Taxes are always there to support those who can't "hold up their end of the system." That's why they're taxes.
This person is contributing to the overall economic system. They're producing income for their employer, which taxes are paid upon. They're drawing in payroll tax. They're paying sales tax and facilitating others to do so. They're surviving within the system.
They're also not entering open rebellion against the well-off, which is one of the interesting side effects of slight socialization.
My ex's mother is uninsured, but is in poor health and frequently goes to the hospital.
Every time she does, she recieves literally dozens of separate little bills. Individual bills for the drugs, bills for the treatment, a bill for the ambulance, bills to be transported from one doctor to another within the same hospital, a bill for the room, a bill for the board, bill for gurney rental, separate hospital fees, MRI fee, splint fee, each doctor she sees...
And, of course, she can't pay any of it. So she recieves four or five of these full bill sets, and then gets taken to court. So now the courts and at least one lawyer are involved (she can't afford one herself). Usually the judge will haggle the astronomical price down to something much smaller that she does have the ability to pay. This usually winds up being less than the lawyers cost...
The strength of Microsoft's software isn't in its quality. It is in it's compatibility with existing infrastructure. If you want to play most games, you need a PC. If you want to reach an audience, you need to program for a PC. If you want to communicate with the world, you need Word. Many places won't even accept Resumes that aren't in Word format. Lots of VPN software is only written for Windows, because customers are on windows, because the VPN software is written for it. And when one business manager in an office decides that you should be on outlook, everyone has to go to outlook.
Thankfully websites have more or less broken the Internet Explorer requirement, but those seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Secondary platform support is always that... secondary. Unless you're working in a back-end capacity, the software that you use, and write, is expected to be written on Windows first and foremost.
Again, Windows' strength lies not in its so-so quality (look at the backlash against Vista), but in its slew of indespensible 3rd party applications all written for the platform. Applications that are unavailable elsewhere simply because everyone is locked into Windows. It doesn't help that Microsoft goes out of their way at every available opportunity to make Windows software incompatible with other platforms, pushing incompatible APIs such as DirectX and ActiveX.
This is Why PC Magazine isn't for people who know about computers.
A: The multiple projector thing is neat, but who is going to buy 12 projecters to have a higher resolution image? The image quality that can be gotten from a single projector basically maxes out the display quality of the average white wall.
B: Mid-air mice have been around for years as presentation tools and novelties. My company has one that you can use on a tabletop or in the air, as you see fit. The main failing is the nature of the device itself: nobody wants to hold their mouse up in the air for any length of time. It's just not comfortable.
C: Quantum computing is so far away as to be a joke. We don't even have what could be described as Quantum Calculating. When Bell Labs says things are 20 years out, you know it's not going to be ready for a long, long time.
D: Router P2P is neat, but could it be described as revolutionary? As described here, it's basically larger-scale caching, with untrusted sources. Even if it worked, it just speeds up the network a few percent.
E: A man made brain? That's a revolutionary idea! With our deep understanding of the human psyche and physiological complexities, we could whip this problem in no more than 20 years. Why haven't we been working on this since the 60's?
This REALLY damages confidence in the ESRB. They're rating... trailers? Not only that, they're rating trailers and demand that they "are not to be available for download or viewing, regardless of being placed behind an age gate."
This is really damaging news. If the ESRB is calling for the banning of what they would rate as AO material, then clearly there is a demonstratable censorial intent.
"However, the mere presence of an age gate does not permit a publisher to simply put whatever content it wishes into the trailer. All trailers must still conform to ARC's Principles and Guidelines, which prohibit the display of excessively violent content or any content likely to cause serious offense to the average consumer."
As a person who makes his living making video games, I find this disturbing. You can't both say that an Adults Only rating isn't censorship, then turn around and censor trailers you don't like... or in this case, contain AO material.
Every time I've interacted with the ESRB is has been pretty benign, though publisher overreaction to potential ESRB issues is a problem. Also, hard and fast rules from the ESRB about content restrictions are basically nill, leaving creators floundering as to, for example, if flipping the bird is T or M. This is a position I may need to reconsider if active censorship is a part of their organization.
'Come on ESRB... now's the time to restore the faith. Prove to us that information is at the top of your list by crusading FOR the sale of AO and unrated materials in the US.
I did read the link. And while I think it is an interesting and in many ways good idea, I don't think that it will solve the problem of the accounting burden, and it will disproportionately shift the tax burden from some groups onto others.
