By the way: For the longest time, Steve Jobs had an annual salary of $1.00 as CEO of Apple. Of course, his stock holdings in the company gave him more money annually than the GDP of many small countries, but...
Anyrate, while this is admirable and such, the sceptic in me wants to know more abut how he can afford to do that (because $70k/yr in Seattle ain't really all that much money), and why.
I agree with your scepticism although I dont have an issue with someone paying themselves a low salary and having their income coming from other sources (the Google CEO's do the same thing). They invested their time and money wisely to get there.
However with this CEO, cutting his salary was only half the story, the shocking other half is that he did that to give his employees a raise.
He might draw a much smaller salary - but as he notes, a $1M salary had low marginal value for him.
Also remember that he draws income from other sources, investments, shares and so forth. His $1,000,000 salary was probably being taxed at a higher rate. Jeremy Clarkson earned GBP 20,000,000 last year, what the papers dont mention is that only GBP 2,000,000 came from Top Gear, the rest came from other investments he's made.
Also note that I have absolutely no issue with this what so ever.
What he just did was remove all money worries from his staff. Now all their focus can go on increasing the value of his business.
This I have some different thoughts on.
Rather than just simply raising their salary, why not tie their increase directly to the health of the company? Why not make part of their salaries a portion of the companies profit similar to the way shares pay dividends (in fact they should be almost exactly like divs). This would be better encouragement to ensure that they work towards making the company profitable as the more profitable a company is the more money they receive. Make the payouts quarterly rather than yearly though and pro-rata for employees that have been there less than 3 months.
The only major downfall at the moment is the administrative overhead involved in having two pay systems.
However I can already feel the shrill, nasal cries of "communist" at this plan... How dare we give workers have a personal stake in what they produce.
Driving is already pretty damn safe in the west given the total number of journeys made and distances travelled. Its only the bedwetting health and safety hysterics who would have us believe otherwise.
This.
People who think that autonomous cars will stop all road fatalities are deluding themselves. You're still going to have suicyclists cutting in front of traffic, pedestrians stepping out onto the road and all manner of human stupidity. In fact with the false sense of security that autonomous cars give people, non-driver deaths will get worse.
The best that will happen is that total deaths might drop 1 or 2 per 100,000 pop in the US, I doubt it will have much of an effect in the UK where the road toll is already 3 per 100,000 pop. The Nordic states are even better despite a drinking culture and lots of snow and ice.
Personally I have no intention of giving up manual control of my car
And there are enough motoring enthusiasts out there to ensure that you never will and I am a fellow driving enthusiast, whether taking twisties in a S2000 or cruising the back roads in an old Benz, I find driving extremely enjoyable so I know how you feel.
The idea that everyone will stop driving is as ridiculous as the idea that we're all going to become hippies and start eating quinoa and kale exclusively.
But people do it anyway. So it's really an *extra* distraction, because it's one more thing to monitor. I've seen people drive a stick with a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, while shifting and adjusting the radio. It's scary.
Not really, Manuals dont abide lazy driving where as automatics encourage it. There will always be outliers which is what you observed, nothing we can do about.
You've seen someone doing something stupid in a manual. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen someone do something stupid in an auto. Phone use especially. You might see 1 manual driver doing something stupid, but for every one of them there are 200 automatic drivers being equally or more stupid.
I know this is anecdotal (but so is your evidence), but as an emergency services volunteer, most accident victims were driving autos and this is far in excess of the percentage of cars registered at automatics in Australia. Also anecdotal but the the UK which has a very high percentage of manual drivers has one of the lowest road tolls per capita of any country (the US is around 10-12 per 100,000 pop, Australia is 5-6, the UK is 2-3).
I fully agree with you about the manual though, I love driving manual. I think it forces the driver to be more aware while driving and less chance of distraction. It's hard to change radio stations or fiddle with GPS when you have to shift gears.
I'm a manual driver and it's not hard to change radio stations when driving a manual, but it is very hard to text or have a phone call and they're the real killers on the road these days.
I've been an emergency service volunteer here in Oz and at the majority of car accidents we find a mobile phone in the foot well (or on the roof if they're driving an SUV)... Every time they're not locked we open them we find a half finished text or a recent phone call.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that driving whilst texting becomes the primary cause of road fatalities in most countries in the very near future.
