It's not up to a company to decide whether taxes should apply to everyone; in the U.S. that decision is left
up to government.
Uh, no. It is largely left up to the individual companies. Only when whatever government decides that the company
has erred, does the government start telling them what to do.
No, first the government passes the law which tells companies what the rules are, then the companies follow the rules (or don't, and risk getting caught). The decision of whether to follow the rules or not is up to each individual or corporation, but the rules themselves are not in question.
Whether it is a subsidy is beside the point - taxes are up to the government (and thus ultimately the
citizenry) to decide, not some random corporation
No, you're missing my first point. There are a set of laws out there, not all of them clearly have the companies name
written all over them. It is a function of the accountants and lawyers to decide which.
True, the company has to decide based on the applicable law whether they fall within the legal prerequisites for the law to apply to them. However, it is just as illegal to assume that one state's laws apply to their operations in all states as it is to assume that no laws apply to them. Determining the appropriate tax under various state laws is what the lawyers and accountants are for. Collecting a tax in the name of a state which has not enacted such a tax is at best a gross misrepresentation and hopefully illegal.
My second point is that this is not some moral injustice; I believe that paying the tax is more equitable than not paying
it. As to whether the company should be compelled to pay that tax for moral reasons is entirely academic. However,
the consumer can still decide to shop elsewhere if he chooses; companies are entitled to charge whatever they damn
well please. No harm done if the consumer doesn't agree to it.
You're free to give any money that you want to any states that you want, whether or not they have a law requiring you to do so. However, I don't want a company charging me on the behalf of a government which has not authorized that company to tax me. I don't think taxation without legislative authorization is equitable at all, and I want each tax pinned on a specific body of elected officials so that I can vote them out (or at least try) if I don't agree with the tax.
I'm not some sort of anti-tax freak; I just believe that the laws that apply to me should be made by my elected representatives. I give some organizations money because I feel that they deserve it, and I pay money to the state and country because it is the law; I don't usually equate the governments of states that I've never visited such credit.
So what's
wrong with collecting the taxes at the rate that the governments have decreed and giving it to them?
The situation which we are discussing concerns a company charging customers sales tax for purchases even when there is no law authorizing them to collect such a tax. If no applicable government has enacted such a tax, then the company is collecting money under false auspices, and it might as well be going into a black hole as going back to whichever state they say they send it to. Since that state doesn't have such a tax, they aren't going to audit such a company to make sure that they don't tax too much or too little. As a result, the consumer can easily be screwed.
It also takes away one
complaint that local merchants usually have with internet based businesses.
If those local merchants want more taxes, they should get them passed by the duly-elected legislature, not added by other businesses.
It's also good PR for the govt bodies in the
states they're not in for the future when they do get a physical presence.
A bribe, in other words.
IMHO, I think you are just offended by the chance of having to pay sales tax on something bought via the internet.
I'm offended by (in no particular order):
tax policy which is not set by the legislature (subject to the vote of the citizenry)
taxation without representation, where another state attempts to tax my purchases without giving me a vote in the situation
governments that feel they have a right to tax the citizenry without considering whether those taxed receive equivalent government services in return
In my state, that is called a "use tax", and follows generally the same rules, which I referred to originally. While I have reservations about that too, I specifically excepted use taxes in my previous post. If there is no law requiring a company to collect taxes for a particular state, it is a definite misrepresentation and possibly illegal for a business to charge a tax on behalf of that state, whether the state gets the money or not.
But you said you had no presence in 20% of the states, so where does the money collected from those residents go? Their state governments aren't accepting it. It may make things simpler from an accounting perspective, but it is definitely not legal to tax residents of another state in such a matter. It's not up to a company to decide whether taxes should apply to everyone; in the U.S. that decision is left up to government.
It's only fair. Why should the government effectively subsidize any E-commerce firm? It simply makes no sense.
The reason why is because there is no law (fortunately, IMHO) taxing out-of-state internet purchases (except for states which have "use taxes"). Whether it is a subsidy is beside the point - taxes are up to the government (and thus ultimately the citizenry) to decide, not some random corporation. If they don't go under for business reasons (I wouldn't buy something from such a site), I sure hope the FTC goes after them.
