Osram's full company name is Osram-Sylvania. In the states and parts of Asia their products are usually sold under the well known Sylvania brand while in Europe they use the Osram brand. In many cases the products are the same, or at least very similsr, they're just branded differently.

Affiliates are quite a bit different than car dealerships. Their affiliate program is more like a company in California hiring a New York Marketing company to run ads on TV in New York. They simply pay someone to advertise their services outside their local operating area.

But it's not a big issue for Amazon since it only applies to the affiliate program. In the short term they're likely to just drop any affiliates in that that district as they've already done in several states. Thus they negate their "presence" there under this ruling and can continue doing business without collecting taxes. That'll hold until suits regarding the Amazon Marketplace sellers make their way through the courts. They're a far clearer "presence" as they are essentially Amazon franchisees and it'll be harder for Amazon to drop them as they're a much more significant source of revenue.

How many other major MMORPG have retained 60% of their peak subs after 9 years?
If not for them evolving their gameplay they'd likely be facing the same dilemma of choosing between trying free to play, implementing microtransactions or just shutting down entirely like so many other MMORPGs have.

As far as the question goes, asking the internet for MMO recommendations is like trying to get relationship advice at a whore house.
The truly massive MMORPGs are WoW, Runescape and EVE. And despite what the internet hipsters say, they're the biggest because they deliver what most people want from a MMORPG better than other games. If none of their gameplay works for you though, you have to delve into the niche games. Many of them are free to play so the best way to see if they fit your niche is to try them. Tera, Aion, DC Universe, D&D:O, Neverwinter, Rift, FF XIV & GW2 tend to be the most talked about but there's countless other small games (many with better than 50k players that feel no less massive than WoW) out there that you'll likely be able to find something you like.

If it's possible for you to find something you like. It seems many people are burnt out on the genre but refuse to admit it to themselves. Most "the last expansion/patch ruined the game" complaints are really "I'm tired of games that require more dedication than my job to obtain virtual items that will become worthless with the next patch" rants. Then there's the the dreamy eyed "TBC was the best" type of player looking for a game to deliver a sense of being special. That feeling that the devs care about you more than everyone else. Back in TBC and Vanilla, if you had epics you were special and part of each patch was just for you as anyone who hadn't found 25 people to run Gruul, Mag, SSC and TK steadily week after week and gain loot from those runs wasn't going to see Illidan during TBC. But now, anyone can ding 90, run around Timeless Isle for an hour or two and gear up enough kill Garrosh in LFR. The game play is the same for the more elite players, but the potential to gain a sense of 'accomplishing something special that no lesser player will be able to' is gone because the only thing an elite player gets that lesser players can't is a few achievements and a temporarily higher iLevel.

I, along with numerous friends had NES consoles fail when the little 'L' shaped piece of metal that held the cartridge bay down failed. It could be fixed by taking it apart and replacing the part with a more sturdy piece of a bent paperclip but that's a lot more involved than blowing.
And the original grey box PS1 had major issues with the laser unit that required people to have to play them with the console upside down for it to read. Fixing it completely required complete replacement of the laser unit.

Almost every console, from Intelivision (controller problems), to Colecovision (problems getting cartridges to seat correctly), to Atari 2600 (Power adapters fried constantly, joysticks were fragile) all the way to modern consoles have had issues to some degree or another.

Thankfully getting warranty service these days is a lot easier than it was before the online age. To get my PS1 laser unit replaced I couldn't just take it back to Walmart and try to get one that worked like I did with my Red Ring of Death plagued Xbox 360. I had to call Sony's not-toll-free hotline and spend 2 hours on hold before talking to someone who knew no English and just read off a phonetic script of irrelevant troubleshooting steps before they finally give me the address to a repair center 60 miles away where I had to take it, then wait 4 weeks to fix it before having to take another 120 mile round trip to pick it up, bring it home and see if it worked. And of course, it didn't so I had to repeat the whole thing a second time before I finally got a working PS1; 2 months, $20 in phone charges, and 480 miles later.

