There are many companies that have internal servers which host applications and data. It's much safer to put IT in charge of antivirus and backups on a few arrays than to have thousands of business and clerical employees save everything to local drives.
Just because the application is made portable across multiple servers rather than having different servers for different applications, or however else you want to distinguish a "cloud" from "a group of servers" doesn't mean it has to be offsite on someone else's equipment.
You'd also need to have proper voice support, which does not mean whatever the game studio stuck on the side of the game. I mean Ventrillo, TeamSpeak, or some equivalent.
I understand XBox Live got this mostly right, using a standard voice chat system across all multiuser games. Does it support multiple channels so there's a team channel, a squad channel, a commanders channel, a game-wide channel, and a clan channel though? What does PS Live have?
It's also much easier to play certain games with multiple screens. Supreme Commander definitely comes to mind. That's not to mention that many gamers have other applications open on a second screen even if only using one screen for a game. These often include the voice chat software I mentioned earlier, but instant messenger, torrent software, music players, and maintenance tasks are popular choices when a game doesn't need all the cores.
Also, until consoles, PDAs, phones, or whatever have proper office or home office software that isn't an absolute pain in the ass to use, real PCs will still be around. That's not to mention all the more specialized software that sucks on a small, low-resolution screen with tiny input devices.
PCs might someday seem more like high-end workstations than like the mainstay of business and home computer use, but then they have been blurring those lines for a decade or two now. The only thing the PC hasn't done is give ground to something smaller than a netbook. People use more devices now, and there's a lot of growth in using really small ones like smartphones. That doesn't mean that smartphones are replacing PCs, and it doesn't mean consoles are replacing PCs either. Most people who have just one general purpose (or even gaming) device have a PC. The others are still add-ons, and will be for quite some time.
Any slump in PC sales is because the market is saturated with older machines that are still "good enough". It's not because the Nexus One, the N8, iPhone, the have XBox 360, the PS3, the Wii, the DS, and the PSP have killed the PC. More sales of desktops are likely to be shifted to the netbook category among light and seldom users, but those are still PCs.
They even rootkit you for listening to your music CDs and remove features on systems already sold. Not to mention the "universal" media disc which could have easily been their own proprietary minidisc and should have been SD or at least CF card slots instead of spinning disc drives anyway. Oh, and fuck overpriced Memory Stick Pro Duo. SD, baby. SD is the way to go in that size range. Fuck Sony.
Oh, and the original PSP was advertised to soon have video out, IIRC. Yet it never did, and they wouldn't take a trade of the original PSP towards the newer models.
Even on Google, the entire first page is relevant links.
HTH.
BTW, the "TL;DR" of it is that it's a game-time-related glitch.
Sort of like patenting an invention to make sure less developed countries get something cheap is generally a time-related glitch of about 20 years or so.
IOW, it's a meta joke about his joke and also a dig at the researchers.
"Cheap" as in "our competitors will make it cheap in 20 years after the patent expires" is more likely. If they're going for a patent, they don't want it to be as cheap as possible. If they are going for a patent and targeting developing nations then one of three things is happening:
they are lying and using "developing nations" as a PR win
they want to charge high prices to developing nations for infrastructure with the higher efficiency being the only "cheap" part of the installation
they want to discount the price to developing nations while using the patent to force industrialized nations to subsidize it
Any of those explain why they are talking about only or primarily developing nations.
Take any one of those with or without the idea that it's most important to target developing nations first so that they don't build a non-solar infrastructure first that needs to be replaced later. Like cell phones or satellite TV skipping over wired phones and cable TV when countries develop after those innovations with lower infrastructure costs came about, going from little energy infrastructure straight to a solar one rather than going through oil and coal will be cheaper and more popular. Also, providing the energy needs of a region with rapidly growing energy demands with clean energy from the start is good for the environment (even if you don't believe in anthropic global warming smog, particulates, and acid rain suck). Focusing on explosive energy usage growth rather than replacing existing infrastructure at first is a smart way to go if yields won't be high enough to target everyone at once.
These are the same sort of piss-poor "web professionals" who swear you need Javascript to do interesting things with menus. Hint: with CSS, you definitely don't.
