cryptnoob

We need to tax PC's to incentive people to buy macs. Yes, macs are expensive.

     Attract repeat visitors to your companies website, 

Change companies to company's

You don't have a sales tax, in that the consumer is not taxed. Instead, you have an excise tax, where the business is taxed. Many businesses will show how much they inflated their prices in order to pay their excise tax, and show this as a line item on the receipt. That's their choice. That doesn't make it a sales tax.

Again, Hawaii is taxing it's own people, instead of it's tourists. In self-defense, many of those businesses pass that tax on to the tourists and itemize it on their receipts, but many don't.

     Meanwhile, Hawaiian taxpayers face a $1.2 billion budget 
     deficit, which is being addressed in part with deferred 
     state tax refunds and deferred Medicaid reimbursements.

Hawaii doesn't have a sales tax. It's a tourist destination without sales tax. How silly is that? I get so tired of these "but that's a regressive tax!" wails and nashings of teeth.

For any tourist destination, a sales tax is beautiful, because you get to tax people who don't live there. There is a danger that given two tourist destinations of equal attractiveness, the one without the sales tax may draw more tourists, but this isn't a problem for Hawaii. Where are you going to go, if you want beaches and sun and live on the west coast? Hawaii or Mexico, and there's a lot of people who go to Hawaii that wouldn't be comfortable with Mexico, so it's off the table. For Hawaii to tax their own people but not tourists seems like a strategically poor move.

A homeless program that cost $2M was not nearly as interesting to me as the fact they, of all states, had a budget deficit.

Well, I have to admit, I am certainly not a 6,000,000 transaction per year merchant, which is when I would need a level 1 audit that you and your friend so gleefully salivate over. I wish I was! If I was, I think it very reasonable to audit your processes to insure security.

In fact, I am a level 4 merchant, to my shame, so I have not spent money having an expensive "Certified QSA Security Consultant" audit my systems. I would remind everybody, that, sadly, they are probably level 4 merchants as well, unless they do over 20K transactions a year. Even if you do more than 20K,you're not in the scary big leagues till you get to 6M transactions.

Finally, I'd like to note that we hear a lot about these "possible fines", in theory, but have you heard of any in real life? I assume they must exist, but I invite you to read about the Heartland data breach, which exposed over 130 million credit card numbers. You'll note they still haven't been fined, but they "may be fined over $150K".

One in every crowd, isn't there?

I'd love to know what happened. $20M is a lot to pay, to then shut the doors.

I hate that google is so "text focused". Obviously, for 90% of the web, that's just fine, but I do web apps that "do things".

For example, if I have a web app that converts numbers between bases (just an example, OK?), Google would ignore me, since my home page is just a couple of text fields and a submit button. (If it's ajax, I don't even have a submit button)

So, I say, "OK, fine, Google, you want text, I'll give you text", and I add a blog, saying some stuff about converting numbers between bases. That works a bit, but really, I don't have that much to say about converting numbers between bases. I have this app, it works well, what's to say? So, I rapidly run out of things to say in this blog I was forced to write. Google sees my site as never having new content, and down I go.

Of course, if I had a bunch of incoming links, no worries, but I won't get them if nobody can find me in the first place.