Court orders to provide customer lists along with what was purchased are routinely issued against online retailers who sell alcohol or tobacco on-line. In the case of tobbaco the state can't really do much to the retailer but in the case of Washington they do routinely issue nasty letters with the threat of legal action to customers who haven't paid the appropriate taxes.

Even if all states adopt a single unified statewide rate for online retailers that is still 46 tax jurisdictions one has to keep track of rates and exemptions in. Furthermore that is 46 jurisdictions with different filing deadlines and requirements, and 46 jurisdictions who can demand an audit of your books.

Then you get the fun corner cases. What happens when I as a Washington State resident order something online and have it shipped to my parents house in Arizona? Do I pay Washington taxes or Arizona taxes?

If you are in the US and got fired because you used up your sick leave and hit some arbitrary cutoff set by HR for unpaid leave that was less than the statutory amounts your former employer is opening themselves up for a lawsuit and Federal fines. The Family and Medical Leave Act entitles you to up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year for illness or medical conditions that leave you unable to perform your duties: http://www.dol.gov/whd/fmla/#.UMIqn7SmClI

The Intrepid's reputation with curation and preservation is shameful. So many other museums like the Air Force Museum in Dayton and the Museum of Flight in Seattle do a much better job with their priceless artifacts.

Given their poor record the Intrepid should not have even been a finalist for a shuttle.

Actually of the museums that were finalists for getting a shuttle but didn't get one the Museum of Flight in Seattle had the best curation plan and the best financial plan. They had an indoor climate controlled gallery next to an airfield that was "Shuttle ready". They actually scored better than the Intrepid did and NASA admits it screwed up the scoring (putting too much weight on metro area population).

But that is water over the seawall as they say, unless NASA decides to take Enterprise back NY will get to keep her.

To be fair Stallman and several of the other FSF types have always been Marxist fanbois on a religious crusade. However they at least knew what they were doing.

The pile of steaming crap that Gnome, KDE, Firefox, and others have become in recent years is extremely annoying. My next laptop most likely will run either OS X or Windows 7 or 8. I might have a VM or two for firing up Linux (or windows if I go the OS X route), but the primary OS is going to be something commercial and supported. I may also toss Linux on my old laptop, but it won't be my primary machine.

The wisdom of HP spinning off its desktop and laptop division remains to be seen. However it would seem they aren't handling it as well as IBM handled spinning off its desktop and laptop division to Lenovo. HP is creating a lot of uncertainty that is just going to drive customers to other vendors.

If anything SuSE and OpenSuSE have been better about upgrades than either Debian or Ubuntu. They have all of the polish you've come to expect from Ubuntu. They offer LTS versions as well. The only real downside is some of the software like Debian/Ubuntu can be way out of date compared to Gentoo/Fedora.

Not to say there aren't some bad bugs as well. But I've yet to find a distro that doesn' t have at least a few annoyances.

an initiative was submitted only to be later found unconstitutional (assuming the income tax initiative passes and the courts toss it). Several anti-tax initiatives have been tossed out by the courts too.

I think the debate over I-1098 will cause will be healthy for the state. I think the results of the vote will prove informative for both sides no matter what the outcome is.

Who knows which way the courts will rule if I-1098 passes? I've seen good arguments on both sides from people who have a fairly good understanding of the Washington Constitution and how it is interpreted by the state courts.

My state is in relatively good shape. Though to hear some people whine you'd think this state (WA) was some cross between California and Greece. Even if the initiative to repeal the junk food and soda taxes passes there is still room to make cuts before the state has to stop paying its bills. Yes further cuts will cause pain, but not to the dire straits some states are in.

While Disney has a much larger market cap ($61B+), Steve Jobs is a Disney Board member and already owns 7% of the stock.

Disney would be much more of a pure content play than Sony too.

Canada? The bastards told me the job was in Bellevue. Though the health care and retirement are better in Soviet Canuckistan and they didn't have to bail their banks out so there may be something to be said for that.

Two things:
1. Some people including some credible economists are rather worried about a dollar collapse and possible hyperinflation. Particularly among those who view inflation/deflation as mainly an effect of the overall money supply. The money supply has expanded dramatically in the past 10 years, especially since the Fed stopped directly reporting M3. Many of the measures taken by the Fed in the past 2 years to stabilize the financial system amount to increasing the money supply exponentially.
2. Given the revolving door between especially Goldman Sachs and Citicorp and the Federal Government I wouldn't be surprised if they had access to intel most other companies don't. Even without the connection, the government has in effect signaled that protecting the big financial players is a matter of national security.

That really sucks. I think you did the right thing in posting though.

I hope your wife is OK and I hope she (and you too!) get the help you guys need.