Those figures aren''t right if it''s in american or canadian. Unless you are shopping at the "rich-mans boutique". I can get most of those products for the same price or less in canadian funds.

Only 97%? Well, Taiwan, and a few other places like Hong Kong don''t have copyright laws...or at least not like the ones we have. They aren''t exactly sparkling examples of how to do things....

A few months ago, NCS was in negotiations with a Hong Kong company to created colored shells for the Playstation. After doing the designing, they let the HK company be in charge of the mass production. A few weeks later, NCS had found out that the HK company was selling those same shells to competitors around the globe. Needless to say, NCS didn''t do business with them again. But the really sad part is that when they were looking into making shells for the dreamcast, they had a hard time finding a HK company that WOULDN''T screw them at the drop of a hat.

Mithrandir:

Don''t try to convinve me that (A) All asians say that, and (B) they are better for it.

I''m sure a few Asians do think that way, but that type of thinking in no way typifies all Asians. I''ve spent a good portion on my college life studying Japanese (only good thing about college thus far), and I''ve been extremely interested in the Japanese game industry for a while now. And I can tell you with some degree of certainty that they are more similar to our beliefs than a lot of people would like to believe.

Also, relatively few asian countries have wacked out copyright laws. Hong Kong mainly, although I think that now it has become part of China it may have changed slightly. I do know that Nintendo was successful in taking down a large Hong Kong pirating network.

In Japan, the music industry is extremely corrupt and is almost exclusively run by the yakuza (the Japanese gangster org). Most CDs there are on the order of $30-$40...not $10-$15 we pay in the US. 60 minutes of music for the same price as The Sims.

In Japan, a young 12 year old girl was beaten to death. Another one sold her body for money. Both instances were over the Tamagotchi. The entire Japanese society is built on fads. It it isn''t eletronic chickens, it is pokemon, or print clubs, or kareoke, or one of a hundred other weird things that us American''s just don''t get...or do we?

In Japan, the video game companies have been successful in creating a law which states that video game stores CAN''T SELL USED GAMES. Everyone thought this would have an enormous impact on the US, but it didn''t. The short and short of it is that companies don''t make money from used games, only the stores do. A place like EB buys a game for $10 and sells it for $35. That is 250% profit for EB, and Konami (or whomever) doesn''t make a cent...and loses a sale.

Greed isn''t destroying our society. Stupidity is. The smart look down on the stupid, the stupid look down on the greedy, and the greedy look down on everyone. The fact of the matter is that the United States is entering one of the latter stages of society. The fall of the Roman Empire is attributed to the fact that the well educated upper class (there was no middle class) had few kids, whereas the unwashed masses had kids by the boatload to help them in the fields. One day, they realized that they outnumbered the ruling class by 100 to 1, and the bread and circuses just weren''t cutting it anymore. Of course, the drinking water which went through lead pipes and the invading Mongal hordes didn''t help much.

It has happened over and over again. Some countries, such as China, may appear to have survived for thousands of years but it has changed societal stuctures many times. Anyway, scholars believe that this lower classes overcoming the upper ones is one of the last few stages of a society. We still have our bread and circuses (aka Cola and Ally McBeal), but that will only last so long.

Before I go, let me tell you a story. I wrote a game for the Mac several years ago and released it to the world as freeware. It wasn''t anything really great, just a humorous version of Daleks called "Lawyers". In it you played a robot who was relentlessly being persuded by the the men-of-the-briefcase. Anyway, one day a year or two later, I received an email from what must have been a 12 year old kid.

He sent me a new version of my program in which he changed the lawyers to robots (same images) and the robots to lawyers. He also removed any mention of my name and replaced it with his, and changed the intro screen to read his "company" instead of mine. He was asking for my permission to release his version, and said his father was a lawyer.

I was apalled. I didn''t want money from the program, but I certainly didn''t want someone else getting credit for my programming AND my "art" (if you can call it that). In a way, he can be compared to Hong Kong. He took something that someone made, and had copyright of. Modified it so that it no longer listed the creators, and tried to make profit (money or prestige) off the hard work of other people. I told him not only to not distribute the game, but to have anyone he''s given it to destroy their copies. Who knows what he did, I moved over to PC programming shortly thereafter.

You can tell me that you think (copy)rights are stupid, but until you''ve had yours violated (and if you make games, it will happen), you don''t understand AT ALL. Maybe you think they''ve gone too far, but remember that they don''t just protect big business...they protect you too. You''ve just never had your rights in question.

I also believe Japan has a law that states Enix can''t release a game on Monday. Apparently they''re so popular there that whenever they release a game, a boatload of people skip work, school, etc just to play it, so productivity is down for the day!

I''m not claiming this as a fact.. someone in college told me this. He was really into the whole japanese video game scene, so I tend to believe him