Might be worth trying to sell it though. I mean, trying to get people to care about things in this country is like trying to shit gold bricks, but they're vulnerable to hysterical fearmongering...Witness how well terrorism paranoia mobilized the midwesterners, and the southerners who are hilariously unlikely to ever encounter anything resembling terrorism.
So, we say, "OMG! Terrerists are trying 2 steal teh elections!!!!!1!!" and since most people here probably believe that if you win the election on paper you're automatically president, regardless of fraud, and thus believe that Pres. bin Laden is possible, and that they could all be forced to grow beards or wear burkas, we might be able to get some real voting machine reform/standards.
I used to run an independant newspaper, and every week I was deluged with a variety of hate mail, from readers claiming my stories were biased, to readers telling me I wasn't representing their views, to people complaining because I didn't feel the need to censor the occasional "shit" out of an article.
I always responded with the same form reply: "If you feel that your views are under-represented, I'll be happy to print an article in which you can explain them in detail. We support reader supplied stories, yadda yadda yadda."
You know how many people actually bothered to write in, even given an open forum and a paper circulation of ~30,000 ad-supported papers, left in prominent places all over town? Maybe one in a hundred.
People love to complain. You see it here every day, people expressing their outrage all over the place. But do they actually bother to try and take the message to people who don't already agree with them? Seldom.
So I'm hardly surprised that the Game media doesn't bother to actually cover events like this. They mainly work from press releases and secondary sources...Very sloppy stuff.
Maybe this is a sign that the gamer community is starting to get proactive, rather than reactive...The best time to stop a crappy game bill from passing in Congress, is before it actually passes.
Whatever. Why is it with games and games alone, people are terrified of the idea that games are resellable? This fantasy that, because you can't force every consumer to buy a new product, and every unsatisfied consumer to keep a crap product, that nothing good will ever come from the industry again.
Economics, which you don't seem to know anything about, states that demand and supply are intimately connected, and that, and this is important, demand will create supply. If people want it, someone will find a way to provide it, and they won't be selling at a loss either. Games are a profitable industry, and if margins are getting too close to profits, the solution is not to say, "Hey consumers are screwing us because they won't pay whatever we think is fair" but to streamline production costs to put them more in line with what people are willing to pay.
Lots of games are like hollywood movies. They throw tons of money at an inferior product, and then cry when it doesn't sell. Some half-assed poorly executed concept, which completely flops. You talk about WoW as a subscription service...It is, and one of the most expensive ones out there, and you have to buy the product, which initially retailed at $50+, which is high for a PC game. Think they skimped on development? Think they lost money? How about Guild Wars? They don't even HAVE a subscription fee, and they're making excellent money off expansion packs. Oblivion? Galactic Civ II? Eve Online, which is a niche success story for MMO's.
Games that a large number of consumers find to be enjoyable are profitable, regardless of used sales. Conversely, crap games have crap sales...You can't blame that on the resale industry. Blame it on an industry that throws tons of money at flashy games that suck. Games are high ticket items, and the target market isn't one that's overflowing with money. If you're not going to make quality products at acceptable prices, there isn't even a need for a resale bin, because your product will end up on the remaindered rack for 5.99 a copy, and the guy behind the counter will laugh in your face when you try to trade in a copy of it.
If the software was well designed, this wouldn't matter at all. I mean it should be clean and simple, and secure. All incoming data should be validated, all data should be stored, and a mile wide system audit trail should be created at the same time. Then, spit out the paper version with a transaction # so you can run it right back against the system.
Instead, I bet it's a pile of shit. Recycled code, buffer vulnerabilities, piles of ad hoc crap, with poor documentation.
I hope someone does find a way to exploit the code. People need to wake the hell up.
So, your argument is that games that fail because NO ONE BUYS them, are the fault of stupid consumers rather than poor design? I know it goes against your indie l33tness, but just because you think it's cool, doesn't mean it somehow "deserves" to be a best seller. Quality niche games are often quite sucessful. But if you don't play to the consumer, then who the hell are you making the game for?
And I know people keep revisiting linux gaming. I just put my job on the line recommending a multimillion dollar application at work because it was one of the only ones we got a quote on that ran linux instead of Windows or closed Unix. I love linux. But I have no desire to game on any of my linux machines...I buy microsoft for games; that's what it's for.
