I don't agree at all that spamhouse should fight this at this level. For an Illinois court to even consider this case, let alone side with the spammer, tells me someone got paid. Screw that court, appeal it at a federal level, and argue the case there. Besides, there needs to be a national level precedent that you can't sue someone for logging your repeated spamming and making a list of these loggings public.
So I'm guessing, since EA + DICE did BF2, and DICE was working on BF2142, that we won't see a huge change. EA's hand was already in the honeypot, this is just to ensure the authors can't use EA to publish the game, get famous, and then leap out on their own and take the BF name with them. Or at least if they do, it will cost them. I wonder what/if Sid Meier had to pay to keep the Civ name after developing under Microprose? I know companies like that have contract clauses that basically say if you developed it while working here, it belongs to us.
Although if they are going to present a dancing clown, doing it in a game with plenty of tanks and guns to blow it up is the way to go!
Videogames do not train you how to shoot a gun. They don't teach you how to handle yourself in a lifethreatening situation. They don't help make you run faster.
They are a good teambuilding exercise, but certainly not a core piece of developing a person into a deadly machine.
That said, that title/summary is very very misleading. The article should have been - 8 independant game developers create CS like game with more realistic terrorist target. No where in here do I see the Government sponsoring the game, or training terrorists with it.
And I promise you - if it picks up widespread exposure perfectly patriotic, Republican Americans will pick up this game, and play on the terrorists side. Why? Because inevitably people that suck at shooters always play the good guys.
Funny, Star Wars was the first thing to pop in my head too.
Damn prequels.
I think this is an awesome idea for development - let the whole world offer solutions and spend only a million dollars. Most companies would spend that much just on a consultant team to tell them their current system sucks.
I'd like to add on that it was just a week or two ago, a man basically went storming into the US Capitol building with a loaded weapon, and the police did not respond with lethal force.
Having a gun is like having a condom - it's much better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
The thing is, Clinton's administration got some bad intel, took a small calculated risk, and shot. Innocents died. It wasn't good. But this Bush administration got some bad intel, created a global case for destabalizing a country, still currently occupies said country because they are the only reasonable authority left, and costs us 1000s of lives and billions of dollars. You're comparing apples to orchards.
And let me remind you, whichever administration currently runs our government, possesses and can use over 20,000 nuclear weapons.
"...Rockstar Games -- of a civil conspiracy, saying they should have foreseen their entertainment would spawn such copycat lawsuits."
FFS - I know these people have got to be pissed, and it saddens me that they have lost their children - but jumping on the bandwagon to sue whoever the media has most recently pointed the "bad thing" finger at just to try and get 600 million dollars is flat out BS, and shows just how little they actually know about the things that are a part of today's culture.
I know this is a dead horse, but kids don't learn behaviors from video games unless there is a complete absense of parental role model. If mom and dad aren't around, yes, kids can fill that role with anything - violence, sex, drugs, anything that stimulates. Chances are better than worse the kid's gonna find a bad role model and follow it. Squelching entertainment isn't going to fix a damn thing. The solution is better parenting, not trying to isolate children from the concept of violence.
"A good rule of thumb is that when a PC game is touted as having 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect about 16; when a console game touts 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect 200. That's just the way it is, and has always been in my experience."
Eh, that's because when you play a game on the PC, and you get stuck, you can Alt Tab and go to gamefaqs, find a way past it, and move on. With a console that requires too much work, so you instead plug away at it. PC games tend to offer more save and restore features, lessening repetition while learning an obstacle. Most "40 hour games" only take 10 hours tops to finish, the rest is the learning curve.
One might also look at the development devoted to each group - Console games seem to get far more attention these days...
"Because of limited shelf space, they just don't want it (number 21) around. It's just not worth having it compared to game number 20 twice, or better yet, The Sims and all of its expansions"
I used to love going to Babbages/Gamestop/Best Buy and seeing some 80-120 games available to choose from. Part of the experience was the selection, seeing all the innovative things out there, and choosing from them. Now that you're down to just the top dog hits, it's not as fun.
So anymore, I just browse the game reviews. Thing is, I rarely go buy what I read reviews about. The impulse buy just isn't there. I think the gaming companies (or more accurately, their distributors) have really missed that.
