In the US the marginal rate at that income would be 33% but SS and medicare (if you count both the employer and employee contributions) is 15% tacked on top. Then state income tax, add about another 8% depending on which state. And of course you'll need Health Insurance, probably another 10% there. Is 66% > 45%?
(And yes I conveniently ignored the Oz payroll taxes and the medicare levy, and for the US side that SS is capped).
There is no proof obviously, that's what "as far as we can tell" means. It is what General Relativity predicts.
There hasn't been a universally accepted doable experiment proposed.
There's http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302294 - though they may have just measured the speed of light and shock horror found that it is the speed of light (+/- 20%)
No it shows that your general rule isn't correct. There's another factor which is "novelty" or maybe "innovation" if you want to be management...
Sure if a game is just like a bunch of other games then yes the most polished one will win out (of course some people might choose the polished graphics over more polished gameplay, etc). However, if your game has something reasonable "unique" then that polish doesn't matter as much since there isn't any competition.
Minecraft was an example of that. The world constuction/destruction aspect gave it something that competitors did not have. Note that terraria has done pretty well too, it has more polish on the gameplay (there actually is gameplay...) though lost a D.
At least I think that's how it works for me - I don't make such conscious decisions - but given the games I do play. There are "old school" RPGs that I once would have loved but now can't get into, I suspect because I can get an RPG with polish and get the RPG part I like with pretty graphics. But there are other games I play which are lack in the polish department, Mount&Blade and AI War: Fleet Command for example - both of which aren't what I would call polished (though AI War has great music) but they offer something I haven't found with more polish (yet).
I doubt this has anything that hasn't been done elsewhere. There are plenty of "safari" type games in which you take pictures of animals (aimed at kids, mind you) so the camera instead of gun isn't new, and there are plenty of games in which editing video is a key part of the game. But I don't actually know anything outside of the slashdot summary (and I skimmed that:), so maybe they do have something newish.
Still you certainly don't need a publisher in this day and age. If your game is actually good it can't be that hard to get some of the popular youtube "watch me a play a game instead of playing it yourself" people to give it a whirl and hence publicity. Steam doesn't seem hard to get into (given the shitty stuff I see on their front page all the time). Yes you won't be able to sell it for $50.
They wouldn't be clocking in if they were running their own business.
Instead they're likely employed to do data entry or whatever for an hour a day and paid for an hour a day. Not that uncommon for the stay at home parent to do in the hour that the kids are occupied.
That's because those paragaphs were added to the article after the fact (and after the summary was written - so the summary isn't incomplete it reflects the idiocitic article at the time).
And that includes slashdot car and pizza analogies.
Unless he is claiming researchers are contributing code to said products that they know contains security bugs and then when it is released reporting it and claiming a bug bounty (and hiding the fact they contributed it since the rules say you can't do that of course).
But he isn't. So the anology is complete and utter garbage.
The British government is examining whether it could save money by getting rid of its printers and giving civil servants free iPads instead
And yet you didn't say they where "given" "free" printers, or "given" "free" paper, or "given" "free" ink/toner. Or chairs, or desks, or heating.
Now sure you can argue that choosing the iPad might be just picking the most trendy option rather than the best (in terms of costs and benefits). But instead you decided to inject the word "free" to try and bias the reader from the start. I assume you are paying the share of the building rent that your desk space/office space/whatever uses and your portion of the electricity bill too, rather then being "given" it for "free".
Seems an actual worthwhile use of tablets to me. It's almost all viewing, with almost no editing. The form factor is similar to paper so the existing setup won't need changing. It also makes for much better practical jokes by updating people's documents on the fly.
Such a usage persists because without it the risk of running a business would be far too large for most people. But yes the business that do run would go bankrupt less often - the price you pay for that is reducing GDP to 1/10th (completely made up) of what it is now. Most people won't take that trade.
And incorporating doesn't insulate you from losses it limits losses to what you have invested. If some third party is willing to loan a company too much money that's their problem - they knew the deal when they made the loan. (If the government then bails them out then that's what the people get for electing such governments.)