Why is it always the fault of the consumer that an industry is unprofitable? When the HELL did that become our fault?
I'm a gamer, I've been gaming since pong, and I still buy tons of games. And I sell some back to the store, so I can buy more games. You know which ones I sell back? The ones that SUCK.
If it's got no replay value, if it's got a crappy story, or a crappy interface, I sell it back. Why not? They don't care enough to make it fun, I don't care if they lose money on a new user.
On the other hand, I have computers and game systems that I painstakingly maintain so I can keep playing the older games that I love. And I buy new copies when the media dies, or when they release an "updated" version that's compatible with newer hardware and drivers.
So here's your wake up. Good products make good money. Good books are profitable, even when tons of used copies end up in the used bookstores, even though one person may buy the book and loan it to ten other people. That's what it means to be a good product.
The same goes for games; one guy buys a copy and loans it to ten friends. If it sucks, those friends give it the hell back, and he trades it for a new game. But if it's good, they go get their own copy, and if it's really good, there AREN'T any used copies. That's the way it works.
Meh. If you become fitness obsessed, your charisma drops again because you become an annoying bastard. I get tired of the fitness nazi's looking down on me because I don't obsess over every little aspect of my appearance/weight.
Everything is about priorities. If WoW is enjoyable, do it! But even enjoyable things should be done in moderation. It's possible to find a quality raiding guild that doesn't require you to run three nights a week...May take a little while, but that's the way it goes. Takes just as long to get in a hardcore raiding guild, with the whole interview/trial period bs.
FTFA the virus is only showing up on a minority of iPods. From your own post, the virus jumps to removable storage devices which the iPod is, from windows machines.
Now, knowing little of the manufacturing process, I can nonetheless guess that they pull one in twenty-five, one in fifty, one in a thousand, whatever, off the line and plug 'em in, to, you know, make sure they work.
No need to assign to malice, that which is almost certainly the work of quality control.
A lot of people feel that WoW's pvp is wimpy, because (basically) you can't steal anythign from 'em once you kill 'em, and they don't take any permanent harm (e.g experience loss or gold loss or anything), and also you can't run amok in the noob zones, even on pvp servers. Lot of old school games pretty much allowed you to loot everything a person might have, or kill 'em until they dropped a level or steal all their money, etc, etc, etc.
In some ways I agree...WoW pvp, especially the sanctioned battleground pvp, is pretty simplistic and the ability to respawn every 20 seconds or so bascially makes tactics and strategy pointless. Likewise losing nothing in a pvp fight is pretty pointless as well, though the "loot it all" school of pvp sucks as well.
At the same time, true "hardcore" pvp doesn't have broad appeal. Most of the people who love it so much, love it because it allows them to prey on people who HATE it, so either you'd have to say, "Everyone must go hardcore pvp" or you'd have to offer choices (like WoW), and I've known more than a few "carebears" who were so appalled at the realities of even WoW's limited pvp, that they ditched their characters and moved down to PvE, so I doubt you'd be able to keep your server populations up with that sort of system.
No, an elegant, polished product with good content and broad appeal will be profitable.
The secret is not about dumbing it down, though, you're right in that a "dumbed down" game will end up with more users than a game geared toward hardcore tastes.
Quality products always do well, unless their focus is hopelessly narrow. The lesson to be learned from WoW is not "OMG! Copy their success!" because that's not going to work. The lesson to be learned is, if you do a good job, you produce a slick world with a good backstory and a good (moddable) interface, and work to make it interesting for your core crowd, it's going to be successful.
eMusic is a bad example; the RIAA used to throw out "up and coming" acts on wide release samplers on tape, and later cd. This is just more of the same. If any of those acts should actually become popular, they'll remove the non-DRM distribution.
The point is not the format. The point is the control of distribution and the perishable nature of the media. They've come to depend on contant obsolesence as a part of their revenue stream, and now that's pretty much shot. They depended on CD sales continuing to increase, but evidence suggests than they've peaked for good, due to the amount of DRM they put on CDs these days, and the prevalence of mp3 players as one of the primary music devices.
