In the UK fire drills *are* mandated by law:
> You should carry out at least one fire drill per year and record the results. You must keep the results as part of your fire safety and evacuation plan.
https://www.gov.uk/workplace-f...
I completely agree with your other points.
They often have a vested interest in the stories they choose to report on or avoid.
e.g.
> Reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre were first asked by FOX News and later bribed, > to downplay a story they had on a cancer-causing growth hormone called Posilac > which is growth hormone for dairy cows which is absorbed by humans through milk. > The reporters decided to blow the whistle on FOX News and filed a law suit. > After the ordeal was over, it was discovered in the appeals court that it's > actually not against the law to falsify the "News."
> The soul of juggling is passing objects between two or more jugglers (I humbly assert).
Absolutely yes, amongst the juggling population in my vicinity this seems to be generally regarded as the ultimate expression of the art.
Some jugglers like 4 count with tricks best, but there's a notable resurgence of interest in passing with both hands - 3 count and other such patterns.
Nice to hear from another juggler here on Slashdot.:)
The juggling analogy again?
on
The Age of Speed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
As a juggler, it's a little annoying when people use juggling as an analogy and get it wrong. So here's an explanation of juggling and how to do it, whether it's clubs or tasks.
It's all in the throw, not in the catch. If the throw is perfect, the catch happens without any corrections or concious thought.
You may have two hands, but your two eyes can only look at one thing at a time. Jugglers just peep at the object as it arcs over and downwards, and that's enough to tell them where and when to stick out a hand and catch it. This has been confirmed experimentally using opaque glasses to block off the view of the objects except around about the top of the arc.
Once you get beyond juggling three objects, you peep at the object but then you have to remember how it's falling while you peep at another, before you stick out your hand to catch the first object. So 1) consistency is hugely important and 2) you have to practise daily until it's completely automatic.
The most important tool for juggling is gravity. That's how jugglers stack the objects and know where and when they'll fall. If gravity wavered, it'd bring the pattern down. You have to know what to expect. Remember in Firefly how something unexpected would happen, and it'd turn out they'd prepared for that contingency? Same thing, really.
Now let's apply the theory of juggling to 'juggling' a bunch of tasks. You have to be able to give each task some impetus and then move on, knowing the point at which you'll have to return to that task. You have to have some method, equivalent to the way jugglers use gravity, that smoothly handles the tasks while your attention is elsewhere. Finally, you have to make it funny. Or perhaps that only applies to juggling? Well, analogies can only be stretched so far.
__________________________________________________________________ About the current CEO:
* He's being paid 1 dollar a year.
* He gets no bonuses, either way.
* He gets no stocks.
* He didn't sign these contracts, he inherited them.
About the people who tanked AIG:
* They are gone.
* They were few.
About the people who received the bonuses:
* They did not kill AIG
* They were offered these bonuses last year, to stay for another year, and clean up the mess.
* They reduced $2.7 trillion of shit to $1.6 trillion of shit.
About the bonuses:
* They are less than.1% of the bailout money.
* They were offered last year, to retain people until they cleaned up the mess.
* They were NOT meant to retain people for next year.
What if we didn't pay them?
* The people who are (successfully) cleaning up the mess, would leave.
* Then, they would sue (rightfully so).
* AIG would have to try to replace them, while trying to prevent losses on the suddenly 'unmanaged' accounts.
* AIG might be forced into bankruptcy, for defaulting (aka: we lose).
* AIG might survive, but take further losses, and need more help (aka: we lose).
Personal thoughts:
* We should have let them fail, but we didn't, it would be idiotic to let them fail now.
* The current CEO deserves nothing but respect, but instead, he gets death threats.
* The people who stayed on, and cleaned up the mess, deserve to be well paid. They saved us a ton of money, and the bonuses are marginal in comparison.
Analogy:
The people from FP (financial products) are the burger flippers at McDonalds. The people who got the bonuses work the counter at McDonalds. The burger flippers made some seriously shitty burgers. They got fired. The counter crew has spent the last year trying to find places to safely unload those burgers (worm farms, bacteria labs, etc.) It was a dirty job, and Mike Rowe wasn't available.
