We all know what sort of base motivations drive tech innovation, so I thought I'd test by looking for strip clubs in an area I'm familiar. A search on "strip clubs near Spring, Texas" actually turns up some strip clubs downlist. The first three mapped hits, though, are pretty interesting. The first is a restaurant, the second appears to be one of those family-friendly entertainment and food complexes, and the third is a training facility where little girls learn gymnastics and dance.
That last one might be the most classic case of "premature optimization" I've ever encountered.
I'm surprised. Really I am. At the large fed TLA where I work, data destruction is taken seriously. We're an all-WinXP (for users) shop, so our default file locations on our standard disk images (there are almost *no* non-standard images in use) all use EFS. Machines to be discarded are run through a standard 7-random-overwrites procedure. Any machine with even the slightest atypical response will have the drives removed, physically dismantled, and destroyed. Our local guy responsible for this is building a giant sculpture made of platters and magnets. Every platter goes across one of those massive magnetic drive-killer machines (you know, the ones with all the scary warnings about not wearing your watch while you use it and keeping uncontrolled metal bits at least 8 feet away) before it gets added to the pile. Over the last couple of years, it's gotten too big to lift and, yes, we know we'll eventually have to send it for meltdown but it sure is funny to watch the pile grow.
Data destruction is easy. There's no excuse for any govt agency to screw it up.
Where I work, we avoid this problem by having a slightly more sensible PW formatting and expiration policy. However, we in front line support are allowed to specifically tell our users to write down their passwords. Our official security policy encourages but does not mandate memorizing passwords. Every day, I encounter a user who can't/won't do this. My reply is always the same. I pull a credit card from my wallet and show it to the user. "See that long number? That's a password to my credit line. It's embossed on right on there. I don't mind that my password is written down. Neither should you. Just make sure you protect the paper on which it's written!!" Most people write them on a slip of paper that they put in the badge holder around their neck. We consider this just fine and dandy, especially since the average user around here will have at least a dozen different username/password combos to keep track of.
The pictures are pretty and I'll assume the thing works. Some folks, however, won't buy it because they don't want their intranets to work like you or I might expect. Let me explain.
I work for a large TLA govt agency. I've begged our people to get something like this. I know, from working with our folks and doing my own digging, that we have a wealth of knowledge tucked away, here and there, on local group shares and out-of-the-way internal web sites. And yet our internal search function is ludicrously bad. It works off "key words" that are simply a manually maintained (I think) list of useless, often off-the-mark descriptions of approved sites of general interest. Special-interest pages are not indexed in this way. The crawler, if you want to call it that, is terrible at doing its job. Enter a string of text and get a hit on a known, universally accessible web page containing that exact string? Not a chance. I test it occasionally and find that it remains as ridiculous as ever, with a level of functionality that would have been technologically uninteresting the better part of a decade ago but is, in this day, infuriating to users.
The reason for all this is that if our intranet were automatically crawled, well indexed, and truly searchable, people would be able to find things. People in Work Area A would be able to see how they might be impacted by something going on in Work Area B. Horrors! That would mean that management would lose much of their ability to keep employees selectively in the dark.
All this came to a head a number of years ago. At that time, our intranet content was maintained by IT. Anybody that wanted a site (literally anybody) could just get their first-line manager to approve the request and they'd get server space and some help setting up a page or two. The exchange of information that started happening was highly disruptive, so a "Communications and Liaison" office was set up that wrenched control of the intranet from IT and required (what seems to be essentially political) approval of the business case for anything that went online. No web sites unless the Communications gods approved.
Nowadays, the employees of one division are only vaguely aware that other divisions exist or have web sites. Each individual fiefdom is protected from the ravages of communications that don't strictly follow the org chart lines. I guess the executives in charge are happy in their insulated little worlds.
If you're going to sell an effective intranet search tool, you're going to have to face the fact that lots of large organization leaders (and you find the same attitudes in both the public and the private sector) would recoil in horror at the thought of having their intranet be effectively searchable. It's too threatening.
Interestingly, if you listen to some of the most deeply committed Christian fundamentalist religious types in the U.S., they tend to conclude that the U.S. will soon be irrelevant. They read Revelations and, in their interpretation, find all sorts of references to modern states like Russia but nothing about the U.S. Since the U.S. isn't in prophecy, they are forced to conclude that it will, by the end of the modern era (i.e., with the coming of the imminent tribulation period), be somehow rendered meaningless and impotent. Generally, they like to think that this will be because such a huge portion of the U.S. population will be caught up in the Rapture that the resulting chaos will leave the U.S. marginalized. For whatever reason, though, it's clear to them that approximately by the time Christ and the armies of God are loosed by the Almighty to kick the Antichrists butt, the U.S. will be just a footnote to history.
Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if the *real* cause of the decline and fall of the U.S. actually turned out to be listening too much to religious leaders? You reap what you sow, indeed.
if japan won, most americans would have become slaves...
Unlikely. The Japanese never really considered occupying the continental U.S. They had this picture in their minds of a cowboy behind every rock with a rifle, just waiting to pick 'em off. They wanted to take the Pacific by destroying the fleet and our ability to project military power westward. They were looking for a sort of victory through marginalization - if the U.S. were rendered impotent, they could take over Asia and the Pacific without worries. Obviously, they miscalculated. But invade and enslave? I don't think so.
...wild elephant...you don't have an adequate gun...
Actually, there have been two documented cases of an elephant killed as a direct result of being shot with a.22 long rifle rimfire. I mean actually killed within minutes by the injury, too, not succumbing weeks later to an infection or some such complication. The first was an accident. The second was done by the same guy just to prove it could be done.
In both cases, the shot was precisely placed in the front armpit (where the skin is about the thinnest on the whole animal) and along a path that led to the heart. In both cases, the bullet managed to penetrate just far enough to poke a.22 caliber hole in the aorta and death resulted in just a few minutes.
In fact, the whole "amazing one-shot-kill" genre is full of similarly documented cases. For a long time, the NYC police were enamored beyond all reason with the 9mm. It's a good round, but they kept it even when the.40S&W was taking over police armories all over the country. Why? Because of a legendary case where a kid had fallen into a cage in the zoo and was being menaced by a bear, polar, iirc. The responding officer fired a single shot that miraculously found some point (I don't remember which) in the central nervous system. The animal dropped like a sack of potatos and the 9mm instantly became some sort of magic sword in the minds of NYC police officials.
