Why is this happening? We're being robbed by bankers who appear to be above justice (bank of america), ruled by politicians who are installed by the same big-money criminals that are bankrupting us and printing money to cover unfinanced wars and bailouts of corrupt institutions, our teachers are taking pay cuts and we have the highest medical care costs in the world and THIS is what the government needs to spend money on?

This town needs an enema.

My only advice is to read everything you're given, and don't sign agreements that are not beneficial to you.

Abide by the contracts you have, and speak to an attorney to figure out how well it would stand up in court.

Well, considering that even various subdivisions of christianity have been happily killing one another for thousands of years over those differences which you are dismissing - in practice the differences are enough to matter.

After making this comment, I recommend you never go to Saudi Arabia.

Having had the delightful good fortune of being the 'it manager' of a 300-ish person company I will tell you that when you have 3 people, there are no meaningful metrics. Work load is too elastic and with a 10k user company, there won't be enough context in which to evaluate any metrics anyhow.

The questions are instead answered with common sense :

- Do my people have good work ethic?
- Do our solutions work, and are we encouraging best practice?
- Do we do what the business needs, in time to meet the businesses goals?
- Are the people paying the bills happy?

And that's all you can do. Trying to evaluate SLAs, ticket closures, and other non-statistics won't produce anything meaningful.

For what it's worth, after 20 years of this business most of the stats I've seen from big businesses (100K + employees) were worthless at best and downright misleading at worst, where notoriously bad employees were actually able to game the system by cherry picking easy-close tickets, refusing to give their names when customers with hard issues called, hanging up on users, and not creating tickets when issues required followup to avoid having long ticket times. Those people end up getting rewarded, which demoralizes everyone and encourages defection.

Unfortunately, in an absence of common sense and connection to the work, management refuses to admit their lack of competence of judgement and would rather tout metrics as a serious tool.

It's hard to stop that inertia from carrying over into making an ever grander mistake. The kindle is a beautiful example of function. It does what it does and does so ideally. The audience for the Kindle is a rare one, too. Those of us who read books. A dying breed to be sure.

The fire is aimed at a completely alien segment. The consumer of media. The form over function. The short attention span, who lives in the world of youtube and sitcoms, chatrooms, and forums. Who has learned to replace you with u for expediency.

The mistake here was in calling it a 'Kindle', and risk harvesting some good will from those who have so far been served so well by foisting upon them a new device that both fails to understand what the audience that could possibly want it desires, and also fails to grasp what those people are like who are already loyal to the brand, such as it is.

The ipad thrives. It can be handed to a toddler who within hours will be sliding tiles with the letter A into their appropriate slot, with no training. It is intuitive and deftly executed because the creators consider all of their users to be to some degree like that toddler. Incompetent, and benignly harmful and who are best served by a very pretty black box.

The kindle, like the android phone both live in a strange world where at some degree their creators hold a secret contempt for the ignorant. They want to create tools that the brilliant can leverage, and in some darkened shadows of reason and camaraderie with their fellow geeks they are quite happy if those who 'do not get it' are de facto denied it by simple dint of a failure to quit the blinking twelves that it provides.

So many failed MMORPGS have taught us the lesson that it is not enough to merely mimic the superficial aspects of a successful venture. And understanding of why those ventures are successful stems from an understanding of the people who make those ventures successful. That is the same opacity we see here. It's not enough to make a cheaper, less approachable, less "ipad" ipad and think that anything will shadow the success.

Regardless, people will try.

They are only acting in self interest - against the interests of the public and children, as they always have. This is just a little more obvious.

This is the same organization that turtles up and protects a teacher when there's evidence of abuse. I guess there's a need for advocacy, but the lines are drawn a little too clearly for me.

The next step in total scrutiny will be isolated identification, which means that cameras placed saturating all public areas will identify and isolate individuals who are not tracked and flag them as suspicious. If you are not carrying RFID ID card, cellphone or other remotely identifying hardware you will be flagged for observation.

How much latitude did you get in your original interpretation of Kirk in the series and how close was it to the treatment you gleaned from the script? In other words how much corrective direction did you take - and if there's room to answer, did this increase or decrease with the series?

((I ask because of what I've heard about Shatner's presence on stage, and wondering about how that changed as the series became popular))

Yes, we should all focus on something so vast and out of our control that we don't really have to do anything except pose and 'be concerned' about it to be fashionably hip without actually making any personal effort.

Here's a clue. How about all those people feigning concern actually go show concern about something that matters.

"--3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes." - http://www.worldhunger.org/

There's something they can all actually do something about, but they won't - because that would be effort. They would rather smile at peta pictures of emaciated 16 year old looking mostly nude models holding signs and act oh-so-concerned about global issues than help the poor bastard who lives 20 miles away.

As Penn and Teller would say, it's all Bullshit.

So, is stealing the cholesterol from the outer membrane of the virus fall under the definition of starving a cold?

It's easy to spite success.

Rather than taxing the individuals, who are difficult to locate and mobile - why not tax the corporations which are paying the individuals? Why do we have the lowest net corporate taxation in the first world? Why do we continue to have bizarre and absurdly complex tax laws?

I don't know, but it's puzzling.

What really bothered me about the changes boiled down to this -

Han Solo fired first, but only after the other guy drew on him. He wasn't portrayed as some coward who killed an unarmed man because he owed a debt, he was portrayed as a guy who played it very close to the edge. He negotiated when he could, but with one hand on his blaster and the other one distracting the guy.

When the guy made it clear he was going to kill Han, Han shot him. The scene left us feeling like the other guy was just out of his depth, and Han was a dangerous guy who was not only willing to go there, but knew what that kind of trouble costs in the underworld - evidenced by him laying down gold to cover up the mess.

The rewrite removed all subtlety and made Han seem like a passive guy who would let himself get shot at at point blank range. A complete change of character, from an old man who wants to remove all the questionable material by redaction from a work that was made when he was a better and braver artist than he is now.

Holy crap, you've just explained religion in one sweet motion. Impressive.