And the high-skill servers will be like SNL's All Steroid Olympics. Why not? Same with MLB. Who cares if people cheat - as long as everyone is cheating, it's still a level playing field.
It's disappointing that so many slashdotters - intelligent and educated people that they tend to be - are reactionary blowhards who obviously haven't even seen the film, and that these same people are so unable to stomach criticism.
Newsflash folks: criticism is the basis of both science and democracy. The ability to be self-critical is what makes science and democracy different from religion and theocracy. You can't criticize Jesus. That means you can't learn, you can't grow, and you can't improve. Hurray!
People who scream 'Michael Moore hates America' are pathologically incapable of thinking critically or handling criticism, even when it is constructive criticism that is desperately needed. Accept Sicko for what it is: a searing and accurate indictment of our disgraceful healthcare system. Unless you are wealthy, our healthcare system is a catastrophic failure. It is complete and utter crap compared to the systems in other developed countries, and it is an embarrassment to our country.
If you care about our country and have a functioning brain, you'll get over the knee-jerk reactionary denial and accept this unpleasant truth, and then go out and help make a change.
This is not troll, but doesn't it strike anyone else as fairly crazy that people are lining up for hours and planning entire days around buying something? It's not like this is an AIDS vaccine or the cure for cancer. I've never really understood the mentality of lining up outside the store or the theater in order to get something or see something at the earliest possible moment. Can someone please explain this whole phenomenon to me? It seems a lot like a drug user itching for a fix, or some equally unhealthy and unhinged obsession with instant gratification. I'm very open to being corrected on this, but it doesn't seem normal to me.
Gene sharing must be exercised with caution. We wouldn't want those self-sterilizing genes that are in Monsanto's seeds ending up in biosphere at large, would we?
Your reply is interesting and informative, but would be better received if you didn't go so far out of your way to sound like Mary Antoinette. "Would you really miss 14 days pay no matter what you earned?" You cannot actually be so far removed from the plight of 150 million other Americans that you intend this question to be taken seriously, unless you're clinically retarded. So instead it comes off just like your other comment about how you would never even notice losing $100 - a brazen exercise is massaging your own overinflated ego. You'd do better without that kind of crap.
Here's a thought: if a company is at risk of going out of business as a consequence of breaking the law, then maybe the whole 'deterrent' thing might actually hold some water, hmmm?
I don't get why in America we can't figure out that fines only work when the penalty is commensurate with the infraction. If you want fines to work, you have to do what they do in Scandinavian countries - charge a percentage of your income. What is a $500 parking ticket for a billionaire? But $500 will ruin your life if you work for minimum wage. It's not fair, it's not just, and it doesn't work.
Fines for corporations should certainly have a minimum value, but they should have NO upper ceiling. When companies like Microsoft or Phillip Morris or ExxonMobil are fined $200 million dollars - as most of them have been - they don't even blink. It's completely useless. The law in America in this regard is completely idiotic in this regard.
I'm astonished nobody got the Rainman "definitely" joke from my original post. Not modded funny, and no mentioned of it in posted replies. Maybe everyone reading and posting is... autistic?
Buddhism deserves the most important of the criticisms leveled at other religions: it asserts the accuracy of a worldview that is based on supernatural assumptions and explanations like reincarnation, etc.
Like all religions, philosophies and belief systems, Buddhism is only meaningful to its practitioners in so far as it explains something about the real world. Claims that religion is about answering 'unanswerable' questions that science and rational thought cannot be applied to are nonsense. We are by definition only capable of asking questions from within the context of reality. Any meaningful answers about life, the universe and everything are going to give us information about reality. If they didn't, they would not - could not, by definition - be meaningful.
Reality is a jigsaw puzzle, and facts are the pieces. The puzzle only fits together one, single way. Anything inconsistent with the puzzle that is reality - ie the supernatural, or religious beliefs not based on evidence - is, by definition, unreal, and therefore untrue, false, wrong.
The beautiful thing about reality is that the pieces of the puzzle do fit together. To say that the real world must be understood using logic and rational thought is redundant: reality is logic. Logic is consistency, nothing more. And reality is not only itself perfectly consistent and therefore perfectly logical, but it defines consistency and logic.
Religion is illogical and based on the supernatural, and therefore doesn't fit together with the rest of the puzzle that is reality. It is therefore either wrong, or doesn't tell us anything useful about reality. Either way, it's meaningless. This line of reasoning is inescapable. Anyone of normal intelligence who looks at the facts - the pieces of the puzzle - cannot avoid concluding that atheism is true, any more than one can avoid concluding that physics or biology or chemistry or mathematics is true. The facts about our world only fit together one way, which is why there is no Muslim biology or Christian physics or Buddhist chemistry. Something can only be true if it is consistent with reality, and by corollary anything that is not consistent with reality cannot be true. Truth transcends religion because religion is wrong. End of story.
