It's not just a tax rate per address. It's per address per product. For example, in New York, clothing under $110 is exempt from state taxes but not necessarily exempt from county, city or other local taxes. Any clothing item over $110 is charged tax on the full price. In Massachusetts, clothing under $175 is exempt from state level sales tax but only the portion above $175 is taxed for higher ticket clothing items. In Connecticut only some clothing items under $50 are exempt from state sales tax. So, just in the category clothing, you can see that what is taxed, which portion is taxed and which items are included in the category definition is different. This is just on the state level and not including the myriad city, county, district and other taxes.

Taxes may be based on types of products: in Massachusetts, the American flag, among other items, is exempt from taxes; in Pennsylvania, textbooks and disposable diapers, among other items, are exempt; or as another poster mentioned, the Chicago Soft Drink Tax (where additional taxes are charged for "soft drinks".) Taxes may be based on areas: higher taxes for Bay Area Rapid Transit district and Louisiana tourism district or reduced taxes for New Jersey's Urban Enterprise Zones. Taxes can be charged based on intended use: in Indiana, a 15 ounce bag of potato chips is tax exempt (food items are exempt) whereas a personal sized bag is taxed because it is for immediate consumption and in California fertilizer is exempt if it's used to grow food.

Realistically, taxes can be based on any criteria that enters the twisted mind of a politician in the tiniest of jurisdictions, Currently, sales taxes can differ based upon temperature of food, whether the customer is a college student, distance from an airport, whether the product is in its original package, whether the product is intended to be used at home, etc. Most sales taxes are charged based upon the sales price while Hawaii also charges a portion of their excise tax (their sales tax equivalent) on the wholesale price and other states only charge on a portion of the sales price (such as the amount of clothing over $175 above.) Many states and municipalities also charge a restaurant and/or hotel tax and it's amazing what can get swept into that tax, such as candy, chips, soft drinks, juice boxes, bottled water, or other immediately consumable items, which an online retailer may sell.

In addition, many states have tax "holidays" when taxes are not charged: in Florida, a "back-to-school" tax holiday is often enacted on clothing, books and school supplies under a certain price; in Georgia, a tax Holiday, usually in October, is enacted on Energy Star rated appliances; Texas's tax holiday lasts for an entire weekend and applies to many items and exempts clothing and footwear under $100 but still taxes golf shoes, no matter the price.

Sales taxes are much more complicated than most people realize and they are completely at the whims of state, county, regional and municipal government officials. The category definitions are different from state to state and often different for local taxes within the state. This means the local taxes are often different from other locations within the state but also means that the local definition may differ from the state's own definitions. So for any given product, any of the taxes; state, county or municipal; may or may not apply. For a physical store, a local accountant can advise you how the taxes apply for that particular location but an online store would need to know what rate applies for every single product for every single address. Obviously, most of these combinations would never actually occur but the databases would need to contain a solution prior to the person placing the order.

In a community of six million people, how many people do you think share the same name? I can just imagine someone in my community reading my name on this Twitter page and thinking it was me rather than one of the three other people I know about with the same name. What a mess.

Worse, imagine getting fired because your clueless boss decided to fire people because their name was on the list and they drive a delivery truck. Even if you later prove that the person was someone sharing your name but living at a different address you're not likely to get your job back in an "at will" employment jurisdiction.

I often find myself slapping on headphones even when I'm not listening to music to keep people from randomly popping into my cubicle to talk about meaningless drivel which is the most distracting thing. When I do listen to music, I prefer something that moves quickly without distracting vocals. Look, good programmers are exceedingly good at optimizing their own productivity and do not need bosses who've read the study du jour and decided that they know what's happening inside the heads of their programmers. The current study was conducted with pop music which any programmer would already have told you is too distracting for them. Of course there were the previous studies that showed classical music increased memory and cognition in students which the marketing wonks decide it made babies into Einstein even though the study did not apply to babies nor were the effects long-lasting. If you want the project done, you can at least allow me to manipulate the environment surrounding my own head since I have much more experience in achieving my own highest productivity than any manager ever will.

