"Don't you think that the clause in question refers to imports from other countries?"
No. All other mentions of the words "import" and "export" refer to entering a state specifically.
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit...
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
There's also:
No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another; nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.
The constitution didn't consider the United States a single "country" per se, but as a union of individual "countries," much like the European Union (which is why they're called "states"). Each state was considered to have the right to regulate commerce acros its own borders as it saw fit, just as with any other independent state, and those powers were only surrendered by their joining the federal Union.
Except for what is explicitly covered in the United States Constitution, the states have all the rights of independent nation-states. This fact is reiterated by the Tenth Amendment.
On the one hand, buying stock will give him some (small) voice at stockholders' meetings, but unless he manages to sell the stock at a loss (or gives it away), he's still going to make a profit off of what he claims to denounce. This has the potential to be a double-edged sword.
Famiclones have been around forver, it's not really news. What would have been newsworth would be these guys making something like the "Dr PC Jr," the Holy Grail of Famiclones (it will play NES ROMs off of a 3.5" floppy disk), but those haven't been manufactured in years and will typically sell for $500 nowadays.
As for your new NEX, try not to play a real NES and avoid certian later Konami/Ultra titles (like Castlevania II and TMNT II) and maybe you won't notice the difference.
"Sales tax is applied to all goods no matter wether they are made within the state, another state, or another country."
Because the sale takes place within the state. This is not so for internet (or mail-order) commerce, where the sale is considered to take place in the state the seller operates in (if the buyer is in California and the seller is in New York, New York may charge sales tax but not California).
The sale took place in the state where the seller is set up and then the goods are transported across state lines, imported into the buyer's state.
"As proposed, businesses would be required to collect sales taxes and send them to the state the purchase was shipped to."
No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States(.)
Congress can let them tax ecommerce, but the proceeds can't go into state coffers.
I'd get a Famiclone if it was done well, but these NES-on-a-chip clones aren't. The colors are washed, sound is spotty with missing sound effects and musical instruments... The people who took the time to both write NES emulators and dump NES cartridges put a lot more effort (and pride) in their work than this bunch of people selling $5 worth of hardware for $50. They make the vast majority of their money from people who don't know any better.
You can get a refurbished front-loader (complete with composite output) on eBay for less than what these people are charging for a cheap knock-off.
If all you're looking for is "better than nothing," here it is.
So the $50 for this Famiclone was worth it when you simply could have spent $10 on eBay for a cleaning kit (or even a clean, working NES) and ended up with better picture and sound quality?
"This is, perhaps, something that doesn't need to be done."
So there isn't a difference between a murder done in the heat of a robbery and a murder done to silence someone and destroy evidence of another crime? Or between those two and killing someone because somebody else paid you?
Legal? Yes. The NES doesn't have a BIOS or anything they'd need to copy, such as with the PlayStation.
Worth the money? No. The chip it uses is a years-old cheap knock-off that has known picture and sound problems. You can get the Real Thing for less money on eBay.
I have a well-maintained front-loader, a top-loader, and an A/V Famicom. Why would I be interested in this? I can stick in my Final Fantasy III cartridge, but will it let me play the game in English? No? Then I'll wait for the Kevtendo.
Heck, can this Famiclone even get all the sound right? They mentioned TMNT II, how was the percussion in that game? Did April's digitized scream come through?
Hell, I had a Tristar once, which did everything this thing does (played both NES and Famicom carts) while pretending to be an add-on to my SNES. That saved even more shelf space than having one of these would. What advantage does this have over a Tristar?
"Oh, so the state was hurt, and they're the ones who have to go after Sony?"
Ignoring for the moment the potential harm done to computers owned and operated by the state government, the state, as a republic, is required to represent the interests of the people.
"The way I see it, Sony breached a contract."
With whom? The people who declined?
"This is easily resolved in court, and anyone who had their contract breached by Sony should go ahead and file an independent lawsuit"
So then you are in favor of Sony playing the odds. Unless enough individuals come forward and (successfully) sue Sony for this, Sony will see a net gain from their illicit efforts, and others will likely follow suit.
This is exactly the same mechanic that perpetuates spam. How's your inbox looking?
