You have to understand a couple of things about the Finnish Lutheran Church and its role in the Finnish society first.
Historically everyone in Finland belonged to the Lutheran Church. Children born were automatically "enrolled" if at least one of the parents (or maybe just the mother) belonged to the church, and since 99% (or so) did, practically all children born in Finland became Lutherans as well.
It didn't matter how religious you were, if you were born in Finland, you were a Lutheran, even if you worshipped pagan Gods in your free time. You had to specifically resign from the church to stop being a Lutheran.
The Finnish people are not particularly religious, especially the younger generations. People go to church only when it's forced upon them (e.g. beginning and end of school year) or for "special occassions" (e.g. christening babies, confirmation, weddings and funerals). Extremely few people attend Sunday service.
Christening and confirmation are usually done mostly by habit rather than by some religious need. Confirmation, in particular, has more to do with teenagers having a blast (and sneaking into each others' rooms during the summer camps most teenagers attend to get the confirmation done) than anything religious. It's more of a rite of passage than reaffirming your belief in God.
Finally the Lutheran Churches' privilege to tax people in Finland has been very unpopular for at least two decades. People don't quite see why they have to pay part of their income to an institution that they have no connection with.
This has nothing to do with any anti-religious movement. The Freethinkers are not bashing Christianity, they are just making it easier for people, who are not religious, to resign from the church.
In principle, I agree with your sentiment. I don't think taxing capital gains on income that's entirely coming in from manipulating the stock market is what capital gains taxation should be about. Instead it should be about encouraging investing directly into creating businesses, e.g. gains from small business loans of any kind, VC investments (and I do realise VCs get most of their ROI from an IPOs or sales to publicly traded companies).
One could argue that this charitable donation is putting more money onto solving problems that are traditionally solved by money coming in from taxes than taxes would. Taxes appear to have a funny habit of dissappearing on bottomless holes like wars and bridges to nowhere.
"No one deserves to be yelled at when at work like that."
Really? Wow. You must live in some alternative universe I'm not quite familiar with.
I interact with salespeople, who do deserve to get yelled at, just about once in every two weeks or so. I rarely do, of course, yell at them, because it's just not worth my time, but I really have to bite my tongue not to. Instead I simply walk out the store, and go to the next retailer that sells the same merchandise. And I never go back to that place again.
"Then learn that my demographic DOESN'T WANT intrusive (or even non-intrusive) advertising in our ENTERTAINMENT."
Actually.
I don't mind non-intrusive advertising in games at all. In some cases it can even improve the gaming experience.
The most recent example of this is the PGR3 Cadillac car pack. What a perfect way to advertise in a game. Free additional content that just happens to be in the form of Cadillac cars. The other example in PGR3 was the Lamborghini sponsored worldwide tournament. That thing was one of the greatest things I've ever participated in in a video game.
Another example is advertising in ice hockey rink boards. If you remove the ads and keep the boards squeeky white within the game, that WILL detract from the realism of the game. Why not allow the developer to sell real advertisement space in that area of the game?
My definition of non-intrusive might be a little different from those of game publishers or advertising agencies however. I consider anything that doesn't fit into the game environment intrusive. The Subway ads, while normally considered non-intrusive, put in place on one of the Half Life servers are the perfect example of this. I didn't know Subway existed in the Half Life world.
You don't even know what tiered Internet is all about.
It's not about paying your own network provider, it's paying DESTINATION (whether final or transit) network provider to carry your traffic at different speeds. It's double-dipping defined.
Re:Take Two has never bothered much with quality.
on
Rockstar Plays it Safe
·
· Score: 1
I read some of the info on Frontier II on the group. Thanks for the tip.
It looks like Gametek UK was the developer who was in charge of releasing the game. They badly screwed it up. David Braben appears to be quite unhappy about it...to say the least:)
Gametek was then bought by Take Two after Gametek USA went into receivership. Gametek UK is now Take Two Europe.
It doesn't seem like Take Two released Frontier II, but most of the people who did are now Take Two employees, or were at some point. This all happened about a decade ago. I'm sure most of the people have moved on by now. Turnover is ridiculous in gaming companies.
Re:Take Two has never bothered much with quality.
on
Rockstar Plays it Safe
·
· Score: 1
I remember Frontier II, and the bugs it had.
I don't think it was a Take Two game though.
You're talking about the sequel (or triquel, whatever) to Elite, right?
That CNN Money article doesn't mention why the game was cancelled. They're speculating it must've been because the game was "controversial".
Given all the financial and quality problems Take Two is having at the moment it wouldn't surprise me at all if the real reason was financial and/or the game sucked so bad it got scrapped before more good money was thrown after bad money on a title that wasn't going to move off the shelves.
Thumper Thompson is, of course, going to trumpet this as a resounding victory for the righteous, but I think the real reason has more to do with bean counting than backing down under pressure from blowhard hypocrites.
