A lot of countries do only tax on the revenues from their country. America is one of the few countries that tries to tax globally. That's why companies are leaving America.
There are just so many reasons to leave the USA. National security letter shenanigans would mean that I wouldn't even have any management staff physically in the USA, there would be no staff in the USA to deliver a NSL to. Taxes? I'd probably prefer to hire non-US citizens, it makes banking with foreign banks a lot easier.
Sell to the US consumer but have no presence in the country.
But.... you don't have to leave the USA. There aren't really any downsides to being an illegal alien here right now. They have the "right" to taxpayer sponsored health care, education, and welfare programs. You can even score a driver's license and vote in some places, too. Other than getting elected President and smoothing over security clearances (which most of us aren't going to ever do/need anyway), there aren't a whole lot of benefits to remaining classified as an Ugly American any more. I've been half waiting for some smaller country to figure out they can score some easy income by simply offering free citizenship to ex-USAans and a reasonable income tax rate of like, oh, say, 10%.
Just pay your renunciation tax, open up a new checking account at Bank of Mozambique so you can get paid directly by your company's Irish office, and shine on you crazy diamond. You don't even have to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road or get involved with that Communist metric conspiracy crap, either!
There will never be a large market for electric cars until the infrastructure has been upgraded accordingly. Where I have lived (Texas, Michigan), there are no charging stations. You can't expect people to buy the car if the infrastructure doesn't support the car.
There appear to be quite a few in San Antonio alone. The entire back row of the Silverado 16 theater parking lot was converted to EV recharge stations, and I'd put that at around 30 spots. I have yet to see even one in use.
Over the past couple of months, WoW has suffered from the "additional instances" problem caused by the instance servers basically becoming resource starved due to the number of people trying to launch instances. A "temporary fix" was put in place back after WotLK launch to prevent the instance lag and crashes that would trap players in dead/crashed instances, but it turned out to be not so "temporary" as here we are 8 months later, it's still in place, and the population in certain battlegroups has grown enough to cause the "additional instances can't be launched" message to become a common sight for many players. Despite knowing that this day would come, when the problem first started showing up in June Blizzard told people who complained about it "working as intended", and indeed avoided doing anything other than explaining how the instance caps works up until mid July. The current solution appears to be hardware reconfiguration of database servers, but even that is a stop gap measure as it only opens up a few more slots... people on "patched" servers are still seeing this error message during "peak hours".
The entire situation has been a failure of capacity planning/engineering and managing customer relations, and while I can't speak for everyone else affected by it, personally I've lost a lot faith in Blizzard's overall competence at a time when you guys are apparently moving to a subscription model where customers will be heavily reliant on your competence to play their purchased games.
What steps are you guys taking to make sure that this isn't repeated in the future? Have you addressed the instance capacity issue in the expansion by creating a high availability system for the instance servers? Have your customer support policies been modified in any way to provide players with more information on service failures in a timely (ie, less than 3 months) manner? Have your program managers at least learned that they should pay attention to their developers when they say stuff like, "This could end up biting us in the ass in 6 months. I'd like to take some time and a team and improve this code..."?
In short: why should I, as a customer, trust you with a subscription payment ever again?
At the end of the day, the COM stuff isn't going anywhere. The.Net APIs provide a kind of wrapper around the system code and usually molest the unmanaged stuff with P/Invoke... they don't replace it. In fact there's some stuff the managed APIs still can't get to (mostly at the system level), and a big reason why you still see jobs posted for VB6 developers out there.
And while I haven't spent much time with IronPython and IronRuby, I'd imagine that the code you produce still must adhere to.Netisms and use.Net core objects to get things done. If there was an IronPerl, there probably wouldn't be much diff between learning how to use it and learning another lang already supported by the CIL.
Finally: perl AND COM? That's not Sparta... that is madness.:(
These kids are not practicing science, they're practicing being human beings.
I dunno, boss. That "theorycrafting" stuff looks awfully scienciful to me.:)
Check out an example here. Specifically, the analysis of enhancement shaman and an attempt to figure out the best weapon/spell combo to maximize damage output.
