There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine.

Money is fungible -- Social Security and Medicare go to the federal government just like everything else. You also get lots of services in exchange for your other taxes, like roads, an educational system, a military, etc., but they aren't broken out separately. They're still all taxes.

I didn't see GP objecting to the taxes, just calling them what they are.

That's only true if it was originally flimed in 2D. With a stereoscopic camera it's perfectly easy to film live action in 3D. That still doesn't make it useful or better than 2D, of course.

"Hiriko" just means "urban". Presumably they didn't feel the need to call it "Hiriko Autoa" because it's pretty obvious that it's a car.

Sadly, no -- if I attempt to stargaze with totally naked eyes, I can't see any stars at all.

I probably have at least 50 books that I haven't read yet, which is a lot more than a handful, but still only about 5% of the books in my apartment (not counting the ones that are still at my parents' houses, long after I moved out). Unfortunately I haven't been good at finding time to read lately, so the backlog has been decreasing only slowly. I blame the internet for being distracting; I could be reading right now, but instead I'm writing a comment on Slashdot.

If they can restrict you from using public transportation, why can't they restrict you from using a car? A bicycle? Shoes? Feet? You can still crawl, it's not like they're actually restricting your freedom of movement.

Right, but the problem now is that they don't even have to give you a trial. It's a catch-22: the only way to get the law overturned is to break the law and be tried for it, but the law itself says that they don't have to try you for breaking the law. We're just stuck.

Space is a lot harder to get to than Canada. That's why earth-based astronomy is still doing lots of useful research, and will continue to do so for a long time to come: a handful of space-based instruments can only do so much, and there are thousands of earth-based ones. Some of them are much, much bigger than the space-based ones, which helps make up for having to look through an atmosphere, but there's useful research being done even with very small telescopes on the ground.

Not really. Light pollution is primarily due to continuous lighting sources; any airliners flying over are only going to be in range for a few minutes each, and aren't going to contribute to skyglow in any noticeable way. They can probably even get the airlines to route around the observatories; a fairly small radius would be sufficient to keep them from interfering entirely.