Ah yes, the whole there's no reason to have corporate taxes at all argument.

Sort of my point. Any illegitimate entity for tax avoidance purposes (whether posing as open source or otherwise) is going to only be something the IRS has ever heard of because it's not a real entity.

That's actually a pretty strong argument for my case. It lays out that they have determined apache to be a legitimate 501 (c)(3), that they are indeed not a 509 (a) and that any change in their funding could change that assessment. Seems reasonable.

Exactly, so they get looked at, and the IRS moves on. They do, as the Apache letter clearly points out, have a number of requirements that need to be met and need to be continually met however. And they need to check on those occasionally.

The whole Apache letter is actually a fairly short summary of the kinds of things someone *could* do illegally that the IRS would look into eventually, to make sure you aren't doing. Because they would limit your tax liabilities.

They aren't necessarily pure tax dodges either, they, as pointed out ,could be one of several types of organizations, and they are required to inform the IRS of changes, which they could be lying about (as with all voluntary tax systems, it is the responsibility of the tax collector to go out and verify any supporting documentation supplied).

Using a US football analogy, we can't always make a touchdown with every effort isn't a heroic 9-yard run a good start? Being any more ambitious with the President's plan would risk all-out resistance from every billion-dollar lobby and politician.

Except US politics is not American football. You get your 9-yard run, then your team doesn't bother snapping the ball again. "We accomplished this!" they exclaim in their bid to get re-elected. And that's all they're after, a feather for their environmentalist cap.

Congress won't take up legislation on an issue they already "decided on". The marginal political benefit of considering additional pieces of legislation along the same lines is minimal. They'd rather take up a bill on an unrelated topic, so they can crow about some other meaningless "achievement" to attract single-issue voters.

This is the reward we get for having a two-party system wherein we vote for the lesser of two weevils.

It does in many way sounds like it could be exploited as a tax dodge too. And the thing is, these would be companies free/open source people wouldn't have ever heard of, because they would be fake.

When looking for tax dodges you will occasionally investigate legitimate enterprises, but the illegitimate ones, that just are tax dodges, no one else will have ever heard of because they're paper entities for tax purposes. Imagine if MS or Toyota or the like tried to get a similar tax exempt status for all of their employees who do the free publicly given away documentation (manuals, MSDN or the like). If your open source project is only useful on a computer supplied by 1 particular company, supported by that one particular companies employees then the non profit corporation paying for the production of the open source software may just be sketchy.

Red flag.

Who said 'reason' had anything to do with this?

How, in this day and age do you have friends so tightly packed that this is reasonable? Today I used various tools (not just facebook) to connect with people in 4 countries (canada, the US, Turkey and the UK), and of those in the US in 3 different states, and I suspect later today I will add India and Albania to that list. For most people e-mail is dead as a viable communications medium, and facebook has allowed the turk and the albanian and myself to collaboratively try and resolve an issue.

If you think that's what facebook is then you're probably not the sort of person I would want an employee. You lack subtlety and have rushed to an uninformed judgment. Sure, don't post anything on facebook you don't want other people to see. But then there are lots of things people want their friends to see... and that goes to my 'red flag' about 'i'm a private person'. So... you don't get along well with people.

Shame on you for judging a tool you don't use, and shame on you for thinking that people who use a tool badly are showing the only way to use it.

So you would prefer to remain unemployed or self employed. See what I said about self righteous jerks? Virtually every company I've interacted with professionally in the last 5 years is full of people who use facebook, from banks to google, rackspace and microsoft, from measurement companies to universities. It's like being the guy who says "I don't own a television". Ok.... you don't have to. But when 14 year olds in india and 60 year olds in the US can all get along quite happily using some social network service and you're saying 'no I don't want to' you stand out as the odd man out. You might be right, but then most people who use facebook will drop it the moment they see something better come along. Don't post anything you don't want people to see and social networking is remarkably useful.

In 7 years I have had (university) students move to probably a dozen countries, and in nearly 20 years since the end of highschool I've had friends move to probably a dozen more. And I only sessionally teach (i.e. 1 course at a time occasionally).

You should know enough about the real world to know how to actually assess the usefulness of tools, and you should realize that deliberately being antisocial is a choice you are free to make, and live with the consequences of. We're in hiring season right now, and I've had a number of former students looking for work have prospective employers call me up. The one thing they want: People who are normal and will get along with the rest of the team. They don't (to use a phrase from a credit union recruiter) want 'a wierdo'.

You're missing out on device convergence and some super handy tools.

If you're so in touch with years of technology that you don't feel the need for a cell phone more power to you. But I have to wonder how much you know about what they can do then, or if you're just spouting off biases and rare occurrences. Considering how many people have smartphones yes, people get mugged for them, but the vast vast vast majority of people don't. Yes, teenagers becomes self absorbed jerks with phones but so what, they're teenagers, they'll be self absorbed with whatever is in front of them.

You're like the guy who wanted to cling to having a typing pool. Sure, the PC put people out of work and you had to learn how to use it for you and not just as a time waster, but they're great little tools. I've been around the PC business in various forms since the Wang.