I'd put up a link to one of my own proofs of concept, but I don't want to/. my own server. Maybe the guy who wrote the silly article submission has some spare bandwidth for me?
The previous poster wasn't bemoaning that the picture was too small. The complaint (or amusement?) was that it was scaled for display by the browser instead of being a thumbnail-sized picture pre-scaled on the server or on the page designer's workstation.
The difference, for those who don't know a thing about web design, is that a proper thumbnail is a small picture with a small file size, possibly with a link to a larger picture for details. Scaling a 4096 by 4096 picture in the browser means every page view loads a 4096 by 4096 image over the net then by default only shows the scaled size, even if the viewer doesn't choose to view the bigger picture.
If you get a few thousand hits, you get a few thousand times the difference in image file sizes between the thumbnail and the full-size image in data transfer savings by using the thumbnail. If you have a few million hits...
I thought I'd head something about a version that demanded a better quality cable as a baseline in order to use fewer pairs. I checked Google for 'copper Gb ehternet', which got me information from Wikipedia.
1000Base-T requires four pair of Cat5 or higher. 1000Base-TX requires two pair of Cat6 or higher.
1000Base-TX is largely a commercial failure, and many 1000Base-T items are incorrectly labeled 1000Base-TX out of confusion, since the most popular version of 100 is 100Base-TX.
The distance is the same for 1000Base-TX as 1000Base-T. The only difference is the trade of demanding better cabling for fewer pairs.
100 meters might be useful for people if the phone companies put mini-DSLAMs in their service pedestals and had sufficient back-haul from there. Although some companies are working on deploying mini-DSLAMs, those are usually neighborhood by neighborhood and not four or so households at a time.
Gbps with the last portion being copper might work in a tightly packed area like a high-rise apartment or business complex or a dorm. Otherwise, that sort of speed is going to need different tech.
There are multitudes of people ignoring copyright on commercial music. There are multitudes of people ignoring copyright on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. It's an epic failure to say that the people using Linux and OpenOffice must be the ones illegally copying music. The MS pilferers are already breaking copyright law. Therefore, I'd suspect that most people breaking copyright law for music are the ones also doing so for their OS.
They're testing processed hog excrement as a heavy crude replacement for asphalt. The actual test is in Eureka, MO, a St. Louis-area community home to Six Flags St. Louis.
These warehouses are run by, you guessed it, a business. The space could be used as a colocation facility if Google themselves didn't want to use it. However, Quincy currently is a terrible place to run a data center because of... lack of bandwidth. If bandwidth was fixed for residences and businesses, these old portions of the mines would make wonderful data centers for existing and new businesses.
Quincy didn't flood more than two blocks east of the river in 1993, 1997, or 2008. The Underground Warehouses facilities were open through all of those, although portions of IL 57 were closed demanding detours.
St. Louis really is a nice town if you give it a chance. What are you, a Cubs fan?;-)
These are active mines, but the active parts are so far away from the warehouse rooms that the employees in the warehouses don't hear the mining. I was a temp in the warehouse portion of the very facility back in 1995 or so. Our section required hardhats because we had block walls but used the old mine chamber's ceiling as-is. The lunch rooms, offices, and parts of the warehouse were of course not hard-hat areas because there were structures built accordingly inside the chambers.
In this case, they are mines. Gypsum and other minerals are taken out to be processed into products, and the chambers left behind are warehouses, offices, docks, and employee parking lots (yes, underground).
Here are some specifics on the Underground Warehouses facilities in Quincy, IL:
1. It has its own traffic light
2. semi trucks haul loads in and out of the existing warehouse
3. not in 1993, 1997, or 2008 did the underground warehouses flood, although Illinois Route 57 was closed getting to them from one direction requiring a detour.
4. Many of the employees park their cars inside the caverns, trucks run in and out, materials are still mined in parts of the complex, and the break room where employees eat is built inside. It's dusty, but the ventilation is good.
5. There are temperature controlled sections in the warehouses already, including a huge frozen food handling area. The whole room is below freezing, workers, palette storage, inspection conveyors, and all. The room is the size of a major-chain pharmacy like CVS. If it wasn't for equipment, you could play soccer in the frozen section, and on a regulation-sized field.
