People at M$...

Obligatory Penny-Arcade: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22.

They should be commended... for their hypocrisy

It isn't hypocrisy, but it isn't what it appears on the surface. This is good old fashioned protectionism. Ain't nobody going to mess with a U.S. based company except the U.S. government.

Do you remove the safety from your gun as well? After all, a defective safety can mean that your gun will refuse to fire when you pull the trigger.

My Glock was manufactured without an active safety mechanism. This means there are mechanisms to prevent accidental discharge, but there is no safety switch. Glocks are reliable enough that a large number of police departments use them.

They are not going to spend 5 grand to catch a $50 drug deal.

Really? This is the U.S. government we are talking about here. They waste more money than that on a daily basis.

So, how's that constitutional law working for shotguns that are "too short?"

Have you fired a shotgun before? While I have never fired a weapon at a living creature, including humans, I have seen what they can do. A 16" shotgun did enough damage that I felt confident it would kill a man. I have spoken with law enforcement officers who collaborate that. Shorter barrels spread the shot out more and make it more... painful, or so I have been told. A sawed off shotgun is not so much about self-defense as it is torture. Imagine the skin and half the bone from your torso and face being ripped off while you slowly, painfully, bleed to death. The last time I fired a shotgun I blew away a stack of cans and half the tree stump they were stacked on.

Again, this is just what I have been told. I stick to pistols. I have no need for rifles, "scary-looking assault" or otherwise, or shotguns. The SCOTUS has been fairly consistent with regards to affirming our right to bear arms that are suitable for self-defense. A pistol I can conceal or wear openly on my waist and that is easily maneuverable in close quarters such as my home is ideal for self-defense.

This is not a good solution. It simply means entrenching a new tier of businesses who have their own needs, costs, vulnerabilities, liabilities - and above all, their own lobbyists, whose job is then to make sure the system never ever ever gets simplified.

Please keep in mind I said there is a solution. I never said it was a good solution or that the tax situation in the U.S. is ideal. If anything, this is an example of the government discouraging sales (the tax means I have less money to spend and encourages me to hoard money, only spending on the most important things), while simultaneously increasing the burden on the seller (pay for a tax service, or hire more people to keep track of sales tax), reducing their capital to make business improvements or sell at a price that may increase volume and improve the economy.

There is a reason why "tax" has synonyms, and none of them are positive.

I am not saying the situation is good nor are the solutions ideal for all users. Only that they are out there. Sales tax sucks for a lot of reasons. First, it is inconsistent. There are thousands of rates out there, and it is impossible to know what to charge unless your business is researching tax rates. Second, it depresses commerce. It the flow of electrons is electricity, the flow of dollars is economy. Sales taxes are like a billion ohm resistor on the economy.

Nothing short of a Constitutional amendment will fix the situation, so we have to learn to live with it until it blows up big enough for a lot of people in government to be willing to fight for fixing it.

Either that or abolish the sales tax altogether in favor of the corporate or income tax.

I agree. Sales tax is dumb in a lot of ways. Abolishing it would make this so much easier. In the meantime, there are solutions to the problem of "how much sales tax do I collect and where do I send it?

So, you are saying that these people maintain these sites and I can set up an automatic way to calculate the sales tax for any address in the U.S. without having to lay out money periodically for updates to that information?

No, I am saying there are tax databases. I said "vendors" provide this information implying it is not free. While far from ideal, there are solutions.

Finding out that oops, this country in this state raised their tax rate and you didn't know but now they're taking you to court for not paying the right fees is not how you want to run a business.

Use a tax service. They tell you what the tax rates are, and some of them deal with the liability issue. If you didn't collect taxes correctly because of their data, they'll cover it. It's insane, actually. Taxes change on an almost daily basis somewhere in the U.S. Between legitimate tax rate changes at any level from city, county, to state, to tax holidays, etc. nobody can keep track of this shit unless they're in the business of keeping track of it... which is why tax services are so helpful. My customers all use them. When your core business is selling widgets, you can't keep track of thousands of tax jurisdictions.

Why should somebody in another state have to keep track of the tax laws in every municipality in every state in the country?

They don't need to, this problem has already been solved:

• http://www.taxrates.com/
• http://www.taxdatasystems.com/
• http://www.zip2tax.com/
• https://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=sales+tax+database

I have customers that use these vendors for taxes as well. The software I work on at my day job integrates quite nicely with these:

• http://taxware.com/
• http://www.vertexinc.com/

If you think political dissidents in this country are routinely destroyed than you are as naive as can be.

Perhaps you should read up on U.S. history. We have a long history of doing just that. Look as far back as Reconstruction, the civil rights movements in the 1960s, and other figures such as Malcolm X. I think our government has learned from these and are far more subtle now, though.

Governments have been corrupt for thousands of years, as long as we have had governments. Many other governments in this world are corrupt as well: what makes the U.S. so special? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So the most powerful nation on the planet with regards to military and economy is somehow the land of peace and love? Where the government does not try to keep its hegemony on world influence? The diplomatic cable leaks serve only to prove that the U.S. government is corrupt and bends rules to get its way.

I am no conspiracy theorist. I just believe in human nature: people want more power and influence than the others around them. Put 535 people like that into Congress, another 2+cabinet into the White House, let them appoint their lackies to government jobs, what is going to happen? Shit like Swartz's case. This is why we need stronger restrictions on what government can and cannot do, and it has to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Finally, we need someone willing to enforce those restrictions. I vote for Batman: his existence is just as likely as our government restricting its own power.

The Core-2-Quad 6600 (q6600) was released in Jan 2007. The chip is such a workhorse that it will run any of the new games out their. The limiter is the video card capabilities.

While the GPU is certainly a much bigger factor, the Q6600 is showing its age. I just handed one down to my wife after upgrading to a Core i7 Ivy Bridge. Part of the problem is while the GPU is the more limiting factor, CPU still plays a role: and after seven 7 years, games will tax a Q6600. The second issue is that architecture doesn't support PCI Express 2 or greater. While the cards are backwards and forwards compatible, this does not mean you will get acceptable performance. If you can't move data fast enough, that new GPU won't really shine. Compatibility does not equal "takes full advantage of."

Oh and you might want to look up "Jon Stweart Ron Paul" to see how badly the primaries are rigged, he got footage that doesn't even try to hide how badly its rigged. It even shows that at places where Paul might have had a snowball's chance in hell the MSM treated him as "he who shall not be named" with talking heads practically tap dancing around their sentences so they would NOT ever speak his name, with it going so far as one naming the first, second, and FOURTH place finishers without even saying the words third place much less the fact that Paul took it.

The party bosses decide who will get the nomination. Every once in a while they don't, but it is a choice between two douchebags and not one douchebag and someone who actually cares about his constituents.