Because Amazon patented 1-click shopping they would have to license it from Amazon to offer a 1 click buying option just like Apple has to for iTunes.

No, I wouldn't say they were necessarily nice but one of the major reasons the Romans succeeded in creating such a vast empire was because they absorbed the culture of the people that they were conquering. This made the transition easier and made revolt far less likely because, in general, people don't care what ruler they are paying tribute (taxes) to; they only care if the amount goes up or it changes how they live their lives.

I think Oracle et al. could learn a lot from the Roman approach.

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding of the problem was that there are a large number of fairly rich people who live in Washington along the south border and do most of their shopping in Oregon (which has no sales tax but a very high property tax). This has allowed them to 'dodge' a lot of the taxes that both these states rely on for revenue. One of the main reasons they were looking at an income tax was to alleviate this problem.

If this is the case, since this measure was shot down, what are the alternative proposals to make up for this loss in revenue?

As a pro-choice, pro-gay rights atheist, who was almost punched by his father (he missed) for saying "the government isn't inherently evil and neither is Obama", I have found that people do some stupid things when they are angry. The rhetoric behind this election has been unbelievable. How can we possibly expect any sort of sane, rational discourse on our problems when everyone is trying to make their opponent out to be Hitler (Godwin be damned). Gridlock for the next two years may help spending, we'll see, but I doubt it is going to calm the electorate at all and may help to polarize it further.

Yes, I'm sure many people here know the old adage 'If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail ' but I think you are misapplying it here. The first thing any real doctor does when faced with the unknown is get a consult (aka. get another doctors opinion). If the unknown occurs during a procedure (eg. surgery, etc) the response is this: Could not operate due to complications. Any other response than this (atleast in the legal world) is called: Malpractice. I'm sorry but doctors don't invent new procedures on the fly, there is simply too much to account for. Even emergency room doctors adhere to this as well (I know this because my neighbor is one and I just asked him about this).

Getting back to the main point of this thread (of which we are woefully offtopic) the debate that seems to be taking place is between conceptual and operational knowledge (aka. why vs how). Ideally, professors want to test conceptual knowledge because this is what best indicates your understanding of a particular idea. Open note tests are a great way to do this because, for instance, lets say you're being tested on some chemistry principles; you may understand all the principles but forget how many atoms are in a Mol (or any number of other unit conversions). In a closed note test, you would get the answer wrong despite understanding the principles but on an open note test, all non-conceptual (aka. only memorized) material is freely available and you can quickly check it. Operational knowledge is exactly like it sounds, follow a procedure to get an your answer. Any slight change in the problem requires a different procedure to be memorized, etc.

While this is certainly true, that list is more a matter of meeting the broad definition of religion and being non-profit rather than having to meet a focused set of criteria. For instance, there are many secular institutions on that list of 'approved churches'. This is only possible because there isn't a focused criteria of things like: must worship a god(s), must hold a worship service, etc that one must meet. If, to be a journalist, one only had to meet the definition of journalism (ie. the act of reporting news) then these two cases would be the same.

As I pointed out in another post later on, the physorg writeup of this story was much more thorough.

From the physorg article:

This is what makes the study interesting and why it can't be chalked up to 'I don't like people who disagree with me'. Its too bad the summery failed to mention this.

Physorg.com covered this story two days ago. Here is a link to the original article from Ohio State University which sponsored the research.

Thank you for bringing this up. Often, if you are able to actually empathize with the enemy, you realize that they are just a symptom of a bigger problem. As of late, our society has spent far too much time trying to treat symptoms (Root out and kill all terrorists) instead of tackling the real underlying problems (why they hate us in the first place).

Just in case kdawson posts this.

The Pirate Bay's website is currently suffering an outage due to a court injunction against its German infrastructure providers. The lawsuit was filed by a number of major Hollywood studios over the copyright infringement of several new blockbusters, notably Alice In Wonderland and The Bounty Hunter. Torrentfreak is reporting that site admins are already working on getting it up and moving again and hope to have it back up within a few hours.

Well considering most /.ers don't RTFA and there was no mention of the bundle in the summary, I'd say your comment is actually the Slashvertisement.