YEAH! And make it legal for citizens to own their own nukes!... how deadly can you become before I am being negligent to my neighbors and children by letting you walk around?
Ah, the old "citizens with nukes" canard. Look: you can't even posses such a thing (outside of having the skills, resources, physical space, and ability to secure it from theft that requires, essentially, a major government's dedication and funds) without, pretty much by definition, being threateningly reckless. Having a repeating rifle in your gun safe at home is a benign thing. Having a 3000-pound passenger car in your garage at home is a benign thing. Using either object recklessly is a different matter. But having a nuke in your gun safe at home is, on the face of it, reckless. Having fertilizer and deisel fuel at home is a benign thing (if you have a decent size garden or small farm), but keeping them stored in a barrel, mixed together, is completely reckless (unless it's a good ways away from any neighbor's property) - even if, as farmers do, they sometimes use it in just that way as an explosive to blow out stumps and rocks.
have to decide the maximum lethality weapon we trust our citizenry with... do you feel it is responsible for a government to give that type of power to it's citizens?
You're giving yourself away, here. We can argue specifics about how a given material, or weapon can be considered threatening by its very nature... but the underlying issue here is that you think rights come from the government. That's exactly, precisely wrong. Rights simply are. Under very specific circumstances (see our country's founding documents) we (the people) allow the government (our employess) to restrict, or enable the states to punish, some acts. Of course, that has gotten pretty much out of hand. But prior restraint is a bad, bad thing, and one of the things the constitution is built to prevent. The guy down the street with the vat of anthrax or the homebrew (or Genuine Discount Russian) nuke, though, is exhibiting behavior not unlike waving a knife in your face. I'd feel comfortable, sitting on a jury, making the distinction between that behavior, and someone with a repeating rifle in their safe.
Of course, nothing we're talking about, in real life, comes even close to the damage that's done with automobiles. Just the other day we had a guy (deliberately, apparently!) make, with one twitch of his wrist, his car leave the main road and dive into a crowd on a sidewalk in Las Vegas. Laws of physics win: death and injury result. Or, he could have done the same thing with a back seat full of things he got at the garden store, and deliberately killed many, many people. If you're interested in listing out the things the government should "let" people do, you'd better start by removing their ability to hurtle multi-ton vehicles at high speeds right past your family and mine. Unless, of course, you're already certain that you know whether or not each driver is in the mood to watch a bunch of people die at any given moment. Because they have the power, and you have to trust them. And, of course, thousands and thousands of people find that trust to have been misplaced, at the expense of their lives, every year. Compare that to the number of people killed by a repeating rifle, and re-evaluate your position.
Hey, I'm an extreme left winger and I agree with you 100%.
Then we need another label for you!
We're not all alike over here in liberal land!
No more than us couldn't-vote-for-Kerry types are all the same over here. It's tough, being a bit of an international relations hawk, a fiscal conservative, a domestic social libertarian, a die-hard capitalist, and friend (or relative!) to many a loony lefty. Of course I'm sure my leftier friends say that I'm their crazy republo-libertarian friend with the oddly good taste in French wine. You know, the one they want around if they ever really need a gun. In the meantime, guns are bad! It's pretty interesting how often you can catch people drifting away from what their gut/reason tells them they should do, politically, about one thing just because they're already signed on, politically, with a person/party/idealogy because of some other thing.
For example, people who are for abortion rights often vote left, even though they love to go pheasant hunting, and they've just voted for the person that thinks they're evil for owning a shotgun. Or, the person who is against abortion rights, and votes that way, but just ended up voting for the person who would rather not allow stem cell research, which might save a sick baby. On the other hand, if we all had candidates that perfectly reflected our own little recipe, we'd never end up with representation or executive leadership that got more than a few percent of the overall vote (in otherwords, we'd get modern Germany). It's awkward! Voting has become a less-of-several-evils issue, no question. So, I tend to balance that by handling local, state, and federal voting in slightly different ways. More importantly, I try to educate more lefties about matters of personal accountability, and more righties about how religion is not science, etc. It's lonely here in the middle, with my shotgun, my science, my art, my dogs, and all three of my like-minded friends! Oh, and of course, everyone on slashdot that loves to hate me... that will keep anyone warm through a long winter's night.
When I said that companies don't help people, I meant that they generally don't help people unless they're helping themselves by doing it.
So... what's not to like? Everyone that works for that company gets the benefit of a thriving company to work for, and the people that purchase or use what that company produces benefit. I guess your tone just sounded negative.
Halo is the perfect example of how Microsoft can buy a great product and put it's name on it like they had crap to do with the development.
Or, like Disney with a Pixar film. Or American Airlines with a Boeing aircraft. People who put a product out in front of that product's consumers/users generally have their name associated with it. But I suppose you're the sort that never reads the credits, and assumes that no one else does, either. Do you really think that MS's cash, audience, game platform, etc., has nothing to do with the success of the game? I think Pixar's work is fantastic... but I know that the success of say, the Toy Story franchise, is at least partly owed to Disney's professional marketing teams - even though they didn't color a single pixel. Don't pretend that marketing isn't important. Great games with no marketing frequently fail. Mediocre games with lots of marketing often get results. But great games with great marketing really attract an audience, and that's why it's done. Disney coughed up a lot of money into marketing and distribution in its partnership with Pixar, just like MS does with the games they front. Of course, things with Pixar/Disney have gotten a little rough lately. That will definitely be too bad for Disney, since only Pixar can do what Pixar does.
Come on, admit it. You're worried that Jackson will make a very cool (or at least, successful) movie, and that MS will get a little street cred buff as a result of having been involved with the product's successfully large audience.
Because, of course, there are no "people" working for Intel, investing in Intel, driving Intel's marketing studies, or purchasing their products. And there are no people working for AMD or anyone else that competes with them. *sigh*
Companies like Intel don't exist to "help" people in the charity sense - they exist to provide customers (the market) what they want, and to be competitive doing so. If they can't do that profitably, they'll cease to exist.
You sound like one of those right-wing gun nuts, opposed to the smart-gun technology which can save lives.
I think you'll find that most of us gun "nuts" are not at all opposed to technology, not even that technology. What we're opposed to is the mandatory use of the technology. In other words, I'd like to know that my wife, or a friend of mine, can pick up my gun and use it with needing to cut off my fingers first, or having the Magic Bracelet on. For that matter, I'd like to be able to pick up my own gun and use it with gloves on, or whether or not my Magic Bracelet's batteries work in sub-zero weather.
