The point is that there is the difference between a job as a way to get something done, and a job just for the sake of paying some people. Both are a job, but one gets something done, the other is just a fancy way to redistribute wealth.

Then again, considering that half the private IT projects and probably three quarters of government ones are about as needed as the pyramids, it's probably no wonder that so many people on this site are unable to see the difference :p

Well, maybe not as we know it today, but the idea of building something useless, or which you don't really need, as a way to give a wage to the poor has been used before. E.g., the follies in the 19'th century.

What makes it effectively welfare from the point of view of the state is that you're not really getting anything you need either way. I mean, if you pay to have a bridge built over a river to relieve a busy ferry, you've bought something useful with that money. If you build a bridge in the middle of a field, just to pay some workers, that's really what you get when people don't want to just pay any loafer but still want to feed some unemployed who want to work.

What Imhotep as high priest came up with is hard to describe as anything else than a religious BS rationalization for why the pharaoh should do that. It wasn't jump from a mastaba tomb (simple rectangular house, so to speak, as a crypt) to pyramid AND the whole complex around it, but also a tradition that it's sorta bad luck to stop building SOMETHING at it. The great pyramid for example, because the Pharaoh still wasn't dead after a long time, ended up with tunnels dug under it to nowhere and stuff like that.

It varies on which version you get - some of them you can (or could - been a couple of years since I used it). That is a warning sign though - some of the dev ones (with visual studio/etc) are testing only, same as MSDN.

Yep - the magic words to google are "Microsoft Action Pack Subscription" - for startups it's great. Tons of useful software for cheap. You may also qualify for BizSpark which is even better (and cheaper - although $500 isnt too bad.)

I like the idea, but I'd go even farther than that: Imhotep.

For a high priest of Ra, the guy wrote a thoroughly secular first medicine manual ever. As in, unlike even later texts from the same area, this guy doesn't do healing with prayers, amulets, etc, and just deals with stuff like washing and bandaging a wound, or extracting medicine from plants.

Also came up with an irrigation system that fed a whole lot of people.

And with the first pyramid. Though that actually doesn't do justice to his contribution to architecture. When you look at the complex of buildings around it, the guy was a frikken genius for that time. E.g., to support some tremendously heavy ceiling blocks, he used the first columns we know of in Egypt AND he figured out anchoring them to the walls for extra strength.

And actually he wrote the first manual of architecture too, which was used by Egyptians a long time after his death.

And arguably, if the pyramids were an early welfare system, in which people could volunteer to pull some blocks for a huge monument in exchange for a wage, this guy pretty much invented welfare.

And all that was happening in 2600 BC. I mean, even Hero was working in the Greek culture which was pretty scientific, and he had some giants on whose shoulders to stand. Imhotep was doing his stuff back when anything even resembling a scientific method OR philosophy wouldn't be discovered for another 2000 years.

It's really a shame that most people probably only know him as the magic-wielding undead villain of The Mummy. The guy really didn't deserve that.

In Australia; business taxes can be reclaimed against shareholders tax through a system called Franking Credits; there's a similar (but different) system setup for foreign investors - although a company can only pick one scheme or the other. Regardless, it's a bit of a moot point.

As a manager over a team in Shanghai; I can confirm that salaries are rapidly equalising there as well; you also need to pay very high payroll taxes (up to 40%); so the cost advantage is beginning to go away. (Where 5 years ago you could hire a team for the price of a single american developer; now you only get ~2 people)

On the upside; the food is better in China.

I'm pretty sure there's several amendments to it which have brought it periodically further up to date. I thought the last was 3.5?

And it's generally not a good idea to rely on C# >= 3.5 in Mono anyway; it tends to be missing fundamental features or functions.

Kinda. C# and .NET and the standard library are a ECMA and IEEE standard. (Microsoft pushed them in as standards), I'm not entirely sure if they did that royalty free (I have a feeling they did), but even if they didn't, ECMA/IEEE requires RAND licensing at worst.

A lot of the top selling iOS/Android games are done with Unity; which also uses C#/Mono. Actually the PS Suite SDK looks very similar to Unity in a lot of respects.

(Actually to take it a full loop; Unity pushes to the PS anyway, Rochard and a few others have gone cross-console with Unity)