It's the same mentality though as the Ford Pinto (remember, the car that would explode?) It would have cost Ford roughly an 11.00 part to repair the problem with the ford pinto, but that would have put it over their magical 'final cost price' of 2000.00 They are marketing these PC's at a certain price level... that's their magic number... They don't want to go over it. They probably don't have a modem, because the ethernet controller was probably already on the motherboard. Now, what they COULD do, form an alliance with some modem manufacturer and offer some sort of rebate on an external modem...
Gary Elsasser, vice president of technology at eMachines, said that consumers wanted to be able to run any software and find computer help easily. Linux makes that hard to do. Typical. People saying that the software that is available on windows is not available on linux. Yes, this is true that a lot of the same software is not available on linux, and sometimes it is not easy to migrate new users... but people will do it... I run a dual boot system on my laptop 'just in case' I have to use windows, but honestly I can't remember the last time I actually NEEDED to use windows. I honestly will be interested in seeing how many businesses migrate to linux for some of their applications once OpenOffice and similar free/open source office projects become available. I believe that we will see (and have already started to see) Microsofts battle against open-source, and it reminds me of the way that MaBell used to battle local telcos, undercut the competition by lowering your price. In this case, they have to undercut it to the point that they are giving it away for free. There have been several slashdot articles on this reccently, and coming from an educational institution, and talking to IT people at other educational institutions I know that Microsoft offers lots of 'perks' to institutions, including free/cheap software and the Microsoft Academic Alliance (for students) to not only get them to use MS products instead of looking for or adopting alternatives, but also to get students used to and familiar with Microsoft Products instead of products from the competition (CS students req'd to make sure code works in Vis Studio before turning it in, intro to computers or other general courses focusing mainly (if only) on MSOffice). I was going somewhere with this, but I lost track. I guess I'll just end in saying the battle with Microsoft has only begun, you might even argue that the first shots have yet to be fired...
Of course. I don't mind them trying to tackle pc's. All waste is an issue, it's not an issue anybody wants to deal with however... As far as where the article states that it might set a precedent for federal regulations, I doubt that very much, especially with an unstable economy. It may set a precedent at the state level, and we may see similar laws, however I doubt that we will see any sort of national legislation, at least not at this time. I think that the writer of the article chose the wrong word or terminology, and perhaps was thinking just a few steps ahead of himself. I do agree with you however that other types of wastes which are much more prevelent in society need to be tackled as well. I don't think that this model will apply to all industries (making the industry [of course ultimately the consumer] pay) but it's an interesting one. I know that where some of my relatives live in Pennsylvania they have mandatory recycling of newspapers and plastic (which is a good thing to see), however in the remote part of Mississippi where I go to school, recycling is hardly even on the radar screen.
The problem is that the costs ultimately fall on the consumers and since recycling is usually considered to be part of waste management it falls on the local/county/state governments. Your taxes pay for waste disposal. Try convincing people to have their taxes raised, it's like pulling teeth. I honestly don't have a problem with my taxes being raised, or new taxes being added if I can see the difference, if I can see a result, however you would not get widespread support like this and it MIGHT even get branded as socialist/communist (think national socialized health care). What would actually be a better system would not be a national recycling program but to have more federal funds earmarked and available to local govt's that choose to use them to create recycling centers and recycling programs so that it is affordable for them. That's just my opinion though.
How will this put them out of business if it is a flat disposal fee that is attached to all computers? Everybody will have their prices going up $xx.xx. Perhaps you can further enlighten me to your logic...
Actually... I imagine that it will be any computer SOLD in the state of California... Of course, it might also mean that you can just take your computer to a local dealer (circuit city, walmart, best buy, etc), and give it to them, and they will dispose of it for you and you pay either nothing (which would be the best thing), or a nominal charge (5-10.00). The costs will already be built into the new computer when you purchase it.
I'm glad to see a technology maker taking this on. I know that it's going to result in higher costs to consumers in the end, but honestly the cost will be trivial compared to the total value of the item you are purchasing. I imagine it's not the exact same bill (I don't have the bill in front of me) but it could simply be the way that something is worded that significantly changed the stance of HP/Compaq on the issue. Waste, whether it is technology related, or other, is a problem for everybody... we all create it, however few want to deal with it... Kudos to HP/Compaq for getting on the bandwagon... Glad to see someone trying to make it a truly clean(er) industry.