Synopsis though is that all citizens and legal residents would get a prebate for the taxes on poverty level spending. So your single mother, unless she's making a lot more than poverty level, wouldn't be paying more in taxes. Her kids would count in the prebate amounts.
Official poverty line for a 3 person household in the use in 2004 was 16,600 dollars, according to federal guidelines. That's pretty low. So you're totally correct to say that the poorest of the poor won't pay more in taxes, but people that are considered nominally poor, lower class, or lower middle class would be paying disproportionately more.
As for making money from investments, sure, that wouldn't be taxed, but neither is income, so it doesn't really matter. The rich guys will pay their taxes when they buy a lexus or BMW, go out to eat in the fru-fru restraunt, etc...
Do you spend any time with rich people? Don't think about expenditures, think about rates of wealth acquisition. If you remove taxation from the cost of investment to the cost of consumption, you're effectively ensuring that those who are rich will get much richer (and therefore more powerful), and those who live hand to mouth will pick up a disproportionate amount of the tax burden as a percent of their overall wealth and income. The problems associated with divergent income classes would become more pronounced, and that doesn't serve anyone. And, ultimately, ability to pay is not based upon how much one spends in a year to acquire wealth, but rather how much one made, net, at the end of the year.
Let me put it to you this way... If you and your husband or wife work crappy low-income jobs in a city and make 35k per year to try to support a family of three (quite difficult where average rents can easily surpass 16k per year), currently they have a "reduced average" tax burden, specifically because A: they're supporting a child, B: they live in a high-rent area (at least, Mass state tax gives you a break) and C: they're in a lower tax bracket anyway. Take away those mitigating factors, and you can see that this family would pay more as relative to an average taxpayer. Essentially, they'd be paying taxes on 100% of their income, which is more than now.
Let's also take a well-off and hard working but not super rich real estate flipper. Say they get investments and fix up / flip real estate roughly 10 times per year, at a net profit to him of 30k per flip. He's making about 300k per year. Let's also say that since he is fixing up real-estate, he is consuming quite a bit of materials and services. Under the current tax system, hey pays more or less on his net, which is to say that he pays taxes on that 300k per year. Under the revised flat tax, he pays disproportionately more, as the tax only cares about what changes hands, not how much the person makes. Assuming an average cost of 150k per unit, this person is paying taxes on the equivalent of 1,500,000 in spending. Unless he can more or less double the value of a unit every time, this business is dead.
Now take a fully rich person like Ballmer or Fiorina (or any of the people in Forbes list of the richest people in America). Ballmer has a net worth of 14.0 billion dollars. Where do you think that money is going to? He's not spending all of it. Ultimately, that money is going to investments. By the current tax system, a portion of the income from those investments goes to road upkeep, schools, police officers, military defense, the FDA, protecting against insider trading, etc. Under a flat tax, the money goes to nothing but being re-invested... and acquiring more control over more of the value in the system. Ballmer's taxes drop to a very small percentage of his total income and / or value, allowing for an increa
Flat tax A: would remove our taxtion classificaitons, ensuring that those least able to pay (such as single mothers earning 20,000 or less) will have taxation burden thrust upon them. B: it would ensure than those who make money through investments rather than their efforts will have a minimal tax burden (as you so aptly point out elsewhere, you don't become rich by spending 100% of your income, but if you're poor you most definitely do). C: It would remove mitigating taxation factors, such as having children, having a failing business, investing in education, etc.
A flat tax would simplify paperwork greatly. But unfortunatley it would also shift a major tax burden onto those least able to pay, and while increasing the wealth of the leisure class.
Remember, this is not a way to collect more money or reduce government spending. It is simply a balance change which shifts sources of income from one area to another. Unfortunatley, those who would bear the brunt would be those least able to pay.
The issue isn't necessarily the rating, so much as the impact of the rating. Which is, to say, that the rating has automatically triggered a ban in the UK, will probalby trigger one throughout the EU, and effectively prevents the game from coming to US shelves by the policies of most US retailers.
Retailers which will carry movies like Hostel, which is extremely gorey, shocking, and offensive, but will not carry Manhunt.
Make no mistake: this rating may well be deserved. But this rating also means that the game has been censored.
