The sales tax issue in the US is breathtaking complicated. We did an ecommerce site for a local chain that has retail locations in a few cities round here. Colorado effectively only applies sales tax if both the consumer and the business share a jurisdiction.

So that means if both and in denver then you need to collect Denver City, Denver County, Colorado State, RTD transit and a few other miscellaneous development levies. However if the business is in denver but the consumer is up in boulder, then you only need to collect Colorado State & RTD.

Unfortunately the boundaries for the different districts are absurdly complicated. I live in a small town in colorado with a single zip code and yet we have 4 different tax rates. The transit tax only applies if you are in a part of the town that was annexed after some year. I can't get the right taxes on something delivered from the other side of town.

I'm sure any sales tax offering will start with just state level taxes being collected, but counties and cities will be right behind in wanting their share. At that point Amazon will have to maintain an accounting relationship with thousands of entities, and they'll have their unfair advantage back since it'll quickly become impractical for all but the largest online retailers to play.

I tried for 6 hours to get my hdtv connected to my macbook and failed dismally. I've been a mac user for 24 years and it utterly let me down.

However it took about 10 seconds with a displayport to HDMI cable on my linux laptop, no configuration necessary.

I bought a Mazda 3 and continually see ads for Mazda3's. I like it, but am unlikely to buy more of them.

I suspect the main driver will be smartphones. Hardly anyone would notice if their smartphone was on IPv6 and it'll be a cheap way for big operators in china and such to get millions of devices online in short order.

I use my G1 hiking on multidays hikes with maverick. In airplane mode I can get a day of hiking with occasional GPS use, though using the screen to plot out courses and things does definitely sap battery power. G1 batteries are about $7 each and super light, i don't really see the problem carrying a stack of them

The quality of maps is way better than my etrex ever did and while i'm sure the new Garmins also come with better maps, I don't see myself going back. Though I do carry my Forerunner 405cx GPS with me too

Yeah, it's really hurt them. They've been wildly unprofitable since then

Larger dies generally cost more because it's more likely that they'll have a defect. I haven't done any chip design since college (and even then it was really entry level stuff) but if you could break the chip down into 10 different subcomponents that need to be spaced out, you could put 100 of those components on the chip and then after manufacture you could select the blocks that perform best and are defect free, spacing your choices accordingly.

I'm pretty sure chip makers likely already

I'm not sure i'd want any kind of backup with an immediate kill switch. I know i'm online an awful lot, but i can think of situations where i'd not have access for quite a few weeks.

Tarsnap is prepaid with paypal, so when your account balance drops to zero they'll wipe your files without any kind of additional charge.

Though I am reminded of that japanese guy who'd been dead for 20 years in his apartment because his pension was going in automatically and his rent and bills were being similarly paid.

On a more serious note.

1) Kill switch is unnecessary. If it's a paid service then it'll purge when you stop paying the bill

2) I've been playing with tarsnap lately and i'm pretty impressed. You use it just like tar but it uses a private key to store the results on their server. They can't see what you store and it intelligently tracks diffs so if a file appears in multiple archives you don't need to transfer or pay for it after the first time.

3) Something like mozy or jungledrive would surely be easier to use and should be able to offer a similar level of protection. Obviously you'll have to be a little cautious about who has access to your private key, but it should protect you from casual snoopers

4) Stop storing personal stuff at work

I think you mean "emails to the wife, photos of the wife, that kind of thing"

The majority of my programming assignments in the later undergrad years started with "choose a suitable language & platform to solve this problem".

I turned over stuff in Java, C, Assembly and I think i even found a reason to put some perl in there. I liked Linux, but you could use Windows, Solaris, IRIX and there were a few macs there towards the end.

If you are trying to select a program today, choose one that's language agnostic. Learning how to fix a y2k bug in cobol is indeed a one trick pony (maybe you'll get some work on 2038), building something that can handle errors in a data feed or rasterize 3d bezier curves will surely get you a lot further.

Doesn't it sound a bit like the US healthcare system?

Some of those students come from countries with poorer educational systems, although I doubt you'll find thousands coming from Germany to pay through the nose for an undergraduate education.

My school (University of Edinburgh) had well over a thousand US students alone, and enough students from asia and the middleeast that scots were among the minority in plenty classes.

Would i have preferred a CS degree from MIT - almost certainly - but when i could go to a school that's consistently in the top 20 worldwide, without paying fees, why would I?

I've seen them run at 50 and 60 mph just fine, of course it just takes one dumbass doing something stupid to screw up the whole traffic flow (though isn't that true of nearly all traffic flows).

For high traffic levels i'm not sure they are any better than traffic lights, but they are great when traffic is low because they don't slow down your journey by making you wait at reds when no-one is coming the other way.

Yeah, it's especially tough since there's no straight ahead signal. It's very hard to tell if someone knows what they are doing and is leaving via the opposite exit, or if they don't know what they are doing and are turning left.

Colorado has a lot of californian drivers too. As best I can tell, california removes the bulbs from all their cars' signals - must be some fuel efficiency standard.