Interesting indeed. I think today's social gamer is more inclined to play against a human opponent, no matter how "humanlike" you can make a bot/AI. There's just no "I one-upped you" thrill from outplaying a computer. No warm glow of teamwork from your AI henchmen helping you through a challenging encounter.
However, in any situation where you do have computer controlled entities, a miserably bad AI can detract very much from the game. I hate to use it an example - but look at World of Warcraft. If a mob can't pathfind to you, it just evade bugs, creating a very surreal environment, especially when all you did to avoid a valid path was jump on top of a small rock.
It's because '06 blew. Every magazine I read indicated that if you had 05, not to bother with 06. So now you've got all your rabid foaming at the mouth by every year's game crowd, combined with the more conservative skip a year or two crowd, all lined up to buy the game.
08 projection? Don't even bother making the game. Sell a box with last year's game in it again, then make waves in 09. That's what six figure salaries suits call "a three-year-plan".
As more non-star bodies that are found, eventually the spectrum of features will be all over the place. If the choice were mine, I'd call the classic nine planets, leave it there, and forget about deciding for a few more centuries.
That's how I feel too. Call everything a natural solar satellite, and leave me my nine planets. At this point I think we know enough about science to move beyond calling them wanderers, and as has been stated earlier in this article the sun and moon were originally planets too. We'll have to continue to modify our definition of planets every time the group of natural solar satellites doesn't break nicely into planets and non-planets, until we finally give up and find a better way to classify them. Fact is, to the non science buffs, Pluto will be the ninth planet, and people that don't give a fuck will continue to remember the nine planets, count themselves amatuer astronomers, and move on to things that matter in their lives.
If you think Pluto should not be a Planet, ask yourself this : if Earth was no longer classified as a Planet, would you feel comfortable letting go of that? Or would you continue to use the word Planet to mean "fat round thing circling the sun"? This is why scientists should stick to using and changing the definition of unpronouncable latin words, because once it becomes common language, it's not up for redefinition by a group of 424 whitecoat shmucks.
"In reality, this isn't really what the article is talking about. They are talking more about the way UO did it. You could basically have like 675 points allocated to various skills, with 100 being the maximum. With about 40-50 skills (I don't remember how many) you could really have diverse characters. But you didn't. The best players had 6 skills at 100, with the other 75 points scattered. And most of the players had those 100 points in the same things, with the only variations often being weapon type."
This is why skill based systems fail. Either you get to cherry pick the best skills, or they have to use some kind of dependancy system, which is back to the same failures of classes - you get/develop abilities that your character may or may not want. It's also a developer's nightmare to balance, especially if pvp is in the game, which modern day demands.
Download as many viruses and trojans as possible, then any cleanings of the registry could have been excused that the defendant was trying to remove the trojans. Plus if you screw up your computer with enough of them, it won't boot anymore.
Plan B : Attempt to water cool your graphics card, then oopsie it.
From an investment standpoint, that's absolutely correct, and it's the concept that's so hard to grasp. The $10^9 country will have much lower total profits, but if you were looking to buy shares in one company or the other, you would be able to buy a much larger chuck of the smaller company than you would of the larger company. Either way, as an investor what you are really worried about is your Return on Investment (ROI). If you buy shares in the company growing at a 15%/year rate, you would expect to see the same return in the money you invested, as compared to the 3% in the larger company.
This is why everyone doesn't just flock out and buy stock in Walmart or Microsoft. Sure, the company is huge, but it's how fast the company grows that determines what an individual investor can make off it.
The fact is, if you sit and do nothing, like you take all your money and stick it in a sock drawer, you lose to inflation. If you put the money into secure investments like savings bonds, you should sit on or barely beat the inflation rate. If you invest in stocks, but make less money than you would have simply sticking the money in the bank, then yes, you lost.
It doesn't really matter when you are talking about 10 bucks. Or even 100 bucks. It's when you are looking at 10s of 1000s of dollars, like people's retirement funds, or inheritances, or what not, that it makes a difference.