Great... Just when I had finally managed to get my computer nice and quiet, they came up with a way to make the fridge louder... I wonder though, if this could be used, or how logical it would be, to apply this to computers, especially as we get faster, and the processors temperatures get hotter. Perhaps instead of purchasing fans most computers will come with an audio coolant system standard?... Anybody have an idea how loud these things are?
My open-source house would have a 'free as in beer' tap...:)
Anybody else thinking of these houses as 'pods'? Kinda creepy... Becoming a pod person and everything.... They also remind me a lot of the trailers in trailer parks or at some construction sites (some of those are modular, and you can expand a house by simply adding another trailer).
please check your math... if you do a daily back up, the backup would be every day... (365 days a year, 366 days once every 4 years)... Now, if you want backups to != saturday and sunday, then number of backups a year would = 261 (not 250). If you don't do backups on Thanksgiving, 4th of July, Memorial Day, Easter, New Years, Labor Day, or Christmas... that's 254... But your point is correct... it is NOT cost effective... Honestly, we use something also not very cost effective where I work... we have redundant hard drives on several computers. Everything is stored actively on both hard drives, but only read off of one in real time (mirroring, sometimes through means of raid, but not always). It may not be cost effective... but it is a fairly good way of backing up... even more critical computers also backup to DAT every night. Of course the other problem with active mirroring is that you don't have that ability to go back to a previous version of a file, or recover a file if it has been deleted... however, if you have a hardware failure or a data failure (some of our computers only mirror certain directories, not EVERYTHING) it is a good, fast recovery...
Our linux users group was introduced to Knoppix by a visiting member from Germany about a year ago. Last spring we held an installfest and the knoppix cd's that we gave out were a huge hit. Best of all, it means that we were able to give out a VERY nice functional test cd that we knew had an almost zero chance of harming an individuals computer. If you have anybody who you've wanted to have try linux or has expressed an interest in linux but is nervous about putting something on the hard drive, knoppix is definitely worth burning a copy of for them.
Unfortunately often they do 'choose' to install gator... the problem is is that people often don't do a good job of examining EULA's... admit it... everyone is guilty of just clicking 'yes' far to often, myself included.... What gets me is when there is a pop up, and they make a 'window inside a window' graphic and people click the 'fake' close window button, and end up getting the software in windows...
I had a laptop which ate hard drives. It was under warranty so I kept sending the hard drives back to the company, and they kept sending me new ones. I was going through about 2-3 hard drives a year (my laptop stays on constantly, It almost never gets turned off) I noticed that most of the problems only occured after the hard drive had reached about a capacity where only the last 8% or so was free (that's about when I knew it was time to do a complete backup).
I guess the biggest problem with search engines is cost and speed.... I will mention that our search engine is able to search through a few million documents in under a second however and do indexing and incrememtal searches... Are three biggest issues were speed, relevancy (which is a pain in the kneck to deal with, and when administering a search engine is something you have to constantly deal with) and cost (we had basically no budget, and the hardware had to come from 'spare parts). In the end we ended up using a home-brewed topic-database search as the primary search engine, If it doesn't find one of the 'keywords' in the topic search it dumps your query to the actual search engine automatically. We did this to help improve our relevancy... I am planning on eventually tying the two databases together somehow, in a cleaner manner (along the lines of how Yahoo displays yahoo 'category items' first), but at this time that is not our top priority...
We had to do that here at the university I work at a few months ago, implement a NEW university wide search engine... Lots of people kept saying things like 'use google', however the free for universities version of google didn't give us the features we needed. We tried multiple pieces of software and finally settled on AspSeek. So far it's been able to hold up to what we've put it through. We haven't really tried to customize it however... Without knowing exactly what you are trying to do it's hard to know how it would hold up. We also tried MnogoSearch (it's worth taking a look at, but we had lots of problems with it). We were originally on ht://dig, but moved away from it due to multiple reasons... If your doing a large scale (over 50k) site search engine, or a multiple site search engine with a database and webcrawler, I wish you luck... there isn't much support out there and the options are few... I hope perhaps the ones that I mention are some help to you.
It may not be patented, but they may start sueing companies that refer to their products as Tivo. Nobody else is calling a non-TiVO PVR yet a TiVO, however it most likely will eventually begin to happen because of brand recognition. Then they may start sueing companies over trademark issues...
has anybody noticed that the website is a news site about advertisements? I would imagine that they would honestly not support something that would REMOVE advertisements, which is something that their market relies on. honestly though, I have to wonder how long the ad-zapping will be around, or if perhaps in the future some ads won't be able to be zapped... who knows... I do think that PVR is here to stay however, even if it is just a 'digital video recorder'...
