Yeah, that whole 4th amendment thing is just crazy at how it prevents the government from looking through my credit card statement and personal property without court issued search warrant. Along with that equally insane 5th amendment thing that prevents me from being required to disclose or testify against myself as to where I buy my PJs and comic books. Course I don't even need to say if I even have PJs or comic books. ;)

For the federal government to collect VAT or sales taxes it would need to amend (or pervert) the Constitution, currently feds are limited to excise and income taxes only. Again Constitution and fact that I can assure state and individual uprisings if the federal government tried.

Personally I would be open to a sales tax (only at the retail level, not a VAT of any kind) provided the amendment that authorized a sales tax also nullified the 16th amendment and required a uniform percentage across all retail goods (not services) that was set by the majority of states, not the federal government.

FYI: The Constitution doesn't allow the Federal government to collect a value added tax of any kind. Also the law as you present it violates the 10th Amendment in various ways as well as many other provisions of Constitution. Just the fact they you put the Constitution in lower case speaks volumes.

"Why do things differ so much from State to State?" Because we are a Republic of independent states and that is how our Constitution was setup to promote a limited ans restricted federal government and to promote individual and state rights. Course many of out federally elected politicians don't seem to understand this, which, is why the Tea Party has been so effective at knocking those career politicians out of office.

From your comment I can assume that you have never actually spoken with the average state employee?

Dude that is so old school. These days you don't need firemen to burn unwanted books/ideas. In a world of electric books on multi-media devices there are two far simpler options:

• You run code to remove electronic copies/versions of unwanted ideas whenever they are found on the network
• You produce large quantities of reality TV, trash novels and other "noise" to drown out unwanted ideas

Libraries should simply buy paper books instead of ebooks while this policy is in place.

Please explain how Author --> Publisher --> Apple --> Amazon --> Reader removed the middleman from what was Amazon's current models of either:

Author --> Publisher --> Amazon --> Reader

or

Author --> Amazon --> Author's mom.

How exactly are book sales going to kick an additional percentage to Apple and be cheaper? Do you honestly believe that if Barnes and Noble and Amazon were not alternative shops for eBooks that Apple would have lower eBook prices, when it was Apple that allowed publishers to force Amazon and BN to raise their ebook prices several months back?

I view Socialism/Communism as the religions that progressives worship. Course, it is slightly different from religions like say Christianity, in the sense that Christians hold beliefs in principles that cannot be proven; whereas Socialists, Communists and Progressives hold onto a belief in things that have repeatedly failed, been disproven time and time again, actually reduce individual rights and freedoms, and yet remain the rage in universities funded by large capital endowments.

Are we talking about junk science in general or global warming specifically?

You were using "free software". You're welcome.

The question I was answering was "where is open source silverlight git repo?"

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight

https://github.com/mono/moon/tree/moon/moon-2-0

I think future Office innovations are likely to be around Office Sites instead of Office Suites. I use Google Docs on my Linux, Windows and Android devices, I use OWA, (not IMAP or POP or Outlook Anywhere) to read my e-mail remotely on both PCs and my phone. Office web apps are a great solution and they could be ported to a local version only version or a private LAN version if needed and designed with that in ming, whereas an Office Suite programming has a lot of OS dependencies that complicates developing for cross platforms.

For the record I was a huge Firefox fan because of their plugin add-ons, but, I switched to Chrome for two main reasons. 1). Chrome is much faster and 2). The real-time syncing of bookmarks, history, searches, etc. is awesome. I was searching for a 9mm AR-15 solution for my friend. As I learned more I found more options, eventually going through dozens and dozens of sites. But not remembering the search strings or links that located me there or their names in every case. I found a great solution for him from my home laptop using Chrome, later that day I ran into my friend and forgot the URL and site name, but it was in synced with my Android phone and available in my saved URLs, despite the fact that I had never closed Chrome or the page on my laptop. That is awesome. You can also push pages/sites to your phone and back very easily.

You are aware they added a method to go anywhere in the tree by clicking on that part of the path in the Window?

So if you are in explorer and your listed path is C:\users\corndog\Documents and you want to go to the corndog folder, you can just click on corndog. If you want to the users folder, you just click on users and if you want to change form Documents to maybe Downloads or Pictures, you can click between corndog and Documents and it will give you a dropdown list of the available folders wihtin corndog (same works between users and corndog if you wanted to switch to an different user's folder).


For the record this message was posted from my ubuntu 10.04 laptop, it could have easily been posted from my dual boot work laptop using either Windows 7 Professional or Fedora 12, my Vista 64bit workstation at home, my Windows 7 64bit workstation at work, or my Android phone.

I honestly love linux and Windows because I like the power to customize my environment and apps, which, is why I hate Apple computers and iDevices.