"The problem is that contract law is too complicated, and you can't fight a contract violation in court without a contract lawyer who likely is part of an organization that wrote the law."
Without law on what may or may not be included in a contract, what do you propose to do to keep contracts from being "too complicated?"
"Who is with me in asking for an amendment limiting all laws to one topic, 200 words or less,"
I challenege you to, in 200 words or less, write a law that defines murder in such a way that includes things like murder-for-hire, and differentiates it from accidental death, unless that death was through criminal negligence (and defining "criminal negligence"), differentiate between classifications of murder by how heinous they are (e. g. was there rape involved?), and specify different punishments for each classification while allowing the judge leeway for sentencing.
"my solution is true moderated arbitration mechanisms in a free market,"
So he who has the money to buy favorable arbitration wins?
Sony is a member of both the MPAA and the RIAA, and therefore has Congress in their back pocket. There is little, however, the state legislatures can do for them, so they don't have any lobbying industry in place in Austin to stop this sort of thing.
"Dragon Quest IV was released here, 13 years ago, biggest NES cart to ever be produced, only the series was called Dragon WARRIOR here until the release of 8."
Yes, and, in the same vein as the reprises of I, II and III for the Super Famicom (and then the Game Boy Color), IV was remade, expanded, etc. for the PlayStation. There's a "coming soon!" ad for it on the back of the Dragon Warrior VII manual. It essentially uses the same engine as VII.
"In fact, the only Dragon Quests we didn't get were the SNES ones(5&6)."
There may be hope for the PlayStation 2 version of V coming over to the US depending on the sales of VIII, but the odds of the original version of V coming over is slim to none, unless something hapens with the Revolution.
"Every real non-johnny come lately RPG fan knows Seiken Densetsu 3."
That doesn't mean everybody is near as orgasmic about it as they are when they hear the words "Final Fantasy." How well did Legend of Mana sell again?
All we're getting from Square-Enix nowadays is 31 flavors of Final Fantasy.
"Not knowing about it is like not knowing what the Mother series is."
In other words, very common. Not every game player has been active for the past 10+ years.
"We're not into obscure territory here at all."
As far as the modern gaming scene is concerned, it's all very obscure.
How many times are we expected to buy the old Famicom and Super Famicom Final Fantasy games? I wish they'd stop whoring that series long enough to, I dunno, translate DQIV for the PlayStation. Or milk some other big Enix names, say a SoulBlazer collection for GBA.
Even other lesser-known Squaresoft games would be something. Seiken Densetsu 3? At what point do we admit we have too much Final Fantasy?
My wet dream is S-E making all the old games they never translated available for download in English for the Revolution.
"The FCC is basically the big media conglomerates arm in government, creating an extremely high cost of entry in media markets, preventing smaller companies or individuals from trying to compete."
No, physics does that. There is only so much information you can transmit in so narrow a band of frequencies. Radio bandwidth is far from infinite.
"The days when we needed the FCC are over -- we have so many different ways to communicate that we don't need any regulation over those systems."
Just the opposite is true. We have many more ways to use radio frequencies but still only the same amount of bandwidth. While technology may allow us to use bandwidth more efficiently, it doens't create more bandwidth and the spectrum is getting more and more crowded.
"Interference from large broadcasters is a myth."
"Photons, whether they are light photons, radio photons, or gamma-ray photons, simply do not interfere with one another," he explains. "They pass through one another."
The idiot you're using as a source doesn't even understand basic classical wave mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics. I suspect he's never actually tried using the pinhole camera he tries to use as an example, never saw the fuzzy pictures produced.
But that's all moot because we're not talking about physical interference but signal interference, the general inability of broadcasters to stay entirely within one frequency or one range of frequencies. Quantum says there will always be spillover into higher and lower frequencies, potentially into somebody else's channel. This is why you can sometimes find the audio from VHF channels 6 and 7 on your FM radio and why you don't see UHF transmitters within 6 channels or so of each other.
"Ever wonder how your house can have 3 cell phones, 3 cordless phones and 15 wireless accessories work together?"
Because they all use different frequency channels.
"even cell phones will be antiquated. I can imagine a near-future of open bandwidth, frequency-hopping competitive technologies that walk all over each other yet don't conflict."