I can think of some occasions where I'd like to know that only I could use my gun. But more importantly, I can think of endless circumstances when I'd want the choice to not rely on such technology. Completely aside from the fact that such tech could be highly unreliable under rough circumstances, it's the principle of the thing. And we already have trigger locks, gun safes, parents, and brains to prevent misuse. You know, the same brains that parents use to talk their kids through not killing themselves by drinking drain cleaner or driving the family car off a cliff.
You'd think, for as much as the left wing talks about choice and freedom, and bitches about the Bush administration and the Patriot Act, that the left would be the very first group to stand up and keep the government from forcing loopy personal tech into use on a simple metal tool. The murders in my county this month have been by gang members with knives. I suppose the cure for that is Smart Knife Technology(tm)?
Mandatory Smart Gun tech isn't any more appropriate than Smart Lawn Mower tech would be in really saving lives. It will, though, be a shining monument to government control in place of personal accountability. Where were the high number of gun deaths back when you could mail-order a gun from Sears and have it shipped to your house? What's changed since then... then lethality of guns, or the culture? Fix the no-consequences culture, and leave the machetes, knives, baseball bats, guns, flammable liquids, garden fertilizer, and family cars out of the personal behavior regulation equation.
He was impeached for lying about whether or not he had sex with Monica. How was that EVER the country's business? Seriously.
Well, since you're being serious. Do you remember the context? An employee of the state government that Clinton was running at the time was escorted by state police to his hotel room, where she was greeted by the governor, in his boxer shorts. She felt a little pressure, faced with her boss, as you can imagine. The question of whether or not, in the course of her raising (yes, with the encouragement of people annoyed by his other seemingly shady doings) the issue of what anyone would consider sexual harrassment and what would appear to be a lot of lying about, was certainly compounded by his blatant lying about his further conduct with another employee in the Oval Office. It's not the sex, per se, it's being at the top of the executive food chain in both the state and federal government with obvious signs of using those positions in questionable ways with employees, and having that get completely tangled up in the obvious stonewalling about the Whitewater mess (you'll recall the withholding of all sorts of subpeonaed legal documents, the multiple convictions of associates at the time, and so on).
If he was the CEO of a company, being investigated for questionable financial dealings, clearly avoiding delivering records that show financial involvement, and in the course of that inquiry, a former employee comes up says, "yes, he's a lying snake," what then? How about if a judicial panel tells the investigating attorney that he also must look into those allegations of contempt of court? If this happened under any other cirumstances, everyone would be applauding the court-time of an obviously slippery person getting caught in his own (amazingly petty) nonsense. It wouldn't matter much, except that he's President Of the Freakin' United States! Come on, now! The way he treats his subordinates, especially in the middle of an indepent counsel's investigations of some very shifty-looking get-rich-quick schemes that saw other associates get felony convictions, does matter. The fact that he was called up in front of a judge to testify about whether he was hiding even more about his relationships and uses of his executive horsepower - and then contemptuosly looked the judge in the eye and lied again (for which she fined him, and for which he was disbarred - remember?) says a lot about to what degree he could be counted on to accurately relay the information that was asked about the way he and his wife made money under other circumstances, and to what degree they were involved with various (convicted) wheelers and dealers. He was impeached for lying, all right, but to imply it was just about one witless sexual daliance is pretty disenguous. Why is it the country's business? For the same reason that it was the country's business when Nixon lied about his use of his power and the criminal people he interacted with, covered up, etc.
He's the president of the most important country in the world. He's the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. He's the top law enforcement officer in the country. That he was comfortable telling his staff to go out and back up his lies about Lewinsky so that he could retain some fleeting credibility when it came to the more serious issues revolving around his influence peddling and husband/wife real estate profiteering as the guy running Arkansas - that absolutely makes it the country's business. And of course on his way out the door, we got to see more of the same as he issued absurd pardons to political supporters, including big-league convicted money launderer who, hanging out in Europe, had his family pledge big bucks to Clinton's persona library/foundation... you get the idea. If the whole thing had been about Lewinsky, rather than being about an ugly pattern of slippery dealings that included lying about multiple instances of sexual interactions with subordinates, it would have merely been embarassing.
Thumbdrives are cheap - rebuilding your identity after Katrina or some other Bush "oops" is much more expensive.
Yes, yes, because the people in, say... Gulfport, MS, who watched their homes and businesses get scraped off their foundations by storm surge have Bush to blame? Come on, is that really helpful (even a little)? It definitely doesn't make your other perfectly good ideas seem any more credible. You can do better than that. Unless the sailors who died on the Cole without having mailing databackups to their families were the subject to a "Clinton oops." Or people who lost it all to Hurrican Floyd in South Carolina - Clinton oopses? It's just silly, man - you're usually less gratuitous than that.
I am getting tired of the big internet companies straight up copying each other.
Should we turn to you to tell us which provider of each major online activity is the one we should all use? Even if the differences are incremental and subtle, I'm glad when I get to choose between Yahoo's and Google's take on a particular app/service. I'm also glad that Audi and Toyota and GM and Honda all have different ideas on cars... even though someone else built one once already. Come on - not every service offered is going to be wholly unique, and shouldn't be. It's competition - for eyeballs, brand loyalty, etc. Same reason there are a zillion Linux distros, even though may overlap. Everyone's got their own idea of what would make it just a little bit better.
Speaking of the Windows universe, here. I've found actual for-real clustering (say, of SQL Server) to be workable, but to be a serious (and expensive) pain in the ass. Obviously it depends on the app, but log-shipping and other mechanisms are frequently good enough to prepare for fail-over to another machine, and decent fault-tolerant hardware is good enough insurance for a lot of circumstances.
On the web side of things, clustering (actual clustering) sure hasn't come up much in my world. But I use native NLB with very good results. Depending on how your app handles state/sessions, that native load balancing is pretty much a no-brainer to set up. There are problems, though... your server can (from NLB's perspective) seem perfectly happy - even as your web app is puking in some way, and defeating the whole purpose. So for that, you've got to have something watching the app and then kicking the machine in the ass if it's stupid in that higher layer. This would be, of course, just as true of any load balancer that's out in front of the web servers and doesn't know if a particular app is happy or not.
