Amazon is based in Seattle, Washington.
Purchases made in Washington should be subject to Washington sales tax. (I live in Washington, so this sucks for me, but whatever)
Purchases not made in Washington should NOT be subject to any sales tax.
It really pisses me off when companies who are not based in this state charge local sales tax for online purchases. Music off the iTunes store, for example, will charge me sales tax, even though Apple is based in California. That's just wrong.
The way I see it, having a physical presence should only matter if you physically go there and physically purchase a physical item.
Online purchases usually are subject to shipping charges, adding sales tax that shouldn't apply in the first place just makes online purchases that much more expensive than they should be.
I don't know how privacy laws work in England, but in the US the concept of "Reasonable Expectation of Privacy" exists. What I can see of your house from the street is NOT private. It's public. If you don't want people to see your house, you better build a big fence, or some other method of exhibiting a particularly strong interest in visual privacy. Otherwise your front lawn should be free game. This concept provides a distinction between Street View and peeping toms. It's not reasonable to expect that nobody will see your house when it is in plain view, but if you close your blinds, you can reasonably expect that people aren't going to go to extra measures to see inside. If they do, you have a legitimate privacy complaint, because you put up a barrier that prevents casual observation of the inside of your house that had to be circumvented to some degree.
Most PC gamers have to at least dual-boot to windows. Virtualization with 3D isn't quiet there yet, but it's getting to it.
I would have OSX right now if I didn't have to buy Apple's overpriced hardware, though. It has a very nice UI. Much better than KDE/Gnome anyway. Gnome's not too bad, and I haven't tried KDE 4 yet. Compiz Fusion is a start...
And if you have 2GB of RAM anyway(most gamers have at least that now), Vista doesn't run too badly. You only lose a few FPS going from XP to Vista.
But not selling a popular product is retarded. Microsoft doing something retarded is hardly news.
A P2P app is nothing like a server. It's hard for me to fully understand your point here, since my residential ISP not only allows servers, it encourages them (and reselling my bandwidth, they'll even do my billing for a small fee if I want), but even assuming that an ISP can say "No Servers", that says NOTHING about p2p. p2p does not use the Client/Server model at all, it's a completely different data distribution system, it is significantly MORE efficient, and ISPs absolutely must support it or they will lose all their customers.
Because, like it or not, that is where the Internet is going. More and more services are being distributed this way. World of Warcraft patchs, Vuze, etc. Eventually not being able to use p2p will equate to not being able to use there internet. What if "No FTP" was a rule? What about "No VoIP". Slippery Slope, etc.
The "No Server" rule is there almost entirely to give the ISP an easy reason to shut off someone's internet when their computer gets infected with a spambot. "You have a mail server, we're turning off your internet until you deactivate it". It shouldn't be used as an excuse to restrict legitimate p2p usage.
The article is correct, however, most software is not nearly so parralel/multithreaded that it can be run effecientyly on a GPU. For general computer purposes, it is better to have a few, fast cores (AMD/Intel) than to have many, slower cores (ATI/nVidia). However, certain scientific computing applications are heavily parralelizable and so run very fast on GPU's.
Basically, it depends on your definition of "powerful".
Someone needs to put an end to this sales tax crap. I live in a state (washington) that has no state income tax (it's against the state constitution), so our sales tax is particularly high. While food is generally exempt, there are times when this can work against the poor. A large block of fancy gourmet cheese is tax free, but toilet paper isn't. The amount of effort and work it would take to properly ease the burden of sales taxes on the poor would be self-defeating. Sales taxes are essentially a flat tax, even somewhat regressive, since a poor person is generally going to spend all their money at retail, while a rich person generally will not.
As much as the Democrats like the champion their support of the poor, they don't seem to have much trouble making them poorer.
They keep leapfrogging each other every few months, at least for the almost-pointless "Best Single Card Graphics Solution" race. Just this year, Nvidia has had the lead, lost it, and got it back again.
I never said the economy wasn't taking a dive. But it's only just now become a borderline recession. The early 1990's was worse. They 80's were MUCH worse. All of this started in August, and for all we know the whole thing could turn around next week (not likely, but possible.) But the past few months have sucked. It's entirely expected in the current environment that the fed will allow inflation in exchange for economic stimulus. That is, in essence, why the Fed exists in the first place, because the value of a currency is best kept flexible to adapt to changing conditions. This is why modern economies don't use the gold standard.
Also, a declining dollar, while in total undesirable, does have some limited benefits. Our exports are skyrocketing, tourism is up, and such. This has dampened the downturn considerably.
Regardless, the worst thing for an economy is unpredictable inflation. And that we are not experiencing. As long as everyone has a general idea of the inflation rate, they can compensate. (real interest = nominal interest - inflation rate). The only ones that lose are banks. The stock market is doing pretty well considering how very unprofitable it is to be a bank right now.