After a fiasco where a player-created hack enabled simulated sex through clothing in GTA 4 prompted the ESRB to re-rate the game as AO, and Oblivion recieved a re-rating after a player merged a naked male chest image with geometry from the female, the ESRB is under tight scrutiny not to overreact. After all, wasn't the M rating created to keep adult material away from kids, without taking it entirely out of the marketplace?
I forget where, but there was a wonderful british study recently that found the suspension of disbelief was harmed by playing a videogame compared to watching a movie. The physical requirement of interacting with a game makes it difficult to forget that you're seeing something fake. Watching a movie, however, has less dischordant elements which stick out, and such things can be more easily glossed over as they require no attention on the part of the user.
a fair and effective free market health care system
But that's the rub. You don't want health care to be fair (which, in free-market terms means ability to pay). You want a health care system which covers everyone who needs covering, and which treats humans like their lives have value.
With the extraordinary costs of health care, that's the last thing you want to have based purely upon free market principles. "I can zap you again to try to restart your heart, but it will cost you an additional 35 dollars for this service. Sign here and we will proceed."
Which is not to say that you don't have a valid point: there is a lot which is wrong with our health care system above and beyond not having a social safety net... such as relying upon employers to maintain health insurance, lawsuits every time something goes wrong, not enough investment in preventative and curative medecines, and a reliance upon the expensive and the extravagent over the effective. And that doesn't even address overburdened doctors who never know their patients.
But the free market is not going to solve this problem. This problem exists in a moral, social, and economic grey realm which the market has been particularly bad in the past at dealing with.
If you took an educated man from 1907 and brought him to 2007, he'd be able to understand just about everything we have except for our computational devices. They even understood a bit about nuclear energy.
Which is to say that what we have today is by and large based off learning from 100 years ago. Except for Liquid Crystal displays. And programming. Data mining. Most of the advanced materials science we take for granted. The amazing science that goes into modern bad food. Instantaneous worldwide communication VIA satellite networks. Cloning. MagLev regulation. Angioplasty.
To say that we haven't made huge strides in the past 100 years is ridiculous. 100 years ago, a trip from New York to Japan would take months and be considerd a culmination of a life's work. Today it can be undertaken for a month's salary and a half-day in a plane.
The problem is, while we have many ideas; they get shot down left and right. I don't see a new source of energy orders of magnitude above previous ones, like what nuclear power provided.
Fusion? Something involving quantum or String, once that mess gets sorted out? Fission has a rough energy conversion of about one thousandth the available energy. Fusion has a current rough energy conversion of about 3 thousandths. That leaves 99.9% of the available energy on the table, if we can figure out how to unlock it.
The edge of physics is still raw, and still amazing. Unfortunately, it is a bit difficult to describe to the average person these days... I've visited the laboratory of a Professor friend of mine, and never cease to be amazed by how difficult it is to describe even low-energy waveform interactions without delving into either highly forced metaphors or obscure mathematical modeling.
We're still advancing, but nowaday's it's hard, very hard.
It has always been hard. We've been working on Quantum computing for something like 20 years now, but we were working on regular digital computing for longer than that before it was useful... and we understood electricity pretty well by then.
Cars took a while, then planes took a while, now we're seeing a nanoscent space travel industry opening up.
If you were in a small village in Greece where you had to walk everywhere by foot, the next village over would be a long way away. The village four villages over would be a tremendous distance. A whole country over would be a gigantic distance, and going to France, for example, would be way out of your league. Traveling to eastern Asia, the Americas, or Australia would look like a pipe dream.
Well, we've got a long time to get there. And we've got a lot of little steps on the road to galactic civilization, including permanent space stations, profitable manufacturing, colonization of nearby planets, colonization of planets further our in the solar system, etc. 100 years to galactic expansion is ridiculous... after 100 years, we'd be lucky if we've got a buzzing little colony on the moon, let alone Mars or other solar systems.
I was visiting London earlier this year, and needed a phone to use locally. I walked into a moble phone store, bought a sim with 5 pounds on it, and stuck it in a borrowed handset from someone else. It worked fine. You bring the phone, they bring the service, just like regular telephones.
I wanted to get my sister a handset in the US, but I didn't want to be responsible for her service. I went to 9 or 10 different stores, none of which could sell me anything without an associated plan and network lock.
