The process of earning your profit can easily counteract the effects of spending your profit on charity, however. The wealthy often realize this paradox when they begin "giving back". The Gates Foundation itself has been accused many times of investing in things that completely undermine its goals. This editorial from 2014 is just one example.; I recall hearing similar claims about investments in totally different industries almost 10 years ago

How you get your profit makes a big difference in what net accomplishments your money can achieve. If your earning provides great support to systems that keep poor countries unstable or work against universal improvements for humanity, but then you wish to spend your profits on humanist goals, then what was the point? I'd rather you'd just become a janitor instead of digging holes in human society and then desperately filling them back in, hoping you might create mountains in the process.

>The IRS, in particular, expects taxpayers to keep records FOREVER (or until you die and your will is probated)

What? Where are you getting this nonsense? The IRS does not expect you to keep records for your *entire life*. That's absolute moronic drivel. In fact, the IRS doesn't require you to do *anything*; it's congress that writes the tax code. Not just a different entity, a completely different branch of government. The IRS isn't some extra-legal entity that makes up their own rules to inflict on citizens and delights in making them difficult.

Anyway, you're required to keep records until the audit window for tax returns dependent on those records expires, no longer. Rarely will an individual have to keep any record of any kind longer than 7 years after the last filing year that record affected; the vast majority of records can be destroyed after no more than 4 years, and almost all people can fit the documents they're required to keep longer than 7 years in a single manilla folder (if they have any at all).

Are you just one of those people who think the IRS are evil because of your strict constructionist views, or something? Maybe you live in a compound in Idaho? Because this whole "IRS is evil and seeks out ways to fuck and/or control the average taxpayer in service of XYZ political force" notion is just so fucking far from the truth I seriously wonder what kind of willful ignorance or bizarre lies someone must experience to believe it.

You're really not seeing how a rough picture of the perpetrator could help solve crimes, simply because many people will share the same rough picture and have some similar underlying DNA?

Right now DNA often comes in near the end of an investigation; you have to select people to test based on traditional detective work, and then you must legally acquire their DNA to match with your sample. If suspects don't want to give you DNA simply because you asked nicely, you have to be fairly sure of their guilt - and able to convince a judge of why you're sure - before you can get their DNA involuntarily. If this test became effective, the sample you got at the beginning would show you who among the likely suspects to test against, and probably lower the bar for getting legal clearance to take their DNA.

Not to mention you clearly have no clue how DNA testing really works; if it's important you can and will be able to match a decent sample to one and only one person. There are commonplace genetic tests that can produce 1 in 10 trillion profiles of a person's or sample's DNA to match against. The fact that this DNA processing produced a rough sketch matching X number of people is irrelevant when you'll be able to narrow that group to very few or one with the most basic detective work.

A lot of this comes down to sex vs gender.

Sex is your biological status: what organs and hormone levels do you have, and how have they developed? Sounds straight-forward, at least at first.

Gender might be defined as a social role and group identity you take on which is influenced most significantly in most people by their sex. So most people pick from one of the two massively dominant genders, wind up pretty content about it, and have organs matching everyone else in their camp.

But what if you have testes and breasts? And hormone levels pretty much in between the standard man and the standard woman? You might end up legally forced to adopt an 'official' sex based on your chromosome data or what went on your birth certificate, perhaps, but does that help you pick a gender? Does that actually reflect your sex? Probably not. Do you identify more with another sex? What about another gender? If you want to change over, how much will you do and what changes are possible?

The organs you have, the hormone levels you have, and how you feel about them all affect what sex you become and what gender you select. People who aren't comfortable being a traditional man or woman and sleeping with the opposite are simply trying to work out all the permutations and nomenclature now that they're somewhat more free to do so.

If a given person is polite about it and doesn't expect you to memorize a bunch of fluid terms to use for them or coddle their sexuality more than you would anyone else, just let it be and don't worry about the variety of possibilities. They'll work themselves out and they aren't likely to affect you. If they're a dick or an irrational activist about it, and there's plenty of those also, just ignore them and/or fight to keep them from defining your life any more than you're allowed to define theirs.

You can look into the definitions in any Women's or Gender Studies website; or you can ignore it for now and simply be a decent human being to the people you meet, ignoring their chosen combination unless they step on your own rights.

Don't you remember the rules of Slashdot polls? "If you're using these numbers for anything important, you're insane."

Of course, there was one poll that was for something very important, and thankfully it worked out well. Ahh, the memories.

The other point I'd make is that there are some /. users in the process of resurrecting old-skool /. in a different venue, so Bruce could give it a try, but I don't think he needs to: one way or another the user base will be giving a big goodbye to Dice.

Also, it's worth noting that this response from timothy was written only after a fairly serious effort to replace slashdot.org with something better (as noted in both our sigs). The suits are thinking something along the lines of "We're going to lose to a competitor! Do something!" and decided that we'd trust timothy more than some PR flak. Of course, the fact that they'd think that indicates to me that they do not know their community - timothy is actually one of the less-respected "editors".

Bernard Marx, perhaps?

I concur: They should have simply put in the OMG Ponies! design and been done with it.

<SEAN-CONNERY>
I have to ask you about the Penis Mightier.

Gussy it up however you like, the question is does it work?
<SEAN-CONNERY>

Of course, no democratic leader would ever make that mistake, right? How soon we forget ...

What the ISPs really want is all the benefits of being a common carrier without any of the responsibilities. And that's exactly what they got with the Net Neutrality ruling. Given that AT&T is in the running for the top campaign donor in the country, it's unlikely that will change anytime soon (Seriously, it would be easier to list the politicians not on the take from AT&T).

Also, if the government didn't force me to give any of my money to those people, then I'd be rich.

(Seriously, a lot of people think that this is the only effect of government programs designed to help poor people, even when they know people who are benefiting from those programs.)

There's another argument here as well: If you've made a really successful game, but the copyright is going to run out before you retire, you'll be more motivated to make a second successful game because you know your gravy train is going to dry up. And yes, that works for all kinds of copyrighted things: For example, many one-hit wonders happily call it quits because that's good enough, rather than trying to write more hits.