Well, on a somewhat less expensive solution, you could just write your congressman / woman yourself. While everything I've ever sent to the oval office has gone into the trash, I actually did get a response back from my House rep the other day. Most people think about it as a great idea, few people actually do it. But if it's any incentive, the fewer people that do something the more weight granted to those that do. For example, when you vote, if only half the eligible voters turn out, your opinion counts for two. In the example of writing to your congressman, if only 1 per 1000 do it, your opinion counts for a 1000 people. If this post encourages 1000 people to write to Congress, I've essentially just persuaded a million people. That's real change.
If everyone that read this actually wrote a letter to congress (write to your rep, not just to congress as a whole) seeking stronger privacy laws, with a simple but well framed arguement why it's important to us, you would see real change. But we've got to make it an issue, because they are receiving letters every day about the war(s), about immigration, about the minimum wage increase. If you don't let them know it's important to you, even a strong advocate of privacy will have a hard time moving legislation through the commitees and floor. A PAC might buy us a representative or two in Congress, but it won't be enough to get people looking at the importance of the issue.
If you don't know how to get ahold of your rep, or for lack of political participation can't figure out who your rep is, visit here : www.congress.org
But be careful! I've read through their privacy policy, and it, much like EA's, is pretty invasive, including the option to sell your personal information. Still, you can use their site to figure out who you want to contact, and take matters to your own hands from there.
"The only way that the numbers in the US get anywhere close to 50% is when people illogically count the tax on a dollar, not a person"
I don't think it's so much that as counting the purchasing power of your dollar after subtracting out all the different times that you are taxed. I don't think you arrive at 50% unless you have a horrible accountant or are very very wealthy, but still.
Fed income tax : 15% (varies, but on average) State income tax : 3.5% (varies a lot, but that's the middle ground in VA) SS : 6% (actually 6.2) Medicare : 1.5% (actually 1.45)
Total : 26% I'm not sure how you're going to exempt social security. It's a forced garnishment from your paycheck. Everything the government collects from you is supposedly to pay you back or benefit you, so that aspect of SS isn't any different, except I suppose it's the one tax they track historically as you pay it. I personally don't count on it when I retire, as there's nothing to guarantee it, and analysts are projecting it to dissolve before I'll reach the age to benefit from it. But I digress...
Many states also drop a state sales tax on you, and in Virginia, that's a whopping 4.5%
In addition, localities exert their own taxes, my current one levies a 1% sales tax, in addition to a 4% tourist tax that affects many things I enjoy locally, for example any dine in restaurant. There are also a multitude of ways they stick you with extra taxes in the form of fees : parking fees, county stickers, property taxes (the stickers cost additional money on top of the property tax). Now, everyone's mileage will vary here, so I'm just going to round this one off to a 2% sales tax.
Add this all up and you're over the 30% mark. Live in a particularly bad state like NJ, or a high tax city, or make more money accelerating your income tax beyond 15%, and I could see these numbers climbing higher. Not sure what the reference for 50% was, but I wouldn't rule it out in some circumstances.
Virginia + Fed is a whopping 37.4 cents per gallon as of 2005, and they have made noises in the Congress of raising it again, in spite of all the tax cuts Bush like to promise. This not only affects your own travel, it jacks the price of anything you purchase.
See, this is where the argument of the tax hitting you several times comes to play. The gallon of milk you buy at the store pays the farmer about 11 cents. I've got family in New York, I know. By the time you buy it, it's up to 4 dollars, and you actually had to make 5 dollars to use that 4 to buy the milk. In between, the farmer got taxed, the transport company got taxed, the store got taxed, you got taxed when you bought it, and you got taxed again if you drive your car to and from the store. If all those taxes weren't in place, you wouldn't have to spend 50 times what the farmer got for the milk. All those taxes just drive the price to the final consumer, which tends to be you and me. So it IS my dollar that eats all the tax. I can't vouch it adds up to 50%, I'm too simple when it comes to all that math, but I can appreciate that it's the little guy that bares the burden.
I'm actually glad to hear that. From what I've seen so far of the "game" - it's basically playdough + pacman, with a horrible RTS at the end to look forward to. If the game is constantly changing the world's dynamics to create challenges for your current creature, the feeling of progress is soon lost - this was one of the things that made FF8 feel like such a fluke in a line of decent RPGs. The customization aspect is neat, the game engine looks good, but they need to think about how to add a little more game to it.
