IF you are a business, there is a space for payment of use tax on your Business & Occupation tax form. When the DoR does their B&O tax audit, they will also helpfully make sure you've paid use tax on all your business purchases. So for businesses, this is pretty well enforced.
If you are an individual, you are *supposed* to file annually. No one does, and no one is really expected to. But...
The DoR has a very large office in Vancouver, WA, and they have agreements with a lot of high-end retailers in Oregon (which has no sales tax). They watch for Washington residents who go into Oregon to make large purchases (jewelry, automobiles, boats, that sort of thing), and they will try to make sure that you don't "forget" to pay your use tax on these thngs.
Ah, but you see, it's not that you owe use tax on anything that you buy out of state. You owe use tax for anything that you *use* in your home state. But then, they exempt the item from use tax if you can show that you already paid sales tax on it (even if you paid that sales tax to another state).
So see, the *tax* is being applied equally on everything. Now, if you want to attack the *exemption* for things you already paid sales tax on, go right ahead. Maybe then you'll get to pay use tax on everything, even if you already paid sales tax on it.
This is an area where Shadowbane does well. Leveling is so fast that this is not a problems at all. A dedicated player can hit the cap in a month. A casual player can hit it in 3 months, and be useful in the meantime.
Of course, this is necessary, because it usually takes three tries to design a character that is any good...
There's post after post on here of people saying "this is stupid", "I can't believe these people pay for stupid icons"
Yet there's quite a bit of the/. crowd that thinks it is perfectly normal and acceptable to sell items or characters for an EverQuest game.
No conflict here at all. It's stupid to *buy* virtual items. It is, however, very smart to *sell* them.
With that in mind, I will say this. The copout by Spector that the technology isn't up to par is the preposterous. With that statement he made yet another step downwards from the person I was envisioned him as. Obviously, he's of the mindset I just mentioned. For him, and apparently the others, love is a technical implementation, not a narrative one. It's a coded system, not the way a character talks or walks or reacts in the game(cf. ICO).
Wow, and my view of Spector's "cop-out" was entirely different. To me it looked like he was being the ultimate perfectionist--wanting to do a single-player love story with an unprecedented level of interactivity--and that's where he's coming up with his comment of the current level of technology being not up to snuff is. He's right, because he's setting the bar so high, that it can't be achieved. My reading of it was that he essentially wants to design an AI who can entice someone to fall in love with it. By all the standards of AI that I've seen, that *is* pretty darn technologically impossible.
Do I think he could aim lower and actually achieve something that was moderately successful. Absolutely. I think his main point of failure was trying to set the parameters too wide, or "mass-market." Most romances are only successful if they are narrowly targetted. But that wasn't the thought problem he was trying to solve.
Also worth mentioning that the first time I ever heard of ICO was in an interview by Warren Spector where he listed it as the "game he most wished he had written." So I don't think that it is beyond his 'mindset'.
You know, Switzerland was a very funny country for you to choose. Sure, we think of them as this little safe neutral country, but that's a misconception.
Every (male?) Swiss citizen is required to serve in the Army. Every household is required to have a firearm and ammunition. For most of the Middle Ages, the Swiss were *the preeminent* mercenaries in Europe.
Basically, they remained independent and neutral because no one dared invade them. One should never equate lack of agression with lack of strength.
Ummm, no. Last I heard the railroads were doing wonderfully. Trains are still the most efficient way to move truly large amounts of freight across the country. Their biggest problem (at least before the latest downturn) has been lack of capacity.
Ohhh, I know. You're thinking of passenger rail. You big silly.
Apple Computer confirmed to The Mac Observer Thursday that its announcement in delaying worldwide release of the iPod mini to July is due to a shortage of Hitachi-made hard drives.
"We're consuming almost all of those drives that are being made," Stan Ng, Director of iPod Worldwide Product Marketing, told The Mac Observer. "So we're putting them in iPod minis as quick as we can get them and trying to get them out as quickly as possible.
