Apparently "Prep and Landing" is the name of a 2009 holiday short about Santa's elite "advance team" of elves that visits houses before Santa's arrival and makes sure that everything goes smoothly (Preparation for Santa's Landing).

http://disney.go.com/prep-and-landing/about/prep-and-landing/

Picoturtles or it didn't happen.

Isn't the real problem that NJ state's tax code is so expansive that its own citizens don't even know what they should or should not pay taxes on?

Tax law is one item that Amazon is paying extremely close attention to as of late. They are actually leading the discussion for the national sales tax, because it forces their competition (eBay) to play by the same rules. Amazon is a distribution system masquerading as an online retail store. They have physical nexus and are being required to collect taxes on behalf of customers in at least 16 states.

Exactly ... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books. If I have â100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?

Good idea. But now the problem is securing the transaction and getting a data connection into the plug (socket standardization).

Exactly. Private enterprise won't get us a city on Mars, it will get us thousands of tiny habitats on asteroids in the belt, to hold the mechanics/repair staff for robotic mining operations. It won't be glorious, but it will make money.

This is the same reason we don't have all of the crazy stuff that classic sci-fi says we should have by now, like habitats at the bottom of the ocean or a city at the north pole. Instead we do have floating oil rigs, mining operations, mountaintop windfarms, desert solar arrays... because that's what is actually profitable.

Good point. Thanks to the Dot Com Bust, fiber optics had become so commonplace that the bottom fell out of the market, which has impacted companies like Owens Corning.

But it was awesome nonsense . . .

Electricity is most commonly produced by giant furnaces burning fuel, which boils water into steam, which turns a turbine, which spins a magnet, which produces an electric field, which transfers electrons along miles of conducting bundles of wires at some loss to where they are consumed by a motor to produce work, or stored by a battery at some loss at the final destination.
 

> With two months in between strips for a web comic ...

Having a heart operation will do that to a person.

... but as soon as you called your family/doctor/S.O. with that new number, that phone got added to the searchable list. If you made more than one call, or call the same people all of the time even with different phones, that disposable phone is now linked via the metadata. Network effect, indeed.

The obvious answer is to add "Are You Sure?" popups to the UI . . . Users love those.

I guess you have a different definition of old-timers, since it was founded in 1824 and became an official Institute in 1832.

The hidden truth is we could not afford the Blue Angels last year either; the country spent $1.1 trillion more than it took in in fiscal year 2012. What the US is doing is issuing debt in the form of bonds to keep itself solvent. Some day that debt will have to be repaid, which means not only balancing the budget, but becoming cash flow positive. That will require true cuts beyond anything any politician is willing to stomach.

Disclosure: My wife is a 3rd party merchant through Amazon's Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) program. I guess I'm her "CIO".

The online retail space has been evolving over the past couple of years, as we all can tell. Since 1992, when the US Supreme Court ruled that sales tax could not be collected from a state where there was no physical business presence, online retail has operated in an essentially un-taxed environment. You were always supposed to track online sales made to customers in your own state, but there was a competitive advantage over brick & mortar (BM) retail stores. Companies like Amazon could locate their warehouses in Arizona and do business in California without being taxed in California; the Californian citizens were supposed to calculate their tax and remit it on their tax forms. You can probably see that individual citizens wouldn't report this, and the states felt they were losing out on a lot of revenue.

So, the BM stores lobbied the states to implement collection policies; it would become the online retailer's responsibility to collect the sales tax and remit it to the state. Additionally, many states have been changing their nexus laws, such that 3rd party sellers that use Amazon's warehouses to hold their products, a transaction is taxable if it is shipped from a warehouse to a customer in that state, even if the object owner is out of state. This will make online retail less competitive on the pricing side.

But, what BM retail stores forget is that they have a competitive advantage too, they are located closer to the customer at the point of sale. When someone goes into the store, they can check out and walk out of the store with the item in hand (no 2 day wait on getting your item). Additionally, they can impulse shop from the store's inventory. Amazon looks at this and says, if I'm going to be taxes as if I have a physical presence, then I might as well have a physical presence, and they have begun building "micro warehouses" in major cities across the country. Now, you will be able to order online, get the vastly superior inventory storage options that a warehouse provides, and get same-day shipping to the customer, so the customer can have the item in hand by the end of the business day.