But if you're trying to spread the pain across a handful of web servers, NLB is a pretty easy solution. Making sure that a SQL server behind those web servers is up though... in real life, unless there's a large budget and good admins doing the care and feeding, the risk of having to rely on a managed fail over to a recently replicated copy of the db on another machine seems to be a pretty popular choice. Considering that you can buy a seriously fault-tolerant server and storage solution for a pittance compared to the long-term admin costs of not screwing up a clustered rig, that's the sweet spot for a lot of users, and the risk is fairly low. Hardware, properly housed in a decent data center, is pretty damn reliable at good price points these days. A somewhat fragile clustering environment, though, is one slightly-drowsy off-shore admin mouseclick away from being REAL hard to unscrew.
Works every time! Or, is this more along the lines of the first-crack-hit-is-free model? Not trolling, here. Why does anyone think that free (as in beer) is ever real, when it comes to humans doing work for you? Something always has to give, and the price always has to be paid... so why do people persist in even using the word "free" in this context? It just rings false, and further distorts the use of that word.
Better to say "no charge for two weeks" or "subsidized" if that's what they really mean - at least it's more realistic, and reduces the cancerous poison of economic magical thinking. At least, in coverage of it, it would keep everyone a little clearer on the subject, and help reduce the cognitive pollution just a tiny bit. I mean, isn't Gentoo for smart, thinking people? Why lead off with a headline that implies something that's just not - on the face of it - really true (or, not the whole picture)? I hate it when banks do it ("Free! But, Not Really[tm]"), and when everyone else does it, too. Oh well.
Check out the new Harvey Danger CD. They are doing just that and bypassing the entire system. Availible on their site for free and Bittorrent!!
I'm game (though I don't know anything about the band/act). If they've decided that making the material available for free is ultimately going to help them recover their costs, then that's definitely their decision to make. But there are a lot of artists are pretty sure they'd like to have their work sell, and aren't so keen on giving it all away. Studio-only performers, for example, aren't promoting a tour. Many aren't selling t-shirts or living off of cover charges at bars, or other using any other vectors for paying their rent. If they'd rather sell their work, and let another company take care of all of that noise so that they can just pay attention to the their art (and making more of it, while not worrying as much about how they'll pay rent), then that's a decision that their fans should respect. But there are certainly artists that are happy to give away their work just for exposure - that's up to them, though, and not anyone else.
If I directly gave the artist the same amount of money he would have made from the sale, had I bought the CD, would that make piracy okay, since I wouldn't be hurting the artist?
That would be fine, if the artist actually wants it that way. But if you like the artist and say you respect them, why not do business with them in a way that they personally have asked you to? No artists wants to have to deal with what amounts to thousands or millions of transactions directly with them. That's exactly why they get in business with a company that deals with that for them.
You've either never had to sign one yourself or you're financially wealthy enough where you would never need to sign one. The contracts are crap and the only reason why the artists sign is because they need the money more than the company needs them.
Then... how do you explain artists (successful ones) that re-sign with record companies? Or successful artists that, at the end of their contract term, shop around, and sign up with yet another record company. I'm not talking about starving bar bands, either. Or how about successful artists that, having spent years within just such contracts, form their own companies, and then seek out and sign other artists?
Typical preaching from the top of the mountain bunk.
I'd say that your comment is more typical "all businesses and all contracts with businesses are evil" FUD. The notion that somehow starving artists are slaves to their business partners (who often as not lose everything they put into the relationship), is exactly wrong. Rather, those people that decide to pirate an artist's work are making pet entertainment slaves out of the artists.
understand what you are saying in theory. However, although you qualify your statement with "in my area", I'm guessing you aren't familiar with the geography of the area that is being discussed.
I understand your point, but think that Google expanding to down the street is still a matter of the same principles. If Google is going to expand, better to do so in a welcoming place such as the new digs. Being attracted to a new "area," or being warmly welcomed in an expansion into the same area aren't really that different. The local IQ may not go up, but nor will it drained by their expansion into, say, Kansas (though they could really use a big Google injection in Kansas).
Wow! It must be easy for you, wherever you work. I can't imagine how much overhead is saved by not having to interview people for jobs. Just hire the first one that applies! All people are equally bright, productive, physically suitable for every task, equally trustworthy, equally inquisitive, and equally able to rise to every challenge.
You completely confuse equality of opportunity before the law with equality of potential. They are not the same, and the results are plain to see, both in every day personal interactions, and in the longer view. The nature/nurture issue doesn't impact the constitutional notion of equality, but it does matter in practical, real-life terms. I'd be interested to hear how you'd feel about having your own job taken by someone who is less able, natively, to perform it. But since you can't conceive of that circumstance, your surprise at that outcome would probably be perpetual, and you'd have to find something else to grouse about.
Well, yeah. But in modern parlance, that pretty much means "Pretend to hate and be aw-shucks embarassed that you and your fellow employees are making a profit on all that hard work and investment." But leaving that aside, how is it "evil" for them to come in, spend a fortune on setting up facilities (including municipal-type expenses - RTFA), and stationing a pile of employees in a place that does indeed sound like it could use some invigorating? It can't possibly be a negative for the local economy and tax base, no matter how advantageous it is for Google to build this up on that federal land partnership.
Why does one class of people, a class that you correctly point out is less educated and less well-off, pay for municipal services, while the upper classes do not?
But the services they're using are the municipal-type services that will be provided by the federal management, and Google will be paying for those. In my neighborhood, just by-the-way, I pay a hugely disporportionate amount of money into the local tax base, relative to what I use. My "class" of people (dual income, middle-of-the-road IT-industry-grade income) pay the vast majority of the taxes, but the largest (by far) users of those resources are the poorer famlilies who choose to have lots of kids. There's nothing even close to equitable about that, but that's a separete discussion (well, sort of).
They way this works, or at least supposed to work, you see, is government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Except, when one person is taxed heavily for the out-of-balance benefit of other people, you get government of the people, by the people, taxing some people, for different people. If Google's expanded presence in the area is a net drain on the economy, you've got something to fuss about. But we all know that what they'll be doing there will be nothing but stimulus for the local economy and the tax base.
You're an ass because you argument essentially reduces to "poor people should be so lucky to have nice rich neighbors like that to buy the coffee they make." In your words, it will "raise the local IQ average by a couple of points."
Don't you get it? I want it for my own sake. I'm one of the lower-IQ people that would be glad to have more bright, innovative people creating, producing, and thinking in the community around me. Do you really think that everyone is the same as everyone else, or that we should all be in cookie-cutter jobs providing the same services back and forth in some sort of zero-sum-game paradise of mediocrity? I'm glad there are musicians better than me, writers better than me, physicists better than me, airline pilots better than me, Google software engineers better than me, and people who are willing to take a starter job making lattes, too. That doesn't mean I think there's some latte/Google caste system, other than those which people make for themselves.