I think people are, in general, being overly pessimistic, which is ironically very dangerous for the economy...
Our money is not anywhere close to worthless. The dollar has been dropping, yes, but we hardly have the hyperinflation that actually results in worthless currency. The Duetchmark in the 1920's was worthless. The dollar is just dropping a bit compared to other currencies. It's hardly ideal, but it could be much worse.
I have googled many of the qualifying boxes and none of them seem to have a price set, much less be available for purchase. If the cost is around $50, I would consider buying one, but if I'm going to have to pay $100, (that is, $60 out of pocket), well, screw that, I'd rather just not watch TV.
It's not like I watch much now as it is.
All these things are awesome. I can only imagine how amazing this particular hack would be if you modified Metroid Prime 3 to track the player's head. It would just be too amazing.
And the next time I have to give a presentation on something I'm definantly using the lightpen/wiimote touch display thing.
As always, force should be a last resort, but honestly being tased is very unlikely to do any permanent damage, and gets the point across amazingly effectively. I'd rather police carry them, as it would probably reduce the number of total injuries or deaths caused by the police, assuming they are properly educated in proper use and dangers inherent in their use.
Torture implies causing pain for pain's sake. No particular method of force can be called inherently torturous unless there is no obvious way that it could be used as a legitimate means of force. Tasering isn't inherently torturous (though it can, of course, be used to torture in the wrong hands).
We have enough trouble with actual, real torture by our government. Let's try to avoid making it up where it doesn't exist.
I have to assume there are some people who feel the way you do. Thankfully, a person's work does not have to be liked by all or even most of society to allow that person to continue making things. He just needs enough fans.
And he has quite a few fans. So, yeh, I think that while your opinion is certainly not unique, it is also not relevant. You're best bet would be to ignore him and let those of us who do like his stuff to enjoy it.
I don't have a child and so I don't actually know how feasable this is, but it seems to me that if a parent is upset with how well a school is teaching their child they should be able to send that child to a different public school (or, obviously, private one), assuming they pay the tranportation costs. That would help support competition amongst public schools.
Because if I found out my child's elementary school simply forgot to teach him science, I would want to fire it. But in the current setup that would be almost impossible without moving.
I personally know the pain of what happens when a school system lets you down, I had to take trig, trig in college, even though I was in every other way fully prepared for calc, because my highschool forgot to teach it to me.
I'm am currently experimenting with H.264 and finding that you can put three full length movies (my example being the Matrix trilogy) on a single layer DVD with virtually no loss in quality (there will always be some loss between formats) in the 832x352 resolution used on the DVD (it's not really 720x480 because DVDs use non-square pixels and generally have black bars encoded in).
There is no reason you should not be able to fit a single full length movie in 720p on a dual layer DVD if you are using H.264 to its fullest extent. You might even get away with 1080p if it's a short-ish movie or your willing to accept some very small amount of artifacting.
This is why Blu-ray's capacity advantage on HD-DVD is completely irrelavent. DVD is nearly good enough as it is.
A) There is a difference between legal, and right. Something can be illegal and perfectly morally sound.
B) Piracy's morality or imorality is still being debated. Many people think it's wrong because of the potential to harm the income of the artists, but many people also think purchasing music legitimately is immoral because it powers a corrupt system, i.e. the RIAA. And most people (like me) are somewhere in between.
Actually there's a big difference between selling and trading. If you sell it, a person gets to vote twice in exchange for money, which is unfair to poor people. However, by trading it, you only bring to the table what every other citizen has, one vote, and it is thus inherently fair.
If HDDVD doesn't pull ahead and win this I will be a very pissed off consumer. It's not like I actually have bought into it yet, I'm not that stupid, but the only reason bluray has any market share at all is pure consumer stupidity and a distinct disinterest in saving any money whatsoever. When this whole mess started and they presented us with two formats, one being signifgantly cheaper to manufacture than the other, why EVERYONE didn't immediatly back the cheaper one I do not understand. How bluray is actually winning, other than Sony imploding in the attempt by shoving it into their game console for no discernible reason whatsoever, I also do not understand. This whole mess is stupid, and I wish it was over. It's not like anyone can afford an HDTV anyway. $1000 for a TV is ridiculous for nothing but a marginal increase in resolution.
The rating is for two people: Parents and retail clerks. Parents can gauge the violence a child is exposed to depending on how far the child has developed his sense of reality vs. fantasy, and retail clerks can prevent sales of M and AO rated games to children to prevent his employer from being sued.
It's pretty much pointless to the rest of us, including the children themselves.