In the US, you're playing roulette with your bill. You may be able to get 1000 minutes for 40 dollars, but each minute over costs you 40 cents. In other words, you have to guess how many minutes you are going to use, and if you guess wrong, you can quickly find yourself with a per-minute bill that increases twelve fold. In other words, they're trying specifically to sell you stuff they know you won't use by punishing you if you do use them. They also disable phone features ( I found out my phone in europe does videoconferencing ). Also note that nobody offers service for less than 30 dollars per month. Let's not forget that if you download a game from Cingular, they'll charge you roughly 5 dollars for the game and 5 dollars for the bandwidth to download the game. And, with the exception of the iPhone, we're always last to get any nifty new phone, if we get it at all.
When I was in Thailand, you could walk into MBK, browse though thousands of new and used phones from around the world, get a provider's sim card, and be up and running in minutes. There was a flat per-minute and per-text rate without a lot of complications or provisos, and what you did with that was up to you. When I described to them what we go through for our phone service in the US, they laughed. They all assumed we were on Star Trek communicators or something, but when I showed them my phone, they laughed at how far behind we were.
BTW, I'm not saying there aren't usage scenarios where we're cheaper than other places, just that the number of hoops and provisos attached to that rate is insane.
The market wasn't large enough to make most ports worthwhile unless the game was a proven hit seller already.
It seems like in this age of 5 platform simultaneous development (PC, PS3, 360, PS2, Wii), that code and resources should be more cross-platform than they ever have been in the past. How much of the "not worthwile to port" problem came from the actual porting process, and how much came from simple marketing / manufacturing / moving boxes?
What makes me scratch my head... if these guys can find holes in a few hours, why can't Apple?
Because 100,000k security researchers and hackers all typing away at keyboards will eventually write Shakespeare?
I don't care how bright your engineers are or how well you've planned your security model, the moment you put it on the 'net it WILL be hacked. That doesn't mean it will stay hacked, so much as the task of securing a system against simulated internal attacks will uncover different problems than putting it in the wild.
The anonymity provided by the internet is rather thin, especially when the OSS project is doing due dilligence and wondering why you don't want to give your name. Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean that your employer doesn't own that work.
Similarly, a huge chunk of the techy people who write for online publications don't technically have the right to give it to them (and they technically don't have the right to publish it) simply because their employer might want it. If you go playtest for another company, technically that "work" could be owned by your employer. An idea you're working on in your spare time? Not yours.
These things are so broadly worded that painting your house could give your employer a stake in your house. It usually doesn't go that far, but it's totally ridiculous.
I don't think the problem is that most people can't be bothered to look at what they're agreeing to, so much as for the daily things they're supposed to read they by and large have no real recourse to disagree anyway.
I don't like non-compete agreements, and I don't like "everything you do in your spare time belongs to us" agreements. And while I've argued the former out of contracts, I've never managed to argue the latter, immoral as it may be, because the people I've worked for have had THEIR clients force it upon THEM.
Similarly, I disagree with certain clauses in the Windows license. But if I didn't agree to the clauses, I'd really be out of a career. I don't agree to "binding arbitration in the state of Virginia" if my VCR explodes and burns my house down, but I can't seem to find a manufacturer who doesn't have that clause written on a sticker on their VCR somewhere. If you buy a video game, take it home, open it, and discover in the EULA that they want to slime your computer with a spyware / monitoring application... what are you going to do? The store sure isn't going to take it back, whatever the heck the click-through license says.
THIS IS WHY WE HAVE LAWS, PEOPLE! The only, THE ONLY reason for forcing your customers to agree to binding arbitration is to take away their legal rights. Don't put up with this.
While I hate sequelitis, there seems to be a good rule of thumb out there.
"A sequal's sales will reflect the previous game's quality"
If you knock out a fast or cheap sequel to a great game, you're going to get great sales... on that one sequel. If you then turn around and make a really great sequel next, that sequel's sales will suffer from the impression left behind by the previous game.
In other words, quality is rewarded more often than we think, just not right away.
And maybe somewhere I'm just not yet ready to blame gamers for the floods of sequels and genre games.
Slashdot Mirror
Taxes are always there to support those who can't "hold up their end of the system." That's why they're taxes.
This person is contributing to the overall economic system. They're producing income for their employer, which taxes are paid upon. They're drawing in payroll tax. They're paying sales tax and facilitating others to do so. They're surviving within the system.
They're also not entering open rebellion against the well-off, which is one of the interesting side effects of slight socialization.
My ex's mother is uninsured, but is in poor health and frequently goes to the hospital.