Back in the day, I worked a few weeks in the frozen foods section as a temp. These places are massive. You can work all day in one chamber and never hear what's going on in the others.
You don't quite understand. These are not little natural caves carved by streams. They are underground warehouses with huge ventilation already in place, underground parking for employees, and whole rooms the size of a CVS or Walgreens temperature controlled for dry storage warehouses or frozen goods storage and handling. They know how to ventilate the place just fine, or their employees would be dead from car and semi exhaust.
Considering they have rooms the size of whole warehouses cooled to as low as 28 F for frozen meat handling to which semis pull up to underground, I doubt the underground operators in Quincy have much problem with managing heat.
I'd welcome you. I live in Quincy, and I can tell you that much of the underground caverns mentioned are huge chambers of a gypsum mine. The chambers that have been fully mined are run by a company called Underground Warehouses which is a division of the processed mineral products company (Huber) that runs the mine.
These chambers are big enough that years ago when I briefly worked as a temp, we were parking inside them and the semis that made pickups and deliveries pulled up to docks inside them.
Quincy's working on getting gravity-propelled hydroelectric turbines installed on two of the lock and dam installations on the Mississippi.
The city's on top of the bluffs, and no more than a few blocks and some outlying areas were flooded in 1993, 1997, or 2008. Some roads into and out of town close in major floods, though, and alternate routes need to be found. The mines are along one of the routes that closes from one end for a few weeks once every few years.
It's also a fairly well-to-do town for its size. At about 45,000 people, it's not huge, but it is the biggest town in any direction for about 100 miles. It's on a spur of interstate highway, it has rail access, an airport with daily flights to St. Louis, a public bus system, taxi service, and a point-to-point van service. A few fairly major companies are located in town, too: Titan International (the largest off-road tire and wheel manufacturer in the US), Knapheide (makes of utility beds for trucks), Harris Broadcasting (makers of digital and analog broadcasting equipment for TV and radio stations), Hollister-Whitney (one of the few makers of the working parts pf elevators, although the installing company is usually the name you see on the inside of the carriage), and a large facility for Gardner Denver (makers of air pumps, compressors, and blowers). I'm sure they'd love some high-speed fiber goodness as much as the residential customers.
Now, I'm not the submitter of the original story. I just happen to live in Quincy right now and would love for Google to come in and upset the AT&T/Comcast apple cart.
We see movie trailers, and we can hear the singles from an album before buying the album or just the single itself. Yet that's still not a decent comparison. Movies and songs are not interactive.
Cars are interactive. You test drive a car. Power tools are interactive, and most manufacturers and home improvement stores have at least an occasional demo of their tools. Game consoles are interactive, and even discount stores like Walmart have demo units. Those console demos are often showing off demos of popular games. Golf stores let you swing a club before buying. Cell phone stores often show you a phone and let you handle it before buying, and some even have 30-day trial periods.
Anyone who thinks players will regularly drop $60 on a title they haven't been able to try out should expect to sell to a lot fewer people initially, as the rest of us will wait to try a few minutes on our friends' copies.
A little bit of graduation isn't so bad. People who are really wealthy don't notice paying a little extra as much. However, it's not exactly fair. The deduction already would help the lower income folks, and the same percentage of much more money is still much more money. That said, I don't think most people mind paying a bit higher rate if they are actually well off, unfair or not.
When you start talking about one group paying 15% of the portion above the deduction and another group paying 60% of that portion, that's going to raise some complaints. After all, just because someone's making more money doesn't necessarily mean they didn't work hard to get ahead.
I'd suggest maybe a $5000 or $6000 deduction per person depending on the tax payer. Above that, I'd say maybe 20% for most folks. People in the top 30% of earners but not the top 5% of earners pay 25%, and that top 5% of earners pays 35%. With no other deductions, they'd have to have a hell of a lot of dependent children to weasel out of it.