So they pay 33% taxes. So do we, the difference is in what you elect the government to spend the money on. They got free lunches, we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire solar system several times over. Now since it really doesn't matter who destroys the planet as we all die anyways, I'd rather have the free lunch.
I have my Microsoft updater running, set to only download critical updates. Apparently, mine and Microsoft's view of a critical update differ slightly, because the other night as I'm about to shut down the comp for the night, I get that little (psst, we're about to install some updates, just click ok). So I've learned better, I look to see wtf I'm about to take up the ass, and low and behold it's Microsoft's Genuine Advantage notification tool, which remarkably doesn't come with an uninstaller.
I guess what I'm trying to say is may the lawyers and RIAA and all there friends go hug a cactus naked in the snow.
It's all pretty easy to predict after the nuclear war:
year 16: bleak year 17: bleak year 18...
Seriously though, more and more scientists and even politicians are waking up to the fact that humankind is constantly changing its environment. Some are saying that the small rises in global temperatures these past couple years may have triggered the increase in hurricane activity and strength we are seeing. Makes sense to me - from a laymans point of view higher temperature = more energy = stronger storm.
As we consume more and more energy, and our ability to shape our environment ever increases, I could see a 30 year simulation as being a good tool for arguing for more green policies, but I don't see it being that good for predicting the next "big one". The intelligent practice would be that if you live in an earthquake prone zone, you build things to withstand earthquakes, not wait until just before you think one's going to strike. Same with hurricanes, tsunamies, etc. If you can't construct something that can withstand it, construct something you can move out of harms way.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree at all that spamhouse should fight this at this level. For an Illinois court to even consider this case, let alone side with the spammer, tells me someone got paid. Screw that court, appeal it at a federal level, and argue the case there. Besides, there needs to be a national level precedent that you can't sue someone for logging your repeated spamming and making a list of these loggings public.
So I'm guessing, since EA + DICE did BF2, and DICE was working on BF2142, that we won't see a huge change. EA's hand was already in the honeypot, this is just to ensure the authors can't use EA to publish the game, get famous, and then leap out on their own and take the BF name with them. Or at least if they do, it will cost them. I wonder what/if Sid Meier had to pay to keep the Civ name after developing under Microprose? I know companies like that have contract clauses that basically say if you developed it while working here, it belongs to us.
Although if they are going to present a dancing clown, doing it in a game with plenty of tanks and guns to blow it up is the way to go!
I'd daresay we could even "train" for it.
Please.
Videogames do not train you how to shoot a gun. They don't teach you how to handle yourself in a lifethreatening situation. They don't help make you run faster.
They are a good teambuilding exercise, but certainly not a core piece of developing a person into a deadly machine.
That said, that title/summary is very very misleading. The article should have been - 8 independant game developers create CS like game with more realistic terrorist target. No where in here do I see the Government sponsoring the game, or training terrorists with it.
And I promise you - if it picks up widespread exposure perfectly patriotic, Republican Americans will pick up this game, and play on the terrorists side. Why? Because inevitably people that suck at shooters always play the good guys.
In other news - Sweden stealth supports software piracy, err, I mean free software!
You know - what is Sweden's immigration policy?
Funny, Star Wars was the first thing to pop in my head too.
Damn prequels.
I think this is an awesome idea for development - let the whole world offer solutions and spend only a million dollars. Most companies would spend that much just on a consultant team to tell them their current system sucks.
I'd like to add on that it was just a week or two ago, a man basically went storming into the US Capitol building with a loaded weapon, and the police did not respond with lethal force.
Having a gun is like having a condom - it's much better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
The thing is, Clinton's administration got some bad intel, took a small calculated risk, and shot. Innocents died. It wasn't good. But this Bush administration got some bad intel, created a global case for destabalizing a country, still currently occupies said country because they are the only reasonable authority left, and costs us 1000s of lives and billions of dollars. You're comparing apples to orchards.
And let me remind you, whichever administration currently runs our government, possesses and can use over 20,000 nuclear weapons.
Hope to see you at the polls in November.
