The difference between "actual companies that did nothing but produce and debug those." and what the engine development team does at Epic is really just semantics.
If the operational component does nothing but work on the engine and generate licensing revenues, it's pretty much the engine "middle-ware" company you're describing. They have staff that are exclusively dedicated to providing support to the licensees.who are developing on the Unreal engine.
I would like a Star Trek PADD. A tablet that will somehow read your mind and interpret incredibly complex, unique, and specific parameters from the user, all entered in just 3-4 taps from whatever screen they were viewing at the time.
But until then I need more practical input devices like a mouse and keyboard.
Given Google's strategy/goal of aggregating all information. I would be surprised if they didn't choose to make motorola a "model design/flagship" house. I really do think it's a given.
They don't stand to gain much at all by stepping into Motorola's shoes and assuming Motorola's same problems and using the same approach as Motorola in competing with 3rd parties. That'd be crazy. Google has delivered a huge upset to the market by making Android a ubiquitous mobile OS. By closing up behind only Motorola phones they'd just be hitting the reset button and turning things back to the way they were with every cellphone using individual platforms.
No, Google would much rather have Android be as popular on mobile devices as Windows is popular on desktops and laptops. Google could then leverage that power into setting the standards for the mobile device market in a way that allows Google services to be at the forefront on all mobile devices. Every time Google thinks up a new service they think would be profitable in the mobile market, they could have an userbase practically overnight through the Android platform. Google would rather use the 3rd parties and benefit from all of them, rather than get down to their level and fight with all of them.
Oh goddammit, I just know that we're going to see a break out of alternative medicine quacks who will start treating people by pushing fancy flashlights into their ears.
Just want to point out that headshots started in a Sniper mod for Team Fortress for quake 1that was eventually incorporated into the main Team Fortress mod. Later that year, GoldenEye released which also featured headshots. Later, the mod SWAT for Quake 1 was also released with headshots, from which developers went on to release the Action Quake 2 mod which had head/chest/stomach/leg hit detection with related damage modifiers.
Gooseman was a part of the Actionquake 2 mod team and eventually left to develop the Counterstrike mod for Half-life 1. Also, the one-life-per-round spawn format was already being used in Actionquake 2 prior to Counterstrike.
Counterstrike popularized the headshot, but it didn't innovate it.
I agree, there will always be people who really need the capabilities granted by a stationary PC.
The summary's proposition of: "But perhaps in the future we will consider a personal computer anything a person does computing on — whether that be laptop, tablet, smartphone, or something that hasn't even been invented yet." seems quite reasonable to me though. Given the inherent breadth of applicability of the term "personal computer" and the growing practicality of portable computing, I think this sort of shift in recognition will come sooner rather than later.
I would very much appreciate better unification between my desktop, laptop, and smartphone platforms for a seamless experience.
A race of who can produce the fastest mutant cyborg athletes would be pretty exciting to watch. It may be an ethical grey area, but everyone involved is a volunteer anyway...
Exactly, there's no reason to use the car windows for this. It's just a horrible UI experience. A kid should be buckled down into the chair, and if they're awkwardly turned 90 degrees towards the window, they're going to be crawling out of that seatbelt constantly. A tablet accomplishes the same purpose but without the incredibly awkward positioning. Plus it's portable so you can take it with you afterwards.
Better yet, just velcro the tablet to the back of the carseats and they won't even need to hold it. It essentially the same as those built-in headrest TVs, only better.
I LOVE Hammer Fight. I played through that campaign 3 times.
The combat is physics based. You pilot a ship with swords, axes, hammers, morningstars, guns, cannons, etc. hanging off your ship, and you control the ship with the mouse. By swinging the mouse (and thereby the ship), you can slam/slash/aim your weapons into enemies, with increased damage the harder the contact is. The game does an absolutely incredible job of making the hits felt. Seeing an enemy hurtle towards you with his whirling blades, and them slamming your hammer directly into center mass at maximum strength tearing off chunks of armor and weaponry with a glorious slow-motion effect kicking in on contact right before the enemy is thrown crashing through a stone wall behind them.
