>We, europeans see you like living in a police state

Do you live in the UK? I'd love for you to be from the UK, as that would be really rich. I'm surprised the UK hasn't mandated cameras strapped to the head of every citizen yet.

>Life in America is much worse nowadays than most of the rest of the world.

Bullfuckingshit. I've travelled the world. There's only a few places I'd love to live more than America, and those places aren't very practical places to live.

I haven't seen Into Darkness but a lot of this review covered what was painfully realized in the first movie: no longer is Trek about philosophy, ethics, tolerance, gray areas and real world problems. It's mostly absolute good versus absolute evil. I think the driving force behind the bad guy in the first movie was largely a misunderstanding ... which is incredibly boring. His motivation was confusingly laughable.

Unsurprisingly I'm pretty sure I heard JJ Abrams tell Jon Stewart that "he never liked Star Trek" on The Daily Show. Well, now he's had a chance to kill it by turning it 100% into a modern day blockbuster action flick and shirking any attempt to tackle an interesting philosophical or ethical dilemma as the main plot. As the modern reemergence of comic book and super hero movies have shown, those films are a dime a dozen that anyone can do. Tackling something deeper while still holding our attention is the hard part. The Watchmen was a good candidate for it but fell short. I'm sure JJ Abrams would rather cover up the complicated parts that question good versus evil with another lens flare.

Yep. I made the mistake of watching the 2009 Star Trek. It was a disaster of a movie. A lot of people have told me they think it's a good movie, just not a good Trek movie, but I don't think it's even a very good movie on its own rights. Horrible plot. Horrible characterization. Horrible product placement.

>I bet you that they have immunity of some sort. That is the problem

Sure, so maybe you won't get the legislators thrown in jail (unless you can prove bribery by the red light cam companies), but a reasonably unbribed judge should throw out the lessened yellow light delays and overturn the tickets.

That's exactly what happened here in San Diego when the exact same thing happened. We've since removed red light cams entirely.

Baldur's Gate stored various things as unsigned shorts, IIRC.

There was a monster called the nishruu that would drain charges off your magic items. So after one combat, I found I now had a charged magic item with 32,000-ish charges on it.

Since the gold value of magic items was proportional to the number of charges remaining, I sold it and never needed to worry about money again in the game.

Of course it has an effect.

But shutting down a lane of the I-5 or the I-405 is much worse.

>Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?

Yes, because there is such a massive leap in population density when you hit the LA County border. That must explain it!

Orange County is part of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, so it serves as a good natural experiment demonstrating the effects the different policies have had since the 1970s.

Orange County has bad traffic. Los Angeles has indescribably shitty traffic.

>Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion.

Yeah, see that's the nice thing about empirical evidence. It shows you're completely full of it. Orange County was able to scale its freeways and has maintained a consistently busy but usable road network. LA is still using the same roads from 40 years ago, a fact that is lost on idiots like you that think it is "proof" that roads do not scale.

Of course, you might be right insofar as they've gone so far down the rabbit hole, they have no chance to dig themselves out now. It'd probably be a billion dollars (that they don't have) just to fix the I-5/I-10 interchange.

"The 405 Freeway runs from the northern end of the San Fernando Valley all the way down to El Torro and runs by LAX."

And is a complete and total piece of shit. Unlike Orange County, which has been upgrading its road network for the last 40 years, LA in the 1970s diverted money away from roads and into mass transit systems (subway, light rail, bus). The net result is the completely clogged arteries of the city, which its vaunted bus network needs dedicated lanes to even barely function in.

Everyone knows when they reach the boundary between OC and LA. Going one way, it opens up from 25MPH to 85MPH. Coming the other way, it slams down from 85MPH to 25MPH.

Also, it's spelled El Toro.

Me, too.

  34 ms 35 ms 34 ms cr2-tengig0-7-3-0.sanfrancisco.savvis.net
  85 ms 99 ms 85 ms cr2-tengig-0-7-0-0.chicago.savvis.net

20mbps Uverse in the states, 85-95ms ping time, for fuck's sake.

>No. The judge isn't allowed to consider those other pieces of legislation and non-legislation that you provided. The judge is only allowed to look at the relevant law

Uh, no. Judges have to look at all relevant laws, and adjudicate them if they conflict, and work to make sure no law is made to be pointless by another.

Read Bush v. Gore some time.

At a certain point, the police load will grow great enough that the city needs to build another police station.

Any way you want to cut it, the proportionate load that Microsoft places on the system is far less than the amount of taxes they pay.

In a town with 100 people, the marginal cost of adding 1 more person to police protective services is 1% of the current budget. This is identical to you saying all 101 people should pay equal amounts.

If that one new person pays 100x the taxes of the other citizens, he's not a "leech". He's a net contributor to government, not a net drain.

>As I pointed out: If you're driving somewhere and I get a ride with you, the fair price for me to pay is at least to split the gas costs. If I only pay the "Marginal" cost of adding me to the trip, I'm not paying my fair share. Likewise, if every person only paid the marginal cost of their existence, the price that it would cost to add them presuming everyone else was still there, it does NOT ADD UP TO THE FULL PRICE.

Great, thanks for agreeing with me.

Microsoft employs 57,000 people in America, or a hundreth of one percent.

Therefore they are liable for no more than $642M a year in order to pay "their fair share".

Thanks for playing.

>Recently an Australian telephone exchange burned down in Warrnambool

Move.

-Xbox Creative Director

>1) How much does Microsoft BENEFIT from the government? Enforcement on Microsoft software requires a complete legal system, educated judges and lawyers, an educated public to sit on juries. It requires roads for these people to move around, social services to keep these people alive. It's not a simple calculation, like you try to make it sound. Microsoft couldn't exist in a vacuum.

What is Microsoft's MARGINAL cost to government? If Microsoft vanished overnight, we'd still have judges, a public education system, and so forth.

>The word marginal is a weasel word here - it implies that society would pay everything that was necessary without Microsoft, and that MS should just add the difference.

The word marginal is key. It's all these nonsense Elizabeth Warren arguments that pretend that if Microsoft doesn't pay for bloody everything, they're not paying enough.

>they rely on the protection of the military, who as I pointed out benefit THEM far more than anyone else.

The military protects everyone in America equally. Until we invade China over pirated copies of MS Office, I think your argument isn't going to fly.

>PS: Nice goalpost move from BillyG -> Microsoft

The arguments apply equally well. Bill Gates pays far more into government than he receives back. Does his kid even go to public school? How many poor kids can go to school because of Gates' property taxes?

Actually, we can calculate that. His house is worth $150M. Property tax in WA is 1%. He pays therefore $1.5M per year in property tax. It costs roughly $10k/student to go to public school. Therefore Gates is supporting 150 homeless kids (i.e. who are paying no property tax at all) on his nickel. While his kid doesn't benefit from public schooling at all, AFAIK.

Tell me again how he's a leech.