Move to another energy resource. Worst case scenario, we run out of oil. Consequence? Increased use of coal, solar, wind, and nuclear power. The US has vast coal reserves, Wind and Solar work everywhere, and actual investment in clean fission tech and allowing for the re-enrichment of spent fuel, we have power and to spare.
There are a lot of reasons to be down on humanity, but when the shit hits the fan, we're crazy inventive. Energy is an issue, but it is a solvable problem. Pollution is a bigger issue, but assuming we don't come up some some form of super-pollution, we should be alright.
In the general case though, of "How is this good for the US?" the answer is, "With the Boomers hitting retirement, any addition to the workforce is welcome." Large populations of non-workers are a huge source of economic stress for any country. It's a basic problem of demographics; the most prosperous countries are countries with a very large workforce, and a very small number of dependants.
It's hitting the US now, but in a few decades, it'll be China that's up a creek with no paddle, because of the huge population bulge above the point where they started limiting the birth rate of their people.
Well, yea, I mean, that's what I do. I mean if they monitor my internet usage off of that machine, they'll only get other games. So all I'll have to worry about is some silly background process eating up cycles. Wonder if I could firewall block the phone home and still play the game?
The thing that leaps to my mind is, with this new revenue stream is the price of the game going to be less? Or is it just there to cover the "free online play"?
I think inevitably people are going to allow an increase in advertising if they get a tangible benefit in return. If not however, they are generally willing to pay more to skip the advertising...Cable TV and Satellite radio prove that people are willing to pay considerably just for a decrease in ads.
Makes more sense than Phonographic, frankly. Just goes to show how out of date those bastards are. If they had their way we'd still be listening to music on wax spools.
Seriously. This is the first format we've ever had that actually had the possibility of being constant quality for the indefinite future, with lossless transference between devices. I mean records got scratched, or degraded in quality over time, magnetic tape stretches, and is super prone to mechanical defects, cd's oxidize and have the alumnium fall off, but digital audio files, not being tied to a player, are a real threat.
Buy the White Album on CD and rip it to the format of your choice, and you'll never have to buy it again (assuming you back up your data). There is no way people will go back to the old "Tied to a chunk of physical stuff" method of information distribution. I just wish they would hurry up and realize this, instead of trying so hard to wish it true.
They don't give a damn about how much WoW gold you collect, but they DO care about how much that gold brings you in real money when you sell it on eBay.
Subscription fees are an obvious tax deduction, but the fact remains if you're making more than a minimum amount on it, and you live in the US (don't know about other countries), you owe taxes on it.
What I'd expect to see out of this is companies like IGE being forced to be more open about their cash flow, to make it easier to find people who are not paying their taxes.
What would the tax be, exactly? For the most part, most states don't require sales tax on internet purchases. And if you sell accounts for more than $400 bucks, then you should be reporting that income to the IRS anyway, same as with any other income.
I don't see any need for a special case. You make money off it, you're supposed to declare that money and pay taxes on it. Goes without saying that most people don't, but that's just an enforcement issue.
As opposed to the Republican controlled House and Senate who passed it in the first place?
Don't turn the whole "politicians whoring themselves for money" into a partisan issue, because they all do it, and pretending like it's partisan just distracts people from the problem.
Chances are no one will ever notice, except for the snails. A lot of the time the smartest thing to do with heavy metal pollution (and fissionables are about as heavy as it gets), is to leave it be. It takes a lot to stir them up off the bottom, so if the worst thing thats happening is that some bottom dwelling snails are picking up a bit of radioactive dust along with whatever sludge they usually eat, that's probably better than sending in an extraction team to try and hoover up miles of sediment, with the side effect that all that dust sitting on the bottom will be stirred up into areas where it could pose more of a threat to humans.
Plutonium 239 has a half life of about 24,000 years. It's an alpha emitter, which means it's not really dangerous unless ingested. I wouldn't mind scuba diving in that area, but I'd probably avoid the shellfish.
With copper prices skyrocketing, and fiber prices dropping, why would anyone be pushing for this tech? Push for better compression and transmission throughput on fiber and accelerate the replacement of obsolete copper line. Sure it's more costly than a pie-in-the-sky maybe-we'll-never-have-to-upgrade solution, but it's realistic, and it's doable.
