prostoalex writes "Washington state Governor signed a tax bill encouraging out of state businesses to collect sales taxes on purchases made by Washington state residents. It should be noted, though, that Washington state does not collect personal income tax, and hence relies on state sales tax for 53.1% of its revenues." As the article notes, "People who purchase items from out-of-state Internet or catalog companies are currently supposed to pay the sales tax, but rarely do." Looks like Washington-staters won't be able to fib on their tax returns about internet purchases, starting in 2008.

An anonymous reader asks: "I am US-based and have recently been doing part-time subcontracting work for a friend in the UK who runs her own small marketing firm. She sells a complete branding/identity plan and if that includes a web site refresh, she calls me. The clients do not know who or where I am, or even that the work is being subbed. Like many designers, I often use Corbis and other photo merchants to mock up layouts for review. It is legal to download images (comps) from Corbis to use offline for the this purpose. If the client likes the design/images, I get a quote from the photo vendor and the client has the option to purchase. If the price is too high, which it often is with Corbis, I turn to less expensive or free alternatives." The problem comes when the site goes live and images from Corbis (or others of its ilk) aren't replaced, which is an honest mistake as long as it doesn't happen excessively. How does one handle isolating the customer, fixing the problem, and paying the proper fees (professional legal consultation here goes without saying) without everything getting blown out of proportion?

reactosfanboy writes "DRM Hacker Alex Ionescu explained the internals of ReactOS in a recent talk. Ionescu indicates that ReactOS is nearly 100% binary and API compatible with the Windows 2003 kernel, and that they are aiming for full Vista compatibility. Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is still not ready for prime time." In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally." Here are slides from Ionescu's talk (PDF), which might prove more useful than the video offered in various forms at over 450 MB.

fireballrus writes with news of the release of ReactOS 0.3.1 — press release, changelog, download packages. ReactOS is "an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003)." The press release notes: "Please don't forget this is an alpha-stage operating system, which means it is not suitable to replace your main OS. Also, this release is aimed to be run mostly in virtualizers / emulators (like QEmu, VMWare, Parallels, etc): because of the big amount of changes, our development team was not able to test/fix all problems which arise when running ReactOS on real hardware."