Anyone who has been around computing since the 70's shouldn't be making such stupid statements. Hardware is only as smart as the software you run on it, and these little gadgets in your pocket can do some really useful things. They can do useless things too. But even as we speak having real time chat with 4 other IT guys I'm working with, all of us in different cities (and two countries) and we can each be physically on site with whatever hardware is causing grief is incredibly handy. You don't need a 500 dollar phone to do that. But if you're not doing it, you're missing out. The gadget can also do a lot of different jobs at once.

Having a camera, flashlight, to do list, grocery list (that can be updated by my spouse and or children without me), my rolodex, a scientific calculator, a multi-party real time text chat system, a gps, a linux terminal, oh and a phone, and the internet in my pocket saves me a lot more than the 15 or 20 minutes of work it takes to pay for the data plan.

Notice my Slashot ID is actually quite a bit earlier than yours. I've been around a long time.

The practical realities of business win out here. If someone doesn't have a facebook account you do have to wonder why not. Since most of the non technical staff don't know or care about the nature of what I described as the facebook privacy invasion service finding employees who are self righteous jerks about it tends to mean they aren't going to fit in.

If you don't have a facebook page (with friends...) the question of 'why not' arises. Do you not have any friends? Are you not allowed to use facebook? Sure, the Facebook privacy invasion service is well, a privacy invasion service, but if you can't connect with the vast real world of people who use it I have to wonder about how well you're going to get along with all of the other people on staff who aren't technical. I don't care how brilliant you are, if you can't get along with people I don't want you as an employee. If you haven't at least used twitter, or don't have a smartphone how tech savvy and current are you? Well.. if you just moved to this country and you don't have a job and don't have a cell phone then no big deal. If you have lived here for 5 years and don't have a smartphone I have to wonder about your nerd cred (depends on the job).

Yes exactly. If you're claiming to not be tweeting, are you tweeting under an alias that is going to come back and bite me, as the employer, in the ass when it gets found out? So you do care a lot about what people are doing online, especially if they aren't at least kind of open about it.

You're contradicting yourself. You very much care. You don't care if it's normal and uninteresting. You care if it's abnormal. And you kinda want to find out which of those two bins the person is in.

If someone comes in for a job and you ask 'what are your 5 most frequented internet sites?' and they say 'I don't use the internet' you kinda wonder about them. If they say 'the pirate bay, torrentfreak, pornhub, redtube, tor, etc.' then they're a bit too honest. If they say 'network world, slashdot, reddit. facebook, google' then they at least know what a good answer is.

While speaking of hipocrisy, why do you hold different outrage for the abuse of non-US citizens versus US citizens? :P

Also, this stuff goes way beyond partisan politics, and has been going on for longer than even Bush. Don't waste time with petty finger-pointing. Yes, boo for falling for Obama. But also no points for being against Obama by default, just because you "are Republican" (this is all bullshit, you are the person your mother gave birth to, the rest are labels made by assholes to catch fools with, and don't you ever forget that).

That said, while it's slightly off-topic, maybe this can be useful to some:

http://prism-break.org/

.. that can only be solved politically. If you want peace of mind, prepare for decades of serious struggle, and learn to be okay with that.

If your ISP and the websites you use hand over everything, if things gets collected at packet level wholesale; what does it even matter what browser you use? It doesn't, not one bit.

So far I have plenty of reason to believe she is, if you believe otherwise maybe you could state your reasons for that. Until then, I take being disgusting to you as a compliment.

On what planet is it ok to excuse a crime by saying that another crime happens more often?

What crime did I excuse that way? Killing someone in self-defense by accident?

Unless you're looking at police reports or other data I haven't seen in this thread, there is no reliable information about what happened.

Even just reading his post is pretty fucking damning.

Now try it with your real name attached, you disgusting asshole.

You can not accuse just anyone to have stolen things from your room which are then found in theirs, for one.

He was in her room, she never was in his.

Then there's the bruises. She has an explanation for them, he has nothing.

Which reminds me, then there is his dumb fucking blog post in response, where he just calls he mentally unstable, and that it should be no surprise to anyone that she would make that up. What psycho fucking bully would leave it at that?

So while you wait for more evidence or someone else to figure it out for you (with that mindset, how can you even say that's what the cops are for: if YOU are unable to figure shit out, how can you verify they are?), I kinda heard enough.

I'm old enough to remember McMartin and how quickly the court of public opinion can crucify somebody only to later turn out to be bullshit

Then why are you not also old enough to remember all the women who got raped or otherwise abused, and were at best ignored, at worst attacked when they asked for help? On what planet is men wrongfully being accused of rape an issue even *visible* next to women being raped?

Just look at this thread and at how many people joke about it, or bend over backwards to pretend there isn't enough information to have an opinion either way, or how technically she could have just as well attacked him. All sorts of insane, cowardly bullshit by spineless anonymous fucks. "rape culture" is not just an empty phrase, it's an atmosphere so thick one can slice it.

Kudos for posting with your account, I guess you're a good dude but I disagree with you. Part of me genuinely wishes she could have simply have cracked his skull. Then it would have been her word against his dead rapist body, and this hardly a story.