CPA license requirements recently changed to require new applicants to have 150+ credits of education to obtain. This now means that anybody taking accounting as an undergrad might as well just stick around and pick up an MBA while they're at it since they'll have to go back to school later anyway to get enough credits.
Now almost all of the new hires at the accounting firm I work at have MBAs or are working towards one because it is essentially the new minimum. Granted, they're allowed to fudge their 150 credits by taking throwaway classes like sports reporting, but it'll still take just as long. Most try to get the MBA to avoid a future scenario where they're the only ones trying to compete as a BA in a sea of candidates with equal experience, but with an MBA.
The 16 trillion figure is on page 131, table 8, bottom right:
In short, it's a pretty absurdly inflated number. Loaning 10 billion for 1 day, and doing it for 30 days, is counted as 300 billion of loans, rather than a 10 billion 30-day loan.
Further, this is pretty much regular operations of the Fed as part of their work in stabilizing the economy through monetary policy. It's what they were made to do.
"Table 8 aggregates total dollar transaction amounts by adding the total dollar amount of all loans but does not adjust these amounts to reflect differences across programs in the term over which loans were outstanding. For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30 business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30... In contrast, a TAF loan of $10 billion extended over a 1-month period would appear as $10 billion. As a result, the total transaction amounts shown in table 8 for PDCF are not directly comparable to the total transaction amounts shown for TAF and other programs that made loans for periods longer than overnight"
The loans were all paid back, with interest, within an extremely short period of time. The interest rates were low of course, because all banks lend at rates on top of how much the fed charged them. When the Fed wants banks to lend out money at low interest rates so that entrepeneurs and businesses take loans to grow their business and the economy, the Fed lowers the interest rate it loans to banks. When the Fed wants banks to stop lending b/c the economy is "overheating" and forming market bubbles, the fed increases the interest rate.
So there's basically nothing "secret" about these loans. I've known about these loans since I was in/highschool/ because this is just the textbook definition of how the Fed implements monetary policy. Notice how nobody's bringing this up as front-page news anywhere else? It's just 1 old man's blog (even if he's a senator). It's because when someone took the time to actually read into that 16 trillion figure, they realized that there's no news to be found here.
In calculating this figure: Loaning 10 billion for 1 day, and doing it for 30 days, is counted as 300 billion of loans, rather than a 10 billion 30-day loan.
Basically it's just a lot of overnight loans, which is simply what the Fed is for.
In short, it's a pretty absurdly inflated number. Loaning 10 billion for 1 day, and doing it for 30 days, is counted as 300 billion of loans, rather than a 10 billion 30-day loan.
"Table 8 aggregates total dollar transaction amounts by adding the total dollar amount of all loans but does not adjust these amounts to reflect differences across programs in the term over which loans were outstanding. For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30 business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30... In contrast, a TAF loan of $10 billion extended over a 1-month period would appear as $10 billion. As a result, the total transaction amounts shown in table 8 for PDCF are not directly comparable to the total transaction amounts shown for TAF and other programs that made loans for periods longer than overnight"
Further, this is pretty much regular operations of the Fed as part of their work in stabilizing the economy through monetary policy. It's what they were made to do.
The GAO is pointing out failures in controls. Offering some perspective as a public company auditor (not a government auditor) I see failures in control all over because there is the concept of an ideal control environment, but every control represents additional costs and times, and general inefficiency. It adds hoops to jump through to get things done. At some point companies look at the risk and the cost needed to implement additional controls on that risk and decide that it's not worth it to strive for 100% security against a problem that may or may not exist. However, auditors point out these risks because that's their job, and the risks are real, whether or not the cost/benefit makes sense. In this specific case, revolving around conflicts of interest, there's only so much you can do, but considering the nature of the issue, it is damned important to have strong controls in these area. In summary, it's not suprising to see control deficiencies, and control deficiencies are not evidence of fraud or misstatement, but it's always better to have less control risk.
