Just working backwards from the "one of you will be fired" comment above. Why not try and come up with a metric that shows you are impressively efficient, but drowning under a massive workload? Done right, it might just force management to hire rather than fire.

There are a number of ways you can do this:
1) For the next few weeks, only deal with issues in the ticketing system that can be resolved quickly. This shows how responsive you are on the "count of problems solved" and "time to resolution".
2) Always upgrade easy problems to "Extremely Urgent", so that they get picked up first (as per above).
3) Do NOT under any circumstances touch a complicated problem that requires consideration or actual work. Find someone to outsource it to. Then blame the outsourcing costs and lack of efficiency (obviously they do not have the same fast response time as you) for the problem.

Seriously: In a 3 man team, you and your manager should KNOW who is working and who is on facebook all day. If you are all working hard, then it is not time to add more pressure by introducing metrics, it is time to hire more help. If on the other hand you are all on facebook all day - well - then good luck to you in your new job at Walmart....

Actually, you need to take your corporate IT hat off for a second. The people who fall for this scam are typically people who didn't grow up with computers. Your mum and dad (now maybe in their sixties), who only use a computer to type the odd letter, Skype the grandkids and maybe look for old friends on Facebook. They do not have access to tech support and mostly their computers have been bought in a standard configuration with just the few things they need installed.

Those people (I can't get myself to call them users) have been told by their kids, the banks and everyone else they trust to understand computers, that viruses are a real threat and that if you get a computer virus it is really bad and awful things can happen to you (identity theft, damaged computer, having your broadbad costs skyrocket from a spam-virus using up your allowance etc.).

I know some of these people are scared to even start a web browser for any site that they have not specifically been told they can trust.

So, when one of these scam (scum) artists calls up and tells them that they have a bad virus - their immediate reaction is fear and confusion. When the scammer then offers to "fix" the problem, they gladly agree to hand over a relatively modest amount (around $150 usually) and let the scammer go ahead. Sadly, once their credit card details have been handed over, it is normally not the end of it.

How do I know all this? Because it happened to the nice old man down the street. He was almost in tears when he told me how he'd gone ahead and let the scammer take almost half his weekly pension money. It also happened to a nice elderly couple that are friends of my parents and to the man who mowes my lawn to supplement his pension. Nice, normal and not even that gullible people - just people who are not geeks.

We (the geeks) actually have a responsibility to educate those poor people rather than calling them idiots. Nothing beats a scammer better than being forewarned.

Please mod this reply up! Despite the slightly offensive language, it is NOT a troll statement. That new construct certainly has the potential to eliminate basic mistakes, which invariably will lead to more stable code. It is almost like a garbage collection for resources - and the value of that is (in my opinion) beyond dispute.

WOW!

First you construe my argument wrong by implying that I said that human society does not employ specialization. I said no such thing. I said that I do not always trust the specialist to be right. Secondly, you go on to call me a "recently unthawed cave man and moron" - which frankly is adding very little to the debate. You are clearly one of those people who resort to attacking the person when you can't refute the argument.

My point was that majority consensus is not necessarily the truth and by using your style of debate (shouting down and denigrating anyone who opposed your particular point of view), you are making people feel that there is something "fishy". If the science was so convincing it could stand by itself, there would be no reason to doubt it or name call opponents. Evolution is convincing to me (I can see it and understand it). Climate change is convincing to me - it has been happening for millenia and will continue to happen - humans influence it of course - but what precise impact humans have on it, that is still not settled.

You can go back a few years and take another look at the "inconvenient truth". In that film (and also in the "majority climatologist consensus" at that time), we had some dire predictions about millions of climate refugees swarming to higher lying countries by 2010. The models "clearly showed" that many island countries would be under water by today. So, the models were clearly wrong, based on simple observation. This basic fact has effectively tarnished all climatologist with an alarmist brush and people start querying all the predictions (and how can you possibly find anything wrong with that?). If you cry wolf, you pay the price.

What needs to happen in the climate change debate is that the climatologist (and their supporters) needs to calm down, stop the name calling and learn to communicate the science and data in such a way that it can be understood and verified by anyone with an interest in the field. Giving people a bunch of raw data and the source of the program used to crunch over it is not that difficult - nor is publishing how any normalization of that data was done. Taking this open source approach would massively increase the credibility of those scientists. Taking the approach that "I know better and you are a moron condemning our children to die under 30 feet of water", is about as scientific as you making the assumption that I am a recently "unthawed" cave man (it is "thawed" BTW - if I was unthawed I'd still be frozen - just saying...).

Sorry, but that is not human society as I know it. That is much more human society as "big brother" would like it.

If you blindly trust your mechanic to do the right thing, then you are in for a very large bill. Mechanics can easily detect when someone doesn't understand what they are dealing with and will happily sell you a "headlight fluid change". It's been done. Trust me!

