Oh there are fun games even now, they're just hard to find, even more if you prefer older game designs (for example first person shooters that don't involve hiding behind cover and aiming for heads). Saints Row 2 is a good recent GTA-like that doesn't screw itself up with too much realism. I think it got kinda ignored as GTA4 got all the attention (and made people angry) but hey, it's really dirt cheap now (the PC version costs a fiver) and not nearly as serious as the box art might suggest.
Some people who felt that modern gaming wasn't worth bothering with really liked New Super Mario Bros Wii.
It's a result of strong competition, except for price collusion there isn't really a way out of that situation once you and all competitors have driven the margins that low.
Hell, I can hit 15GB of legal data in a day when Steam has a really good sale (in fact the amount of data is more limited by my fairly slow DSL connection and the time I'm willing to keep the PC running on a day than the amount of data available). That's regular consumer stuff, nothing especially geeky. Games are around 5GB a piece these days and good Steam sales can get them down to less than a fiver a piece.
Peter Molyneux is known for empty promises because he makes features up as he talks about them. When he tells you about this great new feature in the game chance is that's the first time the development team hears of it.
Justice and freedom are different from left and right, left and right are the ideologies of socialism and nationalism, the ideas of all power to the people or all power to the state. The proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Neither of these extremes is freedom.
Corruption is much less present in the west (in many countries corruption is part of everyday life, in the west your average police officer won't ask you for a bribe) and while westerners may scream a lot we do have a LOT more freedom than someone in China. Just for an example: Try setting up a political party in the west vs doing the same in a communist country. The western party may not have much of a chance in the US electoral system (but other western countries have better systems) but in the communist countries you just get arrested for that.
Also we never really have to fear for our lives because we may not be able to afford the necessities of life, force our children to work in sweatshops to pay our bills and become the victim of organized crime. Our jobs are tested for safety so we won't be sent to mine hazardous materials without any protective gear. The govt can't simply deport us from our homes because it wants to use the space for something, while eminent domain exists it's restricted and of course there's the next election to worry about.
Banning religion isn't limited to communism, autocrats don't like competition so many autocratic nations suppressed religion. E.g. Saddam Hussein supposedly kept muslim extremists suppressed. Atheism rates do go up in communist countries though. Russia and the former GDR have fairly high atheism quotes.
They have enforcement capacities. You may be trading with virtual currency but you're still sitting in a very real place with a very real police station nearby.
Isn't gold only valuable because humans have agreed that it's pretty? There's not much an average person can do with gold except sell it to somebody else.
Americanization is a threat to the morale of any authoritarian nation because it teaches people that living in shit and working hard every day just to survive isn't as fun as living in a western society and dropping all that strict authority and religion. And worst of all, the people LIKE IT! Of course authoritarian governments and religious leaders don't like western influence, it diminishes the control people give them!
I find this statement quite funny, as Slashdotters on average have no respect for the law, so stating its legal status holds no merit
What, in a debate about a country investigating a company? You think the investigators follow Slashdot instead of the law?
Regardless, your statement above is demonstrably absurd. The average cellphone user cannot disable GPS tracking, either. The average person cannot do a great many things when it comes to securing their privacy. Someone who uses these legal methods to accumulate this data (say, by tracking GPS positions using Google Latitude or other services) is not in the wrong.
Yes they are, unless they have specific consent from the user to collect that data they have no right to collect it. If it's generated by regular use of the service the data has to be destroyed, not stored. Only information necessary for billing can be stored by default and then only as long as they are necessary for billing/tax purposes, after that they must be destroyed. A person is allowed to look into the personal data held by a corporation on him (of course not free of charge) and correct it or have it destroyed. Last I checked laws were being implemented that prevent opt-in clauses for data collection to be a part of a non-negotiated contract that's primarily about something else (e.g. a contract to use a service, without that you can't use the service but the citizen must have the ability to use the service without opting into additional data collecting). EULAs are invalid in Germany so that doesn't work either. There are also a ton of sanctions on the data including not exporting it to countries that don't have such strict data protection laws without voluntarily obeying EU data protection laws there too.
