Here, (in Kansas), liquor stores have to close at 11pm. 8pm on Sundays. Bars and etc are allowed to serve until 2am. It's all rather silly and annoying, since I tend to think "a beer sounds nice, should go buy some" around 11:30.

I agree that this is true in theory, but my experience thus far is that things are very.. quirky.

I ran Win7 until I moved to Win8 about a month ago, and getting games that ran fine before to start is sometimes an issue, particularly games that use GFWL, ironically. Other weirdness is not uncommon as well.

Another issue I'm having, though honestly it's hard to pin fault for this, is that every boot I need to reinstall graphics drivers (nvidia), or games will just crash if they use dx10/11.. the error can even be traced back to something nvidia-related via the event viewer.

It's not the end of the world, but you'd think most games, especially GFWL games, would work just was well in Win8 as 7.

People will say that it's a new OS, and that things will be fixed in time, but they're missing the point. the ball is being dropped, and other platforms look more attractive because of it. Plus, I used Win7 starting at the first RC and never had any extra issues getting games to run, unless they were games that didn't run without hacks in vista either.

Considering that loads of places with free wifi exist (even if there are still other cost issues like transportation), it's still more cost effective to just download things if you're going to make effort to get them.. the only thing I could fathom being worth purchasing physical bootlegs of would be hd video content, particularly 1080p content, as going somewhere to download that could be impractical.

Obviously this requires access to a computer that is not completely locked down, but you'd need one to use mp3s as well.

It should also be noted that the above is only reasonable for the developed world, but that's what I assume we're talking about given that TFA is about the USA.

I would assume that anyone intelligent enough to want/be able to use mp3s would also be smart enough to just go home and torrent it, so they aren't much of a market.

Pretty sure bittorrent hashes things for a reason..

I've never heard of nvidia having anticompetitive practices.. not questioning you, just curious if someone could expand on it.

I would counter that while you're right in the short term, they say forever. It seems unlikely that the current desktop form factor will persist recognizably forever, since eventually we'll probably just have implants showing us whatever we want via thought, and all sorts of fancy stuff like that.

But it'll probably persist for quite a while yet.

The real question is if this could be simply used to make an updated version of the tribes 2 linux client.. assuming that was even built on the same engine.

We could pay everyone more to work less. Everyone should work at least a little, ideally, but with how little people are paid if they don't do something "important", we're going to have problems, I agree.

It frustrates me seeing legislators attempting to further sales tax even though it does more harm than good, as far as I can tell. It hurts those with little money by giving them less buying power, especially in those states where food is subject to sales tax, though even past that it makes things harder.

Sure it rewards you for saving (though, I thought we were trying to encourage consumerism to keep the economy healthy, but that's something else...), but those that can afford to save can afford to pay a little more taxes, so it's a bit of a non sequitur as far as I can tell.

It's not that I don't want to pay taxes.. I'm perfectly fine with paying income tax, and having to pay based on my ability, it's that sales tax messes that up, such that the poor, who have no option to spend most or all of their income (assuming they want to eat and stay healthy, anyway), end up being taxed more than is helpful or fair.

Can anyone provide a legitimate reasoning for the existence of general sales tax?

in chrome, it doesn't work at all.. just can't load page, even if copied to url bar manually. In firefox, clicking the link does nothing, while if copied to the url bar, it would appear that firefox tries to google it.

I agree with those saying that days off should just be rearranged for a variety of reasons.. one long block is a lot less useful than many shorter blocks of time off.

First, it can get boring, and it certainly gives you quite a bit of time to forget things. Even if it is fun, the thrill dies quickly, and there are rarely many remedies to this.

If anything, in my experience summer was in some ways a chore, as parents didn't have time to watch me all day or thought I should be active, and had me do annoying daytime summer camps that took a lot of the freedom out of summer. And I consider my parents comparatively responsible people.. they just had life to deal with, that wasn't their fault. If breaks were shorter, parents would be a lot more able and likely to take out time for kids and do things with them, instead of seeing finding things for their kids to do as more of a chore. I know on spring break we generally did something, and it's just a week off. Contrast this with summer where maybe we took one week trip (generally not even that vacationy.. just family or something), and the rest of it was pretty uneventful.. certainly the break should be there, but it need not be months long.

I also think I would've welcomed further breaks during the year, particularly as I got older. Stress mounts easily and quickly, and while summer is nice and stree-free, the rest of the year is not. Breaking up the year better would likely help destress students more often, helping them to learn more effectively.

Is there any real reason that you can't just use some type of virtualization solution? Seems more practical than having extra machines.

I will say, the vita is a lot more solidly built and responsive than most any smartphone I've touched, and it obviously has nice hard controls (the proper analog sticks in particular are the draw here). Even the touchscreen is much nicer than any smartphone I've seen.

But, you are probably right in the unfortunate reality that most will not care enough to buy a new device to gain these things, which is why, again, software must exist as a differentiator or there is no reason for most to want a vita.

Also, on the pricing line - they've been pricing the games surprisingly low, compared to what they had been charging, but still high enough that it will have trouble competing with smartphones on that end. Though it seems few smartphone users are willing to pay for games at all, so it may end up being irrlevant anyway. The vita also has a few free (and at least one freemium) games already, so if that trend continues it may compete on that front, but weather it will really matter is a different question.

I guess in the end, I wish someone that wasn't sony would make a nice piece of hardware like this, with software that actually works decently well.

I have a vita. I like it a lot. It's a very solid piece of hardware, lots of interesting features.

However, it'll have to be a decent bit cheaper and have a lot more interesting games to bring in too many outside of the core fan gamer crowd and jrpg fans. As is, it has few interesting games that aren't just portable versions of existing franchises. It has gravity rush, which is a great game, but it'll need something with a bit more exposure to pull people in.

So developers are wary of making games for a console that doesn't have too many owners, that's not too surprising.