All this "good enough" bullshit is harshing my mellow. Really, what's the point in even getting a high end home theater, if Netflix quality, while getting better over the years, still doesn't come close for a lot of movies? What about uncompressed audio? You gonna deliver that too? Hell, even the cable service itself, has crammed more channels down the pipe, because they're cheap.
I'm not gonna deliver anything, I'm not a streaming service, I'm a consumer.
But I can tell you that even when I own a movie on Blu-ray, I'm more likely to pull it up on Netflix than get up and find the movie in my disk collection and load it into the blu-ray player. And it looks and sounds just fine to me.
As for what the point is in getting a high-end home theater, well, I'm just not sure - I don't see the value in it, I have a decent TV, and since I don't want to wire surround speakers in the living room (which is not a great acoustical environment in the first place), I just have a 2.1 soundbar for sound. I spent less than $1000 for the whole system including TV + Bluray + soundbar and I'm quite satisfied with it.
Maybe you color calibrated your TV and have carefully placed 5.1 speakers in your acoustically perfect room, but I think you'll find that content producers will end up charging you more since they'll decide that if you can spend $5000 on a home theater system, you can spend $50 for the latest movie release instead of watching a "good enough" steaming version for $3.99.
You might as well get what money you can while you can. Owning a book store does not sound like a thing that is going to last for long.
Maybe if you ask nicely, you can get Amazon to put some of their delivery lockers in your store.
But if these customers are walking into your bookstore to buy books. Why would you essentially tell those people not to shop there anymore?
Because it's your last chance to show the customers why they should continue buying from you, even if they buy some content online. If you don't add any value, they are going to stop buying from you whether you sell them a Kindle or not, but at least if they buy it from you, you have the chance to show them how you add value.
At peak, Blockbuster alone had 9,000 video rental stores. The last day to rent a video from Blockbuster is tomorrow. All the stores are closing. When will the last DVD/Blu-Ray disk be made?
Digital download/streaming videos still doesn't match the video/audio quality of a blu-ray, and wont for a long, long time (in the United States at least) because Internet service wont be fast enough/offer high enough caps to make that kind of product practical for long, long time.
A book is a static image. If you don't have a fetish over paper and binding the experience can be reproduced much more easily.
Likewise, if you don't have a fetish for the utmost in picture quality,existing hidef video streaming is already "good enough" for the majority of people.
And I think that will happen when 4k TV takes off. I don’t hear anybody talking about shipping physical media for that format.
No way will this work. Bandwidth caps as they are today will prevent people from downloading 4k video. Here's a reference to a 4k documentary that is 160GB. Does that sound like something that's going to fly with the ISPs we currently have?
4K has only 4X more pixels than 1080p. Netflix says that currently, you need a 5mbit connection for Hidef streaming, or 7mbit for super hidef. So that would put 4K streaming at around 20 - 28mbit... maybe less if better graphics hardware means they can use better compression algorithms. Many people are already able to get that speed from a Cable modem or U-verse style DSL.
Bandwidth caps are a business limitation, not a physical restriction. I'm sure there are bottlenecks that providers will have to overcome, but that's the nature of the business.
The last disc won't be for a long, long time. Too many people like to collect them. It'll be years before they are totally superseded by digital downloads.
Plus, the movie studios will want to wring every last cent out of DVD sales before they move to a pure digital distribution model.
Movie streaming catalogs (even pay per view like Amazon) have a long way to go before they will be as complete as DVD catalogs.
You might as well get what money you can while you can. Owning a book store does not sound like a thing that is going to last for long.
Exactly -- if the customer is in the store and the store can't show that they provide any value to that customer, it sounds like the stores have already lost.
It's not like customers aren't going to buy a Kindle just because they can't find it in their local bookstore.
Highly unlikely that Snowden solicited the accounts. If there's anything that's "theoretically against policy but happens every day", it's a task/project getting late, and some higher-up manager telling subordinates "Just give Department X whatever they need to get this done quickly".
Much more likely than Snowden soliciting the passwords (which would obviously tend to look pretty suspicious well before 20 people), is people systematically pushed passwords on him over time with the mandate "Now get it done now" on various tasks..
20+ years in the industry, and a smell-test of the official story, tells me this is what happened, and this is just more scapegoating of Snowden and CYA on the part of the NSA.
I can believe it - someone hands a computer over to him or reports an application problem, Snowden says "Weird, I can't reproduce it under my user, give me your password so I can try it with yours, you can reset your password after I'm done".
