It might suprise you to know that having a graduate degree and being a good programmer can also net you a job at a company that produces proprietary software. The idea that programmers at Microsoft are all incompetent is partisanship of the most extreme kind; by all accounts it tends to be very competitive and there are truly good programmers there. Certainly noone would accuse Google of hiring slouches.
Your comment ignores the fact that Windows had strong ASLR before Linux did, and by all accounts its security is on par with or better than your average Linux distro.
Profit accounts for a lot, but profit requires selling product, which requires meeting customer demands. Having a product with a reputaiton for poor security tends to hurt demand, which means that good security can indeed come about in proprietary software.
but the number of actual practicing security people in the big software corporations is very low
You just ventured out of the realm of opinion, and made a statement of fact that requires some kind of source. On what basis do you make this claim? And by what logic do you say that there are more honest-to-goodness security gurus donating their time to "OSS" in general?
Its almost like you have disdain for anyone who would try to make a living off of their skills, like being PAID to be a good programmer or security expert was somehow a dirty thing.
Any time a society bans something, it creates an underground market. Some principles are so important and some crimes sufficiently bad that it is nevertheless worth it.
One could flip that argument around and say, well, we know that child prostitution is bad; but we cant STOP it, so we're going to legalize and regulate it. I think most reasonable adults would see that as pretty heinous and would agree-- even if it is driven underground, society cannot condone child prostitution.
Youre basically trying to defend fragmentation as a good thing, because while some programs might not work across the myriad of versions, neither will the vulnerabilities.
You assume that IT folks have no way of tracking what enters and leaves their networks. Maybe that is true in smaller networks, but any larger business with any kind of budget is going to have an edge firewall, and Im gonna go out on a limb and say its not Microsoft's firewall.
b) they have lawyers that will have you run crying to your mommy.
The idea that Microsoft could somehow win that kind of case through the simple merit of its lawyers is ridiculous. Big companies have been brought to unfavorable judgements before, and if the evidence is clear enough theyd probably just settle with you on very favorable terms.
I don't really understand how anyone can care whether a closed source operating system is secure.
This is so much garbage.
Opensource systems have their share of holes, and the idea that there is a gigantic pool of people qualified to catch backdoors in something as relatively simple as a web browser-- let alone an OS-- is absurd. Just because you can look at the source doesnt mean you can do a remotely competent job of auditing it; and the idea that a single person could somehow audit hundreds of thousands of lines of code for security "on a whim" is even more absurd.
There are a lot of benefits to open source, but sometimes its advocates really stretch the imaginations with some of the claims and accusations they level against proprietary software.
it's sufficiently open that blatant backdoors are not going to be inserted.
Youre talking nonsense. Consider that OpenSSL is widely considered a horrendously complex pile of spaghetti code, which I believe has had its share of security issues, and yet we still use it. Is it because we're lazy? No, its because sometimes some of this security stuff is phenomenally complicated, and it would take a horrendous number of man-hours from incredibly talented people to refactor or replace it.
One of the benefits of paid software is that, if theyre competent, they can devote a lot of time to it because they are paid. Im gonna go out on a limb here and say that one of the biggest helpers to good code in a lot of OSS projects are the paid volunteers, not the mere fact that its "open" as if that dash of pixie dust makes a project magically better.
and since you'll hopefully be getting donations seven days a week that makes it equivalent to an income just shy of $3,000 per week.
Thats not a safe bet at all; you cant simply extrapolate from one day's sales to one week's sales-- especially when every other industry recognizes far higher profits on day one than on subsequent days (check opening day sales on any major game or movie, vs the next several days, vs the next several weeks). Theres usually a pretty sharp drop-off.
I've got a wireless router to sell you. It has all these features for QoS and firewalling and it's secure and it gets 300 mbps and it's got the DLNA,I swear.
Except the OS, drive, and driver all claim that NCQ is working on every single SATA disk I have seen that has been set to AHCI. To say "yea but theyre still lying".... why shouldnt we ask for specifics? Are we expected to go out and test every extant drive to see whether it supports NCQ?
