Neither can my one-year-old. But he's learned that anything in matte black or silver with buttons or a screen is a wonderful thing. We gave him a spare remote control and spare keyboard so we could use ours unhindered without just having to shut him down every time he wanted to be like us and use the cool toys. He still knows there's a difference between his and ours, but he's more accepting, and that means I can introduce him to tech while maintaining my desired limits.

There is way too much light to look directly at it, since the Hubble would have to be pointed at the sun to do this. Other stars and other planets are much further away, so their light will be dim enough to be safe to point at.

If you want to see the transit of Venus from Earth, you'll need to be wearing special solar glasses that blot out everything but the sun itself. Unless we put a big solar filter on the Hubble, we can't point it at the sun.

Just for accuracy's sake, the 90% and the 17% are different types of info. The 90% is a marginal rate (for the remaining income above $400,000). The 17% is an total aka average (for all income, including what was below $400,000). Using the CPI as one measure of inflation, $400,000 in 1950 is almost $4 million today. Finally, there were more tax loopholes and tax shelters back then (for individuals at least), so that folks who earned a lot could avoid paying massive taxes by setting up "Foundations" and "Trusts" and other sorts of investments that allowed them to reduce their taxable income. Tax law is complex, and absurd situations like what Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others do is just one more argument to me for a greatly simplified flat tax structure for both individuals and businesses.

4% each way? You really should switch to credit unions. I manage to get my money converted for a 1% fee.

They are also closed for significant periods around Passover (Pesach) and other Jewish Holy Days. I give B&H props for disclosing fully when they have different prices for grey-market (priced for International sales and without USA warranties/rebates) from domestic products.

Having been to Manzanar and Dachau, I can say they are dramatically different. Manzanar had no break-you-down exercises like "Move all the rocks to the west side of the camp today. And move them back to the east side tomorrow." Manzanar permitted those interned to practice their faith. And the only ovens at Manzanar cooked food.

Of 11,000 people who were relocated to Manzanar, only 146 died in 4 years, 0.25%/year. Official records for Dachau are 206,206 prisoners and 31,951 deaths over its 12 years of operation, but those records have problems.

I hoped, by visiting Dachau, to come to a greater understanding of why Germany played mind-games and death-games with its prisoners, while America was content with simply isolating Japanese-Americans. I didn't. The displays and presentations at Dachau offer no insight into what drove the barbaric actions of the Nazis, and offers no lessons on how to prevent it from recurring. Only the memorials erected there offer hope with their charges of "Never Forget."

That flight may have cost Delta $ by itself, but they probably needed the plane in LAX for the next day's travels.

I agree they're not hard technically to fix. They are hard logistically. When there's one hole, you have to divert traffic from that lane for a period of time. You then need several pieces of heavy equipment to grind the surrounding road in order to make a rough surface for adhesion, heat and apply the asphalt mix, flatten it into place, and finally replace any damaged road striping. And if that pothole is seen by 100,000 people in a week, that's a lot of cars you inconvenience while doing your fix, so they'll get annoyed if you just plop down and fix a pothole that you find without putting out signs for a week that you'll be doing construction and they should find an alternate route. You're right that cities make other items higher priorities -- in some places it's transit, in other places it's exorbitant retirement pensions -- because you don't get voted into City Hall on the basis of potholes.

The math is wrong here. If I donate $1,000 to a church or to any other charity and deduct it on my taxes, I reduce my taxable income by $1,000 but income tax is only a portion of my taxable income, not 100%. Otherwise I'd be flat broke. Permanently. Think about it. So if I itemize deductions, I will reduce my tax bill by somewhere between $100 and $400, depending on how much I earn and where I live (in Manhattan, there's even a local income tax; some states have no income tax). So that still means that I gave between 60% and 90% of that $1,000 to that organization. It is not majority government funded.

It's great to hear that a judge has said no to these folks, but given the number of other cases they have filed, I suspect they'll just try a different courtroom next. Per the Judge's decision,

This one case is probably just a hiccup to these trolls, unless a lot of people get a lot of positive legal publicity for this ruling.