Sorry - my facetiousness did not come across in my points. I know doctors are human, I know mistakes are made. What I am putting forward is that the media presentation of medicine sets up so much negative noise that it undermines the trust that is required to put your health/life in the hands of another human being, and people will seek out a solution fits their views, rightly or wrongly.

Perhaps poorly worded - what I mean is when there are those sorts of people that have to be confronted, its beneficial to have a police office that can respond in kind available. The hope is that the ones with the badge are also the ones who have the correct discretion as to when to use that sort of force.

No, I just know that from local news the sorts of things Aussie cops get in trouble for, and the way things don't occur the way they say they do, so I take the Aussie shows with a pinch of salt, I don't have that reference for the NZ and US shows.

When I see the Aussie cop shows they tend to do a lot more talking down and use defensive postures a lot more than what you see on COPS - on COPS the thug behaviour comes across a lot clearer and I can see where they escalate something or use heavy force. I don't doubt the Aussie cops do it, but it seems less of it comes across in their shows.

It is distrust of medicine as a science - look at what people are faced with:
  - Doctors who wont prescribe birth controls, because of the doctors faith, not the patients.
  - Anyone with the title "Dr" (of what, from where) can appear on TV and flog the latest magic beans from the amazon as a cure for everything, unopposed.
  - Advertising for every 3 month cycle of trendy "natural/traditional/herbal/secret" cures also attacks pharmaceuticals as "unnatural chemicals"
  - Any a time a doctor screws up its a news worthy event
  - Everyone has a friend who went to a doctor (or doctors) that misdiagnosed something major (anecdotal: I know someone who saw 4 doctors before the last finally noticed the fist sized tumour growing a creeper up her spine).
  - All doctors are paid by drug companies to play golf, everyone knows that.

Is it any wonder when something as scary as "MMR causes autism" hits the headlines, people take notice and don't ask their doctors. Everything in the media screams "don't trust doctors", why take the risk of autism, doctors have been wrong before?

As a parent of ASD diagnosed twins it certainly crossed my mind did it start when they were immunised. Certainly it was a traumatic time and I felt their behaviour changed after, but no, the symptoms were there before but they just were not advanced enough for it to be obvious. It didn't help that doctors kept telling us "they are twins, they will develop late" (see!). My wife and I as two reasonably intelligent people, knowing the MMR link was debunked, still wanted to put off further immunisations - the fear was there, even though we knew it was not to blame. How can you blame other people with less discerning processing and intelligence to make better decisions with so much bad information.

That said I really feel some parents want something to blame - "its not my genes, it was that evil MMR which was just a scam by doctors to sell drugs.". I looked for it when we got the news - something else was to blame, not us. I can imagine others do something similar.

I thought everyone who watched a Warner Bros cartoon knew that - if you can see the big hole at the end, you are being threatened.

Watching COPS, and Australian/NZ similar shows the differences are stark. The default on COPS seems to be if some mildly drunk person gives some backchat, they get crash tackled, two cops twice their size pound them into the ground screaming "STOP RESISTING" despite the person appearing to be more dazed and confused if anything. In the time I watched it there were plenty of cases where tasers were deployed to obtain conformance to the officers requests, rather than as a defensive measure, in a few instances directly used as a threat against someone for nothing more than talking out of turn. Maybe its just the producers showing the more "exciting" footage, but so many times what they show I would consider the cop assaulting the "perp" for not bowing to his demands rather than being an actual threat.

On the NZ shows they are almost placid - look up "always blow on the pie" to see what I mean. I am sure they have their rough and tumble, but the sort of assault and direct threats you see on COPS is not present, and even when they go against someone drunk and agro they try and talk their way down and only deploy capsicum spray or tasers as a last defence. The Australian cop shows are too heavy edited to show some of a heaviness the cops use here - I have do doubt they have certain groups they don't mind putting the boot into, but most of the confrontations you see on COPS would be resolved differently on the Aussie cop shows in similar situations.

I think shows like COPS though are the sort of thing that attract the wrong people to policing. The sort that like the power trip and the odd chance to rough someone up under the cover of a badge, rather than actually engaging and protecting the community. That said, there are those in the community I don't mind having those sorts of cops available for.

This.

The best manager I had was when I worked in a 14 person sysadmin team. The team leader was vaguely technical but was not a sysadmin at all. The technical details were left to us, she was a people manager first and foremost and spent most of her time either defending our team, getting resources for our team or dealing with crap from other teams. If you screwed up you knew it (sort of one of those "I am not angry so much as disappointed" type deals), but if you needed someone to go in to bat for you it was her - she had most other managers in fear usually. Absolute best manager you could wish for but aside from driving Outlook and Word not an IT person, team thrived, top ratings all round and we were well respected for getting things done.