They may have brand name recognition, and they may be a 'household name' but does that mean that they are going to be around forever? Picks up tha magic 8 ball... signs point to no
The article states that already Tivo/Replay TV are licensing their products. It is very likely that eventually you will find companies that are trying to meet bottom line prices and will buy PVR from whomever can give them the lowest price. That's business. Tivo and the like companies will most likely become more of a software company than a 'hardware' company, especially with the advent of digital cable boxes and satellite boxes in so many homes. Many people will prefer one box that does everything. I honestly won't be surprised if we see television sets soon with PVR embedded into them (does anyone know if this has been done yet?), say within 3 years. Most cable companies are going digital, and to access all the 'great digital features' you have to have an addressable digital cable box, cable companies will gladly install software that will get people to use their product, especially if they think they can charge an extra monthly charge, or use charge, or even simply offer it as a feature and insert a few extra advertisements at the beginning of the program. A quick summary. Tivo may still be around, but they might have a much weaker hardware division, or none at all. They may also have to diversify to stay around... (diversify, I had to use a buzzword;) )
Well, since the links were not publicly accessible yet, and had not yet been officially released, this may constitute hacking according to some individuals (see thread about reuters). Thanks to slashdot for making us all criminals.... i feel l33t now...
I just tried to submit something and got this.. now every page on brack is giving it...
Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
brak is NOT handling the load very well so far... I am getting some errors that the server can't be located, etc... they are sporadic... When things DO load, they take forever... On being a moderation god... 30 points.. wow... That's pretty good... I don't know what to say about it. I've always thought that 5 points was kinda low, but more than 10 points seems excessive... I think this MIGHT be an error, eh?
Update... someone claiming to be B has appeneded to one of the postings on the top page.. is this a member of the slash-team, or has a bigger problem occured... hmm......
By the way, that number of tax locations (according to the article) was 7,500. That probably doesn't figure in a local areas different tax rates on different goods however (i.e. perhaps an extra tax on espresso)
*stands on soap box and prepares to shield himself from tomatoes*
I think that taxation of goods on the net is a good thing. I think we need it. Now, let me explain why. If you buy a good or service on the net there is no tax (usually) that you are forced to pay. Yes, you do end up paying the equivalent of or possibly even more than the cost of tax in shipping. The biggest problem with taxing products on the internet is the number of tax zones that there are in the US. I forget the number, but it's not 50. It gets down to the county, and then to the city, and then finally down to the actual product sometimes (it is not uncommon for food, or prepared food, to have a different rate of income tax, or for their to be an extra penny tax on certain goods). The problem is with all of these tax zones and the diversity of locations where shoppers and businesses are located is that keeping track of this data tends to be a pain, plus it means that while one person from Maryland may have to pay 30.00 for a product plus 5% tax, the person buying it from Florida might have to pay 7%. Enter the net tax: What I WOULD be willing to support is a broad, internet-wide sales tax, say, all products bought on the internet have a set tax rate of 4% (or 6%) but something low. This would be divided in some way where each entity (city, county, state) from both the region where the buyer and the region where the seller are located. Here's WHY I would be willing to support a sales tax on tangebile goods bought on the internet. Think of where that money from sales tax goes. Yes, some of it does go into silly programs, and into the pockets of city and state officials, but most sales tax money is used for programs such as education, fire departments, and other local services that you may use on a daily basis and not even think of. In reality your local city government provides more services to you, and effects you more than the national government in most situations.
I do however REFUSE to support any tax on things such as access, hosting, online payment systems, or other SERVICE related items on the internet. I am STRONGLY against any sort of 'internet access' tax.
In closing, let me say that before you speak violently out against taxes, think about what it would be like without them. Think about how much money could be lost to your city and state if more and more people start purchasing things online, maybe even purchasing online and then being able to pick up at a local retailer. Yes, I hate paying taxes just as much as the next person, I'd like to be able to hold onto as much of my money as I can, but I also am able to see the money being used in the community around me. As long as I can still see that the money is being put to good use, I feel that I can support taxation. If placing a tax on goods purchased on the internet means that I can continue to see this money being used in the community around me and in education, then yes, I'll support it. But in closing, they have to make it easy, if the tax is not just a 'general' tax that you are required to pay (a nation-wide tax that is divided between the different state/local governments) then it will end up being even more of a pain in the neck.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the same mentality though as the Ford Pinto (remember, the car that would explode?) It would have cost Ford roughly an 11.00 part to repair the problem with the ford pinto, but that would have put it over their magical 'final cost price' of 2000.00
They are marketing these PC's at a certain price level... that's their magic number... They don't want to go over it.