What he's saying is that you are forced to pay for what you take from Kroger because of the government's laws and enforcement. You can't just take from Kroger without paying for it or the government's police will get you. Kroger benefits from the government funding of a police force.
If the government doesn't provide enforcers, then people can freely take from Kroger, and only pay when they feel that there would be a consequence to not paying. Kroger would need to hire their own enforcers to provide that consequence.
For Amazon, collections becomes a problem for anyone that purchases with a bounced check (if they ban bounced checks, then collections on those who walk into an Amazon warehouse and take what they want).
To continue along the lines of thought. Government funding provides schools to educate future employees, obstructs abusive pricing from natural monopolies like water/power, and generally keeps a modern society running from which an advanced retailer can develop itself and find a customer base in. Somalia is not a good place for a business like Amazon.
My interpretation of the posts above is not that JoeMerchant is implying that all flight attendants are Air Marshalls. He's saying that their primary purpose is promoting safety from accidental harm, and that they simultaneously work to provide a more comfortable atmosphere rather than passively sitting around like an Air Marshal would in their respective role of promoting safety.
It's less intimidating to have a steward/stewardess, than to have a "safety officer" patrolling the aisles, even if they both share the same primary purpose.
In fact, going forward with the new 150+ credit requirements for CPAs, every one of them is going to be forced through several additional semesters of school beyond undergrad. About half of all new hires in the Big 4 accounting firms have MBAs, and all but a handful of the other half plan to complete one in the future, because they need to meet those credit thresholds anyway. (The remainder are taking fluff courses at night like sports reporting). None of these MBAs demand respect for their MBA because they're all fully aware that it's simply a minimum requirement for the job, not a distinction.
It's essentially a slightly broader undergraduate degree(especially since the level of depth and difficulty is comparable). It's pretty silly to define someone by their most recent degree after more than a year or two. Beyond that, performance and practical experience are far more relevant.
On the other hand, you could say that engineers lack people skills and are completely unqualified to talk to any other department or consider the broader company perspective as a result of their inability to communicate.
You/could/ say that, but you'd be wrong....Because you'd be looking at a bad engineer and categorically deciding that is the very definition of an engineer. You could even try to justify yourself by pointing at how an engineer's education pivots around diagrams and math/programming, and then say, "well, of COURSE they can't work with others, they're taught to be anti-social geeks". For example, if your father had picked up an MBA during the course of his career, it sounds like he would suddenly become an incompetent ass. Personally, I'd imagine that a wealth of experience would be a stronger indicator of his performance rather than the trailing 2 years of his education (regardless of when that occured).
It almost seems as though you could just simply look at the different skill sets and then make a distinction between high performers and low performers rather than defining the general category to be...your awful boss.
The app is/was dreadful in all those respects. However, deleting and reinstalling clears up the horrible lag...at least for a while.
Now most of my irritation stems from swiping to move to the next article. It's horribly annoying because when you're reading with one hand, it will continually switch articles and forget where you were in the article!
Thumbs don't swipe straight up and down. They pivot from the joint. So of course it'll constantly hit the border and cause an article switch. No option to disable either.
Does anyone even read by just swiping to the next article? Who is this feature for? I would think that the vast majority of users read articles they're interested in, not whatever happens to be next in some arbitrary line. So why include this?
Government provides them with an orderly society in which to conduct business.
They don't need to fund a private security army to ensure collections and protect goods in transit amidst anarchy. We have police and a legal system rather than mad max lawlessness.
They also get to hire from a market of educated employees rather than taking in savages from the fields and teaching them letters and numbers.
There are numerous links running back and forth between the private and public sectors that feedback upon each other.