If the author had specifics that he tested and found to improperly implement NCQ, perhaps he should have included his data so that it could be verified. All he gave was a general overview of tagged queuing and NCQ, and then declared "but not everyone does it right". Thats so vague as to be worthless.
This is a false dichotomy. What is needed to fix its "problem" is to have the major players reach out to integrators and try and establish some baseline, default system config (or maybe two, at most) that vendors can target and know that things will work on any compliant system. Like POSIX, but for Desktop Environments (plus all the nuts and bolts, package managers, init scripts, bootloaders, etc down the line).
But at least MS makes it so easy that a vendor practically has to TRY to have a program be incompatible with the newest or oldest supported version of Windows.
Whereas to see an incompatibility on any of the major desktop Linux distros, you just need to wait 6 months-- or even for the next update.
Dont get me wrong, I have loved linux (tho for now I am happy on my Win7 workstation); but it has serious problems when it comes to being where support from a vendor is "expected". Right now its basically a "bonus", and in my eyes that is a problem.
Right, because you have no problem burning an ISO, installing it (and dealing with dualboot shenanigans), and dealing with incompatibilities by googling them.
For the folks who cant go to Dell and get a reasonably priced pre-installed Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian with Dell support (contracted out) behind them, there is a problem.
I think Icaza was right that there is too much variety out there. Options are great, and i think its good that when PulseAudio was broken, it wasnt like Windows where "the soundsystem you have is the soundsystem you have until your vendor graces you with a fix". Being able to switch components like that out is really really good. But Im sure (as Icaza said) it makes it a nightmare for vendors who want to spend as little time thinking about compatibility as possible.
What if there were some initiative where, like "Gnome desktop" and "KDE desktop" are defined genereally in a way that a dev can know what is on the system-- what if the big names (Novell, RedHat / CentOS community, Debian / Canonical) all banded together and said, "OK, here are the major 'desktop flavors', which will guarenteed have these APIs, libraries, and components". Like, Debian and Ubuntu and Mint all agree that in their "Gnome" flavor, whatever stock desktop comes up will support certain audio calls, certain init script types, certain logon screen integration methods, and a specific network configuration widget. Maybe also a standard way of very quickly pulling up a terminal on the desktop.
Doing that would be absolutely huge, because now a vendor has 2 main targets for "Joe Standard User", and it can know that its init scripts will work, the version of Java it expects is either installed or can be auto-installed through the native package manager, and if it needs to walk the user through a network change it can tell him to go to his standard "run command" prompt, type in "GnomeNetworkConfig" and have a bog-standard widget. It doesnt need to maintain documentation for 5 different distros, or worry about 3 different soundsystems, etc.
Thats my thought. You want dell jumping onboard? Get some degree of collaboration between the major players so that, at least from an integrator standpoint, there is some consistency. And if the power user wants to rip out everything and replace it, and deal with any compatibility issues, thats fine-- but for goodness sake lets bring the idea of "sane defaults" home.
They sell the same drives as Enterprise Grade SATA with these NCQ turned on in firmware as they do to consumers with it turned off.
What you get with an "enterprise" sata drive is higher MTBF and a firmware tweaked to work well with RAID (desktop drives try to be more forgiving for IO errors, while the enterprise drives are more quick to decide "ive failed, let the raid controller do its work").
Im not aware of any sata drive that doesnt support NCQ-- its certainly on every desktop drive ive used excepting MAYBE the very first sata drive I bought in 2003. Certainly all SSDs I am aware of (except niche super-low-end ones) and all mass-market desktop drives do.
Which is basically none of them. I would be astonished if anyone could link me a drive sold on newegg, amazon, or by Dell that does not implement NCQ when set to AHCI mode.
That's why if you could do that, it would be the result of a loophole.