Yes, really. Of course the bookstore was at fault. It's the bookstore's rules that require their employees to service the company rather the customer which created an unpleasant customer experience. He wasn't blaming the employees for enforcing the rules, he was pointing out the rules themselves, which employees are forced to conform to without any ability to logically use their judgement to balance the needs of the company against the needs of the customer is what is stupid.
Not everyone is a masochistic consumer who will readily accept being treated like shit just because they once (or still) worked retail and sympathize with the employees over the people those employees are meant to serve.
Who gives a shit about the employees? I never blamed the customer for yelling at me because our service failed them when I worked in tech/customer support. I took it and did my best to calm them and address the problem because that was my job. If you can't handle the smell of shit, don't take a job cleaning out port-o-pottys.

Here's the kind of thing intelligent people do in situations like those: -- We realize the cafe is probably just trying to make people think they have a Starbucks so idiots will pay $5 for a $0.05 cup of swill. That seniors tend to be much easier to confuse into thinking it's a real Starbucks is just a bonus. So we stay at home, brew up a $0.80 cup of our favorite brew and shop online rather than shop at such sleazy establishments. -- We realize that a senior discount is meant to be a sign of respect for elder customers within the local community who are often living on a partial working income due after retirement or as retirement approaches. If a company will give some hipster a 20% discount for signing up to get spam and taking their stupid customer tracking card, they can give a similar discount to an aged gentleman who asks for it. If they don't, we shop somewhere else that better shows respect for the elders within the community in which they are located.

But besides that, his main point was, the brick and mortar location did nothing at all to elevate the buying experience for him over the more efficient and cheaper option of buying online. And rather than make exception to their rules to court seniors, the most likely people to still be willing to buy products using such an archaic technology as paper, they seemed to be trying to repel them with confusing rules and marketing.

You are not thinking like a Corporation. Under Corporate logic, the test makes perfect sense.

If they can get this test adopted, then for children to be considered intelligent they must be able to score well on this this test.
Which means teachers must be able to teach students how to pass the tests.
Which means a huge market for textbooks and study aids will explode overnight as they will be the only means to make any of the test questions make sense.

And with plenty of copyright filings and a good, litigious law firm on retainer, all such materials will be created and sold exclusively by Pearson Education for many, many years to come.

It's a win/win for them. If they get the tests through, they strike gold. If they don't, they've already got a ton of gold from the Gates'.

He's not right, at least as far as consumer OS choice goes and not just a semantical thing like a console running Linux. An exclusive Linux game will likely only cause downloads of Live CDs like Knoppix (especially those with pirated versions of the game included) to it to explode. You'll see more people using computers like a console, but you won't likely see more people using Linux on a daily basis.

The only realistic way Linux will explode is if Microsoft continues down the Windows 8 road and makes their OS completely unsuitable for use on Desktops, forcing OEMs to abandon it to avoid constant complaints and returns. With Linux being the only real desktop OS alternative on 3rd party hardware it would likely win out by default. But it's more likely the OEMs would instead adapt to the new version of Windows by adding touch screens or whatever else was needed so even that's unlikely.

Linux needs a lot of little things to happen to become a common desktop OS. Games support is a major one, but it's not something that could cause it all by itself even with an big time exclusive title.

2000 years ago, when a few parasites in the water supply could wipe out a good chunk of the known population of the world, pulling out and blasting your wife in the face or a dude eschewing women to gargle dong would be a sin as every rugrat a woman could pop out was needed for the species to have the best chance of survival.

If you look at the bible as a 2000 year old social studies and science textbook much of it makes quite a bit of sense. It's only when one tries to rigidly apply it as having any value as a modern day science and social studies textbook that it becomes utterly ridiculous and a great reason to stay away from Texas.

My belief is that most people kept it around because it's what they get with their OEM computers and/or it's what they know (I'm firmly in the latter group). And Windows has always been intuitive enough that none of those people had issues big enough to consider alternatives.

But that all changed with Windows 8. Windows is no longer intuitive. My grandparents bought a new laptop that had it preinstalled and couldn't do a damned thing with it. They'd open something and have no clue how to get it to go away so they could do something else. So of course, they called me for help. I tried to teach them how to use it, even though I'd not used it before, but found myself constantly Googling to find out how to do things. If I had to struggle to learn to use for basic things, I knew they'd never be able to (we'd already been down that road when I bought them a Mac a few years ago).
So I installed Ubuntu. I'm only barely familiar with it thanks to it being the base of the XBMC machines I use around the house, but I knew it was very Windows-like so I gave it a shot. They took to it immediately. And thus, Linux has supplanted Windows in the all important "grandma can use it" metric.