The people who would reset the game are the kind of people who are aware that COD: MW games would not be nearly as popular if there were no awards, and all guns/perks/accessories unlocked from the get gun.
Similarly, MMOs would lose subscriptions in droves if everyone had all loot and all levels as soon as they started their character.
The reward progression makes a difference to these gamers. However meaningless it may be in abstract terms, it still strokes the pleasure center of the brain, which is one of the main reasons people play games.
Well, my wife spends more time gaming than I do, but it's just the same goddamn hidden-object-games from shockwave.com reskinned in a new theme each time.
She'll also play diner dash clones.
She can't play games that involve reflexes, essentially any kind of jumping is unacceptable. Nothing involving shooting, b/c FPS/TPS disorients her. Nothing too complicated, and nothing too stressful either.
This left options like Plants vs. Zombies, Elite Beat Agents, some RPGs, and the like. It's not impossible, just really damned hard to find games she'll play. I don't know what kind of games should be made to appeal to female gamers. My wife honestly doesn't know either, but at least she's still enjoying her HOG games.
Companies want money. They pay for tax experts because the tax savings they bring pays for the tax experts, and then some. For one thing, the cost of those tax experts is fully deductible from their gross income anyway.
The idea that lawyers run the company, as opposed to company management is laughable (Do you think management really wants to give up power?). Tax planning contrivances can indeed create small inefficiences, but again, they do it because these costs bring benefits, and end up paying for themselves and then some. The overall burden is shifted to the economy at large for being inefficient.
By the way, you talk as if Zimbabwe's economic landscape is a bad thing. And it is. They also pay virtually no taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games
The difference between "actual companies that did nothing but produce and debug those." and what the engine development team does at Epic is really just semantics.
If the operational component does nothing but work on the engine and generate licensing revenues, it's pretty much the engine "middle-ware" company you're describing. They have staff that are exclusively dedicated to providing support to the licensees.who are developing on the Unreal engine.
That's an interesting point that I hadn't considered. Thanks!
I would like a Star Trek PADD. A tablet that will somehow read your mind and interpret incredibly complex, unique, and specific parameters from the user, all entered in just 3-4 taps from whatever screen they were viewing at the time.
But until then I need more practical input devices like a mouse and keyboard.
Same reason mine's named "Virus Testbed".
Given Google's strategy/goal of aggregating all information. I would be surprised if they didn't choose to make motorola a "model design/flagship" house. I really do think it's a given.
They don't stand to gain much at all by stepping into Motorola's shoes and assuming Motorola's same problems and using the same approach as Motorola in competing with 3rd parties. That'd be crazy. Google has delivered a huge upset to the market by making Android a ubiquitous mobile OS. By closing up behind only Motorola phones they'd just be hitting the reset button and turning things back to the way they were with every cellphone using individual platforms.
No, Google would much rather have Android be as popular on mobile devices as Windows is popular on desktops and laptops. Google could then leverage that power into setting the standards for the mobile device market in a way that allows Google services to be at the forefront on all mobile devices. Every time Google thinks up a new service they think would be profitable in the mobile market, they could have an userbase practically overnight through the Android platform. Google would rather use the 3rd parties and benefit from all of them, rather than get down to their level and fight with all of them.
Google's privacy policies have always been pretty upfront. They often present the policies in plain english instead of legalese, which is pretty rare.
If you're wondering about the specific services you use, look here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/
They sum it up in about 1 page for each one. Some link to the option to opt-out, I don't know how many of them do, I haven't looked at all of them.
Oh goddammit, I just know that we're going to see a break out of alternative medicine quacks who will start treating people by pushing fancy flashlights into their ears.
Just want to point out that headshots started in a Sniper mod for Team Fortress for quake 1that was eventually incorporated into the main Team Fortress mod. Later that year, GoldenEye released which also featured headshots. Later, the mod SWAT for Quake 1 was also released with headshots, from which developers went on to release the Action Quake 2 mod which had head/chest/stomach/leg hit detection with related damage modifiers.
