Telling it like it is

I'm sitting looking at my company's internal 'learning' system this morning - hundreds of online courses that are available to all employees, some of which we're mandated to take. I'm not sure why the rest of them exist. We certainly don't have time to do any of the courses, and for the average employee, they hold no relevance to what we do, or want to do in our day-to-day jobs. I for one just want to be assigned tasks, and then be left alone. I don't need to do hazardous material training - my job doesn't involve hazardous materials. I don't need micromanagement. I don't need all the various efficiency and ethics courses that are available because I have common sense. I don't need to be instructed how to use the email system, nor how 'just in time' manufacturing is good for the company (it has no bearing on our division). Ok I understand all of this is corporate C-Y-A but so many of these things are just inconsequential to us. On

If you're not much into gaming, you'll have likely missed this, but EA launched the latest in the SimCity franchise last week, and to say it was a disaster is understating the issue. For the uninitiated, here was Electronic Art's business plan last week: Take $60 from a couple of million gamers, deliver a game that needs to be online all the time to play (even in single-player mode), and only have 6 servers on launch day, meaning almost nobody can play the game they've paid for. Ensure no refunds are given, and ensure that people who for refunds (via bank or credit card chargebacks) get their EA accounts banned. EA already had a bad reputation in videogame circles, but last week cemented their place in gaming history as the worst gaming company in the world. What makes things worse is that when they held their public beta test, they had the same issues of people not being able to play, servers kicking people off, and huge latency making the game unplayable. That was