For those who haven't seen it, be sure to watch "Who Killed the Electric Car." Makes a strong case against hybrids. One interesting point that hasn't been raised elsewhere in the thread is that electric cars require only a tiny fraction of the maintenance that cars with engines do.
I'm sure this is going to be a dumb question, but how can a business as high-tech as AMD outsource production? Isn't that kind of like Ferrari outsourcing its car production or NASA outsourcing the launching of the space shuttle?
Your points are well made. Just some additions to them: the two points - stockholders losing sight of the big picture when evaluating individual business units, and tax and regulatory benefits of decentralization - are related via the accounting department through what's called 'transfer pricing'. Let me explain by way of example:
Would you buy multivitamins from China at $850 a pound, plastic buckets from the Czech Republic for $973 each, tissues from China at $1,874 a pound, a cotton dishtowel from Pakistan for $154, and tweezers from Japan at $4,896 each? Would you sell multivitamins to Finland at 61 cents a pound, bus and truck tires to Britain for $11.74 each, color video monitors to Pakistan for $21.90, missile and rocket launchers to Israel for $52.03 and prefabricated buildings to Trinidad for $1.20 a unit? If you are a large conglomerate with different operating units, the answer is yes.
The reason why is that by overpaying on imports from a subsidiary and underpaying on exports to them, a conglomerate can buy from and sell to itself in such a way that it shows losses in a US unit, which offsets taxes, but compensatory profit in a foreign unit based in a tax-haven country.
This gets to the core of both of your points because it shows why shareholders are foolish to look at individual operating units without looking at the context of the whole organization, when it's the bottom line that counts, and that it's foolish to operate units completely independently from one another. It also shows how taxes can be gamed no matter what the regulations may be (in 2001, for example, corporations reported $154 billion more profit to their shareholders in annual reports than they reported to the IRS in their SEC filings, leading to over $50 billion in lost tax revenue).
Lastly, bear in mind that while there are potential savings from decentralizing operations into separate units, there are also additional costs - like having to have a whole new admin department for each unit.
This kind of nonsense from corporations is very revealing. In massive conglomerates, one corporation (i.e.: PepsiCo) may own a subsidiary unit quite different from its original flagship enterprise (i.e.: Taco Bell vs Pepsi). In these situations of acquisition, the challenge is to line up the hierarchy of management with the hierarchy of ownership. It's a challenge, but effective organizations usually manage to get the entire show running as a single, albeit complex and multifaceted, business.
To take an existing company and split it up into smaller sections - whether spin-offs, labels, or whatever - is basically a bullshit move from the standpoint of management. If it's branding we're talking about, that's one thing. Differentiating among brands to target different markets is fine. But to actually split an organization up into separate operating units and decentralize their organizational structure is the new-age crap of the late 80s and 90s that ended up being a giant fart in the spacesuit of business.
Properly managed, a single organization can be of any size and any complexity. Good management will implement organizational decentralization as necessary, and as a corollary will also integrate management of operating units at appropriate decision-making levels to ensure optimum efficiency (management-speak would insert the bullshit word 'synergies' here).
Long story short, if EA was being managed properly in the first place, it wouldn't need to be split apart. The fact that its operating units can't be creative unless they pretend they're separate companies is a sign that the management has no idea what it's doing.
Superb post. I was going to write a reply, but I see you've already covered just about everything I was going to mention. The only thing I would add is that it is important to recognize the agenda behind the vilification of any system that is not strictly plutocratic market capitalism:
Socialism CANNOT be allowed to be a successful sociopolitical system because it would represent a threat to the profit-making machinery of plutocratic market capitalism. The uber-wealthy folks LIKE being able to game the system for profit. While America's economy is growing and corproate profits are at record highs, the middle class is evaporating and life for the poor is fast heading into the toilet - crappy healthcare, crappy education, and on and on.
Now if someone ever actually manages to prove that there's a better way to do things, well, it could all turn very ugly for guys like Dubya. They can't vilify countries full of successful white people - like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc - where socialism really works. But a country full of poor brown people is an easy target for their brand of rhetoric.
This isn't the first time this has happened. I believe in one of Bill Bryson's books - probably 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' - he mentions a whale being found with a hand-thrown inuit spearhead embedded in its blubber. Or something along those lines... Anyway, it put the age of the animal well over 100 years.