You can ALWAYS appeal in the US, until you get into federal court where they can decide that your case has insufficient merit to be heard.
So she should be able to appeal several times, but frankly, it's pretty cut and dried. Libel is not protected speech, so if it's proven she wrote it, she either has to prove the things she said are true, or she has to argue against the venue meriting an 11 million dollar settlement.
Well, Microsoft isn't exactly a dotbomb phenomenon, but this whole Zune thing screams Gizmondo to me...Whole lot of hype on a feature rich platform, that will nonetheless fail to capture market share.
Okay, they're doing pretty well against Sony...Pried open a nice niche in the console market. But they're competing on their home turf there...Anyone want to argue that Windows doesn't dominate PC gaming?
But competing against Apple where the atributes you have to beat are Coolness, User Interface, and User Friendlyness? What the hell are they smoking? It's not going to happen, it's going to be like those damn Mac Commercials...the dividing line between cool and crap is very clear.
I disagree. Best Buy has pull as a media outlet, but their online end is pure crap because they use it purely to drive business to their retail stores.
They're also in many ways customer-hostile. Return a dvd without a reciept, and get treated like a child molester, even if it's still got all the original best buy stickers on it. That sort of attitude fits right in with the DRM scheme that they're espousing in this online service.
Unless Microsoft craps a miracle and their clunky "available in white, black, and brown" player turns out to be amazing, this service is going to languish and fail like dozens of others.
Originally Helix was meant to be kind of a meta-standard for DRM, allowing the same files to be available in different formats to be compatible with different devices.
As far as I know though, it only supports Real and WMA, which is to say Windows and Windows compatible players.
It's a big standards war...Everyone is trying to turn their DRM into the standard, and so no one wants their stuff to be interoperable with their competition. Microsoft and Apple are in the best position to push their stuff right now, and I can't help but think that the light restrictions of Apple's FairPlay DRM are going to beat out Microsoft's more restrictive "PlaysForShit" format.
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Might be worth trying to sell it though. I mean, trying to get people to care about things in this country is like trying to shit gold bricks, but they're vulnerable to hysterical fearmongering...Witness how well terrorism paranoia mobilized the midwesterners, and the southerners who are hilariously unlikely to ever encounter anything resembling terrorism.
So, we say, "OMG! Terrerists are trying 2 steal teh elections!!!!!1!!" and since most people here probably believe that if you win the election on paper you're automatically president, regardless of fraud, and thus believe that Pres. bin Laden is possible, and that they could all be forced to grow beards or wear burkas, we might be able to get some real voting machine reform/standards.
I used to run an independant newspaper, and every week I was deluged with a variety of hate mail, from readers claiming my stories were biased, to readers telling me I wasn't representing their views, to people complaining because I didn't feel the need to censor the occasional "shit" out of an article.
I always responded with the same form reply: "If you feel that your views are under-represented, I'll be happy to print an article in which you can explain them in detail. We support reader supplied stories, yadda yadda yadda."
You know how many people actually bothered to write in, even given an open forum and a paper circulation of ~30,000 ad-supported papers, left in prominent places all over town? Maybe one in a hundred.
People love to complain. You see it here every day, people expressing their outrage all over the place. But do they actually bother to try and take the message to people who don't already agree with them? Seldom.
So I'm hardly surprised that the Game media doesn't bother to actually cover events like this. They mainly work from press releases and secondary sources...Very sloppy stuff.
Maybe this is a sign that the gamer community is starting to get proactive, rather than reactive...The best time to stop a crappy game bill from passing in Congress, is before it actually passes.
Whatever. Why is it with games and games alone, people are terrified of the idea that games are resellable? This fantasy that, because you can't force every consumer to buy a new product, and every unsatisfied consumer to keep a crap product, that nothing good will ever come from the industry again.
Economics, which you don't seem to know anything about, states that demand and supply are intimately connected, and that, and this is important, demand will create supply. If people want it, someone will find a way to provide it, and they won't be selling at a loss either. Games are a profitable industry, and if margins are getting too close to profits, the solution is not to say, "Hey consumers are screwing us because they won't pay whatever we think is fair" but to streamline production costs to put them more in line with what people are willing to pay.
