Tangurena

New York is one of the states that treats co-lo as enough of a presence to trigger the "you must now collect sales tax" requirement. I think TN is another.

However, in this case Amazon had at least one warehouse and at least one office in TX.

Historically, mail-order purchases were exempted from sales tax - unless the seller had a presence in the state. Before there was the internet, before there was telephone, some retail companies got their start shipping catalogs to rural people. The people would order items via mail, and the items would be shipped via train or mail.

Two of the biggest mail order retailers were Sears and Montgomery Ward. To make sure that customers reached for the Sears catalog first, they made theirs slightly smaller (about 1 cm smaller in width and height) so that the folks in the house would stack the smaller catalog (Sears) on top of the larger one (MW). Those old catalogs had everything: clothes, furniture, tools and even house kits.

The 1897 one even had opium: http://www.amazon.com/1897-Sears-Roebuck-Catalogue-Israel/dp...

I've worked for quite a few companies over the years who had made it a firing-offense to discuss salaries at all in the workplace. This made negotiation your top skill in the company - not the quality of your work, nor the quantity of your work.

While this didn't stop employees from finding out who made what, it slowed it down, and it did little to reduce the sense of unfairness.

Folks who tend to go into managerial tracks tend to think that everything is negotiable. While techies tend to be poor negotiators. This results in an arms race where one side is unarmed.

I know it was not frivolous. That does not stop people from attacking it as an example of "what is wrong with the world."

> So, the strongest and most common objection against the English rule is that it would prevent the poor from suing even if they had a good case; they just couldn't afford a 10% chance of owing thousands of dollars.

The majority of cases where the litigant is "poor" involve contingency fees (the lawyer gets nothing unless they win), and contingency fees are considered unethical (to the point you'll get disbarred) in most European countries. I would add the issue where if contingency fees are any part of the lawyer's payment scheme, the lawyer would also be jointly and severally liable for the legal fees of the winning party.

I see three possibilities for this outcome - every case gets settled on the courthouse steps (as opposed to about half these days) or the lawyers fight everything to the bitter end (and there will be no more settling on the courthouse), and finally, much less litigation.

At the moment, the "rediculous" judgements that people complain about (one poster child is the McDonald's coffee case) are acting as a subsidy for lawyers. Without this subsidy, far less cases will be filed

I've strongly considered running with this idea as a ballot initiative in my state.

"Technical" recruiters don't understand technology. The ones I've met are only capable of handling bingo sheets of buzzwords.

My take on the whole recruiter industry is that the parasitic field of recruiters exists because of 2 factors:

1. Mismanagers don't know how to hire people. Is someone skilled? They don't know. Will someone make a good fit? They don't know. It is like Supreme Court Justice Potter's remark "I'll know it when I see it."

2. Companies don't like how references have devolved to "X worked here from Y to Z and is/is not eligible for rehire." This makes paying the 20-40% of the first year's salary for a new hire a cheap way to evade lawyers, courts and previous employer's HR departments. In short, recruiters get hired by HR departments to get around other HR departments (perhaps one should consider getting rid of one's HR dept?).

To get rid of browser crashes, I browse without flash installed, or disabled, whichever is appropriate for the computer in use.

With ad banners in flash, and several per page, all it takes is one poorly written flash app to take down all the browser tabs I've got open.

I will try to be there.

I liken learning to throwing cooked spaghetti against the wall: some sticks, some slides off. The key to being smarter is to make more stuff stick to the walls, whether you can do that by making the knowledge more "sticky" or like what I do, which is to throw even more against the wall.

To twist a phrase from Glengarry Glen Ross: "ABL - Always Be Learnin'."

Yes, it is OK. However modern business tends to select strongly against introverts. So my advice would be to look for some classes on public speaking, or possibly look for a nearby chapter of Toastmasters.

http://www.toastmasters.org/

When you get out into the business world, you'll find that standing up in front of a group and giving presentations is an important skill. It might be for something as simple as explaining why X is the wrong direction and Y is a better direction. You'll need to be able to sell yourself when it comes to business - after all, that is what a job interview is.

The profit margin for a grain farmer in the US is about $100/acre in a good year. There are 43,560 square feet per acre. The ballpark estimate for construction of 10-20 story office space is $125-150 per square foot.

To break even, you'll have to build something that requires zero maintenance that also lasts about 60,000 years and of course you'll need zero point zero interest rates over those sixty millenia just to break even.

The problem lies in how badly companies hire developers.

Sadly, the example used by the author - web development - is quite fitting. We have all met the sort of client who was never satisfied and for whom the saying "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it" was written. The same applies to companies. The hiring folks are not sure what they want, so they put out a bingo card full of specs and hope that something might work out OK.

TL;DR - companies and clients don't know what they want, then complain then they get it.

While I'm sure that the changes to the partner program make sense from the MS side, they were a case of too much too fast for our company.

In many states, non-compete agreements are enforceable. In CA, they aren't worth the paper they are written on.

If CA courts had held non-compete agreements to be enforceable, "Silicon Valley" never would have happened as the free flow of technical expertise never would have happened.

These companies are trying to bypass the legal system by conspiring to make their own arrangement of "non compete agreements" without the knowledge or consent of the workers.

