Hire admins who know their stuff and make sure you have at least two of them with the root password. Make sure they've got some kind of change control in place, and make sure you have them document what they're doing.
I've been the sole sysadmin before, and I always felt worried that my legacy, should I be fired or quit or hit by a bus, would be "She didn't do a great job because everything fell apart after she left/was fired/was bussassinated". So, I always tried to document things and made sure the boss had the "keys to the kingdom" (document with root pw and locations of my documentation to give to my successor).
I saw the originals in the cinema when they came out, so yea, I'm an old phart.
As for the reeking; well, I was kind of trying to be funny with the Han Shot First part (It's an awesome meme). However, I do take issue with the way Lucas has gone back and revised the existing movies to add more zoomy spaceshippy things and bigger 'splosions everywhere. I SERIOUSLY objected to the replacing of guns with walkie-talkies in E.T. If anyone reeks of something, it's Lucas who reeks of revisionism.
I also strongly object to the trend of adding "Happy Meal aliens" (creatures like Ewocs and JarJar). This is going to be very "back in my day", but back in my day, Chewbacca and R2 were very much loved by the young fans (myself included) even though they were actual characters who contributed to the story in a meaningful way and not just there to pander to the "cutsie kid toys" marketing frenzy.
Hey, in the end, they're Lucas' property and he can do what he wants, but I am also free to like/dislike what he's doing and comment on it. Most certainly, I'm free to do my best to not give another dime to Lucas if I can possibly manage it.
You're free to post ad-hominem attacks if you really feel that will make Slashdot a better place.
Sadly true, though I think the last thing I saw in the cinema was Kick Ass, and before that? um... a few years whatever it was, I can't remember.
Proudly, I can say I've never seen Transformers either. Ditto for Indianna Jones, and the jumping shark or whatever the 4th one was called.
Don't even have a netflix account or a Blu-Ray player; I buy my movies on DVD - usually by the time they've come out, I know whether they're worth spending the money on.
/why, yes, come to think of it I AM kind of gettng cranky in my old age // Get off my lawn
It's not illegal, but there's a legal term called "Laches" which essentially means that if you use such "delayed rights assertion to maximize 'damages'" approach, you risk the court reducing or eliminating the damage awards.../NOT a lawyer
I think the point a lot of us are trying to make is that Google got where they are today by those means, but there's been a shift over the last couple years toward more short-term thinking. We all came to Google because they did what you said - they did search better than others.
The problem is that while not intentionally being evil (in my opinion) Google makes huge money from "Made for AdSense" type SEO garbage sites. If they took all those guys out, they'd make less. At the same time, they need to be careful they don't "AltaVista" themselves out of relevance.
Maybe not by intent, but by action/inaction, Google has betrayed those initial principles in favor of "what works and what makes money".
This whole article and discussion led me to doing so research on Google itself about blacklist features. For a period of time, if you used Google while logged in, you'd get this option to kind of down-rank search results/domains that popped up in your searches. Over time, the idea is that you'd get more relevant results and Google would learn about what folks found to be useful and not. Then, at some point about a year ago, they removed the ability to blacklist/demote/downlink in favor of "starring" good results.
I found lots of discussions on the Google support forums about folks asking for BlackList features, and when Google folks replied, they suggested using the - operator... even when folks time and time again said that they knew how to use the - operator but wanted a PERMANENT PERSONAL BLACK LIST, Google folks kind of ignored the issue or deliberately misunderstood, suggesting workarounds.
I'm thinking someone's written a FireFox addon that would provide google searches, but automatically append " -scummydomain.com -crappydomain.com... etx) to every search before sending. If they haven't I need to teach myself how to write one so I can make it.
Actually, if they did something that devalued the USD, it would hurt them badly. If the USD goes down, US goods would be cheaper to the rest of the world, so our exports would increase, and it would decrease the buying power of the dollar for imported goods.
