What you see in primitive conditions is optimization for efficiency. They have low body fat, low muscle mass. The outcome is it takes very little fuel to run their bodies, which is a side effect of living on subsidence rather than abundance.
I imagine GP was referring to the Kenyan runners and other extreme examples of tribal "athletes". In which case you are talking about generations of breeding and training culminating in an entire sub-species of people capable of running fast for a very long time. Even still, those people are the outliers among their own kind.
It doesn't work that way. The EVE cluster is for all intents FIXED. They can't pull down nodes and they don't often add new ones. The reason for this is because of the way the game balances load across those nodes.
I don't know how many nodes they are running right now, but there are 5000+ solar systems. Each node can run one, or more often many solar systems at a time. This only works because the majority of the solar systems are all but empty most of the time. Some systems, like Jita, are SUPER busy all the time and systems like that have their own dedicated node. Even so, Jita is the single most laggy spot in the game. If CCP were to remove nodes from the system, they would be directly increasing lag, something they have been fighting for ages. They aren't going to do that.
That isn't to say that won't save some money on bandwidth and power utilization, but they aren't going to be shutting down nodes anytime soon.
It's simply good business, and as we've been shown endlessly, there is no good or bad, no right and wrong in business. Simply what you can do, and what you can do and get away with.
Google isn't going to arm their competition with the very tools that set google apart. I don't think any rational person would actually expect them to. While I'd like to see their tools and platforms released to the community, it would probably help google's competitors more than it would the community itself. After all, when was the last time you deployed a distributed system with geo nodes across the world and needed absolutely fail safe data backup with no down time? It's just not something anybody does very often.
Simply : No. There isn't actually a will to survive, there is an ingrained need to reproduce. The true biological compunction of all life is to reproduce. Humans call this survival instinct because we project our own beliefs and fears onto the rest of the life we see. Everything else could be simple pain avoidance.
I'm not sure it matters though. I'm not convinced machine intelligence is capable of self awareness. Even at it's highest levels, even if "programmed" with instincts, I'm not convinced self awareness is a function of intelligence. I don't want to get all spiritual, but some might say the machine lacks a soul. But then Orson Scott Card would say the soul would be called when the machine was ready for it.
Ultimately, the relevant question is going to be "At what point does a purely logical intelligence come to the conclusion that humans are a danger not just to themselves, but to everything else?" And then "What path would that intelligence take to 'solve' that problem?"
As a long time gamer, and hardcore at that, I can tell you unequivocally that my circle of friends and gaming buddies will NOT be buying any games that do not include LAN support. Why? I'll give you a simple example. Mercenaries 2. I purchased the game new, having liked the previous title for my Ps2, this time I got it on my PC. It was awesome, and I had heard good things about the co-op game. So I convinced a friend of mine to buy it. In three months of trying we were NEVER able to get a co-op game to work. At that point, we decided it was a fluke and oh well. Enter HAWX. Same problem. The demo was great, and the hacked multiplayer in the demo was even better. So we both purchased the game, but are still virtually unable to play together online. In the case of HAWX we can get our co-op on, but we can't both join the same server and play online for more than a few minutes at a time. No idea why except that once again the publisher isn't supporting multiplayer in any kind of rational way.
Therefore, as a gamer and a consumer, I refuse to purchase anything that doesn't include an out of the box LAN option. I don't care if it wants to call home first, so long as once it does, I can set up a server and run it locally (or hamachi). There is no excuse for a company to advertise a function in a game and then fail to deliver it. This isn't hard, LAN options have been around since the dawn of multiplayer games. This bullshit of not allowing it anymore is just shooting the publisher in the foot.
Funny? They ship items, products by the boat load to us. We send them intellectual property. The only thing funny here is the inequity of the arrangement at hand, and it has nothing to do with piracy.
Check out Urquan masters for more open ended Star control 2 goodness. It's free, and it's a great time waster. It takes all the ships and more from SC2 and puts you in control of an epic mothership with the mission to free the galaxy from the terror of the masters. Great stuff.