But yes, I feel everyone should be forced to learn in a manual as it forces you to form better driving habits in the most formative part of your driving life. Even you never set foot on a clutch again after getting your license, the lessons a manual teaches you will already be ingrained. Manuals simply dont abide lazy driving habits.
WTF? How much does it really matter for a somewhat independent game studio to be on the same time zone?
Clearly you've never worked with someone in a different time zone.
It's difficult enough working with people in the eastern states (I live in Western Australia) as there's a 3 hour time difference so realistically there is only a 5 hour period where you can do business.
The US west coast is -10 GMT, the Australian east coast is +8 GMT. This means when someone gets to work in Sydney at 8:30 AM it's 3:30 PM yesterday in LA, if the head office is in Washington D.C. then all the execs have already gone home as it's 5:30 PM.
Australia has a small population (23 million, less than metropolitan Shanghai)
Spread across a land mass approaching that of the continental united states. That is why transport costs are high.
and higher education is lacking
This is complete bullshit.
More Australians have a tertiary education than Americans. Education here is better overall as we dont separate the haves from the have nots, every Australian gets an equal chance at getting into university regardless of how well off their parents are and students aren't saddled with a huge debt as soon as they graduate thanks to the HECS/HELP scheme.
Actually learn something about Australia, before you comment on Australia.
In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion
So a AAA studio is a studio with an immense bucket of money behind it. That is no indication of quality and realistically never has been.
Steam doesn't have ads. Its a major reason people like steam so much.
Steam doesn't actually own the PC market, it's not like a console where Microsoft or Sony can say "dont like it, stiff because we own your dicks". Steam got to its position by being better than its competitors, more useful, less annoying and far friendlier to gamers. If Valve changes that they will start to lose customers.
Then I guess you should remove it from all non-profits too. Churches are tax-exempt not because of religion but because of their non-profit status.
Not sure about where you live, but non-profits in Australia have to have a purpose which useful and beneficial to society (I.E. provide old age care, help for the less fortunate, provide tutoring or educational services, sporting clubs and so on) and cant be allowed to distribute the money it makes to its members or owners.
Churches, by and large are either exempt or can completely ignore these rules.
So they should be taxed the same as an ordinary business, money used in clearly charitable programs can be deducted from their taxable income, same as a mining company can do for the money it spends maintaining the ecology around it's sites. This change will only harm those religions using most of it's profit for self aggrandisement.
For all of the problems they listed, isn't Apple far bigger and far worse with said problems? Why do I need Apple hardware to merely develop iOS?
I assume it's because Apple isn't in a monopoly or market-dominant position.
ORLY.
What alternatives to Itunes exist? Are any big enough to challenge it?
Apple have been able to use their market position to push around media companies. Media companies for fuck sake, the most pig headed, obnoxious and obstinate arseholes in the game.
Apple have also been suing it's competitors left, right and centre just for being competitors.
If we spin this as the TSA allowing for homosexual acts (especially on God-fearing straight folk!), could we use this to convince the GOP to support shutting it down? Toss in some terms like "limited government" if necessary.
Sadly, no.
Cognitive dissonance is very powerful and this sounds like a textbook case of "no true scotsman".
He wasn't a TSA agent, the brave defenders of 'Murica because no true TSA agent would do such a thing.
They are paying Netflix AND a VPN provider. They are paying extra compared to the USA.
You dont need a VPN. Netflix recently opened in Oz, so I got an Oz account and just use a simple Firefox extension to watch Netflix in the US as the US has many times more shows than Australia (Oz has around 1500 titles, the US has 7500 titles).
However even with a VPN (which is what, $5 a month) it's still much cheaper than trying to get the content locally... IF you can get the content locally.
This is all set up so they can rake over the richer countries without entirely locking themselves out of the less wealthy countries.
And basically this is admitting that they're deliberately ripping off more wealthy countries...
But that's not true. A movie in Thailand costs as much as a movie in the United States... but both are cheaper than Europe who are miles cheaper than New Zealand and Australia. That explanation makes no sense when you consider reality, Thailand is much poorer than the US but Europe isn't significantly wealthier.