If anything, China wants to see the USD stronger... the more the dollar's worth, the cheaper its goods and services are to the US (and world) market by comparison.
I used to consider myself Fiscally Conservative, but Socially Libertarian... think Gov. Bill Weld in Massachusetts.
Bill and Hillary Clinton made my skin crawl.
Then, George W. Bush got elected and completely betrayed every conservative fiscal principal, condoned torture, started two wars, and generally let big business/corporations have free reign with no risks to themselves personally.
I've since deiced that given the choice, I'd much prefer the liberals' view than what the conservatives are pushing these days.
George W. Bush, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh (used to like Rush) have completely betrayed my trust and I will always have special dislike for Bush as he did something I NEVER thought anyone could do: he made me miss Bill Clinton./disgusted!
So, yeah, count me as a former conservative who couldn't stand the direction the Right is going and can't stand their hypocrisy any more.
The difference is that advertisers see it as their right to put in flashing/noisy "active content" ads that in some cases (I'm thinking about the recent use of DoubleClick to install driveby downloads) harmful crap on the page. I come to WikiPedia to look stuff up, not to be sold on something.
This doesn't even touch upon the potential for editorial shenanigans... great - I go to WikiPedia to see what kind of MP3 Tag management software might be available... (Free and commercial) and when I get to the articles, I'm seeing targeted ads for someone's commercial offering? yeah, ok great, I can ignore that, but one wonders if there wouldn't be potential conflict - what if the very page I was viewing on that software happened to mention the advertiser's product in a bad light? would they try and pressure that article to be changed? or what if they went and astroturfed the article to make it favor their product?
Even if the article was completely unbiased, I kind of feel that the potential for, or even the appearance of conflict of interest is too great.
Ads would reduce the credibility of WikiPedia and would potentially devalue it as a go-to source for helping improve the signal to noise ratio of today's Internet.
You're right there's no possible value in researching space... I guess maybe we should spend that 100 Billion on more bombs and bullets to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan./GAH I feel dirty even saying it sarcastically
There's a lot of direct benefit to research done on the space station, but as others have said, dealing with the engineering challenges of building a space station has led to other knock-on benefits and inventions. There's more going on here than just "will it blend" experiments.
Things like Teflon, GPS, satellites, lithium batteries, various new thermal materials for clothing, CAD/CAMM software, and a zillion other things came out of the space program - either directly or as tools/techniques/materials just created along the way to solve problems/address engineering needs.
Plus, think of the benefit to science that the various space telescopes have had.
I know I'm talking about stuff invented pre-ISS, but that's because it's only with a fair degree of hindsight that we even realize that some little thing someone did to solve a given space related problem turns out to be immensely valuable / commercially viable down the road.
In summary: It's sometimes the journey rather than the destination that's important.
You're correct - the goal of terrorism is to make us inconvenience OURSELVES at the airport - and on the roads - and in any public place. The goal of terrorism is to cause fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
We Americans have done more to destroy our own freedom in the name of security (fear) than a whole army of jihaddis could have done by direct action.
We've gone so far over the edge that a simple sno-globe in someone's carry-on made them evacuate an entire terminal at my local airport this morning.
The goal of terrorism is to use fear to accomplish political aims. Mission accomplished from what I can see.
The only way to keep the terrorists from winning is to refuse to allow fear to rule us.
If you feel the need to sneak your ad on my screen by popping it under, hiding it from me until after I've viewed your content, you're still doing it wrong.
I'm just as offended by pop-ups as I am by pop-unders and any other kind of pop.
As a side-note: NoScript and keeping Flash plugin off my FireFox is how I surf (I'll fire up another browser and copy/paste the URL if I REALLY need flash or other plugin content). I'll decide using "temporarily allow example.com" whether the site is worth it or not.
The fastest way to lose my interest / business is to annoy me with an ad.
