"Inaction by not taxing a thing is not the same as action to establish a thing, whereas action to tax a thing is the beginning step in prohibiting the free [exercise/use] of a thing (whether the further steps are taken or not)."
So now you're saying that the government is restricting employment, commerce, trade, etc? you're arguments are shallow and contradictory. Regardless of the law put in place by your nation, the special exception of 'a group' while being enforced to another group de-facto supports of the special exception group. That doesn't necessarily mean that this exception is a problem for society as a whole, but it is support. Your arguments don't change that argument in any way.
Most if not all soup kitchens are non-profit/religious organizations which just like religious organizations receive tax benefits from the government. If you're not receiving taxation from the government, you're receiving a benefit. Be it a credit or an exclusion, ANY special treatment of an organization is either supported, or punished. Some groups which are deemed good for society are religious groups and non-profits, whereas big polluters and the like pay more to the gov in order to do business.
Supermarkets (more likely the suppliers) paid for the samples give out to you in their marketing budgets, so even though the food had a tangible cost, it also has a tangible value. The food's value will be written off as an operating expense. But, items given away for free aren't taxed unless there's a trade of value being made. If I gave you a 'sample' worth $10000, and you gave me a sample worth $10000, that would surely be taxible. Think free web sites for example. You don't pay tax for the right to read slashdot, but you will (or should be anyways) pay taxes for the right to read the NY post, or whatever newspapers are paywalled. Taxible benefits (although there are very well defined exceptions) should apply anywhere that you'd have to pay (consumption) taxes on to begin with.
You are subsidizing the marginal support of homeless people.
You are supporting religion by the fact that they aren't taxed in practically anything they do. Why don't religions pay property taxes? One could argue very weakly that religion has such a positive impact on society, that the tax breaks are justified.
You may want to actually read your tax system laws before lambasting too deeply. You aren't taxed for items that are explicitely necessary in performance of your work duties. Nobody can work for 8 hours without going to the washroom or drinking water without undue care (and the cost structure is so ridiculously cheap, it'd be completely meaningless for the gov to tax it anyways). Food on the other hand is a huge amount of potential dollar value which makes it worth going after, and one could definitely argue that that you can live for 8 hours without food if you chose to (unless you have a pretty severe illness).
And as you mentioned, the prof's tea if he indeed had it provided by his university also falls into this category and he should probably remit it to the government for taxation at the end of the year, so lets say 2 cups a day for 260 days at 20c per cup == $104 of taxible income. Unfortunately for these Google folks, their free lunches are substantially higher than that.
I am 100% positive that Google will write of their entire perks program as an operating expense which is opposed to taxable earnings, hence its a tax break (though only the % of their tax rate's portion of the program).
What is missed as a taxible function would also be the value added to the food costs from aquisition, preperation, and service of said food, unless of course restaurant food isn't taxed on a state/national level.
Yes, that's by definition what a benefit is. If I lived in Google-ville where the company paid for every single service of my daily needs and officially paid me half the wages I'd normally receive, you expect the gov to look the other way and say "meh"? Its not even a tax grab, its simply fair exchange. If the company gives you anything of value, that's taxible. New computer? Taxible. Corporate Jet for personal matters? Taxible. Most companies still stretch the bounds of what are considered perks vs work functions like cell phones, corporate cars, personal internet access, etc..
I had a very generous health/dental package from one of my old companies which I practically never used, and was taxed a very large amount at the end of the year for the benefit. So what did I do? I reduced the package to the bare minimum to save on the tax.
Do each of the devices get their own DMA signalling, or are you crippled to only one device being fast at a time? How does context sharing of the pipe sharing work? I imagine that this -could- be a great step in the right direction, but they need a lot more than just a raw fat pipe to make multiple peripherals fast and responsive.
As per finding a legal DRM-free film, your chances are zero for 99% of everything you'd like to watch, and just highly unlikely for the remaining 1%. Any sites that would advertise such are most likely priating the movies and then selling for profit.