However, the source language is most certainly NOT dead. The majority of the Jewish bible (the "old" testament to many Christians) is in Hebrew, with a smattering of Aramaic. Hebrew is the spoken language of a large number of Israelis, and a huge number of Jews and Christians have reading knowledge of it. Aramaic is also the language of the Talmud, and multiple millions of people study the Talmud in the original Aramaic each week.
Your main point, that we have a good understanding of the languages the different parts of the Bible were written in was perfectly valid, but your examples actually serve to rebut it. This is because a well documented "dead" language is actually more precisely understood than a "living" language. This is because languages that are being actively spoken change and evolve.
The Hebrew that is being spoken in Israel today is *not* the same as the Hebrew that the Bible was written in. It's pretty close, but even in the few decades since its revival, it has started to drift.
If I needed exact meanings, I would no more trust a modern speaker of Greek to translate classical Greek, or a modern speaker of Aramaic to translate Aramaic, than I would an Italian to translate Latin. I'd give a little more leeway right now to an Israeli translating classical Hebrew, but in fifty years I wouldn't.
Well, most people who major in the Humanities probably aren't planning on actually working in that field. (A PhD is something else, of course, but most CS majors aren't getting PhD's either.)I'm an Accountant (with a CPA), and it's a running joke in our department that nobody ever intends to be an accountant, they just find out that it's something they're good at once they start working.
There was a time when you got a degree to be a well-rounded person, not just to get a job. I still recommend that to people: you've got your whole life to hone your job skills, after all. My experience has been that the people who are most successful in their chosen field, have a background in something else as well. My degree was in Linguistics (which I never had any intentions of making a career of, it was just something I was interested in), and there is no doubt in my mind that studying that has made me a better human being, and a better accountant. Not in a way that I could put as a bullet point on my resume, perhaps, but I'm more than my resume.
Keeping a copy of everything on a hard drive would mean that you could keep your hard copies someplace *safe* as opposed to keeping them someplace *accessible*.
From what I've seen, you could post something similar on just about any MMORPG out there (details altered to fit game specifics of course), it would all be a really good idea for everyone to follow it, and it would still be completely ignored by idiots/griefers.
But if you don't at least make the effort, then they've already won. So good luck to you.
I'd love to recommend Shadowbane to you while you're waiting. It's been buggy enough lately that I can't quite do that whole-heartedly, (believe it or not, there was a time when the Mac version was much more stable than the PC version) but they do let you download and try it out for a month for free. So it might be worth a look while you're waiting.
Hear Hear!
I hate the twitch aspect of RTS games, which usually pushes me towards turn-based.
Ironically, my favorite RTS is Myth2. You do have to micro-manage your troops, but since there isn't any resource-gathering/building going on simultaneously, it's actually manageable to do that.
Ahh Parsec. That one was indeed fun.
What I remember about it was being sad that I didn't have a joystick, and having to use the keyboard commands for everything. And then I played in a Parsec tournament, and discovered that if you used the joystick, you could only move half as fast. I ended up scoring 10x as many points as the person in second place, cause I ditched the joystick and had much better control.
Hated those invisible ships.
I didn't lose. I missed two nights of the Daily Show, but got paid a dollar and a free movie. Personally, I consider that a good deal.
Now, if lots of people *did* switch, then I'd lose because that would tell the content providers that we're so dependent on them that we'll pay through the nose for whatever they deign to give us. Standing pat says that I trust DISH to do what they can to keep prices low.
I was an honors math student who flamed out on the math/engineering track in college because calculus made NO FREAKING SENSE. I worked very hard, and in the beginning classes I could often get the right answers from analogy to the practice problems, but I could never figure out *why* anything worked, which eventually killed me.
So perhaps I'll check this out, I guess the worst that could happen is that I could not understand calculus, in another form.
"These days, "Standard" or "Type II" magic where only the last 2 years worth of cards can be played, is far more common, and it doesn't take much cash to build a competative deck in this format."
