Good call, a sales tax would be counted as an Excise. I'd forgotten that one.
Interestingly if you look carefully at that second sentence the uniformity provision doesn't seem to apply to all taxes, but only to Duties, Imposts and Excises. Am I reading that right?
Of course, it's in the nature of the beast. It's not really shocking that a corporation whose purpose of existence is that making of profit would prefer to make more profit rather than less.
Actually, the US constitution requires any tax on interstate commerce to be levied equally. It also prohibits states from taxing purchases made in other states.
It does forbid states from taxing purchases made in other states, but it does not forbid them from collection of those taxes on behalf of the federal government, nor does it forbid the federal government giving them it back. As long as the law is federal, it doesn't matter who actually does the collection.
I'm curious about which provision requires tax to be levied equally? Got any articles on that for me? I know the Minnesota constitution has that provision explicitly, but the federal constitution does not. You could cite the equal protection clause but I suspect if worded carefully it would pass the rational basis test on the grounds that it does not disadvantage out of state business vs in state business.
Amazon doesn't care where the money goes, nor do they really care about the rate. A federal tax could quite easily be collected and kept by the states. The reason they want a federal pre-emption is simply the abundance of rules and regulations that must be obeyed for each different area's individual sales tax. For new enterprise, having to obey one set of rules for collection of sales tax nationwide would represent an amazing saving on accountants bills.
It's not the rate that needs to be uniform, merely the administration and rules. It would be quite possible to have a federal sales tax, with collection outsourced to the states and rate dependant on delivery address. The issue is when every municipality has their own tax and more importantly rules for applying that tax. It's this abundance of differing rules and regulations which make doing business across territories difficult, rates on the other hand can be determined by a simple lookup table.
The other major problem lies with the states that rely on property taxes for their income rather than a sales tax. This is harder to fix but may be doable as long as you allow the rate to vary to 0.
Either you're trolling or you really do believe you should just let sick people who can't pay rot on the street. The problem of course being that you're forgetting one of the most basic rules of epidemiology, sick people generally tend to make others around them sick. The rich can hoard their money if they like but then it won't stop folks in poverty acting as a reservoir for TB and other similar diseases. So my first point is this, it isn't just their problem, it's YOUR problem.
Sick people are also economically inactive, meaning they're less likely to be able to work to pay for their insurance and treatment. This means they'll often not be treated fully and either not go back to work or produce reduced output. It's a major investment by the state to school someone, and one that is rather spoiled if they go and die on you. This brings me to my second point, either you go the whole hog with your investment in social programs such as free schooling and healthcare or you kill it entirely and have none. The halfway point you're in, is quite a wasted investment.
The reason that despite the United States spending the most per capita on healthcare, they do not have the number 1 life expectancy is complicated but boils down to this, you've got a lot of people dragging the average down and your system is inefficient. The UK pays about 9% of it's GDP into healthcare, you pay 15% and yet people live longer in the UK? One way or another healthcare in the US has to be fixed and part of that fix is legislative unfortunately because the market has failed (and yes this probably includes further tort reform).
I can clone a magstripe card with very cheap off the shelf hardware, and use that card whereever. Cloning a modern (using the updated security software) chip card though, especially one that has the original timing attacks fixed requires serious hardware. That was what chip cards were created to fix, the chip and PIN bit was more of a side-benefit.
The original chip cards were vulnerable to cloning using offline terminals however, most of those particular attacks have been fixed through the shift from Static Data Authentication (SDA) to Dynamic (DDA). The attacks themselves are quite interesting and easy to understand. SDA cards (which are cheaper to manufacture) produced a crypto packet which could not be interpreted by the terminal. This caused a problem with offline terminals which were only periodically connected to the bank and were thus vulnerable to replay attacks. Fortunately though, DDA was made mandatory for all cards issued after 2011 so it shouldn't be a problem in future. (there's also a protocol called CDA which adds still further security)
The other problem was that the part of the packet which distinguished chip and sig transactions from chip and pin ones was in a proprietary card issuer dependant format. This meant a chip and pin card could be fooled into falling back to signing a chip and signature request, by a device in the middle which was passed to the terminal as if it were a chip and pin request. The terminal unable to tell the difference, thought the correct pin was entered. It's unclear whether this is fixed yet as it would require a terminal software upgrade to read the IAD and use CDA to protect the IAD, alternatively it would require the issuer to detect a signature verified transaction at their end and decline if it were unexpected.
