that may be true where you live.
but when i lived in florida and sold motorcycles, we were expected to collect taxes based upon the HOME city of the purchaser, which did in fact mean we had to know what the exact sales tax was for each and every county AND city since in many cases, cities would have local option sales taxes added on top of the state tax and county tax.

at least where i live now, all they do is base it on the base state sales tax and tell the counties/cities to piss off when it comes to vehicle purchases. And why do they do this? Because vehicle purchases are one of the main purchases that are routinely purchased outside of a home locality. Especially in states like Iowa where i live when you have a ton of small towns that are within an hour or two driving distance of a larger city that has substantially lower prices.

The reason people are purchasing these "appliances" from Apple is actually quite simple.
They work within their ecosystem and offer the ability to get what people want.
Now, having said that, there are many more people rocking an iPod than there are ones rocking a complete Apple ecosystem because it's easy to use, easy to get what you want, can be used on the major OS's quite easily (other than iTunes being a crappy manager), and despite other manufacturers attempts, it really is one of the better. more easily purchased devices for mom and pop to buy for little Johnny.

Apple is selling an experience.
Their devices work together quite well. This also means that they don't work all that well with others, so if you've spent hundreds or thousands of dollars over the history of iTunes purchasing songs, do you really want to repurchase them as DRM free, or go the route of burning and re-ripping them so you can have them DRM free?
No, you don't. So you keep using their system.

That's why people purchase these products.
That and they look shiny of course (/sarcasm)

leave teh GIMP alone!!!!!

how many apps running on your phone have access to that file?

oh that's right, it isn't kept on your phone if the cell companies have it.

now think about how many apps could be checking against this unencrypted file on your phone for imfromation and sending it to a third party without you even knowing.....

yeah, paying for MLB.com was my idea too.
until i actually tried it.
I live in Iowa, where there are no professional major league teams within 4 hours of me.
yet amazingly, I'm in the "local market" for all of the following teams:
Minnesota Twins
Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox
Milwaukee Brewers
St Louis Cardinals
Kansas City Royals
Colorado Rockies

so if any of those teams are playing home games, and they aren't sold out, they get blacked out for me.
that's correct. 7 of the 30 MLB teams are Home market, subject to blackout teams for me.

Hell, about half the time, they are blacked out on ESPN if they are any night but Sunday which isn't subject to blackout.

so needless to say, i got tired of watching teams from the east and west coast that i cared nothing about as my only options.

I'll stick with my satellite service and watch the games i want to watch.

that's ok.
they still have everything you ever put up there on their end.

no, the claim was not implied.
it was inferred in your case.

having one product FISMA certified does not immediately make other products "utilizing the same platform" fall under the same certification.
The certification process explicitly states which exact products are certified when it is given.
This is why Google has asked that the certification be updated to include the Google Apps for Government.

Thus, the Google Apps for Government is not, currently, FISMA certified, although it appears to be in the process of obtaining such certification.

it's ok.
it's not the size that matters.

i much prefer to HAVE a remote to control my HTPC and not need the keyboard or mouse to do so.
for the 2% of the time i need a keyboard, i can grab the wireless low profile one with integrated trackball i keep stashed under the end table next to my recliner.

and i much prefer my Dell ZinoHD form factor over this thing to have sitting in my a/v component shelves.

Windows plays DVD's just perfectly fine. right out of the box, and has since the release of Vista.
Oh, it doesn't work on your old ass install of XP from 10 years ago out of the box? too fucking bad. update your shit or use the alternatives.

And if your webcam keeps disappearing, and again, i'm betting this is the same old ass install of XP, its most likely either a) a shitty webcam or b) user error.

for the most part, and i do mean the vast majority of the time, the modern windows os's "just work" with almost anything, and if they do require drivers, and you haven't purchased some flea market made in china kirf'd pos peripheral, the drivers install easily and after at most requiring a reboot, your item works.

this.

and since the information database MyMovies pulls from is community maintained and vetted, it is far superior to the metadata that you will get from even good metadata sources like IMDB.

You can use MYMovies for frontend interface on Windows Media Center or you can utilize one of a number of other front ends and only use the MyMovies Collection Management DB backend.

The nice thing about this product is that it does store actor/director/crew information, so you can easily pull up any director and see all of the movies in your collection and with a simple click then pull up any of those movies for immediate playback.
I have 20TB+ of movies/tv shows in my collection (yes i own them, i buy dvd's instead of paying for cable/satellite service) and utilize the MM front end and backend and everything is fast to utilize.
Another nice thing about MM is that it is completely free to use for home use and allows for all of the "nifty" special features people like, including screen customization, movie art, etc.

their newest version (still in beta till the end of the month) also now includes specific features for handling tv shows ripped to individual episodes if you are one the "acquires" these.

ask the greeks, the irish and other EU countries how that's working out.......

holy fuck dude, give it a rest.
you've posted the same dribble three times in less than 20 comments.

several including built in options and free to use options including most anything from linux (via cygwin) or via additional program like SyncBack.

throw in things like Dropbox which are cross platform, or *gasp* paid solutions like carbonite or mozy, and those without backup are either uncaring or completely clueless.

hell even my 60 year old mother wanted to know how to make sure her "pictures" sere backed up in case something happened.