Of course the US tax code is like, what, the second most complicated in the world or something? (I think Germany has it worse?), which is a problem in itself.

That said, what you describe definately seems like it would work quite well for people who just work for an employer, as you mentioned.

But here at least, the amount of people who are either self employed, do free lance on the side, or have some kind of investments, is a pretty damn large portion (on top of my head I actually don't know a single person who does not fall in one of those categories...of course its because of where I live and is not representative), so, at the very least, it wouldn't help me much :)

Filing taxes is annoying enough, and even the "premium" options are just not that expensive for anyone in our field with a job (if you're not in that category, its a different story, obviously), that it just doesn't matter.

I do have a condo I just bought, I'm married, and I do have stocks, but using the appropriate TurboTax option, I basically just punch in some information, and it retrieves my W-2s and tax papers. Punching in the real estate data takes 5 minutes. So all in all, about 45 minutes for both people and forget about it.

Only annoyance was that the e-filling for stocks wasn't available for like, a month after I tried to file, so I had to wait a bit to submit the whole thing, but considering the amount the IRS wants from me, I wasn't in any particular hurry.

Let's generate some outrage! We want to be angry about Microsoft!

Yes, how dare they refuse to support older patch levels of the same OS. Outrageous.

Or it's a recessive gene, which does not have a 100% inheritance rate.

You have first-hand experience of having an autistic child. You do not have first-hand experience of vaccines causing autism, because there is no scientific evidence proving that this is possible, and there is literally an entire planet of evidence that it is not.

Hence it is, and remains, irrelevant that you have an autistic child - unfortunate though that may be.

Being 21 years out of college, it took me 15-20 minutes to build out the basic structure of the console app for the sorting demo and shake the cobwebs off my old CS degree memories and implement it. Which seems to me about right, considering.

You're simply selecting for fresh grads and making excuses up for it later, of course. I commend you on giving younguns a chance and training them (rare nowadays). I just don't know why you need that mass of utter bullshit you wrote to help you justify it in your mind.

Actually Verisign is a company that runs the root DNS for .com and .net, among some other TLDs. They don't do security or certification.

You're thinking of Symantec.

Actually, I think you'll find that 99% of what their job related software would be masses of custom software which won't even run in Linux (or anything bar Windows, and you're lucky if it works in Windows 7).

Point taken and agreed. Apologies. Historically this has been the hallmark of the Linux crowd - though I admit it has grown up a bit and there's actually quite a few people who espouse Linux based on facts and objective benefits nowadays rather than religious drivel like the old days. (For what it's worth, I like Linux. Upgrading the OS in 5 minutes and without a reboot is actually somewhat refreshing when my desktop at home takes 2 hours and reboots twice to do the same thing).

No, it hasn't. No votes were "bought". They lobbied for people to vote the way they wanted, just like anyone else would in that position (whether you or I agree with it or not).

And you're pretty much proving my and the GP's point quite soundly when you continue to spout that rubbish.

Uh-huh. You know what The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times have in common? They aren't scientific journals. Do you believe the press does an accurate job representing scientific consensus today? Probably not, if you've been paying any attention. So why do you think they were doing a better job 40 years ago?

That's the problem with people who get their science from the front page of Time magazine and such. They confuse journalists with actual scientists. Actual scientists have known for a long, long time that the earth is warming and will continue to warm. Journalists continue to get it wrong.

'It looks like it's going to rain.'

It's safe to assume that he was instead saying "reign", and was referring to the white community. UNBELIEVABLY racist!

Truth be told, if they're anything like our tax department they likely need internet access to investigate potential tax fraud (i.e. someone claiming social security and running a business selling things on eBay). Something which literally requires the internet.

The USPS? You mean the organisation that would be completely self-sustaining if they weren't bound by law to account for the lifetime costs of pensions for their entire workforce in their annual budget rather than as they go? Something no other employer in existence has to?