The last thing we need are walking corpses, especially the bitey kind.

Also, Cryogenics isn't about freezing dead people and thawing them out dead to bring back to life. It's about freezing live people and thawing them out alive. If it every works (not like our fundamental understanding of what is "impossible" has ever changed in the past) there will be no corpses involved.

When the summary mentioned a frozen brain, then a head going through customs, I kind of assumed the girl was dead before the procedure occurred.

Or to be a bit more accurate, socialism and the free market are not incompatible.

You're right that most (American) people assume socialism is communism with it's state controlled economy but the reality is almost all socialist countries live with the same kind of mostly free market as we do (China and Vietnam being the most obvious examples, the Nordic states as well although their socialism is extremer mild).

Even capitalism and socialism are not incompatible. many nations have a universal health care system that sits nicely with a capitalist insurance market.

"Capitalism", "Socialism", "Free market" and "Planned economies" are all extremist philosophies in their pure forms. When mixed they are all quite effective in their own ways. Think of it this way, Drinking 95% ethanol will likely kill you, however a nice whiskey at ~50% abv is quite enjoyable, despite the active ingredient being ethanol. Western nations owe most, if not all of their success to the fact that they're not extremist philosophies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

Spread across a land mass approaching that of the continental united states. That is why transport costs are high.

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.

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

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 starts running ads promoting AMD.

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.

Sorry, but it's awfully hard to take it seriously as a religion ... it has about as much credibility as being a Jedi or a Pastafarian.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.