Yikes, "Every brand wants or has an app, and every webapp needs a native mobile counterpart to be taken seriously" sounds like bubbly words to me. Remember when every jack and jill needed a web page of their own? Oh wait... j/k seriously though, with "hundreds of thousands of apps", you'll have to imagine diminishing returns on investment at some point, and when that happens, the pool of employable developers will shrink. How much? Who can tell, certainly not an idle spectator like me. Start recording job sites postings for mobile developers over time. It'll at least be a weak signal of change.
How the hell on EARTH do you have "61,202 cell sites" without de-duping?
Then I checked the US wireless quick facts and found: June-12 June-07 June-02 June-97 285,561 210,360 131,350 38,650
Yikes, that's quite the expansion... but regardless, it still means this phone would've travelled through a very large number of dense American cities to get up to that count.
PC's have and will continue to service the needs of novices and experienced individuals for decades now. I had my PS1 bought for my family around 25 years ago and we knew literally nothing about computers. We learned to use the tools available to do a job, whatever that happened to be. We were able to get by learning to use a word processor, spreadsheet, and eventually for me basic programming.
I guess the main question would demand, if we're post, PC then what makes PC's so inflexible to the needs of today's consumers. You could just shrug it all off and say, well, you don't need a big heavy clunky thing to lug around anywhere, but you won't find your granny or most 'leisure' users lugging around their tablets, laptops and certainly not towers easily at all.
So the question you have to ask yourself is in all the decades of computer and PC advancement, but what makes personal computers so much incapable of living up to today's consumers? Price? Top Amazon Selling Tablets: $199, $159, $269, $179, $299 Top Amazon Selling Laptops: $249, $469, $1,129, $239, $1,129
As long as you're not buying a apple notebook, the price comparisons are pretty close. Factor in the cost for a real blutooth keyboard (basically required for longer than casual use) and many laptops area cheaper than their tablet counterparts.
"But NO, its all about the TOUCH!" Touch becomes a necessity at tablet form-factors with "lean back" characteristics, but lean back can't and won't be used for all casual computing needs, hence the attached keyboard.
"But its about the appz!" There are a lot of applications focused on mobile right now, many of which are also rans. You can look back to the consumer introduction of the CD-ROM for a perfect reflection of the sentement. The CD-ROM brought in Multimedia into our computers in ways that were never experienced before. As such, a ton of products were created for it. Most were unsuitable, crap, sold poorly and went broke, and some really invented the platform and found good uses for it. There will be many good uses for touch centric devices, but to assume that these devices in themselves are the future of computing is rather delusional.
"But they don't get viruses" Nether do most computers these days either. A security exploitation vector is only as good as its underlying technology, and although tablets and phone OS's by in large make it very difficult to gain access to things they shouldn't, OS's will continue to be exploitable regardless of which hardware they're running on. Windows has increasingly made it harder to be infected with all sorts of viruses, and I imagine they will only get better at this. Linux and Mac are in a better position, and eventually they too will develop better user facing security control mechanisms.
In conclusion, I think we may have seen the peak (or close to it) in terms of western society PC adoption as a % of population, but that doesn't mean PC's are destined to become minicomputers. They will always serve as their intended roll of end-user input for non-trivial content creation, control, and management functions. These are rolls that would be difficult if not untenable for other device formats, and quite frankly why bother? PC's only became so ubiquitous because they're so good at being everything for everyone. They're substantially cheaper in terms of their actual computing power, and they're a known quantity that pretty much anyone between 10-50 have had work/school exposure to.
Moved on, XFCE and it's at least replaced all uses for what Gnome was doing for me. Instead of creating a rich unified DE for all to use (with small enhancements and extensions), they flushed down all their good will in re-inventing something that many/most? of their community didn't seem to want.
I wish you well, but this is one ship I simply refuse to sail on (In the same likes as Windows 8 and unity alas).