Chip and signature mode can't be removed either. It is still necessary, as not everyone can use a pin, nor is it feasible to get pins under certain circumstances. Anyway you can find a summary of all these at cambridge's site.
Typical politician showing how ill informed he is. Blackberry Messenger and mobile phones were the tools used to organise this, not Facebook and twitter etc. If Blackberry and the phone companies had just introduced a random lag of 10 minutes + 0 to 15 mins to the messages it would have gone a long way to neutralising it as an organising tool without complete shutdown.
enforced debt incurred against the electorates wishes
And this is your problem ^^. The problem is it wasn't incurred against the electorates wishes, they didn't want to have their taxes raised and they didn't want to lose state benefits or services. The electorate didn't care where the money came from, they just didn't want it coming out of their pockets today. Now your average politician being the kind of creature he is in this situation will try and please as large a percentage of the electorate as possible. What to do? Answer is carry on spending, don't cut much (except things they symbolically opposed) and sweep it under the mat by creating debt. You can claim it was against the electorates wishes but it really doesn't wash, there was too much apathy and ignorance until it had already gotten to be a huge problem that couldn't be fixed with solutions that do not inflict political pain.
campaign promises include defaulting
This is a problem for a far more interesting reason, guess who owns America's debt? Is it all owned by Johnny Foreigner who we can stiff? Not exactly, look at http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/index.html under "ownership of federal securities". A lot is owned by China yes, and believe me they will go nuts and do nasty things to you (possibly including proxy wars against american interests for natural resources) if it hurts their economy. But by that point your default will have done in your own economy because states, cities, municipalities and their pension funds own a massive proportion of this debt.
Usually if a door opens out it will have pins that extend out of the door into the frame when you lock it. Thus the hinges are only there to be able to open it, not for security.
Given that the patent has expired, and the state of software licenses on sample implementations have moved on a lot since the 90's ask the author. Just write him an email or snail mail asking if he'd be willing to license it under a more modern license. Modified BSD, LGPL, GPL or Creative Commons etc which would protect him and you. You'd be surprised how often that works, mainly because most authors hate to see a bit of code go to waste and it's nice to know something you wrote so long ago can be of use.
Work for hire only applies if there is an employee employer relationship (at least in the UK). In the case of work under contract (even verbal) the copyright for a work vests in the contractor, not the person who hired them. If you employ a contractor to build something, you have to get an explicit transfer of copyright. In this case copyright is irrelevant anyway because it was ruled a "design" rather than a copyright. Design rights expire after 15 years, so who owned them is moot.
Why shouldn't the scanner have a full copyright... on the particular scanned work? If you don't want to pay his price for it go scan your own.
Why shouldn't the scanner have a full copyright... on the particular scanned work? Easy, because he didn't exercise any creativity in making it. He did not meet the justification that society gave when we created the compromise that is copyright, therefore he should not derive full benefit from it. However what he does may be a service for which a limited form of recognition might be considered appropriate. Slavish adherence to the old idea that anything created gets immediate full copyright is disingenuous, we need to rethink the compromise in a way that is appropriate for an era where making an exact copy of something is as easy as pushing a button.
Transformative work such as translation or scanning on to new medium, whilst laudable should not gain a full new copyright but one in proportion to the effort. Translation is hard and often requires creative thought to translate cultural idioms, so maybe 20-30 years benefit to reflect that there was effort, making it worthwhile but reflecting that it not an original work. Format shifting on the other hand isn't amazingly hard nor creative, and can often be automated therefore the gain should be made from distribution and it shouldn't gain much if any additional protection (perhaps 5 years if it is from medium classified by a national archivist as endangered).
There are significant physiological differences between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. Just because two species can interbreed does not mean they are the same species.