It's this nice little social contract I have - you don't annoy me and I'll maybe look at your stuff. Truthfully, I'm no longer the 18-35 demographic so they're probably not interested in me anyway (at 40, they're looking at me as someone who is set in their ways and isn't likely to become a new customer - their loss since I've got more disposable income than the Starbuck's Barista they so covet.)
OOps got off track.
point is, I mostly agree with you, but I find pop-unders to display a sneaky/underhanded intent that makes a product just as much of a no-go as any other disreputable tactic.
Any competent guild can take any j.random jerk, carry them most of the way through ICC 10, and get them halfway decent gear. With my guild, it's far more important to make sure they're someone we actually WANT to spend time with (in terms of guild membership).
We want folks who show up on time and prepared. We want folks who either know the fights or take a little time to google for them. We want folks who don't bitch and whine about not getting this loot or that. We want folks who have half a clue about how to itemize for their class/role (or who at least care enough to ask the right questions).
Getting back to GearScore for a second:
I've seen very good players with top gear be such pricks I couldn't stand to be in the same raid with them.
I've seen very well geared folks who have no idea how not to stand in bad.
I've seen poorly geared folks use their class to its fullest and stand toe-to-toe with folks 1000 GS higher than them.
GearScore is useful for a quick "what's the POTENTIAL of this person to do their job well?"... its fine for PUGging soemone in, but I'd care a lot more about ability, experience, and personality if I were looking for a new regular member of my raids.
Oh, I so wish the "Democrat Super-majority Congress" was ignoring the minority, but see, the truth is that the Dems don't vote as a solid block like the Repubs do. If the Democrats in general and Obama in specific had take a "screw you guys, we've got the numbers and we're going do do what we want" then we wouldn't have ended up with such a massively messed up health care bill - we would have had the strong public option instead of this giveaway to the big Insurance companies.
What I've seen is Obama trying to play nice and include the Republicans in the process, and the Republicans returning the favor by filibustering everything, and generally taking the tack that anything Obama wants is bad.
It's as if they've got it in for him or something.
Basically my problem with Obama is that he's trying too hard to be nice - to find the center and compromise. What we need is for him to kick some ass. He's going to get blamed for it anyway, so why not at least get something worthwhile done?
I host an online store for a friend - she used to set up booths at conventions and such but due to health reasons, she is now completely online. (used to do mail order too as it was a niche product, but nobody does mail order anymore). She's having enough trouble just complying with PCI standards. She freaked out when she first saw the questionnaires and I had to spend quite a bit of time going through it and explaining what was meant and spent a lot of time tweaking server and application to meet the PCI standard (it asks for mostly common sense stuff, but is worded with some absolutes that mean that a technically secure compensating measure doesn't qualify you to answer YES/NO to a given question, but I digress)
The point is that she's a friend and I essentially put in quite a few billable hours pro-bono. However, PCI compliance was a walk in the park compared to what we'd have to do should she be required to deal with all those tax jurisdictions you mentioned. She would not be able to afford it with her sales and I'm at my limit (even with a friend) for how much time I'm willing/able to give away.
I custom wrote her shopping cart and checkout system, and before anyone says it, at the time I wrote it, there was NOTHING available on the market that met her needs and she could afford.
YES we could probably rebuild her site using something commercial or FOSS today, but she still can't afford what it would cost to do the conversion. In my opinion, such a complex mess of tax jurisdictions would force mom and pop type places offline or force them to pay big vendors for their carts/checkouts.
That might not seem like the end of the world, but it feels like yet another barrier to entry... over time, the more regulatory and statutory hurdles businesses and individuals have to negotiate in order to go online will destroy a lot of the freedom and openness that made the Internet so fertile a place for speech and innovation in the first place.
I say "sadly" because the vast majority of the public who shop online and aren't charged sales tax by the vendor will never give a second's thought to this. If/when local states can force the vendors to provide this information, the states will see it as a windfall of much needed funds.
