Vista already has some sort of rating system that's supposed to relate to games you can play on your particular machine, but I don't seeing that catch on either. The two problems I see here are:
The scale of the numbering system will likely have to be "reset" every few years to keep up with Moore's Law and its effects on coding. It's easy to say that you need a 3 or 5 to run a game, but what about an 837? If you make the numbering system exponential to begin with, you have customers wondering why cost goes up exponentially just to upgrade from a 3 to a 4.
There's no "one true rating." There's Vista, there's AMD, and there's bound to be a few others, all of which are designed to be anything but vendor-independent. Instead of looking at the back of the box for requirements for CPU, RAM, HDD, etc, you have to look up the Vista Number, the AMD Number, etc.
Now, granted, there are corollaries in the world of console gaming (new consoles needed from time to time, more than one console), but at least there the target market is the comfortably broad category of "television owners." The market for these games are the hardcore PC gamers, a rather small (if disproportionately loud) subset of PC owners overall. And I stress "hardcore" because you're not going to need such a convoluted rating system to find out if your computer can handle the latest from PopCap, whose products certainly aren't going to sell new operating systems, CPUs or GPUs (the manufacturers of which are the ones trying to introduce these metrics in the hopes of selling more of their products). With such a small potential customer base to begin with, there's little or no potential for competing standards to coexist without all of them dying out for lack of adopters.
"Pirates of the Burning Sea Patch?" What is a "sea patch," why is it burning, and how do pirates fit into this?
Considering the target audience, I'll assume this has something to do with an MMO expansion, probably WoW. But neither the title nor the article summary mentions that. What if I just started talking about the latest "Wings of the Goddess patch?" What, never heard of WotG?
"They are doing well with this and are keen to show it"
So, what are the building codes in the affected areas like? Comparable to earthquake-prone regions in North American and Europe? Are any of the Chinese "journalists" asking if things had to be this bad? Are they allowed to?
You mention the response by US governments to Hurricane Katrina. Don't forget that a great deal of the criticism was against the lack of preparation.
In a country where the man who invented something as ubiquitous as the blue LED got paid a whopping bonus of ~$200 by his employers, I'm really not surprised that Japanese teenagers are more interested in majoring in business management and the like.
"he leaves his mom and gets sad." "his (dad) dies and he gets sad."
So... Lucas remade it into Emo Wars? Vader is dressed in black to match the darkness in his soul? When he had his helmet off and chilling in his chamber in "Empire..." he was busy blogging?
"because the whole idea that cell towers and the like just sprouted like weeds is appealing but they are costly."
The towers were there long before anybody thought of SMS.
"How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?"
Small, best-effort text messages? Oh, I'd wager it's at least an order of magnitude less than the cost of switched networks capable of real-time voice transmission.
"Both relied on much existing infrastructure but I have to wonder, whats the preoccupation with texting?"
For me, it's because I get billed $0.20 for every wrong number and/or spam I receive. I've never sent an SMS message in my life and I don't anticipate that changing any time soon. Combine that with the price it cost the sender to send it and it's about enough for the USPS to process physical media. Why send a few dozen characters when you could send them a postcard with a pretty picture on it for less? Or for slightly more than what it costs to both send and receive a text message, you could mail them a DVD.
"Are we that boring we need to bombard everyone around us to prove we are alive?"
I'm more concerned with the phone companies bombarding me with frivolous charges.
"There are plenty of working class folks on the cape, many of whom can barely afford to live there."
In case you haven't heard, there are new homes being foreclosed on all across the country. If you can't afford freakin' Cape Cod, move.
"Some of my family members had to foot the bill for the last thousand feet, but they were able to get Comcrap to drag their signal a mile from the main drag once they saw 8 houses that were interested."
If they have that much to blow on cable television, I suggest you reevaluate your value of "can't afford."
"It looks like my parents may end up stuck having to use dialup to access the Internet from their cottage inside the Cape Cod National Seashore."
My heart bleeds.
"Neither Comcast nor Verizon want to bother upgrading the hardware required to get them faster service."
Surprising, since I'm sure that Comcast and Verizon execs as well as major stockholders are among their neighbors.
"They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive."