Yes, I'm contradicting a post I made yesterday. I watched the full hearings on C-Span today http://c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-R-16464, and learned a hell of a lot from them. Yeah, I changed my mind, but that's what I do when I learn that the facts don't match my perception. __________________________________________________________________
I was quite shocked recently to find out that ACPO is a private company.
http://www.acpo.police.uk/about.html: "The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is not a staff association... The Association has the status of a private company limited by guarantee."
> As for recognizing that they hold some form of authority over you, well, there's an old joke: > Q. What do you call a six foot negro with a seven foot spear? > A. Sir! > > The simple fact that police carry lethal weapons has more than a little to do with the "sirs"...... because they might suddenly decide to use it on you, right?
I only ever used margerine on toast. One day I ran out, and had to spray olive oil on instead using a little spray bottle I got off Amazon.com. I can spray olive oil much more sparingly then spreading margerine.
There was a similar situation awhile ago where I work (in my outfit's Computer Center.)
I found a password ripper on the net, and tried it on our password file. Seemingly, the password rules that used to be applied had been lost during a recent system change; and now passwords like 'password' and 'letmein' were not rejected when the user tried to set their password. I was able to crack >1,000 passwords within 30 minutes.
I reported the problem to my supervisor, and he got me to discuss it with the Technical Director. They decided that the new Identity Management system that they were looking for funding for, would fix the problem. The budget bid failed, and the IDM system still hasn't been built. The hole remained for 2 to 3 more years.
I read a case online where a NASA sysadmin would email users to warn them to strengthen their passwords, so I started doing that myself. "Hullo [user], your password is your favourite football team. That's a dictionary word, and easy to crack. Please choose a stronger password, using one of these methods." This did reduce the scale of the problem somewhat, but new accounts would appear with weak passwords, so the hole was still open.
Around 2 to 3 years after I originally reported the problem, a user reported exactly the same thing to his boss, who told the Computer Centre. He was hauled over the coals, reprimanded and nearly got disciplined for his trouble. Password creation rules were instituted, and the hole was closed in short order.
Since those days my outfit has started filtering our Web access using http://www.websense.com/. I recently found a way around the filter, but don't want to report this hole in case the management decide to punish me for it.
Yes, lets get down to the anecdotes. A drive at my outfit was reimaged using Symantec Ghost. Despite the fact that Ghost doesn't rewrite every sector on a drive, I figured the data was gone.
The HOD sent the drive to a recovery firm, that charged 200 pounds without any guarantees. They weren't able to recover anything. The data was eventually pieced back together from printouts and old copies.
The user learnt that "Is your data backed up?" didn't mean "Have you saved your data from the screen onto the drive (that we're about to reimage.)" And a policy was instituted where we'd make the user sign a form before we'd reimage their drive.
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK fire drills *are* mandated by law: > You should carry out at least one fire drill per year and record the results. You must keep the results as part of your fire safety and evacuation plan. https://www.gov.uk/workplace-f... I completely agree with your other points.
I'll leave this here in case it's useful for anyone. http://torrentfreak.com/everything-you-need-to-refute-a-file-sharing-legal-threat-100114/
As I understand it, the US mainstream media is almost entirely owned by a small handful of companies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership
They often have a vested interest in the stories they choose to report on or avoid.
e.g.
> Reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre were first asked by FOX News and later bribed,
> to downplay a story they had on a cancer-causing growth hormone called Posilac
> which is growth hormone for dairy cows which is absorbed by humans through milk.
> The reporters decided to blow the whistle on FOX News and filed a law suit.
> After the ordeal was over, it was discovered in the appeals court that it's
> actually not against the law to falsify the "News."
http://behavioralhealth.typepad.com/markhams_behavioral_healt/food_and_drink/
> a pay-per-month model of getting access to a DRM-free library does sound good
Q: So, how much is that?
A: It's basically infinity dollars.
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2009/05/20090515.jpg
Here are a couple of good opt-outs for the UK:
Telephone Preference Service - no more junk phone calls.
http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/
Mail preference service - no more junk mail (snailmail).
http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/mpsr/
Anyone got any more?