In freespace 2, a handful of the missions could change the storyline based on your success or failure. If you did well, it could move the odds later on in the story in your favor. If you did badly, some of the later missions were even harder as you lost some of the support you'd have otherwise had.
More than that, doing very well on some missions would get you into the sub-arc of the story where you got to fly some special ops missions in birds you would otherwise never fly. Very impressive. Especially for it's age.
Or for that matter the Independence War series. The first one was a master piece of story telling interspersed with some of the best space combat you can find. The second one was open ended and player driven. The combat didn't change a lot, but it didn't need to because it was already so good.
Further, Iwar 2 is probably one of the sexiest games you've ever seen. The graphics are a few years back now, but considering what they had to work with, they did a spectacular job. Oh, and the entire series uses Newtonian physics, so geometry and vectoring during flight become incredibly important.
If you let the AIs chew on the problem of what to do with all the unemployed humans, you are going to be really mad when they decide they don't need the humans much or at all. The logical conclusion for a machine presented with that problem is to eliminate the unproductive population.
Humans are pack animals by nature. Inherently NOT selfish. If we can be said to be selfish now, it's only because "progress" has taken us to a point of abstraction beyond the average persons ability to reckon. The problem is that most people have NO CONCEPT of how their actions or inactions damage or help other people. Humans in small communities still know what it means to help another person. However, the majority don't live in small communities.
Letting them starve wouldn't be noble here in America (USA?). However, opening a hunting season to "thin the heard" would be. It's already done with lesser species, why not lesser people?
Disclaimer, I don't hunt except for food. Human tastes like chicken.
In the 1930's depression, lots of luxury car makers went tits up. However, right now, the car makers going tits up aren't the luxury brands. BMW, Merc, Porsche, Infinity, Lexus and even most of the "exotics" are doing just fine. It's the terribly managed US run companies that are dying off left right and center. Among those, some of the best positioned are the luxury brands, Cadillac for example.
How this relates to Apple, you are free to figure out on your own.
I run state of the art computers, none of which are Apple. Unlike cars, it's fairly easy for someone with basic skills to assemble high end "premium" PCs. In the car market there are good reasons to buy the "premium" model, unlike computers, the high end cars tend to have a longer life. I've owned 4 BMWs with 200k or more miles. I sold them all in working order. I owned 2 US made cars, and donated both to charity with less than 200k on them. You figure it out.
I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, as you appear to be... however... You very much appear to be on the inside looking out. Most of your argument hinges on users being complete morons. Which is more than a little bit common among developers and IT staff. The reality is more complicated though, and you clearly drank the kool-aid.
The reality is that Palm did the exact opposite of what apple has done, and the platform isn't a "mess". If you install a new browser and it doesn't work you uninstall it, report it as crap in the review page where you got it and move on. What this means is that users self correct issues brought forward by poor development. Apple could do the same, and would probably still come out on top due to mostly superior products. It's unlikely you could build a browser better than safari on the Iphone. You might co-opt safari and put in flash and/or silverlight and/or whatever. If this were to drain the battery, presumably you'd notice your battery life decrease, and all but the stupidest people would understand it was the new browser. They probably wouldn't know it was flash specifically, but most people make causal connections as a matter of course.
At the end of the day, apple protected their platform for lots of reasons. Protecting the users wasn't one of them. Protecting themselves? sure. The billion dollar platform? You bet. Controlling distribution and content just makes sense with these goals.
Winmobile is on devices from dozens of manufacturers. Palm too. Most of the other platforms are spread around at least a little bit. Apple is the only one I can think of with any market share that makes their own OS, and their own hardware. Meaning they are the only one that can REALLY control the market of their device. So they do. No surprise. However, lets not pretend it was altruistic of them to do so.
You don't have a DVD case somewhere with all your systems backed up into with a known good build? Really? What the hell kind of geek are you?