Basically, what theorycrafting is is people attempting to deduce formulae of game mechanics from experimental observation, and then figure out how they can optimize their character's stats to deliver maximum performance in different settings (player-versus-environment or player-versus-player).
It's also worth pointing out that this section of the community is not very tolerant of wild-assed claims with no data to back them up... they will want to see your data and will demand you explain the logic behind your conclusion.
PhD level stuff? Not even close (well, maybe in a liberal arts program). Organized and consistent? Hell, no. But I believe that it's a mistake to dismiss it as simply a bunch of bright kids merely stumbling onto the right answers after putting their thinking caps on for a few minutes.:)
It seems like the rest of the world is finally catching up to what we all envisioned would happen in 2000. Content producers like record and movie studios seem to have finally recognized the fact that folks want content delivered digitally and that customers are no longer willing to be chained to their TVs at a specific time, prefer to carry all of their music with them where ever they roam, and aren't necessarily interested in having to go to theaters to watch movies when they've got their own big screen setups at home.
Having listened to several directors explain parts of the movie biz in commentaries on DVDs, it sounds like the distributors are still holding on to opening weekend ticket sales as the primary metric for determining how well a movie performs financially. This, as a result, determines what movies they'll fund, which scripts they'll buy, etc.
Are things in chaos on the business side as consumers start to move away from the studios' primary metric, or are we not quite there yet? And what do you see the movie making landscape looking like if we ever do get there? Less big budget blockbuster CGI extravaganzas in favor of more character driven movies?
PS: Sling Blade owned. Thanks for giving me a way to use the term "french fried taters" menacingly.:)
They might be looking at trying to retrieve stuff from orbit in addition to delivery of new satellites. Kind of like NASA's C-shuttle program or something.
Of course, in the finest tradition of/. I have failed to RTFA before posting, so...:)
True, but the patent holder also has a responsibility to defend the patent. If they push this to trial, I'd imagine the first question the defense will be asking is, "So, if you knew there were 200+ patent violations in 2003, why did you wait 5 years to send out cease and desist notices or start any legal proceedings against the offenders?"
So, like... did you not read the EULA they force you to agree to every time there's an update?
The one that basically says, "You're paying us a monthly fee for a license to access the game, but in reality we own your characters, all the gold they have, and all their equipment". They told you up front that you have no rights and that they'll come after you (at worst) or shut down your account (at best) if you do anything they don't like. If you don't like it, stop giving them money.
I already have enough of a challenge convincing upper management that I'm not some sort of martian for simply suggesting that we use free software to solve a problem, now you want me to sound like a Farscape nutjob, too.
I'll join the Wing Commander chorus here. Blasting Kilrathi in the later years just wasn't what it was in the beginning... there's only so many times you can be called a "hairless ape" before you get desensitized to it. And you'd think after a single human pilot wipes out 10,000 of their fighters and a couple of hundred of their capital ships they'd know better than to kill his woman or attack his homeworld.
I'd also like to toss out Mechwarrior (downhill after 2) and Gunship (2000 was outstanding, Gunship! not so much).
The only reason I could think that anyone might think that this information was somehow private before now is simply because they've never had the IRS's Eye of Mordor shining upon them.
Your privacy didn't outweigh the government's desire to make sure it collected its fair share of your money... why is it so shocking that it also doesn't outweigh the government's desire to stop crime (which, coincidentally includes not giving the government its fair share of your money)?
Slashdot Mirror
Get to the point. Few words as possible.
I usually explain what the end product is and assume they will ask if they're interested details.
Ok, fine. You want to build an AI. Whatever.
Just refrain from hooking it up to a fscking infinite power source or building it in some underground super fortress please.
Make that shit run on AA's and sit inside of a glass case, please.
A lot of countries do only tax on the revenues from their country. America is one of the few countries that tries to tax globally. That's why companies are leaving America.
There are just so many reasons to leave the USA. National security letter shenanigans would mean that I wouldn't even have any management staff physically in the USA, there would be no staff in the USA to deliver a NSL to. Taxes? I'd probably prefer to hire non-US citizens, it makes banking with foreign banks a lot easier.
Sell to the US consumer but have no presence in the country.