Uh-huh. Guess what: they didn't have cable television, central air, electricity, gas or probably even running water 300 years ago either (let alone the telephone lines used for dial-up). But I'm going to guess that since you're asking about internet access, you've already got all these modern amenities duck taped into a structure that wasn't built to accept it. I'd bet the precious aesthetics were lost about the time that flush toilets were installed.
"I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client"
I'd suggest their pretentious rich asses get used to doing without for a while if they insist on deliberately spending their summers away from civilization.
"I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps."
i. e. their next door neighbors...
"Are there other ways they can increase the functionality despite the pitiful bandwidth?"
Yeah, get over yourselves. After having all the latest Nineteenth and Twentieth Century amenities stapled onto the outside and inside of your "summer cottage," a one-meter satellite dish isn't going to be the end of the world. It won't be as bad as, say, the windmills your parents refuse to allow to be built anywhere near their precious cottage for fear of ruining the view.
"Any other good ideas? Any success stories you can share where people have finally got the bandwidth they crave?"
Crave bandwidth? Summer in a modern condominium instead.
"Two things wrong with that: first, people are allowed to change how they believe and, indeed, most parts of their personality."
That doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their past actions. What's the statute of limitations? Can a case be made that his actions continue to "make available" illegal copies of software today? Is he going to engage in hypocrisy about whether his own illegal actions should be prosecuted?
"Second, strict copyright enforcement is neither republican nor democrat, liberal nor conservative."
Democrat, Republican... this isn't some random voter who happens to be registered with one party or the other, he's a man of power and responsibility within his chosen party, having more sway in his party's political stance on any number of issues, including software piracy, than 99.999% of the posters here.
Regardless of party, this is an example of someone with political power being held to a different standard than the proles. The BSA and FBI aren't kicking in his front door, waving drawn guns around, seizing everything from his laptop to his toaster oven, and shooting his dog. A judge isn't being told about how he had the "equivalent of 187 CD burners" in his possession. DHS isn't coming out with "evidence" that his software piracy helped to fund al Qaeda.
Democrat or Republican, the stance of both parties on intellectual property is the same. As such a central figure in the Warez scene (past or present), by all rights he should currently be treated as if his last name was Gotti. But as he "just happens" to be a higher-up in one of the Beloved Parties, so far he "just happens" to be getting away with it with less than a slap on the wrist.
"It seems to me that an "add-on" would be better as it would prevent the alienation of the early adopters."
OK, so I'm sounding like a broken record in this thread, but...
Microsoft's stance has repeatedly been "Fuck the early adopters." Their HDMI cables need a special disclaimer sticker to keep early adopters from buying it, while the DRM scheme was never designed to allow upgrading hard drives or replacing a broken or otherwise inferior console unit. Expect the PR spin to be similar to what it was when the Elite came out.
"And how cynical is the marketing strategy that says 'Buy now - before we take your USB ports and backwards compatibility away?'"
But that's something that's been going on since even before Sony got into the video game business. The redesigned NES lost composite video, the redesigned SNES lost s-video, the Genesis lost backwards compatibility (more or less) and eventually Sega CD and 32-X compatibility. And this continues on, with the PlayStation losing its parallel and serial ports, the PS2 losing its HDD bay, FireWire port and a chunk of backwards compatibility, the GameCube lost its component video output... The only difference is how quickly Sony axed the PS3's backwards compatibility features. (The PSP, on the other hand... )
Until the Xbox 360, shelling out for launch prices may have made you the "first on your block" to own one, but also guaranteed that you were purchasing what would end up being the most capable, the most compatible version of the console to be released, as little-used features are removed in future revisions in the name of cost-cutting. I don't know what fraction of early adopters take this long-term view, but driving them away like this certainly can't help their launch sales for their next console.
"Odd, considering it comes from the same company who lied about the importance of 'Rumble' until they had their patent issues straigtened out."
Silly? Yes. Annoying? Yes. But I can go out and buy a DualShock 3 and use it with my PS3 out of the box with little or no headaches. But replacing the hard drive that came with my 360 involves some arcane transfer process to work around DRM, and replacing the console outright to get HDMI output (or this new BluRay capability) has even bigger DRM headaches. I've already forsworn buying new Live content after learning about what will happen if my console RRoDs and needs to be replaced.
not to buy an Xbox 720 until well into its lifespan. Sony's first adopters can play PS2 games, Microsoft's have a smaller hard drive, no HDMI port, DRM issues that get in the way of upgrading either, and now this.