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Amazon is based in Seattle, Washington. Purchases made in Washington should be subject to Washington sales tax. (I live in Washington, so this sucks for me, but whatever) Purchases not made in Washington should NOT be subject to any sales tax. It really pisses me off when companies who are not based in this state charge local sales tax for online purchases. Music off the iTunes store, for example, will charge me sales tax, even though Apple is based in California. That's just wrong. The way I see it, having a physical presence should only matter if you physically go there and physically purchase a physical item. Online purchases usually are subject to shipping charges, adding sales tax that shouldn't apply in the first place just makes online purchases that much more expensive than they should be.
I don't know how privacy laws work in England, but in the US the concept of "Reasonable Expectation of Privacy" exists. What I can see of your house from the street is NOT private. It's public. If you don't want people to see your house, you better build a big fence, or some other method of exhibiting a particularly strong interest in visual privacy. Otherwise your front lawn should be free game. This concept provides a distinction between Street View and peeping toms. It's not reasonable to expect that nobody will see your house when it is in plain view, but if you close your blinds, you can reasonably expect that people aren't going to go to extra measures to see inside. If they do, you have a legitimate privacy complaint, because you put up a barrier that prevents casual observation of the inside of your house that had to be circumvented to some degree.
Most PC gamers have to at least dual-boot to windows. Virtualization with 3D isn't quiet there yet, but it's getting to it. I would have OSX right now if I didn't have to buy Apple's overpriced hardware, though. It has a very nice UI. Much better than KDE/Gnome anyway. Gnome's not too bad, and I haven't tried KDE 4 yet. Compiz Fusion is a start... And if you have 2GB of RAM anyway(most gamers have at least that now), Vista doesn't run too badly. You only lose a few FPS going from XP to Vista. But not selling a popular product is retarded. Microsoft doing something retarded is hardly news.
A P2P app is nothing like a server. It's hard for me to fully understand your point here, since my residential ISP not only allows servers, it encourages them (and reselling my bandwidth, they'll even do my billing for a small fee if I want), but even assuming that an ISP can say "No Servers", that says NOTHING about p2p. p2p does not use the Client/Server model at all, it's a completely different data distribution system, it is significantly MORE efficient, and ISPs absolutely must support it or they will lose all their customers.
Because, like it or not, that is where the Internet is going. More and more services are being distributed this way. World of Warcraft patchs, Vuze, etc. Eventually not being able to use p2p will equate to not being able to use there internet. What if "No FTP" was a rule? What about "No VoIP". Slippery Slope, etc.
The "No Server" rule is there almost entirely to give the ISP an easy reason to shut off someone's internet when their computer gets infected with a spambot. "You have a mail server, we're turning off your internet until you deactivate it". It shouldn't be used as an excuse to restrict legitimate p2p usage.
The article is correct, however, most software is not nearly so parralel/multithreaded that it can be run effecientyly on a GPU. For general computer purposes, it is better to have a few, fast cores (AMD/Intel) than to have many, slower cores (ATI/nVidia). However, certain scientific computing applications are heavily parralelizable and so run very fast on GPU's. Basically, it depends on your definition of "powerful".
Someone needs to put an end to this sales tax crap. I live in a state (washington) that has no state income tax (it's against the state constitution), so our sales tax is particularly high. While food is generally exempt, there are times when this can work against the poor. A large block of fancy gourmet cheese is tax free, but toilet paper isn't. The amount of effort and work it would take to properly ease the burden of sales taxes on the poor would be self-defeating. Sales taxes are essentially a flat tax, even somewhat regressive, since a poor person is generally going to spend all their money at retail, while a rich person generally will not.
As much as the Democrats like the champion their support of the poor, they don't seem to have much trouble making them poorer.
They keep leapfrogging each other every few months, at least for the almost-pointless "Best Single Card Graphics Solution" race. Just this year, Nvidia has had the lead, lost it, and got it back again.
I never said the economy wasn't taking a dive. But it's only just now become a borderline recession. The early 1990's was worse. They 80's were MUCH worse. All of this started in August, and for all we know the whole thing could turn around next week (not likely, but possible.) But the past few months have sucked. It's entirely expected in the current environment that the fed will allow inflation in exchange for economic stimulus. That is, in essence, why the Fed exists in the first place, because the value of a currency is best kept flexible to adapt to changing conditions. This is why modern economies don't use the gold standard.
Also, a declining dollar, while in total undesirable, does have some limited benefits. Our exports are skyrocketing, tourism is up, and such. This has dampened the downturn considerably.
Regardless, the worst thing for an economy is unpredictable inflation. And that we are not experiencing. As long as everyone has a general idea of the inflation rate, they can compensate. (real interest = nominal interest - inflation rate). The only ones that lose are banks. The stock market is doing pretty well considering how very unprofitable it is to be a bank right now.
I think people are, in general, being overly pessimistic, which is ironically very dangerous for the economy...
Our money is not anywhere close to worthless. The dollar has been dropping, yes, but we hardly have the hyperinflation that actually results in worthless currency. The Duetchmark in the 1920's was worthless. The dollar is just dropping a bit compared to other currencies. It's hardly ideal, but it could be much worse.