They probably don't have a modem, because the ethernet controller was probably already on the motherboard. Now, what they COULD do, form an alliance with some modem manufacturer and offer some sort of rebate on an external modem...
Gary Elsasser, vice president of technology at eMachines, said that consumers wanted to be able to run any software and find computer help easily. Linux makes that hard to do.
Typical. People saying that the software that is available on windows is not available on linux. Yes, this is true that a lot of the same software is not available on linux, and sometimes it is not easy to migrate new users... but people will do it... I run a dual boot system on my laptop 'just in case' I have to use windows, but honestly I can't remember the last time I actually NEEDED to use windows. I honestly will be interested in seeing how many businesses migrate to linux for some of their applications once OpenOffice and similar free/open source office projects become available. I believe that we will see (and have already started to see) Microsofts battle against open-source, and it reminds me of the way that MaBell used to battle local telcos, undercut the competition by lowering your price. In this case, they have to undercut it to the point that they are giving it away for free. There have been several slashdot articles on this reccently, and coming from an educational institution, and talking to IT people at other educational institutions I know that Microsoft offers lots of 'perks' to institutions, including free/cheap software and the Microsoft Academic Alliance (for students) to not only get them to use MS products instead of looking for or adopting alternatives, but also to get students used to and familiar with Microsoft Products instead of products from the competition (CS students req'd to make sure code works in Vis Studio before turning it in, intro to computers or other general courses focusing mainly (if only) on MSOffice). I was going somewhere with this, but I lost track. I guess I'll just end in saying the battle with Microsoft has only begun, you might even argue that the first shots have yet to be fired...
Mirror of sites that are blocked is up at http://ra.msstate.edu/~naw4/chinafire.html sans graphics.
Of course. I don't mind them trying to tackle pc's. All waste is an issue, it's not an issue anybody wants to deal with however...
As far as where the article states that it might set a precedent for federal regulations, I doubt that very much, especially with an unstable economy. It may set a precedent at the state level, and we may see similar laws, however I doubt that we will see any sort of national legislation, at least not at this time. I think that the writer of the article chose the wrong word or terminology, and perhaps was thinking just a few steps ahead of himself.
I do agree with you however that other types of wastes which are much more prevelent in society need to be tackled as well. I don't think that this model will apply to all industries (making the industry [of course ultimately the consumer] pay) but it's an interesting one. I know that where some of my relatives live in Pennsylvania they have mandatory recycling of newspapers and plastic (which is a good thing to see), however in the remote part of Mississippi where I go to school, recycling is hardly even on the radar screen.
The problem is that the costs ultimately fall on the consumers and since recycling is usually considered to be part of waste management it falls on the local/county/state governments. Your taxes pay for waste disposal. Try convincing people to have their taxes raised, it's like pulling teeth. I honestly don't have a problem with my taxes being raised, or new taxes being added if I can see the difference, if I can see a result, however you would not get widespread support like this and it MIGHT even get branded as socialist/communist (think national socialized health care). What would actually be a better system would not be a national recycling program but to have more federal funds earmarked and available to local govt's that choose to use them to create recycling centers and recycling programs so that it is affordable for them.
That's just my opinion though.
How will this put them out of business if it is a flat disposal fee that is attached to all computers? Everybody will have their prices going up $xx.xx. Perhaps you can further enlighten me to your logic...
Actually... I imagine that it will be any computer SOLD in the state of California... Of course, it might also mean that you can just take your computer to a local dealer (circuit city, walmart, best buy, etc), and give it to them, and they will dispose of it for you and you pay either nothing (which would be the best thing), or a nominal charge (5-10.00). The costs will already be built into the new computer when you purchase it.
I'm glad to see a technology maker taking this on. I know that it's going to result in higher costs to consumers in the end, but honestly the cost will be trivial compared to the total value of the item you are purchasing. I imagine it's not the exact same bill (I don't have the bill in front of me) but it could simply be the way that something is worded that significantly changed the stance of HP/Compaq on the issue. Waste, whether it is technology related, or other, is a problem for everybody... we all create it, however few want to deal with it... Kudos to HP/Compaq for getting on the bandwagon... Glad to see someone trying to make it a truly clean(er) industry.
Great... Just when I had finally managed to get my computer nice and quiet, they came up with a way to make the fridge louder...