Ever seen 'Survivors' (1975) ?
Here's the opening sequence, depicting the accident with the bottle, and the subsequent rapid spread of the disease.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNjjnwCJqCY
> The soul of juggling is passing objects between two or more jugglers (I humbly assert).
Absolutely yes, amongst the juggling population in my vicinity this seems to be generally regarded as the ultimate expression of the art.
Some jugglers like 4 count with tricks best, but there's a notable resurgence of interest in passing with both hands - 3 count and other such patterns.
Nice to hear from another juggler here on Slashdot. :)
As a juggler, it's a little annoying when people use juggling as an analogy and get it wrong. So here's an explanation of juggling and how to do it, whether it's clubs or tasks.
It's all in the throw, not in the catch. If the throw is perfect, the catch happens without any corrections or concious thought.
You may have two hands, but your two eyes can only look at one thing at a time. Jugglers just peep at the object as it arcs over and downwards, and that's enough to tell them where and when to stick out a hand and catch it. This has been confirmed experimentally using opaque glasses to block off the view of the objects except around about the top of the arc.
Once you get beyond juggling three objects, you peep at the object but then you have to remember how it's falling while you peep at another, before you stick out your hand to catch the first object. So 1) consistency is hugely important and 2) you have to practise daily until it's completely automatic.
The most important tool for juggling is gravity. That's how jugglers stack the objects and know where and when they'll fall. If gravity wavered, it'd bring the pattern down. You have to know what to expect. Remember in Firefly how something unexpected would happen, and it'd turn out they'd prepared for that contingency? Same thing, really.
Now let's apply the theory of juggling to 'juggling' a bunch of tasks. You have to be able to give each task some impetus and then move on, knowing the point at which you'll have to return to that task. You have to have some method, equivalent to the way jugglers use gravity, that smoothly handles the tasks while your attention is elsewhere. Finally, you have to make it funny. Or perhaps that only applies to juggling? Well, analogies can only be stretched so far.
The elucidating comment I've read on this so far was from http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/85nk2/spitzer_the_aig_bonuses_are_a_smokescreen/c08bmtg
__________________________________________________________________
About the current CEO:
* He's being paid 1 dollar a year.
* He gets no bonuses, either way.
* He gets no stocks.
* He didn't sign these contracts, he inherited them.
About the people who tanked AIG:
* They are gone.
* They were few.
About the people who received the bonuses:
* They did not kill AIG
* They were offered these bonuses last year, to stay for another year, and clean up the mess.
* They reduced $2.7 trillion of shit to $1.6 trillion of shit.
About the bonuses:
* They are less than .1% of the bailout money.
* They were offered last year, to retain people until they cleaned up the mess.
* They were NOT meant to retain people for next year.
What if we didn't pay them?
* The people who are (successfully) cleaning up the mess, would leave.
* Then, they would sue (rightfully so).
* AIG would have to try to replace them, while trying to prevent losses on the suddenly 'unmanaged' accounts.
* AIG might be forced into bankruptcy, for defaulting (aka: we lose).
* AIG might survive, but take further losses, and need more help (aka: we lose).
Personal thoughts:
* We should have let them fail, but we didn't, it would be idiotic to let them fail now.
* The current CEO deserves nothing but respect, but instead, he gets death threats.
* The people who stayed on, and cleaned up the mess, deserve to be well paid. They saved us a ton of money, and the bonuses are marginal in comparison.
Analogy:
The people from FP (financial products) are the burger flippers at McDonalds. The people who got the bonuses work the counter at McDonalds. The burger flippers made some seriously shitty burgers. They got fired. The counter crew has spent the last year trying to find places to safely unload those burgers (worm farms, bacteria labs, etc.) It was a dirty job, and Mike Rowe wasn't available.
Yes, I'm contradicting a post I made yesterday. I watched the full hearings on C-Span today http://c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-R-16464, and learned a hell of a lot from them. Yeah, I changed my mind, but that's what I do when I learn that the facts don't match my perception.