As you can imagine a company like Google that's specialized in gathering personal information about people isn't terribly popular with the agencies in charge of enforcing data protection laws.
So what about all the migrants who want to talk to their family regularly? You want to up their phone bills? And if that's govt enforced, how do you propose to enforce it in every country? A country with a lot of telemarketing jobs would be stupid to sign up for a treaty like that.
The law does not agree. Few people know about securing WLANs so it's not reasonable to assume every unprotected WLAN was set up with the intent of inviting you in.
Even better if this worked in concert with the service provider so I could still get calls.
We get a lot of spam calls on our second ISDN number, if they call that we can still get called on the regular one. I think flagging a number as busy is done by your local system so you could probably get one that routes telemarketers to your robo line and keeps one channel open for regular calls, capturing them from the regular number too.
Shipping costs may also depend on the regular shipping throughput between the countries, China ships a lot of stuff to the rest of the world so there's likely some cargo plane the packet can be added to cheaply. I doubt Slovakia has as much "bandwidth".
Those numbers seem high, when I imported games they were 3.5% duty, 19% VAT (I think the VAT was labeled as import tax instead but had the same rate) and that as a whole was called the customs fee (or was that a fee slapped on by your shipping company?). The tax free limit is 22€ but I'm not sure what conversion rate they use when determining that (I had Google show me 23€ for something that customs determined was below the limit). Keep in mind that all these fees apply to shipping costs as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh there are fun games even now, they're just hard to find, even more if you prefer older game designs (for example first person shooters that don't involve hiding behind cover and aiming for heads). Saints Row 2 is a good recent GTA-like that doesn't screw itself up with too much realism. I think it got kinda ignored as GTA4 got all the attention (and made people angry) but hey, it's really dirt cheap now (the PC version costs a fiver) and not nearly as serious as the box art might suggest.
Some people who felt that modern gaming wasn't worth bothering with really liked New Super Mario Bros Wii.
It's a result of strong competition, except for price collusion there isn't really a way out of that situation once you and all competitors have driven the margins that low.
That's probably so the judge can't be threatened with a layoff to influence his verdict.
Hell, I can hit 15GB of legal data in a day when Steam has a really good sale (in fact the amount of data is more limited by my fairly slow DSL connection and the time I'm willing to keep the PC running on a day than the amount of data available). That's regular consumer stuff, nothing especially geeky. Games are around 5GB a piece these days and good Steam sales can get them down to less than a fiver a piece.
Peter Molyneux is known for empty promises because he makes features up as he talks about them. When he tells you about this great new feature in the game chance is that's the first time the development team hears of it.
If the imported stuff exceeds the safe limits in the US they could be confiscated by customs.
Justice and freedom are different from left and right, left and right are the ideologies of socialism and nationalism, the ideas of all power to the people or all power to the state. The proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Neither of these extremes is freedom.
Corruption is much less present in the west (in many countries corruption is part of everyday life, in the west your average police officer won't ask you for a bribe) and while westerners may scream a lot we do have a LOT more freedom than someone in China. Just for an example: Try setting up a political party in the west vs doing the same in a communist country. The western party may not have much of a chance in the US electoral system (but other western countries have better systems) but in the communist countries you just get arrested for that.
Also we never really have to fear for our lives because we may not be able to afford the necessities of life, force our children to work in sweatshops to pay our bills and become the victim of organized crime. Our jobs are tested for safety so we won't be sent to mine hazardous materials without any protective gear. The govt can't simply deport us from our homes because it wants to use the space for something, while eminent domain exists it's restricted and of course there's the next election to worry about.
Banning religion isn't limited to communism, autocrats don't like competition so many autocratic nations suppressed religion. E.g. Saddam Hussein supposedly kept muslim extremists suppressed. Atheism rates do go up in communist countries though. Russia and the former GDR have fairly high atheism quotes.