We need a "get your damn kid off my internet" campaign.

I guess they would find plenty of funding if they go to China and create a game where you, as a loyal communist, go forth to improve the lives of your fellow citizens.

No it's not, you do it like this.

You can do that but it always seems to be behind the feature curve of the latest Apple interfaces which means the coolest feares will not be available. For example, the iPhone DJ services will not be available. Likewise, since its only a shared library and you cannot access the music library through a local copy of iTunes, it makes it's more cumbersome to do routine maintenance like rating songs, adding artwork, changing genres, etc. which can only be done in iTunes with a local library and not through a shared library.

Obviously, since iTunes is still a single user app that shares to other computers running iTunes, the application is designed to not allow the "clients" to change the information in the library which is assumed to be shared by a different user. For example, if each computer really represented a different person, it's very likely that the person sharing their library does not want those users to be able to reorganize his library.

In my case, the media server is another Mac running iTunes. You could do the same with a Windows machine running iTunes if you'd prefer. Sadly, iTunes does not behave well with network shares as it really expects to have local drives. Also, remember that if you allow the drives to sleep when inactive it will create significant delays when you begin streaming while they spin up. iTunes is still very much a single user application and I would really like to see Apple create a true client/server solution in the future but at this point you have to work within iTunes limitations. This means having iTunes running on your server then sharing the library so you can access it from iTunes on your other household computers.

Hopefully Apple will eventually embrace the idea of a home media server with a true server version of iTunes running on the server and allowing the clients to share that library in a multi-user fashion. Currently, there are a few inconsistencies when using a shared library instead of a local library; you can't assign a star rating to a song on the remote server, for example, but overall the the interface is so elegant, convenient and worry-free that it justifies accepting the bastardized server arrangement to implement the solution.

The primary problem that anti-virus software tries to protect against malicious activities of other people and not the actual computer user. The level of security to truly harden a networked computer from attack is incredibly high. Even the most sophisticated of us cannot guarantee 100% security of a networked system. Certainly my systems and your systems will have high levels of security but even we cannot guarantee 100% security of our own systems. Luckily, if you're in the top 50% of secure systems and you don't have military grade secrets, you're probably secure enough. Of course, that still leaves a lot of systems that are less than adequately secured. And, their users may be unlikely to become educated in the safe use of those machines

This is not to say that we shouldn't try to educate them but we would certainly be lax if we didn't attempt to improve their security by installing systems that automatically improve the security of their systems. We do this in the real world, too. When you buy a car, it comes standard with a lock and key system to give a small amount of security. Many people in the industry can bypass those safeguards and steal your car. But still we don't keep someone from flattening your tires, cutting your battery leads or draining all your brake fluid. Most of these things could be done to a car that is locked and with the security system armed. Luckily, it's a rare enough event that we don't feel insecure as a result

Likewise, our houses have locks on the doors. Many can still be breached through a window. Some have bars to prevent thatt. But many of those only stop a person from entering with a thin layer of siding, some fiberglass insulation, and a sheet of drywall; all of which could be breached in under a minute. So we develop automated warning systems that can quickly alert the homeowner (and paid security specialists) of a breach. Still they're not foolproof but we accept them as adequate.

This is the equivalent of anti-virus software. Certainly we should attempt to educate people but we should also create systems that alert and notify people when their security has been breached. Likewise, we should have methods to help them remove invaders from their computer. In the real world, we have police to come in and remove criminals occupying a space illegally and it is appropriate to have software and services to do the same in a computer. The police should do the job of removing intruders regardless of whether the person forgot to lock their front door or didn't install a security system.

I guess I'm just a little mystified as to why people always feel a need to start harping on the stupidity of the victims every time an article is written that evaluates the safeguards designed to enhance security. Education is important and certainly needs to be an ongoing effort on all security issues but in the end no one is ever completely secure and other improvements that are willing used by people to enhance their security should certainly be evaluated for effectiveness and reported on accordingly.

