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.

Not only this, but most people hear $1M in online sales, you must be rich!. They don't seem to realize that $1M in sales != $1M in profit. I do consulting work for a couple clients that are above the $1M per year in sales mark. One did about $1.4M in sales last year and had profits of less than $200k. The other did about $7M in online business last year and still had profits of less than $1M.

Add in the additional legal and accounting costs for having to track at least 50 different taxing jurisdictions and up to potentially almost 10k and be up on all the changes to tax law and try to figure out what items are taxable where....it's a nightmare. No only that but it's a legal minefield. For instance our state exempts certain grocery items from sales tax. And some of the things considered grocery items gets funky. An example: a big bag of potato chips are a grocery item. A small sized bag at a snack counter is not. Charge sales tax on the wrong item and get caught and the fine is rather steep even if it's an honest mistake.

If I have a retail location in this state, I get to keep a percentage of the sales tax I collect to cover the cost of being the collector. What about the other states? How much of that tax collected will be owed? Now you times this by at least 50 opening up your legal liabilities tremendously.

$1 Million in sales != $1M in profit. I consult with a couple clients that do more than $1M in sales annually online. One had $1.4M in sales last year. Profits were less than $200k. The other does about $7M a year, profits about $900k. The latter business was almost driven out of the market by PCI compliance a couple years ago. Both companies are less than 20 employees.

Until GIMP gets full CMYK support, it's not going to be seen as anything but a toy.

You bough the wrong device. I bought, 2 actually, apple docking stations for my iPad. One for the office, one for home. They are full sized keyboards with a charging port, hold the device in portrait mode as well. Works extremely well for writing emails and even creating basic documents in Pages/Numbers/Keynote. If I need to create something that is media heavy, I go to my laptop. I also have one of those iPad cases with the mini keyboard. It sucks to type anything long, but in a pinch it is handy.

Truth is most of my days are meetings. My iPad works extremely well for those as I can plug into projectors to give a presentation or jot notes with the travel keyboard and the battery lasts pretty much all day. It's also a hell of a lot lighter to carry around than a 15" MBP.

Now there are days I still have to review code and do other kinds of work that doesn't work on the iPad. But those are fewer in between.

Sales taxes haven't been applied to catalog businesses for decades. What's the difference between a dead tree catalog and a catalog on the inter webs?

It's kind of interesting because the industry has already come up with a solution for this. They allow streaming to mobile devices, but first got to log in with your cable/sat provider's info to verify you subscribe to their service. I know a couple years ago my Dad had a package with everything including all the HBO's. I signed in my iPad under his account and was able to watch the first season of Games of Thrones on my iPad through HBO GO.

Truth is there is starting become a blur between content providers and creators, especially with Comcast now controlling NBCUniversal.

The Undetectable Firearms Act was passed in 1988. We hadn't yet seen the slippery slope that lead to almost total confiscation of firearms in other countries like the UK and Australia yet.

That's primarily the biggest change between then and now. Those of us who are standing up and drawing "the line in the sand" against further gun regulations are doing so because of what we saw happen in those countries, and a lesser extend up north in Canada, during the 1990's and are bound and determined not to let it happen here.

As far as no chance against the military & police go, well that is a matter of numbers I'm afraid. Total number of US military and law enforcement personnel at all levels: about 8 Million. If 5% of the american population decided, for whatever reason, that it was necessary to take up arms they'd outnumber the total US military & law enforcement about 2 to 1. Couple with the fact that most of the "local" level law enforcement are likely abandon their posts or even be in that 5% taking up arms...

Truth be told that's an unlikely. Once you get populations that large, usually you can affect real change without the resort to mass violence.

I own an AR and have for a few years as well as a couple pistols for CCW. Why do I own an AR? First off, easy and fun to shoot. Secondly in case of a Korea Town like situation where there is a temporary breakdown in law and order. For those who don't know what happened in Korea Town, here is the short version: During the LA Riots the cops were ordered to abandon Korea Town and they did. The rioters then proceeded to burn, pillage many Korean owned businesses. Except for a few businesses where armed civilians, owners and volunteers, defended those businesses with firearms. If suddenly there were no cops on the streets tomorrow, what would you do? What would happen to you? Is it likely to happen? Not usually, but it can and it does. And when it does it tends to be quick and unexpected.

Call me paranoid or whatever, but I have a generator, water purifier, a couple guns with enough ammo to load all the mags I own once, and keep about 20 gallons of fuel on hand. I also keep enough non-perishable food for about two weeks on hand. That's enough supplies that in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency I can decide to wait it out or vacate the area.