Nobody, for example, would describe income tax as an income fine, or claim that having a job is against the law.
Actually, lots of people would. And it more or less is. High income taxes is certainly a disincentive, and in many ways a punishment, to making lots of money. Similarly, high interest rates are more or less a punishment for borrowing money, designed to prevent people from doing so, but if they *do* choose to do so, they pay a penalty.
I'm not arguing that something illegal is legal. I thought I'd been quite clear on that. If French law says that selling books for cheap is illegal, and Amazon sells books for cheap, they're breaking the law.
HOWEVER, if, after breaking that law, they then perform/surrender the specified penalty, that particular legal transaction is done. And the French government, by not specifiying an increasing scale of punishments, or by bringing additional charges, or whatever; or, in other words, by continuing to pocket the fine, is saying, in actuality, not in effect, that Amazon's actions are acceptable.
If the law says not 'thou shalt not do this,' but 'thou shalt pay this amount for the privilege of doing this,' what's the problem?
First of all, the legal system in no way equates 'murder' with 'potentially unfair pricing practices,' so why do you keep comparing the two as though they're even close to being similar?
Second, a charge of murder is per incident, as written. Kill one person, one murder charge. Kill two people, two murder charges.
Third, the penalty for murder isn't a fee, tarriff, fine, levy, whichever word you choose to use; it's generally removal from society for life, if not the death penalty.
The way this law seems to be written is over time. 'For each day that the pricing remains in effect,a $1000 fine shall be levied.' Were they to change it to 'for each item that is sold with this pricing, a $1000 fine shall be levied,' Amazon would stop pretty damn quick, no?
But once again, if the Law was intended to *stop* the activity, the punishment would be something other than generating revenue for the government.
I'm not saying that a law for which the penalty is a fine isn't a law; I'm saying that the penalty is one that quite a few corporations are willing to pay.
Your average corporate exec isn't directly impacted by the corp having to pay a fine; the average corporate exec is directly impacted by having his lily-white ass in the slammer.
Economics teachs us that all decisions are made on the basis of profit versus cost. The idea behind a legal penalty is to be sufficiently high as to dissuade any rational being from thinking it a valid choice, without being so harsh as to persuade any rational being that it's time for a revolution. Apparently, x amount of dollars per day, where x is less than profit doing it, isn't enough of a negative incentive.
There's also the concept of performing the punishment satisfies the law. If the penalty for selling at 20 percent below cost is a $1000/day fine, then paying $1000 dollars per day therefore allows you to sell at 20 percent below cost for each day that you've paid the fine. Is it illegal to pay the fine at 9 AM and go about your business for the rest of the day?
No, having your business license revoked is a penalty for breaking the law. Jail time for execs is a penalty for breaking the law. A fine is a monetary cost of doing business; if the fine is more than the profit from the activity being fined, the activity will stop; if the fine is less, the activity will continue.
Without getting into any of the arguments that tarrifs, subsidies and what not have, at best, a neutral effect, the thing here is that France has not said, in any way, 'thou shalt not do that.' They've said 'Thou shall pay a price for doing that.' If Amazon wants to pay that price, great.
They already did that, it was called 'Streets of Sim City.' Also, SimCopter. And SimCity 4 (or possibly it's expansion pack) let you drive around your city as well.
The other type of task was...racing. Yes, the epitome of immersion and realism in games; a rooftop race collecting flags. Nobody notices these flags, nobody noticed the masked assassin planting them, and nobody notices you hopping merrily along collecting them.
I wanted to love AC, I really did, but it's a rail game. I liked it better when it was Beyond Good and Evil. "You can switch weapons during combat, and that makes it less repetitive!" Please.
Honestly? I read it as 'Word doesn't happen to be the correct tool for what I do, therefore it's obviously crap for every conceivable application, including ones it was actually designed for, and should never be used by anyone, for any purpose.'
Kind of like bitching that the giant SUV you bought is no good for inner-city driving, so SUVs are crap. Or the VW Golf you bought is useless to you in your job of hauling steel I-beams, so VW makes crap cars.
Nonsense. If they were able to maintain enough extra 'hot' capacity to double the user base in, say, one week, with zero affect, people would be bitching that Live was twice as expensive as it should be.
Oversubscription of occasional services is a standard and recognized concept. Airplane flights are routinely overbooked, Internet service is overbooked, telephone service is overbooked, and so on.
