Let me suggest an experiment.... For one year don't buy or use any Microsoft products.... At the same time send the government no money, that is, pay no taxes. Then wait. Watch who comes after you for your money and how and with what weapons.
This is incredibly stupid.
If you use no Microsoft products, you owe Microsoft nothing. If you use Microsoft products without paying for them, then you are stealing, and Microsoft can come after you. The only reason they don't is because they lack the resources, or wish to avoid a PR nightmare. If you listen to music you have not paid for, there's a chance you will be sued by the RIAA.
If you are paying no taxes, and still making an income, you *are* using public resources (directly or indirectly,) and you aren't paying for them. If you make no money and use no public services, you legally owe no taxes. No one will show up at your door.
In order to see that extra 212 horsepower, you actually need to buy the CCXR, which is a different model than the standard gasoline car. Ethonol can be burned in a flex fuel engine, but in doing so you must tune the engine for the lowest common denominator.
Seeing a horsepower advantage from ethanol requires a fairly flexible engine design. Turbocharging helps, because you have a lot of control over a turbocharger, but ideally the engine is designed specifically to run ethanol.
People don't starve because of lack of food or infrastructure, they starve for political and economic reasons.
Case in point... Under Pol Pot, millions starved in Camboda. Would you like to make a guess as to what Cambodia's major exports are?
When the resources used to produce food become a major economic export, food prices go up as availability is reduced. In a country already facing mass starvation, ethanol really does take food out of people's mouths.
There is a great deal of danger in speculative trading on the resources required to support life. Look at what's happened due to speculative trade in housing and fuel: housing prices are now way out of line with rent prices.
I'm sure you know this as an old motorcyclist, but it might be of interest to the general non Slashdot riding population...
For most people, a bike with 40,000 miles is considered old. But it's not really the miles that makes it old, it's the owner and how they care for the machine that matters. The most modern of sport bikes will last a hundred thousand miles with minimal maintenance. The bikes usually end up in the scrap heap because they are crashed, or ridden rarely enough that the rubber bits break down. Remember, these are.6 liter engines that put out the horsepower of an average 2 liter economy car.
Read up on Chex Quest, a corporate attempt to do just that to 'Doom.'
Chex Quest was packaged as a prize with boxes of Chex brand cereal, back in the day. General Mills needed a wholesome family game to go with it's Wholesome Family cereal. They developed a version of doom where no harm was done to your enemies (zapping them was said to teleport them away.)
We call this fixation. In motorcycle racing, it happens when you become overstressed, over stimulated, or your being asked to split your attention on too many things.
It's usually a sign that you're in over your head.
The nice thing about gaming though, is that you can fixate without ending up in an accident.:)
My 6th dimensional storage device is/dev/null in order to retrieve the data, all you have to do is go back to the exact moment in time that it was written.
Both quicksave and the difficulty slider ultimately affect how challenging the game is. Sometimes I like to play through a game on medium, sometimes I like to crank it up a little and use quicksave.
I will say that quicksave often produces a nice difficulty curve. Higher difficulty settings keep the game interesting during the relatively easy seconds, and quickload gives me an edge when the going gets rough. What I try to avoid is playing at a level so difficult that I'm on the quickload key ever 30 seconds, and winning more out of luck than skill.
Like many gamers, I'm capable of tailoring my experience without blatantly cheating.
How is playing through a modern FPS with the quick load key any different? Imagine how long it would take to finish Quake 4 on it's highest difficulty level relying only on autosave checkpoints.
In the days of the 386, you would be lucky to have 16MB of main memory. I suspect that the GP meant 128KB, which was a relatively common quantity of video memory in the day.
I think it's also a bit of a troll. The 7th guest was a pre-rendered multimedia game, and came out some time after the heyday of the 386. The nature of multimedia games grants good visuals with little overhead at the cost of a lot of interactivity. Calling a modern game programmer lazy when they've bettered the visuals of T7G in a first person shooter (Crysis) is a bit... Loopy?
I purchased a Quantum 3D Obsidian 2 24X card, back in the day that 3DFX compatibility was still important, but SLI was deemed to take up too many PCI slots.
