You sound paranoid.

Someone submit this NSF project to YouCut!

I was thinking about this the other day and it is far better to allow the top 2% to get something for the large amount of money they paid in, than to prevent them the benefit that they funded. Removing a small percentage of the populations benefit from something they are funding is pretty unjust for me. Same thing applies if we went to something like single payer medical. Just because your rich, doesn't mean you wouldn't be able to use the public service.

This... Like it or not OpenGL has been out of the picture for a while. When you look at the tool-chain Microsoft supplies for developers in comparison to what is available for OpenGL, it's no reason why developers have sided so strongly with DirectX. Even those projects that do work cross platform do so with DirectX and OpenGL through some kind of abstraction layer.

I am neither an expert in flying one of the commercial planes, but I am going to say your really underestimating this one. It might seem simple to you, but fire up one of the simulators and let's see if you hold that point. With lives on the line, the risk vs. reward is . They barely pay the co-pilots anything as is.

The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels... humans and bunnies not included

When these articles come up, why doesn't anyone ever mention it only takes 1 person to successfully crack a heavily DRM'd product to allow everyone who wants to freely play the game? That's it, 1 person. Make some insane DRM that phones home, requires a 3 synchronized USB-dongles, a fob and retinal scan... still doesn't matter. In most cases, it will be cracked before it's released. Someone reverse engineers it, bundles up a torrent and then no one else cares what had to be done to circumvent it. How do developers make people actually buy their product? Convenience. Those people that will potentially buy your product or pirate it instead are weighing cost and convenience. If the game was free, they would be downloading from the manufacture unless it was more convenient to get it somewhere else. Drop the price down under $20 range (I say in the $5-10 range), and then from there give more convenience. Faster downloads, automatic patching, cool updates, and interesting network play. This is not the only industry like this. I don't know why this is so hard for the bean counters up top to understand. They run some math based on some silly estimates and prove mathematically this it's a win, but the math they used to get there is flawed somewhere. We all know it because its common sense.

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Aren't 100% of those salaries + benefits + employer side of medicare and ssi non-taxable anyways? Or are you getting at them spending 20% of the 50% (actually 10% of profits) to receive the other 10% in tax reduction?

In the case they are talking about, you need 3 or 4 people working 10-15 hours a week. This is common in start-ups where everyone wears a lot of hats. As the company grows, those task go from 10 -> 15 -> 25 to full-time jobs.

You picked one of the few things that the federal government should be in control of. Obviously, denying people there unalienable rights is a job for the federal government. Now that will bring debates up about what unalienable rights are, which brings me to another point. Currently, the debate between should you have a certain right is always yes or no for the entire nation. I think the first debate should be whether the right should be given at the federal or state level.

I was going to mention this about you needing a business to bet business service. I know someone who worked one of the call centers and from what I remember, commercial service has 2 major differences in terms of support. One is that you go straight to tier 3 support (or maybe a separate group that tier 3 helps when they have no calls being promoted). Another words, a regular residential phone tech would have to promote the call twice before you would get the same tech. The second difference is that if you have line trouble they dispatch someone within 24 hours. The reasoning is that your business can't be offline for long periods of time or you will cancel. That plus the static ip's and solid service just makes this a win if the price isn't a deciding factor for you. There is also the fact that while they don't police it much, I remember seeing something in the terms of service that said you weren't supposed to be hosting services. I never had a problem with it though.