In a digital world with no borders, this not only makes no sense, but it's completely unenforceable.
The Libertardians will argue that they're charging what the market will bear. But what they forget is that the free market doesn't exist in the entertainment industry because they have a government granted (and occasionally enforced) monopoly. The fact is, the entertainment industry is charging beyond what the market will bear, however in decades past there was little we could do about it. Then we could get a suitcase of bootleg DVD's from Thailand and Bali... Then there was piracy, now doing end runs around geoblocking. All of this _is_ the market asserting itself against what it feels are unfair conditions (and by market I mean people, because that's what a market is comprised of).
Steam sales have repeatedly proven that low prices do more to affect piracy than anything else.
In Australia ISP's have always been considered utilities.
As such, it is not the responsibility of the ISP to police what you do, nor interfere with what you do with its service.
Grey import in Australia is legal, the same applies to services that use geoblocking and other methods for price discrimination. However because the Australian courts cant stop it they turn a blind eye to people circumventing it.
For the life of me I can't understand how people get addicted to the stuff. I'd *much* rather be in pain than feeling nauseous.
The same drug can have radically different effects on different people. Sounds like you dont react well to morphine. Others will react differently.
My brother in law gets knocked out by small doses of doxylamine (over the counter sedative used in some pain killers) but I'm almost completely unaffected by a slightly higher dose.
Before dispensing pharmaceutical or medical advice please be aware of the limitations of what you say.
You really need to start taking your own advice.
Your sources come from brand name manufacturers. Of course they're going to claim generics dont work as well.
The FDA and it's counterparts in every other western country has a requirement that all generic pharmaceuticals are as safe and effective as the brand name pharmaceuticals they're competing against.
Studies have shown that generics are not only bioequivalent, but the lower cost leads to better adherence (I.E. patients "forget" to take the brand name medication more often).
are you sure not Tylenol?
also Panadol, Mapap, Tempra, Feverall, Ofirmev, Acephen, Mejoralito, Xl-dol, Bf-paradac, Aypanal, Aphen, Nortemp, Apap, Ringl
Paracetamol == drug name.
Panadol == brand name.
I never ask for a pain reliever by it's brand name as brand name pain killers are more expensive than generics and the generics are just as effective.
The article reported a "reduction" in responses to "pleasant and disturbing photos". So I wouldn't start claiming that it's having a very negative effect, or much of an effect at all. When I'm in enough pain to necessitate a pain killer I'm not usually worried about being as happy as I could be (9 times out of 10, it's so I can get to sleep).
I typically use Ibuprofen (with a bit of codeine) as most of my pain is a result of inflammation and paracetamol isn't a good anti-inflamatory.
Your talking about racism, this article is about internet trolls They are not the same.
Technically yes, you can be a troll without being racist. However you cant really a racist without being a troll. So there is a lot of overlap between the two concepts.
Ive been tagged a troll because of my views a few times.
As has happened to me a few times. But it's not common and amazingly I still have excellent karma. Normally I get modded "overrated" as that mod has a much lower chance of being corrected by another user with mod points than the troll mod does.
If you're consistently being modded as a troll, you have to accept that either you are a troll or your comments are completely unsuitable for this forum.
If you want your data to be properly disaster proof, it needs to be stored in several secure/low risk offsite locations, preferably in several formats.
Not quite sure why it remains a viable solution for that reason alone,
You're confused because you're doing it wrong.
Tape is for long term storage. If you're restoring a large volume of data from tape either your backup systems were badly designed or you've had a serious failure that's made your nearline backups unavailable... As in you're server room burned down in which case you've accepted it will take some time to recover data.
Here in Saskatchewan, Canada, we measure distance in time.
For example:
Person 1: "How far is Calgary from Regina?"
Person 2: "Oh about 7 hours."
I'm not sure why we do this, but this is the honest truth. My wife used to work at a service station, and had people ask how far X was. They would look at her like she was an alien if they weren't from around here.
We do the same here in Australia because distance never takes traffic into account. Fremantle to Perth is 30 minutes on a Saturday arvo, but 50 minutes on Monday morning.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way: For the longest time, Steve Jobs had an annual salary of $1.00 as CEO of Apple. Of course, his stock holdings in the company gave him more money annually than the GDP of many small countries, but...