I can understand at least the logic(if not necessarily the wisdom) of limited-liability-corporations as a vehicle for tiny stockholders to not take on outsized risks through holding miniscule slices of a large venture over which they have little or no control
That isn't the reason behing limited-liability-corporations. They are vehicles to provide limited libility without regrd to who the shareholders are. Without checking or doing any reasearch I'm going out on a limb and claiming that there are more LLC that are 100% owned by 5 or less pepole than there are owned by more than 5. (Almost every IT person doing consulting jobs incorporates, as do most plumbers, electricians, etc who work for themselves, and so on).
There are costs with those benefits - the entity will have a harder time getting credit and so on than the owner would (in the case in which it's one huge company owning 100% of a small one).
a 100% owned operational subsidiary over which you exercise organizational control, and whose technology you are (no longer) actively on track to integrated into your products? Any notion of financial separation seems like the thinnest of legal fictions.
There are ways to pierce the veil, but usually the i's have been dotted and the t's crossed.
You do know about credit cards right? There are all kinds of fees for a transaction and this makes a 15 times a $1 fee NOT the same in money earned as a 1 time 15$ fee
And since they'd bill at the end of month it wouldn't matter in the slightest. Sure there will be some <$15 charges but they aren't doing 15 $1 charges instead of 1 $15 charges.. Charging in the CC in $1 increments would be stupid and nobody would do that.
Heck they could even charge a $15 minimum - via the points system you mentioned. At the end of the month they take the number of hours the player has played and cap it at 15. Reduce the number of "time points" the player has by that amount. If the "time points" value is now negative charge the CC $15 and add 15 "time points" to the player's account. There that took more time to type than it did to make up - where did you get this "charge the card every hour" crap from? Tweak that "negative" to some other number if you want a pay in advance system. Have a minimum too if you want " if you play <5 hours a month you are charged for 5 hours".
How many minutes of support from a human being do you expect for 14,99 in a month?
And I expect as much support as it takes to fix their screw ups. I've never called support for a game. I've emailed support once or twice because something wasn't working - but that cost was amortized over everyone else since "their shit was broken" (the latest was steam not letting me buy something because my laptop was in the wrong location - that took 1 minute of a support person's time, assuming they are very slow at reading email).
It was nice to read the parents post, just another reminder about how little the average MMO gamer understands about economy
Whereas I got a reminder of how some people like to project their own idiocy onto others. Given nowhere did that post say to make multiple charges on a CC - just to allow for a lower charge on months in which there was little game time used. A system that works just fine for the phone companies, the electricity companies, the water companies, the gas companies, cloud computing providers, etc, etc. Metered pricing is hardly a new idea.
But you ignored that and decided to focus on a suggestion that was never made. Oh well it's nice to get reminder of how retarded at reading comprehension the average furry creature is.
Of course they understand it. They also understand that while we don't have a free market as such it is free enough that competition will see other corporate expenses cut as well.
And I'm pretty sure you don't want to maximize revenue. You want to fund your expenses while reducing GDP by as little as possible. Or if you are politician then fundng your expenses while incentivising the things you like and punishing the things you don't like.
Except of course that everyone over 4 years of age knows this already. That you think it is a revelation says lots about the quality of your junior high school and nothing about anything else.
So because people will play games with taxes we should just set all taxes to 0%, right?
The whole idea for upping the rate is because those on such incomes will be doing such things with their taxes. So since you are only going to get to a tax some portion of their income you have to use a higher rate to get the same end amount. And yes that sucks for the people who don't want to bother tax planning.
And do you really think anyone is going to say - well I was fine with the federal income tax taking $3,500,000 of my income but now that they want $4,500,000 I'm going to start "playing games". I suspect they're already doing all they can.
So after pissing off a minority of users by changing the pricing struture the plan is to piss off the rest?
Force me to consider the disk and the streaming as unrelated things so that when I don't use one that much it'll be easier to ditch it?
I have to search for things in two places?
That whole recommendation thing they did a million dollar prize for not that long ago - it now can't use my DVD watching to recommend streaming?