Every time she does, she recieves literally dozens of separate little bills. Individual bills for the drugs, bills for the treatment, a bill for the ambulance, bills to be transported from one doctor to another within the same hospital, a bill for the room, a bill for the board, bill for gurney rental, separate hospital fees, MRI fee, splint fee, each doctor she sees...
And, of course, she can't pay any of it. So she recieves four or five of these full bill sets, and then gets taken to court. So now the courts and at least one lawyer are involved (she can't afford one herself). Usually the judge will haggle the astronomical price down to something much smaller that she does have the ability to pay. This usually winds up being less than the lawyers cost...
The strength of Microsoft's software isn't in its quality. It is in it's compatibility with existing infrastructure. If you want to play most games, you need a PC. If you want to reach an audience, you need to program for a PC. If you want to communicate with the world, you need Word. Many places won't even accept Resumes that aren't in Word format. Lots of VPN software is only written for Windows, because customers are on windows, because the VPN software is written for it. And when one business manager in an office decides that you should be on outlook, everyone has to go to outlook.
Thankfully websites have more or less broken the Internet Explorer requirement, but those seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Secondary platform support is always that... secondary. Unless you're working in a back-end capacity, the software that you use, and write, is expected to be written on Windows first and foremost.
Again, Windows' strength lies not in its so-so quality (look at the backlash against Vista), but in its slew of indespensible 3rd party applications all written for the platform. Applications that are unavailable elsewhere simply because everyone is locked into Windows. It doesn't help that Microsoft goes out of their way at every available opportunity to make Windows software incompatible with other platforms, pushing incompatible APIs such as DirectX and ActiveX.
Every one of the people who has to use their poorly made software hates the people responsible for it.
It's just that Gates happens to be responsible for a poorly-made piece of software that everyone uses.
Wait! I said Brangelina! I said Brangelina! Oh! I've said Brangelina again!
This is Why PC Magazine isn't for people who know about computers.
A: The multiple projector thing is neat, but who is going to buy 12 projecters to have a higher resolution image? The image quality that can be gotten from a single projector basically maxes out the display quality of the average white wall.
B: Mid-air mice have been around for years as presentation tools and novelties. My company has one that you can use on a tabletop or in the air, as you see fit. The main failing is the nature of the device itself: nobody wants to hold their mouse up in the air for any length of time. It's just not comfortable.
C: Quantum computing is so far away as to be a joke. We don't even have what could be described as Quantum Calculating. When Bell Labs says things are 20 years out, you know it's not going to be ready for a long, long time.
D: Router P2P is neat, but could it be described as revolutionary? As described here, it's basically larger-scale caching, with untrusted sources. Even if it worked, it just speeds up the network a few percent.
E: A man made brain? That's a revolutionary idea! With our deep understanding of the human psyche and physiological complexities, we could whip this problem in no more than 20 years. Why haven't we been working on this since the 60's?
This REALLY damages confidence in the ESRB. They're rating... trailers? Not only that, they're rating trailers and demand that they "are not to be available for download or viewing, regardless of being placed behind an age gate."
j sp
This is really damaging news. If the ESRB is calling for the banning of what they would rate as AO material, then clearly there is a demonstratable censorial intent.
"However, the mere presence of an age gate does not permit a publisher to simply put whatever content it wishes into the trailer. All trailers must still conform to ARC's Principles and Guidelines, which prohibit the display of excessively violent content or any content likely to cause serious offense to the average consumer."
http://www.esrb.org/ratings/principles_guidlines.
As a person who makes his living making video games, I find this disturbing. You can't both say that an Adults Only rating isn't censorship, then turn around and censor trailers you don't like... or in this case, contain AO material.
Every time I've interacted with the ESRB is has been pretty benign, though publisher overreaction to potential ESRB issues is a problem. Also, hard and fast rules from the ESRB about content restrictions are basically nill, leaving creators floundering as to, for example, if flipping the bird is T or M. This is a position I may need to reconsider if active censorship is a part of their organization.
'Come on ESRB... now's the time to restore the faith. Prove to us that information is at the top of your list by crusading FOR the sale of AO and unrated materials in the US.
unexplained absences are considered potential espionage indicators.
Wow. I am a dangerous man.
I did read the link. And while I think it is an interesting and in many ways good idea, I don't think that it will solve the problem of the accounting burden, and it will disproportionately shift the tax burden from some groups onto others.