Gooseman was a part of the Actionquake 2 mod team and eventually left to develop the Counterstrike mod for Half-life 1. Also, the one-life-per-round spawn format was already being used in Actionquake 2 prior to Counterstrike.
Counterstrike popularized the headshot, but it didn't innovate it.
I agree, there will always be people who really need the capabilities granted by a stationary PC.
The summary's proposition of: "But perhaps in the future we will consider a personal computer anything a person does computing on — whether that be laptop, tablet, smartphone, or something that hasn't even been invented yet." seems quite reasonable to me though. Given the inherent breadth of applicability of the term "personal computer" and the growing practicality of portable computing, I think this sort of shift in recognition will come sooner rather than later.
I would very much appreciate better unification between my desktop, laptop, and smartphone platforms for a seamless experience.
A race of who can produce the fastest mutant cyborg athletes would be pretty exciting to watch. It may be an ethical grey area, but everyone involved is a volunteer anyway...
Exactly, there's no reason to use the car windows for this. It's just a horrible UI experience. A kid should be buckled down into the chair, and if they're awkwardly turned 90 degrees towards the window, they're going to be crawling out of that seatbelt constantly. A tablet accomplishes the same purpose but without the incredibly awkward positioning. Plus it's portable so you can take it with you afterwards.
Better yet, just velcro the tablet to the back of the carseats and they won't even need to hold it. It essentially the same as those built-in headrest TVs, only better.
I LOVE Hammer Fight. I played through that campaign 3 times.
The combat is physics based. You pilot a ship with swords, axes, hammers, morningstars, guns, cannons, etc. hanging off your ship, and you control the ship with the mouse. By swinging the mouse (and thereby the ship), you can slam/slash/aim your weapons into enemies, with increased damage the harder the contact is. The game does an absolutely incredible job of making the hits felt. Seeing an enemy hurtle towards you with his whirling blades, and them slamming your hammer directly into center mass at maximum strength tearing off chunks of armor and weaponry with a glorious slow-motion effect kicking in on contact right before the enemy is thrown crashing through a stone wall behind them.
CPA license requirements recently changed to require new applicants to have 150+ credits of education to obtain. This now means that anybody taking accounting as an undergrad might as well just stick around and pick up an MBA while they're at it since they'll have to go back to school later anyway to get enough credits.
Now almost all of the new hires at the accounting firm I work at have MBAs or are working towards one because it is essentially the new minimum. Granted, they're allowed to fudge their 150 credits by taking throwaway classes like sports reporting, but it'll still take just as long. Most try to get the MBA to avoid a future scenario where they're the only ones trying to compete as a BA in a sea of candidates with equal experience, but with an MBA.
The 16 trillion figure is on page 131, table 8, bottom right:
In short, it's a pretty absurdly inflated number. Loaning 10 billion for 1 day, and doing it for 30 days, is counted as 300 billion of loans, rather than a 10 billion 30-day loan.
Further, this is pretty much regular operations of the Fed as part of their work in stabilizing the economy through monetary policy. It's what they were made to do.
"Table 8 aggregates total dollar transaction amounts by adding the total dollar amount of all loans but does not adjust these amounts to reflect differences across programs in the term over which loans were outstanding. For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30
business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30... In contrast, a TAF loan of $10 billion extended over a 1-month period would appear as $10 billion. As a result, the total transaction amounts shown in table 8 for PDCF are not directly comparable to the total transaction amounts shown for TAF and other programs that made loans for periods longer than overnight"
The loans were all paid back, with interest, within an extremely short period of time. The interest rates were low of course, because all banks lend at rates on top of how much the fed charged them. When the Fed wants banks to lend out money at low interest rates so that entrepeneurs and businesses take loans to grow their business and the economy, the Fed lowers the interest rate it loans to banks. When the Fed wants banks to stop lending b/c the economy is "overheating" and forming market bubbles, the fed increases the interest rate.