There's a difference between not learning anything about the computer (or car for that matter) and just learning enough to do the minimum necessary to use the device. When we get a driver's license, you are demonstrating that you have a minimum proficiency to drive an automobile. Truthfully, many of those people still have problems driving in inclement weather or when it's dark out but we accept that they have the minimum proficiency to share the roadways with others. Are you so certain of your mechanical knowledge of your car that you know that a tire will not fail or the car will not accelerate uncontrollably (such as the recent Lexus recall) potentially killing another person on the road? Are you certain, every time you start your car, that someone didn't maliciously tamper with your car putting you or others at risk once you start driving? Of course not. But, as a society, we accept that your lack of knowledge is an acceptable risk even though it puts other people's lives at risk.

You could argue that people should have to get a license to operate a computer on a network but we, as a society, generally frown upon additional regulation. The only reason people accept licensing for drivers is because lives can be put at risk. It's unlikely that anyone would suggest that an elderly woman who has a computer online so that she can get pictures of her distant grand children through email should have some advanced understanding of computers. It's somewhat ridiculous that so many in the computer industry insist that people who have no interest in computers must learn a great deal about its inner workings before they can use one as a tool. Certainly no one expected you to be similarly informed about your car, household appliances or plumbing before you were allowed to use them. Why should they need to know more about their computer or the underlying technology within to surf the web or get email? They don't need to understand radio waves to use a television or cell phone.

Look, I've been a programmer for over twenty years and I definitely enjoy learning about many minute details in the systems I use but I hardly expect the same from everyone around me. Developing safeguards to protect others without them becoming experts seems a logical thing to do.

Even when people learn to drive, accidents still happen. That's why technology is developed to reduce the negative outcomes of those accidents (crumple zones, seat belts, airbags) or attempt to diminish the likelihood of an accident occurring in the first place (brake lights, mirrors, reflective road signs.) This is the same reason anti-virus software is developed and it's certainly appropriate to debate the effectiveness of these methods.

Moderators, please read more than the first line before moderating. This is in no way flamebait.

Well, I guess it all depends on how you have your home set up. I have an office upstairs and my media server is there and always running. In other rooms there are no noisy computers because the Apple TVs and Airport Expresses are driving the attached devices silently.

I can't answer what issues you created by using the Airport Express outside in you Halloween scenario maybe you had a weak signal or other obstacles. It's not really an outdoor device. However, your other assertions are completely wrong. You can stream to as many AirTunes devices (Airport Express or Apple TV) as you like with no problem. In addition, you can stream to them while also playing the same source on the computer's local speakers.

In my household, we have multiple Airport Expresses and Apple TVs and we have a central server with several terabytes of music, movies and TV shows and we love being able to stream our content to wherever we like. It's very simple and allows you to reconfigure how you use everything with ease. For example, you can have internet radio streaming to my desktop computer and two other rooms while my wife is listening to her playlists in two other rooms and someone else is watching a ripped DVD in yet another room. In addition, we can select music from our laptops and a shared library or from our iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

As for the Halloween party you were speaking about, I also enjoy throwing Halloween parties and have found this setup ideal for my needs. I usually have creepy music playlists playing in the front yard graveyard while I have other music streaming throughout the house and a theme specific playlist playing in the backyard, too. (I tend to keep the devices inside the house and run cables to the external speakers, though.) As the night progresses, I usually clear out a dance floor area and begin playing dance music in that area while the other streams continue. Now that Apple has added video playlists, I can also keep sufficiently spooky video going on the TVs all night. Also, with the Apple Remote App, I can turn on the DJ services and allow users to vote from their own iPhones on what songs will play on the dance floor. It's really fun and everyone really enjoys it.

I've been using this setup for years and each year Apple keeps adding new, well-considered features that keep making the system better. To me, that's one of the coolest features; I sit back and do nothing new while Apple keeps creating new features that enhance my entire system and make my friends think I keep adding new stuff. What could be better?

I thought it's purpose was eating baguettes.