...and are married to somebody with comparable income. Swap that wife out for somebody who doesn't make much more than minimum wage, and your $28k/yr basically evaporates. You'd save more being single, but your non-discretionary expenses as a single aren't that much lower than a couple's.

Like saving up for retirement? Not sure why having a million dollars to spend in retirement is more important than having $100/month to spend on cable TV today?

Count yourself lucky. Most of them seem to be about ad sales.

I never said the defendant doesn't get to define right and wrong. However, people who do nothing wrong shouldn't be harassed by the court, whether what they did was legal or not. That is, courts should be about arriving at justice, not determining if the law was followed.

Is this actually an application, or is it just a hyperlink (which 80% of the apps in the chrome store are, including the regular Gmail app but not the offline gmail app)?

An "real" application is self-contained and can potentially operate even without connecting to a server (though usually it implements some kind of front-end to a web-based service). For example, there are calculator apps or ssh apps that do just what you'd expect a calculator/ssh app to do and work just fine without a route to the internet (though obviously an ssh app needs to be able to reach something running sshd). Apps can store data locally via html5 storage.

Many apps are in the store just for the sake of having an app, but they're really no different from a bookmark. They don't "do" anything but direct the browser to a URL, and they are non-functional if there isn't a network connection.

No, there should be a Get Out of Jail Free card at the end because you didn't do anything wrong. People who didn't do something wrong shouldn't be in jail, period. People who are innocent shouldn't HAVE to cooperate during the trial - the court should be apologizing to them for dragging them through the trial in the first place.

I think the problem with your argument is that people expect the justice system to deliver justice. If all it does is determine compliance with a set of rules, then why should we spend so much money on it and give it power over our lives?

I actually wonder if the "rule of law" isn't part of the problem. Loopholes and procedural games are really just the natural consequence of the rule of law - you can never codify justice, and laws are rigid while those seeking to evade them are flexible. The result is that you end up with a court system that merely follows a process and metes out the result, without that much regard to the fairness of the result.

When an innocent person ends up in jail, the question is why did the system fail and how can it be fixed, not whether the system failed. The latter is self-evident.

Don't get me started...

I had visited it, and that option did not exist at the time I visited it.

I'm not sure that getting a mortgage is all that hard. Well, assuming you're not trying to spend more than 1/3rd of your income on debt, and that you're not trying to finance more than 100% of what your home is likely worth. If your housing prices never returned to ~2003 levels after the crash then I could see why a bank wouldn't want to let you borrow 105% of that with a payment that requires 2/3rds of your income.

The last time I refinanced I didn't find the process particularly difficult. Sure, it required paperwork more similar to my experience in 2003 than my experiences in 2006, but nothing over-the-top.

Yup. I imagine lots of people would love to work for Google but are turned off by the fact that they tend to want people to come into the office, and they put all their offices in the middle of major urban areas. If I have a need to drive into work at all it only takes me 25min in the middle of rush hour, or 15-20min otherwise. I can also afford a modest house.

Sure, working at Google would be more fun, but it just doesn't seem to be worth the hassle.

Hmm, wasn't aware of that. Still seems far easier to print and file using standard tax software (usually these packages only include a single e-file per license). Plus this does not require divulging your financials to a third party.

Do you think that the bad guys never thought to read the source before now? I'm sure the NSA has a dozen more exploits against every SSL implementation out there, open or closed. It isn't like the Germans published the specs for Enigma, or that the Iranians posted the design of their centrifuges for all to see.

The service you mention is only available to those with low incomes, and generally they don't support itemized deductions.

I don't need somebody to figure out my taxes for me. I just want to be able to fill in the forms.

But hey, if Congress wants to keep taking bribes I can keep hitting file-print and mailing the stack of documents in. As thick as they are, they still qualify for a single stamp. I never get a refund, so it really just delays the government getting its due.

I'm quite happy that third parties are wiling to perform this service.

I'm even more unhappy that ONLY third parties are allowed to perform this service. My state used to have a perfectly simple to use online tax form. No doubt due to pressure from lobbyists they stripped this down considerably so that the new form is quite painful to use (it makes you do your own math, and redundantly fill in info that appears on multiple forms.

So, I print all my returns and mail them in, which just costs the government more to process. I'm not going to pay more money to file my taxes when I can just do it for the cost of a stamp and a few pieces of paper.