No it's not definitive, but it's one of the major things we look for. Not just can interbreed but whether frequent breeding occurs between them without human intervention. In this case however, human intervention is kinda a given though. Actually I'm not alone in my skeptism, there are other scientists who refer to them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of Homo sapiens rather than separate. The ultimate proof will be in these genetic comparisions between us, and neanderthals but getting that data is tricky as can be and there are still some who think this research is too contaminated to be of any use.
What allows for inter breeding is that the entire Homo genus has the same number of chromosomes. That is it.
Number of chromosomes helps but once again not the major factor in successful breeding, rather it's the amount of similarity in the genome (something like 99.5% according to Noonan et al. 2006). Thus why horses, zebras and donkeys can breed despite having different numbers of chromosomes.
Either way I'm still keeping an open mind on this one.
One of the problems here in saying whether Neanderthal's are a different species to Homo Sapiens is that the word species is poorly defined. It's actually been a problem since Darwin's day, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem gives an idea of how long we've been arguing this. Personally if I feel if they were routinely successfully breeding with homo sapiens then calling them a separate species may be a bit of a stretch.
Sorry I wasn't implying you were saying Wyoming was doing masses of business with New York, I was merely reusing the example. I see what you're saying, but I disagree with your assessment of the implications.
Firstly, the money doesn't go through a Federal Bureaucracy, only the actual implementing law and a minimal amount of coordinating force should be Federal. Local collection, and enforcement have always been the basis of these kind of coordinated tax. A simple example is the UK's council tax (a property tax). This tax is a national level law, but collection, enforcement and rate setting is done solely by municipalities and they have an incentive to do it right because it goes straight to their budgets, it's not laundered through the treasury. Similarly VAT has one Europe-wide accord which sets out the framework but enforcement, rate setting and revenue is done on a national level.
Secondly, because you can allow a variation in rate the effect on states with high property taxes will be minimal. So why is a little change a bad thing? States still get to set their own rates. (And besides California's property tax system could do with looking at, it's a mess and no one will fix it because it's a political third rail)
Finally I challenge you to come up with a better solution? Use tax isn't working and in itself is barely worth the transaction fees the banks charge for receiving so many small payments. At least with a coordinated system you could actually get the taxes and settle them in bulk.
A federal tax would go a long way to fixing the deficit however.
You missed my point I think. I was aiming for a federally managed tax, administered locally by the states and distributed to them. Filching the revenue for the fed is robbing Peter to pay Paul. You'd get rid of one deficit and create another.
Then you're also asking all of those states, counties, and cities to completely re-write their tax codes and even re-charter their constitutions because of differences in how they raise state revenues (some have no sales taxes, and opt for higher property or income taxes instead... or some simply have different mixes of those things). You're talking about telling a state like Wyoming that it now must consider its revenue strategy in the same way that New York does. Which is culturally, geographically, seasonally, and otherwise crazy talk.
Why is it crazy talk? If a state like Wyoming is now doing massive amounts of business with a state like New York something's got to give. Those tax codes and revenue methods were decided at a time when interstate commerce was a lot less common than it is now. Back in the day it was large companies doing a small number of bulk transactions between states. Now you have literally millions of small business to consumer transactions taking place across state lines and you expect just building on the old laws to work? It's the difference between coding for a massive CPU based machine with a maximum of 6 threads executing in parallel and coding for a GPU number cruncher with thousands or even millions of threads in parallel. You have to reduce the original laws down to the ideas behind them and rebuild, it's painful but it should do you for another 100 years.
Exactly. The United States of America was completely built around the concept of having power concentrated from one primary location, out to the spokes of the rest of the empire. Oh wait, it wasn't.
Also, what are you going to do about the states that don't have sales tax?
Also, you're really going to hold the europe/the eurpean union up as an example of economic sanity?
Ok clever clogs, you've slated my answer but you've failed to tell me your solution? Because at the moment the USA is heading to a situation where legislative inactivity has meant that it's going to be down to judges to make up the law and we all know that's exactly what the founding fathers had that in mind. You know as well as I do that "use tax" is a pointless exercise, so come up with a better solution?
With regard to states that don't have a sales tax, you allow variation up to 10%. VAT in Europe runs from 15% to 25%, just run yours from 0-10%.