Synopsis though is that all citizens and legal residents would get a prebate for the taxes on poverty level spending. So your single mother, unless she's making a lot more than poverty level, wouldn't be paying more in taxes. Her kids would count in the prebate amounts.
Official poverty line for a 3 person household in the use in 2004 was 16,600 dollars, according to federal guidelines. That's pretty low. So you're totally correct to say that the poorest of the poor won't pay more in taxes, but people that are considered nominally poor, lower class, or lower middle class would be paying disproportionately more.
As for making money from investments, sure, that wouldn't be taxed, but neither is income, so it doesn't really matter. The rich guys will pay their taxes when they buy a lexus or BMW, go out to eat in the fru-fru restraunt, etc...
Do you spend any time with rich people? Don't think about expenditures, think about rates of wealth acquisition. If you remove taxation from the cost of investment to the cost of consumption, you're effectively ensuring that those who are rich will get much richer (and therefore more powerful), and those who live hand to mouth will pick up a disproportionate amount of the tax burden as a percent of their overall wealth and income. The problems associated with divergent income classes would become more pronounced, and that doesn't serve anyone. And, ultimately, ability to pay is not based upon how much one spends in a year to acquire wealth, but rather how much one made, net, at the end of the year.
Let me put it to you this way... If you and your husband or wife work crappy low-income jobs in a city and make 35k per year to try to support a family of three (quite difficult where average rents can easily surpass 16k per year), currently they have a "reduced average" tax burden, specifically because A: they're supporting a child, B: they live in a high-rent area (at least, Mass state tax gives you a break) and C: they're in a lower tax bracket anyway. Take away those mitigating factors, and you can see that this family would pay more as relative to an average taxpayer. Essentially, they'd be paying taxes on 100% of their income, which is more than now.
Let's also take a well-off and hard working but not super rich real estate flipper. Say they get investments and fix up / flip real estate roughly 10 times per year, at a net profit to him of 30k per flip. He's making about 300k per year. Let's also say that since he is fixing up real-estate, he is consuming quite a bit of materials and services. Under the current tax system, hey pays more or less on his net, which is to say that he pays taxes on that 300k per year. Under the revised flat tax, he pays disproportionately more, as the tax only cares about what changes hands, not how much the person makes. Assuming an average cost of 150k per unit, this person is paying taxes on the equivalent of 1,500,000 in spending. Unless he can more or less double the value of a unit every time, this business is dead.
Now take a fully rich person like Ballmer or Fiorina (or any of the people in Forbes list of the richest people in America). Ballmer has a net worth of 14.0 billion dollars. Where do you think that money is going to? He's not spending all of it. Ultimately, that money is going to investments. By the current tax system, a portion of the income from those investments goes to road upkeep, schools, police officers, military defense, the FDA, protecting against insider trading, etc. Under a flat tax, the money goes to nothing but being re-invested... and acquiring more control over more of the value in the system. Ballmer's taxes drop to a very small percentage of his total income and / or value, allowing for an increa
Flat tax A: would remove our taxtion classificaitons, ensuring that those least able to pay (such as single mothers earning 20,000 or less) will have taxation burden thrust upon them. B: it would ensure than those who make money through investments rather than their efforts will have a minimal tax burden (as you so aptly point out elsewhere, you don't become rich by spending 100% of your income, but if you're poor you most definitely do). C: It would remove mitigating taxation factors, such as having children, having a failing business, investing in education, etc.
A flat tax would simplify paperwork greatly. But unfortunatley it would also shift a major tax burden onto those least able to pay, and while increasing the wealth of the leisure class.
Remember, this is not a way to collect more money or reduce government spending. It is simply a balance change which shifts sources of income from one area to another. Unfortunatley, those who would bear the brunt would be those least able to pay.
The issue isn't necessarily the rating, so much as the impact of the rating. Which is, to say, that the rating has automatically triggered a ban in the UK, will probalby trigger one throughout the EU, and effectively prevents the game from coming to US shelves by the policies of most US retailers.
Retailers which will carry movies like Hostel, which is extremely gorey, shocking, and offensive, but will not carry Manhunt.
Make no mistake: this rating may well be deserved. But this rating also means that the game has been censored.
After a fiasco where a player-created hack enabled simulated sex through clothing in GTA 4 prompted the ESRB to re-rate the game as AO, and Oblivion recieved a re-rating after a player merged a naked male chest image with geometry from the female, the ESRB is under tight scrutiny not to overreact. After all, wasn't the M rating created to keep adult material away from kids, without taking it entirely out of the marketplace?
