Speaking as a lawyer . . .

"in court" is the catch.

*which* court?

There isn't a court in the country with jurisdiction to prosecute "he sped somewhere in some jurisdiction." A court needs to convict for a specified violation within it's own jurisdiction. An acknowledgment that means a crime was committed *somewhere* that *might* have been in that jurisdiction isn't sufficient to convict.

hawk, esq.

>Collecting sales tax on behalf of the states has
>been proposed, but some states don't collect sales
>tax and again, it probably would be struck down as
>unconstitutional based on state's rights to collect
>the tax.

Speaking as a lawyer . . .

you're just plain wrong on this.

The Supreme Court has made it clear that while states cannot force out of state entities to collect sales tax for them, it is for Congress to find a solution. It is not that states *cannot* tax the purchases, but that they cannot tax *out of state* entities. Congress indisputably has the power to handle the issue.

hawk, esq.

The solution has been obvious for more than a decade.

Each zipcode gets a tax rate. If it crosses jurisdictional lines, either the jurisdictions resolve the split between themselves, or it stays in trust until a court resolves the split.

This is a *very* small array for an electronic report.

The company writes a single check, with a monthly electronic report breaking it down by zip code.

My google search on the issue came up with Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Bangladesh. Two of which seem to be African, the latter South Asian I guess.

I'm sure you can come up with better data.

Besides infant mortality, there's probably unreported miscarriage.

There's no room in business for humor. No good business person makes a decision without calculating their potential profit and loss (or risk/benefit, if you prefer those terms). If you don't understand it, I'd hazard to guess that you've never been involved in senior business decisions for a multimillion dollar company.

When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.

A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.

OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.

And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.

It's a very obvious capitalistic endeavor.

Every person that dies is one less customer. You don't have to be Internet connected to be a Microsoft customer.

Facebook, on the other hand, requires Internet connectivity. Every person that doesn't have Internet service is an untapped customer.

How about the children of the Microsoft orange badge employees who never got benefits, regular schedules, raises, job security or promotions?

They also were not allowed to buy from the company store or ride the company bus. How did that affect their family? Did they have time to spend with their children?

Shall we go into Microsoft's well known support for offshoring tens of thousands of jobs to a place where children live in 8x8 concrete hovels and work for $1.80 a day?

Hey Bill, you know you spent $100 billion on R&D for Windows. We could have cured malaria 1000x over for that. In fact, we could have solved every major epidemic mankind has ever faced for $100 billion. Instead we got Windows 8.

Nice job, Bill.

There are 20-somethings with jobs? In America? Where they get paid? With money?

Bullshit.

This country can't build a web site. How the fuck are we going to build an SR-72?

Scientists learn to fellate themselves. Our call for a quote was not immediately returned.

I own ESPN.com? Wow. Maybe I should call someone.

Dumbass.

HSUS is, bluntly, a money laundry based on the animal rights schtick. Since one of the AR goals is no more pets, making pet deaths as ugly and expensive as possible is seen as one way of reducing pet ownership.

That's OK, the Aussie dollar is slipping again against the US$ so the prices can be justifiably lifted again. :(