Be careful whereof you pontificate. Different states have different laws.

In California, what you said is largely correct. The seller is responsible for remitting the sales tax to the state, whether it was collected from the purchaser or not. In fact, if the seller collects less than is due, the seller must remit the full amount due; if the seller collects more than the amount due, the seller must remit the entire amount collected (i.e. can not keep any overcharged tax).

In Pennsylvania, and perhaps other states, it is specifically ILLEGAL for the seller to include the sales tax amount in the retail price. The seller is legally REQUIRED to collect the sales tax as a separate amount from the purchaser. Or at least this was true a few years ago when my company was selling at a conference in Pennsylvania; it may not be true today, but the law was made quite clear to sellers at the event.

This is just a tiny, tiny hint of the complexity of the sales tax situation nationally. Also consider that a specific food item may be taxable in some states and not in others. Indeed, that same food item might be taxable in some jurisdictions (city, county) within a state, and not in others within that same state.

And then get into whether the purchaser is exempt from sales tax or not. For example, in many states, schools do not pay sales tax. In others, they do. It gets very interesting when a teacher goes to a professional conference in another state, and will not be reimbursed for any amount charged for sales tax even though the sale is not exempt in the state where it took place.

Most settlements are self-contained, and are not affected by outside events or court judgments. A settlement by definition is a short-cut to circumvent going to trial; that pretty much limits its scope in both directions. The settlement does not affect other litigation (outbound effect = 0) nor is it affected by other litigation (inbound effect = 0).

If other parties to other lawsuits which have settled agree to reopen those settled (i.e. closed) suits, then they are open game. Otherwise, them's the rules of the game.

The incentive to settle is both to reduce the current thread and also to avoid future exposure. Every settlement includes language to include both past and possible future liability.

The extent of that agreement is the question.

No. This is not what Net Neutrality means. Net Neutrality means giving the same priority to the same type of traffic (voice, data, SMS, etc.) categorized by data type, and most especially NOT categorized by source provider. Net Neutrality means that a carrier should treat all voice calls equally, even if the call originates/terminates/transits a provider other than the carrier.
For example, Sprint should not give higher priority to digital voice packets from a Sprint source than they would to digital voice packets from a Verizon source. AT&T should not allow full bandwidth to streamed video from AT&T movie archives but throttle video from UTube.
Emergency voice traffic would warrant higher priority categorization than normal voice traffic. But the important point is the *type* of traffic, not the source of the funding that pays for it.

Without exception, in traveling to >30 hotels each year for the past [wayyy too many years], the higher the per-night rate for the hotel, the more the nickel-and-dime charges for what should be included as part of the accomodations.

< $100/night usually includes:
    - FREE wifi, unspecified throughput, non-public IP
    - FREE incoming phone calls
    - FREE incoming faxes
    - FREE outgoing phone calls up to 30 min
    - FREE computer near lobby for guest use
    - FREE document printing for reasonable # pages
    - FREE microwave oven in the room
    - FREE mini-fridge in the room
    - FREE pillows & linens on the bed
    - FREE pull-out drying line for laundry in the bathroom
    - coin-op laundry for hotel guests

> $100/night often imposes charges for:
    - WIFI: $12.95+tax per day
    - public IP: additional $10+tax per day
    - incoming faxes: $.50/page
    - outgoing phone calls: AT&T Operator rates + 200% surcharge
    - document printing: $.50/page
    - fridge in room: $25 per night, special request
    - microwave in room: $25 per night, special request
    - linens: changed every 3 days at no charge, no discount for multi-day stay
    - laundry: 24-48 hr turnaround; $5.00 per shirt, $10.00 per pants, don't even ask about other items!

Unrelated amendments should not be allowed to be attached to any proposed legislation. This kind of nonsense is and always has been an abuse of the system, and has been exploited by both parties forever.

Congress could very easily amend its rules to prohibit unrelated riders to legislation. But since congress-critters are the very animals that benefit from the hidden sleight-of-hand, it's unlikely they would take this course on their own.

