From the linked answer: "Type a series of alphanumeric characters via your physical or digital keyboard"
So let me rephrase: What keywords in Google Search led you, and would lead others in a similar situation, to TaxCloud? (Reminder: These search terms have to be written from the starting point of not knowing that TaxCloud exists.) I read the top 20 Google Search results for the query interstate sales tax calculation, and none of them led to TaxCloud. In addition, none of the top 20 results appear to have been updated to reflect this Supreme Court ruling.
It appears DogDude's position is "TaxCloud brings tax compliance for domestic interstate commerce below the complexity threshold that a small business can reasonably handle, but foreign commerce remains above that threshold."
If you sell 5,000 distinct products to 5,000 jurisdictions, how much time does it take you to translate tax codes and product data into a machine-readable form so that your computer can run through the 25 million (product, jurisdiction) tuples?
The reality after this ruling is that shipping domestically to another U.S. state has become almost as overly complicated as shipping internationally. Thus, if it was too complicated to ship internationally before this ruling, it is likely to have become too complicated to ship interstate after this ruling, and for analogous reasons.
Why would a business with less than a million dollars of annual (revenue?) be selling to every city in the world? That doesn't sound viable.
The way I phrase the answer to this question to be most useful depends on your answer to the following question: To how many distinct cities does your business ship over the course of a year?
You realize that this is a problem whose solution has existed for decades, right? Retailers and consumer sales systems (catalog, phone, online, etc.) with nexus in various cities have had this requirement for as long as I've been building systems (early 80's).
The difference is that this ruling gives an online seller the equivalent of nexus in every single state, county, city, and sub-city jurisdiction to which the seller offers to ship.
If you sell 5,000 distinct products to 5,000 jurisdictions, how much time does it take you to run through the 25 million (product, jurisdiction) tuples?
Probably a few man hours. But if you've got 5000 items that you sell to 5000 jurisdictions, the time should be negligible. It's certainly not impossible.
I'm confused. Through what process does one blow through these 25 million combinations in "a few man hours"? Please help the rest of us figure it out so that the rest of us can stop whining about it.
And, why not just use a sales tax service, like TaxCloud to take care of it all for you for $10/month?
Because TaxCloud hasn't been doing enough to make the existence of its service known to the public.
Huh?
A business whose officials do not know that TaxCloud exists cannot use TaxCloud. Through what means has TaxCloud been informing businesses that it exists?
Why do you think that keeping lists of taxable items and jurisdictions is such a difficult task?
If you sell 5,000 distinct products to 5,000 jurisdictions, how much time does it take you to run through the 25 million (product, jurisdiction) tuples?
And, why not just use a sales tax service, like TaxCloud to take care of it all for you for $10/month?
Because TaxCloud hasn't been doing enough to make the existence of its service known to the public.
Does your "small brick-and-mortar and ecommerce business" ship internationally? If so, what goods are taxable when sold to a customer in (say) Condom-en-Armagnac, Gers, France?
What mechanism do you propose to make it practical for a business with less than a million dollars of annual turnover to calculate and remit the correct sales or use tax for every city in the world?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. These particular laptop models were sold with Windows 8 and thus shipped on or after 2012, well within the 21st century.
No, I didn't know that. In the past, several laptops such as the ASUS T100TA and X205TA have had serious problems with X11/Linux. Basic hardware features lacked working drivers, such as Wi-Fi, audio, backlight brightness, and suspend. (Source; check its revision history)
Windows has IFS interface allowing new files systems to be plugged in without permission.
In what way? I thought developing to the IFS interface, or any other Windows kernel-level interface for that matter, required paid permission from one of the Extended Validation (EV) code signing certificate authorities trusted by Microsoft. An ordinary $15 open source developer certificate from Certum won't work; it has to be specifically EV for Windows 10 (source), and last I checked, EV certificates were available only to a corporation or LLC, not an individual developer.
Or are they basing it on number of downloads vs number of opt-ins?
There are ways to count installations. Install image downloads aren't one of them given how easy it is to install multiple machines through sneakernet or BitTorrent. A better way involves estimating how many people are running sudo apt update (or the automatic counterpart) to obtain the latest package index from default repositories.
My first guess is that OP doesn't need to hibernate his PC because normal sleep is good enough to get the user's computer to the next power outlet (if a laptop) or past a brief power outage (if a desktop on a UPS). In fact, Ubuntu disables hibernate by default in PolicyKit for a couple reasons. One is that hardware support is so spotty. Another is that hibernating with a read-write mounted file system that other systems can write in the meantime can cause data corruption. This could be removable media or a shared partition on a dual-boot system.
Besides, I thought the swap space should be separate from hibernation space in case the committed memory at hibernation time exceeds the size of the swap file. This can be the case if (say) you have 8 GB of RAM and 12 GB of swap, but you have 14 GB of committed memory.
I asked because now I'm no longer sure as to whether eyeball minutes, as I believed before, or traffic volume, as Sandvine's survey uses, is a more honest metric.
My first guess is that Canonical has some way of estimating the number of users who consent to security updates from its repository but do not consent to the Hardware/Software Survey.
Slashdot Mirror
For smaller shops, the price of "real programmers" exceeds the price of 30% more VPSes.
I do NOT expect locally installed and contained software and operating systems to "call home".
Then how do you expect that the publisher of security updates for your operating system notify you when said updates are available?
