Which doesn't change the fact that the state laws indicating you have to voluntarily pay them what amounts to sales tax on interstate purchases now.

The use tax is a sales tax on interstate commerce which is completely unconstitutional, if I'm accused of tax evasion courts ignore all my paper structures and convict if the bottom line is I got money and didn't pay the tax. Why should it be any different if the state is simply calling the exact same tax by a different name?

No the constitution prohibits imposing a tax on stuff imported from another state, period. Saying "oh and also marbles are bad" alongside said tax does not allow the state to do so. If any provision of any bill has the RESULT of taxing commerce across state lines it is unconstitutional.

How about we go the other direction and get rid of federal level income taxation. Let states charge income tax, potentially actually make living in one state notably different than living in another, you know, so you can choose. Let the feds ask the states for funds instead of the other way around.

The current system of "use taxes" is not fair because it's unconstitutional. The answer isn't to allow the unconstitutional tax, the answer is to not allow the "use" tax.

Yup, can you imagine the sort of lifeform that could exist as a conciousness with erosion as it's neural process? To it we MIGHT amount a short lived bacterial infection.

"That's not the only way to store electricity, it's just the least leak prone method we currently have."

Right, which makes it the way the we have to do it. ;)

"It's interesting that your lightweight optical battery description happens to be for a house (immobile) and ignores the conversion between electricity, treating that as a separate piece of hardware"

It's interesting that you assume a conversion between electricity when I clearly outlined a scenario in which none is required. What are you going to do convert light gathered from the massive fusion reactors that fill our sky into electricity and feed it into a light bulb to turn it back into light? Of course not, you are just going to route it with fiber optic cabling and shine it through a diffuser directly down into your living room. The same with heat, you capture IR and shine that into your home. No electricity needed.

"It's interesting that your lightweight optical battery description happens to be for a house (immobile) and ignores the conversion between electricity, treating that as a separate piece of hardware. Completely useless for a mobile device, which is where you actually care about the mass of the battery."

The scenario was of the most useful application not depending on advances in optical computing. A battery that doesn't break down with recharge/discharge cycles and can have an incredible capacity without extreme mass is important in a home setting where you'd want to store the 3000w per square meter the sun is shining down on your roof. Also potentially in a vehicle. With existing electronics the lightweight battery would need to be converted to electricity and that would add an extra component that might not make it the answer in all cases. Of course it would still be carbon neutral and require very small pieces of our most efficient solar conversion panels, made more efficient by the fact we could pick the exact spectrum of light we will use, tune the panels to that spectrum, and we can make nearly perfect mirrors when turning for a specific frequency of light and release into a chamber lined with that.

With advances in optical computing your mobile device doesn't use electricity, it runs on light, recharges anywhere it is light out, and/or from an optic cable coming out of the wall and no conversion is required. Of course, NONE of that works, house, car, mobile devices, without an optic battery. Many of those applications work just fine without optical computing or memory.

Someone else mentioned timescales. It seems to me that it depends on how we define "life." Would you consider self-awareness to be life?

Self awareness basically emerges from any self scoring logical multi-dimensional memory system that can emerge patterns. Our brains use neural nets for this but the basic concept behind a neural net is so simple it could exist in logical patterns in ocean currents, rock formations, and or weather patterns on timescales of picoseconds or millions of years.

And then there is scoring, we control this with artificial neural nets because we want them to exhibit a behavior WE are defining and measuring. If you let go of that and just simplify it to a system that tries to assess what exists or doesn't exist with pre-defining what is "correct" for it. You just tie that neural net to a scoring system constantly going through a cycle of 1 (positive score, remember those connections), (neutral score, no change), 0 (negative score). At a glance this seems to have the result of canceling everything out, but that isn't true connections used during both of the first two cycles leave an imprint that will slowly fade unless repeated, higher order patterns will emerge with patterns of complexity limited only by the multi-dimensional memory system.

Are the patterns real or imaginary? They are reflections of what the system has actually been able to observe, measure, or experience which is all we ourselves can say about our thoughts and even our own existence. A system like this views new things through the lens of previous impressions and experiences. It learns. It can identify any pattern it can sense. Science says everything real has a pattern of observable behavior and properties. What about feelings? Feelings are probably a mix of biochemical reactions and perceptions. The result of an intelligence like us but without the biochemical reactions is probably closer to a sociopath, able to perceive, understand and even relate to the negative patterns that trigger the biochemical reactions but not actually having the emotional wash. Unlike a sociopath it wouldn't be human, so it might not relate very at all. One very cool automatic property of a system like this? That scoring loop means it spends 1/3 of it's existence doing what could be argued is the logical equivalent of sleeping.

If you are using the output to light your home, transmit data, or heat up some stew you don't need the solar cells. Toss light based computing in and you don't even need electronics anymore. I should be possible to create a reasonably efficient light motor as well, light can give up it's momentum and it has lots of it. If we can create a solar sail based on this we can create a motor. Light will bend in a magnetic field, that suggests and interaction that transfers energy, it would seem like it should be possible to build that interaction into a motor if you had enough light energy.

Not necessarily as I understand it. Electrical energy currently has to be stored as a potential within a chemical element. They aren't heavy because of the electrons they are heavy because a higher capacity battery literally means a bigger battery filled with a larger quantity of heavy chemicals.

This is more like a capacitor, actually trapping photons without a chemical storage and then releasing all of them in a burst. But unlike a capacitor the potential isn't between differently charged photons fighting each other. The "potential" is in the momentum of the photon which is retained and not in the force used to store it. The photon is being held in a balanced stasis, retaining it's momentum, and not being resisted by an insulator that will ultimately fail. Even better, they can selectively trap different frequencies of light.