If they're going to start getting such info, I hope the court does something like say that FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, any purchase (tax) information will be made available to the destination state, and the vendors are required to inform customers using a big notice at checkout that their local state will be notified of the purchase and that they're liable for local/state use tax.
That way, you get the "ok, fine, you got away with it up till now, but no further"
Folks will alter their online spending habits accordingly.
Frankly, I think the success of online sales should be a strong indication of just how stifling sales taxes are to the economy.
I think it's fundamentally wrong for an online vendor to be forced to keep track of 50 states' tax laws. It's also kind of "entrappy" to have folks feeling like online sales == tax free then coming down on them for back taxes and penalties like a ton of bricks. Yeah, I know, technically the end user has always been responsible under "use tax" laws in many states, but it's one of those things where nobody's ever heard of anyone ever having to "pay the piper".
Seriously, if they want to work out something going forward, great, but it needs to apply to ALL online merchants equally without imposing an undue burden, and in my opinion, it needs to NOT allow retroactive action.
As much as I hate sales tax, I'd rather see some kind of federal one for online transactions... make the value be the average of all state sales tax rates, then divide the money between all the states with some kind of accounting for population or gross online sales delivered to the given state. TO make that work, states would have to agree to allow any online sales even for businesses with brick and mortar presences in-state selling to customers in-state to use the national rate.
It would make for some interesting dynamics: New Hampshire with no state sales tax would get a windfall, and some folks in state would physically go to local merchants to get a tax-free purchase... they'd still get a boost from out of staters coming in to get around the system (if you go to Best Buy in Nashua and buy something expensive with cash, then go home to MA, they're not going to be able to nail you for use tax unless there's some kind of border search).
Meanwhile, states that have high sales taxes may feel that they're losing money to online sales, but if you consider that they'd be getting a crap-ton of income from online sales that they were previously missing out on, I bet it would work out just fine in the long run.
I know it's actually way more complicated than that, but my point is that there are ways to allow states to collect their taxes without suddenly surprising taxpayers with big bills and/or criminal charges for doing something that "everyone" was doing.
It would be like suddenly getting a speeding ticket from every time you ever drove over the limit in the past N years when no cops were watching. Yeah, technically you were braking the law and you technically deserve to be ticketed, but had you been aware that Big Brother was able to track this, you would have had the chance to change your driving habits.
And this idea blows up as soon as spammers/phishers/bot herders just start building fake "your computer has been infected" homepage redirects that take clueless users to their own fake "here's the tools you need to install" page.
There is no software in the world that will cure stupid.
I'm all for high-speed mobile Internet, but will they continue with their abysmally low usage caps?
WOOT! I can watch a full HD movie, streaming it almost in real-time... well, most of it anyway: capped out before the climax? Ahh well, I can finish it once my billing cycle rolls back around.
Yes, I know it's not quite that bad, but you get the point: at the same time all sorts of ISPs and mobile network operators are increasing speeds and falling all over themselves to tell you how quickly you can do stuff, they're capping out monthly transfer at cripplingly low numbers.
I love my 1920x1200 24" monitors. I've got a layout at home with three of them side by side on a corner desk. Recently, one died and I noticed it was not possible to find 1920x1200 or any 16:10 ratio monitor at any local retailers. I had to look around a bit, and I had to spend a bit more for it than back in the day when 16:10 was the norm, but I was able to get a replacement right away.
One of the things that sold me on my MacBook Pro was the 1920x1200 screen.
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Hire admins who know their stuff and make sure you have at least two of them with the root password. Make sure they've got some kind of change control in place, and make sure you have them document what they're doing.
I've been the sole sysadmin before, and I always felt worried that my legacy, should I be fired or quit or hit by a bus, would be "She didn't do a great job because everything fell apart after she left/was fired/was bussassinated". So, I always tried to document things and made sure the boss had the "keys to the kingdom" (document with root pw and locations of my documentation to give to my successor).
Ouch. That was rather mean-spirited of you.