Then blame the government. I imagine you would fire any personal accountant who didnt get you the highest legally allowable return; why are people expecting business accountants to do otherwise? Is there some rubric we can apply to figure out what is "legal but not kosher"?
They might as well cut the middle-man out and donate the money directly.
There are reasons thats not quite true, but point taken. Nevertheless, I think blaming the person for taking advantage of it is like putting out a sign saying "free puppies" and then yelling at the first person to take one.
Doing a bit of research, it appears my usage was (or at least could be) correct. Google "indefinite article with proper noun". It appears that when you have an adjective before a proper noun, you can use the indefinite article "A" or "an". Examples: Mr Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work and Mrs Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his highchair. (Appears to be from harry potter, but was pulled from a forum example) Alfie then shut the gate and ambled off to the house, shaking his head in perplexity, to complain to a sympathetic Dora in the kitchen.
In this case, since "Sharp" is modified by the adjective "cash-poor", the indefinite article is allowable. But as I said, headlines tend to drop all articles, which makes "cash-poor Sharp mortgages" rather ambiguous. Further reference (though there are zillions) http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2204216
Let's say you claimed that unicorns existed, and I said there's no evidence to suggest that they do.
But if I were to show you a unicorn foal, and you responded "that CANT be a unicorn, because unicorns dont exist", then you would be begging the question. Your claim in your previous post was specifically that the Bible cant be true because the things in it (man rising from grave, etc) cant be true. If thats not circular, then I dont know what is.
because by your own definition you assert that his existence cannot be proven.
I am not aware of making or implying that claim in any of my posts. Just because miracles may not be falsifiable, does not mean there is not compelling evidence for the existence of God.
If I tell you that a human being cannot lift a semi truck, it is absolutely supported by reason and science.
There are hidden assumptions and conditionals: "The laws of physics remaining as they are and without outside forces intruding, a human being cannot lift a truck unaided". The claim about a man rising from the grave is specifically that he did NOT do so unaided. When we speak of a "miracle", we are speaking of a supernatural suspension of the normal order of things.
It would be accurate for you to say that "men rising from their graves" isnt the "normal order of things"; the Bible's claim is that it happened and will happen again. The two are not in conflict-- unless you presuppose that the Bible is wrong because there are no miracles. How you would prove the absense of miracles, im not sure. Certainly you are right that THAT is not falsifiable; that doesnt make it wrong.
The famines in the USSR are a direct result of discarding science [wikipedia.org].
Your post was specifically about how discarding faith in favor of "practical acts" was the way to increase prosperity, which I believe Soviet Russia did despite not being prosperous in the least. Certainly what Soviet Russia did was "practical" in the extreme.
I'll gladly concede that point if you'll admit that the formation of the canonized Bible was directed by the political desires of Roman Emperor and not by God, and that the content of the Bible was therefore an accident of history.
How could you construct a reproducible study of bad theology?
Someone declares "The new testament God is all about love, not judgement!" I point to Revelation, the sermon on the mount, any of Jesus interactions with the Pharisees, the entire book of Romans.....
Someone declares "If your faith is strong, God will give you your best life now." I point to Paul's tribulations (2 corinthians, also the whole "executed in Rome" thing), Peter's execution, John's exile, Jesus' own words "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me", etc etc.
Its not much different than if someone were to say "I know that Napoleon conquered eastern Mongolia". By what you seem to be saying, you could not disprove him. But of course we have historical documents which prove him wrong.
There isn't much difference between religious faith and political faith. They're both based on assumptions and assertions instead of facts and mutually observable results.
Im gonna disagree: they can be, but do not have to be. And the implied dichotomy is that "others" do NOT base their beliefs on assumptions, which is just false. Every bit of science is based on ass
The polygamist nature of the compound he supposedly lived in till age 5 being relevant....how? Or is this one of those things called "smearing your opponent"?
Please guys, lets try to elevate this out of the muck. If you have a problem with Romney's policy persuasion, then vote on it. Dont smear the guy with irrelevant attacks though, it does noone any favors.
