Fort Smith (where I live) is 9.75% (was 9.25% until the recent tax increase at the State level). 9.375% (no 9.875%) is for "prepared" foods. Basically it's a tax on restaurants to pay for terrible tourism shortfalls and things like a convention center that no one really uses but still costs the city over a million dollars to maintain. Non-prepared foods are taxed much lower since the state only taxes it at 1.5% instead of the normal 6.5% for everything else.

Even Microsoft is looking at SK and saying: "WTF? We don't even use ActiveX anymore."

If you use a proxy or VPN, then Pandora won't cut out (actually it just restarts the connection and moves to the next song). I've tested this numerous times with Pandora on Android with VPNs and proxy servers. Pandora only seems to complain if you change IPs suddenly (makes sense since you're changing networks).

As for the Siri use case, that's more applicable as you send the request to Siri down one pipe and receive it down the other. It doesn't support sending the same packets down both pipes simultaneously though since it still has to wait for the acknowledgement (or lack thereof) .

Often times, when I drive around the city, my phone will pick up a known wifi hotspot, negotiate an IP, then timeout when I drive too far away and my apps go ape shit crazy because the connection changed. My alternatives are to route all the traffic through a VPN (not the best since I only have 2.5G where I live and negotiation of the certificates takes forever), route the traffic for each hotspot through a proxy (an annoyance of Android for not having a system wide proxy), or turn off the wifi until I reach my destination. I tend to just turn it off since that's a one-click solution.

Obligatory xkcd:

http://xkcd.com/1200/

Federal wage law states any break less than 20 minutes must be paid by the employer. Anything over that, you're riding your own dime. Funny thing, Federal laws don't require breaks at all. An employer could technically make you work an entire shift with no resting periods or to eat anything. However, doing so is a risk to the company since employee turnover will be through the roof, employee exhaustion will cause accidents, increasing workers comp claims, and OSHA violations are bound to pop-up everywhere. The State level is different since each state varies. Some states require rest periods after a certain number of hours worked. Some even require that lunches even be paid. Workers rights in the US are an abysmal failure, especially for hourly jobs. Your best bet is to find a salary job where breaks aren't that big of a concern and your quality and quantity of work are more important than how often you take a moment to breath.

Any deal with Microsoft in the title is destined for failure. Just ask Nokia how that's worked out for them so far.

It does add up if you read the article. The virus survives in humidity levels below 50% and above 98% since 98% simulates the human body. It doesn't fair as well at humidity levels between 60-80%.

That's what she said.

As someone with an undergrad and post grad in business, I feel compelled to answer your confusion between worker pay and executive pay. For the worker, they're focused on their specific task, a tacical viewpoint of the business unit they are responsible. The worker answers for the actions of him/herself and not the actions of their fellow co-workers. When profits are down, investors don't ask the worker, they don't fire the worker, they look at the leadership team. It's not the worker who's neck is on the line if the company is unprofitable, and the worker will most certainly never face lawsuits from investors, the government, and other stakeholders.

The CEO on the other and is responsible for the actions of every worker that represents the company. They're responsible for the financial well being of the organization, the brand, and the relationship with every stakehokder. Like a game of chess, the CEO is responsible for the strategic direction of the business with not just today's direction but tomorrow's and the years ahead. In short, the worker is responsible for one thing, his/her work. The CEO is responsible for the work of everyone underneith him/her.

As far as compensation, most CEO's compensation come with base salaries and huge amounts of stock ownership to incentivise the CEO to return higher profits for the shareholders. So it would make since that CEOs receive a large stake of the profits.

I'm not referring to the resell value, but the brand, which is a major part of public perception. Apple doesn't care about actual resell value, but they do care if their brand is diminished because the lack of their products holding value. If Apple's products diminished in value as rapidly as their PC and android/blackberry smartphone counterparts, then the brand is damaged and will become increasingly difficult to demand higher prices and "claim" to have higher quality. It's human nature to assume that if something loses its (economic) value rapidly, then it isn't worth much to begin with. I would love to claim I have the highest quality products; however, if my product loses half to nearly all its value in one year, then my customers are going to start questioning why I priced my product so high.

Not to go off topic too far, take a look at the housing market. People who are currently underwater are asking themselves if it is better to walk away from their homes or keep throwing money down the toilet, not knowing if the equity in their homes will ever come back. A home is a big portion of one's income, but so is a $500 tablet to someone with a $25,000 salary, and the bigger the portion of my income I lose for a product, the more I'm going to demand that the product not become worthless in less than a year. This is how Apple's brand can be tarnished unsuspectingly, because their price points on their tablets are reaching consumers that weren't once their target market, and could have a greater risk of bad mouthing the brand because they feel ripped off.

While you're right on about the 1% of iPad owners tearing the device apart to repair, you might be missing another problem: resell ability. Apple products are notorious for retaining their resell value, but if it becomes too hard and too expensive to fix issues, then consumers are going to start demanding lower prices or Apple can watch its precious resell brand value evaporate. This typically doesn't matter for most of Apple's products except in their iPhone and iPad products. Clunking down $1500-3000 and having to pay a repair bill of $100 isn't that big of a deal to Apple's target market; however, for those that plopped $50-500 for their iPhones or iPads will find that $100 repair bill a little harder to swallow. A repair shouldn't costs 20% of the purchase price. If you bought a new Camry for $20,000 and you had to come up with $4,000 to repair it, you'd think twice about the purchase; the same idea works here but on a smaller scale.

And nothing happens. While I commend the writer for articulating what is wrong with the current movie industry model, the reality is that Hollywood is hell bent on preserving their business model. For good reason too, most of Hollywood are distributors. The distributors are the ones that pay for the movie, the marketing, and shoving it down the throats of consumers. They're middle men protecting their business. Change the distribution model and you'll hear the sucking sound of Hollywood companies drying up. Studios aren't strapped with tons of cash to pay for hit movies on their own, so you'll have fewer movies being made. No one in Hollywood has any incentive to change the current model, and unlike the music industry that got dragged into the 21st century, or the game industry that has adapted to every new platform to survive, the movie industry consumers lack any desire to force a business model change or adaption. Tthe closest thing to adaption is Netflix and recent price hikes are an indicator that the distributors will kill it before giving the consumers what they want.