I consider myself to favor progressive tax policies, but even I think this goes too far.

"Mark to market" has a lot of problems. As you say, the market price at any given moment in time simply reflects the price at which the most recent sale of any size was executed. There's no guarantee that any other sale would be executed at that price, and if a large volume of the item (or security) were to be sold all at once, it's unlikely that anything close to that price would be realized. So even leaving aside that this is a wealth tax rather than an income tax, it's not taxing actual wealth; it's taxing wealth assuming an arbitrary valuation.

This kind of thing could easily be gamed. Suppose at the end of the year someone arranged to sell a small block of securities at an artificially low price right at the closing bell? Presumably regulations could be passed to inhibit this, but I'm sure there would still be plenty of possibilities.

Furthermore, what happens when the security's price goes down? Does everyone holding it get a rebate? Or it is really nothing more than an annual wealth tax?

I'm not opposed on principle to a wealth tax, and I understand the issue of using an appreciated security as collateral to float a loan that could be more or less constantly renewed. And while a security's price is "stepped up" when passing through probate, I believe the estate still pays tax on the security's value at the time of death (but IANAL).

Right now I'd suggest a higher end point & shoot (e. g. Canon G or SX series, depending upon what you're looking for) more than a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera. The image quality, particularly at high ISO, will indeed be better with an EVIL due to the larger sensor (although some of the EVIL cameras, such as the new Nikons, use a rather small sensor), but they're less convenient, and don't really have more features, than a good P&S.

My Canon SX-1, for example, has the equivalent of 28-560 zoom range, and quite good macro capability. It can also use an E-TTL flash (I use my 550EX on it, occasionally). Some of the newer ones have wider angle lenses than that, although not as wide as the Olympus 7-14 (14-28 equivalent) lens available on micro 4/3.

But if convenience and telephoto capability is more important, a P&S will still beat an EVIL, and for a lot less money to boot.

This kind of timing attack isn't easy to block.

Some kinds of timing attacks are. I think I heard once that a timing attack could be made against passwords in TOPS-20, because the passwords were stored in plaintext and compared one character at a time. The trick was to do the system call to check the password (or whatever it was) with the guess split across a page boundary (maybe the second page was forced out of memory or something). Since the system call would return as soon as one character didn't match, it was easy to see if the next character being guessed was correct or not. The fix was simple enough. Obviously there was a bit more to it than that, but I only heard this apocryphally as it was, and at that probably about 25 years ago.

This kind of thing is harder to fix, since it depends upon the difference between cache and non-cache access time, and the non-cached access time is not deterministic. It would be possible for the browser to introduce an artificial delay into the appropriate JavaScript calls, but that would make performance go down the tubes.

In any event, I tried it and the results didn't look very accurate (the first time, all of the sites it tried claimed that I had hit them; the secon time it caimed only one site was in cache, and after that it thought that nothing was).

I've had a variety of high end (for their time) Dell laptops, and generally have not had problems. Over the past 10 years or so, I've had an Inspiron 8000, 8200, 9400/E1705, and most recently a Precision M6500, which is the best of the lot. I've always bought them used. They tend to be very easy to upgrade, and it's no trouble finding parts on eBay. I've run SUSE/OpenSUSE on everything. Since the 8200, I've had no problems with suspend/resume; the 9400 failed to resume maybe once out of every 100 tries. The M6500 has had a few more suspend/resume failures, but lately it has been much more reliable; I'm not sure why.

I'm careful to look for sellers with very high positive feedback (at least 99.7% for something like a laptop, and preferably at least 99.9%), and I look hard at the negative feedback (there is some junk negative feedback out there -- some people clearly make no attempt to resolve issues with the seller, for example).

Of course, if you want something equivalent to AppleCare, you're going to have to go with a new piece from System 76, Emperor Linux, or the like.

I took a quick look on eBay, and it looks like M6500's go for about 25% less than the closest equivalent 17" MacBook Pro. They're also more expandable. But that's just my take on the matter.

Incidentally, I consider the M6500 to be more desirable than the current M6600. They both have the same expansion capability (2x2.5" drives plus an mSATA, 32 GB RAM, 2xUSB2, 2xUSB3, eSATA, plenty of wireless options including WWAN, and the other usual suspects), but the M6500 has a 16:10 screen (1920x1200) while the M6600 has a 16:9 screen (1920x1080). For photo work, that's about 23% more pixels on the older machine; even if I did watch movies, I don't care about the slight letterboxing. Obviously, you can plug external monitors into both, but that's not how I usually operate. I think Dell did this for cost reasons, since that's what the screen makers prefer to make, but on a flagship laptop like the M6600, that doesn't make a lot of sense. On the Alienware, sure; that's a gaming machine, but the M6600 is a portable workstation. The only advantage of the M6600 that I can see is that it uses Sandy Bridge rather than Nehalem processors and has newer graphics options, but you're going to get more of a speed boost in practice from your memory and disk configuration. Anyhow, the M6500 is very easy to work on; you don't have to remove nearly as many screws as the older ones, and everything is seated very solidly.

AdBlock Plus and NoScript are doing different things -- ABP is basically a filter engine, and the rules are the only thing that (normally) needs to be updated. NoScript is blocking things based on various algorithms, so it's procedural rather than data-driven. It's not surprising that NoScript's engine needs to be updated more often than ABP's.

Where would this end, anyway?

"Causing harm to animals" is extremely vague. Would it mean, for example, that a restaurant that serves meat couldn't use it? Would it mean that I couldn't use such an application to order meat from a grocery store, or buy leather shoes?

There's a very good reason why both the free software and open source definitions forbid field of use restrictions (and even most proprietary software doesn't try things like this).

Performing and composing are different, but one's not "less" or "more" than the other.

Aside from the fact that a lot of forms of music are improvisational, which is a form of creating something new, performing itself requires skill and (in most cases) collaboration with others and is expressive, from the choice of music to the tempo, shaping of the phrases, and indeed individual notes.

Asimov, particularly the Foundation and early Robot series -- these are some of the most important works of early modern SF

Harry Turtledove -- the master of alternate history. His works are very readable and very thought-provoking and may help students learn more about OTL as well.

They appear to allow the manufacturer to rebut negative reviews after the fact, but there are plenty of negative (even highly negative) reviews there

and it has probably been 30 years since I've written in cursive. My penmanship was always atrocious, in either print or cursive. I have decent enough motor control, but not for handwriting.

We learned typing in 8th or 9th grade. That was my salvation. After that, I think I wrote a few long letters to my parents in college, but that was about it for actually hand writing anything.

Personally, I think this is a completely negligible loss.