But, if your cards are basically going to expire after two years, then in order to compete you have to keep buying more cards. So money still is a factor.
As compared to bridge or chess where once you buy the deck, or the game, you can compete with it for the rest of your life.
Thank you! I have been trying to explain to my wife for years now why I don't want to where a watch.
All a watch would do is give me another time that I would have to translate. Already I have to keep track of the fact that the clock on my computer at work is 8 minutes slower than the timeclock, which is 2 minutes slower than the time that the buses run on which is 3 minutes slower than the clock in my car which is 7 minutes slower than my alarm clock.
As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
And Ambrosia has released the previous two games, Escape Velocity, and Escape Velocity Override, as plugins to EV:Nova for free. So if you buy EV: Nova, you can play all three games.
If you are going to game on a Mac, definitely start off by checking out insidemacgames.com ; it is a wonderful site with a lot of information.
I would also check out macgamer.com ; there's a lot of overlap between the sites, but what do you expect.
If I had a nifty new G5 I would use it to play Shadowbane with the graphics turned up, since my poor old G3 can only show me floating torsos. I'd probably also buy NWN and Morrowind, as others have suggested.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are an individual, you are *supposed* to file annually. No one does, and no one is really expected to. But...
The DoR has a very large office in Vancouver, WA, and they have agreements with a lot of high-end retailers in Oregon (which has no sales tax). They watch for Washington residents who go into Oregon to make large purchases (jewelry, automobiles, boats, that sort of thing), and they will try to make sure that you don't "forget" to pay your use tax on these thngs.
So see, the *tax* is being applied equally on everything. Now, if you want to attack the *exemption* for things you already paid sales tax on, go right ahead. Maybe then you'll get to pay use tax on everything, even if you already paid sales tax on it.
Of course, this is necessary, because it usually takes three tries to design a character that is any good...
Someone else mentioned UT-Austin, but there's also Texas A&M and Rice. I'd argue that for Engineering/High Tech those would be even better.
Of course, we play Shadowbane, so that puts us out of the mainstream already.
Yet there's quite a bit of the /. crowd that thinks it is perfectly normal and acceptable to sell items or characters for an EverQuest game.
No conflict here at all. It's stupid to *buy* virtual items. It is, however, very smart to *sell* them.
Wow, and my view of Spector's "cop-out" was entirely different. To me it looked like he was being the ultimate perfectionist--wanting to do a single-player love story with an unprecedented level of interactivity--and that's where he's coming up with his comment of the current level of technology being not up to snuff is. He's right, because he's setting the bar so high, that it can't be achieved. My reading of it was that he essentially wants to design an AI who can entice someone to fall in love with it. By all the standards of AI that I've seen, that *is* pretty darn technologically impossible.
Do I think he could aim lower and actually achieve something that was moderately successful. Absolutely. I think his main point of failure was trying to set the parameters too wide, or "mass-market." Most romances are only successful if they are narrowly targetted. But that wasn't the thought problem he was trying to solve.
Also worth mentioning that the first time I ever heard of ICO was in an interview by Warren Spector where he listed it as the "game he most wished he had written." So I don't think that it is beyond his 'mindset'.
Every (male?) Swiss citizen is required to serve in the Army. Every household is required to have a firearm and ammunition. For most of the Middle Ages, the Swiss were *the preeminent* mercenaries in Europe.
Basically, they remained independent and neutral because no one dared invade them. One should never equate lack of agression with lack of strength.
Ummm, no. Last I heard the railroads were doing wonderfully. Trains are still the most efficient way to move truly large amounts of freight across the country. Their biggest problem (at least before the latest downturn) has been lack of capacity.
Ohhh, I know. You're thinking of passenger rail. You big silly.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/03/25.14 .shtml
Apple Computer confirmed to The Mac Observer Thursday that its announcement in delaying worldwide release of the iPod mini to July is due to a shortage of Hitachi-made hard drives.