That is super nice in terms of potential. Imagine your home in a world where these are built with large capacity. Your solar panel is no longer an inefficient convertor of light energy into electrical potential. It is now a light collector, it carries the light via an optical cable to a large capacity light battery that selectively traps visible and infrared light and lets excess pass out of your home. You don't block UV, you just let it pass away, so you aren't constantly eroding a blocking solution. The IR light is trapped as well but because it is held in stasis it's energy is retained and the battery holding it isn't hot and doesn't need insulated. This is used to heat your water and home. If your collector was on the roof the collecting of this IR light also goes a very long way toward keeping your home cool. The light in your home is the full visible spectrum of the sun (or any blend of any part of it you like) and even at night is actually sunlight. Not converted to electricity at 40% efficiency and back to light at 95% efficiency. The high capacity light batteries might need to be built in banks with smaller capacity, allowing you to release the amount of light you need in to the fine units of X, you can release 1X/s for 50s or you can release 50X/s for 1s.

None of that even requires optical computing. But with fully optical computing your gadgets will eventually all run directly on light. So again, no need for systems that convert other forms of energy to electricity with maybe 40% efficiency. You still have losses of course, imperfection in your optical fiber for instance. But the biggest loses come from that conversion and you've just taken our biggest forms of consumption (light/heat) and eliminated the need for conversion. The next biggest is mechanical energy. That does require conversion, but light is actually an excellent candidate for highly efficient conversion to mechanical energy, there is an awful lot of momentum there.

It's also CO2 and heat neutral, actually there should be a net reduction in global warming because some amount of energy from the sun that would have been released as heat will always be contained in the cumulative balance of these storage systems that never existed before.

A step further? A light based battery is a step enough for me. Light has no mass.

Are we seeing the forerunner to light based batteries? You wouldn't actually need to trap light for memory in an optical system, you only need to have light leave at least a temporary imprint that will impact light bounced against it later.

Intelligence is already reasonably well explained, we use our understanding of intelligence to build our own intelligent systems. Just the other day I watched a human built intelligence given a virtual joystick and fed images of the screen and given no concept of a game (beyond using the score as a simple feedback mechanism) figure out how to play most Atari games better than humans can.

These kind of systems aren't even really that complex, they are just hard for us to follow because they work like ant hills, with lots of very simple pieces doing very simple things and the intelligence is a complex result that emerges when you add it all up. Even if you understand them they are difficult to really own. A good mechanic knows the machine inside and out and can model it's behavior in his head. That is much harder with intelligence because you can't break down it's stages into the behavior of the 2-6 elements our conscious mind is capable of considering at once.

Consciousness, is simply an emergence phenomenon of a sufficiently intelligent system.

"Second: on the bright side, unlike a certain other religion popular the world around, you can say something against the pope and not get assassinated by religious leaders for doing so."

At least not anymore. But you can get ex-communicated which a catholic believes is a one way ticket to an eternity of torture and suffering after an eyeblink short stay on Earth.

"Pedagogy is not a simple subject, and just because you know the material does not, in any way, mean that you can be an effective teacher"

The vast majority of teachers do nothing more than follow along with a textbook. Some paraphrase the material, some simply assign it as reading. Then they'll assign the questions at the end of the chapter as homework. Perhaps they'll have some handout assignments from the teacher version of the text. ANYONE can do that provided they themselves understand the material.

"To be a really good teacher you need to have mastery of the entire discipline so that you understand where every class fits into the overall tableau."

Who said anything about good teachers? But understanding where each class fits in is simply a matter of having worked through the material a few times. Teach the same text book two or three times and you'll have it all memorized and know where every class fits in. You might change it up a bit, skip things, alter things. At that point you are an expert. None of that has anything to do with advanced degrees. The fact that you are "qualified" to teach literally any course with any masters degree regardless of the relevance of your major is proof of that.

"Also, if you think passing the course, or even excelling at the course, gives you the necessary content knowledge to effectively teach it, you are terribly mistaken."

Who said anything about teaching effectively? That has little to do with most of the schools in the US. It means you had the ability to read and comprehend the material. Which means you could do so again and regurgitate that material for students.

"Not to mention the simple case of a student asking you a question that's not in the textbook (which is most of them)."

Read above where I indicated understanding the material, which an A student has done.

"If the highly paid programmers are skewed towards certain high cost of living markets, then it's fairer to compare salaries against other professions in those same markets, and not nationwide averages."

This is what everybody repeated when I lived in a more rural and lower paying market. It's not really as true as I was led to believe. It's even less true as time goes on. Things cost about the same in Home Depot, Walmart, and when buying from Amazon. Cars cost about the same, gas costs about the same, education costs the same, most everything costs about the same with the exception of housing and that isn't nearly so big a hit if you work in the city then live in suburbs like most people.

In rural Illinois you'd pay $500/month mortgage on a reasonable 3 bedroom home in a safe middle class neighborhood, in Dallas you'd pay maybe $700, in Albuquerque you'd pay $800, in Miami you'd pay $1200. So, the biggest gap there is $700/mo. That's $8,400 a year. You might pay up to $200/mo more on utilities (and that would be a massive and unlikely swing) so that is another $2400. $10,800 difference. If you are getting paid $50,000 a year in Omaha for a job I get $100,000 a year for in Dallas you most definitely are NOT making equivalent money after factoring cost of living. Not even close. You will have dramatically less disposable income.

On the flip side, you don't have to be nearly as good at what you do to stay employed in Omaha. There isn't nearly as much skilled competition.