When he handcuffed and taken into the car , he had been arrested: It really doesn't matter what the officer says. I
In most of the US an officer can arrest you and not explain why at the scene. In fact, explaining the reasons for arrest is not a good policy for the police: They can decide exactly what they'll book you for when they are filling the paperwork at the station. This is done 100% on purpose. An officer should have an idea of what he'll report though, since arresting random people on the street for no reason can be rather costly for the department, and job threatening to the officer.
I'm not saying that's how it should be: I think that being put in a police car when you have no idea of what in the world you're supposed to have done wrong is not humane. However, that's how I've seen things done.
As far as Spain is concerned, it's hard to argue that yahoo has way less info than google maps. If you thought things look bad in Madrid, try a smaller city, Like Oviedo: The detailed maps are not even there.
The high amount of principal vs interest among prime borrowers might have something to do with taxes.
It's easy to investment mney in ways that yield at least the same rate as I'm paying on my mortgage. This would make investing savings and putting them directly into the house can be pretty much equivalent by themselves. However, something changes the balance very significantly: taxes. Every dollar I pay of interest on my mortgage is deducted, while all that I earn from the investments is tax-deferred until I retire, when I'd probably be in a much lower tax bracket. This makes keeping my mortgage going for years while I invest for retirement pretty attractive. With aggressive investment, the numbers can just become massive.
Sure you can play most PS2 games in the 60 gb PS3, but the 80gb version won't have the Emotion Engine built in, so the backwards compatibility advantage will take a significant step back. No Gran Turismo 4, no Xenosaga, no Metal Gear 2, no Bully, for example.
The PS3 has a future if people actually want to spend $30-$35 a pop for blu-ray movies. If they'd rather spend $10-$20 for the normal DVD, they blu-ray becomes a liability, not an advantage.
And, in the end, the PS3 needs exclusives to sell, and every big exclusive they had is either gone or delayed to 2008.
I guess you forgot the Sarcasm tags, because in most of Europe, you pay significantly more than just an extra 5% on a car.
In Spain, for example, you get a 13% tax to get plates. If your car is a gas guzzler, you pay more than that. Add VAT, and 30% of a car's price is just tax. There are few items in which you'd pay more tax, like cigarettes and blank CDs.
You might want to know that there's still some glitches in a few of those games. In JSRF, for example, the name of the areas in the map flickers a lot for me. There are also obvious framerate drops while doing quick turning, which didn't happen in an actual xbox.
The game is still playable, but it's not quite the same thing as it is on the original hardware.
Oh, so the rest of us with bigger, better setups that are playing the Wii are just wrong. After all, there is a law against having a 4K+ entertainment center and using a component input to play the Wii. I guess I'm breaking the law.
You are right on one point though: The PS3 and the Wii are not comparable products: One is a console with a bunch of good games, the other is a bad Blu-ray player that has an anemic game library. That's why one is selling well, and the other is tanking. Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo: all 2008 titles.
Quake 3 wasn't even the most popular of the series, or the most innovative. On its own, it's really hard to defend it. Play FFVII again. It's aged poorly, and right now nothing but nostalgia makes it palatable. As far as Square RPGs go, it's way, way worse than, at least, V, VI, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears.
And then there's people to which good posture comes naturally, so they don't have half as many aches, regardless of their age.
It's amazing how many people are completely unaware of how bad their posture is: keyboards at the edge of their desks, chairs that are set up too high and too straight, mice that are too far from the keyboard, screens that are too far down... the list is endless.
As far as computer usage goes, comfort has little to do with being young or old, but with being aware of your body.
If a company is sponsoring someone for a green card, chances are that person has already been working for them for at least a couple of years, if not 4 or 5, and they have no interest in firing him to just get an American that would need a year of training to fill the same position with similar productivity. Since no two programming jobs are the same, creating a position that requires very specific knowledge is not really fraudulent: After all, what the company is asking for is someone that can take the foreigner's responsibilities.
I for one have no problem with that behavior. Would you rather have the H1B go back to his home country because he can't renew his visa any longer, and compete with you from overseas? He'll still get the job, be paid less, and not contribute to the American economy at all.
Make it easier for them to come here and stay here. Stopping them will just make the competition even more unfair for Americans.
