If you don't play the game, the mutual funds won't like your stock and your stock, potentially affecting the share price negatively. Then the board gets all pissy and you don't get as big of bonus. So you play the game. You didn't understand that?

Situations start when there are multiple players in the market and one can obtain acute, short-term benefit by causing more diffuse, long-term harm - unless all players participate in the harmful action, they will suffer more with neither short- nor long-term gains. The efficiency that using economics as a model in this case brings merely ensures that this harm accumulates as quickly as possible.

That kind of rule used to be fairly rampant in some of the more stodgy firms back in the day, started becoming more rare in the '80s, was almost gone in the 90's, and most folks younger than 40 or so, have probably not seen one. Us older folk, though...

These days, it's been supplanted by a looser interpretation saying that you can't be "related to" someone you're supervising (or vice versa) and there are strong cultural norms to not be involved with someone within your chain of command.

Remember that this "deluge" of comments are spread across the entire nation. You have... what? ~1M comments? That's only about 2200 per legislative district (which now averages a little less than 1M people/district) - this counts astroturf and anti-openness advocates, too. Even being generous here, you probably work out to less than 0.2% of people caring enough to complain. People willing to switch votes over that issue? Less than that. People in safe districts voting for "the other side"? Ha!

Given the numbers here, I don't think they give a rat's ass one way or another what that "huge" number of people commenting is going to do with respect to elections.

What would you say that the automated systems that allowed the process refinements did to those kind of jobs then? Frankly, automation replacing those people sounds like a pretty good description, especially since the process refinement allowing those people to be terminated could have only come about using automation.

Law sucks any more according to all the lawyers I know. Big glut. Civil service? Haven't you heard - everyone wants to cut government. Any other ideas?

A president who decides to ignore some laws and pretend thats executive discretion is on incredibly shakey ground; it undermines the whole foundation of the legislative branch's power.

Show me a single president in the last 200 years of our country that had the resources to actively enforce ALL Federal laws. And then it would only be fair if they enforced them equally against all individuals. You want a police state? There's one for the grabbing.

I'd accuse you of holding this particular President to a higher standard than any other, but since I don't attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by stupidity, I'll make an exception in your case.

The White House should respond by providing links to state and federal representatives if they want the law changed.

Why? Can an organization like Tesla not find people smart enough to look them up? Are we not smart enough to know where to look? Or so disengaged we don't know which ones to write? For those like that, here's a start. Tesla should be happy that the administration didn't actively try to work against them.

This is a rich boy whining that he's being oppressed by the system. The only thing that irks me is the fanboys here that seem to want to change this because of "bright, shiny" and "change is good". Note that the jobs Tesla would provide if they got the ability to sell their cars direct probably number many less than the ones provided by current dealerships (and the counterparts needed in the auto companies to deal with said dealers) and that unemployment is still a problem here. Again, Elon should feel lucky that the WH staff didn't send a response about how things are fine as they are and tell him to STFU. That's what you would have gotten if you wanted something. Ask marijuana growers (a much bigger market than electric cars) in Washington or Colorado about that.

Yeah. Like Tesla's phrasing vs. the White House's would make any difference. Last I checked, the unemployment rate was still 6% and worse for the long-term unemployed and older workers, but you can't get the House to move on an unemployment benefit extension. What makes Elon think that his 1% entitlement is any more urgent than any other 1 percenter's desire to keep unemployment benefits away from people? Or from keeping his car off the streets? The Congress obviously has other, better fish to fry. And there are more of the 1% that stand to lose than to gain from Tesla's desire to sell direct. Obama was right on this call - it is Congress' job and nothing he says can make it happen. Be happy his staff didn't come out against the idea entirely.

I think Elon's problem is that he is still naive enough to think that our country's press releases about wanting to be an innovative place is true. In reality, it's a country - it wants to provide a stable environment for its current businesses. What innovation is allowed to happen will be controlled. Elon's idea was just a bit too big for this country.

If its like their past behaviors, they'll tell everyone unless the government asks them not to under penalty of law - and they'll have the FISA court paperwork to make it stick. After all, Google now has a responsibility to its shareholders to not do illegal things, right? As such, I can't see this as more than a PR stunt.

Better make sure there's a True Scottsman around for us to verify your statement with.

Because even though the losses might not be "that terrible", they're still losses? Because the growth in "gaming consoles" is deteriorating due to cannibalization of the low end (where most people live) by the mobile market? Because, in terms of money, mobile comm is the bigger market and they want to concentrate on that side of things a bit more? Because companies have to make decisions like this all the time and they've decided that not making money in a relatively quickly growing market for the past ten years is a pretty fucking good indicator for what the future holds for them in this market, especially when the growth rate in mobile games is swamping the growth rate (note I didn't say overall sales) in consoles?

Seems like a pretty rational decision on Microsoft's part. Maybe this new CEO can do the right things...

The scenario here is so unlikely for the normal Slashdot reader as to render your point moot here.

I don't think you'd like to pay the power bill. That being said, if I was going to waste money on something like that, I'd go with a Cray-1. At least you could use it as a bench.

You know, withholding evidence obtained from a third party to hide it from a legal warrant is probably illegal, too - even if you secreted the evidence out to another country. This is a delaying tactic on Microsoft's part. They'll cave in the end.

On the flip side, if there are outages or faults you almost automatically acquire a negative view of them and again there isn't really a lot they can do to counteract it.

On the other hand, if you have a swift, efficient, and high quality service for an outage, most people understand that things fail and will forgive. It's only when YOU SUCK, repeatedly and without meeting customer needs in a quick and reliable way, that you get real negatives. And, if you actually work to improve these things (e.g., bury above-ground wires to improve reliability, more, smaller substations to limit outages, etc.) and promote these useful activities, you'll get even more positives. So, in short, I think this is an issue of a company coasting and the CEO being an asshat about being criticized while his company coasts. Maybe he ought to think about improvong service so people don't hate him.