If you can directly invest all of your life's earnings into a retirement account
AFAIK you cannot do that. There are contribution limits. For a Roth IRA, its $5000 a year I believe. For a 401k, google tells me its $17k. Theres no loophole, and if there wasnt a limit that wouldnt be a loophole either. Theyre pretty intentional about the language that goes into legislation; if its tax-legal and the IRS hasnt cried foul, then its not a foul.
You MIGHT have a point if you mentioned tax havens.
f you could install energy efficient windows in other people's houses for less than the tax deduction that would also be a loophole.
If the legislation allowed it, no, that wouldnt be a loophole (the entire point of such a measure would be to get people to install energy efficient windows, and you can only do it once per house for a tax reduction). Pretty sure you cant, because again they intentionally prohibited it.
if you could reduce your taxes by more than the value of you donation to goodwill, that would clearly be a tax loophole.
Not true, because if they had not placed a charity giving limit (which they did), it would be clear that they were trying to encourage as much charitable giving as possible.
What about his will too? Maybe that should be public record. After all, if he asks for any privacy whatsoever he MUST have something to hide!
This whole attitude is ridiculous. What exactly are you expecting to find? We know its gonna come forward eventually, and Im gonna wager that theres almost nothing of note there for anyone except those who will find fault no matter what.
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It might suprise you to know that having a graduate degree and being a good programmer can also net you a job at a company that produces proprietary software. The idea that programmers at Microsoft are all incompetent is partisanship of the most extreme kind; by all accounts it tends to be very competitive and there are truly good programmers there. Certainly noone would accuse Google of hiring slouches.
Your comment ignores the fact that Windows had strong ASLR before Linux did, and by all accounts its security is on par with or better than your average Linux distro.
Profit accounts for a lot, but profit requires selling product, which requires meeting customer demands. Having a product with a reputaiton for poor security tends to hurt demand, which means that good security can indeed come about in proprietary software.
but the number of actual practicing security people in the big software corporations is very low
You just ventured out of the realm of opinion, and made a statement of fact that requires some kind of source. On what basis do you make this claim? And by what logic do you say that there are more honest-to-goodness security gurus donating their time to "OSS" in general?
Its almost like you have disdain for anyone who would try to make a living off of their skills, like being PAID to be a good programmer or security expert was somehow a dirty thing.
1) Organic food has a bit of a wishy-washy definition;
Whats not to understand? If it has carbon molecules in it, it is organic.
If youll excuse me, I need to go light my organic oven. Food always tastes better when I use organic hydrocarbons.
Any time a society bans something, it creates an underground market. Some principles are so important and some crimes sufficiently bad that it is nevertheless worth it.
One could flip that argument around and say, well, we know that child prostitution is bad; but we cant STOP it, so we're going to legalize and regulate it. I think most reasonable adults would see that as pretty heinous and would agree-- even if it is driven underground, society cannot condone child prostitution.
Youre basically trying to defend fragmentation as a good thing, because while some programs might not work across the myriad of versions, neither will the vulnerabilities.
I find this logic lacking.
a) if MS hacks you, you'd never know it
You assume that IT folks have no way of tracking what enters and leaves their networks. Maybe that is true in smaller networks, but any larger business with any kind of budget is going to have an edge firewall, and Im gonna go out on a limb and say its not Microsoft's firewall.
b) they have lawyers that will have you run crying to your mommy.
The idea that Microsoft could somehow win that kind of case through the simple merit of its lawyers is ridiculous. Big companies have been brought to unfavorable judgements before, and if the evidence is clear enough theyd probably just settle with you on very favorable terms.
I don't really understand how anyone can care whether a closed source operating system is secure.
This is so much garbage.
Opensource systems have their share of holes, and the idea that there is a gigantic pool of people qualified to catch backdoors in something as relatively simple as a web browser-- let alone an OS-- is absurd. Just because you can look at the source doesnt mean you can do a remotely competent job of auditing it; and the idea that a single person could somehow audit hundreds of thousands of lines of code for security "on a whim" is even more absurd.