"...Rockstar Games -- of a civil conspiracy, saying they should have foreseen their entertainment would spawn such copycat lawsuits."
FFS - I know these people have got to be pissed, and it saddens me that they have lost their children - but jumping on the bandwagon to sue whoever the media has most recently pointed the "bad thing" finger at just to try and get 600 million dollars is flat out BS, and shows just how little they actually know about the things that are a part of today's culture.
I know this is a dead horse, but kids don't learn behaviors from video games unless there is a complete absense of parental role model. If mom and dad aren't around, yes, kids can fill that role with anything - violence, sex, drugs, anything that stimulates. Chances are better than worse the kid's gonna find a bad role model and follow it. Squelching entertainment isn't going to fix a damn thing. The solution is better parenting, not trying to isolate children from the concept of violence.
"A good rule of thumb is that when a PC game is touted as having 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect about 16; when a console game touts 40 hours of gameplay, you can expect 200. That's just the way it is, and has always been in my experience."
Eh, that's because when you play a game on the PC, and you get stuck, you can Alt Tab and go to gamefaqs, find a way past it, and move on. With a console that requires too much work, so you instead plug away at it. PC games tend to offer more save and restore features, lessening repetition while learning an obstacle. Most "40 hour games" only take 10 hours tops to finish, the rest is the learning curve.
One might also look at the development devoted to each group - Console games seem to get far more attention these days...
"Because of limited shelf space, they just don't want it (number 21) around. It's just not worth having it compared to game number 20 twice, or better yet, The Sims and all of its expansions"
I used to love going to Babbages/Gamestop/Best Buy and seeing some 80-120 games available to choose from. Part of the experience was the selection, seeing all the innovative things out there, and choosing from them. Now that you're down to just the top dog hits, it's not as fun.
So anymore, I just browse the game reviews. Thing is, I rarely go buy what I read reviews about. The impulse buy just isn't there. I think the gaming companies (or more accurately, their distributors) have really missed that.
Interesting indeed. I think today's social gamer is more inclined to play against a human opponent, no matter how "humanlike" you can make a bot/AI. There's just no "I one-upped you" thrill from outplaying a computer.
No warm glow of teamwork from your AI henchmen helping you through a challenging encounter.
However, in any situation where you do have computer controlled entities, a miserably bad AI can detract very much from the game. I hate to use it an example - but look at World of Warcraft. If a mob can't pathfind to you, it just evade bugs, creating a very surreal environment, especially when all you did to avoid a valid path was jump on top of a small rock.
It's because '06 blew. Every magazine I read indicated that if you had 05, not to bother with 06. So now you've got all your rabid foaming at the mouth by every year's game crowd, combined with the more conservative skip a year or two crowd, all lined up to buy the game.
08 projection? Don't even bother making the game. Sell a box with last year's game in it again, then make waves in 09. That's what six figure salaries suits call "a three-year-plan".
As more non-star bodies that are found, eventually the spectrum of features will be all over the place. If the choice were mine, I'd call the classic nine planets, leave it there, and forget about deciding for a few more centuries.
That's how I feel too. Call everything a natural solar satellite, and leave me my nine planets. At this point I think we know enough about science to move beyond calling them wanderers, and as has been stated earlier in this article the sun and moon were originally planets too. We'll have to continue to modify our definition of planets every time the group of natural solar satellites doesn't break nicely into planets and non-planets, until we finally give up and find a better way to classify them. Fact is, to the non science buffs, Pluto will be the ninth planet, and people that don't give a fuck will continue to remember the nine planets, count themselves amatuer astronomers, and move on to things that matter in their lives.
If you think Pluto should not be a Planet, ask yourself this : if Earth was no longer classified as a Planet, would you feel comfortable letting go of that? Or would you continue to use the word Planet to mean "fat round thing circling the sun"? This is why scientists should stick to using and changing the definition of unpronouncable latin words, because once it becomes common language, it's not up for redefinition by a group of 424 whitecoat shmucks.