Except half of those historical examples have little to do with wars. ETA wasn't started because of Spain or France conquering anyone, or even fighting any real battle over there: It started because of Franco's attempt to wipe out Basque culture.
The whole 'we want to be our own country' business came in much later, when they had lost their reason to exist, and decided that nothing but pushing for independence would keep them alive. Nowadays, they are not much different than any random organized crime organization, profiting from drug trafficking and extortion. If they really wanted independence, they'd give up their weapons and just try to win elections without defending violence.
When they fight while they can't even win regional elections in a democratic system, how can they be considered freedom fighters?
That's backwards: If it can be converted into money, it has real value. You can exchange US dollars for linden dollars and vice versa, by going through the developer itself!
Besides, what does taxing have to do with anything? If I don't pay taxes on something that the tax code claims should be taxed you are not dealing with something with no value: what you have is tax evasion. Don't put the cart before the horse
The North American market has been bigger than the Japanese market for years. Just look at the figures:
XBOX360: 0.39m Japan 6.34m America
Wii: 2.64m Japan 3.21m America
PS3: 0.94m Japan 1.47m America
Even if we remove the 360s numbers, since the Japanese don't really seem to want the console, the Wii and the PS3 are selling better in America by a similar ratio. Japan has more DSs, but that's as much of a cultural issue as the low 360 sales. Without the DS fever, the market's size difference would be very significant. No wonder even japanese companies like Capcom and Nintendo are releasing new games catering mainly to the US market directly.
Given how many of their bigwigs are taking their severance packages, I can only think of two plausible scenarios:
-This change was mandated by some crazy executive in Japan without caring about what the US division said. This would probably mean the move will be a complete disaster for Nintendo of America.
-Maybe our good friend Reggie, who used to be head of Marketing, thinks that their marketing and sales department is full of bozos, and did this just because he'd get high attrition rates. On the new cities, he already has new management lined up, so the old figureheads take the severance now instead of just getting fired or demoted later. If this is the case, it could be good or bad: Maybe they really were under-performing.
Your typical option number three, an executive wants to move to a nicer city, and who cares about all his underlings, seems very unlikely given how many executives are leaving.
What's so strange about closing 70 locations and opening 165? Anyone that has had anything to do with corporate retail planning can see that it can make perfect sense: The company wants to grow, so they add more stores, at the same time, some stores have been performing so badly that they think the location will never be profitable enough, so they are closed.
The only surprising part is that we are talking about all that many stores at the same time: It either means that the former management was ignoring all the indicators, or that the new management has just gone overboard to make a point.
Either way, it's something that seems perfectly healthy for a retail chain to do.
But if the representatives can ignore their constituencies because they stop needing them, what you get will resemble feudalism. The US's system leads to very few options, and hasn't scaled well. Did the founding fathers expect political parties? Did they expect Gerrymandering? What about less than a dozen companies that control the media your average Joe consumes? What about Corporations in general?
Many reasonable Americans agree that the system should be tweaked, but the two big parties will never be for it, so unless the corruption levels are so high that discontent rises to nation-collapsing levels, nothing will be done.
The point is, the libertarian position is directly against wealth redistribution. In most modern societies, this is done through progressive taxing, luxury taxes, and estate taxes. Without those tools, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and eventually are so far behind that they are pretty much slaves.
Read some Marx. His solutions might have been a waste of time, but he does describe a very real problem in his analysis of history. The libertarian position doesn't have a solution for the problem: it just claims there's no problem.
The problem of government is just caused by it's sheer size and power. Anything big and powerful can be just as bad as government, it's just that, as time goes by, anything with that amount of power takes over government. Having a small government by itself only delays the inevitable: Big corporations and big individual fortunes need to be contained in just the same way. Go do that with libertarian methods.
If we had no H1Bs, those same people would be competing with you from their home countries, and a salary that is a small fraction of what they get in the US. H1Bs make the top foreign talent come to compete with you on your terms.
Do you want to make things even easier for you? Make the green card process easier. Then, those same people will be able to change jobs at will, and will end up asking for the same amount of money as you do.
Most European countries have changed their 'church tax' over the years so that the taxpayer can select different churches or a secular fund to give the tax money too.
