Here’s some rather lengthy political observations combined with a good dose of history. :) First, the history. In 1992, voters voted in an amendment to the state constitution for Colorado. It wasn’t really a tax cut, but it mimics the effects of one. It was a state budget cap. It said that the budgets of the governments within the state could not increase faster than 6% per year. Any taxes collected above this prior year*1.

Sony licenses Ageia technology. All I can say is: Yesssss!The question is whether they’re planning on putting the entire chip in, or just simulate it with SPEs. Hopefully they’ll do the chip, but this will make the hardware a little more expensive. (perhaps $20-30 extra cost with the proper economies of scale. Sony will probably fab the chip themselves if they do, since Ageia is fabless.)Edit: Popedung (holy crap) Sony is grabbing up technologies for development left, right, and center.

I’ve been reading more and more on the San Andreas thing. The more I read the sillier it gets to me. I’m also finding the complete and utter ignorance of how computers work in the general populace and in the political arena to be staggering. The most annoying part is how a game renowned for criminal activity, violence, drugs, etc is now being made adults only because it has a single hidden sex scene that you have to bypass several code locks to open.

I stumbled on a news story today. It claims that next year cable companies will have the technology to do 100 Megabit cable broadband.Excuse me while I fail to be enthusiastic.The current cable modems can already do 43 megabits per second. Really! The cable companies throttle the speed on each individual house down because that 43mbit it split between multiple houses in a single cable “neighbourhood”. Not only that, but upstream of the provider there’s another level of bandwidth splitting.

Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance: Finished, about 8 hours. Did both endings too. I don’t know why everyone rags on this game about the graphics, sound, and gameplay. The only thing I noticed wrong with it was the game was a tad on the easy side. Psychonauts: I polished this one off on a rental. I didn’t get all the stuff, but I didn’t really see the need to. Cute game, and certainly a good effort for a team that hasn’t put out very many modern games.

Part 3: France,It seems that this is becoming a trend for me to post little newsbits from around the world and ridicule them. I’m sure I could find similar things in parts of the US, but since I’m already here they wouldn’t really match with the theme.This isn’t really a law in France, but it is something that seems to have taken place there. It seems that corporations there are allowed to sue you for not using their service.

Reasons not to move to other countries. Part 2, Australia:By law, you have to be very, very careful if you have a computer that has any sort of public access on it whatsoever. If some user of that system unbeknownst to you attaches a domain name to your server that promotes piracy, even if it does not host any files yourself, you could get sued and shut down for it. More info here.

I stumbled into a news item today about the Kyoto treaty and how various US States and cities were taking it upon themselves to put their own local emisions caps in. I think this is a good thing and it moves the decision making back where it belongs, at the local level. It’s an essential part of Federalism (which is basically a lite-version of a Confederation. A few basic rules are applied across all of the states including allowing free movement between states for the citizens of the federal entity.

Part 1. UK.Modding an Xbox gets you arrested On the flipside though, It seems that it may not have been the modding that got him in trouble, but the selling of the 80 pirated games on each xbox unit. I guess this one’s a tossup without more information.Edit: On further reading in the 3rd paragraph down in this link (that no longer exists) it appears that it was the mod chipping itself, not the piracy, that got him arrested.

I grabbed a copy of Breath of Fire 3 the other day. It is a PS1 game that I played long ago but didn’t get very far with. All I remembered was that it was a lot of fun, and that I always felt constrained and claustrophobic in it. It always kind of restricted you to a tiny area of the map. I still haven’t gotten as far as I was last time yet.