It's not just the many, many separate tax rates in this country. You also have to deal with different reporting systems (you can't just blindly send checks out); different monthly/quarterly/annual reporting systems, some localities may not be interested in checks that are "too small", etc. Amazon of course could do it. If you're an individual that wants to start a business, you have no hope. The only choice would be finding some service to do it for you; raising your prices so that you could pay the extra fees to that business on top of the taxes. What I would do is reverse the argument; e.g. say that a business in state X must pay taxes to that state even if the product is shipped out of state. Then you would know if the mail order company depended on not paying sales taxes; e.g. if the company then moved to a state with no sales tax like Oregon.

If you're inclined to guided walking tours, I recommend the London Walks organization; http://www.walks.com./ In addition to walking tours of various parts of London, they also have excursion days to Oxford, Cambridge, etc.

I'd think you could go back much earlier. Syndicated radio, back in the 1930's, was done by individual radio stations subscribing to a show; e.g. a "podcast". "Downloads" were done by the syndicator making copies of records and mailing them to the subscribers. I see zero difference between that and current podcasts where the "syndicator" puts audio/video files on a computer network so that subscribers can download them.

Depends on the era. I was a high school student in Southern California in the early 1970's. At that time in that school district, PE was a mandantory class, one period a day, 5 days a week; graded like any other class. The coaches (PE teachers) though just treated the class like a farm system for high school athletics. If you potentially any good athletically, you were recruited and got an A or B. If you weren't good at sports; etc. but didn't cause the coach problems, you got a C. The classes just switched every so often from one sport to the next. No special effort was given to monitoring extertion, etc.

The official reason they want GPS is that different states have different taxes. So they want to know the miles you drive in each state. There's of course also talk that if they get this, they can use it for toll roads; urban congestion charges, etc.

To my understanding, if any other organization wanted to spend the money to go through multiple big libraries; scanning every document, and then running those scans through an OCR system, there's nothing in this agreement that would prevent that. Google is just the only organization to have spent the money. I would welcome easier access to "orphan", out of print books.

Depends on what area of the country you're in. Some of the old CompUSA stores in (iirc) the southeastern area of the US were purchased by Tiger Direct, along with the CompUSA web site. Unless Tiger Direct starts opening new CompUSA stores though, they're gone as far as the rest of the country is concerned.