There are a million similar stories out there, a surprising number of them quite true. Also true are the opposite cases, especially where Cape Buff are concerned. Those things have been known to absorb enough lead to stop a tank and still kill the hunter. They have a wonderful habit, too, of re-killing anything that pisses them off enough to make them charge. They've been observed to kill a hunter, then stand next to the carcass and fall over on it, dropping their one-ton plus weight on the body, then rolling back and forth like a pig wallowing in mud. Left to their own devices, an angry cape buff will happily turn a careless hunter into something that looks like a large, smelly puddle of moldy breakfast cereal. I'm not a sport hunter and have always said I would only hunt for meat - but if someone offered me a chance at one of those marvelous beasts, I'd be on board in a heartbeat.
If elephants and big cats get reintroduced to the wilds of North America, I say bring some cape buffalo, too.
I've grown up and matured and it's not much of a problem anymore, but when I was a young man I would go deaf while under stress. For example, back in college if I were particularly nervous about approaching a girl but forced myself to go ahead, anyway, I would nearly always experience a reduction in the ambient noise level and then the sound of her voice until, finally, I could sort of hear my own voice off in the distance but nothing else. It didn't matter how noisy the party was, I basically heard nothing until I managed to say something sufficiently stupid or off-the-wall (it's really hard to carry on a conversation if you can't hear the other person) that the girl got disgusted and walked away. With the stress removed, my hearing would quickly return.
...when the Patriot Act required that libraries secretly reveal their patrons' borrowing histories in effectively warrantless searches, librarians around the country made sure that their systems stopped keeping borrowing histories.
Any information gathered per a statutory requirement can be used against people by an evil government. Anything. A well-known and perhaps the best example is probably the census data from 1930s Germany that contained religious affiliation info. That certainly got misused. But the same thing happens here. When the DC-area sniper(s) were running amok, the BATF somehow managed to pull together records of what people in the area owned guns similar to the one being used in the attacks. Doors were knocked on and intimidating packs of thugs with badges "suggested" that those guns be surrendered for testing. It turned out, of course, that all the harrassment was a waste of time; the shooters were from out of town and didn't fit the profile in use, anyway. But that didn't stop the abuse.
When New York City registered assault rifles, they got the law passed in part based on the promise that by registering them, their owners could keep them. That removed some of opposition. The time was very short between the registration and when those registration lists were used to go knocking on doors and confiscating the guns after a ban was subsequently passed.
The next time you hear some pro-gun wacko spouting off about how the government has established an illegal de facto gun registration scheme, cut him some slack. He's right. And that's why the gun rights lobby keeps fighting to have background check information destroyed asap. That's why back when gun dealers kept all their records on paper, it used to be common that when they went out of business and were required to turn all those records over to the BATF it so often happened that the records had been stored in a basement that had gotten accidentally flooded.
My point? How does all this relate to libraries? Here it is: The principle is the same. Give the government information for which it has no justifiable need and you pretty much guarantee bad things will happen.
Good point. What's weird, though, is the way so many religious organizations continued to fight against that movie *after* it came out. The thing ended with God being, well, God - perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful, and merciful. It repeatedly made the point that individual interpretations of scripture can be twisted all sorts of weird ways by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons but, in the end, there would be a perfect God, setting it all right.
I thought it was a seriously uplifting, pro-God kind of movie. Yet even after they'd had a chance to see it, some religious groups still hated it. I don't understand why.
Your resentment is noted and, I must admit, reasonable. I do not apologize for singling out football as, among all team sports, the one with the least value and the greatest negatives. I will, however, grant that team sports do accomplish some good things. Since I've grown up and gotten away, I've seen that it's possible to reinforce fair play and sportsmanship through team sports for kids. I can also see the good side of those point-by-point citations I used as jumping-off points in my previous post. Congrats to you for approaching the subject in a reasonable manner and not using sports to permanently warp the minds of your kids. I've seen that happen way too often and it's nice to hear from someone who can rise above such all-too-common base behavior.
So I apologize to you. My post was overheated.
But you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned Odessa Permian. My situation wasn't quite that bad (those poor, evil saps are in a whole 'nother plane of reality) but I still hate football. I hate pretty much everything about it and I always will. I'm willing to consider the thoughtfulness with which you approach this subject, coming from a former football player, to be as valid as any other statistical outlier but that's as charitable as I can be toward the sport of football. I am generally as proud to be a Texan as anyone, but everytime I hear a Texan defending high school football I get these mental images of an ancient Roman waxing ecstatic over the most recent gladitorial hack-n-slash at the coliseum, complete with a few Christians getting munched on by lions at halftime. Lots of people get mighty eloquent about how it's nothing less than spiritually uplifting entertainment. I say it's just fucking evil.
With my luck, if I ever have a son he'll want nothing more than to play football. If he tells me honestly that it's just so he can get laid, I'll support him all the way. But if he gives me any crap about the virtues of team play as expressed through the brutal, beautiful ballet of football, I swear I'll murder the little bastard in his sleep.
Yes, so that you can all form an unstoppable juggernaut of testosterone to sweep down the halls of your high school, pushing down the weak kids, grabbing ass on the girls, and being admired by the teachers and staff for all the prestige you bring to the school, such prestige mainly coming from the beer-swilling semi-literate ex-jocks that populate the football stands every Friday night, vicariously re-living the youth they wish they'd had through their knuckle-dragging sons.
How to get along with people you may not like
Yes, so you can form a team to hurt the people you, as a group, have decided you really don't like.
Discipline and focus, with regard to achieving a goal
Yes, so you can collectively be far more efficient at making the lives of all the outsiders, the dorks, and the "tweety birds" (i.e. non-athletes) as miserable as possible.
Planning and stragety
Yes, it always helps to have your teammates scoping out whoever you want to hurt next so that you can catch them alone. Nothing is more of a pain than a planning or strategy error that forces you to stop a beatdown because a teacher might see you.
Competitiveness, which certainly can help later in life if applied correctly
Oh, yes, God knows it would be a tragedy to entertain the notion that we might be put on this earth to help each other. We're put here to compete, defeat and destroy! (Yes, that's an actual quote from a football cheer.)
Y'know, I hear idiots talking all the time about how team sports are good for kids. But it's those team sports that help turn kids into those crazy parents in the stands that try to kill each other over a kids game. I'll grant that team sports CAN, under incredibly rare circumstances, be a positive influence. I, however, grew up in central/west Texas, where football is king and literally nothing else in high school matters to anyone. Based on my personal experience, I think the world would be a better place if every football player on it dropped dead. Then again, maybe just the coaches would be enough. I'll take what I can get.
Just IMO, of course. I'm sure I'm the only one in the world who feels that way or had a couple of bad experiences in high school. And junior high. And elementary school.
Let the voicemail enter the phone, if they do not leave a voicemail, it is not important.