But.... you don't have to leave the USA. There aren't really any downsides to being an illegal alien here right now. They have the "right" to taxpayer sponsored health care, education, and welfare programs. You can even score a driver's license and vote in some places, too. Other than getting elected President and smoothing over security clearances (which most of us aren't going to ever do/need anyway), there aren't a whole lot of benefits to remaining classified as an Ugly American any more. I've been half waiting for some smaller country to figure out they can score some easy income by simply offering free citizenship to ex-USAans and a reasonable income tax rate of like, oh, say, 10%.
Just pay your renunciation tax, open up a new checking account at Bank of Mozambique so you can get paid directly by your company's Irish office, and shine on you crazy diamond. You don't even have to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road or get involved with that Communist metric conspiracy crap, either!
Are you saying that there's at least one law that the NSA isn't too big to obey?
There will never be a large market for electric cars until the infrastructure has been upgraded accordingly. Where I have lived (Texas, Michigan), there are no charging stations. You can't expect people to buy the car if the infrastructure doesn't support the car.
There appear to be quite a few in San Antonio alone. The entire back row of the Silverado 16 theater parking lot was converted to EV recharge stations, and I'd put that at around 30 spots. I have yet to see even one in use.
Are there Linux drivers?
Yeah, it's kind of hard to find something with which to relate.
Maybe... "For the crew, it would be like getting ganked by 7,000,000,000,000 retadins (or 7 terarets) in WoW, all at once."
Over the past couple of months, WoW has suffered from the "additional instances" problem caused by the instance servers basically becoming resource starved due to the number of people trying to launch instances. A "temporary fix" was put in place back after WotLK launch to prevent the instance lag and crashes that would trap players in dead/crashed instances, but it turned out to be not so "temporary" as here we are 8 months later, it's still in place, and the population in certain battlegroups has grown enough to cause the "additional instances can't be launched" message to become a common sight for many players. Despite knowing that this day would come, when the problem first started showing up in June Blizzard told people who complained about it "working as intended", and indeed avoided doing anything other than explaining how the instance caps works up until mid July. The current solution appears to be hardware reconfiguration of database servers, but even that is a stop gap measure as it only opens up a few more slots... people on "patched" servers are still seeing this error message during "peak hours".
The entire situation has been a failure of capacity planning/engineering and managing customer relations, and while I can't speak for everyone else affected by it, personally I've lost a lot faith in Blizzard's overall competence at a time when you guys are apparently moving to a subscription model where customers will be heavily reliant on your competence to play their purchased games.
What steps are you guys taking to make sure that this isn't repeated in the future? Have you addressed the instance capacity issue in the expansion by creating a high availability system for the instance servers? Have your customer support policies been modified in any way to provide players with more information on service failures in a timely (ie, less than 3 months) manner? Have your program managers at least learned that they should pay attention to their developers when they say stuff like, "This could end up biting us in the ass in 6 months. I'd like to take some time and a team and improve this code..."?
In short: why should I, as a customer, trust you with a subscription payment ever again?
Here's another one I found in the only other book I've read that wasn't the Bible:
banal
l2facetiousness
I have yet to meet an ex-New Yorker who isn't excessively proud of the fact that he once lived in "The City". They're worse than Texans.
O_o
New Yorkers are Texans.
We annexed the United States back in 1845, but decided to let ya'll keep the old name to soften the blow.
Alright... time to break up this party before it evolves into another bad pun thread.
At the end of the day, the COM stuff isn't going anywhere. The .Net APIs provide a kind of wrapper around the system code and usually molest the unmanaged stuff with P/Invoke... they don't replace it. In fact there's some stuff the managed APIs still can't get to (mostly at the system level), and a big reason why you still see jobs posted for VB6 developers out there.
And while I haven't spent much time with IronPython and IronRuby, I'd imagine that the code you produce still must adhere to .Netisms and use .Net core objects to get things done. If there was an IronPerl, there probably wouldn't be much diff between learning how to use it and learning another lang already supported by the CIL.
Finally: perl AND COM? That's not Sparta... that is madness. :(
These kids are not practicing science, they're practicing being human beings.