The more information you need to transmit, the more frequencies you need to use simultaneously (why we talk about FM and TV channels) and the fewer frequencies are useful to you (longer waves can't carry as much information density, hence the disparity in sound quality between AM and FM). So sayeth special relativity. Everybody wants UHF. If you don't try to limit who uses what frequencies when, you're going to end up with a collision domain far uglier than any unswitched ethernet.
And simply because you can use digital signal transmission doesn't mean you must, especially in your anarcho-capitalist wet dream. You can't stop me from using my spark gap.
"The more power you want to broadcast, the more energy you'll need to do so."
But the power needed to transmit is not only dependent on how far you want to transmit but also how much information (i. e. how high a frequency) you want to transmit at.
"If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them?"
If they're capitalists, it will cost them less than what they charge you to keep from turning on their transmitter.
And you don't need to transmit at "every" frequency, just a few key frequencies in the UHF spectrum (i. e. the useful frequencies) and allow spillover to take care of the rest.
"The only way you could stay in business is with advertisers,"
You are, again, forgetting extortion. "Pay me or I jam your transmissions."
"Without the FCC, we'd see thousands or tens of thousands of community broadcasters."
But the only ones who would produce a clear picture on your television would be the ones with enough money to broadcast strongly enough to drown out the competing signals. Otherwise ever
By monitoring the data, of course. We already have precedent of executive agencies tapping communications without a warrant, or haven't you seen the headlines in the past few days?
"but the DS... well it looks crap.. while the PSP looks so nice."
Then you've already made up your mind, haven't you?
Re:Save the batteries...Pen AND Paper Games...
on
Games That Travel Well
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"Save the batteries...Pen AND Paper Games..."
Recharge the batteries, save the trees.
"tic tack toe"
The only way to win is not to play.
"crossword puzzles"
Yeah, throw a twelve-year-old kid today's New York Times crossword puzzle and see how many they're actually able to complete before "I don't understand any of these, this sucks, are we there yet?"
Slashdot Mirror
No. All other mentions of the words "import" and "export" refer to entering a state specifically.There's also:The constitution didn't consider the United States a single "country" per se, but as a union of individual "countries," much like the European Union (which is why they're called "states"). Each state was considered to have the right to regulate commerce acros its own borders as it saw fit, just as with any other independent state, and those powers were only surrendered by their joining the federal Union.
Except for what is explicitly covered in the United States Constitution, the states have all the rights of independent nation-states. This fact is reiterated by the Tenth Amendment.
$1000 for an HDTV and $400 for a console that will let me watch a grown man sweat? Why wouldn't it sell?
On the one hand, buying stock will give him some (small) voice at stockholders' meetings, but unless he manages to sell the stock at a loss (or gives it away), he's still going to make a profit off of what he claims to denounce. This has the potential to be a double-edged sword.
Famiclones have been around forver, it's not really news. What would have been newsworth would be these guys making something like the "Dr PC Jr," the Holy Grail of Famiclones (it will play NES ROMs off of a 3.5" floppy disk), but those haven't been manufactured in years and will typically sell for $500 nowadays.
As for your new NEX, try not to play a real NES and avoid certian later Konami/Ultra titles (like Castlevania II and TMNT II) and maybe you won't notice the difference.
"Sales tax is applied to all goods no matter wether they are made within the state, another state, or another country."
Because the sale takes place within the state. This is not so for internet (or mail-order) commerce, where the sale is considered to take place in the state the seller operates in (if the buyer is in California and the seller is in New York, New York may charge sales tax but not California).
The sale took place in the state where the seller is set up and then the goods are transported across state lines, imported into the buyer's state.
I'd get a Famiclone if it was done well, but these NES-on-a-chip clones aren't. The colors are washed, sound is spotty with missing sound effects and musical instruments... The people who took the time to both write NES emulators and dump NES cartridges put a lot more effort (and pride) in their work than this bunch of people selling $5 worth of hardware for $50. They make the vast majority of their money from people who don't know any better.
You can get a refurbished front-loader (complete with composite output) on eBay for less than what these people are charging for a cheap knock-off.
If all you're looking for is "better than nothing," here it is.