If the largest harm in cracking down is to listen to you whine, I'd happily take the law. Tax dodges and more importantly drug slingers are the major problem in society and they directly/indirectly kill thousands of people yearly in US/Mexico alone. Your high minded slights on over-reaching control fanaticism makes me sick to my stomach. Get a grip and reality and tell me your GOVERNMENT is the bigger threat than the gang bangers around the corner.
and I would never work for EA. They're a sweat shop. I realized earlier on that I wasn't meant to be a game developer, but I've know several friends that have bumped through the EA treadmill who've left burnt out and miserable.
This may very well be the life of a most game devs, but I don't feel like 60 hour weeks is conducive to a healthy long term career with a company.
As a user, since they've introduced Origin, I've bought one game (ME3) reluctantly, and quite frankly the EA label is a LARGE detriment to my decision for buying games. I was in fact intrigued at buying Sim City for $40 from Amazon before launch, but I was a little Leary about it. Now I think Ubisoft's a little rotten with this whole push for uPlay, but at least they're playing ball with Steam if nothing else.
All that said, I'm VERY glad that the Indy scene seems to be picking up steam both in volume and quality. I'm sure Kickstarter and other such initiatives are helping lead us to a hopefully more diverse and healthy product ecosystem.
"They smply weren't fast enough to attach to the moble market, and its bit them, hard"
Um, you mean the Microsoft that's been making smart phones for over a decade? That microsoft has been late to the party? Its not that they were late, its that they made devices that so few people wanted and for so much money, that the market balked at them and Apple / Android absoltely blew past them in a very short order. The iPhone 1 should've been a huge kick in their ass, and if they were as agile as they were in the 90's, they'd of had Winmo7 or the equivalent years before their meager market bled even further into obscurity.
RDP / NX / Citrix / etc.. make good trade-offs by still having a 'mental' map of windows (so moving windows, some resizing, etc.. are fast), but actually streaming pre-rasterized versions of the output, which dramatically speeds up the interactivity of the applications.
> Open a remote editor on a machine the other side of the world? Have it integrated with my wm? It may not be fast if you're not on a compressed X11 tunnel or NX, but its very possible to integrate with my WM. I don't know what you're working on.
> Copy and paste between windows on different machines without the app having to provide the copy/paste functionality? I've never had a problem copy/pasting between local apps and remoted in apps, but I could be wrong about this.
> Being able to set my preferences once, and not having to reconfigure 40 different desktops to my liking? You mean Wayland allows for the rendering PC to inject a potential security exploit into every remote host it connects to? Sounds intriguing but potentially very dangerous.
> Get the correct DPI and fonts for the display I'm on, not the one of the remote machine? Um, this shouldn't happen. The remote application should be polling the DPI, etc.. from the X server it connects to. I don't know why this wouldn't be working for you.
> Being able to run VMs that look and function the same as when run natively? I'm not sure what your point is here at all. Its up to the VM software to setup and render into the host's frame buffer where appropriate and to expose said host environment's capabilities to the guest. How is this a failure in the display server at all?
Yes, There are fundamental differences. RDP simply works with input events and draw regions. The draw regions use pretty much any compression routines under the sun and supports the windowed regions, so moving windows around inside the container is basically free network IO, whereas VNC requires redraws over all delta regions. I'm not sure if Window border rendering is client side of not, but obviously the inner contents need to be redrawn with graphics sent back.
The real killer against X over networks is in latency, since most of X is performed with operations instead of rasters. Instead of sending possibly hundreds of commands, RDP can send a single raster to represent the same thing. The possible overhead in sending / acking / processing the operations quite often causes a large amount of time. This isn't helped by the fact that traditionally X developers didn't spend much time optimizing network performance, so you'll see a large number of libraries / apps that perform highly serial operations maximizing operation processing latency (since it needs a full round trip just to continue to the next instruction).
On a side note, there's the NX protocol which is a much more highly optimized remoteing solution for X derived services, but its proprietary, so it makes it unlikely for use in wide adoption. NX works quite closely to that of RDP/Citrix so that's why performance should be comparable.
In the US, these entities are in fact regulated, and I imagine its the same in France. If they're acting in the same fashion (but with slightly different physical characteristics), why wouldn't those same laws apply to them? If you want fully de-regulate the long distance phone providers as being telecommunications entities that's one thing, but applying one set of rules because its half tethered off the internet doesn't change the nature of what these companies do.
