Perl is a very good language to learn as a beginner. You don't have to go into all the cool uber geek tricks to make it do incredible amounts of work. The syntax is easy to learn for simple programs.

And I might be a bit biased here, but why not dish out a dose of BASIC on an emulator? While BASIC 2.0 on a C64 doesn't provide good graphics and audio controls, BASIC 7.0 on a C128 does. Very importantly is that this could give some pretty instant gratification to a kid who might be interested in writing a game. The VICE emulator provides C128 emulation that would be good for this.

I have no moderator points right now, but those who do need to moderate the parent, "Funny as Hell."
 

And while I know I will ultimately lose this battle, thomasdz, YOUR Slashdot ID (178114) is too high. :)

I had no idea Neverwinter Nights was a game back then. And an MMORPG to boot. I was living in the C64 world until 1997 so I had no real desire to keep up with the PC world. I was/am a very big an of the gold box D&D games and I feel totally and completely cheated!

I feel obligated to quote "Demon Hunters: Dead Camper Lake", one of the best movies I have ever seen:

When life hands you lemons, kick him in the nuts and say, "I wanted a beer, bitch!"

I want radically different gravity so I can be cool like Vegeta.

Wow! That would have been nice to know! I think they should have advertised that better. But to be honest, $10 off a $50 game when I just paid $50 for the previous version isn't really a good discount. I would not have gone for it. Instead I would have bought Halo.

I'm sure I'll get labeled as something negative here, but at those prices and with as much overlapped content as there was, I would want a 50% discount for the game. Or rather, I would expect a refund to bring the final price down to $25 based on the receipt.

But thanks for the feedback! In the future when I want something like this, I'll keep my eyes more open. As it was, I didn't bother to look because I figured it would never happen!

There are other factors to consider too. I purchased Unreal Tournament 2003 based on how much I liked the first game and the demo for 2003.

Rumor had it that Halo was never going to be released on the PC in order to bolster Xbox sales. Lo and behold, that turned out to be false and one year later, Unreal Tournament 2004 comes out to compete with Halo.

What was 2004 but 2003 + vehicles? While I loved the demo, I was pissed that I spent $50 on the game only to have the next one come out 1 year later. Of course, I didn't buy it even though the demo rocked. Had they offered a good discount to 2003 customers, I probably would have bought it.

There are no doubt other factors than this, but release dates too close to each other (whether to competitor's products or your own) are definitely a very big problem.

I understand this was about taxes, but from a non-tax point of view, you can actually come out ahead by other benefits qualifications.

A single mother where I used to work was making a certain wage. Because of how low her income was, she was able to get child care subsidy from the state. She was told she was going to get a raise of $0.25/hour. It was going to put her total annual income over the limit and disqualify her for the subsidy which was worth about $2.00/hour. She asked to only be given an $0.11/hour raise so she would not go over the income limit. $0.25/hour was the maximum annual pay raise for her position and she was going to nursing school part time. She was going to be out of there in a couple of years making more money as a nurse so she came out ahead by making less money.

While reducing income will not help with lowered taxes, it can help with other things and this should not be forgotten.

Wow! Had I posted this on a site whose users had at least half a brain, that would have been modded funny.

The previous comment was funny. This one is the troll, you stupid fucks.

News from theonion.com? That's more legit than Apple's advertising team in the 1970s. Mac fans probably wont be able to tell the difference!

Not so fast. Gaming on Linux doesn't have to be on the PC. The PS3 runs Linux well. It has decent hardware for gaming purposes already built in. If game developers were to develop games that would run on a PS3 Linux using open APIs, it could be easily recompiled to run on a PC running Linux. Now you've developed for two platforms at the same time.

What we need is very real and very serious (possibly commercial) support of Linux on at least one game console to make this work. Once game devs see that their competition is making more profit on a model like this, they will start to migrate to that platform. So perhaps the console manufacturers need to look at this. Sony did a half-assed attempt at this years ago, but if they (or a third party) introduced official support for a Linux OS on their console, they could make Linux gaming happen and bring more devs to their platform.