So there's basically nothing "secret" about these loans. I've known about these loans since I was in /highschool/ because this is just the textbook definition of how the Fed implements monetary policy. Notice how nobody's bringing this up as front-page news anywhere else? It's just 1 old man's blog (even if he's a senator). It's because when someone took the time to actually read into that 16 trillion figure, they realized that there's no news to be found here.
In calculating this figure: Loaning 10 billion for 1 day, and doing it for 30 days, is counted as 300 billion of loans, rather than a 10 billion 30-day loan.
Basically it's just a lot of overnight loans, which is simply what the Fed is for.
It's on page 131, table 8, bottom right:
In short, it's a pretty absurdly inflated number. Loaning 10 billion for 1 day, and doing it for 30 days, is counted as 300 billion of loans, rather than a 10 billion 30-day loan.
"Table 8 aggregates total dollar transaction amounts by adding the total dollar amount of all loans but does not adjust these amounts to reflect differences across programs in the term over which loans were outstanding. For example, an overnight PDCF loan of $10 billion that was renewed daily at the same level for 30
business days would result in an aggregate amount borrowed of $300 billion although the institution, in effect, borrowed only $10 billion over 30... In contrast, a TAF loan of $10 billion extended over a 1-month period would appear as $10 billion. As a result, the total transaction amounts shown in table 8 for PDCF are not directly comparable to the total transaction amounts shown for TAF and other programs that made loans for periods longer than overnight"
Further, this is pretty much regular operations of the Fed as part of their work in stabilizing the economy through monetary policy. It's what they were made to do.
The GAO is pointing out failures in controls. Offering some perspective as a public company auditor (not a government auditor) I see failures in control all over because there is the concept of an ideal control environment, but every control represents additional costs and times, and general inefficiency. It adds hoops to jump through to get things done. At some point companies look at the risk and the cost needed to implement additional controls on that risk and decide that it's not worth it to strive for 100% security against a problem that may or may not exist. However, auditors point out these risks because that's their job, and the risks are real, whether or not the cost/benefit makes sense. In this specific case, revolving around conflicts of interest, there's only so much you can do, but considering the nature of the issue, it is damned important to have strong controls in these area. In summary, it's not suprising to see control deficiencies, and control deficiencies are not evidence of fraud or misstatement, but it's always better to have less control risk.
What he's saying is that you are forced to pay for what you take from Kroger because of the government's laws and enforcement. You can't just take from Kroger without paying for it or the government's police will get you. Kroger benefits from the government funding of a police force.
If the government doesn't provide enforcers, then people can freely take from Kroger, and only pay when they feel that there would be a consequence to not paying. Kroger would need to hire their own enforcers to provide that consequence.
For Amazon, collections becomes a problem for anyone that purchases with a bounced check (if they ban bounced checks, then collections on those who walk into an Amazon warehouse and take what they want).
To continue along the lines of thought. Government funding provides schools to educate future employees, obstructs abusive pricing from natural monopolies like water/power, and generally keeps a modern society running from which an advanced retailer can develop itself and find a customer base in. Somalia is not a good place for a business like Amazon.
My interpretation of the posts above is not that JoeMerchant is implying that all flight attendants are Air Marshalls. He's saying that their primary purpose is promoting safety from accidental harm, and that they simultaneously work to provide a more comfortable atmosphere rather than passively sitting around like an Air Marshal would in their respective role of promoting safety.
It's less intimidating to have a steward/stewardess, than to have a "safety officer" patrolling the aisles, even if they both share the same primary purpose.
Indeed.
In fact, going forward with the new 150+ credit requirements for CPAs, every one of them is going to be forced through several additional semesters of school beyond undergrad. About half of all new hires in the Big 4 accounting firms have MBAs, and all but a handful of the other half plan to complete one in the future, because they need to meet those credit thresholds anyway. (The remainder are taking fluff courses at night like sports reporting). None of these MBAs demand respect for their MBA because they're all fully aware that it's simply a minimum requirement for the job, not a distinction.
