Why not turn Hubble directly towards Venus as it does its transit? Is there just too much light for Hubble to get a good spectrographic reading by doing it directly? if so, how will this help us when looking at exoplanet atmospheres, since we will be directly looking at their atmospheres as they have transits in front of bright stars as well?
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.
And total taxes were above 90% on the wealthy in the 1950's. The peak was 92% on income over $400,000 per year in 1952. That was too far in one direction. But 17% is too far in the other direction.
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.
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."
Which is why the other part of the judgment is equally important: The court should not be locating the deep pockets just so that the plaintiff can take the settlement private.
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,
"According to this court’s research, at the time of the hearing 69 mass copyright infringement cases had been filed in this district. Of those, plaintiff obtained early discovery in 57 cases and issued subpoenas to obtain subscriber information for more than 18,000 IP addresses."
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.
But they decide, not you.
That is, I think, one of the most important statements in this thread. And the current Western aid process mostly does not let them decide. It is shipped from governments to governments, and the 0.1% use that free aid to feed and arm themselves and their cronies, while pushing down the 99.9% in ways that would make Occupy Wall Street absolutely shiver. If you want to talk about imperialist privilege, talk about the existing aid programs which view themselves as great saviors, and kill a bunch of them off so that a few well-connected corrupt people [Mugabe, for example] lose the resources and power that they currently use to smack down everyone else in their countries.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.