Lots of games are like hollywood movies. They throw tons of money at an inferior product, and then cry when it doesn't sell. Some half-assed poorly executed concept, which completely flops. You talk about WoW as a subscription service...It is, and one of the most expensive ones out there, and you have to buy the product, which initially retailed at $50+, which is high for a PC game. Think they skimped on development? Think they lost money? How about Guild Wars? They don't even HAVE a subscription fee, and they're making excellent money off expansion packs. Oblivion? Galactic Civ II? Eve Online, which is a niche success story for MMO's.
Games that a large number of consumers find to be enjoyable are profitable, regardless of used sales. Conversely, crap games have crap sales...You can't blame that on the resale industry. Blame it on an industry that throws tons of money at flashy games that suck. Games are high ticket items, and the target market isn't one that's overflowing with money. If you're not going to make quality products at acceptable prices, there isn't even a need for a resale bin, because your product will end up on the remaindered rack for 5.99 a copy, and the guy behind the counter will laugh in your face when you try to trade in a copy of it.
If the software was well designed, this wouldn't matter at all. I mean it should be clean and simple, and secure. All incoming data should be validated, all data should be stored, and a mile wide system audit trail should be created at the same time. Then, spit out the paper version with a transaction # so you can run it right back against the system.
Instead, I bet it's a pile of shit. Recycled code, buffer vulnerabilities, piles of ad hoc crap, with poor documentation.
I hope someone does find a way to exploit the code. People need to wake the hell up.
Anonymous Coward, eh? I'll bite.
So, your argument is that games that fail because NO ONE BUYS them, are the fault of stupid consumers rather than poor design? I know it goes against your indie l33tness, but just because you think it's cool, doesn't mean it somehow "deserves" to be a best seller. Quality niche games are often quite sucessful. But if you don't play to the consumer, then who the hell are you making the game for?
And I know people keep revisiting linux gaming. I just put my job on the line recommending a multimillion dollar application at work because it was one of the only ones we got a quote on that ran linux instead of Windows or closed Unix. I love linux. But I have no desire to game on any of my linux machines...I buy microsoft for games; that's what it's for.
Why is it always the fault of the consumer that an industry is unprofitable? When the HELL did that become our fault?
I'm a gamer, I've been gaming since pong, and I still buy tons of games. And I sell some back to the store, so I can buy more games. You know which ones I sell back? The ones that SUCK.
If it's got no replay value, if it's got a crappy story, or a crappy interface, I sell it back. Why not? They don't care enough to make it fun, I don't care if they lose money on a new user.
On the other hand, I have computers and game systems that I painstakingly maintain so I can keep playing the older games that I love. And I buy new copies when the media dies, or when they release an "updated" version that's compatible with newer hardware and drivers.
So here's your wake up. Good products make good money. Good books are profitable, even when tons of used copies end up in the used bookstores, even though one person may buy the book and loan it to ten other people. That's what it means to be a good product.
The same goes for games; one guy buys a copy and loans it to ten friends. If it sucks, those friends give it the hell back, and he trades it for a new game. But if it's good, they go get their own copy, and if it's really good, there AREN'T any used copies. That's the way it works.
Meh. If you become fitness obsessed, your charisma drops again because you become an annoying bastard. I get tired of the fitness nazi's looking down on me because I don't obsess over every little aspect of my appearance/weight.
Everything is about priorities. If WoW is enjoyable, do it! But even enjoyable things should be done in moderation. It's possible to find a quality raiding guild that doesn't require you to run three nights a week...May take a little while, but that's the way it goes. Takes just as long to get in a hardcore raiding guild, with the whole interview/trial period bs.
But that's just icing on the cake! That shows they think it'll work! So just do the redirect upstream, and it'll work fine.
Oh come on.
FTFA the virus is only showing up on a minority of iPods. From your own post, the virus jumps to removable storage devices which the iPod is, from windows machines.
Now, knowing little of the manufacturing process, I can nonetheless guess that they pull one in twenty-five, one in fifty, one in a thousand, whatever, off the line and plug 'em in, to, you know, make sure they work.
No need to assign to malice, that which is almost certainly the work of quality control.
Ironic.