In terms of business regulation Europe is quite sane, though like everywhere there are some absurdities. I can set up business in one European Country and sell to anywhere in Europe. I charge VAT at the local rate, meet European wide consumer safety standards and I don't have to worry about any local business laws because there is usually a Europe-wide standard which has harmonised them. As much as Europeans knock Europe we hang together because the alternative is much less sane. Trying to do business across 27 sovereign states without a central coordinating body is expensive otherwise.
P.S. If you were referring to the Euro, you're right it's not sane but that's not Europe wide. Quite a few countries recognised that yoking a goat with a bull was a bad idea in the first place.
The thing is, they wouldn't replace state sales taxes with a federal sales tax/VAT. You'd get a shiny new federal sales tax, PLUS your existing state/county/local taxes.
This is where you take advantage of federal pre-emption and nuke them otherwise there'd be no point in doing it.
Whilst the Federal government may often be accused of overreaching the powers as defined by the constitution, this is not one of those times. Having many different forms of sales tax made sense when 99% of sales was brick and mortar but it's pretty much unworkable now. And the argument that congress won't agree to it isn't an excuse, if Europe can do it for VAT then the USA can do it for Sales Tax*. Besides I'm pretty sure if someone like Walmart threw their weight behind it with a few choice campaign contributions you could get it through.
* Whilst VAT isn't a sales tax, it is a similar idea.
In short no, Berne only harmonised certain aspects. There are known aberrations and slight differences between various countries copyright laws. For example, fair use is an American doctrine not applicable in the UK. Likewise, the copyright for Peter Pan is permanently vested in Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, but only in the UK. If you tried to cite the Berne convention in a UK court, you'd have a very tough time of it. You could possibly use it as a guide as to what parliament meant when they passed the Copyright Patents and Designs Act but as a standalone document it has no legal force in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Good call, a sales tax would be counted as an Excise. I'd forgotten that one.
Interestingly if you look carefully at that second sentence the uniformity provision doesn't seem to apply to all taxes, but only to Duties, Imposts and Excises. Am I reading that right?
Of course, it's in the nature of the beast. It's not really shocking that a corporation whose purpose of existence is that making of profit would prefer to make more profit rather than less.
Actually, the US constitution requires any tax on interstate commerce to be levied equally. It also prohibits states from taxing purchases made in other states.
It does forbid states from taxing purchases made in other states, but it does not forbid them from collection of those taxes on behalf of the federal government, nor does it forbid the federal government giving them it back. As long as the law is federal, it doesn't matter who actually does the collection.
I'm curious about which provision requires tax to be levied equally? Got any articles on that for me? I know the Minnesota constitution has that provision explicitly, but the federal constitution does not. You could cite the equal protection clause but I suspect if worded carefully it would pass the rational basis test on the grounds that it does not disadvantage out of state business vs in state business.
Amazon doesn't care where the money goes, nor do they really care about the rate. A federal tax could quite easily be collected and kept by the states. The reason they want a federal pre-emption is simply the abundance of rules and regulations that must be obeyed for each different area's individual sales tax. For new enterprise, having to obey one set of rules for collection of sales tax nationwide would represent an amazing saving on accountants bills.
It's not the rate that needs to be uniform, merely the administration and rules. It would be quite possible to have a federal sales tax, with collection outsourced to the states and rate dependant on delivery address. The issue is when every municipality has their own tax and more importantly rules for applying that tax. It's this abundance of differing rules and regulations which make doing business across territories difficult, rates on the other hand can be determined by a simple lookup table.
The other major problem lies with the states that rely on property taxes for their income rather than a sales tax. This is harder to fix but may be doable as long as you allow the rate to vary to 0.
Just was reading http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-lear-iana-timezone-database-04 apparently it looks like Arthur Olson was planning to retire. IETF was planning to take on the custody of the role and host the list? I wonder if this is related?
Either you're trolling or you really do believe you should just let sick people who can't pay rot on the street. The problem of course being that you're forgetting one of the most basic rules of epidemiology, sick people generally tend to make others around them sick. The rich can hoard their money if they like but then it won't stop folks in poverty acting as a reservoir for TB and other similar diseases. So my first point is this, it isn't just their problem, it's YOUR problem.