"Poor" people will hopefully be sending their kids to school with the kids of a woman that spends her day thinking for a living at Google. That's where the cultural osmosis takes place, and it's a good thing.
This comment is based on a thorough misunderstanding of local history, politics, services, and commercial activity in this area.
No, this comment is in response to the editorial choices made by the poster, who (if you read the summary), practically implies that Google is looking to leech off of the local taxpayers, and that somehow what they're doing there won't benefit the local community or increase the activity of the local economy. How can expanding what they're doing locally not, though countless proximate activities, not be boon for the local economy and its tax base? More to the point, how can the local politician complain about their unfunded pension obligations as if that's somehow Google's responsibility? There's only one way that an unfunded government employee pension fund happens, and that's looting the fund to pay for other things, or making financial promises (of contributions to the fund) that the local government's budget authority ultimately decided not to honor.
Saying, out loud, that an incoming business presence (or the expansion of one) is an important factor in covering such an expense, and that Google is somehow getting out of it... well, that says a lot about how that local government got into that mess in the first place.
This is a lame excuse. With your argument no businesses should pay taxes since they bring people and people pay for lots of other things the community will benefit from.
Actually, that's not a bad way to look at it. Businesses are nothing but people, after all. No people, no business.
But that's not what I'm getting at, anyway. My point was that there are plenty of businesses that perform services for the federal government, and avoid some expenses by leveraging land or facilities run by the government. All I'm getting at is that if Google had to spend more money to service the relationship, then they have to pass those costs along to someone (read: taxpayers, via a more expensive contract, or to their advertising customers through more expensive ads, or to their investors, in the form of losses - it has to come from somewhere).
If NASA has space (so to speak) that they're not using, and it can lower the cost of the activity that's being pursued, then that's great.
As for whether employees will pay income taxes: well, if they're just visiting briefly from out of state, then they'll probably just be paying taxes in their own states. But if they actually "move in" there, then they're just as on the hook for local taxes as anyone working at NASA.
First, there are all sorts of government facilities (or, "public land", per the article) in/on which private companies ply their trades and make money. Every company with contractors present on an Air Force base is using a footprint there to do their private-sector business. There are whole buildings in federal campus-type areas, or large swaths of office space essentially subletted to private companies so that those companies can do what it is the taxpayers are paying them to do for the agency that's hired them. This is hardly new.
Further, most towns with any sort of federal activity would be delighted to hear that a bunch of high-end nerds from Google were moving in. It's not like they (the Google people) are going to live on the public property. These people are going to be buying coffee at Starbucks, eating out at restaurants, buying their kids' school supplies, etc., and that's all economic activity for the local communities.
It's a shame that the locals have such a huge unfunded retirement liability (um... I suspect there's a little more to that story than gambling that someday Google would move in and pay a lot of property taxes, and darn, it didn't work out), but there's another way to look at this. Google may not even have lined this gig up if they'd have to had built on private land and passed all of that expense, through the contract, on to NASA as a higher cost. Even if the deal had still gone through, it just would have been a bigger tab for the feds (meaning all of the rest of us) or less for NASA to spend on other things. In the meantime, only the locals get the other local economic benefits of having those new G-men/women moving into the area.
Sorry, but I smell a grasping local government that has just won the demographic lottery of having this happen in their area at all, and want to grab some more cash out of the deal to make up for what sounds like retirement fund planning sins of the past. Personally, I'd welcome a larger Google Presence in my area - it would raise the local IQ average by a couple of points, and make the area that much more attractive to other tech ventures... no matter which square feet of what bit of (unused!) federal property is being used to house the activity.
(which works even if the bag isn't inflating? anyone an EMT deal with O2 wanna chime in as to why the bag wouldn't inflate?)
I believe the idea is that the oxygen is delivered at essentially the same pressure as cabin pressure - even if cabin pressure is abnormally low. Otherwise, they'd need to have respiration devices that could withstand positive pressure, including a seal around your face... even for people with beards, etc.
The object of the game is to increase the ratio of oxygen in what you're breathing at high altitude. So, the gas mixture flowing through the little baggy/tube aparatus is similar to what's flowing through the little hospital nose harness rigs - it's just making the user's mix richer (in oxygen) than the thin surrounding atmosphere.
Of course, I am not a flight engineer, medic, scuba diver, blood-gas guy, or nothin'. Just a guy with a goatee that got lectured about how that means that things like small-footprint gas masks and whatnot really won't seal too well on me... and that got me thinking about the airline rigs once, too. The little baggies are there as a way to allow for some slop in the pressure behind the oxygen flow, I believe, but not to contain anything like serious sea-level-ish positive pressure... which isn't really needed, anyway - just sweet, sweet oxygen.
Of course, I'm ready to be corrected on this! Have at it!
From the article: 'The most astonishing thing is that we have observed them using tools not for obtaining food, but for postural support.'
Sure, because being simple souls, they get all of the flown-in pasta they can pray for. And of course, Postural Support is exactly the sort of thing that you'd expect from a Creator that really understands what it's like to have only Noodly Appendages.
Further, why should the software author be on the hook for anything other than the cost of the software? Meaning, most products that don't work as advertised may indeed result in the vendor having to refund money... but to be held liable for, say, loss of other business, or lost income, or other indirect damages is very rare. And it needs to be, because otherwise very few people would write another lick of commercial software, ever... unless it costs a bloody fortune to pay for the billions needed in insurance. And, rationally, that cost would simply be folded into the price charged for the product.
"Here's your new accounting software, Mr. Jones! We guarantee that you'll be able to run your four-person business without it causing you any inventory or tax slip-ups. That will be $2 million, please, up front. Thank you!"
Of course, this has always been true of mail order companies. Sears, Radio Shack, and other companies running catalogs have been in this boat for decades... the online angle has just exposed more small companies to the issue. Never mind e-commerce... back office accounting systems have been having to wrestle with this (not to mention income tax craziness for different employees with different state residences) for a long time.
If I were a state legislature, I'd just look at doing what's necessary to woo some large businesses into setting up distributiuon points in my state. That creates nexus (enabling local sales taxes under normal circumstances), creates jobs, improves delivery time for local customers... all good things.
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YEAH! And make it legal for citizens to own their own nukes! ... how deadly can you become before I am being negligent to my neighbors and children by letting you walk around?