I've got disk images on my server, and DVD hardcopies in a disc case for every computer I own (more than a few). Anytime one of my systems goes down, gets funked or catches a cold, I pop in a DVD and reboot. Half an hour later I'm rebooting into my fully configured and installed OS of choice.
Combined with a little intelligent partitioning you can make restoring a known good OS childsplay. I put aps and data on 2 separate partitions with the OS on a third. The only real downside is the sometimes tricky business of balancing disk usage. Win XP makes that about as hard as they can, because aps don't respect proper user directories. However it's not impossible and not even hard for a geek.
On to the subject at hand, I'm gonna throw in my 2 cents for Truecrypt also. I've been using it for ages and it's a beautiful thing. As to making it safe on a laptop that may be stolen, a friend of mine did this. Move all sensitive data to one drive/partition/directory (your choice), encrypt the hell out of that unit. Now write a shell script that nukes that unit if a certain key combination isn't pressed within X minutes of log in. Include a prompt that waits for input if you want to be fail safe. Problem solved. Now if you ever lose track of the laptop, and someone attempts to access it, all the important info will be encrypted to start, and erased most likely. This also foils most attempts to extract the HDD and read it with another machine as the data is safely encrypted in a junk file that no one but a pro will recognize. If you throw in a few other "junk" containers as decoys, you're pretty safe. No one is going to apply the horsepower required to even begin cracking the key, even assuming they find the correct file to unlock
For added fun, you can use a duress password which can be set to trigger any number of fun events. From formats to lock outs to fake data.
I'm not paranoid, I'm just careful. I don't think anyone is out to get me, nor do I think the data on my computer would be worth the effort of getting, but I'm damn sure going to make it REALLY hard, just in case. (also, I'm spiteful)
That being said, I liked the thermite idea. It might be a pain to travel with, somehow I'm thinking the airport guys are going to have a problem with even a small thermite charge. You could go EMP, but I'm not sure you could fit the power verter and the coil into the netbook... maybe a full sized laptop...
I used to work for a company that burned about 100 CDs a day. Half were kept as "backups" on site. The other half were shipped off to clients that were only going to use them once to transfer the days data to their server.
About 4 years later we lost a drive array and wanted to restore from the CD backup. I set one of my people to offloading the CDs to a new set of drives. Meanwhile I went to our offsite backup and copied the relevant data back to the server in a few hours. Days later my employee comes back to me and says that "most" of the CDs are coasters and the data is gone. It turns out that about 1/3rd of the CDrs either didn't burn properly in the first place, or had failed in the 2-6 years they were on a shelf.
The lesson was a simple one. The offsite backup server was faster, easier and more reliable than the CDRs. Of course, management blamed the (long since) fired employee that burned most of them. They also paid 5k$ for a brand new Mass burner / labeler, and used up nearly a week of production time getting it working and tested.
A year later the clients all moved to USB thumb drives and or FTP transfer for the data, making the fancy mass burner obsolete.
The answer to this problem on computers is to include a live editor in the game. Such that when a player tries to do something that isn't pre-programmed, the editor comes up and gives the player a tool box to build the effect/outcome s/he was expecting. Then, the game automatically syncs all online copies of the game so that all players can use everyone's creations.
So long as the same, or similar engines are used for future games, all the enhancements can be rolled into new releases. Giving us all a game that includes player driven model of PnP, but with the ease of use and graphical power of a CRPG.
You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means. Cow catchers act like plows to knock the cow out of the way of the train. Granted, you could redesign them to capture cows and consume them for energy, but I'm guessing the power density of a cow isn't going to be enough for it to matter. Besides, do you know how much a cow costs?
Every time this subject shows up on slashdot, I'm shocked by the general ignorance displayed. Most of you are on the right path, but you are several orders of magnitude behind the actual complexity at work.
Typical online retailers (non-mega stores) have such convoluted supply chains that being forced to pay taxes as a brick and mortar store would crush them overnight.
