I see that the House has voted to repeal the estate tax. Ah good, more tax breaks for the wealty just what we need when we're running a massive deficit. This would seem really cynical if it followed a bill to prevent more people from being able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy. Oh yeah, never mind.

This would seem really cynical if it followed a bill to prevent more people from being able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy. Oh yeah, never mind.

It's be extra special is most of those people were the result of astronomical medical bills--or better yet--it those people were in the military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

IIRC, the House has passed anti estate tax stuff before and it got nowhere in the Senate. I'm hoping that happens again.

I missed both Alias and Eyes last night. Does anyone feel like giving me summaries?

I hope I can get my Tivo set up today before I leave. This sucks.

Perkins I have them both recorded but haven't watched yet, You want me to send you a tape this weekend?

You want me to send you a tape this weekend?

I don't/won't have a connected VCR, so I couldn't watch them. Thanks though!

I don't/won't have a connected VCR

What the hell is wrong with you?

Alias: It turns out that Vaughn's dad is really (apparently) dead. We learn this after his rogue excursion with the guy from The Wire in which he shoots Dixon in the bulletproof vest, and retrieves something Rambaldi from the CIA. Wire guy says that Sloane was behind the whole thing. Speaking of Sloane, Nadia's been visiting her aunt in prison, who takes the opportunity to poison herself with chocolate to get Syd to come visit. The upshot is that Syd looks into who really ordered the hit on her, and it turns out Sloane was framing her mother for same. Or was he? Because some creepy guy in Santiago is calling himself Sloane too -- this is definitely the Sloane behind getting Vaughn to go rogue. In the meanwhile, back at the ranch, Marshall steals SpyDaddy's bodily fluid for a test which reveals he's a big old mutant. He seems stoically okay with all that, until Marshall points out it'll hurt Syd if he dies. Seems out of character for him to not have thought of that earlier, though. Also, Vaughn was hot when he a) kicked the shit out of Wire guy, and b) forcibly rebuffed the advances of the chick on his rogue mission not to mention c) speaking French. Go team him.

The internet finally does something important for academia! Now your scholarly papers can be written for you in seconds, including tables and figures. The developers even got one of their randomly generated papers accepted for presentation at an academic conference! As you might expect, the pioneers here are in Computer Science, but I'm sure that the rest of us will catch up soon.

[link]

In unrelated news, I've authored my first paper on "The Influence of Constant-Time Methodologies on Hardware and Architecture".

Criticism welcome.

[link]

I've always wondered, since estate tax doesn't kick in until a fairly ginormous amount ($1 million last time I checked, and it wouldn't surprise me if this Congress had raised it since then), don't most of the people whose estates are big enough to get eaten up have access to lawyers, trusts, and so forth? It seems to me that the government would actually see very little income from the estate tax, though I've no idea if reality bears this out.