crowd control and terrorists

Seems that their fancy crowd control system for when there is a terrorist attack had the minor problem of being reliant on the electricity grid. So any terrorist who blew up the power supply would have disabled it.



I expect that these units will end up looking like those coastal forts to keep out the Russians. It seems Australians are easily spooked and resort as a result to bizarre solutions to provide a bit of comfort. It is like Charlie Brown's blanket. Look we have speakers, we must be safe. Of course if the terrorists attacked outside the CBD there are no speakers. Maybe a mobile phone notification system would make more sense.

competitive advantage

I think it is interesting to read,with all these arguments against changing the rules, such as the carbon tax, becuase they will make our industry uncompetitve comapered to others that the same arguments were put forward by those who wanted to stop the laws preventing slavery over 100 years ago. They argued that a nation without slaves would not be able to compete with one that did have slaves. But still they (the brits) took the gutsy step of banning slavery.

managers who hide

A manager in music store in Alexandria several months ago berated his staff member when the staff member did the right thing. He had mucked up a series of credit card transactions for a customer. In the end he thought he had corrected the problem. The manager, instead of looking over his work and confirming that he had indeed corrected the problem told him that he did not want to know. The manager wanted to live in a world where ignorance is bliss and avoidance of responisibiltiy is the name of the game. If the staff memebr stuffed up then he could blame the member of staff. What he should have done was make sure that the lesson was learned and the mistake not repeated. The fact that it happened int he first place may be an indication of a lack of good management.

user names

When I first started using the internet many years ago, I quickly discovered that there were too many people out there with the same name as me. Of course the problem was that when I went to create a user name, say on the times in new york, I would find that byap and brianyap and various combinations were already in use. I did not want to have to create a new user name for each site as then I had to write them all down. This particularly applied to sites I rarely use. At the time I was trying to learn Mandarin Chinese so I chose my name in mandarin as my user name - yewenyi. This is different to my name in hakka (yap) which is on my birth certificate. BTW yap is still spelled incorrectly, it should be yup. For many years this worked. I had my user name to myself. It worked until the chinese started using the internet in large numbers. But still I rarely encounter them and often I will go in and make a user ID if I am considering a site to stop someone else from taking it.

One advantage is that I can search on this name and see how the search engines rank my sites. This morning I thought to look some where else and the result was quite surprising. As far as I can see most of this stuff is virus and other malicious software. Certainly none of it was ever created by myself.

We need something like this in Australia:

Police incidents database is launched

The National Union of Journalists and the British Press Photographers Association have partnered to launch a website where photographers who feel they have been obstructed by the police can log a report of the incident.

http://www.londonfreelance.org/policing/