We can't even get this done in California, where the Initiative Process lets anything get on the ballot. How can we possibly get this idea passed at the Federal level?

> Please mark .com as depreciated.

Depreciated, as in has lost value...

I vaguely remember a fictional story I read ~20 years ago about someone who had had recent cataract surgery and was kidnaped by smugglers, forced to be their spotter watching for a signal from a UV flashlight on a boat offshore running dark. The story made a point about how people with cataract surgery but no implanted replacement lenses were able to sense UV light (not necessarily "see", but sense).

gmail.com may be around for a long time. But you may decide at some point, for whatever reason, that you do not want Google Gmail to be handling your email. It's pure hell to change to a new email address, much harder than changing a phone number, because senders' records of what they *think* is your email address last essentially forever. Not at all like a little black phone book.

Domain names are cheap, as low as $5 a year depending on the Registrar you use, but certainly easy to find for less than $10/year. Buy one for your personal use. They're not just for business any more!

Set up your private/personal/vanity domain so that email gets handled by whatever email service provider you are using for the moment. Change providers when you want, for whatever reason. Your email address doesn't need to change.

Benefit: if you own the whole domain, you can change the "local" part (to the left of the '@') any time you want if the S/N ratio goes bad due to spam.

It took more than a century to get phone number portability, so that you can take your phone number with you when you change phone service providers. It's built into the email system, if you use it correctly.

And since domain names are quite cheap, compared to the "Old Days", by all means use a different one for a hobby or small business, from Day One, separate from your personal domain. Then you don't have to struggle to separate your personal life from your hobby-become-business from your small-business-just-sold.

Please don't generate a new email message, that's a potential source of new spam.

Much better to configure your SMTP server to reject the email at SMTP connect time, with the error message containing the new address to use. The error message usually ends up visible to the human sender, and spam 'bots will ignore it.

There's a pie-chart meme several years old:
http://artandavarice.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/record-company.gif

That graphic might be derived from information in this article from the 1990s:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

I've not been able to find a direct source for that famous pie chart, let alone the original data source. But in my experience as a musician and publisher, it's plausible.

[heed the signature]

It's still on her Facebook page as of 8:57pm PST:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/sarah-palin/dont-get-demoralized-get-organized-take-back-the-20/373854973434

March 23, 2010 4:49 PM on CBSNews.com:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20001021-503544.html

Oh, yeah. That's what I'm talkin' about!

More seriously, the link is a totally valuable yet MF time sink! I mean both valuable and time-sink. This is what the Web was meant to be: a twisty maze of clickable links, all of which are fascinating to read and may sink your time

I did sink quite a bit of time into reading the presented data/trivia. I'm amazed at how much information was readily available at a click or two.

Nicely done!

I can't tell from TFA whether the user's custom whitelist has also disappeared on the affected accounts. If it has been deleted, then your newly-emptied inbox might start filling up quickly, even if you thought you had whitelist protection on your inbox. S/N ratio essentially zero? Even negative?

Even better: how about 'It should apply to all OBJECTS'. Every single object, mobile or immobile should emit a different tone constantly.

They already do. Every object in the universe already emits its own vibrations. Your sensory apparatus just needs to be tuned correctly to detect it. The extremely narrow range of oscillating frequencies detectable by the auditory sense of earth humans is only a tiny slice.

On Optheria they have a musical instrument (inadequately called an "organ") that plays to many senses, not just hearing. Some would say it plays directly to the soul and bypasses the senses entirely. That's another story altogether.

Wimpy Earthling: if you can't detect objects because you can't sense the vibrations they already radiate,
      GET A HEARING (or whatever) AID!

Or use your other sense organs. Whatever. Or maybe, just maybe, DON'T WALK DOWN THE F**KING MIDDLE OF THE ROAD WITHOUT LOOKING BEHIND YOU. Sheesh!