Mame just turned 15, IIANM. I still keep a running mame 0.35, with roms, from around 1999, because it always works, and plays the 1980s games just fine. It would be quite lovely to be able to point chrome at a file location and run a game. God I'm lazy now....

I don't know how many individuals pay and effective 71% tax rate on their person income.

People pay it on their gross. Exxon made $477 billion, and paid taxes at a lower rate than a person who made those numbers.

In 2008, ExxonMobil (one of the favorite targets of the Left) made $45 billion in net profit; they paid $34.5 billion in sales taxes, $41.7 billion in other taxes and duties, and $36.5 billion in income taxes

Sales taxes? When those are generally charged, the person buying pays them. Why do they get to claim them when no other business collecting and passing on the customer's payments counts them? I guess it doesn't matter fiscally if you take them in and pay them out equally, but put it on the report and nutjobs count sales taxes as something the corporation pays. And "other taxes" is in a financial statement. They call the fees for removing oil from the ground in Alaska "taxes." They run ads on TV stating they are "taxes." However, the reality is that the oil is owned by the State of Alaska, and they are paying below market value for the oil, and paying for what isn't theirs is "taxes" because it's owned by the government? Yeah, that really counts as taxes.

And this also means that basically 25% of the cost of the gas you pump into your car is used to pay the taxes that ExxonMobil pays to the Government. On top of the ~$0.60 per gallon in direct taxation you pay (at least here in Washington State). On that $3/gallon of gas, ExxonMobil is making about $0.28; the Government is $1.35.

$0.184 per gallon goes to the feds, and $0.36 to the state, in the state of WA. You are speaking like the "sales taxes" you counted don't include the excise taxes. It's a corporate cashflow, they have to account for the cash, even if it isn't theirs. You are counting the excise money twice. And counting it against their tax percentage. And "other taxes and duties" seems to me to be nothing more than fees for taking oil. It's part of the cost of the oil, as the resources are often owned by governments or shipped across borders. They paid 7.5% of their gross income (what people are taxed on) in income taxes. That's better than the average middle class family. So I don't see the problem, and it seems you have to use creative accounting to make it look like the poor oil companied are getting raped by the government by having to pay 7.5% of their income in income taxes.

You can do video chat on the PS3. And you can chat with multiple people at the same time. I've personally done it with three people. I don't know what the limit is. All you need is a PS3, a compatible webcam (could be a Playstation Eye, PS2 EyeToy, and there's various other webcams that supposedly work), and a network connection and you're done. Oh, sorry, replied too fast...missed the requirement about needing to be viewable on a PC. Well if that's not a strict requirement, then you can think about the PS3 option.

Well, I work for a media co based on a dead-tree newspaper, and that's the important thing. Make other media - websites, whatever, make money. Use the dead tree thing to drive clicks to the websites, and run em like they're extensions of the old broadsheet. My news/website is fine, started years ago. See wapo, nyt, etc. It's how you use your distribution and penetration in the market. Being a dead-tree newspaper is a start, or an ending, depending on how you build out.

I trust Colin Percival implicitly. His speaking matches his writing to an astonishing extent.

Nothing about why a kid would want to write programs.
My oldest son started playing on my MAME rig at the age of four, GBC/GBA emus at six. He loved the 8 bit Nintendo games.
By age eight I showed him GameMaker. Community, sprite sheets, people writing fan versions. He loved it.
I mean, I'd show him perl and shell and he'd be like, why? But being able to write your own games, that's a motivator for him.
He still does GM stuff, but spends most of his time in Flash, again because it does what he likes.

Context is everything, and awareness of relevant context is a differentiator between any communicators.
In a classroom written context, there will be fewer noticeable differences between native speakers.
As context becomes abstract and less predictable communication starts to break down. Things become less familiar. A great translator, transcriber, or interpreter knows how to adjust and compensate.

The ability to identify the communicating community context is rare. When we say "native speaker" it's a narrow reference to that person's context of familiarity, and I think several posts are trying to discuss this aspect of communication.

and beginning an obsessive hunt for compatible isa network cards so lynx could get to hotmail

The post about McLuhan was great. Also, see the work of Arthur Kroker in the early 90s. Mashups and social networks predicted. "Spasm" - it came with a cd!

There was also a post about newspapers persisting despite the net. Misses the point of this, and this is why tv won't die. The media companies make money with a business model that uses established dino media like newpaper and tv, to drive traffic to money making web based businesses. Pay some attention to what you are being sold, in a paper and on tv. Advertising is about an exchange of influence, not a messaging system. Paying big money for a campaign buys you stuff. That's why you do it. The ad message is largely irrelevant. The transaction is the important business, buying you important regulatory and oversight relief. Funny, eh?

And didn't Xenix have a lovely networking setup too... MSNet anyone? It is great to see NetBSD being recognized. Small fast slim and powerful, you have to know vi, and put on your own perl. What's not to like?

the customer with no mail has unrealistic expectations. when this is getting set up, it needs to be pointed out that it isn't controlled internally. free, but comes with risks. when i deploy google apps, i stress the privacy and advertising angle more than the reliability as far as potential issues to consider. the reliability speaks for itself, it is what it is, and what it will be. places need to assess if they want to plow dollars into their own infrastructure, or use the dollars on better people. for some places, the risk is worth it to get free email for their domain. since apps recently tied domain mail to outlook and other clients, a reason to not choose it was removed. an honest evaluation of the service needs to be given before a decision is made. here's what they do, here's what you get, here's what it would cost for me to do this in house.