You might start here, it's a Supreme Court decision on sales tax and use tax. It has plenty of footnotes and references to earlier decisions.
My reading is that the Supreme Court allows use taxes as long as they do not penalize interstate commerce. Your use tax rate may not be higher than your sales tax rate.
That's why they call it a "use tax", you aren't being taxed on the sale, you are being taxed on the value of the item that you are using in your state of residence. It sounds lame, but the Supreme Court has said that it's constitutional. Some places have a personal property tax, which is an annual tax on the value of your possessions, mostly applied to cars and boats.
The simple solution would be to eliminate use taxes and tax all sales where the sale is made. Buy a computer from a firm in California? They would collect California sales tax on the order, no matter where it was shipped. The high-tax states hate the idea, it forces them to compete for business with low-tax states. It lets the peons vote with their dollars if sales tax rates are too high.
I haven't heard of it being done recently, but I've read stories in the newspaper about state revenue agents staking out popular stores and malls in low-tax states that are near the border with high-tax states, looking for cars with out-of-state license plates and large purchases.
One way to find out the identity of the spammers is to follow the money. Someone with the power to issue subpoenas should be able to find out where the money is going. An old trick is to write a check to the person under investigation and see where it goes.
The Earth's atmosphere is effectively opaque to x-rays. They are absorbed and the energy is reemitted at lower frequencies. This is what produces the fireball when a nuclear device is detonated in the Earth's atmosphere.
For major crimes, the FBI will scour the neighborhood for businesses with security cameras and collect the video tapes. During an average day, how many times are you recorded on video?
I read them. I figure there is no point in buying the game if my computer doesn't meet the minimum specifications. It still may be too slow, even if my computer does meet the minimum specifications, but it's guaranteed to be too slow, or may not run at all, if my computer doesn't meet the minimum specifications.
I'm curious about what the problems mentioned in the article are, sloppy code that runs with a slight penalty on the PC and falls over on the Mac. My Mac has a reasonable number of MIPS (2 x 450 MHz G4), but most ports of PC games are barely playable.
There is a short animated film titled "Bambi Meets Godzilla". It's worth watching, especially if your parents forced you to watch Disney films as a child.
Not only do they plaster their logos all over the screen, but in an effort to sell more commercials, they hack out large segments of the movie/show and time compress what's left. Every year they try to stuff in more commercials per hour. Sometimes I watch a show or movie on DVD after watching it on broadcast television, and I am amazed at how much was cut out.
The ATSC standard provides approximately 19 Mbps of bandwidth for digital video/audio. The bits are already heavily compressed. A raw, uncompressed HDTV signal is about 1.5 Gbps. Network feeds are about 45 Mbps.
The DVD licensing agreement says that a player has to implement the standard set of software that controls the user interface to the DVD. That puts the producer of the DVD in charge of what you can and can't do with the remote control.
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image; make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity.
The average movie theater does not make a profit on showing movies. The price of the ticket is split between the distributor and the theater, with the distributor getting most of the money. The concessions stand is where the theater generates most of its profits. That is why the prices are high. The theater isn't a charity. If it doesn't generate sufficient profits to produce a reasonable return on the money invested in the theater, they will raise prices or close the theater. History has shown that their customers are more sensitive to high ticket prices than they are to high concession prices.
Exit polls do not work well when there are controversial issues and candidates. Many people may vote for a particular candidate and yet be unwilling to admit it to a pollster.
From what I remember, they took the day off, ignoring the mission plan and refusing to talk to the ground controllers in Houston. This pissed off their bosses at NASA and they never flew again. It did force NASA to start paying attention to crew psychology and workload.
Some odors can make certain people physically ill. They can also make people psychologically ill. When you're stuck in a confined environment, little things can drive you nuts over an extended period of time. A crew that is angry or depressed can exhibit poor judgment and reduced performance. It isn't just the Russians, a crew on Skylab went on strike for a day as a protest against the way that they had been treated by ground control.
It isn't just amateur radio. Try ships at sea, aeronautical communications, police, fire, forestry, government, military, disaster services, broadcasting, and many others. Those services are allocated those frequencies by international treaty. They are not going to vacate their frequencies so that a few pr0n addicts can download photoshopped pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar a little faster.
Fax machines, in my experience, just work. Stick the paper in the feeder, dial the number and press "send".
As opposed to finding a PC with a scanner. Discovering that the drivers and bundled software are hosed and nobody knows where the scanner software CD is. Or if it does work, it creates a huge file in some format that other programs can't read or crash when they try to read it. You finally get a scan in a file and attach it to an email message, only to discover that it gets bounced for being too big, gets removed for being an "evil file attachment carrying viruses", fills the disk quota on the recipients mailbox, or causes the email server to choke.
One reason was that they were a big pain in the butt for optical and radio astronomers. The sooner they were gone, the better. The satellites are still up there, and I assume the astronomers still wish they would go away.
BB is actually a reference to the American system of measuring the size of lead/steel shot in shotgun shells. Here is a convenient table. BB shot is about 4.5 mm in diameter.
The federal government, not NASA, decided that it would be a good idea to keep all of those Russian rocket scientists employed, rather than designing and building ICBMs for our enemies. So the Space Station became, in large part, a make-work project for Russian scientists and engineers.
Most of my spam is currently coming from Russia, relayed through hijacked computers on American broadband networks.