I wonder though, if this could be used, or how logical it would be, to apply this to computers, especially as we get faster, and the processors temperatures get hotter. Perhaps instead of purchasing fans most computers will come with an audio coolant system standard?...
Anybody have an idea how loud these things are?
Heheh..... The record industry could then go sue you because your fridge was violating the DMCA... :)
My open-source house would have a 'free as in beer' tap... :)
Anybody else thinking of these houses as 'pods'? Kinda creepy... Becoming a pod person and everything.... They also remind me a lot of the trailers in trailer parks or at some construction sites (some of those are modular, and you can expand a house by simply adding another trailer).
please check your math... if you do a daily back up, the backup would be every day... (365 days a year, 366 days once every 4 years)... Now, if you want backups to != saturday and sunday, then number of backups a year would = 261 (not 250). If you don't do backups on Thanksgiving, 4th of July, Memorial Day, Easter, New Years, Labor Day, or Christmas... that's 254... But your point is correct... it is NOT cost effective... Honestly, we use something also not very cost effective where I work... we have redundant hard drives on several computers. Everything is stored actively on both hard drives, but only read off of one in real time (mirroring, sometimes through means of raid, but not always). It may not be cost effective... but it is a fairly good way of backing up... even more critical computers also backup to DAT every night. Of course the other problem with active mirroring is that you don't have that ability to go back to a previous version of a file, or recover a file if it has been deleted... however, if you have a hardware failure or a data failure (some of our computers only mirror certain directories, not EVERYTHING) it is a good, fast recovery...
Our linux users group was introduced to Knoppix by a visiting member from Germany about a year ago. Last spring we held an installfest and the knoppix cd's that we gave out were a huge hit. Best of all, it means that we were able to give out a VERY nice functional test cd that we knew had an almost zero chance of harming an individuals computer. If you have anybody who you've wanted to have try linux or has expressed an interest in linux but is nervous about putting something on the hard drive, knoppix is definitely worth burning a copy of for them.
Unfortunately often they do 'choose' to install gator... the problem is is that people often don't do a good job of examining EULA's... admit it... everyone is guilty of just clicking 'yes' far to often, myself included.... What gets me is when there is a pop up, and they make a 'window inside a window' graphic and people click the 'fake' close window button, and end up getting the software in windows...
I had a laptop which ate hard drives. It was under warranty so I kept sending the hard drives back to the company, and they kept sending me new ones. I was going through about 2-3 hard drives a year (my laptop stays on constantly, It almost never gets turned off) I noticed that most of the problems only occured after the hard drive had reached about a capacity where only the last 8% or so was free (that's about when I knew it was time to do a complete backup).
I guess the biggest problem with search engines is cost and speed.... I will mention that our search engine is able to search through a few million documents in under a second however and do indexing and incrememtal searches... Are three biggest issues were speed, relevancy (which is a pain in the kneck to deal with, and when administering a search engine is something you have to constantly deal with) and cost (we had basically no budget, and the hardware had to come from 'spare parts).
In the end we ended up using a home-brewed topic-database search as the primary search engine, If it doesn't find one of the 'keywords' in the topic search it dumps your query to the actual search engine automatically. We did this to help improve our relevancy... I am planning on eventually tying the two databases together somehow, in a cleaner manner (along the lines of how Yahoo displays yahoo 'category items' first), but at this time that is not our top priority...
We had to do that here at the university I work at a few months ago, implement a NEW university wide search engine... Lots of people kept saying things like 'use google', however the free for universities version of google didn't give us the features we needed. We tried multiple pieces of software and finally settled on AspSeek. So far it's been able to hold up to what we've put it through. We haven't really tried to customize it however... Without knowing exactly what you are trying to do it's hard to know how it would hold up. We also tried MnogoSearch (it's worth taking a look at, but we had lots of problems with it). We were originally on ht://dig, but moved away from it due to multiple reasons...
If your doing a large scale (over 50k) site search engine, or a multiple site search engine with a database and webcrawler, I wish you luck... there isn't much support out there and the options are few... I hope perhaps the ones that I mention are some help to you.
It may not be patented, but they may start sueing companies that refer to their products as Tivo. Nobody else is calling a non-TiVO PVR yet a TiVO, however it most likely will eventually begin to happen because of brand recognition. Then they may start sueing companies over trademark issues...
has anybody noticed that the website is a news site about advertisements? I would imagine that they would honestly not support something that would REMOVE advertisements, which is something that their market relies on.
honestly though, I have to wonder how long the ad-zapping will be around, or if perhaps in the future some ads won't be able to be zapped... who knows... I do think that PVR is here to stay however, even if it is just a 'digital video recorder'...