I go further. My biggest problem has always been the phone, what with people calling me with problems that they could easily solve for themselves if they'd just spend 90 seconds thinking about the problem instead of reflexively picking up the phone. I hate that, so I just don't pick up the phone. My voicemail message says that I'll respond to messages when I'm able and that if you really want to contact me you should send me email. I haven't been "able" to reply to a voicemail in over a year now.
My boss is fully aware of the way I'm implementing this distraction-avoidance technique and she has no problem with it. As long as I answer my pager within 10 minutes and email within 4 hours, she's happy. BTW, we don't have IMs where I work; I'd never turn 'em on if we did.
Some treatment standards lag behind reality. Diabetics, for example, are coming to realize the benefits of tight blood glucose control in avoiding the long-term complications of the disease. Doctors, on average, are *way* behind the curve on this issue. If you go online and read up on the disease (one of the best mailing lists maintains a semi-official motto of "My body, my science project") enough, you may conclude you want to start shooting insulin *now* instead of a few years from now when you absolutely must. You may decide that the potential benefits (keeping your eyesight and your feet, for example) outweigh the (literal) pain of starting injecting yourself a few years earlier than your physician would direct.
But what happens when you go to an average general practitioner and say you want to start giving yourself (in his view) a bunch of premature and unnecessary injections? He'll typically think you're a crazy hypochondriac and treat you to a dose of head-patting condescension. At that point, if you're smart, you find an endocrinologist whose education didn't stop a decade ago, get the insulin, and start using it. Did you *have* to? Probably not. Are you *sure* this staved off complications? Again, probably not. But was it a reasonable judgement call to make and was it, ultimately, your responsibility to take charge of your own treatment regimen? Damn right it was.
Want another example? It's been long established that some of the vaccinations routinely administered to children in the U.S. are for conditions for which there is, practically speaking, *no* risk. Those children are more at risk from that subset of vaccinations than they are from the diseases. So what happens when parents read up on vaccinations and make an informed decision to subject their child to less than the full panoply of typically-administered injections? Their pediatricians treat them like idiots or worse, sometimes firing their own patients for not towing the line and doing, without question, whatever the doctor orders.
Too many doctors treat educated patients as if they were hypochondriacs. That's unwarranted and sad. They've brought the problem on themselves with their attitudes. The 'net didn't create the problem. Doctors did.
As a youngster, I took a job where work was assigned via a computerized Work Planning and Control system. The WP&C graded each task according to difficulty and then determined how long it would take a successful employee to get it done. Similar work was bundled together and printed tags went on each batch. Each batch took an hour. This was paperwork processing, so a batch of difficult work might be a tenth of an inch thick. A batch of simple work might be two feet tall.
You came in each morning, accepted 8 batches (hours) of work from the assignment clerk, took them to your desk, and went to work. There were always a few people, maybe 10%, who couldn't get finished during the day. About half of the workers could finish in 6 or 7 hours; they tended to take long lunches and breaks and actually finish up right at quitting time.
A few of us, though, had a different situation. I'd grab my 8 hours worth of work, get it done in about 90 minutes, and spend the rest of the day hanging out, wandering the building, and shooting the shit with anyone who wanted to listen. Often, I'd get bored enough to go grab another 8 hours work and blow through that in the last couple of hours of the day. Whenever there was a crunch, management could count on me to check out 20 or 30 hours of work and get it done in a day, putting us back on schedule. Because the WP&C showed I generally did the work of two people, minimum, management thought I was the best employee they had. I, on the other hand, was bored silly.
Here's my point - No matter how management chooses to measure productivity, that measure will not apply to some people. Some people will show up as extra-capable when they really aren't. Some people will show up as poor quality workers when they really aren't. Outside assembly-line (and conceptually similar) work, the only accurate measure of my worth as an employee I've ever been subjected to was a situation where I was evaluated by my coworkers. Generally, they guy who sits next to you knows better than anyone whether you're actually working or not.
Effectively measuring worker productivity in any complex job is a very tough nut to crack. A crutch like a keystroke logger (or the WP&C system I outlined above) is strong evidence that the management was too lazy, stupid, or both to put in the thought and effort required to do a good job of measuring their employees.
Certain gunmakers have marketted "fingerprint resistant" guns. This is a marketting strategy that could very well be aimed at criminals...the gun makers are not advocating use of the product for crime, simply advertising a feature that would be primarily useful to criminals.
Argh. No matter how many times I hear this, it still grates on my nerves.
I remember the first time I saw those TEC advertisements. Part of me said "Oh, shit. Some people are going to think this is a feature desireable by the bad guys." Then my rational side took over and said "There's no way anybody could be that ignorant. Every gun owner knows that leaving one ugly, oily fingerprint on a finely-polished gun barrel can result in a permanent fingerprint, etched in rust, in less than a day. An anti-fingerprint finish is perfect for firearms. Anybody who thinks this is being marketed at the bad guys is just a nut."
Well, it turned out that, in Brady-land and in the halls of government, there were quite a few nuts who had never owned guns, didn't understand how useful this feature was to gun owners, and raised a stink about it. Those of us on the "we use and know guns" side of the fence were just dumbfounded when these idiotic accusations were originally made. And we're just as dumbfounded today when people continue to quote such descredited crapola. If you've ever had to go over one of your guns a third and fourth time to make sure you got all the fingerprints cleaned off before you put it away in the gun safe, you know that the anti-fingerprint finish was a utilitarian triumph, not an embodiment of evil.
What's interesting to me is that this is really on point. When all was said and done, the benign intent of the people who marketed the anti-fingerprint technology was made clear. Under this ruling, those guys would prevail. Interesting. Maybe this isn't such a bad ruling after all. I think I'll dl the pdfs, read them, and make up my own mind.
Almost no one goes on attacking people after they've been shot,
Serious error, there. Criminals in gunfights have been frequently known to continue to be a threat after absorbing multiple hits. Clyde Barrows' brother took a slug to the forehead, lost half his brain matter, and was observed to continue fighting for nearly a minute before he expired. Most "failures" of firearms to stop an assailant are far less dramatic but the principle remains - no matter how powerful your gun, some people will continue trying to kill you even after you shoot them enough times that, if they had any sense at all, they'd lay down and die, already.
So what are high-power handguns for?
Lots of things. In defensive scenarios, more power is better, all else being equal. Of course, all else is never equal. More power equals more recoil equals more difficulty shooting quickly. Like everything, there's a tradeoff but, within reason, when defending yourself more power is better. If you were a cop on lone patrol in a rural area where meth labs are known to operate, I wouldn't blame you for carrying a.44 mag as a backup and an AR as your primary.