... do you feel it is responsible for a government to give that type of power to it's citizens?
Ah, the old "citizens with nukes" canard. Look: you can't even posses such a thing (outside of having the skills, resources, physical space, and ability to secure it from theft that requires, essentially, a major government's dedication and funds) without, pretty much by definition, being threateningly reckless. Having a repeating rifle in your gun safe at home is a benign thing. Having a 3000-pound passenger car in your garage at home is a benign thing. Using either object recklessly is a different matter. But having a nuke in your gun safe at home is, on the face of it, reckless. Having fertilizer and deisel fuel at home is a benign thing (if you have a decent size garden or small farm), but keeping them stored in a barrel, mixed together, is completely reckless (unless it's a good ways away from any neighbor's property) - even if, as farmers do, they sometimes use it in just that way as an explosive to blow out stumps and rocks.
have to decide the maximum lethality weapon we trust our citizenry with
You're giving yourself away, here. We can argue specifics about how a given material, or weapon can be considered threatening by its very nature... but the underlying issue here is that you think rights come from the government. That's exactly, precisely wrong. Rights simply are. Under very specific circumstances (see our country's founding documents) we (the people) allow the government (our employess) to restrict, or enable the states to punish, some acts. Of course, that has gotten pretty much out of hand. But prior restraint is a bad, bad thing, and one of the things the constitution is built to prevent. The guy down the street with the vat of anthrax or the homebrew (or Genuine Discount Russian) nuke, though, is exhibiting behavior not unlike waving a knife in your face. I'd feel comfortable, sitting on a jury, making the distinction between that behavior, and someone with a repeating rifle in their safe.
Of course, nothing we're talking about, in real life, comes even close to the damage that's done with automobiles. Just the other day we had a guy (deliberately, apparently!) make, with one twitch of his wrist, his car leave the main road and dive into a crowd on a sidewalk in Las Vegas. Laws of physics win: death and injury result. Or, he could have done the same thing with a back seat full of things he got at the garden store, and deliberately killed many, many people. If you're interested in listing out the things the government should "let" people do, you'd better start by removing their ability to hurtle multi-ton vehicles at high speeds right past your family and mine. Unless, of course, you're already certain that you know whether or not each driver is in the mood to watch a bunch of people die at any given moment. Because they have the power, and you have to trust them. And, of course, thousands and thousands of people find that trust to have been misplaced, at the expense of their lives, every year. Compare that to the number of people killed by a repeating rifle, and re-evaluate your position.
Hey, I'm an extreme left winger and I agree with you 100%.
Then we need another label for you!
We're not all alike over here in liberal land!
No more than us couldn't-vote-for-Kerry types are all the same over here. It's tough, being a bit of an international relations hawk, a fiscal conservative, a domestic social libertarian, a die-hard capitalist, and friend (or relative!) to many a loony lefty. Of course I'm sure my leftier friends say that I'm their crazy republo-libertarian friend with the oddly good taste in French wine. You know, the one they want around if they ever really need a gun. In the meantime, guns are bad! It's pretty interesting how often you can catch people drifting away from what their gut/reason tells them they should do, politically, about one thing just because they're already signed on, politically, with a person/party/idealogy because of some other thing.
For example, people who are for abortion rights often vote left, even though they love to go pheasant hunting, and they've just voted for the person that thinks they're evil for owning a shotgun. Or, the person who is against abortion rights, and votes that way, but just ended up voting for the person who would rather not allow stem cell research, which might save a sick baby. On the other hand, if we all had candidates that perfectly reflected our own little recipe, we'd never end up with representation or executive leadership that got more than a few percent of the overall vote (in otherwords, we'd get modern Germany). It's awkward! Voting has become a less-of-several-evils issue, no question. So, I tend to balance that by handling local, state, and federal voting in slightly different ways. More importantly, I try to educate more lefties about matters of personal accountability, and more righties about how religion is not science, etc. It's lonely here in the middle, with my shotgun, my science, my art, my dogs, and all three of my like-minded friends! Oh, and of course, everyone on slashdot that loves to hate me... that will keep anyone warm through a long winter's night.
When I said that companies don't help people, I meant that they generally don't help people unless they're helping themselves by doing it.
So... what's not to like? Everyone that works for that company gets the benefit of a thriving company to work for, and the people that purchase or use what that company produces benefit. I guess your tone just sounded negative.
Halo is the perfect example of how Microsoft can buy a great product and put it's name on it like they had crap to do with the development.
Or, like Disney with a Pixar film. Or American Airlines with a Boeing aircraft. People who put a product out in front of that product's consumers/users generally have their name associated with it. But I suppose you're the sort that never reads the credits, and assumes that no one else does, either. Do you really think that MS's cash, audience, game platform, etc., has nothing to do with the success of the game? I think Pixar's work is fantastic... but I know that the success of say, the Toy Story franchise, is at least partly owed to Disney's professional marketing teams - even though they didn't color a single pixel. Don't pretend that marketing isn't important. Great games with no marketing frequently fail. Mediocre games with lots of marketing often get results. But great games with great marketing really attract an audience, and that's why it's done. Disney coughed up a lot of money into marketing and distribution in its partnership with Pixar, just like MS does with the games they front. Of course, things with Pixar/Disney have gotten a little rough lately. That will definitely be too bad for Disney, since only Pixar can do what Pixar does.
Come on, admit it. You're worried that Jackson will make a very cool (or at least, successful) movie, and that MS will get a little street cred buff as a result of having been involved with the product's successfully large audience.
Most companies don't do things to help people.
Because, of course, there are no "people" working for Intel, investing in Intel, driving Intel's marketing studies, or purchasing their products. And there are no people working for AMD or anyone else that competes with them. *sigh*
Companies like Intel don't exist to "help" people in the charity sense - they exist to provide customers (the market) what they want, and to be competitive doing so. If they can't do that profitably, they'll cease to exist.
You sound like one of those right-wing gun nuts, opposed to the smart-gun technology which can save lives.
I think you'll find that most of us gun "nuts" are not at all opposed to technology, not even that technology. What we're opposed to is the mandatory use of the technology. In other words, I'd like to know that my wife, or a friend of mine, can pick up my gun and use it with needing to cut off my fingers first, or having the Magic Bracelet on. For that matter, I'd like to be able to pick up my own gun and use it with gloves on, or whether or not my Magic Bracelet's batteries work in sub-zero weather.
