Large tax companies have teams of hundreds of people that keep track of all the local tax laws, and charge a large amount of money selling the data to large retailers. It's not trivial to keep the laws of every 10,000 person municipality in the database up to date.
Intuit (maker of Quickbooks, the most popular small-medium sized business accounting software in the country) does it now with payroll taxes. I'm sure they'd do the same with sales taxes, and it'd be a $200/year subscription service. No big deal. It's not a very large technical hurdle.
states be required to provide a standard way for merchants, at no cost to the merchant, to ask what the sales tax rate for a given address should be, with the answer being the legally binding rate
Hahahaha! That's absurd. If you want to run a business, you have a responsibility to figure out your own taxes. If you want to deal with 10,000+ tax jurisdictions, that's your problem. If you want to deal with 1, that's your problem.
Making merchants deal with 50 different tax codes is onerous.
Hahahaha... different sales tax codes onerous? Are you joking?
A. Technically, it's trivial. It's software that will be rented from Intuit in most cases.
B. Is there some recent addition to the Bill of Rights that says that merchants should be able to sell anything in any tax jurisdiction without doing do diligence, that I should know about?
Microsoft has provided Microsoft Security Essentials for free to all Windows users for years now. It works really well, and doesn't require any kind of user interaction after it's installed.
driver
What drivers do you need to mess with on a laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed?
"the right office license"
Are you saying that you're having trouble pirating software...?
The harsh truth is it was never a serious competitor which will hurt Microsoft in the future, as its potential customers continue to get burnt....it will end up like the Zune.
Windows Phone 7.5 still works fine. Windows Phone 8.0 works even better (more features). I don't know anybody with a Windows Phone (myself included) that feels that they have gotten "burnt" from the product. Not that it's relevant anymore, but that link you provided wasn't exactly 100% accurate, either. Your "harsh truth" is really anything but.
Microsoft is still dealing with the fact that their flagship products throughout the 1990's are almost universally associated with crashes, poor performance, and overhyped marketing. It bit them with the Zune, and now it's biting them with the phones.
No, Windows Phone 8 is really good (I like it better than the other Big Two), and all of the reviews for it are almost universally very positive. Windows Phone 8 doesn't crash, doesn't have poor performance, or overyhyped marketing, as you say.
No men with guns are forcing anybody to pay anything in the US. Yes, you have to pay taxes with US dollars, but only if you own property, and thus would like to have all of the societal protections that government offers in order to preserve that property. If you'd like to live in a ditch and swap dead squirrels with other people, you're free to do so.
It's called "society". Billions of us all have to live together, and to do so well, we need to agree on a common method of exchange. Your silly "men with guns" strawman is patently silly, and is the result of a serious lack of understanding about society at large.
Either you get your job done or you do not, how long it takes in the allotted time frame or what you do while doing it should not matter.
Spoken just like a person who has never had a single employee. There's a lot more to managing people than just getting X done in Y amount of time. People aren't just cogs in the proverbial machine, as you seem to imply they are.
Unlike most people, I'm very careful how and where I spend my money. I don't spend money at big box stores that are a blight on my community. I don't spend money with online retailers that indirectly damage my local community. I don't spend money at businesses that use their profits to influence our government in ways I don't like. I don't spend money buying media from people that, like Orson Scott Card, actively want to cause harm to innocent people.
It's like voting. Sure, my one vote or my $20 not spent on a book doesn't make that much of a difference, but it's all I can do, and if many people did the same, it'd have a great impact. And, not to mention, I sleep well knowing that I do all that I can to make the world a little bit better.
I was astonished to find that this was a review of a PC game. I honestly had no idea that people still played PC games. Why would anybody bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fancy PC's just to play games that play better and look just as good on a $200 console? Why would somebody put themselves through that kind of hassle and expense?
Joe "I have one share" Blow gets to make strategic business decisions now? Huh.
By purchasing that one share, Joe Blow becomes an owner of the company. Literally. To bring it to it's logical conclusion, is it moral for Joe Blow to buy one share of Al Qaeda, Inc?