I can't be bothered to go look it up, but I'd expect that 1) yes, there is an SLA, 2) it's 'best effort,' AKA none at all, and 3) by signing up for Xbox Live, you agree that it's not going to necessarily work. Couple all that with 4) Xbox Live being broken doesn't take anything away from the 'core' functionality; that is, your games still work, you just can't play online, and 5) Microsoft moved very quickly to recompense the users, this class action will be tossed pretty damn quickly.
And even if the class action succeeded, do you know how Microsoft would probably pay out to the users? A free game. Exactly what they're already doing.
What size display, what aspect ratio, and what average viewing distance? Those three things, and the type of display (LCD, DLP, projector of some sort,) will tell you at what resolution you'll start to pick out pixels.
Or, in other words, HD might not matter to you if you're watching on your 17 inch monitor a foot from your face.
The good: I remember GMing my very first Shadowrun game. 2nd ed. The players decided, as a 'distraction,' to load up a van with plastique. I wanted to know how much damage this would do (as a sidenote; in-play, we just rule-of-thumbed it to keep things going.)
The rulebook provided rules to figure this out.
The bad: Had one of the NPCs at 'ground zero' of the detonation, under this system, managed to roll something like 86 sixes in a row, they would have survived the blast. It wasn't until the Fields of Fire sourcebook that somebody could, canonically speaking, be outright killed. They did this to prevent characters from dying left right and center the first time they walked into SMG fire, but still.
I still have tons of 1st and 2nd ed sourcebooks, if anybody's looking.
Slashdot Mirror
This is when you bring in the neutral, 3rd party observers; UN reps, random citizens, and so on.
But yes, I do prefer the 'count them right then and there' method, myself.
Oh, it's a sad day indeed when people don't even remember that 'web applicatons' started as C, perl, and other such like programs using CGI.
Which is funny, considering that /. is a web app writeen in perl, which could easily be written in C.
No, I'd say it's just plain lazyness.
...Internet Explorer 6 launched in 2001. It's around seven years old at this point.
Seven years.
Actually, lots of people would. And it more or less is. High income taxes is certainly a disincentive, and in many ways a punishment, to making lots of money. Similarly, high interest rates are more or less a punishment for borrowing money, designed to prevent people from doing so, but if they *do* choose to do so, they pay a penalty.
I'm not arguing that something illegal is legal. I thought I'd been quite clear on that. If French law says that selling books for cheap is illegal, and Amazon sells books for cheap, they're breaking the law.
HOWEVER, if, after breaking that law, they then perform/surrender the specified penalty, that particular legal transaction is done. And the French government, by not specifiying an increasing scale of punishments, or by bringing additional charges, or whatever; or, in other words, by continuing to pocket the fine, is saying, in actuality, not in effect, that Amazon's actions are acceptable.
If the law says not 'thou shalt not do this,' but 'thou shalt pay this amount for the privilege of doing this,' what's the problem?
First of all, the legal system in no way equates 'murder' with 'potentially unfair pricing practices,' so why do you keep comparing the two as though they're even close to being similar?
Second, a charge of murder is per incident, as written. Kill one person, one murder charge. Kill two people, two murder charges.
Third, the penalty for murder isn't a fee, tarriff, fine, levy, whichever word you choose to use; it's generally removal from society for life, if not the death penalty.
The way this law seems to be written is over time. 'For each day that the pricing remains in effect,a $1000 fine shall be levied.' Were they to change it to 'for each item that is sold with this pricing, a $1000 fine shall be levied,' Amazon would stop pretty damn quick, no?
But once again, if the Law was intended to *stop* the activity, the punishment would be something other than generating revenue for the government.
I'm not saying that a law for which the penalty is a fine isn't a law; I'm saying that the penalty is one that quite a few corporations are willing to pay.
Your average corporate exec isn't directly impacted by the corp having to pay a fine; the average corporate exec is directly impacted by having his lily-white ass in the slammer.
Economics teachs us that all decisions are made on the basis of profit versus cost. The idea behind a legal penalty is to be sufficiently high as to dissuade any rational being from thinking it a valid choice, without being so harsh as to persuade any rational being that it's time for a revolution. Apparently, x amount of dollars per day, where x is less than profit doing it, isn't enough of a negative incentive.
