I think some people must have misread the question. I don't seriously believe that anyone would PREFER to listen to music with earbuds...

I agree there are many reasons why Amazon is successful without tax coming into it. That's one of the reasons I feel Amazon doesn't need the extra advantage of not having the charge sales tax. I realize that making Amazon et al. charge state tax won't level the playing field entirely (or even much at all), but it is one step to equalizing opportunity between physical and virtual retailers.

As has been noted by one or two other commenters, if you buy something from a company such as Amazon, you are actually meant to report it on your state tax return (under USE tax) and pay the tax on it. This regulation would simply keep people honest by charging them upfront.

A few points. I am well aware that prices online are cheaper already before tax. However, when you then add the tax at a brick and mortar store, the price difference is even greater making you even less likely to purchase at a physical location. Making online retailers charge sales tax will bring the difference back to the 10-25% you claim rather than ~20-35% for those states with the highest sales tax

You may fill in you USE tax however, why not just make everyone honest by making sure they pay upfront? Sounds like it wouldn't matter to you either way...

I think there are viable alternatives for brick and mortar shops over just reducing their physical presence. Borders made some very bad business decisions at a time when many bookshops are attempting to change their business model. You may be interested to see how one bookshop (there are many doing the same thing) has evolved the business of selling dead tree books to fit with the modern era: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/46020-hit-print--how-one-bookstore-uses-its-espresso-book-machine.html

Did I mention Walmart or Target. If those are the only places you shop I feel sorry for you. I bought much of my furniture from local independent shops around where I live. They had a better selection of styles than the inoffensive to everyone, vanilla designs of any large chain and the products are significantly better quality. Yes I paid slightly more to kit out my apartment than if I had gone to say, Ikea, but I'm not worried about whether my coffee table will stand up to moving a few times. It's solid hardwood and takes two people to move it. Note I also pay for movers so weight is not an issue and once again, I can choose to support a local business.

I actually think this is a very fair move. While I'm not going to enjoy paying the CA sales tax it will at least narrow the gap that makes it so hard for brick and mortar shops to compete with online giants like Amazon. Many people buy produce at farmers markets to support local business, why shouldn't the same apply to buying electronics, books and everything else.

Ummm... The point of the Turing Test is that the machine should be able to understand completely unformatted input (although still correct, not random words, for whatever language is desired). That's what makes it such a challenge.

A machine can certainly ask "What do you mean by this" but that doesn't equate to it understanding what you mean. If a machine asks questions of clarification during the Turing test it is very much a give away and the machine fails the test (assuming the person isn't writing in riddles).

Compiling and interpreting code is an exercise in language processing yet here we find the distinction of "Natural Language" processing. Code is in no way natural. Certainly it makes sense but you would never speak in computer code.

There are plenty of spheres where simple natural language processing has been used with great success, like identifying spam email. However, the general problem of building a machine that can understand language in general is far from being solved, if it ever can be. I'm very pleased for you that you built a system to help process requirements documents but if you ask people for help it's your job to explain the problem sufficiently, not their job to ask all the questions so please don't blame the CS guys for giving you what is actually a mostly correct answer given that your system can't read any document, just those that meet certain specifications.

Actually, applying natural language recognition to requirements documents doesn't work in general. If a couple of mechanical engineers wrote something that did I guarantee it was for a very specific case. I would guess that the CS people weren't presented with the correctly framed problem. If they had been told "we have these requirements documents that will always be written in a particular format" they may have given a different answer.

I would very much doubt that a non-computing person would really understand the shortcomings of various platforms or languages unless they had invested a lot of time into understanding code and systems, at which point it might be appropriate to consider them as much a computing person as they are a chemist/biologist/etc... Plenty of CS grads and post-grads struggle with understanding the pros and cons of various platforms and languages, hence the massive flame wars over python vs. perl or Java vs. C++. It takes years of coming up against the shortcomings in your own favourite editor/language/OS before you can objectively asses the options.

I'm rather taken aback that the writer would consider "serious programming" a generalist skill. There is a reason why computer science/engineering is a degree in its own right and teaching students in other disciplines "serious programming" skills would simply mean they learn less about the field they are attempting to become experts in. Would you rather the person researching new cancer drugs knows how to program the Game of Life?

Multiplied by the myriad of ways to write piss poor plugins :)

Hmmm. So potentially inserting the script tag into the body portion of articles... So what is the common factor across the sites? All using some particular plugin or something (I'm hoping it's not a vulnerability in the core of some widely used CMS)?

I'm rather confused by that too. I'd love somebody to explain how an SQL injection attack puts a new javascript tag on a page unless it's targeting some specific CMS that stores a list of required js files in the database.

Seriously? Vim all the way!

IMO it isn't exactly difficult to get python running with the pre-installed apache server. I got it all working in less time than it took me to get everything running on a windows box.