Anyrate, while this is admirable and such, the sceptic in me wants to know more abut how he can afford to do that (because $70k/yr in Seattle ain't really all that much money), and why.
I agree with your scepticism although I dont have an issue with someone paying themselves a low salary and having their income coming from other sources (the Google CEO's do the same thing). They invested their time and money wisely to get there.
However with this CEO, cutting his salary was only half the story, the shocking other half is that he did that to give his employees a raise.
He might draw a much smaller salary - but as he notes, a $1M salary had low marginal value for him.
Also remember that he draws income from other sources, investments, shares and so forth. His $1,000,000 salary was probably being taxed at a higher rate. Jeremy Clarkson earned GBP 20,000,000 last year, what the papers dont mention is that only GBP 2,000,000 came from Top Gear, the rest came from other investments he's made.
Also note that I have absolutely no issue with this what so ever.
This I have some different thoughts on.
Rather than just simply raising their salary, why not tie their increase directly to the health of the company? Why not make part of their salaries a portion of the companies profit similar to the way shares pay dividends (in fact they should be almost exactly like divs). This would be better encouragement to ensure that they work towards making the company profitable as the more profitable a company is the more money they receive. Make the payouts quarterly rather than yearly though and pro-rata for employees that have been there less than 3 months.
The only major downfall at the moment is the administrative overhead involved in having two pay systems.
However I can already feel the shrill, nasal cries of "communist" at this plan... How dare we give workers have a personal stake in what they produce.
Driving is already pretty damn safe in the west given the total number of journeys made and distances travelled. Its only the bedwetting health and safety hysterics who would have us believe otherwise.
This.
People who think that autonomous cars will stop all road fatalities are deluding themselves. You're still going to have suicyclists cutting in front of traffic, pedestrians stepping out onto the road and all manner of human stupidity. In fact with the false sense of security that autonomous cars give people, non-driver deaths will get worse.
The best that will happen is that total deaths might drop 1 or 2 per 100,000 pop in the US, I doubt it will have much of an effect in the UK where the road toll is already 3 per 100,000 pop. The Nordic states are even better despite a drinking culture and lots of snow and ice.
Personally I have no intention of giving up manual control of my car
And there are enough motoring enthusiasts out there to ensure that you never will and I am a fellow driving enthusiast, whether taking twisties in a S2000 or cruising the back roads in an old Benz, I find driving extremely enjoyable so I know how you feel.
The idea that everyone will stop driving is as ridiculous as the idea that we're all going to become hippies and start eating quinoa and kale exclusively.
But people do it anyway. So it's really an *extra* distraction, because it's one more thing to monitor. I've seen people drive a stick with a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, while shifting and adjusting the radio. It's scary.
Not really, Manuals dont abide lazy driving where as automatics encourage it. There will always be outliers which is what you observed, nothing we can do about.
You've seen someone doing something stupid in a manual. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen someone do something stupid in an auto. Phone use especially. You might see 1 manual driver doing something stupid, but for every one of them there are 200 automatic drivers being equally or more stupid.
I know this is anecdotal (but so is your evidence), but as an emergency services volunteer, most accident victims were driving autos and this is far in excess of the percentage of cars registered at automatics in Australia. Also anecdotal but the the UK which has a very high percentage of manual drivers has one of the lowest road tolls per capita of any country (the US is around 10-12 per 100,000 pop, Australia is 5-6, the UK is 2-3).
I fully agree with you about the manual though, I love driving manual. I think it forces the driver to be more aware while driving and less chance of distraction. It's hard to change radio stations or fiddle with GPS when you have to shift gears.
I'm a manual driver and it's not hard to change radio stations when driving a manual, but it is very hard to text or have a phone call and they're the real killers on the road these days.
I've been an emergency service volunteer here in Oz and at the majority of car accidents we find a mobile phone in the foot well (or on the roof if they're driving an SUV)... Every time they're not locked we open them we find a half finished text or a recent phone call.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that driving whilst texting becomes the primary cause of road fatalities in most countries in the very near future.
But yes, I feel everyone should be forced to learn in a manual as it forces you to form better driving habits in the most formative part of your driving life. Even you never set foot on a clutch again after getting your license, the lessons a manual teaches you will already be ingrained. Manuals simply dont abide lazy driving habits.