A lot of people feel that WoW's pvp is wimpy, because (basically) you can't steal anythign from 'em once you kill 'em, and they don't take any permanent harm (e.g experience loss or gold loss or anything), and also you can't run amok in the noob zones, even on pvp servers. Lot of old school games pretty much allowed you to loot everything a person might have, or kill 'em until they dropped a level or steal all their money, etc, etc, etc.
In some ways I agree...WoW pvp, especially the sanctioned battleground pvp, is pretty simplistic and the ability to respawn every 20 seconds or so bascially makes tactics and strategy pointless. Likewise losing nothing in a pvp fight is pretty pointless as well, though the "loot it all" school of pvp sucks as well.
At the same time, true "hardcore" pvp doesn't have broad appeal. Most of the people who love it so much, love it because it allows them to prey on people who HATE it, so either you'd have to say, "Everyone must go hardcore pvp" or you'd have to offer choices (like WoW), and I've known more than a few "carebears" who were so appalled at the realities of even WoW's limited pvp, that they ditched their characters and moved down to PvE, so I doubt you'd be able to keep your server populations up with that sort of system.
No, an elegant, polished product with good content and broad appeal will be profitable.
The secret is not about dumbing it down, though, you're right in that a "dumbed down" game will end up with more users than a game geared toward hardcore tastes.
Quality products always do well, unless their focus is hopelessly narrow. The lesson to be learned from WoW is not "OMG! Copy their success!" because that's not going to work. The lesson to be learned is, if you do a good job, you produce a slick world with a good backstory and a good (moddable) interface, and work to make it interesting for your core crowd, it's going to be successful.
eMusic is a bad example; the RIAA used to throw out "up and coming" acts on wide release samplers on tape, and later cd. This is just more of the same. If any of those acts should actually become popular, they'll remove the non-DRM distribution.
The point is not the format. The point is the control of distribution and the perishable nature of the media. They've come to depend on contant obsolesence as a part of their revenue stream, and now that's pretty much shot. They depended on CD sales continuing to increase, but evidence suggests than they've peaked for good, due to the amount of DRM they put on CDs these days, and the prevalence of mp3 players as one of the primary music devices.
Move to another energy resource. Worst case scenario, we run out of oil. Consequence? Increased use of coal, solar, wind, and nuclear power. The US has vast coal reserves, Wind and Solar work everywhere, and actual investment in clean fission tech and allowing for the re-enrichment of spent fuel, we have power and to spare.
There are a lot of reasons to be down on humanity, but when the shit hits the fan, we're crazy inventive. Energy is an issue, but it is a solvable problem. Pollution is a bigger issue, but assuming we don't come up some some form of super-pollution, we should be alright.
In the general case though, of "How is this good for the US?" the answer is, "With the Boomers hitting retirement, any addition to the workforce is welcome." Large populations of non-workers are a huge source of economic stress for any country. It's a basic problem of demographics; the most prosperous countries are countries with a very large workforce, and a very small number of dependants.
It's hitting the US now, but in a few decades, it'll be China that's up a creek with no paddle, because of the huge population bulge above the point where they started limiting the birth rate of their people.
Well, yea, I mean, that's what I do. I mean if they monitor my internet usage off of that machine, they'll only get other games. So all I'll have to worry about is some silly background process eating up cycles. Wonder if I could firewall block the phone home and still play the game?
The thing that leaps to my mind is, with this new revenue stream is the price of the game going to be less? Or is it just there to cover the "free online play"?
I think inevitably people are going to allow an increase in advertising if they get a tangible benefit in return. If not however, they are generally willing to pay more to skip the advertising...Cable TV and Satellite radio prove that people are willing to pay considerably just for a decrease in ads.
Makes more sense than Phonographic, frankly. Just goes to show how out of date those bastards are. If they had their way we'd still be listening to music on wax spools.
Seriously. This is the first format we've ever had that actually had the possibility of being constant quality for the indefinite future, with lossless transference between devices. I mean records got scratched, or degraded in quality over time, magnetic tape stretches, and is super prone to mechanical defects, cd's oxidize and have the alumnium fall off, but digital audio files, not being tied to a player, are a real threat.