I don't think I ever actually used it, but I wonder if the card might still have value to a retro-gamer.
Perhaps it isn't that gaming has changed. Perhaps it's you.
I went back and played through a lot of old super Nintendo games. What I discovered in the process is that many older games greatly extended their playtime through drudgery. As soon as you have the reload and rewind keys, Contra 3 became a much shorter game. Final Fantasy III (6) was a fantastic on it's own, but the fast forward key really cut-down on a lot of drudgery.
What's changed the most about gaming in the last 15 years? Me.
My willingness to replay the same part of a game over and over as I loose lives, my willingness to devote vast amounts of time to collecting every last trinket, and my patience for boring games.
Of course, once they're truly weaned off the leader, the controlling forces would have to admit what had actually happened- a double mindfuck.
To a degree, this is what happened recently in the united states.
During Bush's first term in office we knew: - Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and needed to be overthrown. - America does not torture - Things were going great in Afghanistan
I believe people are willing to accept a lot so long as it doesn't disrupt their lifestyle, and they are allowed to rationalize their earlier behavior.
I think now would be as good a time as any to repost the Duke Nukem Forever List for those who haven't already read it, or remember it fondly and looking for a encore laugh.
Just as the DNF team would occasionally tease us over the years with trailers, the list has been updated to include humanity's latest accomplishments (and failures.)
I'm 26. A vasectomy will effectively render me incapable of ever having children. I'll have one when I'm ready, but until then I'd prefer to have a method that's reversible.
Any expansion of a business will have a short term impact on profits, hopefully with a long term payoff. Likewise, the most effective way to increase short term profits is to gut the company of it's R&D department, and sell off IP. This would have a devastating impact on long term profits.
Ultimately though, that's all irrelevant. I made a very strong case showing that taxing profits should have no impact on hiring decisions.
To a small business, corporate profits aren't necessarily relevant. If the owner is taking home a large paycheck and has no shareholders expecting dividends, taxes would incentivise showing little or no profit. This is offset, because showing no profit can make it difficult for a small business to obtain business loans, which can be used for expansion.
The modern stock market seems to be focused on building stock value through investment rather than payment of dividends. Buying low and selling high produces a much greater cash payoff than holding stock and collecting dividends. For that reason, it seems like it's more important for a company to grow and perform well than for the company to produce a lot of profit. Remember, the operators are employees - the CEO alone eats a large chunk of the company profits.
As far as I know, business taxes are based on profits, not on gross income. If hiring a new employee reduces gross profits, then the tax burden is likewise reduced. Increasing taxes does nothing to discourage hiring new employees or investment in business growth. If anything, I suspect it would encourage both -- If you were tax 100% of your profits, (and chose to remain in business,) you'd likely use any money above and beyond operating costs to expand the company. Doing so would reduce profit to nothing, and eliminate a lot of your tax burdens.
Small business likewise do not have to be affected. The owner can take money out of the company for his own uses in various ways. A relatively common one is for the owner to make himself or herself an employee of the company, taking a salary. Since the owners salary is now a business expense, business taxes are reduced at the cost of an increase in the owner's income tax. The owner would still be entitled to profits in doing so.
If you spend 20,000 pounds on a bottle of whiskey, you're going to taste the difference, even if there isn't one. Belief can have as much an impact on perception as reality.
Penn & Teller did a great experiment in an episode of their show, Bullshit. In one episode, they serve hose water in fancy bottles with fantastic stump lines about how great and rare each different bottle of hose water is. Most of the diners tasted a difference between the various bottles of hose water.
In another, they had a prop design guy use (extremely) cheap ingredients to create tantalizing foods. The waiter would convince diners that stale bread was an exotic french import, receiving rave reviews in the process.
Advertising is all about perception, and a lot of our consumer economy is based on it. My girlfriend works for a high end cosmetics chain... You wouldn't believe what a rip off that stuff can be.
Slashdot Mirror
Real value: If someone starts a fire on your land, do you want the fire department to respond?
Owning property is a membership in a community. If you don't go to the gym, you still have to pay your gym dues.
This is incredibly stupid.