Furthermore, I think a very small gross receipts tax on business rather than a large profit tax would work better than what we have, at least for publicly traded businesses. Very few big corporations pay much taxes to the federal government at all. Either do away with taxes on businesses to further simplify the code (and pick up the additional taxes as those extra profits go to the shareholders) or actually tax them on an easier amount to verify. Perhaps a 0.25% gross receipts tax on publicly traded companies would be better than both the companies and the government chasing the ledgers to and fro.
What services and regulations did I disparage? One thousand multi-megaton nuclear and hydrogen bombs? A bloated tax agency enforcing a labyrinthine tax code?
I'm all for roads, education, the NIH, the USDA, the FDA, the department of the Interior, the CIA, the NSA, and a reasonable military. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
What I'd like is to see those four million people who do tax compliance work doing productive work, the people in the IRS doing productive work, and a simplified tax code that raises almost as much money for real, usable services. Having to hire extra auditors, extra accountants, and specially trained tax preparers just to collect a tax is silly.
Make it 25% per payer and you get to deduct just one thing: $5000 or so per person who depends on those earnings to survive. Leave the preaching about morality to the preachers because it has no place in the tax code. Leave the investment decisions like 401(k), IRA, buying a home, and such to the investment advisers. We don't need 17,000 pages of text to describe how to tax people fairly.
We also don't need to defend the US against every other nation on Earth at once. Our military spending is just too big. Half of what it is now would suffice just fine, and would still be huge compared to what other countries are spending.
We don't need to get rid of the entire military to cut back military expenditures. Nice strawman, assigning me the slippery slope that I never promoted.
How much defense budget do we need? Probably less than 41.5% of the world's total defense expenditures. How about, instead of spending 1.3 times as much as the next 14 top nations in overall funds, we only spend as much as the next 10 top nations in military expenditures? How about, as a start, instead of spending $123,000,000,000 more than the rest of the world in absolute military expenditures we merely match the rest of the world's defense budgets?
Good news? Other reports list the US as "only" 41% to 42% of overall worldwide military spending.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many companies that have internal servers which host applications and data. It's much safer to put IT in charge of antivirus and backups on a few arrays than to have thousands of business and clerical employees save everything to local drives.
Just because the application is made portable across multiple servers rather than having different servers for different applications, or however else you want to distinguish a "cloud" from "a group of servers" doesn't mean it has to be offsite on someone else's equipment.
Try "internal cloud" in YFSE.
You'd also need to have proper voice support, which does not mean whatever the game studio stuck on the side of the game. I mean Ventrillo, TeamSpeak, or some equivalent.
I understand XBox Live got this mostly right, using a standard voice chat system across all multiuser games. Does it support multiple channels so there's a team channel, a squad channel, a commanders channel, a game-wide channel, and a clan channel though? What does PS Live have?
It's also much easier to play certain games with multiple screens. Supreme Commander definitely comes to mind. That's not to mention that many gamers have other applications open on a second screen even if only using one screen for a game. These often include the voice chat software I mentioned earlier, but instant messenger, torrent software, music players, and maintenance tasks are popular choices when a game doesn't need all the cores.
Also, until consoles, PDAs, phones, or whatever have proper office or home office software that isn't an absolute pain in the ass to use, real PCs will still be around. That's not to mention all the more specialized software that sucks on a small, low-resolution screen with tiny input devices.
PCs might someday seem more like high-end workstations than like the mainstay of business and home computer use, but then they have been blurring those lines for a decade or two now. The only thing the PC hasn't done is give ground to something smaller than a netbook. People use more devices now, and there's a lot of growth in using really small ones like smartphones. That doesn't mean that smartphones are replacing PCs, and it doesn't mean consoles are replacing PCs either. Most people who have just one general purpose (or even gaming) device have a PC. The others are still add-ons, and will be for quite some time.
Any slump in PC sales is because the market is saturated with older machines that are still "good enough". It's not because the Nexus One, the N8, iPhone, the have XBox 360, the PS3, the Wii, the DS, and the PSP have killed the PC. More sales of desktops are likely to be shifted to the netbook category among light and seldom users, but those are still PCs.