Sick people are also economically inactive, meaning they're less likely to be able to work to pay for their insurance and treatment. This means they'll often not be treated fully and either not go back to work or produce reduced output. It's a major investment by the state to school someone, and one that is rather spoiled if they go and die on you. This brings me to my second point, either you go the whole hog with your investment in social programs such as free schooling and healthcare or you kill it entirely and have none. The halfway point you're in, is quite a wasted investment.
The reason that despite the United States spending the most per capita on healthcare, they do not have the number 1 life expectancy is complicated but boils down to this, you've got a lot of people dragging the average down and your system is inefficient. The UK pays about 9% of it's GDP into healthcare, you pay 15% and yet people live longer in the UK? One way or another healthcare in the US has to be fixed and part of that fix is legislative unfortunately because the market has failed (and yes this probably includes further tort reform).
I can clone a magstripe card with very cheap off the shelf hardware, and use that card whereever. Cloning a modern (using the updated security software) chip card though, especially one that has the original timing attacks fixed requires serious hardware. That was what chip cards were created to fix, the chip and PIN bit was more of a side-benefit.
The original chip cards were vulnerable to cloning using offline terminals however, most of those particular attacks have been fixed through the shift from Static Data Authentication (SDA) to Dynamic (DDA). The attacks themselves are quite interesting and easy to understand. SDA cards (which are cheaper to manufacture) produced a crypto packet which could not be interpreted by the terminal. This caused a problem with offline terminals which were only periodically connected to the bank and were thus vulnerable to replay attacks. Fortunately though, DDA was made mandatory for all cards issued after 2011 so it shouldn't be a problem in future. (there's also a protocol called CDA which adds still further security)
The other problem was that the part of the packet which distinguished chip and sig transactions from chip and pin ones was in a proprietary card issuer dependant format. This meant a chip and pin card could be fooled into falling back to signing a chip and signature request, by a device in the middle which was passed to the terminal as if it were a chip and pin request. The terminal unable to tell the difference, thought the correct pin was entered. It's unclear whether this is fixed yet as it would require a terminal software upgrade to read the IAD and use CDA to protect the IAD, alternatively it would require the issuer to detect a signature verified transaction at their end and decline if it were unexpected.
Chip and signature mode can't be removed either. It is still necessary, as not everyone can use a pin, nor is it feasible to get pins under certain circumstances. Anyway you can find a summary of all these at cambridge's site.
Typical politician showing how ill informed he is. Blackberry Messenger and mobile phones were the tools used to organise this, not Facebook and twitter etc. If Blackberry and the phone companies had just introduced a random lag of 10 minutes + 0 to 15 mins to the messages it would have gone a long way to neutralising it as an organising tool without complete shutdown.
enforced debt incurred against the electorates wishes
And this is your problem ^^. The problem is it wasn't incurred against the electorates wishes, they didn't want to have their taxes raised and they didn't want to lose state benefits or services. The electorate didn't care where the money came from, they just didn't want it coming out of their pockets today. Now your average politician being the kind of creature he is in this situation will try and please as large a percentage of the electorate as possible. What to do? Answer is carry on spending, don't cut much (except things they symbolically opposed) and sweep it under the mat by creating debt. You can claim it was against the electorates wishes but it really doesn't wash, there was too much apathy and ignorance until it had already gotten to be a huge problem that couldn't be fixed with solutions that do not inflict political pain.
campaign promises include defaulting
This is a problem for a far more interesting reason, guess who owns America's debt? Is it all owned by Johnny Foreigner who we can stiff? Not exactly, look at http://www.fms.treas.gov/bulletin/index.html under "ownership of federal securities". A lot is owned by China yes, and believe me they will go nuts and do nasty things to you (possibly including proxy wars against american interests for natural resources) if it hurts their economy. But by that point your default will have done in your own economy because states, cities, municipalities and their pension funds own a massive proportion of this debt.
Usually if a door opens out it will have pins that extend out of the door into the frame when you lock it. Thus the hinges are only there to be able to open it, not for security.