If you use no Microsoft products, you owe Microsoft nothing. If you use Microsoft products without paying for them, then you are stealing, and Microsoft can come after you. The only reason they don't is because they lack the resources, or wish to avoid a PR nightmare. If you listen to music you have not paid for, there's a chance you will be sued by the RIAA.
If you are paying no taxes, and still making an income, you *are* using public resources (directly or indirectly,) and you aren't paying for them. If you make no money and use no public services, you legally owe no taxes. No one will show up at your door.
Really. Think this one through.
That 90 day password rotation policy is going to be a bitch...
In order to see that extra 212 horsepower, you actually need to buy the CCXR, which is a different model than the standard gasoline car. Ethonol can be burned in a flex fuel engine, but in doing so you must tune the engine for the lowest common denominator.
Seeing a horsepower advantage from ethanol requires a fairly flexible engine design. Turbocharging helps, because you have a lot of control over a turbocharger, but ideally the engine is designed specifically to run ethanol.
People don't starve because of lack of food or infrastructure, they starve for political and economic reasons.
Case in point... Under Pol Pot, millions starved in Camboda. Would you like to make a guess as to what Cambodia's major exports are?
When the resources used to produce food become a major economic export, food prices go up as availability is reduced. In a country already facing mass starvation, ethanol really does take food out of people's mouths.
There is a great deal of danger in speculative trading on the resources required to support life. Look at what's happened due to speculative trade in housing and fuel: housing prices are now way out of line with rent prices.
I'm sure you know this as an old motorcyclist, but it might be of interest to the general non Slashdot riding population...
For most people, a bike with 40,000 miles is considered old. But it's not really the miles that makes it old, it's the owner and how they care for the machine that matters. The most modern of sport bikes will last a hundred thousand miles with minimal maintenance. The bikes usually end up in the scrap heap because they are crashed, or ridden rarely enough that the rubber bits break down. Remember, these are .6 liter engines that put out the horsepower of an average 2 liter economy car.
Read up on Chex Quest, a corporate attempt to do just that to 'Doom.'
Chex Quest was packaged as a prize with boxes of Chex brand cereal, back in the day. General Mills needed a wholesome family game to go with it's Wholesome Family cereal. They developed a version of doom where no harm was done to your enemies (zapping them was said to teleport them away.)
We call this fixation. In motorcycle racing, it happens when you become overstressed, over stimulated, or your being asked to split your attention on too many things.
It's usually a sign that you're in over your head.
The nice thing about gaming though, is that you can fixate without ending up in an accident. :)
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", eh?
I have concerns about libertarian "free market" ideals, but I think your comment pushes things way too far in the opposite direction.
My 6th dimensional storage device is /dev/null in order to retrieve the data, all you have to do is go back to the exact moment in time that it was written.
Both quicksave and the difficulty slider ultimately affect how challenging the game is. Sometimes I like to play through a game on medium, sometimes I like to crank it up a little and use quicksave.
I will say that quicksave often produces a nice difficulty curve. Higher difficulty settings keep the game interesting during the relatively easy seconds, and quickload gives me an edge when the going gets rough. What I try to avoid is playing at a level so difficult that I'm on the quickload key ever 30 seconds, and winning more out of luck than skill.
Like many gamers, I'm capable of tailoring my experience without blatantly cheating.
I think what we really need is a device that will prevent people from going 55 in my 80 zone.
How is playing through a modern FPS with the quick load key any different? Imagine how long it would take to finish Quake 4 on it's highest difficulty level relying only on autosave checkpoints.
In the days of the 386, you would be lucky to have 16MB of main memory. I suspect that the GP meant 128KB, which was a relatively common quantity of video memory in the day.
I think it's also a bit of a troll. The 7th guest was a pre-rendered multimedia game, and came out some time after the heyday of the 386. The nature of multimedia games grants good visuals with little overhead at the cost of a lot of interactivity. Calling a modern game programmer lazy when they've bettered the visuals of T7G in a first person shooter (Crysis) is a bit... Loopy?
I purchased a Quantum 3D Obsidian 2 24X card, back in the day that 3DFX compatibility was still important, but SLI was deemed to take up too many PCI slots.