As an aside, you may find it interesting that more power is actually more merciful to the person being shot. Generally, when people are shot and if good medical care is quickly available, one of three things happens. One, something vital gets hit and they die immediately. Two, a major blood vessel gets hit and they bleed out quite quickly with a fatal result. Three, neither of those things happens, help arrives, and they survive. How this relates to pistol power is as follows: A single round from a.45ACP may be enough to put an attacker down. Being rendered nonthreatening by a single round minimizes the chance of a major blood vessel being clipped, thus reducing the chances of a person dying from one of the two fatal scenarios mentioned above. A low-powered gun will possibly have to be fired multiple times to cause someone to stop what they're doing. Multiple shots, though, vastly increase the likelihood of a blood vessel being damaged. I realize that at first blush it seems counter-intuitive, but getting hit once with a strong shot is generally less deadly than getting hit multiple times with a wimpy round.
As for other uses for high-power handguns, there's hunting, of course, for which the highest powered handguns are minimally adequate. Finally, there are various target games. Personally, I'm a devotee of handgun silhouette shooting. This is a sport that requires shooting at targets weighing as much as 50 pounds at distances of 50 meters to 200 meters, and sometimes out to 500 meters (rare, but a helluva lotta fun). In order to score, you must knock that 50 pound target down and off its stand. For a task like that at the longest distance, the most powerful handguns you can have built for you are barely adequate. As an added bonus, they're incredibly loud and more fun to shoot than I can possibly communicate here.
I disagree. In early 2001, someone impersonating me used my stolen credit card number to fly all over the west coast for a couple of weeks. They had to show up in person to take the flights and the fact that they weren't me didn't seem to cause them much trouble.
Good point. I was absolutely shocked that the prosecutor brought up jury nullification. That's a topic that I thought prosecutors avoided like the plague. Just mentioning it during voire dire lets the potential jurors know that the concept exists and that, from the prosecutions point of view, must be a very bad thing. In this case, though, the people who thought so poorly of the law were so forthright with their beliefs that the prosecutor felt it necessary to bring up nullification if for no other reason than to defuse that bomb before it got deployed.
She explained what it was. She called it a shameful practice. And she asked if anyone thought they could, under any conceivable circumstances under the given charge, vote to nullify. A few hands went up. I'm sure those few were struck by her if not by the judge. After that was when she gave us her speech about how if we didn't agree with the law we should take it up with the legislature but we simply couldn't let it influence us in the instant proceeding.
Overall, it was the most educational voire dire of the dozen or so in which I've participated.
In several of the places I've lived, the local government was effectively an extension of the local real-estate developers. Do you expect them to do the right thing? I sure don't.
Oh, so you've lived in Houston, Texas, too?:-)
Yeah, I know, it's bad in lots of places but I think Houston is unique. There have been times in the past when literally every single member of the city council was in the real estate development business. How many other places can top that? It goes a long way to explain the complete lack of respect Houston has toward its architectural past, the complete lack of foresight in development plans, and the (near-)complete lack of zoning. I shudder to think of what sort of idiotic schemes some of the real estate developers in this city are going to come up with now that they have this Supreme Court decision to inspire them.
Or 19 year olds who've committed statuatory rape by having sex with their 17 year old significant other's. The laws about that kind of thing make no distinction.
Funny you should mention that. I was on a jury panel last Monday here in Texas. The charge was aggravated sexual assault of a child. During voire dire (I wasn't selected to serve), a couple of things came out that I thought were interesting. First, in Texas, if both the victim and the perp are 14 to 19 years old, it's possible to get a conviction but the guy found guilty is *not* required to register as a sex offender. That's new; there may be some old records in the database but new convictions of the type you cite (19 yr old with a 17 yr old) will, by sometime later this year, no longer go into the database.
The other thing that caught my attention was the reaction of the women on the panel to some of the information presented. After the prosecutor made it crystal clear that this was an aggravated case, made so because the victim was under 14, and that at that age it is impossible for her to give a valid, legal consent, fully a third of the women on the panel reacted very negatively. They openly cited examples from their experience that convinced them a 13 year old could give an informed consent and that that consent should be considered valid and a defense against prosecution. But that's not the law and the consent or lack of it from the victim simply wouldn't be an issue during the trial. A number of women said they were very uncomfortable with that and felt they could be forced to render a verdict they felt was ethically wrong. The prosecuting attorney literally told them they'd have to take that up with the legislature but if they served on the jury they would have to *not* consider any consent that may or may not have occurred. While no one was allowed to provide facts of the case to us, it was strongly hinted that this was a case of a guy in high school and a 12 or 13 year old girl. None of the guys was willing to speak up (we can't, obviously, since doing so makes us look like perverts) but a number of the women were willing to openly communicate that they thought such a case should not be prosecuted. Two of the panel members were teachers who taught kids in that age range, mentioned their level of sexual activity, and went on to say that if the law required us to assume all 13-year-olds are incapable of providing a valid consent then the law was "ridiculous." The prosecutor wasn't happy about that.
I'm not sure why I found this attitude, especially their willingness to openly talk about it, so surprising.
It is amazing that I can go to so much trouble to carefully explain my position only to have you come along and fail to comprehend it, completely. I have to give you credit, though. You did manage to pack more erroneous statements into fewer words than I've seen in a long time. Shall I give you a list?
...this asshole who seriously believes that the wedding is being put on for his benefit rather than, you know, that of you and your guests.
I went to great pains to point out that photogs who act like the wedding is an occasion for taking pictures have got it all wrong. The whole point of my post was that by insisting on good working conditions, I would have a LESS negative impact on the wedding and make sure that the B&G stayed the focus rather than any friction between me and guests who insist on hindering my ability to do my job detracting from your special day.
...last think anyone needs on their wedding day is an employee who thinks they're running the shit.
Define shit. You hire me to do the photography. I expect to do the photography. If the photography==the shit, then I sure as hell expect to run the shit. OTOH, if you mean the whole event==the shit, then you obviously weren't listening. How many times do I have to say that by insisting on reasonable working conditions, I was able to get into and out of each scenario quickly and unobtrusively, thereby MINIMIZING my impact on the event? Face it, having a pro shoot your wedding is a distraction. There's no way around that. But a good one, like I was, will do everything in his power to make sure he distracts as little as possible from the proceedings.
...imagine having your photographer come to you all in a huff and saying "They're taking PICTURES!...
Now you're just being stupid. Look again at the post you're replying to. I emphasized that I set up, well in advance, a contact for this purpose. That person is NEVER the bride or groom. One of the biggest advantages of insisting on good working conditions is that I NEVER had to bother the B&G with administrative details during the event.