Absolute worst was a fellow sysadmin that got promoted - turned into a screaming bully, kissed ass of upper managers and directly blamed people in the team for any issues. Killed morale and any effort above and beyond the team was willing to do.

I have also had a manager who was technically amazing, brilliant guy to work for but you had to really work hard to keep up. He had so many ideas and plans I eventually had to learn to ignore most things he wanted unless he asked for them twice. I think a case of too technical a manager - if he could he would do the lot himself. Not a bad manager, but it was sometimes hard to know what was a priority. At the same place we worked under the head of engineering who was not an IT specialist, but a specialist in our companies field. The problem was he thought he knew IT, so it was a constant battle to undo effects of his autocratic tech decisions - most of the time my manager just outflanked him and went straight to the CTO to get things done.

As for the OP - tech tests are useless - if he is a manager, test his ability to manage. Find out the justifications for the poor decisions, find out why they were made and what the process was. Find out why the budget is the way it is - maybe there is more thought to it that everyone else thinks. I know plenty of users who think IT don't know what they are doing - generally they have no idea what is involved and just get annoyed at minor daily issues.

No, he got the job and and we built it for them.

We still have a V1280 in production (despite my best efforts to get rid of it), in fact I am sure we have an E3000 and some E450s somewhere in the place that somehow runs part of the network in a way no-one understands.

I believe my former boss encountered this actually. He actually stopped them part way through the interview and said "from now on, this is consulting" when their questions started getting too detailed.

I worked for him under the two execs that did the interview, and I have no doubt one of them was the sort of guy who would take an idea he thought he knew and try and ram it through as his own (he was not IT literate, technical in his field but knew nothing of enterprise level IT infrastructure). We frequently had to deal with him talking to vendors behind our backs and undermining the work we did to put in proper solutions because they clashed with his source of free event tickets. The engineers that were under him in his field copped it worse, because he would micro manage their projects and throw in whole new solutions depending on which vendor he could get something from.

So, I think this would come down to more the personality of the person conducting the interview, rather than being an outright plan on behalf of the company.

I would imagine that seeing an unknown mach 2-3 object heading for a carrier anywhere would be reason enough to turn on the anti missile systems like Phalanx or Goalkeeper.

From what I have seen of those systems, even if they got 3-4 of those missles heading for a carrier, those 4200 round per minute gattlings would make fairly short work of all of them.

Free software is only as free as your time, or rather, the time your company is paying you for.

You can bet Coca Cola are do not have their own team to support an OS at a coding level, or a database for that matter. Sure they are probably doing their own software applications, but you can bet the infrastructure will be either commercial or commercially supported. The only place I know of that writes and supports their own OS is Google, and even that is a derivative of Linux.

The problem with running in house customisations is you need to support them. The larger the software stack you need, the more people you need to support it. As you start throwing databases and possible operating systems into that mix, the less those dollars are being spent on something useful to the business. The problem is at some point you will have to go to someone who wrote the code for some component, because no-one else understands it, or no-one has the time to find out the ins and outs of modifying it. In a small shop this might be a rare event, and you might only run a small enough set of software you can support it with a small team. But as you scale up, that no longer holds true, if simply for the fact your pool of talent shallows as you hire more people.

At some point, it makes more business sense to say "this is the vendors problem".

I wouldn't say error, it was designed with parity protection only, so was incapable of correcting single bit errors, only detecting them. Hence, the reason for the crashes (i.e it detected a bit flip). If two bits were flipped you would never know.

I worked in the Sun front line call support during this time, and explaining this over and over to customers was somewhat painful. Never mind the years of mocking that still come from telling customers "it was a cosmic ray". Sun put massive effort into tracking, diagnosing and fixing this issue though. Some customers got versions of CPUs with "mirrored" SRAMs. Sad to say, I remember customers still getting errors with those.....

The US-III chips came out with end to end ECC protection, but the problems remained. In the end it turned out to be a host of socket mounting, pin contact and design specification issues that caused the errors, mostly solved by the time the 1200MHz CPUs were out. I wouldn't be surprised if it was something similar with the US-II.

As for Toyota, if they dont have end to end ECC they only have themselves to blame.

I would suggest our democracy was formed by a vote on a referendum for federation rather than a minor civil disturbance.