I can think of some occasions where I'd like to know that only I could use my gun. But more importantly, I can think of endless circumstances when I'd want the choice to not rely on such technology. Completely aside from the fact that such tech could be highly unreliable under rough circumstances, it's the principle of the thing. And we already have trigger locks, gun safes, parents, and brains to prevent misuse. You know, the same brains that parents use to talk their kids through not killing themselves by drinking drain cleaner or driving the family car off a cliff.
You'd think, for as much as the left wing talks about choice and freedom, and bitches about the Bush administration and the Patriot Act, that the left would be the very first group to stand up and keep the government from forcing loopy personal tech into use on a simple metal tool. The murders in my county this month have been by gang members with knives. I suppose the cure for that is Smart Knife Technology(tm)?
Mandatory Smart Gun tech isn't any more appropriate than Smart Lawn Mower tech would be in really saving lives. It will, though, be a shining monument to government control in place of personal accountability. Where were the high number of gun deaths back when you could mail-order a gun from Sears and have it shipped to your house? What's changed since then... then lethality of guns, or the culture? Fix the no-consequences culture, and leave the machetes, knives, baseball bats, guns, flammable liquids, garden fertilizer, and family cars out of the personal behavior regulation equation.
He was impeached for lying about whether or not he had sex with Monica. How was that EVER the country's business? Seriously.
Well, since you're being serious. Do you remember the context? An employee of the state government that Clinton was running at the time was escorted by state police to his hotel room, where she was greeted by the governor, in his boxer shorts. She felt a little pressure, faced with her boss, as you can imagine. The question of whether or not, in the course of her raising (yes, with the encouragement of people annoyed by his other seemingly shady doings) the issue of what anyone would consider sexual harrassment and what would appear to be a lot of lying about, was certainly compounded by his blatant lying about his further conduct with another employee in the Oval Office. It's not the sex, per se, it's being at the top of the executive food chain in both the state and federal government with obvious signs of using those positions in questionable ways with employees, and having that get completely tangled up in the obvious stonewalling about the Whitewater mess (you'll recall the withholding of all sorts of subpeonaed legal documents, the multiple convictions of associates at the time, and so on).
If he was the CEO of a company, being investigated for questionable financial dealings, clearly avoiding delivering records that show financial involvement, and in the course of that inquiry, a former employee comes up says, "yes, he's a lying snake," what then? How about if a judicial panel tells the investigating attorney that he also must look into those allegations of contempt of court? If this happened under any other cirumstances, everyone would be applauding the court-time of an obviously slippery person getting caught in his own (amazingly petty) nonsense. It wouldn't matter much, except that he's President Of the Freakin' United States! Come on, now! The way he treats his subordinates, especially in the middle of an indepent counsel's investigations of some very shifty-looking get-rich-quick schemes that saw other associates get felony convictions, does matter. The fact that he was called up in front of a judge to testify about whether he was hiding even more about his relationships and uses of his executive horsepower - and then contemptuosly looked the judge in the eye and lied again (for which she fined him, and for which he was disbarred - remember?) says a lot about to what degree he could be counted on to accurately relay the information that was asked about the way he and his wife made money under other circumstances, and to what degree they were involved with various (convicted) wheelers and dealers. He was impeached for lying, all right, but to imply it was just about one witless sexual daliance is pretty disenguous. Why is it the country's business? For the same reason that it was the country's business when Nixon lied about his use of his power and the criminal people he interacted with, covered up, etc.
He's the president of the most important country in the world. He's the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. He's the top law enforcement officer in the country. That he was comfortable telling his staff to go out and back up his lies about Lewinsky so that he could retain some fleeting credibility when it came to the more serious issues revolving around his influence peddling and husband/wife real estate profiteering as the guy running Arkansas - that absolutely makes it the country's business. And of course on his way out the door, we got to see more of the same as he issued absurd pardons to political supporters, including big-league convicted money launderer who, hanging out in Europe, had his family pledge big bucks to Clinton's persona library/foundation... you get the idea. If the whole thing had been about Lewinsky, rather than being about an ugly pattern of slippery dealings that included lying about multiple instances of sexual interactions with subordinates, it would have merely been embarassing.
Thumbdrives are cheap - rebuilding your identity after Katrina or some other Bush "oops" is much more expensive.
Yes, yes, because the people in, say... Gulfport, MS, who watched their homes and businesses get scraped off their foundations by storm surge have Bush to blame? Come on, is that really helpful (even a little)? It definitely doesn't make your other perfectly good ideas seem any more credible. You can do better than that. Unless the sailors who died on the Cole without having mailing databackups to their families were the subject to a "Clinton oops." Or people who lost it all to Hurrican Floyd in South Carolina - Clinton oopses? It's just silly, man - you're usually less gratuitous than that.
I am getting tired of the big internet companies straight up copying each other.
Should we turn to you to tell us which provider of each major online activity is the one we should all use? Even if the differences are incremental and subtle, I'm glad when I get to choose between Yahoo's and Google's take on a particular app/service. I'm also glad that Audi and Toyota and GM and Honda all have different ideas on cars... even though someone else built one once already. Come on - not every service offered is going to be wholly unique, and shouldn't be. It's competition - for eyeballs, brand loyalty, etc. Same reason there are a zillion Linux distros, even though may overlap. Everyone's got their own idea of what would make it just a little bit better.
Speaking of the Windows universe, here. I've found actual for-real clustering (say, of SQL Server) to be workable, but to be a serious (and expensive) pain in the ass. Obviously it depends on the app, but log-shipping and other mechanisms are frequently good enough to prepare for fail-over to another machine, and decent fault-tolerant hardware is good enough insurance for a lot of circumstances.
On the web side of things, clustering (actual clustering) sure hasn't come up much in my world. But I use native NLB with very good results. Depending on how your app handles state/sessions, that native load balancing is pretty much a no-brainer to set up. There are problems, though... your server can (from NLB's perspective) seem perfectly happy - even as your web app is puking in some way, and defeating the whole purpose. So for that, you've got to have something watching the app and then kicking the machine in the ass if it's stupid in that higher layer. This would be, of course, just as true of any load balancer that's out in front of the web servers and doesn't know if a particular app is happy or not.