Look, you may be Mr. Control Freak who can't stand to let his employees do their jobs without dictating how and why, but most of my clients hired me to "just handle it." And handle it, I did. They got great pictures. The attendees sometimes didn't even notice I was there. (I literally had dozens of brides give me feedback in the months after a wedding that there were people who looked at the wedding album and commented that they didn't even realize a photographer was at the wedding. I took that as a very high compliment.) Because there was nothing screwing up my gig, I never had to interfere with the flow of the event. I don't know how to explain this any more clearly: The only reason to insist on being the only shooter at the event is to make sure that competent work gets done without having to make an ass of myself toward the people who will otherwise be happy to jump in front of me as soon as I get a shot set up.
If you don't trust a particular photographer enough to give him full responsibility to do his job, find another shooter you do trust. Obviously, you have problems with competent employees who expect to be allowed to do their job without interference. That's cool. I know lots of jerks like that. Find someone who doesn't mind working under those conditions and stop whining about those of us who expect to act and be treated professionally.
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We all know what sort of base motivations drive tech innovation, so I thought I'd test by looking for strip clubs in an area I'm familiar. A search on "strip clubs near Spring, Texas" actually turns up some strip clubs downlist. The first three mapped hits, though, are pretty interesting. The first is a restaurant, the second appears to be one of those family-friendly entertainment and food complexes, and the third is a training facility where little girls learn gymnastics and dance.
That last one might be the most classic case of "premature optimization" I've ever encountered.
Yes. Strippers. The good ones are worth it.
I'm surprised. Really I am. At the large fed TLA where I work, data destruction is taken seriously. We're an all-WinXP (for users) shop, so our default file locations on our standard disk images (there are almost *no* non-standard images in use) all use EFS. Machines to be discarded are run through a standard 7-random-overwrites procedure. Any machine with even the slightest atypical response will have the drives removed, physically dismantled, and destroyed. Our local guy responsible for this is building a giant sculpture made of platters and magnets. Every platter goes across one of those massive magnetic drive-killer machines (you know, the ones with all the scary warnings about not wearing your watch while you use it and keeping uncontrolled metal bits at least 8 feet away) before it gets added to the pile. Over the last couple of years, it's gotten too big to lift and, yes, we know we'll eventually have to send it for meltdown but it sure is funny to watch the pile grow.
Data destruction is easy. There's no excuse for any govt agency to screw it up.
Parent post seems a whole lot more "Insightful" to me.
Where I work, we avoid this problem by having a slightly more sensible PW formatting and expiration policy. However, we in front line support are allowed to specifically tell our users to write down their passwords. Our official security policy encourages but does not mandate memorizing passwords. Every day, I encounter a user who can't/won't do this. My reply is always the same. I pull a credit card from my wallet and show it to the user. "See that long number? That's a password to my credit line. It's embossed on right on there. I don't mind that my password is written down. Neither should you. Just make sure you protect the paper on which it's written!!" Most people write them on a slip of paper that they put in the badge holder around their neck. We consider this just fine and dandy, especially since the average user around here will have at least a dozen different username/password combos to keep track of.
Simple, huh?
The pictures are pretty and I'll assume the thing works. Some folks, however, won't buy it because they don't want their intranets to work like you or I might expect. Let me explain.
I work for a large TLA govt agency. I've begged our people to get something like this. I know, from working with our folks and doing my own digging, that we have a wealth of knowledge tucked away, here and there, on local group shares and out-of-the-way internal web sites. And yet our internal search function is ludicrously bad. It works off "key words" that are simply a manually maintained (I think) list of useless, often off-the-mark descriptions of approved sites of general interest. Special-interest pages are not indexed in this way. The crawler, if you want to call it that, is terrible at doing its job. Enter a string of text and get a hit on a known, universally accessible web page containing that exact string? Not a chance. I test it occasionally and find that it remains as ridiculous as ever, with a level of functionality that would have been technologically uninteresting the better part of a decade ago but is, in this day, infuriating to users.
The reason for all this is that if our intranet were automatically crawled, well indexed, and truly searchable, people would be able to find things. People in Work Area A would be able to see how they might be impacted by something going on in Work Area B. Horrors! That would mean that management would lose much of their ability to keep employees selectively in the dark.
All this came to a head a number of years ago. At that time, our intranet content was maintained by IT. Anybody that wanted a site (literally anybody) could just get their first-line manager to approve the request and they'd get server space and some help setting up a page or two. The exchange of information that started happening was highly disruptive, so a "Communications and Liaison" office was set up that wrenched control of the intranet from IT and required (what seems to be essentially political) approval of the business case for anything that went online. No web sites unless the Communications gods approved.
Nowadays, the employees of one division are only vaguely aware that other divisions exist or have web sites. Each individual fiefdom is protected from the ravages of communications that don't strictly follow the org chart lines. I guess the executives in charge are happy in their insulated little worlds.
If you're going to sell an effective intranet search tool, you're going to have to face the fact that lots of large organization leaders (and you find the same attitudes in both the public and the private sector) would recoil in horror at the thought of having their intranet be effectively searchable. It's too threatening.
Interestingly, if you listen to some of the most deeply committed Christian fundamentalist religious types in the U.S., they tend to conclude that the U.S. will soon be irrelevant. They read Revelations and, in their interpretation, find all sorts of references to modern states like Russia but nothing about the U.S. Since the U.S. isn't in prophecy, they are forced to conclude that it will, by the end of the modern era (i.e., with the coming of the imminent tribulation period), be somehow rendered meaningless and impotent. Generally, they like to think that this will be because such a huge portion of the U.S. population will be caught up in the Rapture that the resulting chaos will leave the U.S. marginalized. For whatever reason, though, it's clear to them that approximately by the time Christ and the armies of God are loosed by the Almighty to kick the Antichrists butt, the U.S. will be just a footnote to history.
Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if the *real* cause of the decline and fall of the U.S. actually turned out to be listening too much to religious leaders? You reap what you sow, indeed.
Tell us more. That sounds like the only interesting story that could come from this shindig.
Unlikely. The Japanese never really considered occupying the continental U.S. They had this picture in their minds of a cowboy behind every rock with a rifle, just waiting to pick 'em off. They wanted to take the Pacific by destroying the fleet and our ability to project military power westward. They were looking for a sort of victory through marginalization - if the U.S. were rendered impotent, they could take over Asia and the Pacific without worries. Obviously, they miscalculated. But invade and enslave? I don't think so.
Actually, there have been two documented cases of an elephant killed as a direct result of being shot with a .22 long rifle rimfire. I mean actually killed within minutes by the injury, too, not succumbing weeks later to an infection or some such complication. The first was an accident. The second was done by the same guy just to prove it could be done.
In both cases, the shot was precisely placed in the front armpit (where the skin is about the thinnest on the whole animal) and along a path that led to the heart. In both cases, the bullet managed to penetrate just far enough to poke a .22 caliber hole in the aorta and death resulted in just a few minutes.