I figured it's millitons but that's a stupid unit, you can just as well say kilograms and 75kg sounds a bit low for a heavy lifter.
I think it's more efficient if its first mission is to land on 537 politicians.
Or ammunition, depending on whether you subscribe to the American or Russian view.
They have enforcement capacities. You may be trading with virtual currency but you're still sitting in a very real place with a very real police station nearby.
If that authority is so untrustworthy would you trust them that the money supply will always match the gold supply?
Isn't gold only valuable because humans have agreed that it's pretty? There's not much an average person can do with gold except sell it to somebody else.
Americanization is a threat to the morale of any authoritarian nation because it teaches people that living in shit and working hard every day just to survive isn't as fun as living in a western society and dropping all that strict authority and religion. And worst of all, the people LIKE IT! Of course authoritarian governments and religious leaders don't like western influence, it diminishes the control people give them!
Yeah but China claims to be extreme left so they see right extremists as worse.
You mean you haven't heard of Elmyra?
I find this statement quite funny, as Slashdotters on average have no respect for the law, so stating its legal status holds no merit
What, in a debate about a country investigating a company? You think the investigators follow Slashdot instead of the law?
Regardless, your statement above is demonstrably absurd. The average cellphone user cannot disable GPS tracking, either. The average person cannot do a great many things when it comes to securing their privacy. Someone who uses these legal methods to accumulate this data (say, by tracking GPS positions using Google Latitude or other services) is not in the wrong.
Yes they are, unless they have specific consent from the user to collect that data they have no right to collect it. If it's generated by regular use of the service the data has to be destroyed, not stored. Only information necessary for billing can be stored by default and then only as long as they are necessary for billing/tax purposes, after that they must be destroyed. A person is allowed to look into the personal data held by a corporation on him (of course not free of charge) and correct it or have it destroyed. Last I checked laws were being implemented that prevent opt-in clauses for data collection to be a part of a non-negotiated contract that's primarily about something else (e.g. a contract to use a service, without that you can't use the service but the citizen must have the ability to use the service without opting into additional data collecting). EULAs are invalid in Germany so that doesn't work either. There are also a ton of sanctions on the data including not exporting it to countries that don't have such strict data protection laws without voluntarily obeying EU data protection laws there too.
As you can imagine a company like Google that's specialized in gathering personal information about people isn't terribly popular with the agencies in charge of enforcing data protection laws.
So what about all the migrants who want to talk to their family regularly? You want to up their phone bills? And if that's govt enforced, how do you propose to enforce it in every country? A country with a lot of telemarketing jobs would be stupid to sign up for a treaty like that.
The law does not agree. Few people know about securing WLANs so it's not reasonable to assume every unprotected WLAN was set up with the intent of inviting you in.
Even better if this worked in concert with the service provider so I could still get calls.
We get a lot of spam calls on our second ISDN number, if they call that we can still get called on the regular one. I think flagging a number as busy is done by your local system so you could probably get one that routes telemarketers to your robo line and keeps one channel open for regular calls, capturing them from the regular number too.
Shipping costs may also depend on the regular shipping throughput between the countries, China ships a lot of stuff to the rest of the world so there's likely some cargo plane the packet can be added to cheaply. I doubt Slovakia has as much "bandwidth".
Those numbers seem high, when I imported games they were 3.5% duty, 19% VAT (I think the VAT was labeled as import tax instead but had the same rate) and that as a whole was called the customs fee (or was that a fee slapped on by your shipping company?). The tax free limit is 22€ but I'm not sure what conversion rate they use when determining that (I had Google show me 23€ for something that customs determined was below the limit). Keep in mind that all these fees apply to shipping costs as well.
100 hours if we're talking about Comcast's 250GB limit apparently, they measured 2.5GB/h. The video stream isn't very high quality though.