"In reality, this isn't really what the article is talking about. They are talking more about the way UO did it. You could basically have like 675 points allocated to various skills, with 100 being the maximum. With about 40-50 skills (I don't remember how many) you could really have diverse characters. But you didn't. The best players had 6 skills at 100, with the other 75 points scattered. And most of the players had those 100 points in the same things, with the only variations often being weapon type."
This is why skill based systems fail. Either you get to cherry pick the best skills, or they have to use some kind of dependancy system, which is back to the same failures of classes - you get/develop abilities that your character may or may not want. It's also a developer's nightmare to balance, especially if pvp is in the game, which modern day demands.
Download as many viruses and trojans as possible, then any cleanings of the registry could have been excused that the defendant was trying to remove the trojans. Plus if you screw up your computer with enough of them, it won't boot anymore.
Plan B : Attempt to water cool your graphics card, then oopsie it.
From an investment standpoint, that's absolutely correct, and it's the concept that's so hard to grasp. The $10^9 country will have much lower total profits, but if you were looking to buy shares in one company or the other, you would be able to buy a much larger chuck of the smaller company than you would of the larger company. Either way, as an investor what you are really worried about is your Return on Investment (ROI). If you buy shares in the company growing at a 15% /year rate, you would expect to see the same return in the money you invested, as compared to the 3% in the larger company.
This is why everyone doesn't just flock out and buy stock in Walmart or Microsoft. Sure, the company is huge, but it's how fast the company grows that determines what an individual investor can make off it.
The fact is, if you sit and do nothing, like you take all your money and stick it in a sock drawer, you lose to inflation. If you put the money into secure investments like savings bonds, you should sit on or barely beat the inflation rate. If you invest in stocks, but make less money than you would have simply sticking the money in the bank, then yes, you lost.
It doesn't really matter when you are talking about 10 bucks. Or even 100 bucks. It's when you are looking at 10s of 1000s of dollars, like people's retirement funds, or inheritances, or what not, that it makes a difference.
Well, on a somewhat less expensive solution, you could just write your congressman / woman yourself. While everything I've ever sent to the oval office has gone into the trash, I actually did get a response back from my House rep the other day. Most people think about it as a great idea, few people actually do it. But if it's any incentive, the fewer people that do something the more weight granted to those that do. For example, when you vote, if only half the eligible voters turn out, your opinion counts for two. In the example of writing to your congressman, if only 1 per 1000 do it, your opinion counts for a 1000 people. If this post encourages 1000 people to write to Congress, I've essentially just persuaded a million people. That's real change.
/.ers,
If everyone that read this actually wrote a letter to congress (write to your rep, not just to congress as a whole) seeking stronger privacy laws, with a simple but well framed arguement why it's important to us, you would see real change. But we've got to make it an issue, because they are receiving letters every day about the war(s), about immigration, about the minimum wage increase. If you don't let them know it's important to you, even a strong advocate of privacy will have a hard time moving legislation through the commitees and floor. A PAC might buy us a representative or two in Congress, but it won't be enough to get people looking at the importance of the issue.
If you don't know how to get ahold of your rep, or for lack of political participation can't figure out who your rep is, visit here : www.congress.org
But be careful! I've read through their privacy policy, and it, much like EA's, is pretty invasive, including the option to sell your personal information. Still, you can use their site to figure out who you want to contact, and take matters to your own hands from there.
Best wishes
Mike
"Old folks home puts Chinese gold farmers out of business...."
or even better:
"Blizzard bans 14,000 accounts of seniors selling gold to pay their medical bills."
Hell, if I have anything to say about it, I'll still be playing an MMO when I'm retired.
"The only way that the numbers in the US get anywhere close to 50% is when people illogically count the tax on a dollar, not a person"
I don't think it's so much that as counting the purchasing power of your dollar after subtracting out all the different times that you are taxed. I don't think you arrive at 50% unless you have a horrible accountant or are very very wealthy, but still.
Fed income tax : 15% (varies, but on average)
State income tax : 3.5% (varies a lot, but that's the middle ground in VA)
SS : 6% (actually 6.2)
Medicare : 1.5% (actually 1.45)
Total : 26%
I'm not sure how you're going to exempt social security. It's a forced garnishment from your paycheck. Everything the government collects from you is supposedly to pay you back or benefit you, so that aspect of SS isn't any different, except I suppose it's the one tax they track historically as you pay it. I personally don't count on it when I retire, as there's nothing to guarantee it, and analysts are projecting it to dissolve before I'll reach the age to benefit from it. But I digress...