I saw the originals in the cinema when they came out, so yea, I'm an old phart.
As for the reeking; well, I was kind of trying to be funny with the Han Shot First part (It's an awesome meme). However, I do take issue with the way Lucas has gone back and revised the existing movies to add more zoomy spaceshippy things and bigger 'splosions everywhere. I SERIOUSLY objected to the replacing of guns with walkie-talkies in E.T. If anyone reeks of something, it's Lucas who reeks of revisionism.
I also strongly object to the trend of adding "Happy Meal aliens" (creatures like Ewocs and JarJar). This is going to be very "back in my day", but back in my day, Chewbacca and R2 were very much loved by the young fans (myself included) even though they were actual characters who contributed to the story in a meaningful way and not just there to pander to the "cutsie kid toys" marketing frenzy.
Hey, in the end, they're Lucas' property and he can do what he wants, but I am also free to like/dislike what he's doing and comment on it. Most certainly, I'm free to do my best to not give another dime to Lucas if I can possibly manage it.
You're free to post ad-hominem attacks if you really feel that will make Slashdot a better place.
Sadly true, though I think the last thing I saw in the cinema was Kick Ass, and before that? um ... a few years whatever it was, I can't remember.
Proudly, I can say I've never seen Transformers either. Ditto for Indianna Jones, and the jumping shark or whatever the 4th one was called.
Don't even have a netflix account or a Blu-Ray player; I buy my movies on DVD - usually by the time they've come out, I know whether they're worth spending the money on.
Han Shot First!
Also, not giving another dime to Lucas ... EVAR ... if I can possibly avoid it.
The Ewocs were rubbish, but JarJar was unforgivable.
It's not illegal, but there's a legal term called "Laches" which essentially means that if you use such "delayed rights assertion to maximize 'damages'" approach, you risk the court reducing or eliminating the damage awards... /NOT a lawyer
I think the point a lot of us are trying to make is that Google got where they are today by those means, but there's been a shift over the last couple years toward more short-term thinking. We all came to Google because they did what you said - they did search better than others.
The problem is that while not intentionally being evil (in my opinion) Google makes huge money from "Made for AdSense" type SEO garbage sites. If they took all those guys out, they'd make less. At the same time, they need to be careful they don't "AltaVista" themselves out of relevance.
Maybe not by intent, but by action/inaction, Google has betrayed those initial principles in favor of "what works and what makes money".
This whole article and discussion led me to doing so research on Google itself about blacklist features. For a period of time, if you used Google while logged in, you'd get this option to kind of down-rank search results/domains that popped up in your searches. Over time, the idea is that you'd get more relevant results and Google would learn about what folks found to be useful and not. Then, at some point about a year ago, they removed the ability to blacklist/demote/downlink in favor of "starring" good results.
I found lots of discussions on the Google support forums about folks asking for BlackList features, and when Google folks replied, they suggested using the - operator... even when folks time and time again said that they knew how to use the - operator but wanted a PERMANENT PERSONAL BLACK LIST, Google folks kind of ignored the issue or deliberately misunderstood, suggesting workarounds.
(January 2009 Google support thread)
I'm thinking someone's written a FireFox addon that would provide google searches, but automatically append " -scummydomain.com -crappydomain.com ... etx) to every search before sending. If they haven't I need to teach myself how to write one so I can make it.
Actually, if they did something that devalued the USD, it would hurt them badly. If the USD goes down, US goods would be cheaper to the rest of the world, so our exports would increase, and it would decrease the buying power of the dollar for imported goods.
If anything, China wants to see the USD stronger... the more the dollar's worth, the cheaper its goods and services are to the US (and world) market by comparison.
I used to consider myself Fiscally Conservative, but Socially Libertarian... think Gov. Bill Weld in Massachusetts.
Bill and Hillary Clinton made my skin crawl.