Speaking of 2D rendering, I don't get why MS Windows - even Vista - can't get the whole vertical syncing thing figured out. Window contents and icons still 'tear' and flicker when you drag them around, for God sake. Mac fixed this, what, about 250 years ago? Obviously game engines on the PC don't have any problems, so I assume DX10 can manage the issue - but then, from the M$ hype I thought Vista was going to run natively in a DX10 3D environment. Silly me. Much easier just to put new skin on ol' Windows.
Personally, I think the British have an admirable demeanor in the face of adversity or even outright defeat, as compared to the US for example. Stiff upper lip, all that stuff. Surely it's better to admit incompetence than not? Then again, maybe it's just our (American) culture of denial that annoys me.
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And the high-skill servers will be like SNL's All Steroid Olympics. Why not? Same with MLB. Who cares if people cheat - as long as everyone is cheating, it's still a level playing field.
Newsflash folks: criticism is the basis of both science and democracy. The ability to be self-critical is what makes science and democracy different from religion and theocracy. You can't criticize Jesus. That means you can't learn, you can't grow, and you can't improve. Hurray!
People who scream 'Michael Moore hates America' are pathologically incapable of thinking critically or handling criticism, even when it is constructive criticism that is desperately needed. Accept Sicko for what it is: a searing and accurate indictment of our disgraceful healthcare system. Unless you are wealthy, our healthcare system is a catastrophic failure. It is complete and utter crap compared to the systems in other developed countries, and it is an embarrassment to our country.
If you care about our country and have a functioning brain, you'll get over the knee-jerk reactionary denial and accept this unpleasant truth, and then go out and help make a change.
This is not troll, but doesn't it strike anyone else as fairly crazy that people are lining up for hours and planning entire days around buying something? It's not like this is an AIDS vaccine or the cure for cancer. I've never really understood the mentality of lining up outside the store or the theater in order to get something or see something at the earliest possible moment. Can someone please explain this whole phenomenon to me? It seems a lot like a drug user itching for a fix, or some equally unhealthy and unhinged obsession with instant gratification. I'm very open to being corrected on this, but it doesn't seem normal to me.
Gene sharing must be exercised with caution. We wouldn't want those self-sterilizing genes that are in Monsanto's seeds ending up in biosphere at large, would we?
Imagine what a tragedy it would be if malls in America started closing...
"The executive with an attitude like this should know that his outlets will soon be The Buildings That Used To Be Record Stores"
Fixed that for ya.
Your reply is interesting and informative, but would be better received if you didn't go so far out of your way to sound like Mary Antoinette. "Would you really miss 14 days pay no matter what you earned?" You cannot actually be so far removed from the plight of 150 million other Americans that you intend this question to be taken seriously, unless you're clinically retarded. So instead it comes off just like your other comment about how you would never even notice losing $100 - a brazen exercise is massaging your own overinflated ego. You'd do better without that kind of crap.
Here's a thought: if a company is at risk of going out of business as a consequence of breaking the law, then maybe the whole 'deterrent' thing might actually hold some water, hmmm?
Fines for corporations should certainly have a minimum value, but they should have NO upper ceiling. When companies like Microsoft or Phillip Morris or ExxonMobil are fined $200 million dollars - as most of them have been - they don't even blink. It's completely useless. The law in America in this regard is completely idiotic in this regard.
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
I'm astonished nobody got the Rainman "definitely" joke from my original post. Not modded funny, and no mentioned of it in posted replies. Maybe everyone reading and posting is ... autistic?
This is definitely a good thing. Definitely. Definitely.
Like all religions, philosophies and belief systems, Buddhism is only meaningful to its practitioners in so far as it explains something about the real world. Claims that religion is about answering 'unanswerable' questions that science and rational thought cannot be applied to are nonsense. We are by definition only capable of asking questions from within the context of reality. Any meaningful answers about life, the universe and everything are going to give us information about reality. If they didn't, they would not - could not, by definition - be meaningful.
Reality is a jigsaw puzzle, and facts are the pieces. The puzzle only fits together one, single way. Anything inconsistent with the puzzle that is reality - ie the supernatural, or religious beliefs not based on evidence - is, by definition, unreal, and therefore untrue, false, wrong.
The beautiful thing about reality is that the pieces of the puzzle do fit together. To say that the real world must be understood using logic and rational thought is redundant: reality is logic. Logic is consistency, nothing more. And reality is not only itself perfectly consistent and therefore perfectly logical, but it defines consistency and logic.
Religion is illogical and based on the supernatural, and therefore doesn't fit together with the rest of the puzzle that is reality. It is therefore either wrong, or doesn't tell us anything useful about reality. Either way, it's meaningless. This line of reasoning is inescapable. Anyone of normal intelligence who looks at the facts - the pieces of the puzzle - cannot avoid concluding that atheism is true, any more than one can avoid concluding that physics or biology or chemistry or mathematics is true. The facts about our world only fit together one way, which is why there is no Muslim biology or Christian physics or Buddhist chemistry. Something can only be true if it is consistent with reality, and by corollary anything that is not consistent with reality cannot be true. Truth transcends religion because religion is wrong. End of story.