You give yourself a physical presence in local markets because it IS cheaper than routing over an incumbent toll carrier. Take out your hardware, and the skype out feature would cost substantially more for the feature (which is why they have hardware there to begin with). As long as France's standards apply across all competitors, then I see no problem with this.
Everyone I know who bought SCII bought it for single player, and could count their multi-player games on one hand (including me). Obviously this isn't a perfect representation of the community, but I'm sure you'll find that there's far more single-player only gamers than you'd like to believe. Plus, without the single player mode, you'd have a substantially large number of very weak introductory players that would need some sort of introduction to the game. This is one of the biggest weaknesses of on-line only games like DOTA 2 for instance, where the learning curve to reach 'competent' multi-player is quite high.
No firings after an aquisition is like telling raging barbarians not to rape and murder. It just doesn't happen. Some companies will actually pump resources into its new appendage, but thats a lot more common when you acquire very young companies that couldn't self capitalize expansion.
So, basically of the 4 slices in this multiplayer game, each have +5% crime so multiply city crime rate by 10% as a regional adjustment factor.. take maybe 100 of those calculations per slice and you're talking about a ridiculously small amount of computing power. The server would spend a large amount of time processing the NIO involved with automatic save/load sync
Long favored? Most people that I've known doing.NET work are wired into the frameworks Microsoft developed, glued on thier own proprietary bits and called it a day. Can you please leave some feedback on these very popular community driven OSS efforts in the.NET umbrella (outside of Mono which is a re-implementation of Microsoft's API's), becase quite frankly, I've never heard of any.
Nobody banned his book. A publisher decided that it was less profitable to fund a publication from a person of controversial repute. After all the books he's written, I'd hope that Card could continue writing until his dieing days giving his works away without ever having to worry about putting food on the table.
Slashdot Mirror
"Inaction by not taxing a thing is not the same as action to establish a thing, whereas action to tax a thing is the beginning step in prohibiting the free [exercise/use] of a thing (whether the further steps are taken or not)."
So now you're saying that the government is restricting employment, commerce, trade, etc? you're arguments are shallow and contradictory. Regardless of the law put in place by your nation, the special exception of 'a group' while being enforced to another group de-facto supports of the special exception group. That doesn't necessarily mean that this exception is a problem for society as a whole, but it is support. Your arguments don't change that argument in any way.
Most if not all soup kitchens are non-profit/religious organizations which just like religious organizations receive tax benefits from the government. If you're not receiving taxation from the government, you're receiving a benefit. Be it a credit or an exclusion, ANY special treatment of an organization is either supported, or punished. Some groups which are deemed good for society are religious groups and non-profits, whereas big polluters and the like pay more to the gov in order to do business.
Supermarkets (more likely the suppliers) paid for the samples give out to you in their marketing budgets, so even though the food had a tangible cost, it also has a tangible value. The food's value will be written off as an operating expense. But, items given away for free aren't taxed unless there's a trade of value being made. If I gave you a 'sample' worth $10000, and you gave me a sample worth $10000, that would surely be taxible. Think free web sites for example. You don't pay tax for the right to read slashdot, but you will (or should be anyways) pay taxes for the right to read the NY post, or whatever newspapers are paywalled. Taxible benefits (although there are very well defined exceptions) should apply anywhere that you'd have to pay (consumption) taxes on to begin with.
You are subsidizing the marginal support of homeless people.
You are supporting religion by the fact that they aren't taxed in practically anything they do. Why don't religions pay property taxes? One could argue very weakly that religion has such a positive impact on society, that the tax breaks are justified.
You may want to actually read your tax system laws before lambasting too deeply. You aren't taxed for items that are explicitely necessary in performance of your work duties. Nobody can work for 8 hours without going to the washroom or drinking water without undue care (and the cost structure is so ridiculously cheap, it'd be completely meaningless for the gov to tax it anyways). Food on the other hand is a huge amount of potential dollar value which makes it worth going after, and one could definitely argue that that you can live for 8 hours without food if you chose to (unless you have a pretty severe illness).