Horse shit. It's not just "MBA"s and such making these decisions. It's everybody. Every Joe Blow who buys a stock or a mutual fund is interested in one thing: return. Let's not pretend that average people investing for their retirement are interested in making less money for the sake of, say, treating employees well or making ethical business decisions. The problem is the whole system of public companies in the US. Corporations have all of the rights of actual people, with none of the liabilities, and the owners of said public companies (every stock/fund holder) are completely and entirely divorced from anything the company does other than earn profit.
Clearly, they're using Apple's pricing strategy. It's a Business 101 classic: many customers WANT to spend too much on stuff. Those customers see high prices as some (twisted) source of prestige. As a retailer, I see it every day. There are products that you can sell MORE of if you increase the price.
I honestly didn't know that Firefox still existed. We banned it from our company after waiting years for various memory leaks to be fixed. I thought that most people had done the same a long time ago. We're very happy with Chrome, and don't see a reason to bother with Firefox again. Is there any real reason to use Firefox any more?
Thanks for your "first 15 minutes with Windows 8" review. That was very helpful. Would you care to hear my "first 15 minutes with Linux" review? Or how about my "first 15 minutes with Apple* review"? Would that be useful?
Oh, puh-lease. I'd mod you -1 Conspiracy Theory if that were an option. I honestly doubt that Microsoft is counting on companies to do what you describe, and I honestly doubt that many companies do what you describe.
And, MS does not have a monopoly on the desktop. Lots of people buy Apple, and apparently some people use Linux, too, so I'm told.
Slashdot Mirror
Large tax companies have teams of hundreds of people that keep track of all the local tax laws, and charge a large amount of money selling the data to large retailers. It's not trivial to keep the laws of every 10,000 person municipality in the database up to date.
Intuit (maker of Quickbooks, the most popular small-medium sized business accounting software in the country) does it now with payroll taxes. I'm sure they'd do the same with sales taxes, and it'd be a $200/year subscription service. No big deal. It's not a very large technical hurdle.
states be required to provide a standard way for merchants, at no cost to the merchant, to ask what the sales tax rate for a given address should be, with the answer being the legally binding rate
Hahahaha! That's absurd. If you want to run a business, you have a responsibility to figure out your own taxes. If you want to deal with 10,000+ tax jurisdictions, that's your problem. If you want to deal with 1, that's your problem.
Making merchants deal with 50 different tax codes is onerous.
Hahahaha... different sales tax codes onerous? Are you joking?
A. Technically, it's trivial. It's software that will be rented from Intuit in most cases.
B. Is there some recent addition to the Bill of Rights that says that merchants should be able to sell anything in any tax jurisdiction without doing do diligence, that I should know about?
So, what's your point? It's still a relatively trivial database.
if what you said was true, no one would be stuck on a win 7 phone....but there they are.
What does the parent pointing out that Windows Phone 8 will be upgradeable have anything to do with Windows 7?
expiring AV
Microsoft has provided Microsoft Security Essentials for free to all Windows users for years now. It works really well, and doesn't require any kind of user interaction after it's installed.
driver
What drivers do you need to mess with on a laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed?
"the right office license"
Are you saying that you're having trouble pirating software...?
The harsh truth is it was never a serious competitor which will hurt Microsoft in the future, as its potential customers continue to get burnt....it will end up like the Zune.
Windows Phone 7.5 still works fine. Windows Phone 8.0 works even better (more features). I don't know anybody with a Windows Phone (myself included) that feels that they have gotten "burnt" from the product. Not that it's relevant anymore, but that link you provided wasn't exactly 100% accurate, either. Your "harsh truth" is really anything but.
Microsoft is still dealing with the fact that their flagship products throughout the 1990's are almost universally associated with crashes, poor performance, and overhyped marketing. It bit them with the Zune, and now it's biting them with the phones.
No, Windows Phone 8 is really good (I like it better than the other Big Two), and all of the reviews for it are almost universally very positive. Windows Phone 8 doesn't crash, doesn't have poor performance, or overyhyped marketing, as you say.
