Let me get this straight: you want to tax corporate interests so much that they want to leave the US. And when they do, somehow you feel that's a good thing as there is "less competition for real American businesses"?

Do you honestly believe that would be the result? I don't believe you thought your cunning plan all the way through.

While Discovery Channel is paying these families, I really don't feel encouraged to have a lot of children. In fact, because of those shows I'm becoming more supportive of forced sterilization. Starting with the Duggars...

I think this being the Discovery Channel has a lot to do with it. It's interesting to me anyway.

No pricing nor benchmarks. The article is purely a discussion about the architecture.

Not entirely, but it becomes much more expensive to start up a new project. Getting rid of ACES only to start over from scratch doesn't seem like a wise business decision. Still, I don't think Flight is a true reboot of MSFS- it may just be a simpler game wrapped around a simple flight engine (like Pilotwings), dumbed down for a wider (and more attention-deficit) audience.

I wouldn't be surprised to see if Microsoft does the same with Age of Empires- AOE and AOK, (and to some extent, III) were all fairly complex as far as tech trees and counter strategies, especially compared to more mainstream RTSes like C&C and Starcraft.

Coincidently, Microsoft "lost" the Ensemble team who did the original AOE games in a similar way it "lost" the ACES team, yet similarities end there. MS is contracting the former Ensemble devs (under Robot Entertainment) to do AOE Online, but it appears Flight is being done in-house.

You notice when Microsoft is trying to reach out to a large audience and advertise one of their own products, they don't force Silverlight down our throats?

Patents are a monopolistic privileges granted by the government, as they require government assistance to enforce. Most prominent anarcho-capitalists (ie- the ones who oppose any regulation) are strongly opposed to the idea of patents, and many oppose all forms of intellectual property- though the philosophy that one can "own" ideas is largely independent of the economic spectrum.

ROTT actually came after Doom.

ROTT did not have diagonal walls- the wall placement was still orthogonal, just like Wolfenstein. The floors and ceilings were fixed throughout the level, but the ceiling height could differ from one level or the next, or be nonexistent. The illusion of stairs was brought by sprites (gravitational anomaly disks?) that changed perspective depending on their vertical relationship to the player.

Heretic, OTOH, used the Doom engine and added y-shearing for looking up and down- it wasn't perspective-correct, but it did the job.

I don't believe there was much of an incremental steps between Wolfenstein and Doom, but there were some incremental steps between Doom and Quake. The Build engine, used by Duke Nukem 3D and other games (Shadow Warrior, Blood, Redneck Rampage, etc) allowed slanted floors, horizontal wall movement, and rooms-above-rooms.

Well, it's conceivable that this guy is his own grandfather, so why not?

Neither did Apple. They gave away cases.

I agree, a 22 would have been better. First time I shot a 30.06 was when I was 17, and weighed 130 lbs. And it still felt like it had ripped off my shoulder- not to mention the scope left a permanent scar above my eyebrow. 13 year holds should not be shooting higher caliber weapons than they can physically handle, even if it's to prove a point.

It's Bring search, you plick!

Taiwan != China

Well, at least to the Taiwanese anyway...

The Nexus One had a subsidized option if you went the T-mobile route.

I'm surprised AT&T hasn't caught on with you yet- I had originally done the same with my Nexus One. I was on the $10 Medianet plan with AT&T, until they either got ahold of IMEI numbers for the N1 or figured out that my data usage (about a gig/month) must have come from a smartphone. In April, I received an email from AT&T telling me that "for my convenience" they switched me to the correct smartphone plan. Now I'm stuck paying ~$100/month for the cheapest voice plan plus unlimited data and texts and not much else.