There are a lot of benefits to open source, but sometimes its advocates really stretch the imaginations with some of the claims and accusations they level against proprietary software.
it's sufficiently open that blatant backdoors are not going to be inserted.
So I suppose the whole potential IPSEC backdoor in freeBSD thing was just my imagination, then?
Youre talking nonsense. Consider that OpenSSL is widely considered a horrendously complex pile of spaghetti code, which I believe has had its share of security issues, and yet we still use it. Is it because we're lazy? No, its because sometimes some of this security stuff is phenomenally complicated, and it would take a horrendous number of man-hours from incredibly talented people to refactor or replace it.
One of the benefits of paid software is that, if theyre competent, they can devote a lot of time to it because they are paid. Im gonna go out on a limb here and say that one of the biggest helpers to good code in a lot of OSS projects are the paid volunteers, not the mere fact that its "open" as if that dash of pixie dust makes a project magically better.
and since you'll hopefully be getting donations seven days a week that makes it equivalent to an income just shy of $3,000 per week.
Thats not a safe bet at all; you cant simply extrapolate from one day's sales to one week's sales-- especially when every other industry recognizes far higher profits on day one than on subsequent days (check opening day sales on any major game or movie, vs the next several days, vs the next several weeks). Theres usually a pretty sharp drop-off.
Not $3000, $426. 300 x $1.42 average. Very slight difference-- goes from "maybe economically viable" to "OK as a hobby, not as a means of support".
Exclamatory!
I've got a wireless router to sell you. It has all these features for QoS and firewalling and it's secure and it gets 300 mbps and it's got the DLNA,I swear.
You mean this thing? (after installing dd-wrt)
On a serious note, exactly how is one supposed to purchase a drive if we cant trust anything on the product page? Just guess?
Except the OS, drive, and driver all claim that NCQ is working on every single SATA disk I have seen that has been set to AHCI. To say "yea but theyre still lying".... why shouldnt we ask for specifics? Are we expected to go out and test every extant drive to see whether it supports NCQ?
If the author had specifics that he tested and found to improperly implement NCQ, perhaps he should have included his data so that it could be verified. All he gave was a general overview of tagged queuing and NCQ, and then declared "but not everyone does it right". Thats so vague as to be worthless.
This is a false dichotomy. What is needed to fix its "problem" is to have the major players reach out to integrators and try and establish some baseline, default system config (or maybe two, at most) that vendors can target and know that things will work on any compliant system. Like POSIX, but for Desktop Environments (plus all the nuts and bolts, package managers, init scripts, bootloaders, etc down the line).
But at least MS makes it so easy that a vendor practically has to TRY to have a program be incompatible with the newest or oldest supported version of Windows.
Whereas to see an incompatibility on any of the major desktop Linux distros, you just need to wait 6 months-- or even for the next update.
Dont get me wrong, I have loved linux (tho for now I am happy on my Win7 workstation); but it has serious problems when it comes to being where support from a vendor is "expected". Right now its basically a "bonus", and in my eyes that is a problem.
Right, because you have no problem burning an ISO, installing it (and dealing with dualboot shenanigans), and dealing with incompatibilities by googling them.
For the folks who cant go to Dell and get a reasonably priced pre-installed Fedora, Ubuntu, or Debian with Dell support (contracted out) behind them, there is a problem.
I think Icaza was right that there is too much variety out there. Options are great, and i think its good that when PulseAudio was broken, it wasnt like Windows where "the soundsystem you have is the soundsystem you have until your vendor graces you with a fix". Being able to switch components like that out is really really good. But Im sure (as Icaza said) it makes it a nightmare for vendors who want to spend as little time thinking about compatibility as possible.