"We're consuming almost all of those drives that are being made," Stan Ng, Director of iPod Worldwide Product Marketing, told The Mac Observer. "So we're putting them in iPod minis as quick as we can get them and trying to get them out as quickly as possible.
Your main point, that we have a good understanding of the languages the different parts of the Bible were written in was perfectly valid, but your examples actually serve to rebut it. This is because a well documented "dead" language is actually more precisely understood than a "living" language. This is because languages that are being actively spoken change and evolve.
The Hebrew that is being spoken in Israel today is *not* the same as the Hebrew that the Bible was written in. It's pretty close, but even in the few decades since its revival, it has started to drift.
If I needed exact meanings, I would no more trust a modern speaker of Greek to translate classical Greek, or a modern speaker of Aramaic to translate Aramaic, than I would an Italian to translate Latin. I'd give a little more leeway right now to an Israeli translating classical Hebrew, but in fifty years I wouldn't.
There was a time when you got a degree to be a well-rounded person, not just to get a job. I still recommend that to people: you've got your whole life to hone your job skills, after all. My experience has been that the people who are most successful in their chosen field, have a background in something else as well. My degree was in Linguistics (which I never had any intentions of making a career of, it was just something I was interested in), and there is no doubt in my mind that studying that has made me a better human being, and a better accountant. Not in a way that I could put as a bullet point on my resume, perhaps, but I'm more than my resume.
Keeping a copy of everything on a hard drive would mean that you could keep your hard copies someplace *safe* as opposed to keeping them someplace *accessible*.
The necessity of which triples if you have kids.
From what I've seen, you could post something similar on just about any MMORPG out there (details altered to fit game specifics of course), it would all be a really good idea for everyone to follow it, and it would still be completely ignored by idiots/griefers.
But if you don't at least make the effort, then they've already won. So good luck to you.
Hear Hear! I hate the twitch aspect of RTS games, which usually pushes me towards turn-based. Ironically, my favorite RTS is Myth2. You do have to micro-manage your troops, but since there isn't any resource-gathering/building going on simultaneously, it's actually manageable to do that.
Ahh Parsec. That one was indeed fun. What I remember about it was being sad that I didn't have a joystick, and having to use the keyboard commands for everything. And then I played in a Parsec tournament, and discovered that if you used the joystick, you could only move half as fast. I ended up scoring 10x as many points as the person in second place, cause I ditched the joystick and had much better control. Hated those invisible ships.
Now, if lots of people *did* switch, then I'd lose because that would tell the content providers that we're so dependent on them that we'll pay through the nose for whatever they deign to give us. Standing pat says that I trust DISH to do what they can to keep prices low.
Apparently, in the coming apocalypse, all basic necessities will be destroyed except makeup, odd colors of hair dye, and multicolored spandex.
And if you really like WAM that much, you could always upgrade.
I was an honors math student who flamed out on the math/engineering track in college because calculus made NO FREAKING SENSE. I worked very hard, and in the beginning classes I could often get the right answers from analogy to the practice problems, but I could never figure out *why* anything worked, which eventually killed me.
So perhaps I'll check this out, I guess the worst that could happen is that I could not understand calculus, in another form.
But, if your cards are basically going to expire after two years, then in order to compete you have to keep buying more cards. So money still is a factor.
As compared to bridge or chess where once you buy the deck, or the game, you can compete with it for the rest of your life.
All a watch would do is give me another time that I would have to translate. Already I have to keep track of the fact that the clock on my computer at work is 8 minutes slower than the timeclock, which is 2 minutes slower than the time that the buses run on which is 3 minutes slower than the clock in my car which is 7 minutes slower than my alarm clock.
As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
I would also check out macgamer.com ; there's a lot of overlap between the sites, but what do you expect.
If I had a nifty new G5 I would use it to play Shadowbane with the graphics turned up, since my poor old G3 can only show me floating torsos. I'd probably also buy NWN and Morrowind, as others have suggested.
Since you can still play WC3 multiplayer if you're banned, I don't see any problem with the terms.