Then, George W. Bush got elected and completely betrayed every conservative fiscal principal, condoned torture, started two wars, and generally let big business/corporations have free reign with no risks to themselves personally.
I've since deiced that given the choice, I'd much prefer the liberals' view than what the conservatives are pushing these days.
George W. Bush, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh (used to like Rush) have completely betrayed my trust and I will always have special dislike for Bush as he did something I NEVER thought anyone could do: he made me miss Bill Clinton. /disgusted!
So, yeah, count me as a former conservative who couldn't stand the direction the Right is going and can't stand their hypocrisy any more.
The difference is that advertisers see it as their right to put in flashing/noisy "active content" ads that in some cases (I'm thinking about the recent use of DoubleClick to install driveby downloads) harmful crap on the page. I come to WikiPedia to look stuff up, not to be sold on something.
This doesn't even touch upon the potential for editorial shenanigans... great - I go to WikiPedia to see what kind of MP3 Tag management software might be available... (Free and commercial) and when I get to the articles, I'm seeing targeted ads for someone's commercial offering? yeah, ok great, I can ignore that, but one wonders if there wouldn't be potential conflict - what if the very page I was viewing on that software happened to mention the advertiser's product in a bad light? would they try and pressure that article to be changed? or what if they went and astroturfed the article to make it favor their product?
Even if the article was completely unbiased, I kind of feel that the potential for, or even the appearance of conflict of interest is too great.
Ads would reduce the credibility of WikiPedia and would potentially devalue it as a go-to source for helping improve the signal to noise ratio of today's Internet.
The first rule of Anonymous club is "you don't talk about Anonymous club".
The second rule of Anonymous club is that you don't talk... oops sorry the second rule of Anonymous club is "No Smoking"
The thir....^%&$*NO CARRIER
Actually, I was thinking about "Copernick's Rebellion" http://www.amazon.com/Copernicks-Rebellion-Leo-Frankowski/dp/0345340337
Good book... I might just put that on the "re-read this" pile.
All I know is that dogs have owners, but cats have staff.
And if you write a user interface with it, that would be a GooUI
My first thought is that this completely explains and legitimizes Col. Wilma Deering's wardrobe...
then I realized this also went for Cmdr. Rogers' and I threw up in my mouth a little.
You're right there's no possible value in researching space... I guess maybe we should spend that 100 Billion on more bombs and bullets to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan. /GAH I feel dirty even saying it sarcastically
There's a lot of direct benefit to research done on the space station, but as others have said, dealing with the engineering challenges of building a space station has led to other knock-on benefits and inventions. There's more going on here than just "will it blend" experiments.
Things like Teflon, GPS, satellites, lithium batteries, various new thermal materials for clothing, CAD/CAMM software, and a zillion other things came out of the space program - either directly or as tools/techniques/materials just created along the way to solve problems/address engineering needs.
Plus, think of the benefit to science that the various space telescopes have had.
I know I'm talking about stuff invented pre-ISS, but that's because it's only with a fair degree of hindsight that we even realize that some little thing someone did to solve a given space related problem turns out to be immensely valuable / commercially viable down the road.
In summary: It's sometimes the journey rather than the destination that's important.
You're correct - the goal of terrorism is to make us inconvenience OURSELVES at the airport - and on the roads - and in any public place. The goal of terrorism is to cause fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
We Americans have done more to destroy our own freedom in the name of security (fear) than a whole army of jihaddis could have done by direct action.
We've gone so far over the edge that a simple sno-globe in someone's carry-on made them evacuate an entire terminal at my local airport this morning.
The goal of terrorism is to use fear to accomplish political aims. Mission accomplished from what I can see.
The only way to keep the terrorists from winning is to refuse to allow fear to rule us.
If you feel the need to sneak your ad on my screen by popping it under, hiding it from me until after I've viewed your content, you're still doing it wrong.
I'm just as offended by pop-ups as I am by pop-unders and any other kind of pop.