Take a random example. A company called nulime. (I am not affiliated with them in any way, nor do I recommend them, but I am familiar with their supply chain) They have a website, they have an amazon presence and an ebay presence. They have a tiny warehouse, and a handful of employees. So, now lets track a purchase through their supply chains.
Customer goes to nulime and orders $Widget. Nulime confirms the order and takes the money (by CC). They then pass the order to the supplier for that item. In this case it's a company called Dropshipdirect. Dship takes the order, and most of the money (by CC in oregon). Then they pass the order to the actual manufacturer, who confirms the order and takes most of the money again. (by CC in california). The manufacturer then boxes up and ships the item from their warehouse (in a different state than the offices). The item is UPS'd to the customer directly. Now, who pays what taxes and where?
Technically speaking you have at least 3 separate transactions. 6 if you count the credit card company/processor sucking off 3% and a.25cent transaction fee each time. If the customer pays the taxes for their location, and the manufacturer pays the taxes for their location, that one item has been taxed twice, and we STILL haven't taxed either of the two internet companies handling the order.
The current legal standing puts the burden mostly on the manufacturer (and or distributor). However, given the shell game nature of most online retailing, taxing it fairly is almost impossible. I have my personal opinion, and that is that all sales taxes should be paid by the purchaser in their home state ONLY.
Currently, if I buy something from a website in washington state, from my home in oregon, which is shipped from california, I pay the purchase price, shipping, and taxes in both washington state and california. Meanwhile, I live in a state that DOES NOT have a sales tax (yet). There are webstores that don't charge sales taxes even if they are located in a state with sales tax. However, this only goes on for so long before it gets noticed and the company gets hit with a giant tax bill and delinquency fees and may even loose their business license.
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What you see in primitive conditions is optimization for efficiency. They have low body fat, low muscle mass. The outcome is it takes very little fuel to run their bodies, which is a side effect of living on subsidence rather than abundance.
I imagine GP was referring to the Kenyan runners and other extreme examples of tribal "athletes". In which case you are talking about generations of breeding and training culminating in an entire sub-species of people capable of running fast for a very long time. Even still, those people are the outliers among their own kind.
It doesn't work that way. The EVE cluster is for all intents FIXED. They can't pull down nodes and they don't often add new ones. The reason for this is because of the way the game balances load across those nodes.
I don't know how many nodes they are running right now, but there are 5000+ solar systems. Each node can run one, or more often many solar systems at a time. This only works because the majority of the solar systems are all but empty most of the time. Some systems, like Jita, are SUPER busy all the time and systems like that have their own dedicated node. Even so, Jita is the single most laggy spot in the game. If CCP were to remove nodes from the system, they would be directly increasing lag, something they have been fighting for ages. They aren't going to do that.
That isn't to say that won't save some money on bandwidth and power utilization, but they aren't going to be shutting down nodes anytime soon.
It's simply good business, and as we've been shown endlessly, there is no good or bad, no right and wrong in business. Simply what you can do, and what you can do and get away with.
Google isn't going to arm their competition with the very tools that set google apart. I don't think any rational person would actually expect them to. While I'd like to see their tools and platforms released to the community, it would probably help google's competitors more than it would the community itself. After all, when was the last time you deployed a distributed system with geo nodes across the world and needed absolutely fail safe data backup with no down time? It's just not something anybody does very often.
500 years ago people like you KNEW the earth was the center of the universe.
200 years ago people like you KNEW the world was flat.
100 years ago people like you KNEW that lighting was gods doing.
Imagine what you are going to know tomorrow.
Simply : No. There isn't actually a will to survive, there is an ingrained need to reproduce. The true biological compunction of all life is to reproduce. Humans call this survival instinct because we project our own beliefs and fears onto the rest of the life we see. Everything else could be simple pain avoidance.
I'm not sure it matters though. I'm not convinced machine intelligence is capable of self awareness. Even at it's highest levels, even if "programmed" with instincts, I'm not convinced self awareness is a function of intelligence. I don't want to get all spiritual, but some might say the machine lacks a soul. But then Orson Scott Card would say the soul would be called when the machine was ready for it.