But if you're trying to spread the pain across a handful of web servers, NLB is a pretty easy solution. Making sure that a SQL server behind those web servers is up though... in real life, unless there's a large budget and good admins doing the care and feeding, the risk of having to rely on a managed fail over to a recently replicated copy of the db on another machine seems to be a pretty popular choice. Considering that you can buy a seriously fault-tolerant server and storage solution for a pittance compared to the long-term admin costs of not screwing up a clustered rig, that's the sweet spot for a lot of users, and the risk is fairly low. Hardware, properly housed in a decent data center, is pretty damn reliable at good price points these days. A somewhat fragile clustering environment, though, is one slightly-drowsy off-shore admin mouseclick away from being REAL hard to unscrew.
Works every time! Or, is this more along the lines of the first-crack-hit-is-free model? Not trolling, here. Why does anyone think that free (as in beer) is ever real, when it comes to humans doing work for you? Something always has to give, and the price always has to be paid... so why do people persist in even using the word "free" in this context? It just rings false, and further distorts the use of that word.
Better to say "no charge for two weeks" or "subsidized" if that's what they really mean - at least it's more realistic, and reduces the cancerous poison of economic magical thinking. At least, in coverage of it, it would keep everyone a little clearer on the subject, and help reduce the cognitive pollution just a tiny bit. I mean, isn't Gentoo for smart, thinking people? Why lead off with a headline that implies something that's just not - on the face of it - really true (or, not the whole picture)? I hate it when banks do it ("Free! But, Not Really[tm]"), and when everyone else does it, too. Oh well.
I seriously doubt you'll be seeing the "poor" eating the "rich" anytime soon. :-)
I don't know... you should see the way taxes work in Maryland.
Check out the new Harvey Danger CD. They are doing just that and bypassing the entire system. Availible on their site for free and Bittorrent!!
I'm game (though I don't know anything about the band/act). If they've decided that making the material available for free is ultimately going to help them recover their costs, then that's definitely their decision to make. But there are a lot of artists are pretty sure they'd like to have their work sell, and aren't so keen on giving it all away. Studio-only performers, for example, aren't promoting a tour. Many aren't selling t-shirts or living off of cover charges at bars, or other using any other vectors for paying their rent. If they'd rather sell their work, and let another company take care of all of that noise so that they can just pay attention to the their art (and making more of it, while not worrying as much about how they'll pay rent), then that's a decision that their fans should respect. But there are certainly artists that are happy to give away their work just for exposure - that's up to them, though, and not anyone else.
If I directly gave the artist the same amount of money he would have made from the sale, had I bought the CD, would that make piracy okay, since I wouldn't be hurting the artist?
That would be fine, if the artist actually wants it that way. But if you like the artist and say you respect them, why not do business with them in a way that they personally have asked you to? No artists wants to have to deal with what amounts to thousands or millions of transactions directly with them. That's exactly why they get in business with a company that deals with that for them.
You've either never had to sign one yourself or you're financially wealthy enough where you would never need to sign one. The contracts are crap and the only reason why the artists sign is because they need the money more than the company needs them.
Then... how do you explain artists (successful ones) that re-sign with record companies? Or successful artists that, at the end of their contract term, shop around, and sign up with yet another record company. I'm not talking about starving bar bands, either. Or how about successful artists that, having spent years within just such contracts, form their own companies, and then seek out and sign other artists?
Typical preaching from the top of the mountain bunk.
I'd say that your comment is more typical "all businesses and all contracts with businesses are evil" FUD. The notion that somehow starving artists are slaves to their business partners (who often as not lose everything they put into the relationship), is exactly wrong. Rather, those people that decide to pirate an artist's work are making pet entertainment slaves out of the artists.
understand what you are saying in theory. However, although you qualify your statement with "in my area", I'm guessing you aren't familiar with the geography of the area that is being discussed.
I understand your point, but think that Google expanding to down the street is still a matter of the same principles. If Google is going to expand, better to do so in a welcoming place such as the new digs. Being attracted to a new "area," or being warmly welcomed in an expansion into the same area aren't really that different. The local IQ may not go up, but nor will it drained by their expansion into, say, Kansas (though they could really use a big Google injection in Kansas).
Yes. In every sense that matters, yes.
Wow! It must be easy for you, wherever you work. I can't imagine how much overhead is saved by not having to interview people for jobs. Just hire the first one that applies! All people are equally bright, productive, physically suitable for every task, equally trustworthy, equally inquisitive, and equally able to rise to every challenge.
You completely confuse equality of opportunity before the law with equality of potential. They are not the same, and the results are plain to see, both in every day personal interactions, and in the longer view. The nature/nurture issue doesn't impact the constitutional notion of equality, but it does matter in practical, real-life terms. I'd be interested to hear how you'd feel about having your own job taken by someone who is less able, natively, to perform it. But since you can't conceive of that circumstance, your surprise at that outcome would probably be perpetual, and you'd have to find something else to grouse about.
"Do no evil" --- isn'that the motto?
Well, yeah. But in modern parlance, that pretty much means "Pretend to hate and be aw-shucks embarassed that you and your fellow employees are making a profit on all that hard work and investment." But leaving that aside, how is it "evil" for them to come in, spend a fortune on setting up facilities (including municipal-type expenses - RTFA), and stationing a pile of employees in a place that does indeed sound like it could use some invigorating? It can't possibly be a negative for the local economy and tax base, no matter how advantageous it is for Google to build this up on that federal land partnership.
Why does one class of people, a class that you correctly point out is less educated and less well-off, pay for municipal services, while the upper classes do not?
But the services they're using are the municipal-type services that will be provided by the federal management, and Google will be paying for those. In my neighborhood, just by-the-way, I pay a hugely disporportionate amount of money into the local tax base, relative to what I use. My "class" of people (dual income, middle-of-the-road IT-industry-grade income) pay the vast majority of the taxes, but the largest (by far) users of those resources are the poorer famlilies who choose to have lots of kids. There's nothing even close to equitable about that, but that's a separete discussion (well, sort of).
They way this works, or at least supposed to work, you see, is government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Except, when one person is taxed heavily for the out-of-balance benefit of other people, you get government of the people, by the people, taxing some people, for different people. If Google's expanded presence in the area is a net drain on the economy, you've got something to fuss about. But we all know that what they'll be doing there will be nothing but stimulus for the local economy and the tax base.
You're an ass because you argument essentially reduces to "poor people should be so lucky to have nice rich neighbors like that to buy the coffee they make." In your words, it will "raise the local IQ average by a couple of points."