Despite warnings not to hand over passwords to *anyone*, our helpdesk still gets laptops for repair with a yellow sticky that says "Here's my password: FooBar123".
I know right. It's not like a System admin can change or reset a password to gain access to the same document.
If he can change a colleagues password without the colleague knowing and without it being flagged in some audit log that arises suspicion, then the NSA has no password security at all.
Fuck that. I know what enterprise software looks like. I will stick to driving my own car.
I think it would look more like aviation software. I don't know how that differs from typical enterprise software, but plane crashes are rarely blamed on flight-control software bugs. (I know they do happen, but are pretty rare in comparison to the number of annual flight hours)
it must be nice to be able to plan for watching a movie in advance...
It's not so much planning as adding movies to the queue ahead of time - I have so many movies in my Netflix queue that it would take me 2 years to get through the queue at my normal movie watching rate.
If i have a serious movie watching emergency and need to watch something right *now*, I have about 200 DVDs of my own to fall back on (used disks cost around $5 or $6 at Amazon) and if I can't find anything there, then I can fall back on Netflix streaming, or even pay $3 to Amazon to watch a movie on demand.
It's great that you and the other AC can describe programming best practices. Sounds like you've singlehanded solved the problem of bad programming. Now if you can just go back and fix up the millions of vulnerable sites, the world will be a better place.
Birds have survived far more environmental catastrophes in their tens, or hundreds, of millions of years on Earth. I bet they'll be around after we're long extinct!
We have lawyers, and copyright, and copyright lawyers
Your move, birds
I've heard that one of the paint manufacturers brought a suit against Robin birds because the Robins were using "robin-egg blue" for their eggs without paying the appropriate licensing fees. The birds tried to claim prior art, but without any written history, they were unable to prove it, and the paint company clearly filed first. I haven't heard if the Robins are going to pay the fees or evolve a different color of egg.
In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe".
That's the funny thing about SQL injection attacks - it can turn a SELECT into a DELETE or UPDATE. So you may have *meant* your GET request to be a simple retrieval, but a successful attack could make it do so much more.
Which is a great segue to the obligatory xkcd comic!
The pressures that they use to fracture rock are in the THOUSANDS of pounds, the pressures they're injecting CO2 at are in the HUNDREDS.
The CO2 isn't fracturing the rock.
Depends on how the rocks are sited and where the CO2 is injected. A pressure of "hundreds of pounds" doesn't guarantee that no rock crushing forces are generated. Bad luck could result in rocks being configured in such a way that when you injected the CO2, it pushed them together in such a way that unexpected movement occured.
If you inject 100psi of well contained CO2 under a large 50ft by 50ft slab of rock it's going to generate about 36 million pounds force on that slab. In comparison, a 50ft cube of granite weighs around 21 million pounds
Because a mirror used in such a way is effectively a lens, even if it isn't one technically. Is the headline correct? No, but it's correct enough that you've got to be in a pedantic mood to bother complaining about it.
It's hardly pedantic to point out that a mirror is not a lens. Would you complain to your contractor if he accidentally installed a bathroom lens instead of a bathroom mirror? Or just let it slide since they are pretty much the same thing and only a pedant would complain?
"But it's a whopper! Just consider the hundreds-of-millions of dollars in sales Amazon makes in New Jersey each year." Wouldn't that be NJ making it? How do you know they're aren't dutifully recording it all (Amazon) and handing it over to NJ?
In most (all?) states where sales tax is collected, any excess sales tax collected must be refunded to the customer or turned over to the state -- the company doesn't get to keep it.
> Of course, you're still required to pay the tax even if the retailer doesn't collect it.
Which is unconstitutional because it is a violation of the interstate commerce clause.
How is that unconstitutional? Are you saying that a state has no right to collect a tax from its citizens?
As far as I know, every state that collects a sales-tax for in-state purchases requires use-tax to be paid on out of state purchases, even you drive across the border to purchase items that you'll use in your home state (though in that case, you can typically take a credit for sales tax paid in that state).
Use-tax isn't new, California has had it on the books since the 1930's. So I think that it were truly unconstitutional, someone would have had it tested by the courts long before now.
That is bs! The reason why California wakes up with New York is because those who have to do. Those that don't, don't wake up. For example, what are the store hours or a best buy in California and in New York? http://stores.bestbuy.com/428/ and http://stores.bestbuy.com/187/. See that? Same hours! So in other words the best buy in California does not give a rats arse on when stores open in New York. They open according to the local timezone. Switch that into two timezones and things become confusing because those on either end of the zone will not appreciate the lack of sun.