In fact, the whole "amazing one-shot-kill" genre is full of similarly documented cases. For a long time, the NYC police were enamored beyond all reason with the 9mm. It's a good round, but they kept it even when the .40S&W was taking over police armories all over the country. Why? Because of a legendary case where a kid had fallen into a cage in the zoo and was being menaced by a bear, polar, iirc. The responding officer fired a single shot that miraculously found some point (I don't remember which) in the central nervous system. The animal dropped like a sack of potatos and the 9mm instantly became some sort of magic sword in the minds of NYC police officials.
There are a million similar stories out there, a surprising number of them quite true. Also true are the opposite cases, especially where Cape Buff are concerned. Those things have been known to absorb enough lead to stop a tank and still kill the hunter. They have a wonderful habit, too, of re-killing anything that pisses them off enough to make them charge. They've been observed to kill a hunter, then stand next to the carcass and fall over on it, dropping their one-ton plus weight on the body, then rolling back and forth like a pig wallowing in mud. Left to their own devices, an angry cape buff will happily turn a careless hunter into something that looks like a large, smelly puddle of moldy breakfast cereal. I'm not a sport hunter and have always said I would only hunt for meat - but if someone offered me a chance at one of those marvelous beasts, I'd be on board in a heartbeat.
If elephants and big cats get reintroduced to the wilds of North America, I say bring some cape buffalo, too.
I've grown up and matured and it's not much of a problem anymore, but when I was a young man I would go deaf while under stress. For example, back in college if I were particularly nervous about approaching a girl but forced myself to go ahead, anyway, I would nearly always experience a reduction in the ambient noise level and then the sound of her voice until, finally, I could sort of hear my own voice off in the distance but nothing else. It didn't matter how noisy the party was, I basically heard nothing until I managed to say something sufficiently stupid or off-the-wall (it's really hard to carry on a conversation if you can't hear the other person) that the girl got disgusted and walked away. With the stress removed, my hearing would quickly return.
Anyone else ever experience this?
Any information gathered per a statutory requirement can be used against people by an evil government. Anything. A well-known and perhaps the best example is probably the census data from 1930s Germany that contained religious affiliation info. That certainly got misused. But the same thing happens here. When the DC-area sniper(s) were running amok, the BATF somehow managed to pull together records of what people in the area owned guns similar to the one being used in the attacks. Doors were knocked on and intimidating packs of thugs with badges "suggested" that those guns be surrendered for testing. It turned out, of course, that all the harrassment was a waste of time; the shooters were from out of town and didn't fit the profile in use, anyway. But that didn't stop the abuse.
When New York City registered assault rifles, they got the law passed in part based on the promise that by registering them, their owners could keep them. That removed some of opposition. The time was very short between the registration and when those registration lists were used to go knocking on doors and confiscating the guns after a ban was subsequently passed.
The next time you hear some pro-gun wacko spouting off about how the government has established an illegal de facto gun registration scheme, cut him some slack. He's right. And that's why the gun rights lobby keeps fighting to have background check information destroyed asap. That's why back when gun dealers kept all their records on paper, it used to be common that when they went out of business and were required to turn all those records over to the BATF it so often happened that the records had been stored in a basement that had gotten accidentally flooded.
My point? How does all this relate to libraries? Here it is: The principle is the same. Give the government information for which it has no justifiable need and you pretty much guarantee bad things will happen.
Good point. What's weird, though, is the way so many religious organizations continued to fight against that movie *after* it came out. The thing ended with God being, well, God - perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful, and merciful. It repeatedly made the point that individual interpretations of scripture can be twisted all sorts of weird ways by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons but, in the end, there would be a perfect God, setting it all right.
I thought it was a seriously uplifting, pro-God kind of movie. Yet even after they'd had a chance to see it, some religious groups still hated it. I don't understand why.
Your resentment is noted and, I must admit, reasonable. I do not apologize for singling out football as, among all team sports, the one with the least value and the greatest negatives. I will, however, grant that team sports do accomplish some good things. Since I've grown up and gotten away, I've seen that it's possible to reinforce fair play and sportsmanship through team sports for kids. I can also see the good side of those point-by-point citations I used as jumping-off points in my previous post. Congrats to you for approaching the subject in a reasonable manner and not using sports to permanently warp the minds of your kids. I've seen that happen way too often and it's nice to hear from someone who can rise above such all-too-common base behavior.
So I apologize to you. My post was overheated.
But you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned Odessa Permian. My situation wasn't quite that bad (those poor, evil saps are in a whole 'nother plane of reality) but I still hate football. I hate pretty much everything about it and I always will. I'm willing to consider the thoughtfulness with which you approach this subject, coming from a former football player, to be as valid as any other statistical outlier but that's as charitable as I can be toward the sport of football. I am generally as proud to be a Texan as anyone, but everytime I hear a Texan defending high school football I get these mental images of an ancient Roman waxing ecstatic over the most recent gladitorial hack-n-slash at the coliseum, complete with a few Christians getting munched on by lions at halftime. Lots of people get mighty eloquent about how it's nothing less than spiritually uplifting entertainment. I say it's just fucking evil.
With my luck, if I ever have a son he'll want nothing more than to play football. If he tells me honestly that it's just so he can get laid, I'll support him all the way. But if he gives me any crap about the virtues of team play as expressed through the brutal, beautiful ballet of football, I swear I'll murder the little bastard in his sleep.
Yes, so that you can all form an unstoppable juggernaut of testosterone to sweep down the halls of your high school, pushing down the weak kids, grabbing ass on the girls, and being admired by the teachers and staff for all the prestige you bring to the school, such prestige mainly coming from the beer-swilling semi-literate ex-jocks that populate the football stands every Friday night, vicariously re-living the youth they wish they'd had through their knuckle-dragging sons.
Yes, so you can form a team to hurt the people you, as a group, have decided you really don't like.
Yes, so you can collectively be far more efficient at making the lives of all the outsiders, the dorks, and the "tweety birds" (i.e. non-athletes) as miserable as possible.
Yes, it always helps to have your teammates scoping out whoever you want to hurt next so that you can catch them alone. Nothing is more of a pain than a planning or strategy error that forces you to stop a beatdown because a teacher might see you.
Oh, yes, God knows it would be a tragedy to entertain the notion that we might be put on this earth to help each other. We're put here to compete, defeat and destroy! (Yes, that's an actual quote from a football cheer.)
Y'know, I hear idiots talking all the time about how team sports are good for kids. But it's those team sports that help turn kids into those crazy parents in the stands that try to kill each other over a kids game. I'll grant that team sports CAN, under incredibly rare circumstances, be a positive influence. I, however, grew up in central/west Texas, where football is king and literally nothing else in high school matters to anyone. Based on my personal experience, I think the world would be a better place if every football player on it dropped dead. Then again, maybe just the coaches would be enough. I'll take what I can get.
