming it's land they need to care for and manage. How much of a budget do THEY have?! How about letting a little more of THAT land go back to nature, un-managed, and give that money saved to the National Park Service? That's a much more logical move, IMO, than expecting people to pay to bicycle or hike along a dirt path.

There is a radio controlled flight club for the DC area, which operates out of Gaithersburg (really not that far a drive from DC proper).

http://www.dc-rc.org/

The fact is, we have no need for building this tall. If the Arab world didn't have more money from oil than they know what to do with, they'd never spend the money on such a project in the first place.

Many of our current skyscrapers have problems with unoccupied rooms/floors, as it is. You can try to recoup money on tourism - but that only makes so much sense. The higher the building, the more you've got invested in heating and cooling, electricity, maintenance, etc. etc. -- just to get the same tourist dollars the "other guy" used to get with his tall building that USED to be the "tallest one" before you beat him.

Carbon fiber technology is worth pursuing, so sure - this has some engineering and scientific interest. But realistically, no ... We've got plenty of space on this planet for people without resorting to these measures.

I happen to be one of the people who admires many of Jobs' business decisions and ideas. But he was also known to "overshoot" reality at times, with expectations that went beyond what was reasonable.

I think he was desperately looking for solutions for a "post PC" world, where people would give up traditional computers, in exchange for a superior device. (After all, in the sci-fi "Star Trek" universe, nobody was carrying around a laptop computer, right? The computer was just built in to the environment so you could speak commands to it.)

I really like my iPad, especially since I started taking the train to and from work each day in a 1 hour long commute. It's the ideal device to read the news on, check email, waste time on Facebook, play a casual game or two on, etc. But it's really just a convenience item in the modern world. It's never been anything much more than a big version of Apple's smartphone, without the cellular voice call features.

The word "drone" itself conjures up all sorts of fear in the general public, so of course they're going to milk this situation for all it's worth.

Let's be realistic though... You could probably drive a small radio controlled car up to the front entrance of the White House too, with some payload like a bomb on it -- and that's been possible for long before the toy drones/helicopters were available on the mass market.

There's probably not anything you can or should do about this stuff beyond the systems they've got in place. (A bunch of human beings paid to try to protect the president and the grounds.) New FAA restrictions? That will mean nothing to someone bent on mis-using a drone to cause destruction at the White House!

Let's face it. The White House has been FULL of drones for a long time!

I've used a *lot* of different mice out there, and I keep settling on Logitech's MX series as one of my favorites.
I used to have their MX1000 laser mouse, and then the MX Revolution .... and now the Performance Mouse MX.

My only complaint about these mice is that the black rubber "grippy" areas on the sides where you rest your fingers wears off after a while in spots, making the mouse look pretty ragged/beat-up at that point, even if it's still functional otherwise.

I also preferred the MX Revolution's charging cradle to the current design where you just plug a micro-USB cable into the front of the mouse to recharge it. (I find the micro USB cable to be a bit difficult to get inserted just right, and I have a feeling it will be one of the things that breaks first on this mouse.)

What I'd really like to see, though, is a bluetooth version of one of these. If you're a Mac user (especially of a notebook like the Air which doesn't have a lot of ports), a bluetooth mouse makes much more sense than wasting a USB port with a wireless receiver dongle. But there's VERY little available in the way of quality bluetooth mice. HP makes a couple of Z series BT mice, but the more expensive ($60 or so) one that tries to look like an Apple product (complete with gesture support on the flat top surface) fails to impress. Other than it's promised long battery life, it was nothing but negatives when I tried it. Gesture support is jerky and overly sensitive, unlike Apple's own Magic Mouse -- and the buttons start acting up where they stick when pressed or fail to register when pressed. The cheaper black Z series BT mouse from HP actually feels more comfortable in my hand and works better as a standard mouse (no fancy gesture support or slim line buttons that don't work right). BUT, drop it on the floor even once and expect it to blow up into pieces all over the floor.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle, myself.

Someone deciding to make some extra money on the side driving for Uber doesn't need a "commercial license" from the DMV! What they probably DO need is a special car insurance policy or rider that covers the situation.

Just like if I upgrade my car with a fancy, multi-thousand dollar stereo system -- I can't expect my auto insurance to cover its replacement cost if it's stolen. They're going to say, "Sorry buddy. We insured you based on the standard equipment we know comes with the particular make and model of vehicle you insured with us." They WILL however, let me pay extra to itemize what's in it and get that covered as additional coverage.

The auto insurance company who starts marketing a reasonably priced insurance rider specifically for folks doing "ride sharing" will find it very profitable and popular.