And as you mentioned, the prof's tea if he indeed had it provided by his university also falls into this category and he should probably remit it to the government for taxation at the end of the year, so lets say 2 cups a day for 260 days at 20c per cup == $104 of taxible income. Unfortunately for these Google folks, their free lunches are substantially higher than that.
I am 100% positive that Google will write of their entire perks program as an operating expense which is opposed to taxable earnings, hence its a tax break (though only the % of their tax rate's portion of the program).
What is missed as a taxible function would also be the value added to the food costs from aquisition, preperation, and service of said food, unless of course restaurant food isn't taxed on a state/national level.
Yes, that's by definition what a benefit is. If I lived in Google-ville where the company paid for every single service of my daily needs and officially paid me half the wages I'd normally receive, you expect the gov to look the other way and say "meh"? Its not even a tax grab, its simply fair exchange. If the company gives you anything of value, that's taxible. New computer? Taxible. Corporate Jet for personal matters? Taxible. Most companies still stretch the bounds of what are considered perks vs work functions like cell phones, corporate cars, personal internet access, etc..
I had a very generous health/dental package from one of my old companies which I practically never used, and was taxed a very large amount at the end of the year for the benefit. So what did I do? I reduced the package to the bare minimum to save on the tax.
Do each of the devices get their own DMA signalling, or are you crippled to only one device being fast at a time? How does context sharing of the pipe sharing work? I imagine that this -could- be a great step in the right direction, but they need a lot more than just a raw fat pipe to make multiple peripherals fast and responsive.
http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_watch_Netflix_(Watch_Instantly)_in_Linux
As per finding a legal DRM-free film, your chances are zero for 99% of everything you'd like to watch, and just highly unlikely for the remaining 1%. Any sites that would advertise such are most likely priating the movies and then selling for profit.
Yikes, "Every brand wants or has an app, and every webapp needs a native mobile counterpart to be taken seriously" sounds like bubbly words to me. Remember when every jack and jill needed a web page of their own? Oh wait... j/k seriously though, with "hundreds of thousands of apps", you'll have to imagine diminishing returns on investment at some point, and when that happens, the pool of employable developers will shrink. How much? Who can tell, certainly not an idle spectator like me. Start recording job sites postings for mobile developers over time. It'll at least be a weak signal of change.
How the hell on EARTH do you have "61,202 cell sites" without de-duping?
Then I checked the US wireless quick facts and found:
June-12 June-07 June-02 June-97
285,561 210,360 131,350 38,650
Yikes, that's quite the expansion... but regardless, it still means this phone would've travelled through a very large number of dense American cities to get up to that count.
PC's have and will continue to service the needs of novices and experienced individuals for decades now. I had my PS1 bought for my family around 25 years ago and we knew literally nothing about computers. We learned to use the tools available to do a job, whatever that happened to be. We were able to get by learning to use a word processor, spreadsheet, and eventually for me basic programming.
I guess the main question would demand, if we're post, PC then what makes PC's so inflexible to the needs of today's consumers. You could just shrug it all off and say, well, you don't need a big heavy clunky thing to lug around anywhere, but you won't find your granny or most 'leisure' users lugging around their tablets, laptops and certainly not towers easily at all.
So the question you have to ask yourself is in all the decades of computer and PC advancement, but what makes personal computers so much incapable of living up to today's consumers? Price?
Top Amazon Selling Tablets: $199, $159, $269, $179, $299
Top Amazon Selling Laptops: $249, $469, $1,129, $239, $1,129
As long as you're not buying a apple notebook, the price comparisons are pretty close. Factor in the cost for a real blutooth keyboard (basically required for longer than casual use) and many laptops area cheaper than their tablet counterparts.
"But NO, its all about the TOUCH!"
Touch becomes a necessity at tablet form-factors with "lean back" characteristics, but lean back can't and won't be used for all casual computing needs, hence the attached keyboard.
"But its about the appz!"