Clearly you've never worked with someone in a different time zone.
It's difficult enough working with people in the eastern states (I live in Western Australia) as there's a 3 hour time difference so realistically there is only a 5 hour period where you can do business.
The US west coast is -10 GMT, the Australian east coast is +8 GMT. This means when someone gets to work in Sydney at 8:30 AM it's 3:30 PM yesterday in LA, if the head office is in Washington D.C. then all the execs have already gone home as it's 5:30 PM.
Australia has a small population (23 million, less than metropolitan Shanghai)
Spread across a land mass approaching that of the continental united states. That is why transport costs are high.
and higher education is lacking
This is complete bullshit.
More Australians have a tertiary education than Americans. Education here is better overall as we dont separate the haves from the have nots, every Australian gets an equal chance at getting into university regardless of how well off their parents are and students aren't saddled with a huge debt as soon as they graduate thanks to the HECS/HELP scheme.
Actually learn something about Australia, before you comment on Australia.
WTF is AAA?
It's a grading system, based on three grading criteria, each of which can score up to an 'A':
Game success among critics/reviewers
"Innovative gameplay"
Financial success
This is absolute bollocks.
AAA only defines the amount of money they can throw at a project.
Quoteth Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_%28game_industry%29
In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion
So a AAA studio is a studio with an immense bucket of money behind it. That is no indication of quality and realistically never has been.
Here is the critical flaw with your plan.
Steam doesn't have ads. Its a major reason people like steam so much.
Steam doesn't actually own the PC market, it's not like a console where Microsoft or Sony can say "dont like it, stiff because we own your dicks". Steam got to its position by being better than its competitors, more useful, less annoying and far friendlier to gamers. If Valve changes that they will start to lose customers.
Why do you lump Jedis and Pastafarians in with Scientologists?
Its much easier to take a religions that was deliberately designed to be a piss-take more seriously than Scientology.
He is referring to the famous quotation attributed to Niemöller
Which is a perfect example of why he was wrong and the GP that corrected him was correct.
Niemöller's poem was about the Nazi's pre-emptively isolating and in many cases killing their enemies.
Then I guess you should remove it from all non-profits too. Churches are tax-exempt not because of religion but because of their non-profit status.
Not sure about where you live, but non-profits in Australia have to have a purpose which useful and beneficial to society (I.E. provide old age care, help for the less fortunate, provide tutoring or educational services, sporting clubs and so on) and cant be allowed to distribute the money it makes to its members or owners.
Churches, by and large are either exempt or can completely ignore these rules.
So they should be taxed the same as an ordinary business, money used in clearly charitable programs can be deducted from their taxable income, same as a mining company can do for the money it spends maintaining the ecology around it's sites. This change will only harm those religions using most of it's profit for self aggrandisement.
For all of the problems they listed, isn't Apple far bigger and far worse with said problems? Why do I need Apple hardware to merely develop iOS?
I assume it's because Apple isn't in a monopoly or market-dominant position.
ORLY.
What alternatives to Itunes exist? Are any big enough to challenge it?
Apple have been able to use their market position to push around media companies. Media companies for fuck sake, the most pig headed, obnoxious and obstinate arseholes in the game.
Apple have also been suing it's competitors left, right and centre just for being competitors.
If we spin this as the TSA allowing for homosexual acts (especially on God-fearing straight folk!), could we use this to convince the GOP to support shutting it down? Toss in some terms like "limited government" if necessary.
Sadly, no.
Cognitive dissonance is very powerful and this sounds like a textbook case of "no true scotsman".
He wasn't a TSA agent, the brave defenders of 'Murica because no true TSA agent would do such a thing.
Obvious solution is to neuter all TSA agents.
Eunuchs admins?
They are paying Netflix AND a VPN provider. They are paying extra compared to the USA.
You dont need a VPN. Netflix recently opened in Oz, so I got an Oz account and just use a simple Firefox extension to watch Netflix in the US as the US has many times more shows than Australia (Oz has around 1500 titles, the US has 7500 titles).
However even with a VPN (which is what, $5 a month) it's still much cheaper than trying to get the content locally... IF you can get the content locally.