Your argument might make sense if all you want is a bunch of specs, as opposed to caring about the actual utility of the product. The PS2's specs were pathetic, but the games sold the console. At the current price, without an advantage in software, the PS3 is just selling promises and Blu-Ray discs. And, even with an HDTV, most people will still spend $16 on a new DVD than $25-$35 on the HD version, which in most cases will not play in their laptops and other portable players.
The fact is, at the current price, Sony is getting creamed. Without a big turnaround before the end of the year, no third party publisher will even consider PS3 exclusives due to the low install base. Without the third party exclusives, the PS3 cannot be successful.
It really doesn't matter what the console's costs are: If the Wii is beating you 7:1 in japan, and losing to the 360 in weekly sales in every other territory, all that talk about brand is going to mean nothing. All these layoffs and kutaragi's retirement mean that many inside Sony think that they've dropped the ball with their strategy. Without a price drop, they have no chance whatsoever, no matter how much you like your purchase.
Good customer service? I guess you never had to call them yourself. They'll argue with you about having to pay for the box, about your console being in warranty, and lie about what you're getting back. I have friends in their second replacement already, because the repaired box they got lasted a whole two weeks!
And, if your console's problem is not 'it doesn't work', they'll probably tell you that they won't replace or repair anything. The drive is going bad and sounds like a vacuum cleaner? It fails to read discs just sometimes? it's all your problem.
I don't know about you, but I don't think that is good customer service.
Are you sure you have the same inputs? The cables that you find on most older TVs have two audio jacks, white and red, and a single, yellow input for video. The ones Apple TV needs use three different cables just for video, and uses a separate audio connection.
The first consumer-grade TVs I saw with component cables were EDTVs and HDTVs in the late 90s. I'd be surprised if there was any standard definiton TV in america that took those inputs before 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
When he handcuffed and taken into the car , he had been arrested: It really doesn't matter what the officer says. I
In most of the US an officer can arrest you and not explain why at the scene. In fact, explaining the reasons for arrest is not a good policy for the police: They can decide exactly what they'll book you for when they are filling the paperwork at the station. This is done 100% on purpose. An officer should have an idea of what he'll report though, since arresting random people on the street for no reason can be rather costly for the department, and job threatening to the officer.
I'm not saying that's how it should be: I think that being put in a police car when you have no idea of what in the world you're supposed to have done wrong is not humane. However, that's how I've seen things done.
As far as Spain is concerned, it's hard to argue that yahoo has way less info than google maps. If you thought things look bad in Madrid, try a smaller city, Like Oviedo: The detailed maps are not even there.
At least get the quote right:
If we hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards..... checkmate.
The high amount of principal vs interest among prime borrowers might have something to do with taxes.
1 0307.htm
It's easy to investment mney in ways that yield at least the same rate as I'm paying on my mortgage. This would make investing savings and putting them directly into the house can be pretty much equivalent by themselves. However, something changes the balance very significantly: taxes. Every dollar I pay of interest on my mortgage is deducted, while all that I earn from the investments is tax-deferred until I retire, when I'd probably be in a much lower tax bracket. This makes keeping my mortgage going for years while I invest for retirement pretty attractive. With aggressive investment, the numbers can just become massive.
There's plenty or articles on the subject out there, like this one: http://www.fool.com/foolu/askfoolu/2001/askfoolu0
Sure you can play most PS2 games in the 60 gb PS3, but the 80gb version won't have the Emotion Engine built in, so the backwards compatibility advantage will take a significant step back. No Gran Turismo 4, no Xenosaga, no Metal Gear 2, no Bully, for example. The PS3 has a future if people actually want to spend $30-$35 a pop for blu-ray movies. If they'd rather spend $10-$20 for the normal DVD, they blu-ray becomes a liability, not an advantage. And, in the end, the PS3 needs exclusives to sell, and every big exclusive they had is either gone or delayed to 2008.
I guess you forgot the Sarcasm tags, because in most of Europe, you pay significantly more than just an extra 5% on a car.
In Spain, for example, you get a 13% tax to get plates. If your car is a gas guzzler, you pay more than that. Add VAT, and 30% of a car's price is just tax. There are few items in which you'd pay more tax, like cigarettes and blank CDs.
