taxation is a function of sovereignity. It's entirely a sign of it. When's the last time you paid a tax that didn't go to a government?
When's the last time you paid a tax that didn't go to your (local/state/federal government.
Britains don't pay taxes to Ireland. Californians don't pay taxes to Utah. French don't pay taxes to the Columbians.
All this does not apply to taxes paid while people are in a different country (I.E., even though I'm from the US I still pay VAT in Europe, and anyone from Europe would pay sales tax in the US.)
There may be good examples of private behavior, but smoking in public, and cutting down a whole lot of trees don't sound like private behavior to me. Both have a direct effect on air quality, and air doesn't respect property lines or personal space.
Smoking ban:
Bars/Resturaunts: My bar/resturaunt. I make the rules. You don't want smokers near you, goto another bar/resturaunt. I'm not forcing you to come to mine.
Trees: My land, my business, my trees. You want a forest, you buy your own land. Don't tell me what to do with mine. I'm maintaining it the way I want to. Problem with the effect of air quality affecting others? Sue LA with all their cars and traffic jams and freeways. I'm sure that they affect more people downwind of them than anything I could do.
The 'rabid right' I refer to is the group that advocates expanded government control of private behavior. If that isn't you, then I don't consider you a rabid rightist.
I consider a lot of what the democrats to do too fall under control of private behavior. Can't smoke, can't cut down a whole lot of trees on land I own. Couple of other things in there as well. Not sayin the right doesn't do it, just saying the left does it as well.
Ok, here's another one: why are people really happy when they receive big income tax refunds, knowing full well that they've lost a year's worth of potential interest on their money that they could have had if they had filled out their W-4 differently?
Because if there is too big of a difference between what you are supposed to pay and what you do pay, then the IRS fines you. (Whether you paid too much or too little by tax time).
A lot of election supervisors didn't, or allowed the company's techs to test & give the A-OK, or just followed the testing procedure that the company told them to do (i.e., didn't do full-spectrum blackbox testing).
Seriously, the election commissioners you are talking about should be fired. I've talkied to my local one. She personally worked on testing the machines with out company interference.
There were documented cases of company techies patching the machines ON THE DAY of elections, and in some cases not telling the election officials
Who the hell let them have access to the machines? Tha machines should have been secured from tampering, among other things. Idiot commissioners seem to be a bigger threat than anything else. If they were still coming out with patches the day or/before the election, the systems weren't ready for use.
You seem to be either really naive or disingenuous about the possibility of voter fraud.
Neither, I just know that we've already had massive problems with the current systems. Chicagos mantras: "Vote Early, Vote Often" and "Where many dead people vote, often more than once." From my experience it's not the machines that are the problem, but often the rest of the system.
As soon as congress sets a mandatory date for a switch to digital (and thus killing analog), the people who make Digital/Analog converters will know when the market will be in place. They then plan on having $50-$80 converters en mass on the market by that date. Until they have a firm date, they don't know when there will be a market for the D/A converters (as people can still tune to the analog).
You won't need a "free converter" if the manufacturers would integrate the receivers into the TVs and that's exactly what the FCC is mandating. I never did understand why companies don't provide the product people want - half the people with "wide screen" think they're getting HDTV. Oh that's why - they can sell a cheaper product and people will *think* it's what they want.
Bundling a DTV reciever into any tv currently ups the price by at least $100. So take to HDTVs that are identical in any way excpet one doesn't have hte built in reciever. The one with the reciever will cost at least $100 more. There are reasons to not have the converter in the TV.
A) You use cable/satelite/other only and no OTA (Over the Air)
B) The external recievers you can buy are usually superior to the ones that come bundled in the TVs (better at handling multipat/impulse noise/decoding)
As for broadcaster take on this? Most of them would love to be able to shut down the analog transmitter. It costs them well over $10K a month to power a single transmitter. Then there are other equipment issues and the infrastructure necessary to support it. One station even requested it be able to hand over it's analog channel early and was denide by the FCC (crazy world we live in).
I remember that story. (Incidentally,/. search has been down for a while, anyone know why?) The guy had no proof from what I recall, just his say so. Additionaly, just because it can be built, does not mean it could be implemented. County election supervisors test and verify the machines to make sure they are working properly ahead of time. That should catch any "corruption" as you mention in the program. Also, I highly doubt any commissioner is going to let the manufacturers come out with a "patch" 2 months before an election. How would they get any program to vote for a certain candidate if the program was written 4 years or more before the current election?