I forget where, but there was a wonderful british study recently that found the suspension of disbelief was harmed by playing a videogame compared to watching a movie. The physical requirement of interacting with a game makes it difficult to forget that you're seeing something fake. Watching a movie, however, has less dischordant elements which stick out, and such things can be more easily glossed over as they require no attention on the part of the user.
Anyone have a link?
a fair and effective free market health care system
But that's the rub. You don't want health care to be fair (which, in free-market terms means ability to pay). You want a health care system which covers everyone who needs covering, and which treats humans like their lives have value.
With the extraordinary costs of health care, that's the last thing you want to have based purely upon free market principles. "I can zap you again to try to restart your heart, but it will cost you an additional 35 dollars for this service. Sign here and we will proceed."
Which is not to say that you don't have a valid point: there is a lot which is wrong with our health care system above and beyond not having a social safety net... such as relying upon employers to maintain health insurance, lawsuits every time something goes wrong, not enough investment in preventative and curative medecines, and a reliance upon the expensive and the extravagent over the effective. And that doesn't even address overburdened doctors who never know their patients.
But the free market is not going to solve this problem. This problem exists in a moral, social, and economic grey realm which the market has been particularly bad in the past at dealing with.
The GPL grants users some of the rights of a copyright holder.
EULA's restrict users from exercising certain rights they would otherwise have as non-copyright holders.
Big Difference.
How about this one? Universal coverage for 1/2 of what we're paying.
If you took an educated man from 1907 and brought him to 2007, he'd be able to understand just about everything we have except for our computational devices. They even understood a bit about nuclear energy.
Which is to say that what we have today is by and large based off learning from 100 years ago. Except for Liquid Crystal displays. And programming. Data mining. Most of the advanced materials science we take for granted. The amazing science that goes into modern bad food. Instantaneous worldwide communication VIA satellite networks. Cloning. MagLev regulation. Angioplasty.
To say that we haven't made huge strides in the past 100 years is ridiculous. 100 years ago, a trip from New York to Japan would take months and be considerd a culmination of a life's work. Today it can be undertaken for a month's salary and a half-day in a plane.
The problem is, while we have many ideas; they get shot down left and right. I don't see a new source of energy orders of magnitude above previous ones, like what nuclear power provided.
Fusion? Something involving quantum or String, once that mess gets sorted out? Fission has a rough energy conversion of about one thousandth the available energy. Fusion has a current rough energy conversion of about 3 thousandths. That leaves 99.9% of the available energy on the table, if we can figure out how to unlock it.
The edge of physics is still raw, and still amazing. Unfortunately, it is a bit difficult to describe to the average person these days... I've visited the laboratory of a Professor friend of mine, and never cease to be amazed by how difficult it is to describe even low-energy waveform interactions without delving into either highly forced metaphors or obscure mathematical modeling.
We're still advancing, but nowaday's it's hard, very hard.
It has always been hard. We've been working on Quantum computing for something like 20 years now, but we were working on regular digital computing for longer than that before it was useful... and we understood electricity pretty well by then.
Cars took a while, then planes took a while, now we're seeing a nanoscent space travel industry opening up.
If you were in a small village in Greece where you had to walk everywhere by foot, the next village over would be a long way away. The village four villages over would be a tremendous distance. A whole country over would be a gigantic distance, and going to France, for example, would be way out of your league. Traveling to eastern Asia, the Americas, or Australia would look like a pipe dream.
Well, we've got a long time to get there. And we've got a lot of little steps on the road to galactic civilization, including permanent space stations, profitable manufacturing, colonization of nearby planets, colonization of planets further our in the solar system, etc. 100 years to galactic expansion is ridiculous... after 100 years, we'd be lucky if we've got a buzzing little colony on the moon, let alone Mars or other solar systems.
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I was visiting London earlier this year, and needed a phone to use locally. I walked into a moble phone store, bought a sim with 5 pounds on it, and stuck it in a borrowed handset from someone else. It worked fine. You bring the phone, they bring the service, just like regular telephones.
I wanted to get my sister a handset in the US, but I didn't want to be responsible for her service. I went to 9 or 10 different stores, none of which could sell me anything without an associated plan and network lock.