But, as the summary said:
"I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. "
And indeed, this best buy in Austin opens an hour earlier than your Albany, NY store.
You may refute that people in the Central time zone do things an hour earlier (and comparing 2 stores is hardly proof), but arguing that California and NY use different times is not the way to do that since under a 2 time zone system, NY and California would continue to be on different time zones.
The idea of two time zones is absolutely insane. I lived in Vienna while my wife lived in Zurich and there was an hour difference in sunrise and sunset. It was not nice to have to live and work in Vienna as it meant very early to rise and early to bed. I like the notion of time zones, and like the notion of switching because it really does make a difference. If it were up to me I would add a few more time zones because some cities at either side of a zone have really odd sunrise and sunset.
Some would say that the idea of DST is absolutely insane, yet we still have it. Personally, I'd just keep the timezones and shift the clocks by 30 minutes once and end DST.
Your stopping distance at 100mph is about 4 times greater than at 50mph.
Physics, you fail it
It has been a while since I've been in a Physical class, but from what I remember, the formula for Kinetic Energy is: Ek =.5 * m * v^2. So doubling the speed increases the kinetic energy by 4 times. Plugging in 50mph and 100mph:
Ek1=(0.5) * m * (50)^2 = m * 1250
Ek1 = (0.5) * m * (100)^2 = m * 5000
m is constant
Ek2 = 4 * Ek1
Is there a car whose brakes work exponentially better at higher speeds?
If you don't believe me, here's a braking calculator:
And why is a regressive tax bad? People love to complain about regressive taxes, but the argument why they're bad always falls back to "because its bad!". I find that opponents of regressive taxes always prefer progressive taxes, as if that's somehow better. Why?
Because it puts an excessive burden on the poor, who are least able to afford it. The assumption is that the rich got rich from the work of the poor. Which is probably not so true today as it was when we had a more industrial economy.
Now the rich get rich in increasingly complex financial schemes to extract more and more money from the underprivileged. I don't think it's sustainable in the long term - the 1% has an enormous portion of the wealth in this country, and the class of poor is expanding as the middle class contracts. As more and more of the poor are unable to support themselves, someone's got to pay for them, and the rich carefully protect their riches to make sure it's not them. So who is left to pay taxes when the poor are too poor to pay taxes, the middle class is virtually non-existent, and the wealthy have made sure that they pay very little?
The problem in the USA isn't that there are too many poor people, it's that there are too few wealthy people - locking up the wealth in a tiny class of super rich does not make for a healthy economy.
Maybe if the retailer did collect it I wouldn't buy it at all because I couldn't afford it?
That's pretty much the argument from brick and motar retailers for forcing online retailers to collect sales tax. Otherwise, if you can't afford it at Best Buy, you're more likely to buy from B&H because it's x% cheaper there without the sales tax. And for a big dollar item (the kind that's expensive for retailers to keep in stock because it is so expensive), the savings often far exceeds to cost of shipping.
You should call your representatives and demand a 100% sales tax, because it's probably going to cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to punish me for not giving the government a couple of hundred dollars that I earned.
As a private citizen (as opposed to a business) there's probably a very slim chance of non-payment of sales/use tax being discovered, even during an audit, Unless you're making any large deductions of items that you should have paid tax on. I have significant self-employment income and deduct everything legally possible, which includes significant out of state purchases, so I do track and pay my use-tax accordingly. The savings from the business deduction is worth more than the savings from not paying the use tax.
California has a simple use-tax table that seems would get you off the hook for use tax liability by paying the tax in the table for all purchases less than $1000. For larger purchases you should still itemize.
Doesn't change the fact that sales tax is regressive. Once again the 1% fucks the everyman. When's it gonna be our time to violently ass rape Mr. Monopoly?
Well, it's not entirely regressive. A low income person will spend a higher portion of his income on food and housing than a higher income person -- things that are generally exempt from state tax. The higher income person will be eating out more, buying more "toys", buying an expensive car, etc and generally making more purchases that are not exempt from tax.
Slashdot Mirror
All this "good enough" bullshit is harshing my mellow. Really, what's the point in even getting a high end home theater, if Netflix quality, while getting better over the years, still doesn't come close for a lot of movies? What about uncompressed audio? You gonna deliver that too? Hell, even the cable service itself, has crammed more channels down the pipe, because they're cheap.