Buy the White Album on CD and rip it to the format of your choice, and you'll never have to buy it again (assuming you back up your data). There is no way people will go back to the old "Tied to a chunk of physical stuff" method of information distribution. I just wish they would hurry up and realize this, instead of trying so hard to wish it true.
They don't give a damn about how much WoW gold you collect, but they DO care about how much that gold brings you in real money when you sell it on eBay.
Subscription fees are an obvious tax deduction, but the fact remains if you're making more than a minimum amount on it, and you live in the US (don't know about other countries), you owe taxes on it.
What I'd expect to see out of this is companies like IGE being forced to be more open about their cash flow, to make it easier to find people who are not paying their taxes.
What would the tax be, exactly? For the most part, most states don't require sales tax on internet purchases. And if you sell accounts for more than $400 bucks, then you should be reporting that income to the IRS anyway, same as with any other income.
I don't see any need for a special case. You make money off it, you're supposed to declare that money and pay taxes on it. Goes without saying that most people don't, but that's just an enforcement issue.
As opposed to the Republican controlled House and Senate who passed it in the first place?
Don't turn the whole "politicians whoring themselves for money" into a partisan issue, because they all do it, and pretending like it's partisan just distracts people from the problem.
Like http://slashdot.org? Or as I like to call it. h-t-t-p-:-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
Chances are no one will ever notice, except for the snails. A lot of the time the smartest thing to do with heavy metal pollution (and fissionables are about as heavy as it gets), is to leave it be. It takes a lot to stir them up off the bottom, so if the worst thing thats happening is that some bottom dwelling snails are picking up a bit of radioactive dust along with whatever sludge they usually eat, that's probably better than sending in an extraction team to try and hoover up miles of sediment, with the side effect that all that dust sitting on the bottom will be stirred up into areas where it could pose more of a threat to humans.
Plutonium 239 has a half life of about 24,000 years. It's an alpha emitter, which means it's not really dangerous unless ingested. I wouldn't mind scuba diving in that area, but I'd probably avoid the shellfish.
The thing that leaps to my mind is: Why?
With copper prices skyrocketing, and fiber prices dropping, why would anyone be pushing for this tech? Push for better compression and transmission throughput on fiber and accelerate the replacement of obsolete copper line. Sure it's more costly than a pie-in-the-sky maybe-we'll-never-have-to-upgrade solution, but it's realistic, and it's doable.
You can ALWAYS appeal in the US, until you get into federal court where they can decide that your case has insufficient merit to be heard.
So she should be able to appeal several times, but frankly, it's pretty cut and dried. Libel is not protected speech, so if it's proven she wrote it, she either has to prove the things she said are true, or she has to argue against the venue meriting an 11 million dollar settlement.
Well, Microsoft isn't exactly a dotbomb phenomenon, but this whole Zune thing screams Gizmondo to me...Whole lot of hype on a feature rich platform, that will nonetheless fail to capture market share.
Okay, they're doing pretty well against Sony...Pried open a nice niche in the console market. But they're competing on their home turf there...Anyone want to argue that Windows doesn't dominate PC gaming?
But competing against Apple where the atributes you have to beat are Coolness, User Interface, and User Friendlyness? What the hell are they smoking? It's not going to happen, it's going to be like those damn Mac Commercials...the dividing line between cool and crap is very clear.
I disagree. Best Buy has pull as a media outlet, but their online end is pure crap because they use it purely to drive business to their retail stores.
They're also in many ways customer-hostile. Return a dvd without a reciept, and get treated like a child molester, even if it's still got all the original best buy stickers on it. That sort of attitude fits right in with the DRM scheme that they're espousing in this online service.
Unless Microsoft craps a miracle and their clunky "available in white, black, and brown" player turns out to be amazing, this service is going to languish and fail like dozens of others.
Originally Helix was meant to be kind of a meta-standard for DRM, allowing the same files to be available in different formats to be compatible with different devices.
As far as I know though, it only supports Real and WMA, which is to say Windows and Windows compatible players.
It's a big standards war...Everyone is trying to turn their DRM into the standard, and so no one wants their stuff to be interoperable with their competition. Microsoft and Apple are in the best position to push their stuff right now, and I can't help but think that the light restrictions of Apple's FairPlay DRM are going to beat out Microsoft's more restrictive "PlaysForShit" format.