Republicans used to be about small Government. Bloomberg is doing it. Washington Republicans are doing the exact opposite.
He's fiercely pro-business, so much so that he's essentially running the NYC administration and government as a business. The Washington Republicans are running the country as a huge piggy-bank of favors to The Party supporters.
Bloomberg has done wonders in improving the NYC services. The 311 service is just amazing in how well and inexpensively it does what it does. The Washington Republicans were in charge of the Katrina mess.
When Bloomberg cuts services, as unpopular as that is, he cuts the ones that don't perform. The Washington Republicans cut the services their faith based agenda doesn't accept no matter how efficient they are.
I'd rather have more Bloombergs as Republicans (or Democrats for that matter).
The definition is "whatever Jack Thompson finds offensive or objectionable". Today it's video game violence, yesterday it was rap music, tomorrow it is?
A lot of the editorials on US newspapers fall into the political commentary camp as well, but I don't hear anyone asking Google to remove them from Google News.
I think Google might've just shot themselves in the foot. On the other hand they claim they report all the news all the time, or whatever...at least that's the expactation users of Google News get. On ther other hand Google is clearly policing the content on Google News quite explicitly.
I think Google is going to find it very difficult to define what is acceptable and not acceptable on Google News. There appears to be no rules, for lack of a better word, at Google to define acceptable content, and it's more of a judgment call from some Google manager (or committee) what is acceptable and what's not. At least that's the impression I'm getting from all this.
"A couple years ago I needed to file taxes in 3 states and the taxes came out effectively the same as if I paid a single state at the highest rate (which was NY)."
This is the real problem...when you work and live in different states you end up paying taxes on whichever state charges the highest taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like the devil reading the bible.
So you'd say something like "kill all those fucking Israelis" instead.
Man, that's SO different.
"Ironic that a former "peacekeeper" says "Nuke"... Very lame, regardless of the reason."
You'd probably say much the same thing if someone dropped a laser-guided bomb on your colleague's head.
Apparently from a study by a Harvard professor:
q s8.html
http://www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu/mainFrame/news/fa
"They all sound unacceptable violent to me..."
Naah, the violence ranks from 40% to 95%. The acceptable level of violence, as everyone knows, in the US is 101%.
The acceptable level of nipples, on the other hand, is 0%.
That's really all I can say about this.
You have to understand a couple of things about the Finnish Lutheran Church and its role in the Finnish society first.
Historically everyone in Finland belonged to the Lutheran Church. Children born were automatically "enrolled" if at least one of the parents (or maybe just the mother) belonged to the church, and since 99% (or so) did, practically all children born in Finland became Lutherans as well.
It didn't matter how religious you were, if you were born in Finland, you were a Lutheran, even if you worshipped pagan Gods in your free time. You had to specifically resign from the church to stop being a Lutheran.
The Finnish people are not particularly religious, especially the younger generations. People go to church only when it's forced upon them (e.g. beginning and end of school year) or for "special occassions" (e.g. christening babies, confirmation, weddings and funerals). Extremely few people attend Sunday service.
Christening and confirmation are usually done mostly by habit rather than by some religious need. Confirmation, in particular, has more to do with teenagers having a blast (and sneaking into each others' rooms during the summer camps most teenagers attend to get the confirmation done) than anything religious. It's more of a rite of passage than reaffirming your belief in God.
Finally the Lutheran Churches' privilege to tax people in Finland has been very unpopular for at least two decades. People don't quite see why they have to pay part of their income to an institution that they have no connection with.
This has nothing to do with any anti-religious movement. The Freethinkers are not bashing Christianity, they are just making it easier for people, who are not religious, to resign from the church.
They're giving to charity every day. In China.
In principle, I agree with your sentiment. I don't think taxing capital gains on income that's entirely coming in from manipulating the stock market is what capital gains taxation should be about. Instead it should be about encouraging investing directly into creating businesses, e.g. gains from small business loans of any kind, VC investments (and I do realise VCs get most of their ROI from an IPOs or sales to publicly traded companies).
One could argue that this charitable donation is putting more money onto solving problems that are traditionally solved by money coming in from taxes than taxes would. Taxes appear to have a funny habit of dissappearing on bottomless holes like wars and bridges to nowhere.
Sure. Wait time: 30 - 90 days.
"No one deserves to be yelled at when at work like that."
Really? Wow. You must live in some alternative universe I'm not quite familiar with.
I interact with salespeople, who do deserve to get yelled at, just about once in every two weeks or so. I rarely do, of course, yell at them, because it's just not worth my time, but I really have to bite my tongue not to. Instead I simply walk out the store, and go to the next retailer that sells the same merchandise. And I never go back to that place again.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper for AT&T to rewrite the privacy policy as:
"You have no privacy. Your data is ours. You have no rights."
Rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars to pay lawyers to draft some marketdroir-laden crap everyone knows is complete bullshit.
I'm so hoping I'll get contacted by an AT&T salesperson in the next few months. I think I'd enjoy the conversation tremendously.
"I coughed up $130 for 3 in 1 credit monitoring services"
Sounds like a protection racket to me. You pay the same people, who are causing the problems in the first place.
"Then learn that my demographic DOESN'T WANT intrusive (or even non-intrusive) advertising in our ENTERTAINMENT."
Actually.
I don't mind non-intrusive advertising in games at all. In some cases it can even improve the gaming experience.
The most recent example of this is the PGR3 Cadillac car pack. What a perfect way to advertise in a game. Free additional content that just happens to be in the form of Cadillac cars. The other example in PGR3 was the Lamborghini sponsored worldwide tournament. That thing was one of the greatest things I've ever participated in in a video game.
Another example is advertising in ice hockey rink boards. If you remove the ads and keep the boards squeeky white within the game, that WILL detract from the realism of the game. Why not allow the developer to sell real advertisement space in that area of the game?
My definition of non-intrusive might be a little different from those of game publishers or advertising agencies however. I consider anything that doesn't fit into the game environment intrusive. The Subway ads, while normally considered non-intrusive, put in place on one of the Half Life servers are the perfect example of this. I didn't know Subway existed in the Half Life world.
You show up at a major countries statehouse...looking like a hobo...
"companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting"
You don't even know what tiered Internet is all about.
It's not about paying your own network provider, it's paying DESTINATION (whether final or transit) network provider to carry your traffic at different speeds. It's double-dipping defined.
I read some of the info on Frontier II on the group. Thanks for the tip.
:)
It looks like Gametek UK was the developer who was in charge of releasing the game. They badly screwed it up. David Braben appears to be quite unhappy about it...to say the least
Gametek was then bought by Take Two after Gametek USA went into receivership. Gametek UK is now Take Two Europe.
It doesn't seem like Take Two released Frontier II, but most of the people who did are now Take Two employees, or were at some point. This all happened about a decade ago. I'm sure most of the people have moved on by now. Turnover is ridiculous in gaming companies.
I remember Frontier II, and the bugs it had.
I don't think it was a Take Two game though.
You're talking about the sequel (or triquel, whatever) to Elite, right?
That CNN Money article doesn't mention why the game was cancelled. They're speculating it must've been because the game was "controversial". Given all the financial and quality problems Take Two is having at the moment it wouldn't surprise me at all if the real reason was financial and/or the game sucked so bad it got scrapped before more good money was thrown after bad money on a title that wasn't going to move off the shelves. Thumper Thompson is, of course, going to trumpet this as a resounding victory for the righteous, but I think the real reason has more to do with bean counting than backing down under pressure from blowhard hypocrites.
Don't you mean they'd shoot the little bastard in the face?
Republicans used to be about small Government. Bloomberg is doing it. Washington Republicans are doing the exact opposite.
He's fiercely pro-business, so much so that he's essentially running the NYC administration and government as a business. The Washington Republicans are running the country as a huge piggy-bank of favors to The Party supporters.
Bloomberg has done wonders in improving the NYC services. The 311 service is just amazing in how well and inexpensively it does what it does. The Washington Republicans were in charge of the Katrina mess.
When Bloomberg cuts services, as unpopular as that is, he cuts the ones that don't perform. The Washington Republicans cut the services their faith based agenda doesn't accept no matter how efficient they are.
I'd rather have more Bloombergs as Republicans (or Democrats for that matter).
Spasiba bolshoy, tovarish.
It's good to be home, again.
All that encryption will do you no good when the Government knows exactly who you called when and for how long.
Make too many calls to your cousin Ahmed in Pakistan and you're in the slammer even if you used 1,024,000 bit encryption keys.
Of course there's a definition.
The definition is "whatever Jack Thompson finds offensive or objectionable". Today it's video game violence, yesterday it was rap music, tomorrow it is?
A lot of the editorials on US newspapers fall into the political commentary camp as well, but I don't hear anyone asking Google to remove them from Google News.
I think Google might've just shot themselves in the foot. On the other hand they claim they report all the news all the time, or whatever...at least that's the expactation users of Google News get. On ther other hand Google is clearly policing the content on Google News quite explicitly.
I think Google is going to find it very difficult to define what is acceptable and not acceptable on Google News. There appears to be no rules, for lack of a better word, at Google to define acceptable content, and it's more of a judgment call from some Google manager (or committee) what is acceptable and what's not. At least that's the impression I'm getting from all this.
"A couple years ago I needed to file taxes in 3 states and the taxes came out effectively the same as if I paid a single state at the highest rate (which was NY)."
This is the real problem...when you work and live in different states you end up paying taxes on whichever state charges the highest taxes.