The Apple App Store is not immune to malware, but does offer some level of protection and once a threat is spotted in the wild corrective action can be taken by the platform. I know a lot of people who went to droid and bragged about how "open" the platform was and not limited to any one store and that it was 1985 with Windows vs Mac again only this time with Android playing the Windows role. And I agreed with them. Android will become the windows of mobile devices. Complete with the viruses and malware windows users have come to know and love.

I still love BSD. 15 years ago FreeBSD in particular had some advantages with its ports system over linux. It was also in that time that FreeBSD often time ran software faster using its linux emulation mode than linux itself back then. We still use FreeBSD to this day running many of our core web servers & PostgreSQL database cluster. The argument could be made today that Linux would be better suited for the task as it's far more common and you can find enterprise support. But frankly, our system ain't broke. It does its job, doesn't get in our way, and we use it in a few area like our network switches & routers are Juniper and we're using FreeNAS for our storage area.

Not sure about shops, but you can buy discs from several online vendors if you don't have the bandwidth to download: http://www.netbsd.org/sites/cdroms.html

Furthermore, I don't really see the difference between delivery via streaming packets vs delivery via post of a physical item from a logical viewpoint.

Now I only have to be fluent in Javascript and leave Klingon to Bing!

Recently I needed to find a plugin for a certain feature and remembered one for FF4 I used a while back. When to down load it on this new computer to find out the developer had stopped updating the plugin. The reason: these frequent updates didn't leave him enough time to continuously test and make sure it still worked with each version every few weeks. I searched for similar plugins and everyone I saw the author pretty much said the same thing. They had all discontinued development for FireFox because the release cycle was too quick.

Instead I ended up finding a plugin for Chrome and went with it. Frankly other than to test against FF and certain debugging. I don't use it that much anymore.

As a 4g hotspot user let me tell you that even now the limiting factor for me is only the allowed bandwidth on my plan (12GB per month). The 4G speed is plenty fast to do pretty much all the work I need and will even run games if they aren't absolutely latency dependent (basically anything but FPS). Even with four or five devices connected 4G is fast enough for most business uses and I would say for most people's internet use. In fact oftentimes the limits on the download speed is the server on the other side.

I have the hotspot to connect my WiFi tablet and laptop when I'm out on the road or in meetings, especially meetings where the client has a secured wifi and either doesn't know the password or can't grant guest access, etc..

I mean hell, we have a 100MB/s line into our office and we are only tapping a fraction of that on a daily basis.

So 1Gb/s sounds cool, but device and access speed now isn't my problem. Bandwidth cap is the problem.

I played a couple MMO's, BSGO during it's open beta phase when it was really fun, and STO until it got grindy. In the case of both games I could grind a couple hours a week and then earn enough resources to do what I wanted. Well when that ended I ironically went back to playing Battlefied 3 because if I took off two months and then picked it up for an hour, I wasn't out that much. It seemed like in the other games if I took time off and came back you were so far "behind" it would be an endless grind trying to catch up.

What got me more than anything in STO was the new starbase system and the fact you needed a guild/fleet about twice to three times our size to really complete it in any decent amount of time. And we had a fun group of about 10 - 15 active players. Trying to expand that beyond 15 started to cause problems. I know STO has a new expansion coming out with the new movie and I looked at it and pretty much went "meh".

The DOD must ban the sales of all shovels: http://www.northeastshooters.com/vbulletin/build-yourself/179192-diy-shovel-ak-photo-tsunami-warning.html

I agree with this and it's annoying to someone who actively shoots on a regular basis and no longer can. I used to buy a brick of .22LR every couple months and at least 100 rounds of 9mm & .40 every month. I even gave up my range membership this year. No sense in spending $300 when there's no ammo to shoot. And I have a feeling that the ammo that is going to be produced this year is already spoken for by the panic buyers as people like me decide that maybe the next time we see ammo available at decent prices we should stock up in case of more panic.

Really? Because both my grandfather had dynamite and blasting caps on their farms even as I was growing up in the 80's. I don't recall either having or requiring any permits. In my Dad's era they went down to the MFA and bought it by the create when they wanted to clear some land. And down in that area this wasn't exactly uncommon either.

Hell, our school had .22's and .410 shotguns we learned to shoot in the 5th grade as part of hunters education and safety. The high school had M1's and 1903 Springfield's for the rifle club/marksmanship team. I hear gun free zones today and think to myself that back then our school had a freaking armory located in the school. Kids had shotguns in their trucks and would go hunting after school. Guns were everywhere. No one even thought about coming into school and shooting up the place.

I look around and wonder what exactly happened in the past 40 years. I mean I run across people today, especially in the city, that when I tell them that we learned to shoot at school as kids react in complete shock and horror.

Well that's only going to work if you also ban white tip matchsticks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0jxpLH8FtY

We have our full time employees and thus we know we need X seats of Microsoft Office split between Windows & Mac users. Well we're coming up on summer where we will have 3 - 5 interns working for us and bringing their own computers. Office365 gives us the ability to add an extra 3 seats for 4 months costing ~ $150 vs. $1500 to go buy extra seats. Actually one of the interns is a graphics arts major and instead of spending nearly $2k for software to be used by one person for a couple months it's going to cost us around $200 for Adobe Cloud. Usually we sub the graphics design stuff out, but we have a project the students will be working on over the summer. So for us, it gives us great flexibility being able to price things per project as opposed to having to sink large sums of money into software that we may only need for one project.

Now to those like the graphics artist we hire to do most of our graphics work, yeah I can see where they'd be pissed. Many of them I know generally spend $2k and get about 4 years out of the software before upgrading. I still know a lot of professionals still using CS2 because it does all they need and see no reason to upgrade until they absolutely have to.

Think is, it's not only tax rates, it's what is and is not taxed. That varies from state to state. As example, my state does not tax groceries. The state 20 minutes from my house does. But they don't tax clothing items under $50 or $100 (can't remember off hand). Then someone has to make sure that the taxes collected are then paid to the states that they are owed. And when do you pay them? Monthly? Quarterly? It depends on the amount of sales often in those states. Or instance one of the companies I work with primarily sells within an 8 state region in the midwest. Do they make sales to California and New York? Of course, but not that much.

I'm sure that there will be services that will offer it, but how much will it cost? Credit cards charge about 2% just to collect money from one persons account and deposit it to yours. This is a much more complicated transactions, so how much is that going to cost? 1%, 2%, 3%? Both companies operate on margins of about 10 - 15%, meaning after the cost of everything is factored in that's their taxable profit. Add in another $10k a month to hire additional accountant or two plus additional legal services, even if a third party service collects and distributes there are going to be issues and someone has to balance the accounts and make sure the service is doing their job and in the case of one of my clients, you've just about halved their profits.

Never run a business have you? Let's see here:

Cost of Raw Materials = $3M.
Labor to turn Raw Materials into Widgets- $28.50 per hour (Internal Labor Rate) = $1.1M
Overhead: (Salaried Employees, Benefits, Building Mortgage, Insurance, Utilities, Maintenance) - $175k per month = $2.1M

The US needs to revise it's tax code and stop double taxing income from international operations. Double tax I you say? Yes you pay taxes in the country of operations, then if you transfer that money back to the US it gets taxed again under the US code. Most other countries don't do this. This is why international firms set up shop outside the US in more friendly taxing jurisdictions. Even when I worked at a small company, about 35 employees with operations in the US & Europe that's exactly what they did. They moved the corporate HQ out of the US and set up the US company as a holding unit. After we paid US tax we shipped the rest offshore where it wasn't taxed again. Same with income from the UK & Germany.