In the US, you're playing roulette with your bill. You may be able to get 1000 minutes for 40 dollars, but each minute over costs you 40 cents. In other words, you have to guess how many minutes you are going to use, and if you guess wrong, you can quickly find yourself with a per-minute bill that increases twelve fold. In other words, they're trying specifically to sell you stuff they know you won't use by punishing you if you do use them. They also disable phone features ( I found out my phone in europe does videoconferencing ). Also note that nobody offers service for less than 30 dollars per month. Let's not forget that if you download a game from Cingular, they'll charge you roughly 5 dollars for the game and 5 dollars for the bandwidth to download the game. And, with the exception of the iPhone, we're always last to get any nifty new phone, if we get it at all.
When I was in Thailand, you could walk into MBK, browse though thousands of new and used phones from around the world, get a provider's sim card, and be up and running in minutes. There was a flat per-minute and per-text rate without a lot of complications or provisos, and what you did with that was up to you. When I described to them what we go through for our phone service in the US, they laughed. They all assumed we were on Star Trek communicators or something, but when I showed them my phone, they laughed at how far behind we were.
BTW, I'm not saying there aren't usage scenarios where we're cheaper than other places, just that the number of hoops and provisos attached to that rate is insane.
The US phone industry is incredibly warped with respect to the rest of the world, doing things that nobody else would put up with.
Why we put up with it is a mystery to me.
It is reasonable to assume this blog was created for the singular purpose of disparaging Kaplan, with
no other viable content.
There is nothing illegal about disparaging someone if it is true.
The market wasn't large enough to make most ports worthwhile unless the game was a proven hit seller already.
It seems like in this age of 5 platform simultaneous development (PC, PS3, 360, PS2, Wii), that code and resources should be more cross-platform than they ever have been in the past. How much of the "not worthwile to port" problem came from the actual porting process, and how much came from simple marketing / manufacturing / moving boxes?
I can't imagine a group of developers that deserves it more. Good luck with the infusion, guys!
What makes me scratch my head... if these guys can find holes in a few hours, why can't Apple?
Because 100,000k security researchers and hackers all typing away at keyboards will eventually write Shakespeare?
I don't care how bright your engineers are or how well you've planned your security model, the moment you put it on the 'net it WILL be hacked. That doesn't mean it will stay hacked, so much as the task of securing a system against simulated internal attacks will uncover different problems than putting it in the wild.
The anonymity provided by the internet is rather thin, especially when the OSS project is doing due dilligence and wondering why you don't want to give your name. Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean that your employer doesn't own that work.
Similarly, a huge chunk of the techy people who write for online publications don't technically have the right to give it to them (and they technically don't have the right to publish it) simply because their employer might want it. If you go playtest for another company, technically that "work" could be owned by your employer. An idea you're working on in your spare time? Not yours.
These things are so broadly worded that painting your house could give your employer a stake in your house. It usually doesn't go that far, but it's totally ridiculous.
I don't think the problem is that most people can't be bothered to look at what they're agreeing to, so much as for the daily things they're supposed to read they by and large have no real recourse to disagree anyway.
I don't like non-compete agreements, and I don't like "everything you do in your spare time belongs to us" agreements. And while I've argued the former out of contracts, I've never managed to argue the latter, immoral as it may be, because the people I've worked for have had THEIR clients force it upon THEM.
Similarly, I disagree with certain clauses in the Windows license. But if I didn't agree to the clauses, I'd really be out of a career. I don't agree to "binding arbitration in the state of Virginia" if my VCR explodes and burns my house down, but I can't seem to find a manufacturer who doesn't have that clause written on a sticker on their VCR somewhere. If you buy a video game, take it home, open it, and discover in the EULA that they want to slime your computer with a spyware / monitoring application... what are you going to do? The store sure isn't going to take it back, whatever the heck the click-through license says.
THIS IS WHY WE HAVE LAWS, PEOPLE! The only, THE ONLY reason for forcing your customers to agree to binding arbitration is to take away their legal rights. Don't put up with this.
While I hate sequelitis, there seems to be a good rule of thumb out there.
"A sequal's sales will reflect the previous game's quality"
If you knock out a fast or cheap sequel to a great game, you're going to get great sales... on that one sequel. If you then turn around and make a really great sequel next, that sequel's sales will suffer from the impression left behind by the previous game.
In other words, quality is rewarded more often than we think, just not right away.
And maybe somewhere I'm just not yet ready to blame gamers for the floods of sequels and genre games.