"Now, you're right, that list alone creates a plausible but by no means airtight case that he killed her and disposed of the body."
It doesn't need to be much more than "plausible." The jury decided that there was no room for reasonable doubt. If all juries were required to have "airtight" evidence before convicting, Charles Manson would be a free man (recall that he meticulously ensured he had no direct hand in the murders). It's possible that he didn't kill her. It's possible it was the Chinese spies, or Al Qaeda, or the GNAA trolls that killed her instead. But every last member of the jury concluded that there was only one likely explanation.
"Since there's little worth lying about that's more important than being falsely convicted of murder, the jury concluded that his lies were covering up a murder. In short, he talked himself into jail. He's not the first defendant to do that."
His was not the only testimony in the trial; after all, he hired professional attorneys to represent him, who had the ability to present evidence and testimony in his defense, as well as challenge the testimonies of those against him. There was far more in this trial than Reiser's testimony alone, this has been going on for several months now.
It is possible that the jury improperly convicted him because his testimony prejudiced them, but I have yet to see any juror interviews where one said "I was going to acquit until he took the stand," and even if one came anywhere near saying that, that's what the appeals process is for.
Yes, it really is possible for someone from your community to brutally murder someone. It's time to move past the "denial" phase, before I start to point out that the "It's not airtight!" hand-waving is something one would expect from the Intelligent Design camp.
"Something I've never understood is why so many people I know try to get out of jury duty."
Because 99.999999% of the jury trials out there don't become the Trial of the Century of the Week, even if you do ultimately end up in an actual jury. The first day of jury duty alone involves a great deal of waiting for the prospective jurors and repetitive paperwork for the clerks. Bring a good book.
And then even if you do find yourself in a petit jury, more often than not you find yourself sitting in judgment of your average petty criminal who lacked the intelligence to avoid capture or listen to his own attorneys recommending the more lenient plea bargain. But lucky for you, as the trial goes on, the defense attorney can continue to try to convince his client of the better option, change his plea, and ultimately make your attendance moot.
"It also seems like having actually educated computer geeks on these juries might actually result in better verdicts."
Because your superior knowledge of kernel coding makes you better able to decide the average "bitch set me up" drug deal gone bad?
"Saddly those folks don't make jury selection, they are predisposed to believe DNA==Guilty. SO by the time you select a *impartial* jury (i.e. folks who tilted their answers to jury selection questions to show that, no, they don't watch modern televisin what's this DNA stuff?) you got a panel or 12 Judy Judy watching MORONS who will be swayed by which ever attorney *looks* ballsy enough."
Who's the true moron, the one sitting on a jury, or the one who works for a law firm yet doesn't understand that the right to a jury trial is not a requirement and can be waived?
"There was the last case I helped with (civil, not criminal)"
In most (if not all) states, civil juries only happen when somebody pays for them out of their own pocket. Who's idea was it to have the jury to begin with?
"Hans is an egotist. He *knows* he's smarter than you. And he spews contempt at your ignorance for not realizing this."
And yet, it was ultimately his call whether or not he'd be tried by a jury of his presumptive peers to begin with. He could have waived his right to a jury trial just as he waived his right to not testify.
"The fault in out justice system is that our fate is in the hands of the lowest common denomiator."
"Yeah, I HATE it when an article motivates me to go out an learn something I didn't already know."
If you're supposed to "be motivated to go elsewhere to learn stuff," what's the point of coming here in the first place? View the ads to keep Taco's lights on?
CEO's of major corporations are so easily duped. Are the stockholders really getting their money's worth, what with all the golden parachutes on top of this?
Slashdot Mirror
- The scale of the numbering system will likely have to be "reset" every few years to keep up with Moore's Law and its effects on coding. It's easy to say that you need a 3 or 5 to run a game, but what about an 837? If you make the numbering system exponential to begin with, you have customers wondering why cost goes up exponentially just to upgrade from a 3 to a 4.
- There's no "one true rating." There's Vista, there's AMD, and there's bound to be a few others, all of which are designed to be anything but vendor-independent. Instead of looking at the back of the box for requirements for CPU, RAM, HDD, etc, you have to look up the Vista Number, the AMD Number, etc.