Given that the patent has expired, and the state of software licenses on sample implementations have moved on a lot since the 90's ask the author. Just write him an email or snail mail asking if he'd be willing to license it under a more modern license. Modified BSD, LGPL, GPL or Creative Commons etc which would protect him and you. You'd be surprised how often that works, mainly because most authors hate to see a bit of code go to waste and it's nice to know something you wrote so long ago can be of use.
Work for hire only applies if there is an employee employer relationship (at least in the UK). In the case of work under contract (even verbal) the copyright for a work vests in the contractor, not the person who hired them. If you employ a contractor to build something, you have to get an explicit transfer of copyright. In this case copyright is irrelevant anyway because it was ruled a "design" rather than a copyright. Design rights expire after 15 years, so who owned them is moot.
Why shouldn't the scanner have a full copyright... on the particular scanned work? If you don't want to pay his price for it go scan your own.
Why shouldn't the scanner have a full copyright... on the particular scanned work? Easy, because he didn't exercise any creativity in making it. He did not meet the justification that society gave when we created the compromise that is copyright, therefore he should not derive full benefit from it. However what he does may be a service for which a limited form of recognition might be considered appropriate. Slavish adherence to the old idea that anything created gets immediate full copyright is disingenuous, we need to rethink the compromise in a way that is appropriate for an era where making an exact copy of something is as easy as pushing a button.
Transformative work such as translation or scanning on to new medium, whilst laudable should not gain a full new copyright but one in proportion to the effort. Translation is hard and often requires creative thought to translate cultural idioms, so maybe 20-30 years benefit to reflect that there was effort, making it worthwhile but reflecting that it not an original work. Format shifting on the other hand isn't amazingly hard nor creative, and can often be automated therefore the gain should be made from distribution and it shouldn't gain much if any additional protection (perhaps 5 years if it is from medium classified by a national archivist as endangered).
There are significant physiological differences between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens. Just because two species can interbreed does not mean they are the same species.
No it's not definitive, but it's one of the major things we look for. Not just can interbreed but whether frequent breeding occurs between them without human intervention. In this case however, human intervention is kinda a given though. Actually I'm not alone in my skeptism, there are other scientists who refer to them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of Homo sapiens rather than separate. The ultimate proof will be in these genetic comparisions between us, and neanderthals but getting that data is tricky as can be and there are still some who think this research is too contaminated to be of any use.
What allows for inter breeding is that the entire Homo genus has the same number of chromosomes. That is it.
Number of chromosomes helps but once again not the major factor in successful breeding, rather it's the amount of similarity in the genome (something like 99.5% according to Noonan et al. 2006). Thus why horses, zebras and donkeys can breed despite having different numbers of chromosomes.
Either way I'm still keeping an open mind on this one.
One of the problems here in saying whether Neanderthal's are a different species to Homo Sapiens is that the word species is poorly defined. It's actually been a problem since Darwin's day, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem gives an idea of how long we've been arguing this. Personally if I feel if they were routinely successfully breeding with homo sapiens then calling them a separate species may be a bit of a stretch.
Sorry I wasn't implying you were saying Wyoming was doing masses of business with New York, I was merely reusing the example. I see what you're saying, but I disagree with your assessment of the implications.
Firstly, the money doesn't go through a Federal Bureaucracy, only the actual implementing law and a minimal amount of coordinating force should be Federal. Local collection, and enforcement have always been the basis of these kind of coordinated tax. A simple example is the UK's council tax (a property tax). This tax is a national level law, but collection, enforcement and rate setting is done solely by municipalities and they have an incentive to do it right because it goes straight to their budgets, it's not laundered through the treasury. Similarly VAT has one Europe-wide accord which sets out the framework but enforcement, rate setting and revenue is done on a national level.
Secondly, because you can allow a variation in rate the effect on states with high property taxes will be minimal. So why is a little change a bad thing? States still get to set their own rates. (And besides California's property tax system could do with looking at, it's a mess and no one will fix it because it's a political third rail)
Finally I challenge you to come up with a better solution? Use tax isn't working and in itself is barely worth the transaction fees the banks charge for receiving so many small payments. At least with a coordinated system you could actually get the taxes and settle them in bulk.
