At the Republican debate, when asked "Who doesn't believe in evolution?" FOUR Presidential Candidates raised their hands!
No wonder science and math education in the U.S. lags against other nations. No child left behind? If these guys are controlling the Dept of Education, I'd prefer my child be left behind to educate herself rather than taken along on the ride that's being offered.
My company makes software that uses XML messages as the interface between a user's invoicing system and our system for tax calculation. The schema for the various messages is well-commented, but we felt the raw XML wasn't as human-friendly as we'd like.
We tried output from XML Spy which was an improvement for some purposes, but what we really wanted was a succinct table that listed each element/attribute along with its occurance info, valid values, and a text description. We initially did this manually in Excel, but then we internally-developed a tool that reads the XML and outputs the info in a human-friendly HTML table.
Our XML documentation includes the raw schema + the HTML reference tables + sample messages. We provide this doc in HTML format with a frameset to provide table of contents, search, and index (currently WebHelp output from RoboHelp, but we're in the process of switching to Author-IT).
If this flexible-reflective light display stuff really works, it could be developed into a wearable display that uses optical sensors to display the environment around you, like a primative forerunner of the camoflage technology in the "Predator" movies. How much fun would THAT be?
Wouldn't surprise me at all if the US military already has a whole team of researchers working on this.
...since the story of the MIT candidate sleeping for decades is simply a retelling of Rip Van Winkle.
There aren't many new story ideas--maybe even no story ideas--that are completely independent of inspiration and formula from previous legends, myths, history, and pop culture sources.
Cedar Point is great, but if you're a coaster lover and you're in the Ohio-Pennsylvania region you owe it to yourself to also check out Kennywood. It's a small park near Pittsburgh, and something of an overlooked gem. They have excellent, especially a deceptively small-looking steel coaster that is actually built over a cliff so the biggest drop--nearly straight down toward the Allegheny River--is hidden in the middle. It's regularly listed among the ten best coasters in the world.
ckotchey, the laws you speak of already exist. They're called use taxes, and they require you to report out-of-state purchases to your state and pay tax on them. Every state that has a sales tax also has an equivalent use tax. Whether you order by mail, Internet, or drive to Delaware (which has no sales tax) and then carry the goods home yourself, the rules are the same. It's just that most people don't understand them and don't follow them.
We broke from England because of taxation without representation, not "double taxation." You have elected representatives who decide your taxes. If you don't like what they're doing, you can complain and you can vote against them. Not that what you do will matter much with our broken 2-party system, but that's a topic for another thread.
Believe it or not, part of the reason we have so many kinds of taxes is an effort to be fair to everyone. Some taxes, like sales tax or property tax, hurt the poor more than the rich. Other taxes, like our tiered income tax, balance that by being much harder on the wealthy. The overall effect is to spread around the pain, so no income strata is unfairly burdened versus the other strata.
The reason you need to pay this is spelled out in the Constitution: the government exists to secure your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You want the government to keep Saddam Hussain from taking your land? Lock up snipers who want to kill you? Stop greedy inside traders from swindling you out of your retirement savings? Help you if your house is destroyed in a flood? Then you have to accept taxes.
There's a common misunderstanding that Internet sales are currently tax-free. They aren't tax-free and never were.
Every state that has a sales tax has "use tax" laws that require you to pay tax on stuff you buy from out-of-state. It's called a use tax instead of a sales tax, but it's still the same tax.
The use tax exists because jurisdictions can't force a seller to collect tax where they have no physical presence. The courts have consistantly ruled that this would put an unfair burden on the seller because of the complexity of tax and filing laws. Since they couldn't force the seller to collect the sales tax, states require residents to report their purchases and pay a use tax equal to the sales tax.
Anyone who, for example, buys a computer from Dell by mail-order but doesn't report the purchase to their state and pay the tax due is breaking state law (unless you live in a state like Delaware, which doesn't have sales or use tax).
Individual consumers can get away with not reporting their puchases and paying the use taxes because it's too much trouble for the government to pursue them. Like speeding, just because the odds of being caught are fairly low and everyone is doing it, that doesn't make it legal. Businesses generally do end up paying the use taxes because they're larger buyers and get targetted for audits if the state suspects they aren't reporting their out-of-state purchases.
This has been a problem for decades with mail-order, but the spotlight is coming on it because of the Internet. Although currently only about 1% of total sales are online, it's a growing segment. Also, Internet technology actually makes it more feasible for sellers to collect sales tax without undue burden.
The idea behind Streamline Sales Tax is to make it so easy to collect the taxes that the courts won't see it as a burden. So, if it goes through, it only means we all might end up paying the sales taxes that we've been illegally avoiding all these years.
The Internet tax amnesty bill is a totally different subject: it only protects us against NEW taxes targeted specifically at the Internet. It was never intended to protect us from the sales taxes that were already present but unenforcable.
