I don't have TV, at all. I don't have cable even less so. I think this series is brilliant, but to watch it I have to find a friend who has cable and be there when it airs.

In a world with such ubiquitous connectivity and an already existing HBO-GO infrastructure, as well as netflix streaming and whatnot - it's flatly stupid that I can't pay for these episodes and watch them - which I would gladly do.

I want to support this kind of thing being made but I have no way to do that.

for the people you are outsourcing to.

Eventually you've become a consumer who is a middleman. Someone else is the talent, and your customer is coming to you because you happen to be the one peddling that to them.

Later, as you lose your value addition and you're nothing but administrators and investors you'll wonder where the dream went - and finally, where the business went.

Let's put this in more practical terms.

"We're a company that sells apples. Do you think we should just buy apples from someone else and sell those instead? We'll jsut fire everyone who has any practical knowledge of apple growing, selection and breeding and just do what we do best... sell apples."

Pretty soon, you're a more expensive Walmart, which won't last long.

So yes, outsource your development. Leave the skill gain and ability to more worthy people. The future belongs to them.

But when I was a kid, the scientific community was in consensus that global cooling was our biggest threat, from pollution. Now it's global warming, and in another generation it'll probably be global cooling again. This isn't a science issue so much as it is a social one. Scientists are just as susceptible or perhaps more so than anyone in being swept away by the inertia of positive bias. It's very difficult to dissent in a community as tightly woven as the science community has become.

Everyone pats one another on the ass to get published and to cite publications while publishing. That trends heavily towards publishing things which are guaranteed to not rock the boat, go against the current trends and to be widely difficult to disprove such as issues as nebulous as global warming. Without any 'causes', what we have are weather patters which are roughly linear going back to the ice ages and which have occurred on uninhabited planets as well.

Despite the obvious explanation that perhaps weather is cyclic, and taking into account man's minority contribution to the organic discharge of carbon on the planet, we have a frantic persuasive group demanding that this be the issue which guides our judgement, not because this issue itself has validity or provability but rather because the tertiary effects of abiding by policies guided by this doctrine will achieve the other desirable outcomes; in this case a moral support of secondary 'green' initiatives.

In that way, and I won't go too far with this parallel, the global warming debate has become a religious issue. Without proof, those who believe in it are fervent and zealous. They see proof in everything, and that reaffirms their faith. They know that if others would convert to their faith, the other problems which plague them such as conservatism of wetlands and undeveloped lands and control of pollution and emissions would also be resolved.

This is not an issue in itself, as it is a banner under which other issues are being brought. That is why the argument itself doesn't appear to make sense to outsiders to the faith, because it isn't and never has been a simple, explicable and provable thing. It's a nebulous accusation that carries the hope of people who have genuine and valid concerns, and are driven to have a cause to unite them.

to cynically assume the worst. You'll come up just a little short of reality but you won't be very surprised.

Considering the NSA is currently building the world's largest data warehouse / encryption system http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1 ... and that google saves everything, and knows who asked the questions.. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/20/AR2006012001799.html, you are well on your way to the NSA knowing what you were looking for, and devising ways to illegalize precrime and do away with the annoying unconstitutionality of prior restraint.

That it is impossible to fight fad and agenda, especially in the scientific community as it is anywhere else.

Anyone growing up in my generation remembers that we were taught as kids that the next ice age was almost upon us due to pollution. Now our kids are being taught that it's global warming. In another 20 years, it'll be another ice age, or something else and 'dissenters' will be equally scorned and shunned and ridiculed because the sky is falling, and who dares doubt?

This is yet another straw man issue, intended to give people who don't want to tackle the real issues something to act concerned about and never, ever have to lift a finger to do anything about or change their own lives in any way or suffer any inconvenience.

I heap my greatest scorn upon them all.

This makes an atheist say "Amen."

First, Zimmerman isn't white. So your hypothetical scenario isn't really contrasting.

Secondly, let's ask another question. If it was a black man acting as neighborhood watch, and he had an as yet unknown altercation with a hispanic youth who did not live in the neighborhood and the result was that the hispanic youth was shot, would anyone be making death threats against the black man? Would there be national media attention?

Even better, if it was black on black violence - would anyone even notice? No, obviously not because it's happening right now, all the time every day and I don't see you or anyone else giving a shit about it.

Noone cares about the kid who was killed. All they care about is trying to jump on the bandwagon that people hope will make them look good in the latest facebook firestorm of sharing.

With a complete media circus, public examination of evidence and death threats against the accused; proving that we had not hit rock bottom.

The cost of crude oil is determined not by the supply, but by the price that speculators are willing to pay for it. Hence the suppliers makes bank, the speculator makes a dime and the end market is paying an inflated rate.

Of course domestic oil won't lower the cost, because that's not where costs are coming from. The domestic oil is being sold on the market for bank, and rebought at market price which is passed on at the pump.

We're so god damned stupid we put up with it, so, we deserve nothing less.

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.