Sure they are clearly planning to ditch the DVD half and re trying to limit damages from people ranting about it to a brand name that isn't netflix. But I doubt the people doing the complaining are going to oblige.
Next you'll say you haven't heard of Plan 9 or that it's just a crappy movie. Or that you don't know who Rob Pike or Ken Thompson are.
And yes it won't make for anything usable for someone who wants to, oh I don't know, make a phone call. But this isn't "Consumer Phones For Idiots" either.
Wow, a nobel laureate stepping outside their field of expertise and being an idiot. That has never happened!
Oh wait, from Pauling going from a chemistry nobel prize to advocating megadoses of Vitamin C to cure everything. To Mechnikov winning the nobel for medicine and then going cuckoo for probiotics. To Montagnier winning the nobel in medicine and then jumping into the complete quakery of homeopathy. That seems to be a common ailment - win a nobel and then parade your idiocy in other areas.
Which says nothing either way on global warming, but citing that nobel as any sort of evidence of expertise and authority just shows you aren't interested in the actual science but just in scortng points.
Sure they do. Everyone is free to pressure people via ranting and raving. Unless the one doing the pressuring is "the government" (or an agent thereof) in which case pressuring someone to perform (or not perform) religious acts is not just illegal but unconstitutional.
I'm pretty sure the Coward you are replying to isn't acting as an agent of the government and hence is well within his rights to pressure people (via legal mechanisms like talking to them, using a soapbox and ranting, etc) to give up on religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Where too?
In the US the marginal rate at that income would be 33% but SS and medicare (if you count both the employer and employee contributions) is 15% tacked on top. Then state income tax, add about another 8% depending on which state. And of course you'll need Health Insurance, probably another 10% there. Is 66% > 45%?
(And yes I conveniently ignored the Oz payroll taxes and the medicare levy, and for the US side that SS is capped).
There is no proof obviously, that's what "as far as we can tell" means. It is what General Relativity predicts.
There hasn't been a universally accepted doable experiment proposed.
There's http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302294 - though they may have just measured the speed of light and shock horror found that it is the speed of light (+/- 20%)
But it's still cool that having your clock/detector be 60 nanoseconds off is the different between rewriting physics textbooks and ho-hum.
No it shows that your general rule isn't correct. There's another factor which is "novelty" or maybe "innovation" if you want to be management...
Sure if a game is just like a bunch of other games then yes the most polished one will win out (of course some people might choose the polished graphics over more polished gameplay, etc). However, if your game has something reasonable "unique" then that polish doesn't matter as much since there isn't any competition.
Minecraft was an example of that. The world constuction/destruction aspect gave it something that competitors did not have. Note that terraria has done pretty well too, it has more polish on the gameplay (there actually is gameplay...) though lost a D.
At least I think that's how it works for me - I don't make such conscious decisions - but given the games I do play. There are "old school" RPGs that I once would have loved but now can't get into, I suspect because I can get an RPG with polish and get the RPG part I like with pretty graphics. But there are other games I play which are lack in the polish department, Mount&Blade and AI War: Fleet Command for example - both of which aren't what I would call polished (though AI War has great music) but they offer something I haven't found with more polish (yet).
I doubt this has anything that hasn't been done elsewhere. There are plenty of "safari" type games in which you take pictures of animals (aimed at kids, mind you) so the camera instead of gun isn't new, and there are plenty of games in which editing video is a key part of the game. But I don't actually know anything outside of the slashdot summary (and I skimmed that :), so maybe they do have something newish.
Still you certainly don't need a publisher in this day and age. If your game is actually good it can't be that hard to get some of the popular youtube "watch me a play a game instead of playing it yourself" people to give it a whirl and hence publicity. Steam doesn't seem hard to get into (given the shitty stuff I see on their front page all the time). Yes you won't be able to sell it for $50.
Because they don't want to say "One of you idiots spammed the email and the spam filters worked as designed".
They wouldn't be clocking in if they were running their own business.