I'm not gonna deliver anything, I'm not a streaming service, I'm a consumer.
But I can tell you that even when I own a movie on Blu-ray, I'm more likely to pull it up on Netflix than get up and find the movie in my disk collection and load it into the blu-ray player. And it looks and sounds just fine to me.
As for what the point is in getting a high-end home theater, well, I'm just not sure - I don't see the value in it, I have a decent TV, and since I don't want to wire surround speakers in the living room (which is not a great acoustical environment in the first place), I just have a 2.1 soundbar for sound. I spent less than $1000 for the whole system including TV + Bluray + soundbar and I'm quite satisfied with it.
Maybe you color calibrated your TV and have carefully placed 5.1 speakers in your acoustically perfect room, but I think you'll find that content producers will end up charging you more since they'll decide that if you can spend $5000 on a home theater system, you can spend $50 for the latest movie release instead of watching a "good enough" steaming version for $3.99.
You might as well get what money you can while you can. Owning a book store does not sound like a thing that is going to last for long.
Maybe if you ask nicely, you can get Amazon to put some of their delivery lockers in your store.
But if these customers are walking into your bookstore to buy books. Why would you essentially tell those people not to shop there anymore?
Because it's your last chance to show the customers why they should continue buying from you, even if they buy some content online. If you don't add any value, they are going to stop buying from you whether you sell them a Kindle or not, but at least if they buy it from you, you have the chance to show them how you add value.
At peak, Blockbuster alone had 9,000 video rental stores.
The last day to rent a video from Blockbuster is tomorrow. All the stores are closing. When will the last DVD/Blu-Ray disk be made?
Digital download/streaming videos still doesn't match the video/audio quality of a blu-ray, and wont for a long, long time (in the United States at least) because Internet service wont be fast enough/offer high enough caps to make that kind of product practical for long, long time.
A book is a static image. If you don't have a fetish over paper and binding the experience can be reproduced much more easily.
Likewise, if you don't have a fetish for the utmost in picture quality,existing hidef video streaming is already "good enough" for the majority of people.
And I think that will happen when 4k TV takes off. I don’t hear anybody talking about shipping physical media for that format.
No way will this work. Bandwidth caps as they are today will prevent people from downloading 4k video. Here's a reference to a 4k documentary that is 160GB. Does that sound like something that's going to fly with the ISPs we currently have?
4K has only 4X more pixels than 1080p. Netflix says that currently, you need a 5mbit connection for Hidef streaming, or 7mbit for super hidef. So that would put 4K streaming at around 20 - 28mbit... maybe less if better graphics hardware means they can use better compression algorithms. Many people are already able to get that speed from a Cable modem or U-verse style DSL.
Bandwidth caps are a business limitation, not a physical restriction. I'm sure there are bottlenecks that providers will have to overcome, but that's the nature of the business.
The last disc won't be for a long, long time. Too many people like to collect them. It'll be years before they are totally superseded by digital downloads.
Plus, the movie studios will want to wring every last cent out of DVD sales before they move to a pure digital distribution model.
Movie streaming catalogs (even pay per view like Amazon) have a long way to go before they will be as complete as DVD catalogs.
You might as well get what money you can while you can. Owning a book store does not sound like a thing that is going to last for long.
Exactly -- if the customer is in the store and the store can't show that they provide any value to that customer, it sounds like the stores have already lost.
It's not like customers aren't going to buy a Kindle just because they can't find it in their local bookstore.
Highly unlikely that Snowden solicited the accounts. If there's anything that's "theoretically against policy but happens every day", it's a task/project getting late, and some higher-up manager telling subordinates "Just give Department X whatever they need to get this done quickly".
Much more likely than Snowden soliciting the passwords (which would obviously tend to look pretty suspicious well before 20 people), is people systematically pushed passwords on him over time with the mandate "Now get it done now" on various tasks..
20+ years in the industry, and a smell-test of the official story, tells me this is what happened, and this is just more scapegoating of Snowden and CYA on the part of the NSA.
I can believe it - someone hands a computer over to him or reports an application problem, Snowden says "Weird, I can't reproduce it under my user, give me your password so I can try it with yours, you can reset your password after I'm done".
Despite warnings not to hand over passwords to *anyone*, our helpdesk still gets laptops for repair with a yellow sticky that says "Here's my password: FooBar123".
I know right. It's not like a System admin can change or reset a password to gain access to the same document.
If he can change a colleagues password without the colleague knowing and without it being flagged in some audit log that arises suspicion, then the NSA has no password security at all.