When I had an architect design my house, I disagreed with much of what he had done. The house may well have stood, but some areas were not practical to live in and I had several rooms changed, even to the point of having the way doors opened changed.

I'm mostly with you on this one. However, if I step onto a bridge and it feels unsafe and creaky under my feet, then I will go back - no matter what some "dude in a hard-hat" tells me. Engineers are not infalible. Remember the Maccabiah bridge collapse?

Tell that to the thalidomide children... (OK - that was a low-blow - but you get the point)..

Yes, McDonalds markets themselves as a restaurant and certainly have gone out of their way to say their food is edible and nutritious. Not wanting to be sued into oblivion, I just want you to draw your own conclusions from that statement.

Hmmm - had any ID fraud lately? Listened to and paid the guy (with a credit card) who calls you from "Security Maintenance International", who has detected that your computer is infected with a virus and for a small fee will help you remove it over the phone?

And see, this is where things fall apart. People are opportunists. Most climatologist have read the same textbook, been taught by the same teachers and compete for the same grants to survive. They are not infalible or more trustworthy than doctors, mechanics, engineers or anyone else. "Peer reviewed" is not a substitute for good science, sometimes it just means they've all attended the same conference. I once had a teacher who told me that if you could not explain a complex concept in laymen's terms so that anyone with an average IQ could understand it - then you had most likely failed to fully understand it yourself. And telling everyone that disagrees with you that they must be a Republican or a Creationist is just plain silly. It is just like me saying you must be some 20 year old with no life experience and an authority figure submission complex. Please keep the debate on the issue and refrain from attacking the person on the other side of the argument. You are just perpetuating why people don't like the way the climate debate is unfolding. Blind faith is not science. Blind faith is what has caused more wars than I care to enumerate. Blind faith is not healthy. Science is constant doubt, inquiry, experimentation, measurement, publication and revision. Science is not about living in awe of someone who has spent most of their life in a classroom and therefore must be smarter. History is full of self-educated people who beat the scientists of the day with better theories and good experiments. PS: I am not a Republican.

In my humble opinion, your comment is actually the key cause why so many people are sceptical about the science. When somebody trumpets and shouts to the high heaven that they are right and everyone who questions any detail is a "denier", you have most people's BS sensor move to high alert. Especially when in the same breaths we are told that it is also too complicated for non-climate-scientists to understand, so we must just accept the "consensus" on pure faith.

This week, an Australian scientist published a peer-reviewed article based on actual water level measurements, that showed that water level rises are slowing and that based on an extrapolation of the observed data (not models), the most likely water level rise in Australian waters over the next century is 15cm. That is a far cry from the doom and gloom spouted by most climate advocates (like Al Gore - who most certainly isn't a scientist).

Personally, as a scientist and engineer, I am convinced that we are encountering climate change. To what extend that is man-made and to what extend it is natural is still not in any way shape or form a "consensus" to me. As an engineer, I believe climate models is a poor substitute for emperical data and based on how well scientists in other disciplines manage to model complex systems (think economists) - I think the jury is still very much out on what our climate will look like 100 years from now.

The way I see it, is that the military doesn't need that capability themselves. They just need to know where to buy it.

From a military perspective, cyber-warfare is restricted to figuring out where an attack is coming from and then hitting the source location with a predator drone - collateral damage be damned!! Now that would be true cyber war!! Just think how many hackers would be able to concentrate on the job at hand after a few of their colleagues have become carbon polution or the proxies the have hopped through suddenly vaporized (literally).

And if the military needs to pay a civilian expert to reach that goal, they will - and they won't care if the individual in question has served time for hacking or is a known white hat.

Now, other government agencies who doesn't have the ability do drop a misile through the chimney of those annoying hackers, that is a completely different story... Spy agencies definetely needs a cyber-warfare team - and maybe a really nice bunker for them too ;)

Don't count on it. The Danish courts are not in the pockets of big business the way the US courts are (mainly because judges are appointed for life and don't have to please their political masters to get re-elected). WikiLeaks have picked an interesting jurisdiction for this battle. I for one am going to get some pop-corn and enjoy the show.

Actually, Dane-geld comes from the Viking age. A good example is that the French king paid the Danes to stop destroying Paris. So they took the money and left, only to come back later and ask for more money. So yes - paying Dane-geld does not get rid of the Dane... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld

Because in Russia films host you... No seriously - it is obvious that those sites are in "uncooperative" jurisdictions. So they go for the closer target to get some press. Kino.ru/so/ir/kp will likely be available any day now.

Given the present state of NASA and lack of vision within the US government about the space program, China may well get there first. Their space program is rapidly expanding and their thirst for energy is almost insatiable. I can easily see them pursuing this goal and reap the rewards well before the US gets its act together. If TFA is realistic, this could be a major game changer in terms of who holds economic power on a world scale.