(Of course, it'll just be blamed on the article submitter, but nobody's
fooled.)
"fooled" isn't really the correct word, since the "running scared" quote was written by the submitter, not the/. editorial staff. You see, everything in italics was written by the submitter, and everything in normal type is editorial comment. Think of it more as a letter to the editor - you don't blame the Times for telling lies just because someone writes in with an untruth.
Granted there is some bias on this site, but this particular case is not an example of it.
Well, if the packets were created by anybody it's by the user's actions as they manipulate corp. X's client. So by that logic your actions in the game are (C) you, just like anything you create with Photoshop is (C) you.
A better question would be, does the game's over-the-wire protocol count as an anti-circumvention measure under the DMCA? We've already seen that pitifully poor cryptography is eligible for protection; how about just obfuscated bytes on a wire? Distributing a server which understands this protocol would then be illegal under the DMCA. It's a scary thought...
I've never played EQ. Does Verant make a lot of money off of the $10/month, or is that just to cover the cost of the server and some admins, etc.? In my mind, there's a difference between using your client SW EULA to require the use of your non-free servers because the servers are really the cash cows, versus just providing the server for a nominal fee so that players have a trusted venue for playing.
Bottom line: as in so many other issues I see here on/., if you're expecting to use the U.S. legal system to make up for your inadequate technical preparations to keep a worldwide community of users and hackers in line, you've got another think coming. See sig.
Maybe they flush writes to disk much more often (almost immediately?) and don't run as many daemons that have to be shut down? It's impressive, that's for sure. Hopefully the production systems will still be that quick.
True, there is a large debt which hasn't been paid. But that's different than having resolutions passed that condemn the U.S., which is what I was more curious about.
The Chinese do not have the ability to mount an invasion that would require them to cross the Pacific. Their entire
fleet would be wiped out by the US and British before they got anywhere near Hawaii.
I think I can safely say that a Chinese invasion is *very* unlikely.
Boy, that really sounds familiar. I wonder if there were ever any attacks on Hawaii that came as a surprise to the U.S.?
And just for the record, the nation that's told the UN to stick it more than anyone else is -guess who?- the United
States! The UN routinely passes motions to condemn the US for one action or another, and we tell them to shove it.
Well, at least most Internet companies don't have a business model that involves charging your users for info they freely submitted to you. Even Napster had a better plan than that!
I don't recall agreeing to or signing any license agreement when I installed Linux, fired up the KDE CD player, and added freedb.org to the setup info. I don't see how a license which the user never sees can be enforced; if CDDB doesn't want to send me CD track info, they have the power to have their server bounce me. As long as they make the info available publicly, the public will make use of it, license be damned.
This copying from CDDB to FreeDB sounds cool - I would do that but apparently all of my CD's are already in FreeDB. I haven't had a failed lookup in months.
Well, they're certainly not interested in radio waves from earth - building it out in WV was supposed to avoid that:) The telescope is definitely looking for radio waves that are part of the electromagnetic spectrum from space.
When I was there, hot plates or gas stoves. I think area residents that aren't actually living on the facility can have microwave ovens, although if yours is old or leaky they'll track you down and get you to stop.
Other posters have pointed out the National Radio Quiet Zone, which helps keep the airwaves in Green Bank (a beautiful trip, if you ever have the chance to travel there or even intern there as I did, do yourself a favor and take the opportunity). Astronomers there were up in arms over Motorola's Iridium project, though, since Iridium was close to a widely-used radio astronomy band, and due to its high-powered hardware actually bled over into one of the bands which was assigned to radio astronomers world wide. I imagine they're not too unhappy about all those satellites plummeting!
Well, since the only thing on the LAN which would even look sort-of like a console to an end-user would be another PC, I think it's reasonable to infer that the application error crashed their whole network. It's not like they would mistake a networked printer for a console, y'know. And I doubt that they were running the ship off of web pages back when this originally occurred, considering that it was probably using technology that was state-of-the-art a year or two before the ship crashed, and at that time Microsoft hadn't even discovered the Internet yet (I say this in the same sense that Columbus "discovered" the New World).