The messages are in the Cyrillic alphabet. I can usually recognize telephone numbers with a Russian country code and mailing addresses in Moscow. I don't know what they are selling, but it's targeted at Russian speaking customers from firms in Russia.
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My reading is that the Supreme Court allows use taxes as long as they do not penalize interstate commerce. Your use tax rate may not be higher than your sales tax rate.
The simple solution would be to eliminate use taxes and tax all sales where the sale is made. Buy a computer from a firm in California? They would collect California sales tax on the order, no matter where it was shipped. The high-tax states hate the idea, it forces them to compete for business with low-tax states. It lets the peons vote with their dollars if sales tax rates are too high.
I haven't heard of it being done recently, but I've read stories in the newspaper about state revenue agents staking out popular stores and malls in low-tax states that are near the border with high-tax states, looking for cars with out-of-state license plates and large purchases.
One way to find out the identity of the spammers is to follow the money. Someone with the power to issue subpoenas should be able to find out where the money is going. An old trick is to write a check to the person under investigation and see where it goes.
The Earth's atmosphere is effectively opaque to x-rays. They are absorbed and the energy is reemitted at lower frequencies. This is what produces the fireball when a nuclear device is detonated in the Earth's atmosphere.
For major crimes, the FBI will scour the neighborhood for businesses with security cameras and collect the video tapes. During an average day, how many times are you recorded on video?
I read them. I figure there is no point in buying the game if my computer doesn't meet the minimum specifications. It still may be too slow, even if my computer does meet the minimum specifications, but it's guaranteed to be too slow, or may not run at all, if my computer doesn't meet the minimum specifications.
I'm curious about what the problems mentioned in the article are, sloppy code that runs with a slight penalty on the PC and falls over on the Mac. My Mac has a reasonable number of MIPS (2 x 450 MHz G4), but most ports of PC games are barely playable.
There is a short animated film titled "Bambi Meets Godzilla". It's worth watching, especially if your parents forced you to watch Disney films as a child.
Not only do they plaster their logos all over the screen, but in an effort to sell more commercials, they hack out large segments of the movie/show and time compress what's left. Every year they try to stuff in more commercials per hour. Sometimes I watch a show or movie on DVD after watching it on broadcast television, and I am amazed at how much was cut out.
The ATSC standard provides approximately 19 Mbps of bandwidth for digital video/audio. The bits are already heavily compressed. A raw, uncompressed HDTV signal is about 1.5 Gbps. Network feeds are about 45 Mbps.
That doesn't stop our ingenious drivers from attempting to pass on the shoulder, hitting any stopped vehicles found in their path.
The average movie theater does not make a profit on showing movies. The price of the ticket is split between the distributor and the theater, with the distributor getting most of the money. The concessions stand is where the theater generates most of its profits. That is why the prices are high. The theater isn't a charity. If it doesn't generate sufficient profits to produce a reasonable return on the money invested in the theater, they will raise prices or close the theater. History has shown that their customers are more sensitive to high ticket prices than they are to high concession prices.
Exit polls do not work well when there are controversial issues and candidates. Many people may vote for a particular candidate and yet be unwilling to admit it to a pollster.
The Vietnam War was authorized by the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
The United States has not formally declared war on another country since World War II.
From what I remember, they took the day off, ignoring the mission plan and refusing to talk to the ground controllers in Houston. This pissed off their bosses at NASA and they never flew again. It did force NASA to start paying attention to crew psychology and workload.
Some odors can make certain people physically ill. They can also make people psychologically ill. When you're stuck in a confined environment, little things can drive you nuts over an extended period of time. A crew that is angry or depressed can exhibit poor judgment and reduced performance. It isn't just the Russians, a crew on Skylab went on strike for a day as a protest against the way that they had been treated by ground control.
It isn't just amateur radio. Try ships at sea, aeronautical communications, police, fire, forestry, government, military, disaster services, broadcasting, and many others. Those services are allocated those frequencies by international treaty. They are not going to vacate their frequencies so that a few pr0n addicts can download photoshopped pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar a little faster.
As opposed to finding a PC with a scanner. Discovering that the drivers and bundled software are hosed and nobody knows where the scanner software CD is. Or if it does work, it creates a huge file in some format that other programs can't read or crash when they try to read it. You finally get a scan in a file and attach it to an email message, only to discover that it gets bounced for being too big, gets removed for being an "evil file attachment carrying viruses", fills the disk quota on the recipients mailbox, or causes the email server to choke.
One reason was that they were a big pain in the butt for optical and radio astronomers. The sooner they were gone, the better. The satellites are still up there, and I assume the astronomers still wish they would go away.
BB is actually a reference to the American system of measuring the size of lead/steel shot in shotgun shells. Here is a convenient table. BB shot is about 4.5 mm in diameter.
It doesn't help when the people who used to maintain the documentation get outsourced and/or laid off due to budget cuts.
The federal government, not NASA, decided that it would be a good idea to keep all of those Russian rocket scientists employed, rather than designing and building ICBMs for our enemies. So the Space Station became, in large part, a make-work project for Russian scientists and engineers.
Most of my spam is currently coming from Russia, relayed through hijacked computers on American broadband networks. The messages are in the Cyrillic alphabet. I can usually recognize telephone numbers with a Russian country code and mailing addresses in Moscow. I don't know what they are selling, but it's targeted at Russian speaking customers from firms in Russia.