I totally agree. My wife and I both graduated with BA's from Christian colleges. She had the typical college finance experience, with the school squeezing every penny that they could out of her, and then sending letters to her (probably for the rest of her life) asking for donations. She liked the school otherwise, but that (although typical) was/is irksome.

I, on the other hand, went to Moody Bible Institute. It is a college that aims to prepare people to do full-time Christian ministry. Since most of these graduates wind up in fields that don't have great earning potential, they don't charge tuition. I'll repeat that: they don't charge tuition. It's not an easy school to get in to, (it's certainly not for everyone) and it is by no means perfect, but it was the right fit for me. (I'm a missionary, but I'm up late tonight doing some open source coding and getting distracted by Slashdot.) Anyway, Moody avoids charging tuition by having a profitable publishing house, as well as a radio station and broadcast media company. All of the profits that they turn from these (as well as some hefty donations) are what keep the financial wheels turning at the school. When I graduated in 2005, they estimated that for my graduating class, the waived tuition amounted to a $78,000 scholarship per graduating student.

I receive letters occasionally from Moody asking for donations, and these are MUCH more easy for me to stomach. I don't have much in the way of spare money at the moment, but if/when I have the means, supporting Moody is something I'd like to do. I appreciate my education, and the fact that I could get through it without taking out ANY student loans, and I'd love to help present that opportunity to others if at all possible.

Anyway, I realize that I'm on a tangent, but I think that Moody Bible Institute is as close to a true non-profit as I've seen any university be.

You would need to provide a shipping address to get a tax amount, but it wouldn't be that hard to code. You can get a database of tax rates by zip code pretty trivially. I think (when I programmed for a brick-and-mortar that delivered all over the state of CA) that we paid $100 annually for a CSV of the whole state's data, and if my memory serves me correctly, a national database was $500. It was updated from time to time, when tax rates changed, but it was a matter of dumping the CSV into a MySQL database a few times a year. I don't think that Amazon could legally set a flat "tax rate" and charge that for purchases, but charging by delivery zip would not be that hard.

Yeah, I forgot my external hd was attached to my laptop when I went to move it. The enclosure is fine, but the 1 TB drive inside is toast. That happened last night. There went all my bt downloads...

I almost checked the "Post Anonymously" button on principle, but the difference is that I can choose what part of my identity to share with Slashdot. I just finished reading How to Access the Internet, A Guide from 2015 when I flipped to Slashdot and saw this article. Here's the first step. Creepy.

Heck, for that price, I'd do it alone, and I'd throw in the hardware as an act of goodwill!

Whoosh!!

FWIW, I live in the Amazon rainforest, and I have no earthly idea how much rain we get in the average year. I don't much care either, as much as there are no massive floods or droughts.

Nope, you're not. Might it be that the cops don't want this so they won't get caught as easily? That would be my assumption, based on my years living in downtown Chicago.

Ha, that's nothing! Try driving anything (or even walking) in a town full of cell phone using motorcycle drivers. (Maybe funny, but sadly true here.)

OK, I'll take the bait. As much as a random Frist Ps0+ should be downmodded, why choose "Redundant"!? To quote Inigo Montoya "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." I'm impressed that the first thing in any thread can be called redundant!

Wait, you work for Microsoft!? **ducks**

Funny you should use that euphemism. A road would have helped the rover considerably.

I was waiting for SOMEONE to mention them. I've used their stuff pretty extensively, and even the free stuff if very good, Linux/Mac/ and yes, Windows too. You can use pretty much anything you can install Postgres on as a server. I've used the paid version as well, and I know a number of friends who use them to run their small consulting firms.

Wow. I tried it, and the best answer I found was "don't bother". I figured that since the thing runs Linux, it'd be easy enough to repurpose. Boy was I wrong. I'd like to say that I enjoyed messing with it anyway, but the truth is, it was just a pain. All of the important drivers are wrapped up in a huge binary blob, and unusable without the TiVO software. A TiVO is worthless as pretty much anything but a TiVO, unfortunately. Maybe you're a lot smarter than me (a quite distinct possibility), but I didn't get anywhere. If you decide to go ahead anyway, I wish you luck, and a lot more success than I had.