Now, granted, there are corollaries in the world of console gaming (new consoles needed from time to time, more than one console), but at least there the target market is the comfortably broad category of "television owners." The market for these games are the hardcore PC gamers, a rather small (if disproportionately loud) subset of PC owners overall. And I stress "hardcore" because you're not going to need such a convoluted rating system to find out if your computer can handle the latest from PopCap, whose products certainly aren't going to sell new operating systems, CPUs or GPUs (the manufacturers of which are the ones trying to introduce these metrics in the hopes of selling more of their products). With such a small potential customer base to begin with, there's little or no potential for competing standards to coexist without all of them dying out for lack of adopters."Pirates of the Burning Sea Patch?" What is a "sea patch," why is it burning, and how do pirates fit into this?
Considering the target audience, I'll assume this has something to do with an MMO expansion, probably WoW. But neither the title nor the article summary mentions that. What if I just started talking about the latest "Wings of the Goddess patch?" What, never heard of WotG?
"They treated HP like"
As the owner of a Pavilion laptop, I'm not going to shed a tear for HP.
"They are doing well with this and are keen to show it"
So, what are the building codes in the affected areas like? Comparable to earthquake-prone regions in North American and Europe? Are any of the Chinese "journalists" asking if things had to be this bad? Are they allowed to?
You mention the response by US governments to Hurricane Katrina. Don't forget that a great deal of the criticism was against the lack of preparation.
In a country where the man who invented something as ubiquitous as the blue LED got paid a whopping bonus of ~$200 by his employers, I'm really not surprised that Japanese teenagers are more interested in majoring in business management and the like.
"then I'm sure we can look forward to a multitude of Special Editions with various tweaks."
The title will be digitally altered to read "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark."
(Seriously, WTF is up with that?)
"he leaves his mom and gets sad."
"his (dad) dies and he gets sad."
So... Lucas remade it into Emo Wars? Vader is dressed in black to match the darkness in his soul? When he had his helmet off and chilling in his chamber in "Empire..." he was busy blogging?
"Any new media can never compare to the beloved originals."
Yeah, nothing can improve on the original Rai--HOLY SHIT, SEAN FUCKING CONNERY!!!11!!11!!ONE
"a theater executive and has a vested financial interest in de-hyping this movie"
Because people buying tickets to watch the movie loses the theater executives money?
Are we talking about the movie industry or video games?
Nobody ever used a VCR to fast-forward and skip through the commercials in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
"because the whole idea that cell towers and the like just sprouted like weeds is appealing but they are costly."
The towers were there long before anybody thought of SMS.
"How much did it cost to deploy and manage a network capable of servicing text messages?"
Small, best-effort text messages? Oh, I'd wager it's at least an order of magnitude less than the cost of switched networks capable of real-time voice transmission.
"Both relied on much existing infrastructure but I have to wonder, whats the preoccupation with texting?"
For me, it's because I get billed $0.20 for every wrong number and/or spam I receive. I've never sent an SMS message in my life and I don't anticipate that changing any time soon. Combine that with the price it cost the sender to send it and it's about enough for the USPS to process physical media. Why send a few dozen characters when you could send them a postcard with a pretty picture on it for less? Or for slightly more than what it costs to both send and receive a text message, you could mail them a DVD.
"Are we that boring we need to bombard everyone around us to prove we are alive?"
I'm more concerned with the phone companies bombarding me with frivolous charges.
"There are plenty of working class folks on the cape, many of whom can barely afford to live there."
In case you haven't heard, there are new homes being foreclosed on all across the country. If you can't afford freakin' Cape Cod, move.
"Some of my family members had to foot the bill for the last thousand feet, but they were able to get Comcrap to drag their signal a mile from the main drag once they saw 8 houses that were interested."
If they have that much to blow on cable television, I suggest you reevaluate your value of "can't afford."
"It looks like my parents may end up stuck having to use dialup to access the Internet from their cottage inside the Cape Cod National Seashore."
My heart bleeds.
"Neither Comcast nor Verizon want to bother upgrading the hardware required to get them faster service."
Surprising, since I'm sure that Comcast and Verizon execs as well as major stockholders are among their neighbors.
"They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive."