It's essentially a slightly broader undergraduate degree(especially since the level of depth and difficulty is comparable). It's pretty silly to define someone by their most recent degree after more than a year or two. Beyond that, performance and practical experience are far more relevant.
On the other hand, you could say that engineers lack people skills and are completely unqualified to talk to any other department or consider the broader company perspective as a result of their inability to communicate.
You /could/ say that, but you'd be wrong. ...Because you'd be looking at a bad engineer and categorically deciding that is the very definition of an engineer. You could even try to justify yourself by pointing at how an engineer's education pivots around diagrams and math/programming, and then say, "well, of COURSE they can't work with others, they're taught to be anti-social geeks". For example, if your father had picked up an MBA during the course of his career, it sounds like he would suddenly become an incompetent ass. Personally, I'd imagine that a wealth of experience would be a stronger indicator of his performance rather than the trailing 2 years of his education (regardless of when that occured).
It almost seems as though you could just simply look at the different skill sets and then make a distinction between high performers and low performers rather than defining the general category to be...your awful boss.
The app is/was dreadful in all those respects. However, deleting and reinstalling clears up the horrible lag...at least for a while.
Now most of my irritation stems from swiping to move to the next article. It's horribly annoying because when you're reading with one hand, it will continually switch articles and forget where you were in the article!
Thumbs don't swipe straight up and down. They pivot from the joint. So of course it'll constantly hit the border and cause an article switch. No option to disable either.
Does anyone even read by just swiping to the next article? Who is this feature for? I would think that the vast majority of users read articles they're interested in, not whatever happens to be next in some arbitrary line. So why include this?
Government provides them with an orderly society in which to conduct business.
They don't need to fund a private security army to ensure collections and protect goods in transit amidst anarchy. We have police and a legal system rather than mad max lawlessness.
They also get to hire from a market of educated employees rather than taking in savages from the fields and teaching them letters and numbers.
There are numerous links running back and forth between the private and public sectors that feedback upon each other.
The people who would reset the game are the kind of people who are aware that COD: MW games would not be nearly as popular if there were no awards, and all guns/perks/accessories unlocked from the get gun.
Similarly, MMOs would lose subscriptions in droves if everyone had all loot and all levels as soon as they started their character.
The reward progression makes a difference to these gamers. However meaningless it may be in abstract terms, it still strokes the pleasure center of the brain, which is one of the main reasons people play games.
Well, my wife spends more time gaming than I do, but it's just the same goddamn hidden-object-games from shockwave.com reskinned in a new theme each time.
She'll also play diner dash clones.
She can't play games that involve reflexes, essentially any kind of jumping is unacceptable. Nothing involving shooting, b/c FPS/TPS disorients her. Nothing too complicated, and nothing too stressful either.
This left options like Plants vs. Zombies, Elite Beat Agents, some RPGs, and the like. It's not impossible, just really damned hard to find games she'll play. I don't know what kind of games should be made to appeal to female gamers. My wife honestly doesn't know either, but at least she's still enjoying her HOG games.
Bottom line is that US companies pay only slightly more taxes on average than other OECD countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/economy/03rates.html
Companies want money. They pay for tax experts because the tax savings they bring pays for the tax experts, and then some. For one thing, the cost of those tax experts is fully deductible from their gross income anyway.
The idea that lawyers run the company, as opposed to company management is laughable (Do you think management really wants to give up power?). Tax planning contrivances can indeed create small inefficiences, but again, they do it because these costs bring benefits, and end up paying for themselves and then some. The overall burden is shifted to the economy at large for being inefficient.
By the way, you talk as if Zimbabwe's economic landscape is a bad thing. And it is. They also pay virtually no taxes.