There's also the concept of performing the punishment satisfies the law. If the penalty for selling at 20 percent below cost is a $1000/day fine, then paying $1000 dollars per day therefore allows you to sell at 20 percent below cost for each day that you've paid the fine. Is it illegal to pay the fine at 9 AM and go about your business for the rest of the day?
No, having your business license revoked is a penalty for breaking the law. Jail time for execs is a penalty for breaking the law. A fine is a monetary cost of doing business; if the fine is more than the profit from the activity being fined, the activity will stop; if the fine is less, the activity will continue.
Without getting into any of the arguments that tarrifs, subsidies and what not have, at best, a neutral effect, the thing here is that France has not said, in any way, 'thou shalt not do that.' They've said 'Thou shall pay a price for doing that.' If Amazon wants to pay that price, great.
A fine is nothing but a tarriff.
...so, why *do* they call you Solid Snake?
Sure, but each runner has the option of buying said special shoes, shirt, shorts, and so on.
The other runners don't have the option of replacing their legs with springy reverse-articulated running legs.
The entire history of Animal Husbandry has been about reducing genetic diversity.
Exactly. Gene-mod meat is one thing, meat pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics is one thing, but cloned? Shouldn't be an issue.
They already did that, it was called 'Streets of Sim City.' Also, SimCopter. And SimCity 4 (or possibly it's expansion pack) let you drive around your city as well.
Machine counted means that you're trusting whoever wrote the code that counts.
Hand counted means that you can watch and verify the count.
*ahem* Wii.
The other type of task was...racing. Yes, the epitome of immersion and realism in games; a rooftop race collecting flags. Nobody notices these flags, nobody noticed the masked assassin planting them, and nobody notices you hopping merrily along collecting them.
I wanted to love AC, I really did, but it's a rail game. I liked it better when it was Beyond Good and Evil. "You can switch weapons during combat, and that makes it less repetitive!" Please.
Oh, granted, granted. Garbage in, garbage out and all that. But one man's garbage is another's favourite show and all that.
Honestly? I read it as 'Word doesn't happen to be the correct tool for what I do, therefore it's obviously crap for every conceivable application, including ones it was actually designed for, and should never be used by anyone, for any purpose.'
Kind of like bitching that the giant SUV you bought is no good for inner-city driving, so SUVs are crap. Or the VW Golf you bought is useless to you in your job of hauling steel I-beams, so VW makes crap cars.
Nonsense. If they were able to maintain enough extra 'hot' capacity to double the user base in, say, one week, with zero affect, people would be bitching that Live was twice as expensive as it should be.
Oversubscription of occasional services is a standard and recognized concept. Airplane flights are routinely overbooked, Internet service is overbooked, telephone service is overbooked, and so on.
I can't be bothered to go look it up, but I'd expect that 1) yes, there is an SLA, 2) it's 'best effort,' AKA none at all, and 3) by signing up for Xbox Live, you agree that it's not going to necessarily work. Couple all that with 4) Xbox Live being broken doesn't take anything away from the 'core' functionality; that is, your games still work, you just can't play online, and 5) Microsoft moved very quickly to recompense the users, this class action will be tossed pretty damn quickly.
And even if the class action succeeded, do you know how Microsoft would probably pay out to the users? A free game. Exactly what they're already doing.
What size display, what aspect ratio, and what average viewing distance? Those three things, and the type of display (LCD, DLP, projector of some sort,) will tell you at what resolution you'll start to pick out pixels.
Or, in other words, HD might not matter to you if you're watching on your 17 inch monitor a foot from your face.
The good: I remember GMing my very first Shadowrun game. 2nd ed. The players decided, as a 'distraction,' to load up a van with plastique. I wanted to know how much damage this would do (as a sidenote; in-play, we just rule-of-thumbed it to keep things going.)
The rulebook provided rules to figure this out.
The bad: Had one of the NPCs at 'ground zero' of the detonation, under this system, managed to roll something like 86 sixes in a row, they would have survived the blast. It wasn't until the Fields of Fire sourcebook that somebody could, canonically speaking, be outright killed. They did this to prevent characters from dying left right and center the first time they walked into SMG fire, but still.
I still have tons of 1st and 2nd ed sourcebooks, if anybody's looking.
Argh, that's the one. Mean Streets. With Sylvia Linsky and the TV that played Star Trek.
Quite right, quite right. I sit corrected.