Don't forget that the Catholic Church has changed it's stance on suicide as well. It has changed from being a sin (killing ones self knowingly) to factoring in depression and other things and considering that you are not in control/mentally fit when you make such a decision.
Oh, and there are women priests at unitarian churches.
Yeah, and people weren't scared of wall paneling either, when it contained asbestos.
As usuall, things are the lesser of two evils. How many people have died or gotten ill from asbestos? maybe 1,000? How many people have lived because asbestos slowed down or prevented fire? Many many more.
For the same reason that anti-fur and animal rights protesters only protest out in front of high priced fur outlets and not out in front of biker bars. "Because it's not sexy" media wise.
I'd love to convince those protesters to go out in front of a bike bar (you know, the guys that wear black leather pants/jackets and whose girlfriends wear leather thongs and such?) and throw paint on the bikers. Then laugh as the get the crap beat out of them by said bikers.
On top of that, there's also the whole "backdoor left wide open" stigma that comes with the Windows house.
Considering that my house (along with many of my neighbors) has a 3 foot wide, 4 foot high bay window that opens right onto a deck, I would say that MS has had their hooks in houses for over 20 years.
or six months after a legal notice alleging infringement is sent out.
So if I decide to challenge someone in court after the 9 months are up, anyone can choose to try to kill the patent for the next 6 months. Basically, as long as I don't try to sue anyone, the patent would be able to stand after that 6 months. As soon as I try to sue someone (which is what we really care about) there are 6 months for someone to initiate proceedings against the patent every time I try to sue.
Seriously though, I've been against giving calculators to grade school kids for a long time. It's all part of the dumbing down of our society. Let them learn how to do math properly, [I]then[/I] teach them how to use a calculator when they start studying higher maths that actually
2 years ago, when I was still in college, My roommate (we'll call him Alvin) and I were helping out another roommate (lets call him Adam) with math. Pre-Calc, to be exact. Now, Adam is having trouble and keeps reaching for the frigin calculator so Alvin gives Adam a simple problem. If X-2=5, what is X. Adam immediatley starts to reach for the calculator. He had become so dependant on the calculator that he didn't seem to be able to do any math without it. [interesting enough, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about this where people forget how to do math because the calculator does it all [and I mean all] for them).
Oh, and the original problems we were trying to help him with? They were along the lines of y=x^2+5x-7, find the max/min point.
Possibly, or is that "damage" in the sense of "music theft".
FTA: He is accused of a series of hacking offences including deleting "critical" files from military computers.
Lets say I hack into a businesses computer system. I then delete system files and/or data files (say customer records or something that they actually use). I have just caused damage. Why? Becuase regardless of the security holes, the business then has to spend time and money and has lost revenue from having to restore everything from backups. And you can add lost productivity to that as well. So no, this is not like "music theft" this is real damage.
But IQ tests in particular suffer from no end of problems, especially on the lower end of the scale. Did person X score low because they lack intelligence, or because they lack education (not the same thing) or because of other factors.
Having taken an IQ test before, I have one quetion for you. Where does education fall into the IQ test? I honestly don't remember any questions dealing with what I learned. More along the lines of memmory tests and pattern matching, but nothing dealing with education.
Re:What ever happened making every vote count?
on
WA Governor Race Ends
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· Score: 1
If conservatives want to have low taxes, they need to start actually picking specific gov't services to cut, instead of just bellyaching about generalities.
Ok, lets start with the "Housing and Urban Development" program that gives individuals over $20k a year in housing vouchers. All they have to do is get to the top of a list to recieve it and not make more than x ammount of (reported) money a year. Followed up by slowly getting the feds out of health care (so the prices will finally come down). Say, increase the minimum age of medicare/medicaid by 1 year every few years for the next couple decades.
When you start talking about specific, real things to cut, people balk and don't want to do it. Until you can convince people to accept cuts in services, stop bitching about taxes.
Problem is more on the lines of who balks at what. What I balk at is probably different than what you balk at. Hence we could rarely (if ever) come to an agreement.
I bet Intel's people wish that all software could be recompiled on installation, to target the specific tweaks they put into a certain chip model. Instead of waiting for the OS or app vendor to recompile for an optimized binary distribution, which rarely happens.
