This isn't accurate. Web-based tax apps are now easily as full featured as their desktop variants. I've used TaxCut Online for some years, now, and have been able to do so relatively complex returns that way (investments, small business employer, etc).

My main criteria for choosing an elementary school for my kids is distance. That is, can they walk to it on their own? If yes, then I'm good.

I understand why other parents shop around for the "best" elementary schools, but I don't know that their reasoning is sound, in all (most?) cases. In the end, nearly all schools will be roughly the same. Yes, there are going to be some outliers in both directions, but those are the exceptions.

In most cases, the school will have a mix of good teachers, mediocre teachers, and outright bad teachers. It is my job as a parent to make sure that my kids learn what they need to learn regardless of what kind of teacher they have. That means nightly discussions on what they learned in school that day plus an overview of their homework. If the teacher is good, then my involvement doesn't need to go much beyond that. If the teacher is bad (like my daughter's 5th grade math teacher -- terrible!), then it's my responsibility to step up and fill in the gaps.

So yeah, if the school ended up being one of the terrible outliers, then the amount of time I would need to invest would likely drive me to find a different school... and yeah, a great outlier would mean less time for me, but who cares?

The problem with this approach is that it focuses on the end user's connectivity and not the effect such laws would have on the web sites themselves. Who cares if you have unfettered access to all sites when the sites don't exist due to legal threats.

Let's take Slashdot as an example. Say something like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc eventually succeeds and it becomes very easy to shut down any website with just a suggestion of copyright infringement on the site. That is, if somebody posted a link to The Pirate Bay in the comments, then somebody else could get Slashdot as a whole effectively shut down as a result. And yes, that's what could happen with laws such as SOPA.

What do you think happens to sites like Slashdot in an environment like this? The only reasonable response would be to drastically limit, if not eliminate, all user comments.

Meanwhile, the Slashdot user deftly installs the circumvention software and is easily able to get to Slashdot... but who cares? Without the comments, the entire site has only marginal value.

That's why circumvention software is only a tiny part of a workaround and one that will eventually fail. It's the sites that need to be protected, not the access.

I had really high hopes for the various Linux-based mobile OSes last year and before... but I wonder if it's too little; too late at this point. By all accounts, WP7 is very very slick, yet it has negligible market share and even less mind share. What advantage will this new merged OS have?

Also, the software developer side of me has extremely high doubts that this will be doable in any reasonable time frame. Merging any kind of software is tricky; merging an OS is a herculean task. And for what?

I hear this theory quite a bit and I believe that Lucas himself has said this to be the case. I don't buy it. The entire Jedi mythology holds that it's the Jedi's mastery of the Force that gives him the ability to fight with a light saber. They made it very explicit with Yoda's fight with Dooku -- Yoda was hundreds of years old and practically disabled, but his immense mastery of the Force gave him incredible fighting abilities. If anything, Obi-Wan and Vader's age should have increased their skills, not decreased them.

I remember the first time I looked into FreeBSD. It was back in 1994 and I needed to run some Unix variant on my 386 and it came down to FreeBSD or Linux. At the time, FreeBSD seemed to be significantly farther along than Linux... but in a completely unusable way, to me. I was a rank newbie to Unix that had just learned how to exit 'vi' without powering down the computer. FreeBSD had almost no documentation and certainly none for somebody like me.

Linux, on the other hand, had the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). The docs there were incredible! I hogged the computer lab's laser printer printing off the SAG and the NAG and, most importantly, Matt Welsh's 'Installation and Getting Started Guide'.

It was no contest. FreeBSD was an impenetrable mystery but 60 something floppies of Slackware later and I was hooked on Linux for life.

Nah, this is a fatal flaw only if you attempt to base Christianity on logic. Religions don't work that way. The key component is Faith, as in "my feeble human mind cannot hope to grasp God's grand design, so I have FAITH that it is true".

I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian but never thought that Adam was a real person. Genesis was always an allegory. I always assumed that it was only the Catholics that cared about "original sin" and the like.

Oh, you say that without "original sin" that quite a bit of Christianity falls apart? Yeah, that's going through the whole "logic" route again. I had faith.

I think you summarized the Android v iOS question pretty well. I'm in a similar boat -- a long time iOS user that's wanted to move to Android, but it's just not there yet. Maybe Ice Cream Sandwich will be?

I do have to take exception with one thing you said, though: "Apple...refused to produce and release any significant hardware improvements [in the 4S]". I hear refrains like this all over the place and just don't get it. The 4S has the same screen and case profile as the 4 but everything else is updated. The hardware improvements are massive! Sooo.... no new screen and no NFC and they haven't made any? Odd.

But yeah, Nexus Prime plus Ice Cream Sandwich looks like it might finally catch up to the iPhone + iOS. That leaves hope that a later model might actually supersede it.

BitCoins are currently used almost exclusively in financial transactions of an illicit nature. You want to buy drugs online and not be traced? Head to the dark webs with BitCoins at the ready! There are clear advantages to using BitCoins if what you are doing is illegal and so it makes perfect sense for them to take off in that market.

But eventually, one would want to use BitCoins to pay for legal services. My question is; how do you get to that point? Why would a legitimate business accept a currency that is used almost exclusively for illegal means? What is the strategy to convince mainstream businesses that BitCoins have a purpose in the main web, as well?

I was a juror on a murder trial just a month ago (full/long story here: http://rants.granroth.org/2011/04/the-trial/). I have wanted to be on a jury for years, though.

Why? Well, any society will eventually veer towards tyranny. This is the natural order of things. There are only two avenues of power that an average citizen has to prevent this from happening: voting and juries.

The reasons for voting are pretty obvious. They are the way for otherwise powerless citizens to influence what those in power do. As time goes by, though, the power of the vote diminishes... at least here in the US. We're at the stage where nearly all candidates to any political office are controlled almost entirely by corporations and other special interest groups. It's very much a "damned if you do; damned if you don't" situation.

That leaves jury duty as the sole incorruptible source of power for the average Joe. The entrenched power structure will always try to use the laws to keep the powerless under control. The ONLY thing keeping that from happening entirely is the jury of your peers standing between you and those that would suppress you. A jury, then, is there to protect the defendant as much as possible.

Now... I'm not naive. I realize that many (most?) juries exist just to put a rubber stamp on whatever the prosecutor is telling them. But it doesn't have to be that way. If enough principal minded citizens go out of their way to *not* be excluded from the jury, then this can change.

I do realize the perceived hypocrisy of me talking about protecting the defendant when, in the one case I was a juror on, we judged him guilty. I don't see that as a problem, though. A jury doesn't exist to subvert justice but rather to ensure that justice is served. This guy was definitely guilty.