No men with guns are forcing anybody to pay anything in the US. Yes, you have to pay taxes with US dollars, but only if you own property, and thus would like to have all of the societal protections that government offers in order to preserve that property. If you'd like to live in a ditch and swap dead squirrels with other people, you're free to do so.
Perhaps we should start looking into alternate cryptocurrencies like Litecoin instead?
Perhaps you should. I, on the other hand, am perfectly fine using US dollars.
It's called "society". Billions of us all have to live together, and to do so well, we need to agree on a common method of exchange. Your silly "men with guns" strawman is patently silly, and is the result of a serious lack of understanding about society at large.
DO me a favor. Go out, start a business, don't advertise, let us know how long you stay in business.
It's been 10 1/2 years for me. How 'bout you?
It's a cute idea, but clearly this city councilperson doesn't understand how email works.
Either you get your job done or you do not, how long it takes in the allotted time frame or what you do while doing it should not matter.
Spoken just like a person who has never had a single employee. There's a lot more to managing people than just getting X done in Y amount of time. People aren't just cogs in the proverbial machine, as you seem to imply they are.
Unlike most people, I'm very careful how and where I spend my money. I don't spend money at big box stores that are a blight on my community. I don't spend money with online retailers that indirectly damage my local community. I don't spend money at businesses that use their profits to influence our government in ways I don't like. I don't spend money buying media from people that, like Orson Scott Card, actively want to cause harm to innocent people.
It's like voting. Sure, my one vote or my $20 not spent on a book doesn't make that much of a difference, but it's all I can do, and if many people did the same, it'd have a great impact. And, not to mention, I sleep well knowing that I do all that I can to make the world a little bit better.
Remote Desktop is built into XP and later. It's free, secure, and has been around for more than a decade. Why not just use that?
I was astonished to find that this was a review of a PC game. I honestly had no idea that people still played PC games. Why would anybody bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fancy PC's just to play games that play better and look just as good on a $200 console? Why would somebody put themselves through that kind of hassle and expense?
Joe "I have one share" Blow gets to make strategic business decisions now? Huh.
By purchasing that one share, Joe Blow becomes an owner of the company. Literally. To bring it to it's logical conclusion, is it moral for Joe Blow to buy one share of Al Qaeda, Inc?
Horse shit. It's not just "MBA"s and such making these decisions. It's everybody. Every Joe Blow who buys a stock or a mutual fund is interested in one thing: return. Let's not pretend that average people investing for their retirement are interested in making less money for the sake of, say, treating employees well or making ethical business decisions. The problem is the whole system of public companies in the US. Corporations have all of the rights of actual people, with none of the liabilities, and the owners of said public companies (every stock/fund holder) are completely and entirely divorced from anything the company does other than earn profit.
Clearly, they're using Apple's pricing strategy. It's a Business 101 classic: many customers WANT to spend too much on stuff. Those customers see high prices as some (twisted) source of prestige. As a retailer, I see it every day. There are products that you can sell MORE of if you increase the price.
I was in IT a bit over a decade ago. This kind of thing was prevalent back then. I don't find it surprising at all.
I honestly didn't know that Firefox still existed. We banned it from our company after waiting years for various memory leaks to be fixed. I thought that most people had done the same a long time ago. We're very happy with Chrome, and don't see a reason to bother with Firefox again. Is there any real reason to use Firefox any more?
That's your opinion. And we all know what they say about opinions...
Thanks for your "first 15 minutes with Windows 8" review. That was very helpful. Would you care to hear my "first 15 minutes with Linux" review? Or how about my "first 15 minutes with Apple* review"? Would that be useful?
Oh, puh-lease. I'd mod you -1 Conspiracy Theory if that were an option. I honestly doubt that Microsoft is counting on companies to do what you describe, and I honestly doubt that many companies do what you describe.
And, MS does not have a monopoly on the desktop. Lots of people buy Apple, and apparently some people use Linux, too, so I'm told.