Well, time does slow down when you're moving close to the speed of light ...
For those who haven't seen it, be sure to watch "Who Killed the Electric Car." Makes a strong case against hybrids. One interesting point that hasn't been raised elsewhere in the thread is that electric cars require only a tiny fraction of the maintenance that cars with engines do.
I'm sure this is going to be a dumb question, but how can a business as high-tech as AMD outsource production? Isn't that kind of like Ferrari outsourcing its car production or NASA outsourcing the launching of the space shuttle?
Would you buy multivitamins from China at $850 a pound, plastic buckets from the Czech Republic for $973 each, tissues from China at $1,874 a pound, a cotton dishtowel from Pakistan for $154, and tweezers from Japan at $4,896 each? Would you sell multivitamins to Finland at 61 cents a pound, bus and truck tires to Britain for $11.74 each, color video monitors to Pakistan for $21.90, missile and rocket launchers to Israel for $52.03 and prefabricated buildings to Trinidad for $1.20 a unit? If you are a large conglomerate with different operating units, the answer is yes.
The reason why is that by overpaying on imports from a subsidiary and underpaying on exports to them, a conglomerate can buy from and sell to itself in such a way that it shows losses in a US unit, which offsets taxes, but compensatory profit in a foreign unit based in a tax-haven country.
This gets to the core of both of your points because it shows why shareholders are foolish to look at individual operating units without looking at the context of the whole organization, when it's the bottom line that counts, and that it's foolish to operate units completely independently from one another. It also shows how taxes can be gamed no matter what the regulations may be (in 2001, for example, corporations reported $154 billion more profit to their shareholders in annual reports than they reported to the IRS in their SEC filings, leading to over $50 billion in lost tax revenue).
Lastly, bear in mind that while there are potential savings from decentralizing operations into separate units, there are also additional costs - like having to have a whole new admin department for each unit.
To take an existing company and split it up into smaller sections - whether spin-offs, labels, or whatever - is basically a bullshit move from the standpoint of management. If it's branding we're talking about, that's one thing. Differentiating among brands to target different markets is fine. But to actually split an organization up into separate operating units and decentralize their organizational structure is the new-age crap of the late 80s and 90s that ended up being a giant fart in the spacesuit of business.
Properly managed, a single organization can be of any size and any complexity. Good management will implement organizational decentralization as necessary, and as a corollary will also integrate management of operating units at appropriate decision-making levels to ensure optimum efficiency (management-speak would insert the bullshit word 'synergies' here).
Long story short, if EA was being managed properly in the first place, it wouldn't need to be split apart. The fact that its operating units can't be creative unless they pretend they're separate companies is a sign that the management has no idea what it's doing.
Socialism CANNOT be allowed to be a successful sociopolitical system because it would represent a threat to the profit-making machinery of plutocratic market capitalism. The uber-wealthy folks LIKE being able to game the system for profit. While America's economy is growing and corproate profits are at record highs, the middle class is evaporating and life for the poor is fast heading into the toilet - crappy healthcare, crappy education, and on and on.
Now if someone ever actually manages to prove that there's a better way to do things, well, it could all turn very ugly for guys like Dubya. They can't vilify countries full of successful white people - like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, etc - where socialism really works. But a country full of poor brown people is an easy target for their brand of rhetoric.
Maybe because you didn't have enough money to hire a real lawyer? Another victory for the $ystem.
The truth has a way of threatening a plurality of different opinions.
This isn't the first time this has happened. I believe in one of Bill Bryson's books - probably 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' - he mentions a whale being found with a hand-thrown inuit spearhead embedded in its blubber. Or something along those lines... Anyway, it put the age of the animal well over 100 years.
Good thing we didn't have the same attitude about phones and TV in decades past...
Speaking of 2D rendering, I don't get why MS Windows - even Vista - can't get the whole vertical syncing thing figured out. Window contents and icons still 'tear' and flicker when you drag them around, for God sake. Mac fixed this, what, about 250 years ago? Obviously game engines on the PC don't have any problems, so I assume DX10 can manage the issue - but then, from the M$ hype I thought Vista was going to run natively in a DX10 3D environment. Silly me. Much easier just to put new skin on ol' Windows.
Personally, I think the British have an admirable demeanor in the face of adversity or even outright defeat, as compared to the US for example. Stiff upper lip, all that stuff. Surely it's better to admit incompetence than not? Then again, maybe it's just our (American) culture of denial that annoys me.