The advent of the internet has simplified life for millions of consumers in this country. But for state governments, many of which are hungry for more tax revenue to purvey their rapacious welfare states, e-commerce has complicated their ability to collect all sales taxes owed to the state – at least without directly taxing the consumer, something the statists are too scared to do. Most | Read More »
Out of control. It seems like only defeating Barack Obama in an election will truly stop this administration. Sure, for now they’ve been scared off of the Internet Tax, but with Net Neutrality and the Cybersecurity Executive Order still brewing, the Obama administration has more power grabs up its sleeves than we should ever have allowed.
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I know, it’s terrible, but after missing Friday due to the RedState upgrade, I feel behind tonight and so am just going to have to speed through some of this tonight.
Ah, the ARRA, aka the Porkulus. Picking Internet winners and losers in Colorado, and probably nationwide in many “little” stories the national media chooses not to pick up.
Read More »Steve Jobs died today after a long battle with cancer. He was 56. Founding NeXT would have been enough to turn anyone into a cult hero in his field. Acquiring Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group and turning it into Pixar would have made anyone a respected business leader. But for Steve Jobs, those were feathers in his cap called Apple, the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak, | Read More »
I’ve been warning for ages that Universal Service Fund reform was coming, and that it would end up as an Internet tax. Well here we go: Plans are afoot. Oddly enough though, people seem fine with the America’s Broadband Connectivity Plan, which so far seems to be a plan to redirect funding toward greater Internet access. Free State Foundation is fine with the plans so | Read More »
Sorry if you’ve been missing Tech at Night this week. Monday I just ran out of time as I had to do a whole bunch of housekeeping*, and tonight I’m running late. So let’s go. In classic Tech at Night style, let’s talk about the FCC. They took forever to get the ball rolling on Net Neutrality, but it’s coming now and it’s a vehicle | Read More »
I really can’t wait until the Lulzsec crew learns about the joys of frogmarching. These arrogant punks need to have some sense smacked into them, and felony charges would be a great way to do that. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you improve domestic cybersecurity: find the people breaking into servers and take away their liberties under existing US law. More in security news: | Read More »
Top story: the great Steven Crowder has a new video on Net Neutrality. With all the hype on Twitter leading up to this release, I was looking forward to Crowder’s video release. It’s funny, accurate, and devastating to the left. As usual for Crowder. Sometimes a patent troll runs into fire. Lodsys, as you may recall, decided to abandon the strategy of targeting deep pockets | Read More »
For a while there, we seemed to have a bit of a break from the big news. We knew big fights like the AT&T/T-Mobile deal loomed, but it was all talk. But that’s changing. As the coalition of self-seekers and socialists forms, the final scope of the debate is beginning to take shape. Listen to this: Some Democrats are criticizing AT&T for planning to use | Read More »
Curse Firefox. I’m getting to this much later tonight than I would have, thanks to a stinking Firefox 3.6 rendering bug, plus Firefox’s refusal to make it easy to work around Firefox rendering bugs. Microsoft Internet Explorer makes that easy with conditional comments. Firefox has no such feature, pretending it’s always right. Which is fine, except when Firefox 4 and Firefox 3.6 render the same | Read More »
Good evening. Here’s a bit I’d never expect to read from the San Francisco Chronicle about Sprint’s begging for the FCC to pick winners and losers, instead of just standing aside and letting AT&T and T-Mobile get together: At a time when wireless service is getting cheaper and more innovative, there is no reason for a Depression-era bureaucracy like the FCC to step in and | Read More »
California’s Democrats, having refused to get tough with the unions who coincidentally will fund their re-election campaigns, are still determined to raise taxes. So they continue to push for an unconstitutional Amazon Tax on the Internet that just might cost the state more than it brings in, in the long run. They’re playing with “thresholds” to try to focus the bill on specific companies like | Read More »
In a startling turn of events, I’m starting tonight’s edition of Tech at Night at 6pm, roughly 8 hours earlier than I have been starting it lately. Imagine that. Top story is a shocker. I mean, I had no idea the Democrats would get this far out there. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, wants to pass a national sales tax solely on Internet transactions. The | Read More »
As I began work on tonight’s late Tech at Night, reports came out of an explosion at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture, Japan. As Japan continues to deal with an unimaginably strong earthquake and then a devastating tsunami caused by that quake, I hope nobody takes those special circumstances and tries to argue against clean, effective power generation technology in the general case. | Read More »
And now I really push the definition of Tech at Night, starting to write this at 2am. I’d originally planned to skip tonight’s edition, and instead just sleep. But I woke up, and sleep isn’t returning anytime soon, so let’s make the rounds of tech and policy. Some Democrats still haven’t learned the lesson of the PCCC. The far left alternative to the DCCC published | Read More »
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