You apparently feel that a corporation has an obligation to "give back", whatever that means. Let's be clear: beyond paying the taxes required by the state in which an organization conducts it business, there is no further obligation of the company to the state. Apple and other dozen or so large tech companies that have setup similar subsidiary businesses in NV are paying taxes according to NV state law. Just because that equals zero in NV does not mean they owe something to California for business transactions that were not conducted in CA.

That aside, combined with the other tech companies that run their transactions through NV, constitue about 500 well-paid employees in Reno. If other states figured out how to get out of the way of business and stop trying to create jobs, then other state economies might be doing better.

Why is that reasonable? Micorsoft Licensing GP is a wholly owned subsidiary. All of their licensing servers are located in Nevada and all electronic licenses are fullfilled from outside Washington. Just because they write code in one state doesn't mean they have to sell it there. It's the same as a book being written in one state and then sold by a publisher in another.

Microsoft employs a few hundred in Reno. While not much compared to their global operations, that number continues to grow. It's interesting to see the number of companies relocating to NV. Washington and California are taxing, social entitling, and regulating themselves to death. It is not due to NV pursuing some "unfair" tax policy.

FYI, the Apple office in this article is less than a mile from my own. People do work there and many other companies are doing this same thing. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and others all have offices here that handle their finance and treasury activities. Due to this concentration, Reno has become a unique hub of financial managers, accountants, lawyers, and technology companies. Know what these all have in common? Good paying jobs. So while one place suffers due to poor govnernment, NV is thriving.

This has been an open topic for some time....but the problem is that in order to implement it, you'd have to eventually upgrade the OS of every BGP router in the world. From the IP Journal,

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_6-3/securing_bgp_s-bgp.html
"Status:

As of early 2003, an implementation of S-BGP has been developed and demonstrated on small numbers of workstations representing small numbers of ASes. We also developed software for a simple repository, and for NOC tools that support secure upload and download of certificates, CRLs, and AAs to and from repositories, and for certificate management for NOC personnel and routers. This suite of software, plus CA software from another Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program, provide all of the elements needed to represent a full S-BGP system. All of this software is available in open source form. Summary

S-BGP represents a comprehensive approach to addressing a wide range of security concerns associated with BGP. It detects and rejects unauthorized UPDATE messages, irrespective of the means by which they arise; for example, misconfiguration, active wiretapping, compromise of routers or management systems, etc. S-BGP is not perfect; it has a few residual vulnerabilities, but these pale in comparison to the security features S-BGP provides, and removal of these vulnerabilities would require more fundamental changes to BGP semantics.

The S-BGP design is based on a top-down security analysis, starting with the semantics of BGP and factoring in the wide range of attacks that have or could be launched against the existing infrastructure."

You can use more than TCP/UDP ports to block certain types of traffic these days. Cisco routers, for example, have NBAR, which can look into the application layer and find out what is using port 80, then take action on it. Pretty cool.