You might want to know that there's still some glitches in a few of those games. In JSRF, for example, the name of the areas in the map flickers a lot for me. There are also obvious framerate drops while doing quick turning, which didn't happen in an actual xbox.
The game is still playable, but it's not quite the same thing as it is on the original hardware.
Oh, so the rest of us with bigger, better setups that are playing the Wii are just wrong. After all, there is a law against having a 4K+ entertainment center and using a component input to play the Wii. I guess I'm breaking the law.
You are right on one point though: The PS3 and the Wii are not comparable products: One is a console with a bunch of good games, the other is a bad Blu-ray player that has an anemic game library. That's why one is selling well, and the other is tanking. Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo: all 2008 titles.
Quake 3 wasn't even the most popular of the series, or the most innovative. On its own, it's really hard to defend it.
Play FFVII again. It's aged poorly, and right now nothing but nostalgia makes it palatable. As far as Square RPGs go, it's way, way worse than, at least, V, VI, Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears.
And then there's people to which good posture comes naturally, so they don't have half as many aches, regardless of their age.
It's amazing how many people are completely unaware of how bad their posture is: keyboards at the edge of their desks, chairs that are set up too high and too straight, mice that are too far from the keyboard, screens that are too far down... the list is endless.
As far as computer usage goes, comfort has little to do with being young or old, but with being aware of your body.
If a company is sponsoring someone for a green card, chances are that person has already been working for them for at least a couple of years, if not 4 or 5, and they have no interest in firing him to just get an American that would need a year of training to fill the same position with similar productivity. Since no two programming jobs are the same, creating a position that requires very specific knowledge is not really fraudulent: After all, what the company is asking for is someone that can take the foreigner's responsibilities.
I for one have no problem with that behavior. Would you rather have the H1B go back to his home country because he can't renew his visa any longer, and compete with you from overseas? He'll still get the job, be paid less, and not contribute to the American economy at all.
Make it easier for them to come here and stay here. Stopping them will just make the competition even more unfair for Americans.
About even? I guess that they are, in the same sense that 30 are 60 are about the same.
NPD numbers for May in the US:
* Nintendo DS: 423K
* Nintendo Wii: 338K
* Sony PSP: 221K
* Sony PlayStation 2: 187K
* Microsoft Xbox 360: 155K
* Sony PlayStation 3: 81K
The Wii sells twice as much as the 360, which sells roughly twice as much as the PS3. I call that a spectacular failure for Sony.
Except half of those historical examples have little to do with wars. ETA wasn't started because of Spain or France conquering anyone, or even fighting any real battle over there: It started because of Franco's attempt to wipe out Basque culture.
The whole 'we want to be our own country' business came in much later, when they had lost their reason to exist, and decided that nothing but pushing for independence would keep them alive. Nowadays, they are not much different than any random organized crime organization, profiting from drug trafficking and extortion. If they really wanted independence, they'd give up their weapons and just try to win elections without defending violence.
When they fight while they can't even win regional elections in a democratic system, how can they be considered freedom fighters?
Amazing single player experiences? Are you sure you mean the same repetitive Halo that the rest of s suffered through?
Tycho and Gabe said it best:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/11/28
That's backwards: If it can be converted into money, it has real value. You can exchange US dollars for linden dollars and vice versa, by going through the developer itself!
Besides, what does taxing have to do with anything? If I don't pay taxes on something that the tax code claims should be taxed you are not dealing with something with no value: what you have is tax evasion. Don't put the cart before the horse
The North American market has been bigger than the Japanese market for years. Just look at the figures: XBOX360: 0.39m Japan 6.34m America Wii: 2.64m Japan 3.21m America PS3: 0.94m Japan 1.47m America Even if we remove the 360s numbers, since the Japanese don't really seem to want the console, the Wii and the PS3 are selling better in America by a similar ratio. Japan has more DSs, but that's as much of a cultural issue as the low 360 sales. Without the DS fever, the market's size difference would be very significant. No wonder even japanese companies like Capcom and Nintendo are releasing new games catering mainly to the US market directly.
Given how many of their bigwigs are taking their severance packages, I can only think of two plausible scenarios:
-This change was mandated by some crazy executive in Japan without caring about what the US division said. This would probably mean the move will be a complete disaster for Nintendo of America.