What if there were some initiative where, like "Gnome desktop" and "KDE desktop" are defined genereally in a way that a dev can know what is on the system-- what if the big names (Novell, RedHat / CentOS community, Debian / Canonical) all banded together and said, "OK, here are the major 'desktop flavors', which will guarenteed have these APIs, libraries, and components". Like, Debian and Ubuntu and Mint all agree that in their "Gnome" flavor, whatever stock desktop comes up will support certain audio calls, certain init script types, certain logon screen integration methods, and a specific network configuration widget. Maybe also a standard way of very quickly pulling up a terminal on the desktop.
Doing that would be absolutely huge, because now a vendor has 2 main targets for "Joe Standard User", and it can know that its init scripts will work, the version of Java it expects is either installed or can be auto-installed through the native package manager, and if it needs to walk the user through a network change it can tell him to go to his standard "run command" prompt, type in "GnomeNetworkConfig" and have a bog-standard widget. It doesnt need to maintain documentation for 5 different distros, or worry about 3 different soundsystems, etc.
Thats my thought. You want dell jumping onboard? Get some degree of collaboration between the major players so that, at least from an integrator standpoint, there is some consistency. And if the power user wants to rip out everything and replace it, and deal with any compatibility issues, thats fine-- but for goodness sake lets bring the idea of "sane defaults" home.
They sell the same drives as Enterprise Grade SATA with these NCQ turned on in firmware as they do to consumers with it turned off.
What you get with an "enterprise" sata drive is higher MTBF and a firmware tweaked to work well with RAID (desktop drives try to be more forgiving for IO errors, while the enterprise drives are more quick to decide "ive failed, let the raid controller do its work").
Im not aware of any sata drive that doesnt support NCQ-- its certainly on every desktop drive ive used excepting MAYBE the very first sata drive I bought in 2003. Certainly all SSDs I am aware of (except niche super-low-end ones) and all mass-market desktop drives do.
Which is basically none of them. I would be astonished if anyone could link me a drive sold on newegg, amazon, or by Dell that does not implement NCQ when set to AHCI mode.
That's why if you could do that, it would be the result of a loophole.
Then blame the government. I imagine you would fire any personal accountant who didnt get you the highest legally allowable return; why are people expecting business accountants to do otherwise? Is there some rubric we can apply to figure out what is "legal but not kosher"?
They might as well cut the middle-man out and donate the money directly.
There are reasons thats not quite true, but point taken. Nevertheless, I think blaming the person for taking advantage of it is like putting out a sign saying "free puppies" and then yelling at the first person to take one.
Doing a bit of research, it appears my usage was (or at least could be) correct. Google "indefinite article with proper noun". It appears that when you have an adjective before a proper noun, you can use the indefinite article "A" or "an". Examples:
Mr Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work and Mrs Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his highchair. (Appears to be from harry potter, but was pulled from a forum example)
Alfie then shut the gate and ambled off to the house, shaking his head in perplexity, to complain to a sympathetic Dora in the kitchen.
In this case, since "Sharp" is modified by the adjective "cash-poor", the indefinite article is allowable. But as I said, headlines tend to drop all articles, which makes "cash-poor Sharp mortgages" rather ambiguous.
Further reference (though there are zillions)
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2204216
Let's say you claimed that unicorns existed, and I said there's no evidence to suggest that they do.
But if I were to show you a unicorn foal, and you responded "that CANT be a unicorn, because unicorns dont exist", then you would be begging the question. Your claim in your previous post was specifically that the Bible cant be true because the things in it (man rising from grave, etc) cant be true. If thats not circular, then I dont know what is.
because by your own definition you assert that his existence cannot be proven.
I am not aware of making or implying that claim in any of my posts. Just because miracles may not be falsifiable, does not mean there is not compelling evidence for the existence of God.
If I tell you that a human being cannot lift a semi truck, it is absolutely supported by reason and science.
There are hidden assumptions and conditionals: "The laws of physics remaining as they are and without outside forces intruding, a human being cannot lift a truck unaided". The claim about a man rising from the grave is specifically that he did NOT do so unaided. When we speak of a "miracle", we are speaking of a supernatural suspension of the normal order of things.