They even rootkit you for listening to your music CDs and remove features on systems already sold. Not to mention the "universal" media disc which could have easily been their own proprietary minidisc and should have been SD or at least CF card slots instead of spinning disc drives anyway. Oh, and fuck overpriced Memory Stick Pro Duo. SD, baby. SD is the way to go in that size range. Fuck Sony.
Oh, and the original PSP was advertised to soon have video out, IIRC. Yet it never did, and they wouldn't take a trade of the original PSP towards the newer models.
Google search for "berry glitch"
Even on Google, the entire first page is relevant links.
HTH.
BTW, the "TL;DR" of it is that it's a game-time-related glitch.
Sort of like patenting an invention to make sure less developed countries get something cheap is generally a time-related glitch of about 20 years or so.
IOW, it's a meta joke about his joke and also a dig at the researchers.
Again, HTH.
HAND.
Oh, and just in case you missed it....
*whoosh*
"Cheap" as in "our competitors will make it cheap in 20 years after the patent expires" is more likely. If they're going for a patent, they don't want it to be as cheap as possible. If they are going for a patent and targeting developing nations then one of three things is happening:
Any of those explain why they are talking about only or primarily developing nations.
Take any one of those with or without the idea that it's most important to target developing nations first so that they don't build a non-solar infrastructure first that needs to be replaced later. Like cell phones or satellite TV skipping over wired phones and cable TV when countries develop after those innovations with lower infrastructure costs came about, going from little energy infrastructure straight to a solar one rather than going through oil and coal will be cheaper and more popular. Also, providing the energy needs of a region with rapidly growing energy demands with clean energy from the start is good for the environment (even if you don't believe in anthropic global warming smog, particulates, and acid rain suck). Focusing on explosive energy usage growth rather than replacing existing infrastructure at first is a smart way to go if yields won't be high enough to target everyone at once.
Um... They're seeking a patent. They envision cheap solar power in about 20 years. ;-)
Or DS3. After all, some people have AT&T or Qwest.
These are the same sort of piss-poor "web professionals" who swear you need Javascript to do interesting things with menus. Hint: with CSS, you definitely don't.
I'd put up a link to one of my own proofs of concept, but I don't want to /. my own server. Maybe the guy who wrote the silly article submission has some spare bandwidth for me?
The previous poster wasn't bemoaning that the picture was too small. The complaint (or amusement?) was that it was scaled for display by the browser instead of being a thumbnail-sized picture pre-scaled on the server or on the page designer's workstation.
The difference, for those who don't know a thing about web design, is that a proper thumbnail is a small picture with a small file size, possibly with a link to a larger picture for details. Scaling a 4096 by 4096 picture in the browser means every page view loads a 4096 by 4096 image over the net then by default only shows the scaled size, even if the viewer doesn't choose to view the bigger picture.
If you get a few thousand hits, you get a few thousand times the difference in image file sizes between the thumbnail and the full-size image in data transfer savings by using the thumbnail. If you have a few million hits...
I thought I'd head something about a version that demanded a better quality cable as a baseline in order to use fewer pairs. I checked Google for 'copper Gb ehternet', which got me information from Wikipedia.
1000Base-T requires four pair of Cat5 or higher.
1000Base-TX requires two pair of Cat6 or higher.
1000Base-TX is largely a commercial failure, and many 1000Base-T items are incorrectly labeled 1000Base-TX out of confusion, since the most popular version of 100 is 100Base-TX.
The distance is the same for 1000Base-TX as 1000Base-T. The only difference is the trade of demanding better cabling for fewer pairs.
100 meters might be useful for people if the phone companies put mini-DSLAMs in their service pedestals and had sufficient back-haul from there. Although some companies are working on deploying mini-DSLAMs, those are usually neighborhood by neighborhood and not four or so households at a time.
Gbps with the last portion being copper might work in a tightly packed area like a high-rise apartment or business complex or a dorm. Otherwise, that sort of speed is going to need different tech.
There are multitudes of people ignoring copyright on commercial music. There are multitudes of people ignoring copyright on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. It's an epic failure to say that the people using Linux and OpenOffice must be the ones illegally copying music. The MS pilferers are already breaking copyright law. Therefore, I'd suspect that most people breaking copyright law for music are the ones also doing so for their OS.
