If there were good quality kids games (especially for the younger ones under 10) and educational stuff TotalGaming would have me subscribing for life. There *is* a lot of bargain basement stuff that's great -- if it doesn't crash on newer hardware, OS revisions and changes in DirectX libs. I wouldn't mind an alternative to the Disney stuff ...

After reading through a bunch of articles I realise one of the reasons why I do far less of it on JU as opposed to, say, a site like Slashdot -- the lack of threaded discussion makes it hard to follow when the conversation diverges. As an (old) geek, I'm used to threaded interfaces for USENET, mail and news sites. It seems antiquated that JU doesn't employ this and other common features like criteria for sorting posts. I had a quick peak at Blog Navigator (public) and it didn't seem to ...

While it's a dubious public service that I perform by directing people to Slashdot (the external URL for this article), the original poster writes about an idea for "fixing" healthcare that I've never heard of. Premise: The cost of malpractice insurance is both a burden on patients and medical practitioners who are additionally discouraged both from practicing and offering certain (possibly medically necessary) procedures. Supposition: Transfer the burden of risk to the patient by makin...

One of the reasons I've played GalCiv since the OS/2 days is that it doesn't depend on my ability to twitch the mouse at a minimum speed (and secondly it didn't require FPS level hardware). I bought a subscription in the hopes of getting more games like GalCiv -- but they seem to be in the vanishing minority. I realize this also reflects the market, but there *are* quality non-realtime strategy/action games out there that are still actively developed and popular, e.g., Worms. Here's my l...

All this talk about what "fair" level of personal income tax to levy seems premature to me without resolving two key issues on the transfer of wealth: 1. Inheritance/estate taxes -- how does wealth move intergenerationally. 2. Business taxes -- how much are corporate and organizational entities fiscally responsible to the employees, shareholdres, local, provincial/state and federal levels of government/society. Any tax system for individuals can easily be skewed or frustrated by the sy...

I posted this in response to a different article in "Humor" ( Link ): What really yanks my wanker about Western society now .... .... We're becoming more technically dependent and proficient BUT more illiterate .... .... We no longer study History or Geography .... .... Science is now regarded with the same suspicion as politics or religion (and is dismissed as either) .... .... Either everyone is a hero or no one is .... .... finally, to personalize everything, a charismatic simpl...

The CBC link plus my original article ( Link ) provide some background on the dispute. Essentially: - NAFTA rejects final US appeal that Canadian lumber practices are unfairly subsidized to the detriment of the US lumber industry - Canada asks for all tariffs levied and collected to be halted and returned - US says, "No way -- our own trade panel says you hurt us" - Canada says this endangers NAFTA and cancels softwood lumber negotiations - US says, "Let's talk -- it's the only way th...

I don't know what it is about JU -- probably because, even in "Internet time", it's a pretty young community. But this place just loves to feed the Trolls [q.v. Link ]. I don't mean just offer them sustenance -- the users seem to actively go out of their way to find posts that are offensive/ridiculous to them and actually help promote these articles by participating in flame wars. I doubt everybody here is that much of a n00b -- everyone probably knows about the Scoring System ( Link )...

The temperature on the Canada-US softwood lumber dispute has just been dialed up again by an old adversary of the Canadian lumber industry: Senator Max Baucus (D-Mon) who introduced the original legislation to double the tariffs. Currently, Canadian lumber companies exporting to the US have paid C$3.6 billion of tariffs into an escrow account -- the status of the funds awaiting final ruling on both the legality and amount collected. However, the new Baucus bill could seek to distribute the es...

Like many are speculating, I believe Colin Powell will resign in favour of Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State. And, as everybody is predicting, Rehnquist will resign to start the process of moving in a new bunch of Supremes.

There are a few bright, burning issues of contention that exist between the good neighbours in North America. Hopefully these will get resolved amicably during GW Bush's second term: 1. Lumber tariffs -- though the Canadian stumpage rules do need reform, the tariff regime imposed by the US is way out of line since they can't even prove to their own FTC that anyone has been substantively harmed. This has been going on for over a decade now (almost two) and every multinational dispute pan...

[My 2nd attempt at creating a feature article for my blog -- the 1st was interrupted by a system-wide joeuser.com crash. Coincidence?] The origin of my pseudonym, sunwukong, is the character Sun Wu'kong (most popular English spelling) from the Chinese Buddhist/Taoist classic, Journey to the West . He's also known as (translated into English), the Monkey King, Older Brother Monkey, or just Monkey. There are regional representations and stories in Japan and India (where he's known as Han...