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At the Republican debate, when asked "Who doesn't believe in evolution?" FOUR Presidential Candidates raised their hands!
No wonder science and math education in the U.S. lags against other nations. No child left behind? If these guys are controlling the Dept of Education, I'd prefer my child be left behind to educate herself rather than taken along on the ride that's being offered.
My company makes software that uses XML messages as the interface between a user's invoicing system and our system for tax calculation. The schema for the various messages is well-commented, but we felt the raw XML wasn't as human-friendly as we'd like.
We tried output from XML Spy which was an improvement for some purposes, but what we really wanted was a succinct table that listed each element/attribute along with its occurance info, valid values, and a text description. We initially did this manually in Excel, but then we internally-developed a tool that reads the XML and outputs the info in a human-friendly HTML table.
Our XML documentation includes the raw schema + the HTML reference tables + sample messages. We provide this doc in HTML format with a frameset to provide table of contents, search, and index (currently WebHelp output from RoboHelp, but we're in the process of switching to Author-IT).
If this flexible-reflective light display stuff really works, it could be developed into a wearable display that uses optical sensors to display the environment around you, like a primative forerunner of the camoflage technology in the "Predator" movies. How much fun would THAT be?
Wouldn't surprise me at all if the US military already has a whole team of researchers working on this.
...since the story of the MIT candidate sleeping for decades is simply a retelling of Rip Van Winkle.
There aren't many new story ideas--maybe even no story ideas--that are completely independent of inspiration and formula from previous legends, myths, history, and pop culture sources.
Cedar Point is great, but if you're a coaster lover and you're in the Ohio-Pennsylvania region you owe it to yourself to also check out Kennywood. It's a small park near Pittsburgh, and something of an overlooked gem. They have excellent, especially a deceptively small-looking steel coaster that is actually built over a cliff so the biggest drop--nearly straight down toward the Allegheny River--is hidden in the middle. It's regularly listed among the ten best coasters in the world.
ckotchey, the laws you speak of already exist. They're called use taxes, and they require you to report out-of-state purchases to your state and pay tax on them. Every state that has a sales tax also has an equivalent use tax. Whether you order by mail, Internet, or drive to Delaware (which has no sales tax) and then carry the goods home yourself, the rules are the same. It's just that most people don't understand them and don't follow them.
We broke from England because of taxation without representation, not "double taxation." You have elected representatives who decide your taxes. If you don't like what they're doing, you can complain and you can vote against them. Not that what you do will matter much with our broken 2-party system, but that's a topic for another thread.
Believe it or not, part of the reason we have so many kinds of taxes is an effort to be fair to everyone. Some taxes, like sales tax or property tax, hurt the poor more than the rich. Other taxes, like our tiered income tax, balance that by being much harder on the wealthy. The overall effect is to spread around the pain, so no income strata is unfairly burdened versus the other strata.
The reason you need to pay this is spelled out in the Constitution: the government exists to secure your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You want the government to keep Saddam Hussain from taking your land? Lock up snipers who want to kill you? Stop greedy inside traders from swindling you out of your retirement savings? Help you if your house is destroyed in a flood? Then you have to accept taxes.
There's a common misunderstanding that Internet sales are currently tax-free. They aren't tax-free and never were.
Every state that has a sales tax has "use tax" laws that require you to pay tax on stuff you buy from out-of-state. It's called a use tax instead of a sales tax, but it's still the same tax.
The use tax exists because jurisdictions can't force a seller to collect tax where they have no physical presence. The courts have consistantly ruled that this would put an unfair burden on the seller because of the complexity of tax and filing laws. Since they couldn't force the seller to collect the sales tax, states require residents to report their purchases and pay a use tax equal to the sales tax.
Anyone who, for example, buys a computer from Dell by mail-order but doesn't report the purchase to their state and pay the tax due is breaking state law (unless you live in a state like Delaware, which doesn't have sales or use tax).
Individual consumers can get away with not reporting their puchases and paying the use taxes because it's too much trouble for the government to pursue them. Like speeding, just because the odds of being caught are fairly low and everyone is doing it, that doesn't make it legal. Businesses generally do end up paying the use taxes because they're larger buyers and get targetted for audits if the state suspects they aren't reporting their out-of-state purchases.
This has been a problem for decades with mail-order, but the spotlight is coming on it because of the Internet. Although currently only about 1% of total sales are online, it's a growing segment. Also, Internet technology actually makes it more feasible for sellers to collect sales tax without undue burden.
The idea behind Streamline Sales Tax is to make it so easy to collect the taxes that the courts won't see it as a burden. So, if it goes through, it only means we all might end up paying the sales taxes that we've been illegally avoiding all these years.
The Internet tax amnesty bill is a totally different subject: it only protects us against NEW taxes targeted specifically at the Internet. It was never intended to protect us from the sales taxes that were already present but unenforcable.