GIMP can't do CMYK, so WHO CARES??
The majority of people that do graphics for web, not print?
Fuck that. I know what enterprise software looks like. I will stick to driving my own car.
I think it would look more like aviation software. I don't know how that differs from typical enterprise software, but plane crashes are rarely blamed on flight-control software bugs. (I know they do happen, but are pretty rare in comparison to the number of annual flight hours)
it must be nice to be able to plan for watching a movie in advance...
It's not so much planning as adding movies to the queue ahead of time - I have so many movies in my Netflix queue that it would take me 2 years to get through the queue at my normal movie watching rate.
If i have a serious movie watching emergency and need to watch something right *now*, I have about 200 DVDs of my own to fall back on (used disks cost around $5 or $6 at Amazon) and if I can't find anything there, then I can fall back on Netflix streaming, or even pay $3 to Amazon to watch a movie on demand.
It's great that you and the other AC can describe programming best practices. Sounds like you've singlehanded solved the problem of bad programming. Now if you can just go back and fix up the millions of vulnerable sites, the world will be a better place.
Thank you.
Birds have survived far more environmental catastrophes in their tens, or hundreds, of millions of years on Earth. I bet they'll be around after we're long extinct!
We have lawyers, and copyright, and copyright lawyers
Your move, birds
I've heard that one of the paint manufacturers brought a suit against Robin birds because the Robins were using "robin-egg blue" for their eggs without paying the appropriate licensing fees. The birds tried to claim prior art, but without any written history, they were unable to prove it, and the paint company clearly filed first. I haven't heard if the Robins are going to pay the fees or evolve a different color of egg.
In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe".
That's the funny thing about SQL injection attacks - it can turn a SELECT into a DELETE or UPDATE. So you may have *meant* your GET request to be a simple retrieval, but a successful attack could make it do so much more.
Which is a great segue to the obligatory xkcd comic!
http://xkcd.com/327/
The pressures that they use to fracture rock are in the THOUSANDS of pounds, the pressures they're injecting CO2 at are in the HUNDREDS.
The CO2 isn't fracturing the rock.
Depends on how the rocks are sited and where the CO2 is injected. A pressure of "hundreds of pounds" doesn't guarantee that no rock crushing forces are generated. Bad luck could result in rocks being configured in such a way that when you injected the CO2, it pushed them together in such a way that unexpected movement occured.
If you inject 100psi of well contained CO2 under a large 50ft by 50ft slab of rock it's going to generate about 36 million pounds force on that slab. In comparison, a 50ft cube of granite weighs around 21 million pounds
Because a mirror used in such a way is effectively a lens, even if it isn't one technically. Is the headline correct? No, but it's correct enough that you've got to be in a pedantic mood to bother complaining about it.
It's hardly pedantic to point out that a mirror is not a lens. Would you complain to your contractor if he accidentally installed a bathroom lens instead of a bathroom mirror? Or just let it slide since they are pretty much the same thing and only a pedant would complain?
"But it's a whopper! Just consider the hundreds-of-millions of dollars in sales Amazon makes in New Jersey each year."
Wouldn't that be NJ making it?
How do you know they're aren't dutifully recording it all (Amazon) and handing it over to NJ?
In most (all?) states where sales tax is collected, any excess sales tax collected must be refunded to the customer or turned over to the state -- the company doesn't get to keep it.
> Of course, you're still required to pay the tax even if the retailer doesn't collect it.
Which is unconstitutional because it is a violation of the interstate commerce clause.
How is that unconstitutional? Are you saying that a state has no right to collect a tax from its citizens?
As far as I know, every state that collects a sales-tax for in-state purchases requires use-tax to be paid on out of state purchases, even you drive across the border to purchase items that you'll use in your home state (though in that case, you can typically take a credit for sales tax paid in that state).
Use-tax isn't new, California has had it on the books since the 1930's. So I think that it were truly unconstitutional, someone would have had it tested by the courts long before now.
That is bs! The reason why California wakes up with New York is because those who have to do. Those that don't, don't wake up. For example, what are the store hours or a best buy in California and in New York? http://stores.bestbuy.com/428/ and http://stores.bestbuy.com/187/. See that? Same hours! So in other words the best buy in California does not give a rats arse on when stores open in New York. They open according to the local timezone. Switch that into two timezones and things become confusing because those on either end of the zone will not appreciate the lack of sun.