I dunno, boss. That "theorycrafting" stuff looks awfully scienciful to me. :)
Check out an example here. Specifically, the analysis of enhancement shaman and an attempt to figure out the best weapon/spell combo to maximize damage output.
Basically, what theorycrafting is is people attempting to deduce formulae of game mechanics from experimental observation, and then figure out how they can optimize their character's stats to deliver maximum performance in different settings (player-versus-environment or player-versus-player).
It's also worth pointing out that this section of the community is not very tolerant of wild-assed claims with no data to back them up... they will want to see your data and will demand you explain the logic behind your conclusion.
PhD level stuff? Not even close (well, maybe in a liberal arts program). Organized and consistent? Hell, no. But I believe that it's a mistake to dismiss it as simply a bunch of bright kids merely stumbling onto the right answers after putting their thinking caps on for a few minutes. :)
It seems like the rest of the world is finally catching up to what we all envisioned would happen in 2000. Content producers like record and movie studios seem to have finally recognized the fact that folks want content delivered digitally and that customers are no longer willing to be chained to their TVs at a specific time, prefer to carry all of their music with them where ever they roam, and aren't necessarily interested in having to go to theaters to watch movies when they've got their own big screen setups at home.
:)
Having listened to several directors explain parts of the movie biz in commentaries on DVDs, it sounds like the distributors are still holding on to opening weekend ticket sales as the primary metric for determining how well a movie performs financially. This, as a result, determines what movies they'll fund, which scripts they'll buy, etc.
Are things in chaos on the business side as consumers start to move away from the studios' primary metric, or are we not quite there yet? And what do you see the movie making landscape looking like if we ever do get there? Less big budget blockbuster CGI extravaganzas in favor of more character driven movies?
PS: Sling Blade owned. Thanks for giving me a way to use the term "french fried taters" menacingly.
Not making it a fscking mission to get your Blender work (sorry, "assets") into XNA's Content Pipeline?
:)
That seems like a good place to start.
They might be looking at trying to retrieve stuff from orbit in addition to delivery of new satellites. Kind of like NASA's C-shuttle program or something.
/. I have failed to RTFA before posting, so... :)
Of course, in the finest tradition of
True, but the patent holder also has a responsibility to defend the patent. If they push this to trial, I'd imagine the first question the defense will be asking is, "So, if you knew there were 200+ patent violations in 2003, why did you wait 5 years to send out cease and desist notices or start any legal proceedings against the offenders?"
I think I know who just set the record for employee referral bonuses for his HR department this quarter....
So, like... did you not read the EULA they force you to agree to every time there's an update?
The one that basically says, "You're paying us a monthly fee for a license to access the game, but in reality we own your characters, all the gold they have, and all their equipment". They told you up front that you have no rights and that they'll come after you (at worst) or shut down your account (at best) if you do anything they don't like. If you don't like it, stop giving them money.
Maybe.
But it could also be your one shot to get onto the roster for an eleet clan.
"Put daddy in the match, or else you're going to time-out. One. TWO...."
Oh, great.
I already have enough of a challenge convincing upper management that I'm not some sort of martian for simply suggesting that we use free software to solve a problem, now you want me to sound like a Farscape nutjob, too.
Frak that.
I'll join the Wing Commander chorus here. Blasting Kilrathi in the later years just wasn't what it was in the beginning... there's only so many times you can be called a "hairless ape" before you get desensitized to it. And you'd think after a single human pilot wipes out 10,000 of their fighters and a couple of hundred of their capital ships they'd know better than to kill his woman or attack his homeworld.
I'd also like to toss out Mechwarrior (downhill after 2) and Gunship (2000 was outstanding, Gunship! not so much).
Makes sense to me.
My network engineer is always telling me he's got more common sense in his pinky than all of the monkeys in my department put together.
Usually right before he changes the passwords on the switches.
Again: "So what?"
The only reason I could think that anyone might think that this information was somehow private before now is simply because they've never had the IRS's Eye of Mordor shining upon them.
Your privacy didn't outweigh the government's desire to make sure it collected its fair share of your money... why is it so shocking that it also doesn't outweigh the government's desire to stop crime (which, coincidentally includes not giving the government its fair share of your money)?