Ultimately, the relevant question is going to be "At what point does a purely logical intelligence come to the conclusion that humans are a danger not just to themselves, but to everything else?" And then "What path would that intelligence take to 'solve' that problem?"
As a long time gamer, and hardcore at that, I can tell you unequivocally that my circle of friends and gaming buddies will NOT be buying any games that do not include LAN support. Why? I'll give you a simple example. Mercenaries 2. I purchased the game new, having liked the previous title for my Ps2, this time I got it on my PC. It was awesome, and I had heard good things about the co-op game. So I convinced a friend of mine to buy it. In three months of trying we were NEVER able to get a co-op game to work. At that point, we decided it was a fluke and oh well. Enter HAWX. Same problem. The demo was great, and the hacked multiplayer in the demo was even better. So we both purchased the game, but are still virtually unable to play together online. In the case of HAWX we can get our co-op on, but we can't both join the same server and play online for more than a few minutes at a time. No idea why except that once again the publisher isn't supporting multiplayer in any kind of rational way.
Therefore, as a gamer and a consumer, I refuse to purchase anything that doesn't include an out of the box LAN option. I don't care if it wants to call home first, so long as once it does, I can set up a server and run it locally (or hamachi). There is no excuse for a company to advertise a function in a game and then fail to deliver it. This isn't hard, LAN options have been around since the dawn of multiplayer games. This bullshit of not allowing it anymore is just shooting the publisher in the foot.
Funny? They ship items, products by the boat load to us. We send them intellectual property. The only thing funny here is the inequity of the arrangement at hand, and it has nothing to do with piracy.
This being /. it's pretty likely he doesn't know. Unfortunately, it's entirely beyond my writing ability to describe getting blown.
You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
Check out Urquan masters for more open ended Star control 2 goodness. It's free, and it's a great time waster. It takes all the ships and more from SC2 and puts you in control of an epic mothership with the mission to free the galaxy from the terror of the masters. Great stuff.
In freespace 2, a handful of the missions could change the storyline based on your success or failure. If you did well, it could move the odds later on in the story in your favor. If you did badly, some of the later missions were even harder as you lost some of the support you'd have otherwise had.
More than that, doing very well on some missions would get you into the sub-arc of the story where you got to fly some special ops missions in birds you would otherwise never fly. Very impressive. Especially for it's age.
Or for that matter the Independence War series. The first one was a master piece of story telling interspersed with some of the best space combat you can find. The second one was open ended and player driven. The combat didn't change a lot, but it didn't need to because it was already so good.
Further, Iwar 2 is probably one of the sexiest games you've ever seen. The graphics are a few years back now, but considering what they had to work with, they did a spectacular job. Oh, and the entire series uses Newtonian physics, so geometry and vectoring during flight become incredibly important.
If you let the AIs chew on the problem of what to do with all the unemployed humans, you are going to be really mad when they decide they don't need the humans much or at all. The logical conclusion for a machine presented with that problem is to eliminate the unproductive population.
Humans are pack animals by nature. Inherently NOT selfish. If we can be said to be selfish now, it's only because "progress" has taken us to a point of abstraction beyond the average persons ability to reckon. The problem is that most people have NO CONCEPT of how their actions or inactions damage or help other people. Humans in small communities still know what it means to help another person. However, the majority don't live in small communities.
Letting them starve wouldn't be noble here in America (USA?). However, opening a hunting season to "thin the heard" would be. It's already done with lesser species, why not lesser people?
Disclaimer, I don't hunt except for food. Human tastes like chicken.
In the 1930's depression, lots of luxury car makers went tits up. However, right now, the car makers going tits up aren't the luxury brands. BMW, Merc, Porsche, Infinity, Lexus and even most of the "exotics" are doing just fine. It's the terribly managed US run companies that are dying off left right and center. Among those, some of the best positioned are the luxury brands, Cadillac for example.
