And *you* obviously have never run a tiny Internet-only business. I sell a couple of apps. Kind of the "in" thing to do these days, and it brings in just enough to pay for an occasional new device to write new apps for. I do my bookkeeping by hand with spreadsheets and a small database, because that's all it really needs.

I pay my state's business taxes, and sales tax on in-state purchases. By check, once a year. Manually. Last year, I remitted $.41 (that's 41 *cents*) spread across 5 different tax zones to cover the in-state sales taxes. It probably cost the State and those taxing areas hundreds if not *thousands* of times more than that just to process the payment. But, the law's the law.

Now say I have to track and pay sales taxes in *all* of the States. Not every state has an online lookup for all local taxes. A subscription to one of the commercial services would wipe out most of my profit for the year. Then there's the cost of mailing checks for a few cents to at least 50 taxing authorities (assuming that all of them even *take* checks).

If Apple, Google, Amazon, and all the other app stores don't pick up the burden of collecting the exact sales tax on each paid download, then most of the U.S. app developers are probably going to be forced out of business by the overhead.

Tax rates don't follow zip codes at all. A given taxing area may span multiple zip codes, and a zip code may (and probably does) cover multiple different tax areas. Furthermore, each taxing district may have it's own special rules and exemptions - it's never a simple percentage.

Got the tax code for every little county/town/tax district in the entire country handy? As a very small app seller, it's going to be a nightmare.

Budget cuts.

Next thing you know, the USDA will be studying Farmville to develop agricultural subsidy policies...

This isn't a dupe - it's a tradition!

Look about 5 stories later....

And what will that do to the office-furniture-repair industry?

Thanks Rob, for all the years of distraction and information :-) Future paleo-anthropologists are going to make careers out of mining the depths of the /. archives (you *do* have this all backed up on floppies under your desk, right???)

Oh, this is just the use of the word "unlimited" in the cellular carrier sense...

as in, "unlimited data" == 2GB.

Simple.

Exactly how is this different from Wikimapia (http://wikimapia.org)? That's a community-driven map-places-editing site that's been active for several years now...

Oh, there's an issue with the radio side of it also. The more data you are shoving over the radio channels and the more devices you have in the field, the more spectrum you need. That's simple physics. This is why all those people hoping to get fantastic speeds on Verizon LTE are in for a big shock, once the number of units in the field gets past the miniscule level. They just don't have the radio bandwidth to support lots of 4G users, and it's going to fall over badly.

And thus, the critters living in the swamp get great Internet speeds. While the rest you *outside* the swamp get nothing.

Wireless 2-way data is *not* broadcast TV!