Given my experiences with Windows, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft does this when installing everything. Aside from some experiences I've had moving between Intel and AMD with the same install (very interesting blue screens). I often wonder hwo they can fit 1.4GB of info on a singel 700MB CD without compiling from the source code.
Without getting into the details on why Intel doesn't have silicon-on-insulator (IBM wants to "trade" instead of license...), one would think that AMD would have been a *much* better choice for Apple.
How about Silicon on Saphire (SoS)? SoS (assuming SoS!=SoI) is usually considered too expensive except for harsh environments and places where you really need it. However, since saphire can now be artifically created, it may have come down in price enough for them to integrate it into the assembly line.
I personally think that they are trying to drive the consumer back into the theater, where they can make fat cash off of stale popcorn and swimming pool sized soda sales.
The only people who make money off the concessions in theaters are the people who own the theatres. Seeing as how (in the US at least) movie studios are barred from owning movie theatres (old anti-trust case that goes back at least 50 years), the studios aren't making money off the concesions.
Nope. They just want full control of the disks and the playback, that's all.
Article such as the one Zonk cited are a favorite of the hard left environmental movement.
A big part of the reason, apparently, is more efficient farming practices which have allowed us to restore a lot of farmland back to forests
I don't know about the hard left environmentalists or better farming, but from what I know we have the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC/3C) to thank for a chunk of the reforestation. It was part of the "New Deal" from back during the depression. In 9 years they planted 3 billion trees. Usually along hte lines of take 10 steps, dig a 6" hole, next person behind you drops a saproling in the hole.
Unfortunately, today most of the forsts are going up in smoke (and won't recover for a long time) due to the midwestern forest fires we are having. Since we have suppressed any and all forest fires for the past ~70 years or more, we have a large layer of kindling in the forests. The grass burns, which causes the bushes to burn, which causes small trees to burn, which cause the medium to large trees to burn which turns into a crown fire and everything burns. In a proper forest, there are no small/medium trees (any under 10 feet to bottom branches or something like that). A crown fire is where the top leaves (canopy) are on fire in a forest. This is bad as it kills the trees which can survive a fires where the trunk on gets hot as long as the keep their upper leaves.
The solution for this has been to go in and manually cut down any tree under 4 inches in diameter and cut out the undergrowth (but leave it on the ground) and then do a contolled burn. This is still dangerous due to all the kindling and can get out of controll. Unfortunately, it is the only way to get the forests back to "normal".
The short of it is, the hard left environmentalists have done more to harm the forests than anyone else. (I don't consider the CCC hard left or environmentalists) The loggers (that own their own land) at least have an interest in doing selective logging and replanting trees, so they will still have a job in 10 years. The hard left does stuff that so far has only lead to problems in the end.
According to my friend, they were marching through old forests whose ecosystems supported little other than trees, and you can't eat a tree.
Old Growth Forests = Large Trees (like sequoias [red woods]). Those types of trees keep undergrowth (bushes, grass, etc) from forming. No undergrowth means no deer or anything else of similar size. Old growth forests are nice, but have almost no plant life. The suck for biodiversity. I'd prefer softwood forests, personally. Generally has many smaller plants and lots of animals.
Consoles need the ability for you to add a keyboard/mouse and be able to use it in game, programming the buttons as you like. No more of this "Here's the button configuration, live with it" crap.
PC's need the ability to handle controllers better in games.
As for resoltutions? 1080i, the second highest resouliton out there (highest is 1080p) has 1036800 pixels (1080p has 2073600). A 1280x1024 monitor has more pixels, but isn't wide screen. However, Samsung has this nice widescreen LCD monitor that gives you 1920x1200. Higher than any HD resolution. Since LCDs are only getting bigger (and CRTs are above that) resolution is not the reason to go with consoles. Not having to upgrade the hardware, plug n' play compatability, knowing it will just work and the controllers (with some exceptions) is.
Slashdot Mirror
taxation is a function of sovereignity. It's entirely a sign of it. When's the last time you paid a tax that didn't go to a government?
When's the last time you paid a tax that didn't go to your (local/state/federal government.
Britains don't pay taxes to Ireland. Californians don't pay taxes to Utah. French don't pay taxes to the Columbians.