Just outside a town within commuting distance of Quincy, IL, a Hannibal, MO area hog farm has been harnessed as a possible source of crude oil replacement.
They're testing processed hog excrement as a heavy crude replacement for asphalt. The actual test is in Eureka, MO, a St. Louis-area community home to Six Flags St. Louis.
These warehouses are run by, you guessed it, a business. The space could be used as a colocation facility if Google themselves didn't want to use it. However, Quincy currently is a terrible place to run a data center because of... lack of bandwidth. If bandwidth was fixed for residences and businesses, these old portions of the mines would make wonderful data centers for existing and new businesses.
Quincy didn't flood more than two blocks east of the river in 1993, 1997, or 2008. The Underground Warehouses facilities were open through all of those, although portions of IL 57 were closed demanding detours.
St. Louis really is a nice town if you give it a chance. What are you, a Cubs fan? ;-)
There's already car parking for employees inside UW, and offices and break rooms, too.
These are active mines, but the active parts are so far away from the warehouse rooms that the employees in the warehouses don't hear the mining. I was a temp in the warehouse portion of the very facility back in 1995 or so. Our section required hardhats because we had block walls but used the old mine chamber's ceiling as-is. The lunch rooms, offices, and parts of the warehouse were of course not hard-hat areas because there were structures built accordingly inside the chambers.
In this case, they are mines. Gypsum and other minerals are taken out to be processed into products, and the chambers left behind are warehouses, offices, docks, and employee parking lots (yes, underground).
Here are some specifics on the Underground Warehouses facilities in Quincy, IL:
1. It has its own traffic light
2. semi trucks haul loads in and out of the existing warehouse
3. not in 1993, 1997, or 2008 did the underground warehouses flood, although Illinois Route 57 was closed getting to them from one direction requiring a detour.
4. Many of the employees park their cars inside the caverns, trucks run in and out, materials are still mined in parts of the complex, and the break room where employees eat is built inside. It's dusty, but the ventilation is good.
5. There are temperature controlled sections in the warehouses already, including a huge frozen food handling area. The whole room is below freezing, workers, palette storage, inspection conveyors, and all. The room is the size of a major-chain pharmacy like CVS. If it wasn't for equipment, you could play soccer in the frozen section, and on a regulation-sized field.
Back in the day, I worked a few weeks in the frozen foods section as a temp. These places are massive. You can work all day in one chamber and never hear what's going on in the others.
You don't quite understand. These are not little natural caves carved by streams. They are underground warehouses with huge ventilation already in place, underground parking for employees, and whole rooms the size of a CVS or Walgreens temperature controlled for dry storage warehouses or frozen goods storage and handling. They know how to ventilate the place just fine, or their employees would be dead from car and semi exhaust.
Considering they have rooms the size of whole warehouses cooled to as low as 28 F for frozen meat handling to which semis pull up to underground, I doubt the underground operators in Quincy have much problem with managing heat.
I'd welcome you. I live in Quincy, and I can tell you that much of the underground caverns mentioned are huge chambers of a gypsum mine. The chambers that have been fully mined are run by a company called Underground Warehouses which is a division of the processed mineral products company (Huber) that runs the mine.
These chambers are big enough that years ago when I briefly worked as a temp, we were parking inside them and the semis that made pickups and deliveries pulled up to docks inside them.
Quincy's working on getting gravity-propelled hydroelectric turbines installed on two of the lock and dam installations on the Mississippi.
The city's on top of the bluffs, and no more than a few blocks and some outlying areas were flooded in 1993, 1997, or 2008. Some roads into and out of town close in major floods, though, and alternate routes need to be found. The mines are along one of the routes that closes from one end for a few weeks once every few years.