You can tell by the tone of the whole article that it is not technically specific. They talk about a database overflow in
one instance, and a divide by the number zero elsewhere...
That part made sense to me - somebody put a zero in the database, and the application later hit the zero and was off to the races.
That's a good point - considering the lead times of government development projects, maybe Linux wasn't workable when the Smart Ship was originally spec'd. Of course, more traditional Unices would certainly have done the job better than NT, so I suppose that's not really a good explanation.
The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the
number zero, the memo said. The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator
entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to
overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.
Maybe the initial problem was an application error, but the fact that all the other machines crashed indicates that there were some OS issues as well. If it were just an application error, this wouldn't be news, but take down every machine on the ship and there should be some serious explaining going on.
Slashdot Mirror
No, first the government passes the law which tells companies what the rules are, then the companies follow the rules (or don't, and risk getting caught). The decision of whether to follow the rules or not is up to each individual or corporation, but the rules themselves are not in question.
True, the company has to decide based on the applicable law whether they fall within the legal prerequisites for the law to apply to them. However, it is just as illegal to assume that one state's laws apply to their operations in all states as it is to assume that no laws apply to them. Determining the appropriate tax under various state laws is what the lawyers and accountants are for. Collecting a tax in the name of a state which has not enacted such a tax is at best a gross misrepresentation and hopefully illegal.
You're free to give any money that you want to any states that you want, whether or not they have a law requiring you to do so. However, I don't want a company charging me on the behalf of a government which has not authorized that company to tax me. I don't think taxation without legislative authorization is equitable at all, and I want each tax pinned on a specific body of elected officials so that I can vote them out (or at least try) if I don't agree with the tax.
I'm not some sort of anti-tax freak; I just believe that the laws that apply to me should be made by my elected representatives. I give some organizations money because I feel that they deserve it, and I pay money to the state and country because it is the law; I don't usually equate the governments of states that I've never visited such credit.
The situation which we are discussing concerns a company charging customers sales tax for purchases even when there is no law authorizing them to collect such a tax. If no applicable government has enacted such a tax, then the company is collecting money under false auspices, and it might as well be going into a black hole as going back to whichever state they say they send it to. Since that state doesn't have such a tax, they aren't going to audit such a company to make sure that they don't tax too much or too little. As a result, the consumer can easily be screwed.
If those local merchants want more taxes, they should get them passed by the duly-elected legislature, not added by other businesses.
A bribe, in other words.
I'm offended by (in no particular order):
In my state, that is called a "use tax", and follows generally the same rules, which I referred to originally. While I have reservations about that too, I specifically excepted use taxes in my previous post. If there is no law requiring a company to collect taxes for a particular state, it is a definite misrepresentation and possibly illegal for a business to charge a tax on behalf of that state, whether the state gets the money or not.
But you said you had no presence in 20% of the states, so where does the money collected from those residents go? Their state governments aren't accepting it. It may make things simpler from an accounting perspective, but it is definitely not legal to tax residents of another state in such a matter. It's not up to a company to decide whether taxes should apply to everyone; in the U.S. that decision is left up to government.
The reason why is because there is no law (fortunately, IMHO) taxing out-of-state internet purchases (except for states which have "use taxes"). Whether it is a subsidy is beside the point - taxes are up to the government (and thus ultimately the citizenry) to decide, not some random corporation. If they don't go under for business reasons (I wouldn't buy something from such a site), I sure hope the FTC goes after them.
But it doesn't really work right until version 3 or better, right :)
"fooled" isn't really the correct word, since the "running scared" quote was written by the submitter, not the /. editorial staff. You see, everything in italics was written by the submitter, and everything in normal type is editorial comment. Think of it more as a letter to the editor - you don't blame the Times for telling lies just because someone writes in with an untruth.
Granted there is some bias on this site, but this particular case is not an example of it.
Well, if the packets were created by anybody it's by the user's actions as they manipulate corp. X's client. So by that logic your actions in the game are (C) you, just like anything you create with Photoshop is (C) you.