All this does not apply to taxes paid while people are in a different country (I.E., even though I'm from the US I still pay VAT in Europe, and anyone from Europe would pay sales tax in the US.)
There may be good examples of private behavior, but smoking in public, and cutting down a whole lot of trees don't sound like private behavior to me. Both have a direct effect on air quality, and air doesn't respect property lines or personal space.
Smoking ban:
Bars/Resturaunts: My bar/resturaunt. I make the rules. You don't want smokers near you, goto another bar/resturaunt. I'm not forcing you to come to mine.
Trees: My land, my business, my trees. You want a forest, you buy your own land. Don't tell me what to do with mine. I'm maintaining it the way I want to. Problem with the effect of air quality affecting others? Sue LA with all their cars and traffic jams and freeways. I'm sure that they affect more people downwind of them than anything I could do.
The 'rabid right' I refer to is the group that advocates expanded government control of private behavior. If that isn't you, then I don't consider you a rabid rightist.
I consider a lot of what the democrats to do too fall under control of private behavior. Can't smoke, can't cut down a whole lot of trees on land I own. Couple of other things in there as well. Not sayin the right doesn't do it, just saying the left does it as well.
Ok, here's another one: why are people really happy when they receive big income tax refunds, knowing full well that they've lost a year's worth of potential interest on their money that they could have had if they had filled out their W-4 differently?
Because if there is too big of a difference between what you are supposed to pay and what you do pay, then the IRS fines you. (Whether you paid too much or too little by tax time).
I believe all copywritten works should go to the public domain after 20 years. Period.
How about 14 years with the option to renew for another 14? You know, how it was orginally way back in 1790.
Since we're on that note anyway, Copyright Timeline
A lot of election supervisors didn't, or allowed the company's techs to test & give the A-OK, or just followed the testing procedure that the company told them to do (i.e., didn't do full-spectrum blackbox testing).
Seriously, the election commissioners you are talking about should be fired. I've talkied to my local one. She personally worked on testing the machines with out company interference.
There were documented cases of company techies patching the machines ON THE DAY of elections, and in some cases not telling the election officials
Who the hell let them have access to the machines? Tha machines should have been secured from tampering, among other things. Idiot commissioners seem to be a bigger threat than anything else. If they were still coming out with patches the day or/before the election, the systems weren't ready for use.
You seem to be either really naive or disingenuous about the possibility of voter fraud.
Neither, I just know that we've already had massive problems with the current systems. Chicagos mantras: "Vote Early, Vote Often" and "Where many dead people vote, often more than once." From my experience it's not the machines that are the problem, but often the rest of the system.
As soon as congress sets a mandatory date for a switch to digital (and thus killing analog), the people who make Digital/Analog converters will know when the market will be in place. They then plan on having $50-$80 converters en mass on the market by that date. Until they have a firm date, they don't know when there will be a market for the D/A converters (as people can still tune to the analog).
t vtechnology.com+congress+box&btnG=Search
You won't need a "free converter" if the manufacturers would integrate the receivers into the TVs and that's exactly what the FCC is mandating. I never did understand why companies don't provide the product people want - half the people with "wide screen" think they're getting HDTV. Oh that's why - they can sell a cheaper product and people will *think* it's what they want.
Bundling a DTV reciever into any tv currently ups the price by at least $100. So take to HDTVs that are identical in any way excpet one doesn't have hte built in reciever. The one with the reciever will cost at least $100 more. There are reasons to not have the converter in the TV.
A) You use cable/satelite/other only and no OTA (Over the Air)
B) The external recievers you can buy are usually superior to the ones that come bundled in the TVs (better at handling multipat/impulse noise/decoding)
As for broadcaster take on this? Most of them would love to be able to shut down the analog transmitter. It costs them well over $10K a month to power a single transmitter. Then there are other equipment issues and the infrastructure necessary to support it. One station even requested it be able to hand over it's analog channel early and was denide by the FCC (crazy world we live in).
Read TV Technolgy. It covers a lot of these issues.
Here's one article on the D/A boxes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=+site%3A
I remember that story. (Incidentally, /. search has been down for a while, anyone know why?) The guy had no proof from what I recall, just his say so. Additionaly, just because it can be built, does not mean it could be implemented. County election supervisors test and verify the machines to make sure they are working properly ahead of time. That should catch any "corruption" as you mention in the program. Also, I highly doubt any commissioner is going to let the manufacturers come out with a "patch" 2 months before an election. How would they get any program to vote for a certain candidate if the program was written 4 years or more before the current election?