I have googled many of the qualifying boxes and none of them seem to have a price set, much less be available for purchase. If the cost is around $50, I would consider buying one, but if I'm going to have to pay $100, (that is, $60 out of pocket), well, screw that, I'd rather just not watch TV. It's not like I watch much now as it is.
All these things are awesome. I can only imagine how amazing this particular hack would be if you modified Metroid Prime 3 to track the player's head. It would just be too amazing. And the next time I have to give a presentation on something I'm definantly using the lightpen/wiimote touch display thing.
You can have all the good managers in the world, but if the coders in the trenches are incompetent, you end up with a Spiderman 3 or something.
As always, force should be a last resort, but honestly being tased is very unlikely to do any permanent damage, and gets the point across amazingly effectively. I'd rather police carry them, as it would probably reduce the number of total injuries or deaths caused by the police, assuming they are properly educated in proper use and dangers inherent in their use. Torture implies causing pain for pain's sake. No particular method of force can be called inherently torturous unless there is no obvious way that it could be used as a legitimate means of force. Tasering isn't inherently torturous (though it can, of course, be used to torture in the wrong hands). We have enough trouble with actual, real torture by our government. Let's try to avoid making it up where it doesn't exist.
I read a book once called Quarantine that went like this. It was pretty good.
SAY WHAT AGAIN! I DARE YOU! -Samuel L. Jackson (in Boondocks)
I have to assume there are some people who feel the way you do. Thankfully, a person's work does not have to be liked by all or even most of society to allow that person to continue making things. He just needs enough fans. And he has quite a few fans. So, yeh, I think that while your opinion is certainly not unique, it is also not relevant. You're best bet would be to ignore him and let those of us who do like his stuff to enjoy it.
I don't have a child and so I don't actually know how feasable this is, but it seems to me that if a parent is upset with how well a school is teaching their child they should be able to send that child to a different public school (or, obviously, private one), assuming they pay the tranportation costs. That would help support competition amongst public schools.
Because if I found out my child's elementary school simply forgot to teach him science, I would want to fire it. But in the current setup that would be almost impossible without moving.
I personally know the pain of what happens when a school system lets you down, I had to take trig, trig in college, even though I was in every other way fully prepared for calc, because my highschool forgot to teach it to me.
I'm am currently experimenting with H.264 and finding that you can put three full length movies (my example being the Matrix trilogy) on a single layer DVD with virtually no loss in quality (there will always be some loss between formats) in the 832x352 resolution used on the DVD (it's not really 720x480 because DVDs use non-square pixels and generally have black bars encoded in).
There is no reason you should not be able to fit a single full length movie in 720p on a dual layer DVD if you are using H.264 to its fullest extent. You might even get away with 1080p if it's a short-ish movie or your willing to accept some very small amount of artifacting.
This is why Blu-ray's capacity advantage on HD-DVD is completely irrelavent. DVD is nearly good enough as it is.
Those two comments are not mutually exclusive if the game itself is uninteresting to him.
A) There is a difference between legal, and right. Something can be illegal and perfectly morally sound.
B) Piracy's morality or imorality is still being debated. Many people think it's wrong because of the potential to harm the income of the artists, but many people also think purchasing music legitimately is immoral because it powers a corrupt system, i.e. the RIAA. And most people (like me) are somewhere in between.
Actually there's a big difference between selling and trading. If you sell it, a person gets to vote twice in exchange for money, which is unfair to poor people. However, by trading it, you only bring to the table what every other citizen has, one vote, and it is thus inherently fair.
If HDDVD doesn't pull ahead and win this I will be a very pissed off consumer. It's not like I actually have bought into it yet, I'm not that stupid, but the only reason bluray has any market share at all is pure consumer stupidity and a distinct disinterest in saving any money whatsoever. When this whole mess started and they presented us with two formats, one being signifgantly cheaper to manufacture than the other, why EVERYONE didn't immediatly back the cheaper one I do not understand. How bluray is actually winning, other than Sony imploding in the attempt by shoving it into their game console for no discernible reason whatsoever, I also do not understand. This whole mess is stupid, and I wish it was over. It's not like anyone can afford an HDTV anyway. $1000 for a TV is ridiculous for nothing but a marginal increase in resolution.
Scarcity is an illusion when you are dealing with digital data. There is no scarcity of something that is infinitely copyable for no costs.
The rating is for two people: Parents and retail clerks. Parents can gauge the violence a child is exposed to depending on how far the child has developed his sense of reality vs. fantasy, and retail clerks can prevent sales of M and AO rated games to children to prevent his employer from being sued. It's pretty much pointless to the rest of us, including the children themselves.
If you make so many calls near a WiFi hotspot that you can drop your plan to a bracket that is at least $10 cheaper, then it's essentially free.