From the linked answer: "Type a series of alphanumeric characters via your physical or digital keyboard"
So let me rephrase: What keywords in Google Search led you, and would lead others in a similar situation, to TaxCloud? (Reminder: These search terms have to be written from the starting point of not knowing that TaxCloud exists.) I read the top 20 Google Search results for the query interstate sales tax calculation, and none of them led to TaxCloud. In addition, none of the top 20 results appear to have been updated to reflect this Supreme Court ruling.
It appears DogDude's position is "TaxCloud brings tax compliance for domestic interstate commerce below the complexity threshold that a small business can reasonably handle, but foreign commerce remains above that threshold."
Through what means did you "figure it out"? In particular, through what means did you discover TaxCloud?
If you sell 5,000 distinct products to 5,000 jurisdictions, how much time does it take you to translate tax codes and product data into a machine-readable form so that your computer can run through the 25 million (product, jurisdiction) tuples?
The reality after this ruling is that shipping domestically to another U.S. state has become almost as overly complicated as shipping internationally. Thus, if it was too complicated to ship internationally before this ruling, it is likely to have become too complicated to ship interstate after this ruling, and for analogous reasons.
Why would a business with less than a million dollars of annual (revenue?) be selling to every city in the world? That doesn't sound viable.
The way I phrase the answer to this question to be most useful depends on your answer to the following question: To how many distinct cities does your business ship over the course of a year?
You realize that this is a problem whose solution has existed for decades, right? Retailers and consumer sales systems (catalog, phone, online, etc.) with nexus in various cities have had this requirement for as long as I've been building systems (early 80's).
The difference is that this ruling gives an online seller the equivalent of nexus in every single state, county, city, and sub-city jurisdiction to which the seller offers to ship.
If you sell 5,000 distinct products to 5,000 jurisdictions, how much time does it take you to run through the 25 million (product, jurisdiction) tuples?
Probably a few man hours. But if you've got 5000 items that you sell to 5000 jurisdictions, the time should be negligible. It's certainly not impossible.
I'm confused. Through what process does one blow through these 25 million combinations in "a few man hours"? Please help the rest of us figure it out so that the rest of us can stop whining about it.
And, why not just use a sales tax service, like TaxCloud to take care of it all for you for $10/month?
Because TaxCloud hasn't been doing enough to make the existence of its service known to the public.
Huh?
A business whose officials do not know that TaxCloud exists cannot use TaxCloud. Through what means has TaxCloud been informing businesses that it exists?
Why do you think that keeping lists of taxable items and jurisdictions is such a difficult task?
If you sell 5,000 distinct products to 5,000 jurisdictions, how much time does it take you to run through the 25 million (product, jurisdiction) tuples?
And, why not just use a sales tax service, like TaxCloud to take care of it all for you for $10/month?
Because TaxCloud hasn't been doing enough to make the existence of its service known to the public.
To how many taxing bodies does your business remit sales tax annually?
Does your "small brick-and-mortar and ecommerce business" ship internationally? If so, what goods are taxable when sold to a customer in (say) Condom-en-Armagnac, Gers, France?
In the case of resale of used goods, I thought the tax was already paid when the product was sold new.
Large firms also suffer from labor shortages
I disagree. A lot of people go into this sort of self-employment because several employers in a row have "gone with another candidate."
What mechanism do you propose to make it practical for a business with less than a million dollars of annual turnover to calculate and remit the correct sales or use tax for every city in the world?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. These particular laptop models were sold with Windows 8 and thus shipped on or after 2012, well within the 21st century.
No, I didn't know that. In the past, several laptops such as the ASUS T100TA and X205TA have had serious problems with X11/Linux. Basic hardware features lacked working drivers, such as Wi-Fi, audio, backlight brightness, and suspend. (Source; check its revision history)
get some years of field experience working at a game company
Not every city has game companies. How does one get the initial money to survive between moving from a city without to a city with and finding a job?
Windows has IFS interface allowing new files systems to be plugged in without permission.
In what way? I thought developing to the IFS interface, or any other Windows kernel-level interface for that matter, required paid permission from one of the Extended Validation (EV) code signing certificate authorities trusted by Microsoft. An ordinary $15 open source developer certificate from Certum won't work; it has to be specifically EV for Windows 10 (source), and last I checked, EV certificates were available only to a corporation or LLC, not an individual developer.
Does this include promoting GNU/Linux and bashing "M$"? And whatever happened to DeadZero anyway?
Or are they basing it on number of downloads vs number of opt-ins?
There are ways to count installations. Install image downloads aren't one of them given how easy it is to install multiple machines through sneakernet or BitTorrent. A better way involves estimating how many people are running sudo apt update (or the automatic counterpart) to obtain the latest package index from default repositories.
My first guess is that OP doesn't need to hibernate his PC because normal sleep is good enough to get the user's computer to the next power outlet (if a laptop) or past a brief power outage (if a desktop on a UPS). In fact, Ubuntu disables hibernate by default in PolicyKit for a couple reasons. One is that hardware support is so spotty. Another is that hibernating with a read-write mounted file system that other systems can write in the meantime can cause data corruption. This could be removable media or a shared partition on a dual-boot system.
Besides, I thought the swap space should be separate from hibernation space in case the committed memory at hibernation time exceeds the size of the swap file. This can be the case if (say) you have 8 GB of RAM and 12 GB of swap, but you have 14 GB of committed memory.
I asked because now I'm no longer sure as to whether eyeball minutes, as I believed before, or traffic volume, as Sandvine's survey uses, is a more honest metric.
My first guess is that Canonical has some way of estimating the number of users who consent to security updates from its repository but do not consent to the Hardware/Software Survey.