Known about this for about a month now, it's been a very badly kept secret with the ground floor guys at RS. From what I've gathered, it's the new CEOs push to really get back to what drew people to the store in the first place -- the "Oooh, neat" factor. How they execute it, however, is still up in the air; most RSs are dinosaurs in terms of getting new product in / clearing out old product. My experience with them was mostly replacing/repacking stuff that had its casing yellowed because they've been in the store so long.

To be fair, I can understand wanting to diversify a bit -- it's basically been focusing so much on cellphones for the past decade that it's no wonder that it might be tempted to garner more sales than from a market that has since become extremely competetive and harder to pull a large profit from without the messiah-like capabilities of its more salesman-like staff (the few are hard to find; the turnover is pretty awful).

I'd just be happy if A) It became a geek store again that B) could actually turn a good, fair profit. Dreams.

A World Heritage site should be something that exists in the world; something we interact with and can learn from.

Wikipedia is a very fascinating project and I wouldn't mind having some sort of international intervention in its preservation, but it's inappropriate to put it in the same ranks as a 4000-year-old forest or a historical church. It's a website; there should be better channels than this for it.

There are my keys...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_Auto_Transit,_Inc._v._Brady

Two questions:
1) Does the use of outside businesses for shipping constitute nexus on the part of Amazon? Probably not.
2) Although Amazon forwards packages to these states, are they using any public services in said states outside of the shipping company? Not really.

Truth be told, I think he's got a point under the current law. Simply sending a lot of packages to a place doesn't constitute owing that place a tax, at least on the part of Amazon.

I think there is some murky ground when it comes to what the customer should or shouldn't be responsible for in terms of taxation, but I don't feel it is Amazon's responsibility to collect this tax by force.

I'm assuming there's supposed to be an "EXCLUSIVE" in one of those two spots, no?

But yes, that just gives more credence to why the term is overused. It's like saying because something isn't in the kernel, it shouldn't be included in any releases of an OS; in theory you could have a micro-government subsisting on just the constitution, but people demand things like police services and Flash 10, so you make room for them at lower levels, where they can do less harm to the overall structure.

Also -- it's kinda surprising I never noticed the comparison between government models and OS frameworks before.

' “We’re no different from other big chains of retailers,” Bezos said. “They don’t collect sales taxes in states where they don’t have [employees], either.” '

They also don't sell merchandise in those states to consumers.

I do sympathize somewhat -- it seems like a bit of a burden to any online retailer to have to log and track sales tax for every single state in the United States in order to do business online. However, simply selling your product directly to consumers also shouldn't exempt you from having to pay sales taxes, either. I feel like there should just be a separate tax pool for online sales, essentially creating an imaginary taxed "online" state, the funds of which could then be proportioned to the various states on a per-state percentage.

Or perhaps we could drop sales taxes in general and just submit to a higher tax rate in this country. No, that'd be silly...

When asked about this achievement for C. elegans, the species did not respond, instead opting to reproduce asexual for a period of three to five days.

I'm just waiting for the Constitution to be declared unconstitutional, at which point a dark vortex will begin swirling underneath Washington D.C. and devour the National Mall...

Yes, but we've yet to develop nano-sized shotguns, so that'll have to wait.

I'm taking this with a grain of salt.

If being constantly bombarded by birth theories is what's required of me to be a reader of the "free press", I think I'll just pick up a subscription to Pravda, thanks.

Get me:

(1) A New Final Fantasy on a tablet and other portable device that, (2) While still pretty, (3) Has a fun and exciting mechanism incorporating touchscreen RPGing and (4) Isn't prepared by a poll of "things teenagers like". Make sure that it (6) Has a triage that goes: Gameplay, Immersiveness, Storyline, and then Graphics; and (7) Has an ability, in some form, to interact with other players, be it via Bluetooth or over the Internet.

You risk falling victim to being another dead game company if you continue to emphasize high-budget "Wow!" games over ones that will actually draw new players into the series. You don't have to abandon the concepts you've developed, but please, just try something new. Is that so much to ask?

Raise the damned rates! And I do mean by a substantial amount.

If your customer base has shrunken, you've lost out to a competitor. If it's essentially vanished, you offer nothing they don't. Despite what may be said, the Post Office isn't dead -- it's just broke. You want to mail a letter? You want to make sure it gets there?

Five bucks to mail a personal letter. You may hate it, but when it comes time to mail a letter to your girlfriend in California, five bucks won't seem like such a burden after all. And that's the key -- capturing that novelty market that uses it from time to time for the physical sentiment of having an object sent by one person in their hands.

The problem with those ideas is that they're basically already being covered by two strong competitors who have garnered people's trust. The USPS is redundant and perhaps, as the weaker candidate with little to offer the general public, it should be eliminated.