Just IMO, of course. I'm sure I'm the only one in the world who feels that way or had a couple of bad experiences in high school. And junior high. And elementary school.
I go further. My biggest problem has always been the phone, what with people calling me with problems that they could easily solve for themselves if they'd just spend 90 seconds thinking about the problem instead of reflexively picking up the phone. I hate that, so I just don't pick up the phone. My voicemail message says that I'll respond to messages when I'm able and that if you really want to contact me you should send me email. I haven't been "able" to reply to a voicemail in over a year now.
My boss is fully aware of the way I'm implementing this distraction-avoidance technique and she has no problem with it. As long as I answer my pager within 10 minutes and email within 4 hours, she's happy. BTW, we don't have IMs where I work; I'd never turn 'em on if we did.
Some treatment standards lag behind reality. Diabetics, for example, are coming to realize the benefits of tight blood glucose control in avoiding the long-term complications of the disease. Doctors, on average, are *way* behind the curve on this issue. If you go online and read up on the disease (one of the best mailing lists maintains a semi-official motto of "My body, my science project") enough, you may conclude you want to start shooting insulin *now* instead of a few years from now when you absolutely must. You may decide that the potential benefits (keeping your eyesight and your feet, for example) outweigh the (literal) pain of starting injecting yourself a few years earlier than your physician would direct.
But what happens when you go to an average general practitioner and say you want to start giving yourself (in his view) a bunch of premature and unnecessary injections? He'll typically think you're a crazy hypochondriac and treat you to a dose of head-patting condescension. At that point, if you're smart, you find an endocrinologist whose education didn't stop a decade ago, get the insulin, and start using it. Did you *have* to? Probably not. Are you *sure* this staved off complications? Again, probably not. But was it a reasonable judgement call to make and was it, ultimately, your responsibility to take charge of your own treatment regimen? Damn right it was.
Want another example? It's been long established that some of the vaccinations routinely administered to children in the U.S. are for conditions for which there is, practically speaking, *no* risk. Those children are more at risk from that subset of vaccinations than they are from the diseases. So what happens when parents read up on vaccinations and make an informed decision to subject their child to less than the full panoply of typically-administered injections? Their pediatricians treat them like idiots or worse, sometimes firing their own patients for not towing the line and doing, without question, whatever the doctor orders.
Too many doctors treat educated patients as if they were hypochondriacs. That's unwarranted and sad. They've brought the problem on themselves with their attitudes. The 'net didn't create the problem. Doctors did.
As a youngster, I took a job where work was assigned via a computerized Work Planning and Control system. The WP&C graded each task according to difficulty and then determined how long it would take a successful employee to get it done. Similar work was bundled together and printed tags went on each batch. Each batch took an hour. This was paperwork processing, so a batch of difficult work might be a tenth of an inch thick. A batch of simple work might be two feet tall.
You came in each morning, accepted 8 batches (hours) of work from the assignment clerk, took them to your desk, and went to work. There were always a few people, maybe 10%, who couldn't get finished during the day. About half of the workers could finish in 6 or 7 hours; they tended to take long lunches and breaks and actually finish up right at quitting time.
A few of us, though, had a different situation. I'd grab my 8 hours worth of work, get it done in about 90 minutes, and spend the rest of the day hanging out, wandering the building, and shooting the shit with anyone who wanted to listen. Often, I'd get bored enough to go grab another 8 hours work and blow through that in the last couple of hours of the day. Whenever there was a crunch, management could count on me to check out 20 or 30 hours of work and get it done in a day, putting us back on schedule. Because the WP&C showed I generally did the work of two people, minimum, management thought I was the best employee they had. I, on the other hand, was bored silly.
Here's my point - No matter how management chooses to measure productivity, that measure will not apply to some people. Some people will show up as extra-capable when they really aren't. Some people will show up as poor quality workers when they really aren't. Outside assembly-line (and conceptually similar) work, the only accurate measure of my worth as an employee I've ever been subjected to was a situation where I was evaluated by my coworkers. Generally, they guy who sits next to you knows better than anyone whether you're actually working or not.
Effectively measuring worker productivity in any complex job is a very tough nut to crack. A crutch like a keystroke logger (or the WP&C system I outlined above) is strong evidence that the management was too lazy, stupid, or both to put in the thought and effort required to do a good job of measuring their employees.
Argh. No matter how many times I hear this, it still grates on my nerves.
I remember the first time I saw those TEC advertisements. Part of me said "Oh, shit. Some people are going to think this is a feature desireable by the bad guys." Then my rational side took over and said "There's no way anybody could be that ignorant. Every gun owner knows that leaving one ugly, oily fingerprint on a finely-polished gun barrel can result in a permanent fingerprint, etched in rust, in less than a day. An anti-fingerprint finish is perfect for firearms. Anybody who thinks this is being marketed at the bad guys is just a nut."
Well, it turned out that, in Brady-land and in the halls of government, there were quite a few nuts who had never owned guns, didn't understand how useful this feature was to gun owners, and raised a stink about it. Those of us on the "we use and know guns" side of the fence were just dumbfounded when these idiotic accusations were originally made. And we're just as dumbfounded today when people continue to quote such descredited crapola. If you've ever had to go over one of your guns a third and fourth time to make sure you got all the fingerprints cleaned off before you put it away in the gun safe, you know that the anti-fingerprint finish was a utilitarian triumph, not an embodiment of evil.
What's interesting to me is that this is really on point. When all was said and done, the benign intent of the people who marketed the anti-fingerprint technology was made clear. Under this ruling, those guys would prevail. Interesting. Maybe this isn't such a bad ruling after all. I think I'll dl the pdfs, read them, and make up my own mind.
Serious error, there. Criminals in gunfights have been frequently known to continue to be a threat after absorbing multiple hits. Clyde Barrows' brother took a slug to the forehead, lost half his brain matter, and was observed to continue fighting for nearly a minute before he expired. Most "failures" of firearms to stop an assailant are far less dramatic but the principle remains - no matter how powerful your gun, some people will continue trying to kill you even after you shoot them enough times that, if they had any sense at all, they'd lay down and die, already.
Lots of things. In defensive scenarios, more power is better, all else being equal. Of course, all else is never equal. More power equals more recoil equals more difficulty shooting quickly. Like everything, there's a tradeoff but, within reason, when defending yourself more power is better. If you were a cop on lone patrol in a rural area where meth labs are known to operate, I wouldn't blame you for carrying a .44 mag as a backup and an AR as your primary.