It would be accurate for you to say that "men rising from their graves" isnt the "normal order of things"; the Bible's claim is that it happened and will happen again. The two are not in conflict-- unless you presuppose that the Bible is wrong because there are no miracles. How you would prove the absense of miracles, im not sure. Certainly you are right that THAT is not falsifiable; that doesnt make it wrong.
The famines in the USSR are a direct result of discarding science [wikipedia.org].
Your post was specifically about how discarding faith in favor of "practical acts" was the way to increase prosperity, which I believe Soviet Russia did despite not being prosperous in the least. Certainly what Soviet Russia did was "practical" in the extreme.
I'll gladly concede that point if you'll admit that the formation of the canonized Bible was directed by the political desires of Roman Emperor and not by God, and that the content of the Bible was therefore an accident of history.
This is inaccurate. I suggest you read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_Christian_Biblical_canon#Development_of_the_New_Testament_canon
In a nutshell, there was a pretty firmly established canon by the end of the second century. What you bring up is a myth.
How could you construct a reproducible study of bad theology?
Someone declares "The new testament God is all about love, not judgement!" I point to Revelation, the sermon on the mount, any of Jesus interactions with the Pharisees, the entire book of Romans.....
Someone declares "If your faith is strong, God will give you your best life now." I point to Paul's tribulations (2 corinthians, also the whole "executed in Rome" thing), Peter's execution, John's exile, Jesus' own words "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me", etc etc.
Its not much different than if someone were to say "I know that Napoleon conquered eastern Mongolia". By what you seem to be saying, you could not disprove him. But of course we have historical documents which prove him wrong.
There isn't much difference between religious faith and political faith. They're both based on assumptions and assertions instead of facts and mutually observable results.
Im gonna disagree: they can be, but do not have to be. And the implied dichotomy is that "others" do NOT base their beliefs on assumptions, which is just false. Every bit of science is based on ass
The polygamist nature of the compound he supposedly lived in till age 5 being relevant....how? Or is this one of those things called "smearing your opponent"?
Please guys, lets try to elevate this out of the muck. If you have a problem with Romney's policy persuasion, then vote on it. Dont smear the guy with irrelevant attacks though, it does noone any favors.
If you can directly invest all of your life's earnings into a retirement account
AFAIK you cannot do that. There are contribution limits. For a Roth IRA, its $5000 a year I believe. For a 401k, google tells me its $17k. Theres no loophole, and if there wasnt a limit that wouldnt be a loophole either. Theyre pretty intentional about the language that goes into legislation; if its tax-legal and the IRS hasnt cried foul, then its not a foul.
You MIGHT have a point if you mentioned tax havens.
f you could install energy efficient windows in other people's houses for less than the tax deduction that would also be a loophole.
If the legislation allowed it, no, that wouldnt be a loophole (the entire point of such a measure would be to get people to install energy efficient windows, and you can only do it once per house for a tax reduction). Pretty sure you cant, because again they intentionally prohibited it.
if you could reduce your taxes by more than the value of you donation to goodwill, that would clearly be a tax loophole.
Not true, because if they had not placed a charity giving limit (which they did), it would be clear that they were trying to encourage as much charitable giving as possible.
how you balanced the books while running your company,
Thats not gonna be in his tax returns, that will be in the financial books of Bain Capital.
, especially if your claims are how you've created huge amounts of jobs for the American people
Nor will that. Nor will who he employed, fired, etc etc etc. Those are all part of company records, not a personal tax return.
What about his will too? Maybe that should be public record. After all, if he asks for any privacy whatsoever he MUST have something to hide!
This whole attitude is ridiculous. What exactly are you expecting to find? We know its gonna come forward eventually, and Im gonna wager that theres almost nothing of note there for anyone except those who will find fault no matter what.
and a Nobel Prize for whoever figured it out.
I thought you had to do something political to get one of those.