good luck with that. i agree btw.

I own a business that does IT for businesses too small to have their own IT staff. (plus retail sales and repair of computer stuff) Parent is 100% right on in every way.

I agree that 10% of someone making 10k/year is a lot harder to stomach than 10% of someone making 1mil/year. But I don't see how you can say it's "unfair". A flat tax is the epitome of fair. it's _the same_ across the board. The only unfair thing is taxing wealthy people way more just because they *happen* to be more successful (whatever the reason). And no, i'm not one of them. I'm pulling in 40k currently. If you went a flat tax, then yeah, low income people would suffer at first, but I'll tell you what, there would be no greater motivation for them to get off their ass and improve their life/situation/job/whatever. not to mention, they'd actually vote on stuff to help everyone, (since everyone is taxed the same) instead of voting on freebies because they don't pay tax anyway.

you might solve hunger temporarily, but then you'd run into the next shortage: energy. I bet those replicators aren't super efficient for the Mark I and II versions.... so you might have the ability to make all the food, but can the poor / 3rd world people afford the energy to run the replicators?

I agree with you 100%

I'm 110% Conservative, but if this guy is gonna complain that 174K won't do it for him, then it's time Wisconsin looks for a new politician for his seat.

Really? A lot of the standard 15.6" windows laptops now have dedicated numpads. My customers love 'em

This not true for Standard OEM discs. This IS true for machines like Dells, which manufacture their own OEM version of the disc and embed the key automatically. This key IS different from the key on the side of the machine. You generally don't have to activate the Dell installs, but neither can you use the dell branded-OEM disc on non-dell machine. You CAN use a Standard OEM disc to install on said Dell and use the key on the side of the machine to install/activate. So basically you have two ways to get it done.

Yep, you just install it as a full version, don't activate (it will fail) and then UPGRADE that installation, and you'll be good to go. (activation and all!) great way to save some cash.

Oh I'm not. :) Just wanted to cover all the bases. Nothing is stopping you from buying an OEM from newegg, and that's the route I'd go anyway...

Which used to be ok, but is now against the license. It has to be a fully functional computer, as per the OEM licensing rules for System Builders.

I never thought about the double NAT stuff. interesting....

I second that d-link comment. I've had exactly one d-link router (and i've been doing homebased network installs and selling consumer routers in my retail store for over 10 years) that has worked correctly. netgear stuff has come along way recently, and is much better. linksys is still the gold standard from the consumer point of view. it's the brand they look for, so it's the brand we carry. For people that have repeat problems with one (which is admittedly VERY few), we throw DDWRT on it for them, no labor charge. I even run a linksys crappy WRT150N at home. it crashed 4x per day until I put DDWRT on it. Now I reboot it once per year, maybe.

that's what i'm talking about

It is also a very large part of our laptop repair requests as well. So much better for the customer than having to replace the entire motherboard! Now if we just didn't have so many problems with some of the solder that some manufacturers use, it just doesn't want to melt and let go sometimes!