As a side-note: NoScript and keeping Flash plugin off my FireFox is how I surf (I'll fire up another browser and copy/paste the URL if I REALLY need flash or other plugin content). I'll decide using "temporarily allow example.com" whether the site is worth it or not.
The fastest way to lose my interest / business is to annoy me with an ad.
It's this nice little social contract I have - you don't annoy me and I'll maybe look at your stuff. Truthfully, I'm no longer the 18-35 demographic so they're probably not interested in me anyway (at 40, they're looking at me as someone who is set in their ways and isn't likely to become a new customer - their loss since I've got more disposable income than the Starbuck's Barista they so covet.)
OOps got off track.
point is, I mostly agree with you, but I find pop-unders to display a sneaky/underhanded intent that makes a product just as much of a no-go as any other disreputable tactic.
Any competent guild can take any j.random jerk, carry them most of the way through ICC 10, and get them halfway decent gear. With my guild, it's far more important to make sure they're someone we actually WANT to spend time with (in terms of guild membership).
We want folks who show up on time and prepared. We want folks who either know the fights or take a little time to google for them. We want folks who don't bitch and whine about not getting this loot or that. We want folks who have half a clue about how to itemize for their class/role (or who at least care enough to ask the right questions).
Getting back to GearScore for a second:
I've seen very good players with top gear be such pricks I couldn't stand to be in the same raid with them.
I've seen very well geared folks who have no idea how not to stand in bad.
I've seen poorly geared folks use their class to its fullest and stand toe-to-toe with folks 1000 GS higher than them.
GearScore is useful for a quick "what's the POTENTIAL of this person to do their job well?" ... its fine for PUGging soemone in, but I'd care a lot more about ability, experience, and personality if I were looking for a new regular member of my raids.
Oh, I so wish the "Democrat Super-majority Congress" was ignoring the minority, but see, the truth is that the Dems don't vote as a solid block like the Repubs do. If the Democrats in general and Obama in specific had take a "screw you guys, we've got the numbers and we're going do do what we want" then we wouldn't have ended up with such a massively messed up health care bill - we would have had the strong public option instead of this giveaway to the big Insurance companies.
What I've seen is Obama trying to play nice and include the Republicans in the process, and the Republicans returning the favor by filibustering everything, and generally taking the tack that anything Obama wants is bad.
It's as if they've got it in for him or something.
Basically my problem with Obama is that he's trying too hard to be nice - to find the center and compromise. What we need is for him to kick some ass. He's going to get blamed for it anyway, so why not at least get something worthwhile done?
Absolutely.
I host an online store for a friend - she used to set up booths at conventions and such but due to health reasons, she is now completely online. (used to do mail order too as it was a niche product, but nobody does mail order anymore). She's having enough trouble just complying with PCI standards. She freaked out when she first saw the questionnaires and I had to spend quite a bit of time going through it and explaining what was meant and spent a lot of time tweaking server and application to meet the PCI standard (it asks for mostly common sense stuff, but is worded with some absolutes that mean that a technically secure compensating measure doesn't qualify you to answer YES/NO to a given question, but I digress)
The point is that she's a friend and I essentially put in quite a few billable hours pro-bono. However, PCI compliance was a walk in the park compared to what we'd have to do should she be required to deal with all those tax jurisdictions you mentioned. She would not be able to afford it with her sales and I'm at my limit (even with a friend) for how much time I'm willing/able to give away.
I custom wrote her shopping cart and checkout system, and before anyone says it, at the time I wrote it, there was NOTHING available on the market that met her needs and she could afford.
YES we could probably rebuild her site using something commercial or FOSS today, but she still can't afford what it would cost to do the conversion. In my opinion, such a complex mess of tax jurisdictions would force mom and pop type places offline or force them to pay big vendors for their carts/checkouts.
