You could try a less drastic approach and simply not use Unity. Or try a lightweight desktop environment instead of gnome. Although for such a machine I would suggest forgoing a desktop environment and just use a window manager. Ubuntu has many other options than the default interface, all just an apt-get away.

Boss got back to me - the problem with the site you linked to is that it only takes zip code as a parameters. The issue is that about 20K zip codes cross county lines, which is why the full address is needed to get accurate sales tax info. Meaning, the site you linked to will give inaccurate results for some addresses.

My apologies - the site does include other local taxes. My boss just said that we are currently maintaining sales tax info manually - and that the bigger companies such as veritax will charge 50K for such a service. He was highly skeptical of the site you linked to, but said he would look into it.

Please try to keep up. The link you give is for state sales tax only, do you remember any other taxes that may need to be collected that I mentioned? State sales tax only is a joke - most states are joined together to provide a consistent state sales tax. However, the ones that don't will also sometimes allow their cities and counties to have their own sales taxes.

I'm sorry, what does payroll subscriptions have to do with anything? Thanks for letting me know the price, I'll remember that if I'm in the market. If you had not quoted my post, I would have thought you accidentally replied to the wrong post.

Now anyway, I'm actually in the online retail business, so I may have a better grip on the price of such things. These companies that keep track of this stuff already exist, and the price is considerable enough that you must negotiate with a sales person. As in, you aren't getting it for some flat rate costing merely hundreds of dollars. My employer must charge sales tax in only 2 states (our nexus and our parent companies' nexus), for which we must buy a ~$20k/year package. I'm not sure on whether this includes all states, but I doubt it. In my opinion, that's a bit much for a small online business.

Sales tax is incredibly complex and must be specific down to the address, not only this but it is dynamic. I'm sure if we sold a wider range of products the taxes would change based on that as well. Some states/cities/counties charge taxes based on the type of product.

Also, your comment reads like something I would see on youtube. Don't bother to reply, you add nothing of value.

Sales tax is a tax paid by the purchaser and not Amazon. It's not like Amazon is going to begin charging different rates based on your state's tax percent (which is the implication you make when you say Amazon pays the tax); the extra tax gets past on directly to the consumer.

Not only does sales tax exemption create an unfair advantage for out-of-state retailers

I don't buy this because the local brick and mortar stores have the same advantage; they just (seem to) choose not to exercise it. That's 49 other states they could be selling sales-tax free goods, which is actually more of an advantage than Amazon gets. That's the trade off: you own a brick and mortar store, you enjoy those benefits. I'm not entirely sure what those benefits are, and I'm not that interested because it was the B&M store's decision and tradeoff.

Then there are the "main street fairness" groups, made up of stores such as wal-mart who get neither advantage - they are in most (every?) state so they must charge sales tax regardless, online or not. For them it makes sense to go up against Amazon. It's just that it's a bit harder to feel sorry for wal-mart, who has also enjoyed its own state tax-breaks (tax breaks directly for wal-mart, not being exempt from collecting sales tax from consumers). That's the reason alarm bells should be going off for these b&m stores - these are obvious trends that push for them to begin business online, but instead they choose to ignore those trends and ally with their historical worst enemy.

However, the idea that a store should collect local sales tax regardless of nexus seems to exclusively hurt small online business owners who have no hope of paying for software to track the various state/city/county sales taxes. This would also close the advantage of a small b&m business to exploit the lack of nexuses in different states. I believe then that "fairest" sales tax would be an even nation-wide sales tax - and that's actually what Amazon wants.

Look at this chart, tiny bit longer doesn't quite cover it. Though of course for some this will be a completely acceptable trade-off it'd be better if most people were on a recent version of the OS just from the security standpoint

That chart hides a little too much information and refers to "current version of the OS" which I think is different from still getting updates. You can be running a version of the OS that isn't the current "major version" but still be receiving security and bug fixes. Also, this is a chart that talks about version numbers, which are arbitrary. If google were to never release another "major version" they would look amazing on this chart. We'd also need to know what enhancements were in each new major version to make an accurate comparison.

If you're having such problems with email on your corporate network (presumably the same place you'd use these collaboration tools that make sense in the workplace), maybe you need a better mail admin.

Perhaps reread his post? He is the email admin. The remainder of your post reinforces the parent post, which you apparently disagree with.

The beauty of email is that it is asynchronous.

That once was true, but in the blackberry infested world I live in, the difference between email and IM is negligible.

It has less to do with blackberry and more to do with IM being asynchronous too :)

I can't tell if you're being ironic.

Love the sig though.