Don't forget that the Catholic Church has changed it's stance on suicide as well. It has changed from being a sin (killing ones self knowingly) to factoring in depression and other things and considering that you are not in control/mentally fit when you make such a decision.
Oh, and there are women priests at unitarian churches.
Yeah, and people weren't scared of wall paneling either, when it contained asbestos.
As usuall, things are the lesser of two evils. How many people have died or gotten ill from asbestos? maybe 1,000? How many people have lived because asbestos slowed down or prevented fire? Many many more.
For the same reason that anti-fur and animal rights protesters only protest out in front of high priced fur outlets and not out in front of biker bars. "Because it's not sexy" media wise.
I'd love to convince those protesters to go out in front of a bike bar (you know, the guys that wear black leather pants/jackets and whose girlfriends wear leather thongs and such?) and throw paint on the bikers. Then laugh as the get the crap beat out of them by said bikers.
On top of that, there's also the whole "backdoor left wide open" stigma that comes with the Windows house.
Considering that my house (along with many of my neighbors) has a 3 foot wide, 4 foot high bay window that opens right onto a deck, I would say that MS has had their hooks in houses for over 20 years.
or six months after a legal notice alleging infringement is sent out.
So if I decide to challenge someone in court after the 9 months are up, anyone can choose to try to kill the patent for the next 6 months. Basically, as long as I don't try to sue anyone, the patent would be able to stand after that 6 months. As soon as I try to sue someone (which is what we really care about) there are 6 months for someone to initiate proceedings against the patent every time I try to sue.
Seriously though, I've been against giving calculators to grade school kids for a long time. It's all part of the dumbing down of our society. Let them learn how to do math properly, [I]then[/I] teach them how to use a calculator when they start studying higher maths that actually
2 years ago, when I was still in college, My roommate (we'll call him Alvin) and I were helping out another roommate (lets call him Adam) with math. Pre-Calc, to be exact. Now, Adam is having trouble and keeps reaching for the frigin calculator so Alvin gives Adam a simple problem. If X-2=5, what is X. Adam immediatley starts to reach for the calculator. He had become so dependant on the calculator that he didn't seem to be able to do any math without it. [interesting enough, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about this where people forget how to do math because the calculator does it all [and I mean all] for them).
Oh, and the original problems we were trying to help him with? They were along the lines of y=x^2+5x-7, find the max/min point.
Calculators are becoming the new "new math".
The prime numbers may have been in the IQ test I had. But I don't think so. As for the vocabulary. I know for sure that that was not in the test.
What you took sounds more like an aptitude test (similar to the SAT). The US military uses an aptitude test as well. However, it is not an IQ test.
Possibly, or is that "damage" in the sense of "music theft".
FTA: He is accused of a series of hacking offences including deleting "critical" files from military computers.
Lets say I hack into a businesses computer system. I then delete system files and/or data files (say customer records or something that they actually use). I have just caused damage. Why? Becuase regardless of the security holes, the business then has to spend time and money and has lost revenue from having to restore everything from backups. And you can add lost productivity to that as well. So no, this is not like "music theft" this is real damage.
But IQ tests in particular suffer from no end of problems, especially on the lower end of the scale. Did person X score low because they lack intelligence, or because they lack education (not the same thing) or because of other factors.
Having taken an IQ test before, I have one quetion for you. Where does education fall into the IQ test? I honestly don't remember any questions dealing with what I learned. More along the lines of memmory tests and pattern matching, but nothing dealing with education.
If conservatives want to have low taxes, they need to start actually picking specific gov't services to cut, instead of just bellyaching about generalities.
Ok, lets start with the "Housing and Urban Development" program that gives individuals over $20k a year in housing vouchers. All they have to do is get to the top of a list to recieve it and not make more than x ammount of (reported) money a year. Followed up by slowly getting the feds out of health care (so the prices will finally come down). Say, increase the minimum age of medicare/medicaid by 1 year every few years for the next couple decades.
When you start talking about specific, real things to cut, people balk and don't want to do it. Until you can convince people to accept cuts in services, stop bitching about taxes.
