I know not a single house that has a basement. Subsequently, our nerds-in-training escape their cages (homes) fairly frequently and we have to deal with them in awkward social situations fairly regularly (see: silicon valley).

For a level 1-2 support position, metrics should probably be focused on how efficiently tickets are resolved. Once you get into administrative functions and management, those positions should be the ones focusing on increasing stability and reducing the amount of tickets submitted in the first place. Hopefully your managers and administrators are being assessed for their success in those areas, just as the junior staff are being assessed for how efficiently they can process the issues.

You guys have been calling twitter a fad for at least two years, meanwhile families, businesses, celebrities and politicians have been flocking to it in droves and using it extremely successfully. For example, Dell.

Also, I see a lot of "what does Twitter really do??" posts. Either these posters are simply being obtuse or /. IQ's have plummeted recently.

It's called usury, and it is prohibited quite explicitly by Islamic law. Nothing to do with Jews.

[citation needed]

Having become so accustomed to hearing the term "millions", "billions" and, more recently "trillions" used to describe public spending, I had to look up this strange word "thousands". Apparently, it represents something akin to like .0001 percent of a trillion dollars. I had no idea such antiquated amounts of money were still spent in the public sector. I thought you couldn't even get a toilet seat for under a million...

If you think that you are not a criminal, it is for one of three reasons:

1 - You are a criminal and you know it, but you haven't been caught yet, so you haven't been publicly labeled as such or

2 - You are ignorant of laws that criminalize things you do (and there are oh so many laws) or

3 - They haven't passed a law against what you enjoy doing yet.

There are libraries, Neo, endless libraries to hold all of our laws. We, as private citizens, are overrun with laws that examine our personal lives and behavior and make criminals of us all. All the State need do is to shine their spotlight on your life and soon enough you too will find yourself a "criminal".

So you might not want to be so quick to suggest capital punishment for all of those who run afoul of the government. Just sayin.

Fortunately for you, a President WILL be set today. Something tells me you were maybe hoping for a precedent to be set in this case, though...

While I agree that this has happened to some extent, it describes what is happening at fly-by-night "audit firms" and other shady outfits far more than it does at the established accounting and consulting firms, who are drawing on staff that have long worked with projects involving government regulation and really have minimal need to create any kind of 'new breed'.

What I don't get is how TFA can say:

"have acted more for theatrical purposes rather than any legitimate reason. Basically, all they've done is create new reporting requirements that do little to nothing to either prevent fraud or clarify a company's actual financial position."

There have always been audits. The effectiveness of audits to uncover fraud and clarify financial positions has never been questioned (unless the firm conducting the audit was corrupt). The only difference now with SOX is which companies are subject to audit. Saying that audits dont prevent fraud or provide clearer views of finances is a fairly absurd accusation.

After all, these same companies are conducting similar audits during mergers and acquisitions. What's good for the goose...

Astounding how we, as a country, can have comments like the ones in this thread, and like the ones in TFA, that continue to stand up for deregulation of the financial markets, having less accountability, requiring less transparency, while the entire system is collapsing precisely because of a lack or regulation, accountability, and transparency.

You all are standing in the lobby of a skyscraper that is collapsing, preaching to the screaming people who are frantically running out the doors that 'this is exactly why we should enforce less standards when we build skyscrapers!' Everyone is looking at you like you are the retarded maniac that you probably are.

*Gasp* an internal control audit, you say!? Why, that doesn't make any sense... that a publically traded company (whose business model relies on their business partners, who are private companies, remaining financially solvent) should require those private companies to attain attestation to the effectiveness of their own internal controls? How dare they. That just sounds, so... so...

Responsible!