You're looking at it wrong. The point is that exploiting loopholes to escape your tax obligation (and don't give me the "it's legal" crock of shit; setting up offshore accounts and corporations in other countries is obviously shady however legal it is) is unethical, not that paying taxes is ethical.

No. If you answer yes, you have a sense of ethics. But you're right, such a person will probably be replaced because businesses don't tolerate ethical behavior unless said behavior is required by law.

You mean things that are either essential parts of AD and can be assumed to be implemented, or things which were specifically called out in TFS as being supported? Granted: saying they support it is not the same as actually supporting it. But unless you've already installed and tested this thing, it's a bit early to be calling bullshit on their claims.

Why? Isn't the whole point of a test environment to find out if something has issues? I think that interested parties should put it into a test environment immediately, cause that's why they have a test environment. But yes, wait some time to put it into production.

Uh-huh. Right...

I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but cloud-based services complement traditional computing environments, they do not replace them. If you're in certain situations (e.g., a small business with only 10 employees), the cloud can indeed be your entire IT infrastructure... but that won't work for everyone. Different needs for different organizations.

If you're talking about "harm to startups", you implicitly are already talking about the owner(s), rather than the employees, as they are the one(s) with the above-average stake in it. And really, if you are an employee only with no ownership of the company, you never had an expectation that you'd get a cut in the cash, regardless of what happened, unless you were working at one of the very rare companies which split the profits with employees (and I mean a real cut, not a nominal pittance). And if you are working at one of those companies, they will probably see to it that everyone profits from the buyout anyway.

I can honestly think of no likely real world scenario where the employee would a) have a reasonable expectation that, despite not having ownership, they would see some of that profit, and b) not see some of the profit that comes about as the result of a buyout.

No Ferengi would bother with it. They don't care about gold, merely the latinum that gold can act as an enclosure for.

I have a smartphone, and only 450 minutes. There are, in fact, people who don't talk on the phone enough to justify the cost of unlimited minutes, but still want the connectivity of a smartphone.

I don't doubt that, but the point is that the company doesn't have to (unlike if you cut their revenues so much they were actually taking a loss). If they choose to do that, the blame rests with them and not with whatever caused the loss in profits.

Fining 10% of profits does not in and of itself cost jobs, as those are profits - therefore, the jobs can still be kept without causing loss to the company. So if Apple decides to fire people just to reinflate profits, I wouldn't exactly blame a court judgement for that.

Yeah, but those statements have only happened in the last few months (6 months or so). Given the lead time on game development, you can't reasonably expect fruit from any efforts starting then for at least another year or two.

O.o

I'd love to know what kind of upgrades you have in mind that a $20,000 budget for tech is "modest". In my book, that kind of budget, devoted solely to tech upgrades, is enormous.

I think anyone with half a brain can figure that part out; the trickier question is what form of more money is the most effective. Just giving everyone a one-time, unconditional raise will make them happy for a while, but the slackers won't be any more motivated by it, and eventually the happiness will wear off to boot. So you need to structure the monetary rewards in some way that gives people the incentive to work to earn those rewards.

I think Steam was broken some last night. When I got the game installed, I couldn't connect to a friend nor could he connect to me. I was about to try putting my PC in the DMZ, when my friend tried restarting Steam and it suddenly worked.

Ah, so you're a sociopath. Got it. I'll stop trying to talk to you about treating people right, then.