So the $50 for this Famiclone was worth it when you simply could have spent $10 on eBay for a cleaning kit (or even a clean, working NES) and ended up with better picture and sound quality?
"This is, perhaps, something that doesn't need to be done."
So there isn't a difference between a murder done in the heat of a robbery and a murder done to silence someone and destroy evidence of another crime? Or between those two and killing someone because somebody else paid you?
Legal? Yes. The NES doesn't have a BIOS or anything they'd need to copy, such as with the PlayStation.
Worth the money? No. The chip it uses is a years-old cheap knock-off that has known picture and sound problems. You can get the Real Thing for less money on eBay.
I have an experiment for you, then:
Yet another Hong Kong Famiclone. Yay.
I have a well-maintained front-loader, a top-loader, and an A/V Famicom. Why would I be interested in this? I can stick in my Final Fantasy III cartridge, but will it let me play the game in English? No? Then I'll wait for the Kevtendo.
Heck, can this Famiclone even get all the sound right? They mentioned TMNT II, how was the percussion in that game? Did April's digitized scream come through?
Hell, I had a Tristar once, which did everything this thing does (played both NES and Famicom carts) while pretending to be an add-on to my SNES. That saved even more shelf space than having one of these would. What advantage does this have over a Tristar?
"Oh, so the state was hurt, and they're the ones who have to go after Sony?"
Ignoring for the moment the potential harm done to computers owned and operated by the state government, the state, as a republic, is required to represent the interests of the people.
"The way I see it, Sony breached a contract."
With whom? The people who declined?
"This is easily resolved in court, and anyone who had their contract breached by Sony should go ahead and file an independent lawsuit"
So then you are in favor of Sony playing the odds. Unless enough individuals come forward and (successfully) sue Sony for this, Sony will see a net gain from their illicit efforts, and others will likely follow suit.
This is exactly the same mechanic that perpetuates spam. How's your inbox looking?
"The problem is that contract law is too complicated, and you can't fight a contract violation in court without a contract lawyer who likely is part of an organization that wrote the law."
Without law on what may or may not be included in a contract, what do you propose to do to keep contracts from being "too complicated?"
"Who is with me in asking for an amendment limiting all laws to one topic, 200 words or less,"
I challenege you to, in 200 words or less, write a law that defines murder in such a way that includes things like murder-for-hire, and differentiates it from accidental death, unless that death was through criminal negligence (and defining "criminal negligence"), differentiate between classifications of murder by how heinous they are (e. g. was there rape involved?), and specify different punishments for each classification while allowing the judge leeway for sentencing.
"my solution is true moderated arbitration mechanisms in a free market,"
So he who has the money to buy favorable arbitration wins?
Sony is a member of both the MPAA and the RIAA, and therefore has Congress in their back pocket. There is little, however, the state legislatures can do for them, so they don't have any lobbying industry in place in Austin to stop this sort of thing.
"While having a version that I could actually play on my TV would be nice...."
Heh... I just got a copy of SD3 off of eBay, dumped it, patched it, and play it in English on my SNES through my Super Wild Card. >:)
"the French Parliament voted yesterday... against the French government"
Silly me, I thought Parlement was the French government!
"Dragon Quest IV was released here, 13 years ago, biggest NES cart to ever be produced, only the series was called Dragon WARRIOR here until the release of 8."
Yes, and, in the same vein as the reprises of I, II and III for the Super Famicom (and then the Game Boy Color), IV was remade, expanded, etc. for the PlayStation. There's a "coming soon!" ad for it on the back of the Dragon Warrior VII manual. It essentially uses the same engine as VII.
"In fact, the only Dragon Quests we didn't get were the SNES ones(5&6)."
There may be hope for the PlayStation 2 version of V coming over to the US depending on the sales of VIII, but the odds of the original version of V coming over is slim to none, unless something hapens with the Revolution.
"Every real non-johnny come lately RPG fan knows Seiken Densetsu 3."
That doesn't mean everybody is near as orgasmic about it as they are when they hear the words "Final Fantasy." How well did Legend of Mana sell again?
All we're getting from Square-Enix nowadays is 31 flavors of Final Fantasy.
"Not knowing about it is like not knowing what the Mother series is."
In other words, very common. Not every game player has been active for the past 10+ years.