In most states, non-compete agreements are upheld by courts. In California, non-competes are almost always thrown out by courts [1]. In other states, such as NY or OH, non-competes are always interpreted in favor of the company.

What was being done by the companies is an informal arrangement to make non-compete agreements exist even in the cases where the employee didn't sign one.

Notes: 1 - Pretty much the only non-competes upheld in CA courts are ones where the signing party sells a business or is a major partner.

Snoop's story is tragically sad, but also inspirational as she did get out of the cycle of violence.

http://www.amazon.com/Grace-After-Midnight-Felicia-Pearson/d...

>Where does your platonic idea of chocolate come from?

Cadbury Flake.

Maybe I'm Jewish and I want to keep kosher. Maybe I'm not. It is my decision what goes into my body. Not yours. Not some company's.

There are a lot of foods I don't eat anymore. I happen to love chocolate. But I don't want to eat chocolate with PGPR in it, therefore I don't purchase Hershey's anymore. Is PGPR "bad" for me? Umm, no. When you were a child, you had (and ate) "wax lips" which are PGPR with some color added. It doesn't belong in my chocolate, therefore I refuse to eat it, and refuse to purchase foods with PGPR

Trying to eliminate what I consider "bad" foods from my diet is becoming harder as the producers change the name. I really don't care if it has been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to be bad - because that process took over 100 years for tobacco. I want X out of my life, I should be allowed to detect items containing X.

Hmm, this is an interesting idea. Perhaps instead of making the buff wear off, make things available for the next time you are "in game" as it would be rather risky trying to play the game while walking on a treadmill, bike or eliptical machine.

Oh great, World of WorkoutCraft.

15 years old. It runs Win 95 and is used to build a version of one of our products that stops shipping this summer. It uses a 3rd party control that cannot be installed elsewhere as the vendor has gone out of business and the product has an aggressive anti-copying mechanism.

It was the only machine remaining that could build the product (the others died or were upgraded by mistake over the years), and the replacement 32-bit product ended up being 5 years late.

Some languages are closer to how you see a problem. Therefore they're going to be "easier" for you to program in.

I found that uninstalling flash stops my tabbed browsing sessions from crashing. With 2-6 flash ads per page, a typical session could have 20-50 tabs open, so that there is usually well over 100 flash adverts running. All it takes is a single advert to crash flash, then flash takes down the browser application.

> We don't get to hear their side of the story. The customer has no idea what's going on. That's a pretty bad business practice.

That is the problem with pay pal. Dealing with them is like dealing with a roach motel: data and money go in, but nothing comes out. A sign of how abusive they are is that you cannot get a telephone number for them. There is no one you can call. No one you can send a certified/registered letter. Everything has to be via email.

I am obese [1]. When I sit in one of those cheapy ($150 or so) office chairs from the office stores, I find that the gas cylinders last about 6 months before my fat a@@ squeezes the gas out of them. Since they're cheap imports, the only way to get a replacement gas cylinder is to buy a new chair. So I was spending $250-350/year on office chairs at home.

I've had my Aeron for 4 years now. No new cylinders. So the $800 I spent more than paid for itself. If I had stayed using office chairs, I'd have spent more than $1k on them.

Notes:

1 - Getting run over by a car, and being unable to be as physically active as I used to be didn't help.

If it is possible to predict a financial crisis, then it is possible to make a profit off of that crisis. The immediately obvious conclusion is then that it is worth provoking financial crises when it is possible to predict them.

In Michael Lewis' book The Big Short, this is exactly what several folks did when they figured out how to use credit default swaps to short CDO bonds.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0...

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/students/dunlop/2009-CDOme...

The current rules for the filing date for the copy of the recipient's copy of the 1099 is Jan 31. The electronic filing deadline for the IRS's copy is Mar 31.

> What are the features that make pure software companies so attractive?

Being a pure software company, there are lots of opportunities to jump around to different workgroups doing different things, as well as software development is seen as an asset (not a cost). In a non-software company, the IT group is usually seen as a cost center rather than as a profit center.

I've worked at places where software is not the primary business. And in those places, we wrote software to make the company work better.

A lot of programmers want to get into the finance sector, but don't know how to do so.

It is 3x the cost of light rail (which only goes 50mph) construction in a city.

It is 4x the cost of highway construction in a city.

In an urban environment, land acquisition is the most expensive part of the cost of large construction projects.

We've had one successful large construction project (T-REX) here in Denver that involved both highways and light rail. It was completed 4 years ago, on time and under budget. At that time, the light rail construction costs were about 20 megabucks/mile. The cost of construction materials have shot up since 2006 and the next large (FasTracks is almost all light rail) construction project is currently running about 50% over budget (official estimates) to 100% over budget (unofficial estimates). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_T-REX_Project_(TRanspo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTracks

Construction costs for rail go up sharply with the speed of the trains. Once one gets into "high speed rail" categories (which in the US means average speed > 90 mph between cities), grade crossings have to be replaced with overpasses, as the European experiences with HSR is that the time taken to stop a train is greater than the visible horizon for the train - so a "stuck" vehicle on the tracks will be hit as the train cannot possibly stop in time. To get some perspective on costs, rural freight lines run about 1 megabuck/mile, with passenger lines running about 2x that. Paving interstate highways runs about 1 megabuck/mile/lane.

Disclaimer: I ran for election in 2008 for an office related to this.