His job as Supreme Court justice was to interpret the law and defend the Constitution. As a private citizen, he's entitled to any opinion he likes, stupid or not. He'd only have been remiss in his job if he'd interpreted the Constitution the way he wanted it written. Got evidence for that? (I honestly don't know.)

The Federalist papers were propaganda designed to promote the Constitution. They're fascinating and can be stirring, but they were written by three people as propaganda. You can't extrapolate to all the Founding Fathers.

So I can nominate myself for President and have just as much air time as, say, Hilary?

Actually, I'm not a member of the Unorganized Militia any more. There's an upper age limit.

The reason Hitler didn't invade Switzerland was that Switzerland was much more useful to him as it was. It would not have taken many divisions, nor lasted for long. The Swiss threat to blow up tunnels through the Alps was more of a deterrence.

I don't know if they were thieves, but it seems more likely than that they were that incompetent. However, they could have done the same thing with any currencies, just as easily, except that when they're an explicitly financial institution it's harder to evade regulation. They failed to maintain the most basic auditing, for whatever reason, and they were not acting as any sort of regulated financial institution.

We keep those people next to the Ayn Rand fans, and cook popcorn. No matter what stupid idea it is, it's probably on Slashdot somewhere.

Generally, evidence can be collected with an illegal act, provided the police and other legal authorities don't do it or encourage it. It doesn't make the act legal. (Note: IANAL. Reliance on random pseudonymous people on the net for legal advice may not be wise, even if it is common.)

Defending oneself can lead to getting in trouble. It can also stop the bullying. No bully likes getting hurt; that's for the victims.

Because defining income is really difficult, that's why.

It seems to me you're suggesting Intuit do the hard parts for free and charge for doing the easy parts. The hard part of my tax returns this year was knowing where to apply all these numbers from all the forms and notes. Calculating from there isn't that bad. Paper filing is easy, even if I have to copy numbers from screen to tax form.

TurboTax efiled my Federal return free, but charged actual money to efile my State return. (Don't know how much, but it was double-digit dollars. I didn't bother to look at the exact amount, since it didn't matter for my decision making, so I only remember the number of digits.)

I'm pretty sure that the only people who gain from charging that much for efiling are the USPS.

And, if you've got that much credit card debt*, odds are that you'd just spend more because you were able to pay more off. It may be more useful to get a large refund and pay off the credit cards then.

*Yeah, there can be legitimate reasons to run up a lot of credit card debt. I'd bet a nickel most people with a lot of that don't have legitimate reasons, and the reason they've got the debt is that they're lousy with money. At that point, something that makes them budget involuntarily may be a help.

If you hand him a wad of cash, it's a gift and not income. This means, of course, that if it's a large enough gift (> $10K) you're going to have to file tax forms on it.

With higher-level languages, you can make language constructs that enforce things like that. If you have a set of rules about locking memory pages and zeroing out data, you're going to miss something sometime. If you have a language construct that does it, you won't miss things. If you have to write your own, you'll be able to test it and prove correctness once, and guarantee not making those mistakes 238 times.