MS language is potentially worse than the default. And there is room for litigation to surprise us.

"You attaching moral values on to the cake is again your own choice."

You say "moral". I say "religious". Don't ignore the constitution.

"How is it forcing when said individual CHOOSE to open a business/choose a profession that might put them in situations where they're exposed to things they religiously object?"

Ever hear the concept of corporate personhood? The concept dates back early in the 19th century (early in our existence as a nation). I believe it applies. Further, sole proprietorships do not give up constitutional rights when choosing to do business.

Yes. The last stuff I wrote that I couldn't compile today was in "Promal" or "Paradox". My C and C++ code from 1980 still builds and runs.

All of my web development is on Ruby on Rails. That environment has had a lot of development and I've had to port to new versions. So old code for RoR would not quite run out of the box, but it's close.

Unless you're Mel, in which case you make awesomely unintuitive and necessarily complex systems to save one or two clock cycles in the inner loop, and become a legend.

You're mixing income tax with consumption tax. If you want to tax income, tax income. But if we're taxing consumption, then those who consume more pay more than those who consume less, and those who consume least because they have the least to spend pay the least in taxes because of the baseline exemption. The upper middle class guy who's busting his butt to pay off his student loans, and who saves as much as he can, is not going to pay a disproportionate amount in taxes. (Or are we going to tax his student loan payments as consumption, even though he paid consumption tax while living on those loans? What about deposits in a savings account, or stock purchases? If we're going to do that, we may as well just call it an income tax, because that's what it is.)

If he pays off his student loans and still chooses to live modestly, he continues to pay a low tax rate. If he instead decides to start living large, then he'll start paying more in taxes. Either way, he essentially chooses his tax bracket, because he chooses every day what to buy, and how much to spend on it. This is especially true if we're giving him a front-loaded exemption on expected costs for rent and groceries. In other words, we're not taxing him for living, eating, and having shelter, and we're not taxing him for working and earning money. We're taxing whatever life style he chooses above and beyond the baseline. This tax is progressive in that people who choose to live modestly or who cannot afford to live extravagantly pay very little in taxes. Those who are able and choose to live extravagantly pay much more in taxes. Yes, you could have a billionaire who pays no taxes because he chooses to live in an efficiency and drive an '86 Yugo. That's only a problem if you believe that the government owns all income, and is naturally entitled to its "fair share," because class warfare or whatever. I prefer the tax theory of take from people the very least necessary for government to function. And I suspect there would be very few billionaires living tax free under this system, because it has an actual lifestyle cost to them. The only cost now for billionaires to live tax-free is they pay their accountants and lawyers $900/hour to get creative with shell entities.

"then the owner must accept all the laws of the land,"

Agreed.

"... or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

Your point?

If you force an individual to take part in something to which they have a religious objection how are you not violating the first amendment?

Can I refuse to sell you cake based on race or whatever? No. Can I refuse to sell you a WEDDING cake, decorating it in a way that is counter to my religious beliefs? I believe the answer to that would be and should be YES.

Would *I*? No. I don't think it's a big deal. Either way.

Popular computing languages do not in general have only one Open Source implementation, and do not get abandoned.

Development with a proprietary language is ultimately harmful to your own interests, whether you make proprietary software for a profit or Free software.

The one thing every business needs is control. When you make it possible for another company to block your business, you lose control. Your options become limited. Solving business problems potentially becomes very costly, involving a complete rewrite.

The one thing that should be abundantly clear to everyone by now is that making your business dependent on Microsoft anything is ultimately a losing proposition. They have a long history of deprecating their own products after customers have built products upon them.

All Open Source licenses come with an implicit patent grant, it's an exhaustion doctrine in equitable law.

The problem is not patent holders who contribute to the code, you're protected from them. It's trolls who make no contribution and then sue.

Of course these same trolls sue regarding proprietary code as well.

1. You misunderstood me. I was saying you could come up with a really long list of exceptions to consumption tax without being more complicated than our current labyrinthine tax code.

2. I'm not arguing in favor of progressive taxes. Again, I was just pointing out that there is plenty of room for a consumption tax to get really complicated without being more complicated than the mess we have now.

And no, if you want to make a consumption tax regressive, you don't have to make it complicated. You can exempt the first $X of purchases, where $X is some "living wage" line according to some politician's favored theory. You now have a progressive tax. Perhaps not progressive enough to wage effective class warfare, which means the Democrats will hate it. But the good news is, Republicans will hate that it doesn't have enough loopholes for their monied cronies to avoid paying any taxes at all. So maybe I'm in favor of it after all. I'm in favor of almost anything that those clowns in Washington are all unified in hating. And since everybody would be helping to carry the load of the government they ask for, the big winners in this system are the upper middle class, who are currently getting screwed from both ends of the income spectrum.

Ever hear of angie's list? It has been around for a decade or two and largely takes the difficult out of the equation.

I was kind of thinking the same thing. Except instead of yellow pages, I was thinking angie's list. They do some subscription thing to make money but screen reviews and only allow customers of whatever services to make them. I think they are limited to home improvement type stuff though.

Don't you think there is a difference between someone who can afford booze and drugs who can hold a job and someone who drinks to the point they cannot? Isn't there a difference between someone who buys a bag of weed and someone who buys groceries?

Just because we do the same things doesn't mean we are equally doing them. When you know when to stop, when you don't do it beyond your means, you do not end up losing your means, you are not the same. But that really doesn't matter because other choices play a bigger role. Choices like being a single mom or having 10 trophies (kids) or screwing up jobs so you are stuck with shit jobs and low pay.

But hey, did you know that two income families making minimum wage is not considered in poverty? Divorce them and both will be.

Sears tried something like this years ago. Except it mostly dealt with connecting contractors to customers who purchased the products sold for installation. They ran into a lot of legal problems. Some areas considered them to be contractors themselves so they needed to be licensed and bonded. Some areas considered them liable for disputes that popped up. They got a handle on it but not before some headaches. Amazon will find this out too.