There are a lot of applications focused on mobile right now, many of which are also rans. You can look back to the consumer introduction of the CD-ROM for a perfect reflection of the sentement. The CD-ROM brought in Multimedia into our computers in ways that were never experienced before. As such, a ton of products were created for it. Most were unsuitable, crap, sold poorly and went broke, and some really invented the platform and found good uses for it. There will be many good uses for touch centric devices, but to assume that these devices in themselves are the future of computing is rather delusional.
"But they don't get viruses"
Nether do most computers these days either. A security exploitation vector is only as good as its underlying technology, and although tablets and phone OS's by in large make it very difficult to gain access to things they shouldn't, OS's will continue to be exploitable regardless of which hardware they're running on. Windows has increasingly made it harder to be infected with all sorts of viruses, and I imagine they will only get better at this. Linux and Mac are in a better position, and eventually they too will develop better user facing security control mechanisms.
In conclusion, I think we may have seen the peak (or close to it) in terms of western society PC adoption as a % of population, but that doesn't mean PC's are destined to become minicomputers. They will always serve as their intended roll of end-user input for non-trivial content creation, control, and management functions. These are rolls that would be difficult if not untenable for other device formats, and quite frankly why bother? PC's only became so ubiquitous because they're so good at being everything for everyone. They're substantially cheaper in terms of their actual computing power, and they're a known quantity that pretty much anyone between 10-50 have had work/school exposure to.
Moved on, XFCE and it's at least replaced all uses for what Gnome was doing for me. Instead of creating a rich unified DE for all to use (with small enhancements and extensions), they flushed down all their good will in re-inventing something that many/most? of their community didn't seem to want.
I wish you well, but this is one ship I simply refuse to sail on (In the same likes as Windows 8 and unity alas).
If the largest harm in cracking down is to listen to you whine, I'd happily take the law. Tax dodges and more importantly drug slingers are the major problem in society and they directly/indirectly kill thousands of people yearly in US/Mexico alone. Your high minded slights on over-reaching control fanaticism makes me sick to my stomach. Get a grip and reality and tell me your GOVERNMENT is the bigger threat than the gang bangers around the corner.
and I would never work for EA. They're a sweat shop. I realized earlier on that I wasn't meant to be a game developer, but I've know several friends that have bumped through the EA treadmill who've left burnt out and miserable.
This may very well be the life of a most game devs, but I don't feel like 60 hour weeks is conducive to a healthy long term career with a company.
As a user, since they've introduced Origin, I've bought one game (ME3) reluctantly, and quite frankly the EA label is a LARGE detriment to my decision for buying games. I was in fact intrigued at buying Sim City for $40 from Amazon before launch, but I was a little Leary about it. Now I think Ubisoft's a little rotten with this whole push for uPlay, but at least they're playing ball with Steam if nothing else.
All that said, I'm VERY glad that the Indy scene seems to be picking up steam both in volume and quality. I'm sure Kickstarter and other such initiatives are helping lead us to a hopefully more diverse and healthy product ecosystem.
"They smply weren't fast enough to attach to the moble market, and its bit them, hard"
Um, you mean the Microsoft that's been making smart phones for over a decade? That microsoft has been late to the party? Its not that they were late, its that they made devices that so few people wanted and for so much money, that the market balked at them and Apple / Android absoltely blew past them in a very short order. The iPhone 1 should've been a huge kick in their ass, and if they were as agile as they were in the 90's, they'd of had Winmo7 or the equivalent years before their meager market bled even further into obscurity.
RDP / NX / Citrix / etc.. make good trade-offs by still having a 'mental' map of windows (so moving windows, some resizing, etc.. are fast), but actually streaming pre-rasterized versions of the output, which dramatically speeds up the interactivity of the applications.
> Open a remote editor on a machine the other side of the world? Have it integrated with my wm?
It may not be fast if you're not on a compressed X11 tunnel or NX, but its very possible to integrate with my WM. I don't know what you're working on.
> Copy and paste between windows on different machines without the app having to provide the copy/paste functionality?
I've never had a problem copy/pasting between local apps and remoted in apps, but I could be wrong about this.