It's also a fairly well-to-do town for its size. At about 45,000 people, it's not huge, but it is the biggest town in any direction for about 100 miles. It's on a spur of interstate highway, it has rail access, an airport with daily flights to St. Louis, a public bus system, taxi service, and a point-to-point van service. A few fairly major companies are located in town, too: Titan International (the largest off-road tire and wheel manufacturer in the US), Knapheide (makes of utility beds for trucks), Harris Broadcasting (makers of digital and analog broadcasting equipment for TV and radio stations), Hollister-Whitney (one of the few makers of the working parts pf elevators, although the installing company is usually the name you see on the inside of the carriage), and a large facility for Gardner Denver (makers of air pumps, compressors, and blowers). I'm sure they'd love some high-speed fiber goodness as much as the residential customers.
Now, I'm not the submitter of the original story. I just happen to live in Quincy right now and would love for Google to come in and upset the AT&T/Comcast apple cart.
We see movie trailers, and we can hear the singles from an album before buying the album or just the single itself. Yet that's still not a decent comparison. Movies and songs are not interactive.
Cars are interactive. You test drive a car. Power tools are interactive, and most manufacturers and home improvement stores have at least an occasional demo of their tools. Game consoles are interactive, and even discount stores like Walmart have demo units. Those console demos are often showing off demos of popular games. Golf stores let you swing a club before buying. Cell phone stores often show you a phone and let you handle it before buying, and some even have 30-day trial periods.
Anyone who thinks players will regularly drop $60 on a title they haven't been able to try out should expect to sell to a lot fewer people initially, as the rest of us will wait to try a few minutes on our friends' copies.
A little bit of graduation isn't so bad. People who are really wealthy don't notice paying a little extra as much. However, it's not exactly fair. The deduction already would help the lower income folks, and the same percentage of much more money is still much more money. That said, I don't think most people mind paying a bit higher rate if they are actually well off, unfair or not.
When you start talking about one group paying 15% of the portion above the deduction and another group paying 60% of that portion, that's going to raise some complaints. After all, just because someone's making more money doesn't necessarily mean they didn't work hard to get ahead.
I'd suggest maybe a $5000 or $6000 deduction per person depending on the tax payer. Above that, I'd say maybe 20% for most folks. People in the top 30% of earners but not the top 5% of earners pay 25%, and that top 5% of earners pays 35%. With no other deductions, they'd have to have a hell of a lot of dependent children to weasel out of it.
Furthermore, I think a very small gross receipts tax on business rather than a large profit tax would work better than what we have, at least for publicly traded businesses. Very few big corporations pay much taxes to the federal government at all. Either do away with taxes on businesses to further simplify the code (and pick up the additional taxes as those extra profits go to the shareholders) or actually tax them on an easier amount to verify. Perhaps a 0.25% gross receipts tax on publicly traded companies would be better than both the companies and the government chasing the ledgers to and fro.
What services and regulations did I disparage? One thousand multi-megaton nuclear and hydrogen bombs? A bloated tax agency enforcing a labyrinthine tax code?
I'm all for roads, education, the NIH, the USDA, the FDA, the department of the Interior, the CIA, the NSA, and a reasonable military. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
What I'd like is to see those four million people who do tax compliance work doing productive work, the people in the IRS doing productive work, and a simplified tax code that raises almost as much money for real, usable services. Having to hire extra auditors, extra accountants, and specially trained tax preparers just to collect a tax is silly.
Make it 25% per payer and you get to deduct just one thing: $5000 or so per person who depends on those earnings to survive. Leave the preaching about morality to the preachers because it has no place in the tax code. Leave the investment decisions like 401(k), IRA, buying a home, and such to the investment advisers. We don't need 17,000 pages of text to describe how to tax people fairly.
We also don't need to defend the US against every other nation on Earth at once. Our military spending is just too big. Half of what it is now would suffice just fine, and would still be huge compared to what other countries are spending.
We don't need to get rid of the entire military to cut back military expenditures. Nice strawman, assigning me the slippery slope that I never promoted.
How much defense budget do we need? Probably less than 41.5% of the world's total defense expenditures. How about, instead of spending 1.3 times as much as the next 14 top nations in overall funds, we only spend as much as the next 10 top nations in military expenditures? How about, as a start, instead of spending $123,000,000,000 more than the rest of the world in absolute military expenditures we merely match the rest of the world's defense budgets?
Good news? Other reports list the US as "only" 41% to 42% of overall worldwide military spending.