A better question would be, does the game's over-the-wire protocol count as an anti-circumvention measure under the DMCA? We've already seen that pitifully poor cryptography is eligible for protection; how about just obfuscated bytes on a wire? Distributing a server which understands this protocol would then be illegal under the DMCA. It's a scary thought...
I've never played EQ. Does Verant make a lot of money off of the $10/month, or is that just to cover the cost of the server and some admins, etc.? In my mind, there's a difference between using your client SW EULA to require the use of your non-free servers because the servers are really the cash cows, versus just providing the server for a nominal fee so that players have a trusted venue for playing.
Bottom line: as in so many other issues I see here on /., if you're expecting to use the U.S. legal system to make up for your inadequate technical preparations to keep a worldwide community of users and hackers in line, you've got another think coming. See sig.
Even in the U.S., anything delivered by email doesn't have the force of law. You can at least hold out for a registered letter. IANAL, of course.
Maybe they flush writes to disk much more often (almost immediately?) and don't run as many daemons that have to be shut down? It's impressive, that's for sure. Hopefully the production systems will still be that quick.
True, there is a large debt which hasn't been paid. But that's different than having resolutions passed that condemn the U.S., which is what I was more curious about.
Waldorf: "The food here is terrible!"
Statler: "And such small portions, too!"
You mean "death throes", I think.
Boy, that really sounds familiar. I wonder if there were ever any attacks on Hawaii that came as a surprise to the U.S.?
Interesting - where did you see this?
Well, at least most Internet companies don't have a business model that involves charging your users for info they freely submitted to you. Even Napster had a better plan than that!
I don't recall agreeing to or signing any license agreement when I installed Linux, fired up the KDE CD player, and added freedb.org to the setup info. I don't see how a license which the user never sees can be enforced; if CDDB doesn't want to send me CD track info, they have the power to have their server bounce me. As long as they make the info available publicly, the public will make use of it, license be damned.
This copying from CDDB to FreeDB sounds cool - I would do that but apparently all of my CD's are already in FreeDB. I haven't had a failed lookup in months.
s'true - when you hit 50 you quit moving up.
That's funny! (see sig)
Well, they're certainly not interested in radio waves from earth - building it out in WV was supposed to avoid that :) The telescope is definitely looking for radio waves that are part of the electromagnetic spectrum from space.
When I was there, hot plates or gas stoves. I think area residents that aren't actually living on the facility can have microwave ovens, although if yours is old or leaky they'll track you down and get you to stop.
Other posters have pointed out the National Radio Quiet Zone, which helps keep the airwaves in Green Bank (a beautiful trip, if you ever have the chance to travel there or even intern there as I did, do yourself a favor and take the opportunity). Astronomers there were up in arms over Motorola's Iridium project, though, since Iridium was close to a widely-used radio astronomy band, and due to its high-powered hardware actually bled over into one of the bands which was assigned to radio astronomers world wide. I imagine they're not too unhappy about all those satellites plummeting!
Well, since the only thing on the LAN which would even look sort-of like a console to an end-user would be another PC, I think it's reasonable to infer that the application error crashed their whole network. It's not like they would mistake a networked printer for a console, y'know. And I doubt that they were running the ship off of web pages back when this originally occurred, considering that it was probably using technology that was state-of-the-art a year or two before the ship crashed, and at that time Microsoft hadn't even discovered the Internet yet (I say this in the same sense that Columbus "discovered" the New World).
That part made sense to me - somebody put a zero in the database, and the application later hit the zero and was off to the races.
Or if the beasts don't get us, Reagan's acting sure will :)
That's a good point - considering the lead times of government development projects, maybe Linux wasn't workable when the Smart Ship was originally spec'd. Of course, more traditional Unices would certainly have done the job better than NT, so I suppose that's not really a good explanation.
Also from the article:
Maybe the initial problem was an application error, but the fact that all the other machines crashed indicates that there were some OS issues as well. If it were just an application error, this wouldn't be news, but take down every machine on the ship and there should be some serious explaining going on.