Uh-huh. Guess what: they didn't have cable television, central air, electricity, gas or probably even running water 300 years ago either (let alone the telephone lines used for dial-up). But I'm going to guess that since you're asking about internet access, you've already got all these modern amenities duck taped into a structure that wasn't built to accept it. I'd bet the precious aesthetics were lost about the time that flush toilets were installed.
"I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client"
I'd suggest their pretentious rich asses get used to doing without for a while if they insist on deliberately spending their summers away from civilization.
"I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps."
i. e. their next door neighbors...
"Are there other ways they can increase the functionality despite the pitiful bandwidth?"
Yeah, get over yourselves. After having all the latest Nineteenth and Twentieth Century amenities stapled onto the outside and inside of your "summer cottage," a one-meter satellite dish isn't going to be the end of the world. It won't be as bad as, say, the windmills your parents refuse to allow to be built anywhere near their precious cottage for fear of ruining the view.
"Any other good ideas? Any success stories you can share where people have finally got the bandwidth they crave?"
Crave bandwidth? Summer in a modern condominium instead.
"Two things wrong with that: first, people are allowed to change how they believe and, indeed, most parts of their personality."
That doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their past actions. What's the statute of limitations? Can a case be made that his actions continue to "make available" illegal copies of software today? Is he going to engage in hypocrisy about whether his own illegal actions should be prosecuted?
"Second, strict copyright enforcement is neither republican nor democrat, liberal nor conservative."
Democrat, Republican... this isn't some random voter who happens to be registered with one party or the other, he's a man of power and responsibility within his chosen party, having more sway in his party's political stance on any number of issues, including software piracy, than 99.999% of the posters here.
Regardless of party, this is an example of someone with political power being held to a different standard than the proles. The BSA and FBI aren't kicking in his front door, waving drawn guns around, seizing everything from his laptop to his toaster oven, and shooting his dog. A judge isn't being told about how he had the "equivalent of 187 CD burners" in his possession. DHS isn't coming out with "evidence" that his software piracy helped to fund al Qaeda.
Democrat or Republican, the stance of both parties on intellectual property is the same. As such a central figure in the Warez scene (past or present), by all rights he should currently be treated as if his last name was Gotti. But as he "just happens" to be a higher-up in one of the Beloved Parties, so far he "just happens" to be getting away with it with less than a slap on the wrist.
"It seems to me that an "add-on" would be better as it would prevent the alienation of the early adopters."
OK, so I'm sounding like a broken record in this thread, but...
Microsoft's stance has repeatedly been "Fuck the early adopters." Their HDMI cables need a special disclaimer sticker to keep early adopters from buying it, while the DRM scheme was never designed to allow upgrading hard drives or replacing a broken or otherwise inferior console unit. Expect the PR spin to be similar to what it was when the Elite came out.
But we've already seen this pattern before when Microsoft denied an HDMI 360 even after photos of the new motherboard were leaked.
"And how cynical is the marketing strategy that says 'Buy now - before we take your USB ports and backwards compatibility away?'"
But that's something that's been going on since even before Sony got into the video game business. The redesigned NES lost composite video, the redesigned SNES lost s-video, the Genesis lost backwards compatibility (more or less) and eventually Sega CD and 32-X compatibility. And this continues on, with the PlayStation losing its parallel and serial ports, the PS2 losing its HDD bay, FireWire port and a chunk of backwards compatibility, the GameCube lost its component video output... The only difference is how quickly Sony axed the PS3's backwards compatibility features. (The PSP, on the other hand... )
Until the Xbox 360, shelling out for launch prices may have made you the "first on your block" to own one, but also guaranteed that you were purchasing what would end up being the most capable, the most compatible version of the console to be released, as little-used features are removed in future revisions in the name of cost-cutting. I don't know what fraction of early adopters take this long-term view, but driving them away like this certainly can't help their launch sales for their next console.
"Odd, considering it comes from the same company who lied about the importance of 'Rumble' until they had their patent issues straigtened out."