Instead they're likely employed to do data entry or whatever for an hour a day and paid for an hour a day. Not that uncommon for the stay at home parent to do in the hour that the kids are occupied.
Sure you would think that. But you just destroyed 3 jobs! Obama will be pissed.
That's because those paragaphs were added to the article after the fact (and after the summary was written - so the summary isn't incomplete it reflects the idiocitic article at the time).
Those last two paragraphs were added later, without any indication of them being an after original publication edit.
http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=doom9
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=doom10
And that includes slashdot car and pizza analogies.
Unless he is claiming researchers are contributing code to said products that they know contains security bugs and then when it is released reporting it and claiming a bug bounty (and hiding the fact they contributed it since the rules say you can't do that of course).
But he isn't. So the anology is complete and utter garbage.
The British government is examining whether it could save money by getting rid of its printers and giving civil servants free iPads instead
And yet you didn't say they where "given" "free" printers, or "given" "free" paper, or "given" "free" ink/toner. Or chairs, or desks, or heating.
Now sure you can argue that choosing the iPad might be just picking the most trendy option rather than the best (in terms of costs and benefits). But instead you decided to inject the word "free" to try and bias the reader from the start. I assume you are paying the share of the building rent that your desk space/office space/whatever uses and your portion of the electricity bill too, rather then being "given" it for "free".
Seems an actual worthwhile use of tablets to me. It's almost all viewing, with almost no editing. The form factor is similar to paper so the existing setup won't need changing. It also makes for much better practical jokes by updating people's documents on the fly.
Such a usage persists because without it the risk of running a business would be far too large for most people. But yes the business that do run would go bankrupt less often - the price you pay for that is reducing GDP to 1/10th (completely made up) of what it is now. Most people won't take that trade.
And incorporating doesn't insulate you from losses it limits losses to what you have invested. If some third party is willing to loan a company too much money that's their problem - they knew the deal when they made the loan. (If the government then bails them out then that's what the people get for electing such governments.)
I can understand at least the logic(if not necessarily the wisdom) of limited-liability-corporations as a vehicle for tiny stockholders to not take on outsized risks through holding miniscule slices of a large venture over which they have little or no control
That isn't the reason behing limited-liability-corporations. They are vehicles to provide limited libility without regrd to who the shareholders are. Without checking or doing any reasearch I'm going out on a limb and claiming that there are more LLC that are 100% owned by 5 or less pepole than there are owned by more than 5. (Almost every IT person doing consulting jobs incorporates, as do most plumbers, electricians, etc who work for themselves, and so on).
There are costs with those benefits - the entity will have a harder time getting credit and so on than the owner would (in the case in which it's one huge company owning 100% of a small one).
a 100% owned operational subsidiary over which you exercise organizational control, and whose technology you are (no longer) actively on track to integrated into your products? Any notion of financial separation seems like the thinnest of legal fictions.
There are ways to pierce the veil, but usually the i's have been dotted and the t's crossed.
You do know about credit cards right? There are all kinds of fees for a transaction and this makes a 15 times a $1 fee NOT the same in money earned as a 1 time 15$ fee
And since they'd bill at the end of month it wouldn't matter in the slightest. Sure there will be some <$15 charges but they aren't doing 15 $1 charges instead of 1 $15 charges.. Charging in the CC in $1 increments would be stupid and nobody would do that.
Heck they could even charge a $15 minimum - via the points system you mentioned. At the end of the month they take the number of hours the player has played and cap it at 15. Reduce the number of "time points" the player has by that amount. If the "time points" value is now negative charge the CC $15 and add 15 "time points" to the player's account. There that took more time to type than it did to make up - where did you get this "charge the card every hour" crap from? Tweak that "negative" to some other number if you want a pay in advance system. Have a minimum too if you want " if you play <5 hours a month you are charged for 5 hours".
How many minutes of support from a human being do you expect for 14,99 in a month?
And I expect as much support as it takes to fix their screw ups. I've never called support for a game. I've emailed support once or twice because something wasn't working - but that cost was amortized over everyone else since "their shit was broken" (the latest was steam not letting me buy something because my laptop was in the wrong location - that took 1 minute of a support person's time, assuming they are very slow at reading email).