A federal tax would go a long way to fixing the deficit however.
You missed my point I think. I was aiming for a federally managed tax, administered locally by the states and distributed to them. Filching the revenue for the fed is robbing Peter to pay Paul. You'd get rid of one deficit and create another.
Then you're also asking all of those states, counties, and cities to completely re-write their tax codes and even re-charter their constitutions because of differences in how they raise state revenues (some have no sales taxes, and opt for higher property or income taxes instead ... or some simply have different mixes of those things). You're talking about telling a state like Wyoming that it now must consider its revenue strategy in the same way that New York does. Which is culturally, geographically, seasonally, and otherwise crazy talk.
Why is it crazy talk? If a state like Wyoming is now doing massive amounts of business with a state like New York something's got to give. Those tax codes and revenue methods were decided at a time when interstate commerce was a lot less common than it is now. Back in the day it was large companies doing a small number of bulk transactions between states. Now you have literally millions of small business to consumer transactions taking place across state lines and you expect just building on the old laws to work? It's the difference between coding for a massive CPU based machine with a maximum of 6 threads executing in parallel and coding for a GPU number cruncher with thousands or even millions of threads in parallel. You have to reduce the original laws down to the ideas behind them and rebuild, it's painful but it should do you for another 100 years.
Exactly. The United States of America was completely built around the concept of having power concentrated from one primary location, out to the spokes of the rest of the empire. Oh wait, it wasn't.
Also, what are you going to do about the states that don't have sales tax?
Also, you're really going to hold the europe/the eurpean union up as an example of economic sanity?
Ok clever clogs, you've slated my answer but you've failed to tell me your solution? Because at the moment the USA is heading to a situation where legislative inactivity has meant that it's going to be down to judges to make up the law and we all know that's exactly what the founding fathers had that in mind. You know as well as I do that "use tax" is a pointless exercise, so come up with a better solution?
With regard to states that don't have a sales tax, you allow variation up to 10%. VAT in Europe runs from 15% to 25%, just run yours from 0-10%.
In terms of business regulation Europe is quite sane, though like everywhere there are some absurdities. I can set up business in one European Country and sell to anywhere in Europe. I charge VAT at the local rate, meet European wide consumer safety standards and I don't have to worry about any local business laws because there is usually a Europe-wide standard which has harmonised them. As much as Europeans knock Europe we hang together because the alternative is much less sane. Trying to do business across 27 sovereign states without a central coordinating body is expensive otherwise.
P.S. If you were referring to the Euro, you're right it's not sane but that's not Europe wide. Quite a few countries recognised that yoking a goat with a bull was a bad idea in the first place.
The thing is, they wouldn't replace state sales taxes with a federal sales tax/VAT. You'd get a shiny new federal sales tax, PLUS your existing state/county/local taxes.
This is where you take advantage of federal pre-emption and nuke them otherwise there'd be no point in doing it.
Whilst the Federal government may often be accused of overreaching the powers as defined by the constitution, this is not one of those times. Having many different forms of sales tax made sense when 99% of sales was brick and mortar but it's pretty much unworkable now. And the argument that congress won't agree to it isn't an excuse, if Europe can do it for VAT then the USA can do it for Sales Tax*. Besides I'm pretty sure if someone like Walmart threw their weight behind it with a few choice campaign contributions you could get it through. * Whilst VAT isn't a sales tax, it is a similar idea.
In short no, Berne only harmonised certain aspects. There are known aberrations and slight differences between various countries copyright laws. For example, fair use is an American doctrine not applicable in the UK. Likewise, the copyright for Peter Pan is permanently vested in Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, but only in the UK. If you tried to cite the Berne convention in a UK court, you'd have a very tough time of it. You could possibly use it as a guide as to what parliament meant when they passed the Copyright Patents and Designs Act but as a standalone document it has no legal force in the UK.
Well, I've seen worse in other operating systems.
Not any modern mainstream OS's.
Windows ME, Vista's UAC. Bad UI design happens and it happens mainstream.