I don't think I ever actually used it, but I wonder if the card might still have value to a retro-gamer.
Perhaps it isn't that gaming has changed. Perhaps it's you.
I went back and played through a lot of old super Nintendo games. What I discovered in the process is that many older games greatly extended their playtime through drudgery. As soon as you have the reload and rewind keys, Contra 3 became a much shorter game. Final Fantasy III (6) was a fantastic on it's own, but the fast forward key really cut-down on a lot of drudgery.
What's changed the most about gaming in the last 15 years? Me.
My willingness to replay the same part of a game over and over as I loose lives, my willingness to devote vast amounts of time to collecting every last trinket, and my patience for boring games.
And much like jury duty, we'd have powerful officers actively working to eliminate anyone who is too independent or thoughtful to be lead around.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Actually, many specialty appliances are now moving to x86 hardware. Off the top of my head, Cisco and F5 both deploy linux/unix on x86 hardware.
To a degree, this is what happened recently in the united states.
During Bush's first term in office we knew:
- Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and needed to be overthrown.
- America does not torture
- Things were going great in Afghanistan
I believe people are willing to accept a lot so long as it doesn't disrupt their lifestyle, and they are allowed to rationalize their earlier behavior.
I think now would be as good a time as any to repost the Duke Nukem Forever List for those who haven't already read it, or remember it fondly and looking for a encore laugh.
Just as the DNF team would occasionally tease us over the years with trailers, the list has been updated to include humanity's latest accomplishments (and failures.)
Interestingly, a conversation regarding the late great duke came up at work just today...
I'm 26. A vasectomy will effectively render me incapable of ever having children. I'll have one when I'm ready, but until then I'd prefer to have a method that's reversible.
Any expansion of a business will have a short term impact on profits, hopefully with a long term payoff. Likewise, the most effective way to increase short term profits is to gut the company of it's R&D department, and sell off IP. This would have a devastating impact on long term profits.
Ultimately though, that's all irrelevant. I made a very strong case showing that taxing profits should have no impact on hiring decisions.
To a small business, corporate profits aren't necessarily relevant. If the owner is taking home a large paycheck and has no shareholders expecting dividends, taxes would incentivise showing little or no profit. This is offset, because showing no profit can make it difficult for a small business to obtain business loans, which can be used for expansion.
The modern stock market seems to be focused on building stock value through investment rather than payment of dividends. Buying low and selling high produces a much greater cash payoff than holding stock and collecting dividends. For that reason, it seems like it's more important for a company to grow and perform well than for the company to produce a lot of profit. Remember, the operators are employees - the CEO alone eats a large chunk of the company profits.
As far as I know, business taxes are based on profits, not on gross income. If hiring a new employee reduces gross profits, then the tax burden is likewise reduced. Increasing taxes does nothing to discourage hiring new employees or investment in business growth. If anything, I suspect it would encourage both -- If you were tax 100% of your profits, (and chose to remain in business,) you'd likely use any money above and beyond operating costs to expand the company. Doing so would reduce profit to nothing, and eliminate a lot of your tax burdens.
Small business likewise do not have to be affected. The owner can take money out of the company for his own uses in various ways. A relatively common one is for the owner to make himself or herself an employee of the company, taking a salary. Since the owners salary is now a business expense, business taxes are reduced at the cost of an increase in the owner's income tax. The owner would still be entitled to profits in doing so.
If you spend 20,000 pounds on a bottle of whiskey, you're going to taste the difference, even if there isn't one. Belief can have as much an impact on perception as reality.
Penn & Teller did a great experiment in an episode of their show, Bullshit. In one episode, they serve hose water in fancy bottles with fantastic stump lines about how great and rare each different bottle of hose water is. Most of the diners tasted a difference between the various bottles of hose water.
In another, they had a prop design guy use (extremely) cheap ingredients to create tantalizing foods. The waiter would convince diners that stale bread was an exotic french import, receiving rave reviews in the process.
Advertising is all about perception, and a lot of our consumer economy is based on it. My girlfriend works for a high end cosmetics chain... You wouldn't believe what a rip off that stuff can be.
It makes me wish I was in the cosmetics business.