How this relates to Apple, you are free to figure out on your own.
I run state of the art computers, none of which are Apple. Unlike cars, it's fairly easy for someone with basic skills to assemble high end "premium" PCs. In the car market there are good reasons to buy the "premium" model, unlike computers, the high end cars tend to have a longer life. I've owned 4 BMWs with 200k or more miles. I sold them all in working order. I owned 2 US made cars, and donated both to charity with less than 200k on them. You figure it out.
I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, as you appear to be... however... You very much appear to be on the inside looking out. Most of your argument hinges on users being complete morons. Which is more than a little bit common among developers and IT staff. The reality is more complicated though, and you clearly drank the kool-aid.
The reality is that Palm did the exact opposite of what apple has done, and the platform isn't a "mess". If you install a new browser and it doesn't work you uninstall it, report it as crap in the review page where you got it and move on. What this means is that users self correct issues brought forward by poor development. Apple could do the same, and would probably still come out on top due to mostly superior products. It's unlikely you could build a browser better than safari on the Iphone. You might co-opt safari and put in flash and/or silverlight and/or whatever. If this were to drain the battery, presumably you'd notice your battery life decrease, and all but the stupidest people would understand it was the new browser. They probably wouldn't know it was flash specifically, but most people make causal connections as a matter of course.
At the end of the day, apple protected their platform for lots of reasons. Protecting the users wasn't one of them. Protecting themselves? sure. The billion dollar platform? You bet. Controlling distribution and content just makes sense with these goals.
Winmobile is on devices from dozens of manufacturers. Palm too. Most of the other platforms are spread around at least a little bit. Apple is the only one I can think of with any market share that makes their own OS, and their own hardware. Meaning they are the only one that can REALLY control the market of their device. So they do. No surprise. However, lets not pretend it was altruistic of them to do so.
Never mind the cops, what the hell is a female? I'm almost afraid to ask what menstruation is...
You don't have a DVD case somewhere with all your systems backed up into with a known good build? Really? What the hell kind of geek are you?
I've got disk images on my server, and DVD hardcopies in a disc case for every computer I own (more than a few). Anytime one of my systems goes down, gets funked or catches a cold, I pop in a DVD and reboot. Half an hour later I'm rebooting into my fully configured and installed OS of choice.
Combined with a little intelligent partitioning you can make restoring a known good OS childsplay. I put aps and data on 2 separate partitions with the OS on a third. The only real downside is the sometimes tricky business of balancing disk usage. Win XP makes that about as hard as they can, because aps don't respect proper user directories. However it's not impossible and not even hard for a geek.
On to the subject at hand, I'm gonna throw in my 2 cents for Truecrypt also. I've been using it for ages and it's a beautiful thing. As to making it safe on a laptop that may be stolen, a friend of mine did this. Move all sensitive data to one drive/partition/directory (your choice), encrypt the hell out of that unit. Now write a shell script that nukes that unit if a certain key combination isn't pressed within X minutes of log in. Include a prompt that waits for input if you want to be fail safe. Problem solved. Now if you ever lose track of the laptop, and someone attempts to access it, all the important info will be encrypted to start, and erased most likely. This also foils most attempts to extract the HDD and read it with another machine as the data is safely encrypted in a junk file that no one but a pro will recognize. If you throw in a few other "junk" containers as decoys, you're pretty safe. No one is going to apply the horsepower required to even begin cracking the key, even assuming they find the correct file to unlock
For added fun, you can use a duress password which can be set to trigger any number of fun events. From formats to lock outs to fake data.
I'm not paranoid, I'm just careful. I don't think anyone is out to get me, nor do I think the data on my computer would be worth the effort of getting, but I'm damn sure going to make it REALLY hard, just in case. (also, I'm spiteful)
That being said, I liked the thermite idea. It might be a pain to travel with, somehow I'm thinking the airport guys are going to have a problem with even a small thermite charge. You could go EMP, but I'm not sure you could fit the power verter and the coil into the netbook... maybe a full sized laptop...
