Seems simple enough to me.
I have no issue with paying for PSN as long as the price is reasonable. I paid for XBox Live for years, before I got rid of my XBox. $60/yr is perfect, $5/mo. That's $5m per month with 1m users (random user number). I couldn't see servers, bandwidth, datacenter, licensing, and power costs being beyond $60m per year, but then again, IANA MMO SysAd. Any more than $60, and it will fail. Maybe they could get away with a $100/yr price if they included a full Skype client, with video...maybe.
eh hem...put on tin-foil conspiracy hat... Could this be the beginning of a real-world "Newspeak?" With everything else the UK has done in recent years, it is merely one more step toward 1984. For those unfamiliar with Orwellian Newspeak:
I've been looking for a replacement for my 12" G4 Powerbook and looked at the Dell Mini 12. Good dimensions and screen resolution, but what killed it for me was the Intel GMA 500 chipset and Atom N530. Underpowered and overpriced, plus flaky compatibility and lousy battery life. Its like a TFT maker had leftover panels and Intel had the junk leftover from making "quality" GMA 9x0 and N2x0 parts and sold it to Dell real cheap.
Roll in a candy coating and sell it for $100+ more than the good Mini 10 series and presto! A line that will be quickly discontinued because the geeks that actually buy netbooks know better.
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for the Federal Government.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for unaccountable entities whose primary responsibility is profit.
I don't think Shakrai was implying that education and health care should be run by for-profit corporation. Only that they should not be run by the Federal government. While I like my private health insurance, I believe that education should be run by the local government. Afterall, they should understand the local community better than any bureaucrat in D.C. or a state capital.
"The new "Star Trek" movie, opening next month, boldly goes where no "Trek" film has gone before: back to the beginning. It's set in the decades before the start of the TV series, returning to the young adulthoods of space adventurers James T. Kirk and Spock and their first voyage on the Starship Enterprise.
Some of Hollywood's biggest franchises, including "X-Men" and "Terminator," are taking a similar back-to-the-future approach this summer. To refresh familiar film sagas and grab new audiences, studios are increasingly offering up stories that trace the early years of popular characters and tell epics from their beginnings.
As a gamer, I've had my eye on a PSP for a while now, mainly for the piracy/hack factor. Its a nice little system that would be great for emulation and PSP games. But what is killing this system, other than the DS, is the Game Starvation. All one needs to do is compare the review lists at IGN (or your favorite game site). Games come out weekly for the DS, in bulk. Games come out in spurts for the PSP, a few here and there, sometimes months apart.
Plus when you go to the store, the PSP section always looks like a clearance section. Few games, broken/off displays, lots of empty spaces signifying "better days," and the same few crap games they had last time you stopped in.
Games sell systems. And "50 million" PSP gamers should be large enough to sell new, quality content to. Lack of games and a great system to do emulation on equals high piracy numbers. And lack of software sales is DIRECTLY ATTRIBUTABLE to available content. Just put together a Virtual Console like Nintendo with legal emulation and see how your software sales do.
Sony, want to turn your PSP software sales around? Then 1) sell the damn thing to developers! Your claimed user base should be more than enough to attract some good shops with interesting ideas and IP. 2) Hire new merchandise reps. Your store displays suck. 3) Keep publishing older games and keep them in stock. To sell more games they have to be available. 4) Stop trying to make every game a port or offshoot of a PS2/PS3 game.
When I'd go to Montreal, I'd get hit for GST and QST when I bought stuff. Then when I got back to Michigan, I was supposed to pay Duty/Use Tax for it. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that there's some IRS tax form that you can fill out to get GST and QST back, but unless its a big purchase, its more hassle than its worth. Granted, I was physically there and not shopping online.
It wouldn't surprise me though if us Americans enacted a sales tax based on company location, the Canadians would quickly pass something similar. So buy a product from NY, pay NY tax; buy QC, pay QC tax; buy CA, pay CA tax, etc. If this is the case, I can see many web businesses that aren't more than a warehouse and a website moving to low-tax locations to give them an advantage in pricing. Especially if the difference is great enough to justify the move. Or if the law allows to reincorporate in a "cheap" state and/or have a payment processing clerk there. 5 states have no sales tax: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.