> Being able to set my preferences once, and not having to reconfigure 40 different desktops to my liking?
You mean Wayland allows for the rendering PC to inject a potential security exploit into every remote host it connects to? Sounds intriguing but potentially very dangerous.
> Get the correct DPI and fonts for the display I'm on, not the one of the remote machine?
Um, this shouldn't happen. The remote application should be polling the DPI, etc.. from the X server it connects to. I don't know why this wouldn't be working for you.
> Being able to run VMs that look and function the same as when run natively?
I'm not sure what your point is here at all. Its up to the VM software to setup and render into the host's frame buffer where appropriate and to expose said host environment's capabilities to the guest. How is this a failure in the display server at all?
Well to be fair, they licensed the technology from Citrix, so I doubt they even could give it away if they wanted to.
Yes, There are fundamental differences. RDP simply works with input events and draw regions. The draw regions use pretty much any compression routines under the sun and supports the windowed regions, so moving windows around inside the container is basically free network IO, whereas VNC requires redraws over all delta regions. I'm not sure if Window border rendering is client side of not, but obviously the inner contents need to be redrawn with graphics sent back.
The real killer against X over networks is in latency, since most of X is performed with operations instead of rasters. Instead of sending possibly hundreds of commands, RDP can send a single raster to represent the same thing. The possible overhead in sending / acking / processing the operations quite often causes a large amount of time. This isn't helped by the fact that traditionally X developers didn't spend much time optimizing network performance, so you'll see a large number of libraries / apps that perform highly serial operations maximizing operation processing latency (since it needs a full round trip just to continue to the next instruction).
On a side note, there's the NX protocol which is a much more highly optimized remoteing solution for X derived services, but its proprietary, so it makes it unlikely for use in wide adoption. NX works quite closely to that of RDP/Citrix so that's why performance should be comparable.
Skype in this case is taking the place of an inter-exchange carrier as described generally in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interexchange_carrier
In the US, these entities are in fact regulated, and I imagine its the same in France. If they're acting in the same fashion (but with slightly different physical characteristics), why wouldn't those same laws apply to them? If you want fully de-regulate the long distance phone providers as being telecommunications entities that's one thing, but applying one set of rules because its half tethered off the internet doesn't change the nature of what these companies do.
You give yourself a physical presence in local markets because it IS cheaper than routing over an incumbent toll carrier. Take out your hardware, and the skype out feature would cost substantially more for the feature (which is why they have hardware there to begin with). As long as France's standards apply across all competitors, then I see no problem with this.
Everyone I know who bought SCII bought it for single player, and could count their multi-player games on one hand (including me). Obviously this isn't a perfect representation of the community, but I'm sure you'll find that there's far more single-player only gamers than you'd like to believe. Plus, without the single player mode, you'd have a substantially large number of very weak introductory players that would need some sort of introduction to the game. This is one of the biggest weaknesses of on-line only games like DOTA 2 for instance, where the learning curve to reach 'competent' multi-player is quite high.
No firings after an aquisition is like telling raging barbarians not to rape and murder. It just doesn't happen. Some companies will actually pump resources into its new appendage, but thats a lot more common when you acquire very young companies that couldn't self capitalize expansion.
So, basically of the 4 slices in this multiplayer game, each have +5% crime so multiply city crime rate by 10% as a regional adjustment factor.. take maybe 100 of those calculations per slice and you're talking about a ridiculously small amount of computing power. The server would spend a large amount of time processing the NIO involved with automatic save/load sync
Long favored? Most people that I've known doing .NET work are wired into the frameworks Microsoft developed, glued on thier own proprietary bits and called it a day. Can you please leave some feedback on these very popular community driven OSS efforts in the .NET umbrella (outside of Mono which is a re-implementation of Microsoft's API's), becase quite frankly, I've never heard of any.
Nobody banned his book. A publisher decided that it was less profitable to fund a publication from a person of controversial repute. After all the books he's written, I'd hope that Card could continue writing until his dieing days giving his works away without ever having to worry about putting food on the table.