__________________________________________________________________
I was quite shocked recently to find out that ACPO is a private company.
http://www.acpo.police.uk/about.html: "The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is not a staff association ... The Association has the status of a private company limited by guarantee."
> you have to pay a television licence fee in the UK, even if you NEVER watch the stations financed by that licence.
Not so. I never watch the stations financed by that licence, but I don't pay the fee.
The secret is, you only have to pay if you have a TV.
> As for recognizing that they hold some form of authority over you, well, there's an old joke: ... because they might suddenly decide to use it on you, right?
> Q. What do you call a six foot negro with a seven foot spear?
> A. Sir!
>
> The simple fact that police carry lethal weapons has more than a little to do with the "sirs"...
Got it.
Looks as promising as the Mactini Nano!
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=noe3kR8KqJc
No-one's mentioned introversion / extroversion yet? Briefly,
75% of people are extroverts. They gain energy from social interaction.
25% of people are introverts. They lose energy from social interaction, but gain energy from solitary cogitation.
75% of intellectuals are introverts, and only 25% are extroverts. This is probably why the 'socialising for nerds' class is necessary.
I wonder if they're going to steam open every letter sent in the UK, and photocopy the contents?
> Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Right, that's going to be my new .sig file.
Thanks!
If only advertising could be better targetted. There are garish billboards everywhere, many of which don't apply to lots of the folks who see them.
Advertising directed only at the folk who actually might use the product or service, would give us all back some minutes/hours every day.
> Our dumb (tm) drug laws are largely responsible [f]or this.
You think?
http://www.november.org/graphs/FedbyOffense.gif
I only ever used margerine on toast. One day I ran out, and had to spray olive oil on instead using a little spray bottle I got off Amazon.com. I can spray olive oil much more sparingly then spreading margerine.
I haven't bought any margerine since.
Yes, I have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Safari
It's a great album, that I bought on CD twice before downloading.
There was a similar situation awhile ago where I work (in my outfit's Computer Center.)
I found a password ripper on the net, and tried it on our password file. Seemingly, the password rules that used to be applied had been lost during a recent system change; and now passwords like 'password' and 'letmein' were not rejected when the user tried to set their password. I was able to crack >1,000 passwords within 30 minutes.
I reported the problem to my supervisor, and he got me to discuss it with the Technical Director. They decided that the new Identity Management system that they were looking for funding for, would fix the problem. The budget bid failed, and the IDM system still hasn't been built. The hole remained for 2 to 3 more years.
I read a case online where a NASA sysadmin would email users to warn them to strengthen their passwords, so I started doing that myself. "Hullo [user], your password is your favourite football team. That's a dictionary word, and easy to crack. Please choose a stronger password, using one of these methods." This did reduce the scale of the problem somewhat, but new accounts would appear with weak passwords, so the hole was still open.
Around 2 to 3 years after I originally reported the problem, a user reported exactly the same thing to his boss, who told the Computer Centre. He was hauled over the coals, reprimanded and nearly got disciplined for his trouble. Password creation rules were instituted, and the hole was closed in short order.
Since those days my outfit has started filtering our Web access using http://www.websense.com/. I recently found a way around the filter, but don't want to report this hole in case the management decide to punish me for it.
Just a reminder, the scientists at CERN needed a good way to share information, and the Web was the result.
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/About/Web-en.html
Who knows what spin-offs might come from the LHC?
Yes, lets get down to the anecdotes. A drive at my outfit was reimaged using Symantec Ghost. Despite the fact that Ghost doesn't rewrite every sector on a drive, I figured the data was gone.
The HOD sent the drive to a recovery firm, that charged 200 pounds without any guarantees. They weren't able to recover anything. The data was eventually pieced back together from printouts and old copies.
The user learnt that "Is your data backed up?" didn't mean "Have you saved your data from the screen onto the drive (that we're about to reimage.)" And a policy was instituted where we'd make the user sign a form before we'd reimage their drive.
The XKCD view of 'Mythbusters'
http://xkcd.com/397/
> I think you mean "made them less responsible."
Mitchell & Webb - Identity Theft [audio]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E