Many states also drop a state sales tax on you, and in Virginia, that's a whopping 4.5%
In addition, localities exert their own taxes, my current one levies a 1% sales tax, in addition to a 4% tourist tax that affects many things I enjoy locally, for example any dine in restaurant. There are also a multitude of ways they stick you with extra taxes in the form of fees : parking fees, county stickers, property taxes (the stickers cost additional money on top of the property tax). Now, everyone's mileage will vary here, so I'm just going to round this one off to a 2% sales tax.
Add this all up and you're over the 30% mark. Live in a particularly bad state like NJ, or a high tax city, or make more money accelerating your income tax beyond 15%, and I could see these numbers climbing higher. Not sure what the reference for 50% was, but I wouldn't rule it out in some circumstances.
And we haven't even opened the discussion on the gas tax:
http://www.gaspricewatch.com/usgastaxes.asp
Virginia + Fed is a whopping 37.4 cents per gallon as of 2005, and they have made noises in the Congress of raising it again, in spite of all the tax cuts Bush like to promise. This not only affects your own travel, it jacks the price of anything you purchase.
See, this is where the argument of the tax hitting you several times comes to play. The gallon of milk you buy at the store pays the farmer about 11 cents. I've got family in New York, I know. By the time you buy it, it's up to 4 dollars, and you actually had to make 5 dollars to use that 4 to buy the milk. In between, the farmer got taxed, the transport company got taxed, the store got taxed, you got taxed when you bought it, and you got taxed again if you drive your car to and from the store. If all those taxes weren't in place, you wouldn't have to spend 50 times what the farmer got for the milk. All those taxes just drive the price to the final consumer, which tends to be you and me. So it IS my dollar that eats all the tax. I can't vouch it adds up to 50%, I'm too simple when it comes to all that math, but I can appreciate that it's the little guy that bares the burden.
I'm actually glad to hear that. From what I've seen so far of the "game" - it's basically playdough + pacman, with a horrible RTS at the end to look forward to. If the game is constantly changing the world's dynamics to create challenges for your current creature, the feeling of progress is soon lost - this was one of the things that made FF8 feel like such a fluke in a line of decent RPGs. The customization aspect is neat, the game engine looks good, but they need to think about how to add a little more game to it.
So they pay 33% taxes. So do we, the difference is in what you elect the government to spend the money on. They got free lunches, we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire solar system several times over. Now since it really doesn't matter who destroys the planet as we all die anyways, I'd rather have the free lunch.
I can't play Titan's quest for more than 15 minutes without the game crashing. But I'm sure that's not contributing to the lack of sales...
I have my Microsoft updater running, set to only download critical updates. Apparently, mine and Microsoft's view of a critical update differ slightly, because the other night as I'm about to shut down the comp for the night, I get that little (psst, we're about to install some updates, just click ok). So I've learned better, I look to see wtf I'm about to take up the ass, and low and behold it's Microsoft's Genuine Advantage notification tool, which remarkably doesn't come with an uninstaller.
I guess what I'm trying to say is may the lawyers and RIAA and all there friends go hug a cactus naked in the snow.
It's all pretty easy to predict after the nuclear war:
year 16: bleak
year 17: bleak
year 18...
Seriously though, more and more scientists and even politicians are waking up to the fact that humankind is constantly changing its environment. Some are saying that the small rises in global temperatures these past couple years may have triggered the increase in hurricane activity and strength we are seeing. Makes sense to me - from a laymans point of view higher temperature = more energy = stronger storm.
As we consume more and more energy, and our ability to shape our environment ever increases, I could see a 30 year simulation as being a good tool for arguing for more green policies, but I don't see it being that good for predicting the next "big one". The intelligent practice would be that if you live in an earthquake prone zone, you build things to withstand earthquakes, not wait until just before you think one's going to strike. Same with hurricanes, tsunamies, etc. If you can't construct something that can withstand it, construct something you can move out of harms way.
They all drove home smug in their SUVs.