That might not seem like the end of the world, but it feels like yet another barrier to entry... over time, the more regulatory and statutory hurdles businesses and individuals have to negotiate in order to go online will destroy a lot of the freedom and openness that made the Internet so fertile a place for speech and innovation in the first place.
Sadly, you're 100% correct.
I say "sadly" because the vast majority of the public who shop online and aren't charged sales tax by the vendor will never give a second's thought to this. If/when local states can force the vendors to provide this information, the states will see it as a windfall of much needed funds.
If they're going to start getting such info, I hope the court does something like say that FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, any purchase (tax) information will be made available to the destination state, and the vendors are required to inform customers using a big notice at checkout that their local state will be notified of the purchase and that they're liable for local/state use tax.
That way, you get the "ok, fine, you got away with it up till now, but no further"
Folks will alter their online spending habits accordingly.
Frankly, I think the success of online sales should be a strong indication of just how stifling sales taxes are to the economy.
I think it's fundamentally wrong for an online vendor to be forced to keep track of 50 states' tax laws. It's also kind of "entrappy" to have folks feeling like online sales == tax free then coming down on them for back taxes and penalties like a ton of bricks. Yeah, I know, technically the end user has always been responsible under "use tax" laws in many states, but it's one of those things where nobody's ever heard of anyone ever having to "pay the piper".
Seriously, if they want to work out something going forward, great, but it needs to apply to ALL online merchants equally without imposing an undue burden, and in my opinion, it needs to NOT allow retroactive action.
As much as I hate sales tax, I'd rather see some kind of federal one for online transactions... make the value be the average of all state sales tax rates, then divide the money between all the states with some kind of accounting for population or gross online sales delivered to the given state. TO make that work, states would have to agree to allow any online sales even for businesses with brick and mortar presences in-state selling to customers in-state to use the national rate.
It would make for some interesting dynamics: New Hampshire with no state sales tax would get a windfall, and some folks in state would physically go to local merchants to get a tax-free purchase... they'd still get a boost from out of staters coming in to get around the system (if you go to Best Buy in Nashua and buy something expensive with cash, then go home to MA, they're not going to be able to nail you for use tax unless there's some kind of border search).
Meanwhile, states that have high sales taxes may feel that they're losing money to online sales, but if you consider that they'd be getting a crap-ton of income from online sales that they were previously missing out on, I bet it would work out just fine in the long run.
I know it's actually way more complicated than that, but my point is that there are ways to allow states to collect their taxes without suddenly surprising taxpayers with big bills and/or criminal charges for doing something that "everyone" was doing.
It would be like suddenly getting a speeding ticket from every time you ever drove over the limit in the past N years when no cops were watching. Yeah, technically you were braking the law and you technically deserve to be ticketed, but had you been aware that Big Brother was able to track this, you would have had the chance to change your driving habits.
And this idea blows up as soon as spammers/phishers/bot herders just start building fake "your computer has been infected" homepage redirects that take clueless users to their own fake "here's the tools you need to install" page.
There is no software in the world that will cure stupid.
I'm all for high-speed mobile Internet, but will they continue with their abysmally low usage caps?
WOOT! I can watch a full HD movie, streaming it almost in real-time... well, most of it anyway: capped out before the climax? Ahh well, I can finish it once my billing cycle rolls back around.
Yes, I know it's not quite that bad, but you get the point: at the same time all sorts of ISPs and mobile network operators are increasing speeds and falling all over themselves to tell you how quickly you can do stuff, they're capping out monthly transfer at cripplingly low numbers.
I love my 1920x1200 24" monitors. I've got a layout at home with three of them side by side on a corner desk. Recently, one died and I noticed it was not possible to find 1920x1200 or any 16:10 ratio monitor at any local retailers. I had to look around a bit, and I had to spend a bit more for it than back in the day when 16:10 was the norm, but I was able to get a replacement right away.
One of the things that sold me on my MacBook Pro was the 1920x1200 screen.
LOL /came here to make some random Xenu comment //leaving satisfied