But, as the summary said:
"I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. "
And indeed, this best buy in Austin opens an hour earlier than your Albany, NY store.
You may refute that people in the Central time zone do things an hour earlier (and comparing 2 stores is hardly proof), but arguing that California and NY use different times is not the way to do that since under a 2 time zone system, NY and California would continue to be on different time zones.
The idea of two time zones is absolutely insane. I lived in Vienna while my wife lived in Zurich and there was an hour difference in sunrise and sunset. It was not nice to have to live and work in Vienna as it meant very early to rise and early to bed. I like the notion of time zones, and like the notion of switching because it really does make a difference. If it were up to me I would add a few more time zones because some cities at either side of a zone have really odd sunrise and sunset.
Some would say that the idea of DST is absolutely insane, yet we still have it. Personally, I'd just keep the timezones and shift the clocks by 30 minutes once and end DST.
Would "Affordable Timecare Act" excite you more?
We don't need no socialist Obamatime around here!
Your stopping distance at 100mph is about 4 times greater than at 50mph.
Physics, you fail it
It has been a while since I've been in a Physical class, but from what I remember, the formula for Kinetic Energy is: Ek = .5 * m * v^2. So doubling the speed increases the kinetic energy by 4 times. Plugging in 50mph and 100mph:
Ek1=(0.5) * m * (50)^2 = m * 1250
Ek1 = (0.5) * m * (100)^2 = m * 5000
m is constant
Ek2 = 4 * Ek1
Is there a car whose brakes work exponentially better at higher speeds?
If you don't believe me, here's a braking calculator:
http://www.random-science-tools.com/physics/stopping-distance.htm
Feel free to plug in some speeds and see how the braking distance is proportional to the square of the speed. Or correct my physics.
And why is a regressive tax bad? People love to complain about regressive taxes, but the argument why they're bad always falls back to "because its bad!". I find that opponents of regressive taxes always prefer progressive taxes, as if that's somehow better. Why?
Because it puts an excessive burden on the poor, who are least able to afford it. The assumption is that the rich got rich from the work of the poor. Which is probably not so true today as it was when we had a more industrial economy.
Now the rich get rich in increasingly complex financial schemes to extract more and more money from the underprivileged. I don't think it's sustainable in the long term - the 1% has an enormous portion of the wealth in this country, and the class of poor is expanding as the middle class contracts. As more and more of the poor are unable to support themselves, someone's got to pay for them, and the rich carefully protect their riches to make sure it's not them. So who is left to pay taxes when the poor are too poor to pay taxes, the middle class is virtually non-existent, and the wealthy have made sure that they pay very little?
The problem in the USA isn't that there are too many poor people, it's that there are too few wealthy people - locking up the wealth in a tiny class of super rich does not make for a healthy economy.
Maybe if the retailer did collect it I wouldn't buy it at all because I couldn't afford it?
That's pretty much the argument from brick and motar retailers for forcing online retailers to collect sales tax. Otherwise, if you can't afford it at Best Buy, you're more likely to buy from B&H because it's x% cheaper there without the sales tax. And for a big dollar item (the kind that's expensive for retailers to keep in stock because it is so expensive), the savings often far exceeds to cost of shipping.
You should call your representatives and demand a 100% sales tax, because it's probably going to cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to punish me for not giving the government a couple of hundred dollars that I earned.
As a private citizen (as opposed to a business) there's probably a very slim chance of non-payment of sales/use tax being discovered, even during an audit, Unless you're making any large deductions of items that you should have paid tax on. I have significant self-employment income and deduct everything legally possible, which includes significant out of state purchases, so I do track and pay my use-tax accordingly. The savings from the business deduction is worth more than the savings from not paying the use tax.
California has a simple use-tax table that seems would get you off the hook for use tax liability by paying the tax in the table for all purchases less than $1000. For larger purchases you should still itemize.
Doesn't change the fact that sales tax is regressive. Once again the 1% fucks the everyman. When's it gonna be our time to violently ass rape Mr. Monopoly?
Well, it's not entirely regressive. A low income person will spend a higher portion of his income on food and housing than a higher income person -- things that are generally exempt from state tax. The higher income person will be eating out more, buying more "toys", buying an expensive car, etc and generally making more purchases that are not exempt from tax.
There are other places to get stuff from where you don't have to pay the California extortion. B&H, J&R to name 2 off the top of my head.
I'd rather my money go to UPS and FED-Ex than the bozos in Sacramento.
Of course, you're still required to pay the tax even if the retailer doesn't collect it.