Problem is more on the lines of who balks at what. What I balk at is probably different than what you balk at. Hence we could rarely (if ever) come to an agreement.
I bet Intel's people wish that all software could be recompiled on installation, to target the specific tweaks they put into a certain chip model. Instead of waiting for the OS or app vendor to recompile for an optimized binary distribution, which rarely happens.
Given my experiences with Windows, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft does this when installing everything. Aside from some experiences I've had moving between Intel and AMD with the same install (very interesting blue screens). I often wonder hwo they can fit 1.4GB of info on a singel 700MB CD without compiling from the source code.
10GHz networking
I think you mean 10 Gbit networking. That aside, I think what you want is an OC-192. That clocks in at around 9.955 Gbps. That close enough for ya?
Without getting into the details on why Intel doesn't have silicon-on-insulator (IBM wants to "trade" instead of license...), one would think that AMD would have been a *much* better choice for Apple.
How about Silicon on Saphire (SoS)? SoS (assuming SoS!=SoI) is usually considered too expensive except for harsh environments and places where you really need it. However, since saphire can now be artifically created, it may have come down in price enough for them to integrate it into the assembly line.
I personally think that they are trying to drive the consumer back into the theater, where they can make fat cash off of stale popcorn and swimming pool sized soda sales.
The only people who make money off the concessions in theaters are the people who own the theatres. Seeing as how (in the US at least) movie studios are barred from owning movie theatres (old anti-trust case that goes back at least 50 years), the studios aren't making money off the concesions.
Nope. They just want full control of the disks and the playback, that's all.
Article such as the one Zonk cited are a favorite of the hard left environmental movement.
A big part of the reason, apparently, is more efficient farming practices which have allowed us to restore a lot of farmland back to forests
I don't know about the hard left environmentalists or better farming, but from what I know we have the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC/3C) to thank for a chunk of the reforestation. It was part of the "New Deal" from back during the depression. In 9 years they planted 3 billion trees. Usually along hte lines of take 10 steps, dig a 6" hole, next person behind you drops a saproling in the hole.
Unfortunately, today most of the forsts are going up in smoke (and won't recover for a long time) due to the midwestern forest fires we are having. Since we have suppressed any and all forest fires for the past ~70 years or more, we have a large layer of kindling in the forests. The grass burns, which causes the bushes to burn, which causes small trees to burn, which cause the medium to large trees to burn which turns into a crown fire and everything burns. In a proper forest, there are no small/medium trees (any under 10 feet to bottom branches or something like that). A crown fire is where the top leaves (canopy) are on fire in a forest. This is bad as it kills the trees which can survive a fires where the trunk on gets hot as long as the keep their upper leaves.
The solution for this has been to go in and manually cut down any tree under 4 inches in diameter and cut out the undergrowth (but leave it on the ground) and then do a contolled burn. This is still dangerous due to all the kindling and can get out of controll. Unfortunately, it is the only way to get the forests back to "normal".
The short of it is, the hard left environmentalists have done more to harm the forests than anyone else. (I don't consider the CCC hard left or environmentalists) The loggers (that own their own land) at least have an interest in doing selective logging and replanting trees, so they will still have a job in 10 years. The hard left does stuff that so far has only lead to problems in the end.
According to my friend, they were marching through old forests whose ecosystems supported little other than trees, and you can't eat a tree.
Old Growth Forests = Large Trees (like sequoias [red woods]). Those types of trees keep undergrowth (bushes, grass, etc) from forming. No undergrowth means no deer or anything else of similar size. Old growth forests are nice, but have almost no plant life. The suck for biodiversity. I'd prefer softwood forests, personally. Generally has many smaller plants and lots of animals.
Consoles need the ability for you to add a keyboard/mouse and be able to use it in game, programming the buttons as you like. No more of this "Here's the button configuration, live with it" crap.
PC's need the ability to handle controllers better in games.
As for resoltutions? 1080i, the second highest resouliton out there (highest is 1080p) has 1036800 pixels (1080p has 2073600). A 1280x1024 monitor has more pixels, but isn't wide screen. However, Samsung has this nice widescreen LCD monitor that gives you 1920x1200. Higher than any HD resolution. Since LCDs are only getting bigger (and CRTs are above that) resolution is not the reason to go with consoles. Not having to upgrade the hardware, plug n' play compatability, knowing it will just work and the controllers (with some exceptions) is.