They may have brand name recognition, and they may be a 'household name' but does that mean that they are going to be around forever?
;) )
Picks up tha magic 8 ball... signs point to no
The article states that already Tivo/Replay TV are licensing their products. It is very likely that eventually you will find companies that are trying to meet bottom line prices and will buy PVR from whomever can give them the lowest price. That's business. Tivo and the like companies will most likely become more of a software company than a 'hardware' company, especially with the advent of digital cable boxes and satellite boxes in so many homes. Many people will prefer one box that does everything. I honestly won't be surprised if we see television sets soon with PVR embedded into them (does anyone know if this has been done yet?), say within 3 years. Most cable companies are going digital, and to access all the 'great digital features' you have to have an addressable digital cable box, cable companies will gladly install software that will get people to use their product, especially if they think they can charge an extra monthly charge, or use charge, or even simply offer it as a feature and insert a few extra advertisements at the beginning of the program.
A quick summary. Tivo may still be around, but they might have a much weaker hardware division, or none at all. They may also have to diversify to stay around... (diversify, I had to use a buzzword
Well, since the links were not publicly accessible yet, and had not yet been officially released, this may constitute hacking according to some individuals (see thread about reuters).
Thanks to slashdot for making us all criminals.... i feel l33t now...
I just tried to submit something and got this.. now every page on brack is giving it...
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, pater@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
brak is NOT handling the load very well so far... I am getting some errors that the server can't be located, etc... they are sporadic... When things DO load, they take forever...
On being a moderation god... 30 points.. wow... That's pretty good... I don't know what to say about it. I've always thought that 5 points was kinda low, but more than 10 points seems excessive... I think this MIGHT be an error, eh?
Update... someone claiming to be B has appeneded to one of the postings on the top page.. is this a member of the slash-team, or has a bigger problem occured... hmm......
By the way, that number of tax locations (according to the article) was 7,500. That probably doesn't figure in a local areas different tax rates on different goods however (i.e. perhaps an extra tax on espresso)
*stands on soap box and prepares to shield himself from tomatoes*
I think that taxation of goods on the net is a good thing. I think we need it. Now, let me explain why.
If you buy a good or service on the net there is no tax (usually) that you are forced to pay. Yes, you do end up paying the equivalent of or possibly even more than the cost of tax in shipping.
The biggest problem with taxing products on the internet is the number of tax zones that there are in the US. I forget the number, but it's not 50. It gets down to the county, and then to the city, and then finally down to the actual product sometimes (it is not uncommon for food, or prepared food, to have a different rate of income tax, or for their to be an extra penny tax on certain goods). The problem is with all of these tax zones and the diversity of locations where shoppers and businesses are located is that keeping track of this data tends to be a pain, plus it means that while one person from Maryland may have to pay 30.00 for a product plus 5% tax, the person buying it from Florida might have to pay 7%.
Enter the net tax: What I WOULD be willing to support is a broad, internet-wide sales tax, say, all products bought on the internet have a set tax rate of 4% (or 6%) but something low. This would be divided in some way where each entity (city, county, state) from both the region where the buyer and the region where the seller are located.
Here's WHY I would be willing to support a sales tax on tangebile goods bought on the internet. Think of where that money from sales tax goes. Yes, some of it does go into silly programs, and into the pockets of city and state officials, but most sales tax money is used for programs such as education, fire departments, and other local services that you may use on a daily basis and not even think of. In reality your local city government provides more services to you, and effects you more than the national government in most situations.
I do however REFUSE to support any tax on things such as access, hosting, online payment systems, or other SERVICE related items on the internet. I am STRONGLY against any sort of 'internet access' tax.
In closing, let me say that before you speak violently out against taxes, think about what it would be like without them. Think about how much money could be lost to your city and state if more and more people start purchasing things online, maybe even purchasing online and then being able to pick up at a local retailer. Yes, I hate paying taxes just as much as the next person, I'd like to be able to hold onto as much of my money as I can, but I also am able to see the money being used in the community around me. As long as I can still see that the money is being put to good use, I feel that I can support taxation. If placing a tax on goods purchased on the internet means that I can continue to see this money being used in the community around me and in education, then yes, I'll support it. But in closing, they have to make it easy, if the tax is not just a 'general' tax that you are required to pay (a nation-wide tax that is divided between the different state/local governments) then it will end up being even more of a pain in the neck.