Silly? Yes. Annoying? Yes. But I can go out and buy a DualShock 3 and use it with my PS3 out of the box with little or no headaches. But replacing the hard drive that came with my 360 involves some arcane transfer process to work around DRM, and replacing the console outright to get HDMI output (or this new BluRay capability) has even bigger DRM headaches. I've already forsworn buying new Live content after learning about what will happen if my console RRoDs and needs to be replaced.
not to buy an Xbox 720 until well into its lifespan. Sony's first adopters can play PS2 games, Microsoft's have a smaller hard drive, no HDMI port, DRM issues that get in the way of upgrading either, and now this.
"It's probably pretty difficult to fake all that heat output."
And how much oil is Iran sitting on top of again?
"Now, you're right, that list alone creates a plausible but by no means airtight case that he killed her and disposed of the body."
It doesn't need to be much more than "plausible." The jury decided that there was no room for reasonable doubt. If all juries were required to have "airtight" evidence before convicting, Charles Manson would be a free man (recall that he meticulously ensured he had no direct hand in the murders). It's possible that he didn't kill her. It's possible it was the Chinese spies, or Al Qaeda, or the GNAA trolls that killed her instead. But every last member of the jury concluded that there was only one likely explanation.
"Since there's little worth lying about that's more important than being falsely convicted of murder, the jury concluded that his lies were covering up a murder. In short, he talked himself into jail. He's not the first defendant to do that."
His was not the only testimony in the trial; after all, he hired professional attorneys to represent him, who had the ability to present evidence and testimony in his defense, as well as challenge the testimonies of those against him. There was far more in this trial than Reiser's testimony alone, this has been going on for several months now.
It is possible that the jury improperly convicted him because his testimony prejudiced them, but I have yet to see any juror interviews where one said "I was going to acquit until he took the stand," and even if one came anywhere near saying that, that's what the appeals process is for.
Yes, it really is possible for someone from your community to brutally murder someone. It's time to move past the "denial" phase, before I start to point out that the "It's not airtight!" hand-waving is something one would expect from the Intelligent Design camp.
"Something I've never understood is why so many people I know try to get out of jury duty."
Because 99.999999% of the jury trials out there don't become the Trial of the Century of the Week, even if you do ultimately end up in an actual jury. The first day of jury duty alone involves a great deal of waiting for the prospective jurors and repetitive paperwork for the clerks. Bring a good book.
And then even if you do find yourself in a petit jury, more often than not you find yourself sitting in judgment of your average petty criminal who lacked the intelligence to avoid capture or listen to his own attorneys recommending the more lenient plea bargain. But lucky for you, as the trial goes on, the defense attorney can continue to try to convince his client of the better option, change his plea, and ultimately make your attendance moot.
"It also seems like having actually educated computer geeks on these juries might actually result in better verdicts."
Because your superior knowledge of kernel coding makes you better able to decide the average "bitch set me up" drug deal gone bad?
"Saddly those folks don't make jury selection, they are predisposed to believe DNA==Guilty. SO by the time you select a *impartial* jury (i.e. folks who tilted their answers to jury selection questions to show that, no, they don't watch modern televisin what's this DNA stuff?) you got a panel or 12 Judy Judy watching MORONS who will be swayed by which ever attorney *looks* ballsy enough."
Who's the true moron, the one sitting on a jury, or the one who works for a law firm yet doesn't understand that the right to a jury trial is not a requirement and can be waived?
"There was the last case I helped with (civil, not criminal)"
In most (if not all) states, civil juries only happen when somebody pays for them out of their own pocket. Who's idea was it to have the jury to begin with?
"Hans is an egotist. He *knows* he's smarter than you. And he spews contempt at your ignorance for not realizing this."
And yet, it was ultimately his call whether or not he'd be tried by a jury of his presumptive peers to begin with. He could have waived his right to a jury trial just as he waived his right to not testify.
"The fault in out justice system is that our fate is in the hands of the lowest common denomiator."
Yes, your own.
"the reason that is it not (some value here)mc^2 is because c is a natural constant with a non-integer value,"
c is an integer value, 299 792 458 m/s exactly, by virtue of the meter being defined by the speed of light.
"Yeah, I HATE it when an article motivates me to go out an learn something I didn't already know."
If you're supposed to "be motivated to go elsewhere to learn stuff," what's the point of coming here in the first place? View the ads to keep Taco's lights on?
CEO's of major corporations are so easily duped. Are the stockholders really getting their money's worth, what with all the golden parachutes on top of this?