As an aside, you may find it interesting that more power is actually more merciful to the person being shot. Generally, when people are shot and if good medical care is quickly available, one of three things happens. One, something vital gets hit and they die immediately. Two, a major blood vessel gets hit and they bleed out quite quickly with a fatal result. Three, neither of those things happens, help arrives, and they survive. How this relates to pistol power is as follows: A single round from a .45ACP may be enough to put an attacker down. Being rendered nonthreatening by a single round minimizes the chance of a major blood vessel being clipped, thus reducing the chances of a person dying from one of the two fatal scenarios mentioned above. A low-powered gun will possibly have to be fired multiple times to cause someone to stop what they're doing. Multiple shots, though, vastly increase the likelihood of a blood vessel being damaged. I realize that at first blush it seems counter-intuitive, but getting hit once with a strong shot is generally less deadly than getting hit multiple times with a wimpy round.
As for other uses for high-power handguns, there's hunting, of course, for which the highest powered handguns are minimally adequate. Finally, there are various target games. Personally, I'm a devotee of handgun silhouette shooting. This is a sport that requires shooting at targets weighing as much as 50 pounds at distances of 50 meters to 200 meters, and sometimes out to 500 meters (rare, but a helluva lotta fun). In order to score, you must knock that 50 pound target down and off its stand. For a task like that at the longest distance, the most powerful handguns you can have built for you are barely adequate. As an added bonus, they're incredibly loud and more fun to shoot than I can possibly communicate here.
Was there anything else you wanted to know?
I disagree. In early 2001, someone impersonating me used my stolen credit card number to fly all over the west coast for a couple of weeks. They had to show up in person to take the flights and the fact that they weren't me didn't seem to cause them much trouble.
Good point. I was absolutely shocked that the prosecutor brought up jury nullification. That's a topic that I thought prosecutors avoided like the plague. Just mentioning it during voire dire lets the potential jurors know that the concept exists and that, from the prosecutions point of view, must be a very bad thing. In this case, though, the people who thought so poorly of the law were so forthright with their beliefs that the prosecutor felt it necessary to bring up nullification if for no other reason than to defuse that bomb before it got deployed.
She explained what it was. She called it a shameful practice. And she asked if anyone thought they could, under any conceivable circumstances under the given charge, vote to nullify. A few hands went up. I'm sure those few were struck by her if not by the judge. After that was when she gave us her speech about how if we didn't agree with the law we should take it up with the legislature but we simply couldn't let it influence us in the instant proceeding.
Overall, it was the most educational voire dire of the dozen or so in which I've participated.
Oh, so you've lived in Houston, Texas, too? :-)
Yeah, I know, it's bad in lots of places but I think Houston is unique. There have been times in the past when literally every single member of the city council was in the real estate development business. How many other places can top that? It goes a long way to explain the complete lack of respect Houston has toward its architectural past, the complete lack of foresight in development plans, and the (near-)complete lack of zoning. I shudder to think of what sort of idiotic schemes some of the real estate developers in this city are going to come up with now that they have this Supreme Court decision to inspire them.
The other thing that caught my attention was the reaction of the women on the panel to some of the information presented. After the prosecutor made it crystal clear that this was an aggravated case, made so because the victim was under 14, and that at that age it is impossible for her to give a valid, legal consent, fully a third of the women on the panel reacted very negatively. They openly cited examples from their experience that convinced them a 13 year old could give an informed consent and that that consent should be considered valid and a defense against prosecution. But that's not the law and the consent or lack of it from the victim simply wouldn't be an issue during the trial. A number of women said they were very uncomfortable with that and felt they could be forced to render a verdict they felt was ethically wrong. The prosecuting attorney literally told them they'd have to take that up with the legislature but if they served on the jury they would have to *not* consider any consent that may or may not have occurred. While no one was allowed to provide facts of the case to us, it was strongly hinted that this was a case of a guy in high school and a 12 or 13 year old girl. None of the guys was willing to speak up (we can't, obviously, since doing so makes us look like perverts) but a number of the women were willing to openly communicate that they thought such a case should not be prosecuted. Two of the panel members were teachers who taught kids in that age range, mentioned their level of sexual activity, and went on to say that if the law required us to assume all 13-year-olds are incapable of providing a valid consent then the law was "ridiculous." The prosecutor wasn't happy about that.
I'm not sure why I found this attitude, especially their willingness to openly talk about it, so surprising.
It is amazing that I can go to so much trouble to carefully explain my position only to have you come along and fail to comprehend it, completely. I have to give you credit, though. You did manage to pack more erroneous statements into fewer words than I've seen in a long time. Shall I give you a list?
I went to great pains to point out that photogs who act like the wedding is an occasion for taking pictures have got it all wrong. The whole point of my post was that by insisting on good working conditions, I would have a LESS negative impact on the wedding and make sure that the B&G stayed the focus rather than any friction between me and guests who insist on hindering my ability to do my job detracting from your special day.
Define shit. You hire me to do the photography. I expect to do the photography. If the photography==the shit, then I sure as hell expect to run the shit. OTOH, if you mean the whole event==the shit, then you obviously weren't listening. How many times do I have to say that by insisting on reasonable working conditions, I was able to get into and out of each scenario quickly and unobtrusively, thereby MINIMIZING my impact on the event? Face it, having a pro shoot your wedding is a distraction. There's no way around that. But a good one, like I was, will do everything in his power to make sure he distracts as little as possible from the proceedings.
Now you're just being stupid. Look again at the post you're replying to. I emphasized that I set up, well in advance, a contact for this purpose. That person is NEVER the bride or groom. One of the biggest advantages of insisting on good working conditions is that I NEVER had to bother the B&G with administrative details during the event.
Look, you may be Mr. Control Freak who can't stand to let his employees do their jobs without dictating how and why, but most of my clients hired me to "just handle it." And handle it, I did. They got great pictures. The attendees sometimes didn't even notice I was there. (I literally had dozens of brides give me feedback in the months after a wedding that there were people who looked at the wedding album and commented that they didn't even realize a photographer was at the wedding. I took that as a very high compliment.) Because there was nothing screwing up my gig, I never had to interfere with the flow of the event. I don't know how to explain this any more clearly: The only reason to insist on being the only shooter at the event is to make sure that competent work gets done without having to make an ass of myself toward the people who will otherwise be happy to jump in front of me as soon as I get a shot set up.
If you don't trust a particular photographer enough to give him full responsibility to do his job, find another shooter you do trust. Obviously, you have problems with competent employees who expect to be allowed to do their job without interference. That's cool. I know lots of jerks like that. Find someone who doesn't mind working under those conditions and stop whining about those of us who expect to act and be treated professionally.