Congress is on track to passing a nationwide Internet retail sales tax, but it has serious flaws that could majorly muck up the e-commerce industry. We think citizens are often smarter than the government, and we want to give you a chance to make the bill better before it becomes law. So, we’ve teamed up with Congressman Darrell Issa’s Open Government Foundation, which designed a platform for making line-by-line suggestions to proposed laws. In TechCrunch’s version of the “Project Madison” crowdsourcing legislative platform, our readers can add, delete, and amend specific passages in the upcoming tax law.

Suggestions that are voted up by our community will get the most attention of Congressional staffers (which we know are watching our platform). It’s been claimed that the Internet is “democratizing” the world; well, here’s our chance to prove it.

Senate Bill S.743, the “Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013,” passed the Senate with overwhelming support and is on to the House of Representatives. But, it won’t be passed for at least a month, so we have some time to bubble up the best ideas from our community of readers.

Biomimicry is an engineering field that takes cues from nature to help solve and address human problems, and Google today launched a new website at its Google Green initiative that highlights some of the ways nature’s engineers can inspire and guide human behavior. The site uses gorgeous National Geographic images along with brief descriptions of how the natural antecedent relates to the human concept, and then provides Google-sourced tools to help people emulate that activity.

Is it basically an ad? Yes. Is it a smart one? Definitely. Google manages to pitch pretty much all of its major web- and app-based offerings and services in a single slide show, with direct integrations built in that make it possible to take immediate action based on the trends they choose to highlight. You can do a local search for recycled and upcycled decorating material, grab apps and movies on the subjects from Google Play, search for maps and join Google+ communities and more. My only complaint is that Google buries the science at the end of the site in linked academic articles for each animal or plant behavior, where those probably should have been at least linked somewhere in each well-designed spread right alongside the Google service advertisements.

Some might call this empty lip-service to Earth Day, which takes place today and probably would be better served by Google powering down a server farm or two for a few hours, but the concepts highlighted (including ride sharing, composting, energy conservation and diet modification) are solid ones and would have genuinely beneficial ecological effects if adopted by large portions of the community. Plus it’s an impressive example of web design in its own right, and a look at what Google can do with content marketing models which could be a key vector for it to exploit as the nature of online advertising continues to shift.

There is no shortage of cloud-based file storage and synchronization solutions: Dropbox, Box.net, Ubuntu One, and on and on and on. Most offer pretty much the same things. A few niche players offer something special, like Spideroak‘s approach to encryption, or ownCloud‘s host-it-yourself solution. QloudSync puts forward two interesting differentiators: it’s powered by 100% renewable energy, and it’s hosted in Iceland.

From a feature perspective, QloudSync isn’t anything new. File storage and synchronization. Share links with others. Stream music and video. The client apps are open source, and built atop SparkleShare.

QloudSync runs on GreenQloud‘s ComputeQloud and StorageQloud, which offer API compatibility with Amazon EC2 and S3. What is different about GreenQloud’s offerings, though, are that they run on renewable energy and claim to be carbon neutral, without the use of emissions offsets of any kind. Users of GreenQloud’s services can easily share their carbon savings to the social media outlet of their choice.

Correction: There is a Jedi meld starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Force_meld (h/t @thegarance)

President Obama inadvertently triggered national geek outrage, after he mistakenly mixed up the warring science fiction universes of Star Wars and Star Trek. During a press conference related to recently triggered budget cutbacks, known as the “sequester,” he said, “I can’t do some kind of Jedi Mind Meld on congressional Republicans,” referring to the partisan gridlock that has prevented Congress from passing a budget. Twitter immediately lit up with comments poking fun of the fact that Obama mixed up Star Wars’ ‘Jedi Mind Trick‘, used for mind control, and Star Trek‘s Vulcan ‘Mind Meld’, for sharing thoughts.

Obama just said "Jedi mindmeld." What's next, Klingon lightsabers? #Shame #Impeach

As American science students struggle to compete with the global competition, Oklahoma is moving forward with a law that could ban Biology teachers from failing students who argue that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. The state legislator’s committee in charge of education standards has approved a law that would forbid teachers from penalizing students who argue against widely accepted scientific theories, such as evolution and climate change.

“I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks,” said Republican State Representative Gus Blackwell who sponsored the Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act, which can now go the state legislature for a vote.

Students are not exempt from being tested on textbook material, “but no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories,” reads the bill [PDF].