Don't you get it? I want it for my own sake. I'm one of the lower-IQ people that would be glad to have more bright, innovative people creating, producing, and thinking in the community around me. Do you really think that everyone is the same as everyone else, or that we should all be in cookie-cutter jobs providing the same services back and forth in some sort of zero-sum-game paradise of mediocrity? I'm glad there are musicians better than me, writers better than me, physicists better than me, airline pilots better than me, Google software engineers better than me, and people who are willing to take a starter job making lattes, too. That doesn't mean I think there's some latte/Google caste system, other than those which people make for themselves.
"Poor" people will hopefully be sending their kids to school with the kids of a woman that spends her day thinking for a living at Google. That's where the cultural osmosis takes place, and it's a good thing.
This comment is based on a thorough misunderstanding of local history, politics, services, and commercial activity in this area.
No, this comment is in response to the editorial choices made by the poster, who (if you read the summary), practically implies that Google is looking to leech off of the local taxpayers, and that somehow what they're doing there won't benefit the local community or increase the activity of the local economy. How can expanding what they're doing locally not, though countless proximate activities, not be boon for the local economy and its tax base? More to the point, how can the local politician complain about their unfunded pension obligations as if that's somehow Google's responsibility? There's only one way that an unfunded government employee pension fund happens, and that's looting the fund to pay for other things, or making financial promises (of contributions to the fund) that the local government's budget authority ultimately decided not to honor.
Saying, out loud, that an incoming business presence (or the expansion of one) is an important factor in covering such an expense, and that Google is somehow getting out of it... well, that says a lot about how that local government got into that mess in the first place.
This is a lame excuse. With your argument no businesses should pay taxes since they bring people and people pay for lots of other things the community will benefit from.
Actually, that's not a bad way to look at it. Businesses are nothing but people, after all. No people, no business.
But that's not what I'm getting at, anyway. My point was that there are plenty of businesses that perform services for the federal government, and avoid some expenses by leveraging land or facilities run by the government. All I'm getting at is that if Google had to spend more money to service the relationship, then they have to pass those costs along to someone (read: taxpayers, via a more expensive contract, or to their advertising customers through more expensive ads, or to their investors, in the form of losses - it has to come from somewhere).
If NASA has space (so to speak) that they're not using, and it can lower the cost of the activity that's being pursued, then that's great.
As for whether employees will pay income taxes: well, if they're just visiting briefly from out of state, then they'll probably just be paying taxes in their own states. But if they actually "move in" there, then they're just as on the hook for local taxes as anyone working at NASA.
First, there are all sorts of government facilities (or, "public land", per the article) in/on which private companies ply their trades and make money. Every company with contractors present on an Air Force base is using a footprint there to do their private-sector business. There are whole buildings in federal campus-type areas, or large swaths of office space essentially subletted to private companies so that those companies can do what it is the taxpayers are paying them to do for the agency that's hired them. This is hardly new.
Further, most towns with any sort of federal activity would be delighted to hear that a bunch of high-end nerds from Google were moving in. It's not like they (the Google people) are going to live on the public property. These people are going to be buying coffee at Starbucks, eating out at restaurants, buying their kids' school supplies, etc., and that's all economic activity for the local communities.
It's a shame that the locals have such a huge unfunded retirement liability (um... I suspect there's a little more to that story than gambling that someday Google would move in and pay a lot of property taxes, and darn, it didn't work out), but there's another way to look at this. Google may not even have lined this gig up if they'd have to had built on private land and passed all of that expense, through the contract, on to NASA as a higher cost. Even if the deal had still gone through, it just would have been a bigger tab for the feds (meaning all of the rest of us) or less for NASA to spend on other things. In the meantime, only the locals get the other local economic benefits of having those new G-men/women moving into the area.
Sorry, but I smell a grasping local government that has just won the demographic lottery of having this happen in their area at all, and want to grab some more cash out of the deal to make up for what sounds like retirement fund planning sins of the past. Personally, I'd welcome a larger Google Presence in my area - it would raise the local IQ average by a couple of points, and make the area that much more attractive to other tech ventures... no matter which square feet of what bit of (unused!) federal property is being used to house the activity.
(which works even if the bag isn't inflating? anyone an EMT deal with O2 wanna chime in as to why the bag wouldn't inflate?)
I believe the idea is that the oxygen is delivered at essentially the same pressure as cabin pressure - even if cabin pressure is abnormally low. Otherwise, they'd need to have respiration devices that could withstand positive pressure, including a seal around your face... even for people with beards, etc.
The object of the game is to increase the ratio of oxygen in what you're breathing at high altitude. So, the gas mixture flowing through the little baggy/tube aparatus is similar to what's flowing through the little hospital nose harness rigs - it's just making the user's mix richer (in oxygen) than the thin surrounding atmosphere.
Of course, I am not a flight engineer, medic, scuba diver, blood-gas guy, or nothin'. Just a guy with a goatee that got lectured about how that means that things like small-footprint gas masks and whatnot really won't seal too well on me... and that got me thinking about the airline rigs once, too. The little baggies are there as a way to allow for some slop in the pressure behind the oxygen flow, I believe, but not to contain anything like serious sea-level-ish positive pressure... which isn't really needed, anyway - just sweet, sweet oxygen.
Of course, I'm ready to be corrected on this! Have at it!
From the article: 'The most astonishing thing is that we have observed them using tools not for obtaining food, but for postural support.'
Sure, because being simple souls, they get all of the flown-in pasta they can pray for. And of course, Postural Support is exactly the sort of thing that you'd expect from a Creator that really understands what it's like to have only Noodly Appendages.
Further, why should the software author be on the hook for anything other than the cost of the software? Meaning, most products that don't work as advertised may indeed result in the vendor having to refund money... but to be held liable for, say, loss of other business, or lost income, or other indirect damages is very rare. And it needs to be, because otherwise very few people would write another lick of commercial software, ever... unless it costs a bloody fortune to pay for the billions needed in insurance. And, rationally, that cost would simply be folded into the price charged for the product.
"Here's your new accounting software, Mr. Jones! We guarantee that you'll be able to run your four-person business without it causing you any inventory or tax slip-ups. That will be $2 million, please, up front. Thank you!"
Of course, this has always been true of mail order companies. Sears, Radio Shack, and other companies running catalogs have been in this boat for decades... the online angle has just exposed more small companies to the issue. Never mind e-commerce... back office accounting systems have been having to wrestle with this (not to mention income tax craziness for different employees with different state residences) for a long time.
If I were a state legislature, I'd just look at doing what's necessary to woo some large businesses into setting up distributiuon points in my state. That creates nexus (enabling local sales taxes under normal circumstances), creates jobs, improves delivery time for local customers... all good things.