It was nice to read the parents post, just another reminder about how little the average MMO gamer understands about economy
Whereas I got a reminder of how some people like to project their own idiocy onto others. Given nowhere did that post say to make multiple charges on a CC - just to allow for a lower charge on months in which there was little game time used. A system that works just fine for the phone companies, the electricity companies, the water companies, the gas companies, cloud computing providers, etc, etc. Metered pricing is hardly a new idea.
But you ignored that and decided to focus on a suggestion that was never made. Oh well it's nice to get reminder of how retarded at reading comprehension the average furry creature is.
Of course they understand it. They also understand that while we don't have a free market as such it is free enough that competition will see other corporate expenses cut as well.
Sure, but that wasn't the argument being made.
And I'm pretty sure you don't want to maximize revenue. You want to fund your expenses while reducing GDP by as little as possible. Or if you are politician then fundng your expenses while incentivising the things you like and punishing the things you don't like.
No shit sherlock. You are a smart one!
Except of course that everyone over 4 years of age knows this already. That you think it is a revelation says lots about the quality of your junior high school and nothing about anything else.
So because people will play games with taxes we should just set all taxes to 0%, right?
The whole idea for upping the rate is because those on such incomes will be doing such things with their taxes. So since you are only going to get to a tax some portion of their income you have to use a higher rate to get the same end amount. And yes that sucks for the people who don't want to bother tax planning.
And do you really think anyone is going to say - well I was fine with the federal income tax taking $3,500,000 of my income but now that they want $4,500,000 I'm going to start "playing games". I suspect they're already doing all they can.
So after pissing off a minority of users by changing the pricing struture the plan is to piss off the rest?
Force me to consider the disk and the streaming as unrelated things so that when I don't use one that much it'll be easier to ditch it?
I have to search for things in two places?
That whole recommendation thing they did a million dollar prize for not that long ago - it now can't use my DVD watching to recommend streaming?
Sure they are clearly planning to ditch the DVD half and re trying to limit damages from people ranting about it to a brand name that isn't netflix. But I doubt the people doing the complaining are going to oblige.
It's got nothing to do with the parent, which was pretty damn obvious from the post...
My kid's school for example sent out the following list of things the kid should bring for class in the first week (to hopefully the last the year):
* 2 glue sticks
* 6 pencils
* 1 bottle of hand sanitizer
* 1 plastic pencil box
* 1 pack of 3x3 post it notes
* 2 boxes of tissues
* 1 pack of baby wipes
* 10 folders
Doesn't matter what my opinion is on those things, I'm not going to piss off the teacher on day 1...
Are you sure you're on the right website?
Next you'll say you haven't heard of Plan 9 or that it's just a crappy movie. Or that you don't know who Rob Pike or Ken Thompson are.
And yes it won't make for anything usable for someone who wants to, oh I don't know, make a phone call. But this isn't "Consumer Phones For Idiots" either.
Wow, a nobel laureate stepping outside their field of expertise and being an idiot. That has never happened!
Oh wait, from Pauling going from a chemistry nobel prize to advocating megadoses of Vitamin C to cure everything. To Mechnikov winning the nobel for medicine and then going cuckoo for probiotics. To Montagnier winning the nobel in medicine and then jumping into the complete quakery of homeopathy. That seems to be a common ailment - win a nobel and then parade your idiocy in other areas.
Which says nothing either way on global warming, but citing that nobel as any sort of evidence of expertise and authority just shows you aren't interested in the actual science but just in scortng points.
Sure they do. Everyone is free to pressure people via ranting and raving. Unless the one doing the pressuring is "the government" (or an agent thereof) in which case pressuring someone to perform (or not perform) religious acts is not just illegal but unconstitutional.
I'm pretty sure the Coward you are replying to isn't acting as an agent of the government and hence is well within his rights to pressure people (via legal mechanisms like talking to them, using a soapbox and ranting, etc) to give up on religion.
Wow what logic, "happy to" means "absolutely will do".