Even the staunchest pro-gun advocates agree that when ordering a TV online, you shouldn't receive a semiautomatic.

If you think Apple is a vertical corporate monolith, wait until you get a load of Amazon's reported plans: The e-tailer turned tablet maker turned publisher is said to be planning a physical store in Seattle with an eye toward building a national chain. And you thought the literati hated Amazon before.

After launching an electronic assault on local shops and abusing sick and pregnant warehouse workers, Amazon.com has been sued for ripping off and royally screwing over in every other possible way a partner that made Kindle cases. Maybe the e-tailer's 2011 New Year's resolution was "be evil constantly."

Apparently concerned that it's not already doing enough to undermine local physical retailers across the country, Amazon.com announced it will pay customers up to $5 to go into a local store, scan an item, walk out, and buy the same item on Amazon. Please don't do this cheap, sad thing.

Zappos employee Christina Gomez sounded like an opiated zombie when she first talked to Freakonomics Radio. "This job is worth more than a million dollars, definitely," she said. "It's kind of like the Wizard of Oz, and we're in the Emerald City." A week later, Gomez was wondering what she had been smoking — and raising questions about life at the Amazon shoe subsidiary.

This weekend, Amazon.com was revealed to have repeatedly landed warehouse workers in the emergency room because it refused to open doors amid extreme heat. Now the online retailer is hiring medics to care for workers the next time it refuses to open warehouse doors amid extreme heat. Progress!

Workers in an Amazon.com warehouse were routinely sent to the emergency room because of sweltering, suffocating heat that sometimes exceeded 110 degrees — and because Amazon refused to open warehouse doors, fearing theft, according to a devastating exposé in the Allentown, Pennsylvania Morning Call. After workers, an E.R. doctor and a security guard complained, federal regulators investigated the warehouse and recommended changes. Amazon responded with popsicles, bandanas and finger pointing.

Uber nerd website ArsTechnica has one. Amazon is guiding web savvy writers toward them. And now even the electronic newspaper of the future, the Huffington Post, has one. Meet the so-called "book," heir apparent to the future of media.

Amazon.com really, really does not want to collect sales tax from its customers. But that's not just the online retailer's problem: If you work for Amazon, the tax obsession means you need permission to visit certain states, and might not be able to send certain emails when you get there. In some instances, you won't even be able to identify yourself as working for Amazon.com.

These candid portraits of powerful corporate executives, taken this weekend at the private investment firm Allen & Company's annual media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, intrigued us for reasons we can't fully explain. Maybe it's because some of these rich guys seem so damned miserable?

Under pressure from Sen. Joe Lieberman, Amazon.com kicked WikiLeaks.org off its servers. But why stop there? There's all kinds of controversial customers the cowardly but remarkably convenient e-tailer can flee from.

Philip Greaves gained instant notoriety on Wednesday when his book The Pedophile's Guide to Love & Pleasure became a sudden, bizarre bestseller. But The Pedophile's Guide isn't the only book Greaves has written.

The Internet was afire today with the news that Amazon.com is selling a guide for pedophiles. Tonight, Anderson Cooper let his disgust be known when he opened AC360 with a related segment and called out Amazon's hypocrisy in the process.

Amazon.com cut its Kindle price by $70 to $190, and Barnes & Noble did likewise with the Nook. This is no doubt to fend off Apple's fast-selling iPad, but should also keep people buying those high-margin $15 e-books. Clever.

If you see someone toting a Kindle onto the subway, give them space: Judging from what owners of the e-book reader have done to author Michael Lewis, they can be some seriously mean and vengeful nerds.

Bloomberg TV proclaims that, just as Amazon.com reinvented itself as a megamart, former Amazon.com bull Henry Blodget has reinvented himself as Blogger King. Hey, if Blodget's blogs do as well as his Amazon.com call, Perez Hilton should watch his tiara.

Barnes & Noble is making an e-reader; Gizmodo published the first pictures today. With similar media-tech fusions out or anticipated from Amazon.com, Apple, Hearst, Time Inc. and others, it's tough to keep track. No worries; here's a list.

The best time to say "sorry" to your customers is when no one else will hear you say it. That seems to be the thinking at Google, Amazon and AT&T, which are all ready to grovel to you, today.

You'd think Steve Forbes would be content having his name slathered all over his various properties. You'd be wrong, because Forbes wants to be the author of a bestseller, too. Badly. Badly enough to spend company money buying his book.

Jeff Bezos recently apologized for corporate wrongdoing via his Amazon.com profile, allowing the CEO's customers to quickly investigate what he thinks of his own products. Mostly, he raves. One, however, is total crap, and Bezos thinks you should know.