-Maybe our good friend Reggie, who used to be head of Marketing, thinks that their marketing and sales department is full of bozos, and did this just because he'd get high attrition rates. On the new cities, he already has new management lined up, so the old figureheads take the severance now instead of just getting fired or demoted later. If this is the case, it could be good or bad: Maybe they really were under-performing.
Your typical option number three, an executive wants to move to a nicer city, and who cares about all his underlings, seems very unlikely given how many executives are leaving.
What's so strange about closing 70 locations and opening 165? Anyone that has had anything to do with corporate retail planning can see that it can make perfect sense: The company wants to grow, so they add more stores, at the same time, some stores have been performing so badly that they think the location will never be profitable enough, so they are closed.
The only surprising part is that we are talking about all that many stores at the same time: It either means that the former management was ignoring all the indicators, or that the new management has just gone overboard to make a point.
Either way, it's something that seems perfectly healthy for a retail chain to do.
But if the representatives can ignore their constituencies because they stop needing them, what you get will resemble feudalism. The US's system leads to very few options, and hasn't scaled well. Did the founding fathers expect political parties? Did they expect Gerrymandering? What about less than a dozen companies that control the media your average Joe consumes? What about Corporations in general?
Many reasonable Americans agree that the system should be tweaked, but the two big parties will never be for it, so unless the corruption levels are so high that discontent rises to nation-collapsing levels, nothing will be done.
The point is, the libertarian position is directly against wealth redistribution. In most modern societies, this is done through progressive taxing, luxury taxes, and estate taxes. Without those tools, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and eventually are so far behind that they are pretty much slaves.
Read some Marx. His solutions might have been a waste of time, but he does describe a very real problem in his analysis of history. The libertarian position doesn't have a solution for the problem: it just claims there's no problem.
The problem of government is just caused by it's sheer size and power. Anything big and powerful can be just as bad as government, it's just that, as time goes by, anything with that amount of power takes over government. Having a small government by itself only delays the inevitable: Big corporations and big individual fortunes need to be contained in just the same way. Go do that with libertarian methods.
If we had no H1Bs, those same people would be competing with you from their home countries, and a salary that is a small fraction of what they get in the US. H1Bs make the top foreign talent come to compete with you on your terms.
Do you want to make things even easier for you? Make the green card process easier. Then, those same people will be able to change jobs at will, and will end up asking for the same amount of money as you do.
Most European countries have changed their 'church tax' over the years so that the taxpayer can select different churches or a secular fund to give the tax money too.
Your argument might make sense if all you want is a bunch of specs, as opposed to caring about the actual utility of the product. The PS2's specs were pathetic, but the games sold the console. At the current price, without an advantage in software, the PS3 is just selling promises and Blu-Ray discs. And, even with an HDTV, most people will still spend $16 on a new DVD than $25-$35 on the HD version, which in most cases will not play in their laptops and other portable players.
The fact is, at the current price, Sony is getting creamed. Without a big turnaround before the end of the year, no third party publisher will even consider PS3 exclusives due to the low install base. Without the third party exclusives, the PS3 cannot be successful.
It really doesn't matter what the console's costs are: If the Wii is beating you 7:1 in japan, and losing to the 360 in weekly sales in every other territory, all that talk about brand is going to mean nothing. All these layoffs and kutaragi's retirement mean that many inside Sony think that they've dropped the ball with their strategy. Without a price drop, they have no chance whatsoever, no matter how much you like your purchase.
Good customer service? I guess you never had to call them yourself. They'll argue with you about having to pay for the box, about your console being in warranty, and lie about what you're getting back. I have friends in their second replacement already, because the repaired box they got lasted a whole two weeks!
And, if your console's problem is not 'it doesn't work', they'll probably tell you that they won't replace or repair anything. The drive is going bad and sounds like a vacuum cleaner? It fails to read discs just sometimes? it's all your problem.
I don't know about you, but I don't think that is good customer service.
Are you sure you have the same inputs? The cables that you find on most older TVs have two audio jacks, white and red, and a single, yellow input for video. The ones Apple TV needs use three different cables just for video, and uses a separate audio connection.
The first consumer-grade TVs I saw with component cables were EDTVs and HDTVs in the late 90s. I'd be surprised if there was any standard definiton TV in america that took those inputs before 2000.