And with it becoming obvious by how they've tried to "fix" Windows 8's problems with Blue, that Microsoft has become touched in the head and really believes the Windows 8 type of interface is viable for a traditional desktop computer. So with no competition in the "intuitive to use" being likely in the near future, it wouldn't take much to push Linux onto the desktops of all the OS indifferent people out there who care only that an OS is easy to use.

Valve isn't likely to be the force that gets Linux on desktops. It's those OS indifferent people who really matter. If they all switched to Linux, the app writers and game developers would go with them en masse. A little bit of marketing to that demographic would likely do it. If some Distro started throwing up ads during Law and Order and Murder She Wrote marathons, Linux use would likely explode.

A. To most people who have never smoked, tobacco quite frankly tastes like shit. With the availability of numerous other flavors ranging from fruit flavors to desert flavos and even fish, few people who don't smoke are going to find tobacco flavors more appealing. And almost none of them are ever going to decide they'd prefer to smoke or chew actual tobacco over tailored flavors. B. Smoking cessation and nicotine delivery isn't the only use for ecigs. I know several diabetics and dieters who use ecigs with nicotine free eliquids to curb cravings for sweets and other junk food with great success.

It can cost a lot if you make it a hobby. But it doesn't have to cost a lot. A $80 Vamo kit (with 2 batteries and a charger), a $20 Protank and maybe $10 in replacement heads a month will cover the hardware costs for a fairly high performance. And a 30ml bottle of eliquid costs about $20 on the high end and will last most people about 2 weeks. As for it being harmful, It's almost certainly more harmful than not vaping but there's no concrete data showing it's any more harmful than breathing the air in any major city and a great deal of data showing it's far less harmful than smoking. There's a fine line to draw in order to help existing smokers transition to them (since they're evidently better than actual cigarettes) and discouraging non-smokers (especially teenagers) from trying them out. By painting the opposition as nutjobs, all you're doing is looking like a nutter yourself.

The main ingredient in Smoke/Fog fluid is Triethylene glycol, not ethylene glycol.

The point is to get off the highly carcinogenic substances produced by the combustion involved in smoking tobacco.

Not me. It's still great music and I have no problem listening to it (well, not St. Anger and anything since, that's all been shit).
Buying it on the other hand, is something I haven't and won't ever do again. And I'd bought a lot. And it all got ripped and shared out (on Direct Connect, I hated Napster) within days of Lars showing up on C-Span whining to Congress that some broke ass kid deserves to go to jail for listening to a song without paying.
That fucker used to brag incessantly about how they'd fucked people over to get by in their early days. Turned out, they just liked fucking people over and getting by was just an excuse for being shit human beings. But I don't blame the music just because the artists who made it are douchebags.

The first problem is you assume publishers don't already use similar methods. They do. But instead of limiting themselves to users of a single website they cast a much wider net by sending copies of their books to public libraries, book store owners, book clubs and critics as well as using social/sales driven websites that already do similar things to what you propose like Goodreads, Amazon, LibraryThing, etc....

The second problem is your method limits the potential audience to fans of a particular website. If that website tends to be more popular with fans of Fantasy than it is with fans of Harlequin Romances or Thrillers those books would be hamstrung from the start.

And the biggest problem is that any attempt to objectively evaluate a wildly subjective medium is fruitless. Imagine if Rowling had named her boy wizard "Jefferson Cowler". The skill of the writer would have been the same, the story would have been the same, but there's a good chance the reception would have been quite different.

A successful artist, no matter what medium they are utilize, needs both talent and luck to become a success. You can't eliminate either one from the equation, no matter what method you use.

The subsidy needs to be shifted to rural broadband. Several cities are already struggling with pushes to rezone buffer land located close to the city for industrial use because rural areas are still very underserved with broadband and even farms and mills and the like are increasingly in need of broadband access to do business.

I'd much rather pay a few bucks more for internet and phone service to subsidize the roll out of broadband to country folk than have a pig farm 3 blocks away from my house.