You don't have any idea what an elliptic plane is do you?
I used to work for a company that burned about 100 CDs a day. Half were kept as "backups" on site. The other half were shipped off to clients that were only going to use them once to transfer the days data to their server.
About 4 years later we lost a drive array and wanted to restore from the CD backup. I set one of my people to offloading the CDs to a new set of drives. Meanwhile I went to our offsite backup and copied the relevant data back to the server in a few hours. Days later my employee comes back to me and says that "most" of the CDs are coasters and the data is gone. It turns out that about 1/3rd of the CDrs either didn't burn properly in the first place, or had failed in the 2-6 years they were on a shelf.
The lesson was a simple one. The offsite backup server was faster, easier and more reliable than the CDRs. Of course, management blamed the (long since) fired employee that burned most of them. They also paid 5k$ for a brand new Mass burner / labeler, and used up nearly a week of production time getting it working and tested.
A year later the clients all moved to USB thumb drives and or FTP transfer for the data, making the fancy mass burner obsolete.
I was told that once. My response did not win me any favors. You can't outrun them, but you can jam them.
The answer to this problem on computers is to include a live editor in the game. Such that when a player tries to do something that isn't pre-programmed, the editor comes up and gives the player a tool box to build the effect/outcome s/he was expecting. Then, the game automatically syncs all online copies of the game so that all players can use everyone's creations.
So long as the same, or similar engines are used for future games, all the enhancements can be rolled into new releases. Giving us all a game that includes player driven model of PnP, but with the ease of use and graphical power of a CRPG.
You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means. Cow catchers act like plows to knock the cow out of the way of the train. Granted, you could redesign them to capture cows and consume them for energy, but I'm guessing the power density of a cow isn't going to be enough for it to matter. Besides, do you know how much a cow costs?
Every time this subject shows up on slashdot, I'm shocked by the general ignorance displayed. Most of you are on the right path, but you are several orders of magnitude behind the actual complexity at work.
.25cent transaction fee each time. If the customer pays the taxes for their location, and the manufacturer pays the taxes for their location, that one item has been taxed twice, and we STILL haven't taxed either of the two internet companies handling the order.
Typical online retailers (non-mega stores) have such convoluted supply chains that being forced to pay taxes as a brick and mortar store would crush them overnight.
Take a random example. A company called nulime. (I am not affiliated with them in any way, nor do I recommend them, but I am familiar with their supply chain) They have a website, they have an amazon presence and an ebay presence. They have a tiny warehouse, and a handful of employees. So, now lets track a purchase through their supply chains.
Customer goes to nulime and orders $Widget. Nulime confirms the order and takes the money (by CC). They then pass the order to the supplier for that item. In this case it's a company called Dropshipdirect. Dship takes the order, and most of the money (by CC in oregon). Then they pass the order to the actual manufacturer, who confirms the order and takes most of the money again. (by CC in california). The manufacturer then boxes up and ships the item from their warehouse (in a different state than the offices). The item is UPS'd to the customer directly. Now, who pays what taxes and where?
Technically speaking you have at least 3 separate transactions. 6 if you count the credit card company/processor sucking off 3% and a
The current legal standing puts the burden mostly on the manufacturer (and or distributor). However, given the shell game nature of most online retailing, taxing it fairly is almost impossible. I have my personal opinion, and that is that all sales taxes should be paid by the purchaser in their home state ONLY.
Currently, if I buy something from a website in washington state, from my home in oregon, which is shipped from california, I pay the purchase price, shipping, and taxes in both washington state and california. Meanwhile, I live in a state that DOES NOT have a sales tax (yet). There are webstores that don't charge sales taxes even if they are located in a state with sales tax. However, this only goes on for so long before it gets noticed and the company gets hit with a giant tax bill and delinquency fees and may even loose their business license.