And basically this is admitting that they're deliberately ripping off more wealthy countries...
But that's not true. A movie in Thailand costs as much as a movie in the United States... but both are cheaper than Europe who are miles cheaper than New Zealand and Australia. That explanation makes no sense when you consider reality, Thailand is much poorer than the US but Europe isn't significantly wealthier.
In a digital world with no borders, this not only makes no sense, but it's completely unenforceable.
The Libertardians will argue that they're charging what the market will bear. But what they forget is that the free market doesn't exist in the entertainment industry because they have a government granted (and occasionally enforced) monopoly. The fact is, the entertainment industry is charging beyond what the market will bear, however in decades past there was little we could do about it. Then we could get a suitcase of bootleg DVD's from Thailand and Bali... Then there was piracy, now doing end runs around geoblocking. All of this _is_ the market asserting itself against what it feels are unfair conditions (and by market I mean people, because that's what a market is comprised of).
Steam sales have repeatedly proven that low prices do more to affect piracy than anything else.
With ISPs now considered utilities,
In Australia ISP's have always been considered utilities.
As such, it is not the responsibility of the ISP to police what you do, nor interfere with what you do with its service.
Grey import in Australia is legal, the same applies to services that use geoblocking and other methods for price discrimination. However because the Australian courts cant stop it they turn a blind eye to people circumventing it.
For the life of me I can't understand how people get addicted to the stuff. I'd *much* rather be in pain than feeling nauseous.
The same drug can have radically different effects on different people. Sounds like you dont react well to morphine. Others will react differently.
My brother in law gets knocked out by small doses of doxylamine (over the counter sedative used in some pain killers) but I'm almost completely unaffected by a slightly higher dose.
You really need to start taking your own advice.
Your sources come from brand name manufacturers. Of course they're going to claim generics dont work as well.
The FDA and it's counterparts in every other western country has a requirement that all generic pharmaceuticals are as safe and effective as the brand name pharmaceuticals they're competing against.
Studies have shown that generics are not only bioequivalent, but the lower cost leads to better adherence (I.E. patients "forget" to take the brand name medication more often).
are you sure not Tylenol? also Panadol, Mapap, Tempra, Feverall, Ofirmev, Acephen, Mejoralito, Xl-dol, Bf-paradac, Aypanal, Aphen, Nortemp, Apap, Ringl
Paracetamol == drug name.
Panadol == brand name.
I never ask for a pain reliever by it's brand name as brand name pain killers are more expensive than generics and the generics are just as effective.
The article reported a "reduction" in responses to "pleasant and disturbing photos". So I wouldn't start claiming that it's having a very negative effect, or much of an effect at all. When I'm in enough pain to necessitate a pain killer I'm not usually worried about being as happy as I could be (9 times out of 10, it's so I can get to sleep). I typically use Ibuprofen (with a bit of codeine) as most of my pain is a result of inflammation and paracetamol isn't a good anti-inflamatory.
Technically yes, you can be a troll without being racist. However you cant really a racist without being a troll. So there is a lot of overlap between the two concepts.
As has happened to me a few times. But it's not common and amazingly I still have excellent karma. Normally I get modded "overrated" as that mod has a much lower chance of being corrected by another user with mod points than the troll mod does.
If you're consistently being modded as a troll, you have to accept that either you are a troll or your comments are completely unsuitable for this forum.
is the only safe solution.
Not the entire solution though.
If you want your data to be properly disaster proof, it needs to be stored in several secure/low risk offsite locations, preferably in several formats.
You're confused because you're doing it wrong.
Tape is for long term storage. If you're restoring a large volume of data from tape either your backup systems were badly designed or you've had a serious failure that's made your nearline backups unavailable... As in you're server room burned down in which case you've accepted it will take some time to recover data.
Here in Saskatchewan, Canada, we measure distance in time.
For example:
Person 1: "How far is Calgary from Regina?"
Person 2: "Oh about 7 hours."
I'm not sure why we do this, but this is the honest truth. My wife used to work at a service station, and had people ask how far X was. They would look at her like she was an alien if they weren't from around here.
We do the same here in Australia because distance never takes traffic into account. Fremantle to Perth is 30 minutes on a Saturday arvo, but 50 minutes on Monday morning.