I find dhl to be the most inconsistent.

They left a $2k laptop on the doorstep
But required a signature for a replacement battery from the same supplier for the same laptop
They left $1500 in cash in a Travelex Currency Services envelope sitting in plain view
The required a signature for a cellphone case.

I don't think you are right, open source projects virtually never provide services for any kind of fee.

What you often find are that companies who develop open source projects provide services for a fee. However if they were trying to give money to one of those companies then surely they'd just sign up for enterprise support and never use it.

The real issue is that most open source projects aren't under the property of any corporation or foundation. The majority of projects are a solo or small group of developers that work together. Asking a random group of developers "Hey, can you guys form a corporation and invoice us for some service and we'll give you $5k" just isn't appealing. In parts of europe it'd cost more than that just to establish the corporation and set up a bank account that can take a US Dollar remittance.

The other issue is that the project has to find something to do with the money otherwise it's taxable for them. Most open source projects have few real expenses, source code hosting is effectively free, most hardware was probably not bought specifically for the project, and most of the development tools are free as well. If they are just going to pay it out to developers then they need to find some equitable way to split that up, and few projects are started with that in mind.

The easier approach would be to write to key developers on the projects, request a trivial feature and offer to pay them as consultants to develop and open source the feature for you. More developers are familiar with that model and it removes the problem of having to deal with the "project" as a whole and the fact that it's likely not any kind of tax entity.

Yeah I was pretty shocked in France to order my "bifteck bien cuit" and still have blood pour into my frites when i cut into it.

Now I've grown up I really want to go back :)

Bullshit. TMobile upgraded my TMo Dash (HTC Excalibur) to Windows Mobile 6 before the iPhone even came out.

The difficult place I lived had 4 discrete tax rates depending on where in the zip code you were.

If the government publishes a list by zip code and manages a central escrow account so I don't have to piss around sending checks to every county then that'd satisfy me.

Have you actually done that?

There's nothing particularly trivial about it. Even if software calculates the number this means that each small business will have to remit payments at least quarterly to 50 different authorities. That's a major pain in the ass. Even if it takes less than an hour per state, that's someone's full time job for a month of the year.

The consider that some states tax shipping, most don't, and I believe some states even tax free shipping at the actual value. NY doesn't tax clothing under $100. Georgia doesn't tax energy efficient products between Oct 5th and 7th. All kinds of states have exemptions for school supplies, but I'd bet they don't consider the same set of items as "school supplies".

Plus if this goes ahead, then county sales tax will surely be fast on its heels. That get's into extra special levels of stupidity - in the town I used to live in, you only had to pay for the transit district if the land your house is on was annexed by the city after 1992. Even ordering stuff from the national retailers online, most of them just gave up and asked me which tax rate applied to me.

Don't get me wrong, i have no issue with sales tax as such, but it needs to be simple or it'll really hurt small online retailers (I suspect it'll actually be a win for Amazon). I'd rather see something like a flat 5% or 8% that your remit to the federal government and they do the work of dividing it up.

I can't see why it wouldn't work. The extruder just appears to be melting the pellets and shaping them as filament, then the filament is melted in a 3d printer to make an object, I can't see why you couldn't repeat unless there's some chemical in the ABS that becomes weaker with each melt and set cycle.

Between my girlfriend and I we used 180GB last month and that didn't include a drop of piracy. A few hours of hd streaming per day, both of us streaming spotify all day, online backup from four computers and that's most of our quota gone. At the rate we're ramping up, I expect we'll hit the comcast 250G limit before the end of the year.

Where does the notion that nobody wants to live near a wind farm?

I can see windmills from my house and I can see a coal fired power station (well i could if i could get above the treeline), I would *far* rather see more windmills. As an engineer I find them beautiful.

The thing I don't understand is why they don't have a "free" period.

If an ISP didn't count traffic from 10pm - 8am against your quota, and perhaps even bumped up your upload cap for that period, then the heavy downloaders would run all that stuff at night.

I know I already have my online backup service and my podcast updates queued to run in the middle of the night because it seems like the courteous thing to do (and it impacts my own connection less) - why not provide a real incentive to do that?

Bandwidth (like electricity) doesn't have a fixed effective cost, it's much more expensive at peak hours.

I'm not sure why that's been missed! Don't you guys want to see me there?

Actually last CES I went to was such a zoo that I think we mostly hung out and gambled with my boss' money.

I concur. I put damn near everything on credit cards and have only ever carried a balance in a couple of instances (and mostly because it was easier than moving funds out of other investments to settle it).

Depending on what promotions I'm on, I usually end up with something in the region of $1500 in cashback or rewards in a given year. Then there are extended warranty benefits, I dropped an expensive pair of sunglasses and Amex covered it. Had a paypal purchase go wrong and visa took care of the appeal for me. Then I have Amex's premium rental car coverage which gives me primary coverage for rental cars when state farm wont. The Visa concierge service is handy in a pinch, if you find yourself stuck somewhere they'll happily arrange hotels and such.

Sure you can misuse credit cards, but that doesn't make them evil.

Clearly the public still buy it.

He's going to eliminate Obamacare on day 1? It's going to be an uphill battle to do it at all unless the gop take the senate too. Doing it on day 1? Dream on.

He's also going to label China as a currency manipulator on day 1 - except that only the treasury secretary can do that.

There's loads of local interest stuff missing. I'm not sure exactly where it could be acquired from, but I know when I take local tours of historical sites there are lots of interesting stories and ties with historical figures that are almost entirely uncaptured online.

Presumably it would require citing actual history books and the likes but it would require a reasonable effort to get that all online.

That's mostly based on extrapolation of buying a needle source from somewhere like united nuclear. I suspect whoever carried out the poisoning had a more wholesale source for the material.