"We're not into obscure territory here at all."
As far as the modern gaming scene is concerned, it's all very obscure.
If you think the proportions on the tyranosaurus were bad, you should see the size they make the gorillas!
(Fantasy!)
How many times are we expected to buy the old Famicom and Super Famicom Final Fantasy games? I wish they'd stop whoring that series long enough to, I dunno, translate DQIV for the PlayStation. Or milk some other big Enix names, say a SoulBlazer collection for GBA.
Even other lesser-known Squaresoft games would be something. Seiken Densetsu 3? At what point do we admit we have too much Final Fantasy?
My wet dream is S-E making all the old games they never translated available for download in English for the Revolution.
No, physics does that. There is only so much information you can transmit in so narrow a band of frequencies. Radio bandwidth is far from infinite.
"The days when we needed the FCC are over -- we have so many different ways to communicate that we don't need any regulation over those systems."
Just the opposite is true. We have many more ways to use radio frequencies but still only the same amount of bandwidth. While technology may allow us to use bandwidth more efficiently, it doens't create more bandwidth and the spectrum is getting more and more crowded.
"Interference from large broadcasters is a myth."
The idiot you're using as a source doesn't even understand basic classical wave mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics. I suspect he's never actually tried using the pinhole camera he tries to use as an example, never saw the fuzzy pictures produced.
But that's all moot because we're not talking about physical interference but signal interference, the general inability of broadcasters to stay entirely within one frequency or one range of frequencies. Quantum says there will always be spillover into higher and lower frequencies, potentially into somebody else's channel. This is why you can sometimes find the audio from VHF channels 6 and 7 on your FM radio and why you don't see UHF transmitters within 6 channels or so of each other.
"Ever wonder how your house can have 3 cell phones, 3 cordless phones and 15 wireless accessories work together?"
Because they all use different frequency channels.
"even cell phones will be antiquated. I can imagine a near-future of open bandwidth, frequency-hopping competitive technologies that walk all over each other yet don't conflict."
The more information you need to transmit, the more frequencies you need to use simultaneously (why we talk about FM and TV channels) and the fewer frequencies are useful to you (longer waves can't carry as much information density, hence the disparity in sound quality between AM and FM). So sayeth special relativity. Everybody wants UHF. If you don't try to limit who uses what frequencies when, you're going to end up with a collision domain far uglier than any unswitched ethernet.
And simply because you can use digital signal transmission doesn't mean you must, especially in your anarcho-capitalist wet dream. You can't stop me from using my spark gap.
"The more power you want to broadcast, the more energy you'll need to do so."
But the power needed to transmit is not only dependent on how far you want to transmit but also how much information (i. e. how high a frequency) you want to transmit at.
"If some large radio tower company wanted to block EVERY FREQUENCY for hundreds of miles, do you know how much it would cost them?"
If they're capitalists, it will cost them less than what they charge you to keep from turning on their transmitter.
And you don't need to transmit at "every" frequency, just a few key frequencies in the UHF spectrum (i. e. the useful frequencies) and allow spillover to take care of the rest.
"The only way you could stay in business is with advertisers,"
You are, again, forgetting extortion. "Pay me or I jam your transmissions."
"Without the FCC, we'd see thousands or tens of thousands of community broadcasters."
But the only ones who would produce a clear picture on your television would be the ones with enough money to broadcast strongly enough to drown out the competing signals. Otherwise ever
"Can you really say that a rich guy would want to spend tens of thousand of dollars per hour in broadcasting goatse?"
Ever the capitalist, he would be that rich because people would pay him not to broadcast.
By monitoring the data, of course. We already have precedent of executive agencies tapping communications without a warrant, or haven't you seen the headlines in the past few days?
Obviously it would taste good or they wouldn't be extinct to begin with.
"but the DS ... well it looks crap .. while the PSP looks so nice."
Then you've already made up your mind, haven't you?
"Save the batteries...Pen AND Paper Games..."
Recharge the batteries, save the trees.
"tic tack toe"
The only way to win is not to play.
"crossword puzzles"
Yeah, throw a twelve-year-old kid today's New York Times crossword puzzle and see how many they're actually able to complete before "I don't understand any of these, this sucks, are we there yet?"