Posts by Great Southern Land 36 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Feb 2011
>Not even a full day passed between the call asking if I still had a copy and the lawyers sending me a nasty-gram via FedEx.
If that was me, that would be the end of my cooperation with them. Sending the lawyers in that quickly is bullying behaviour. From that point onwards, they can deal with my lawyers.
>>> Ahhh Pagers
>>> Do you still get these in this day and age?
Yes, the NSW State Emergency Services and NSW Rural Fire Service (both volunteer organisations) use them for callouts. They use a separate network to the phones and SMS and hence are seen as being slightly more reliable. We also get the callout messages on SMS.
And at the other end of the spectrum....
I was visiting my father in a Sydney ICU, and developed a screaming headache. The nursing staff simply asked some questions, presumably to ensure nothing serious was going on, and handed over 2 paracetamol tabs and water, no charge.
Anyone want to guess how much of the $54.75 went to the Candystriper (who are untrained volunteers BTW)?
.... Between Monitoring and Surveliiance.
I used to work for a Government Department, where unauthorised access to client records was punishable by dismissal, if you were lucky, and criminal prosecution if you were not. It was well known that the department was logging all access to client records, and this was enough for the majority of the 20,000+ staff to do the right thing. This is MONITORING.
SURVEILLANCE (and potentially BULLYING) is when the system reports how often your computer is idle, how often the screen is locked, how many phone calls you made or answered today, how many forms you processed, etc..... and when the results of the report are used to justify disciplinary action against the worker. The worker usually has no access to the report data, won't necessarily remember a day's work 1-2 weeks ago, and if he/she is called in to the manager's office, the onus is usually on the worker to explain the discrepancies, not the manager/organisation. It cannot be assumed that poor results on their own mean a poor worker, but all too often that's what management assumes.
No, you're not the only one who thinks it's a problem.
My experience with a Government network shows that people save their files to the desktop because that's the default setting and they don't realise it until it's too late. Luckily, the desktop usually pointed to a folder on their network storage, not the C:\ equivalent.
But it's not just the "My......" folders that are crazy. Anyone ever gone looking for something in the AppData folders? Why the hell does Microsoft need multiple levels of folders here?
Another bugbear I have is OneDrive. Windows decided one day that it had the right to move everything in the \Users\XXXXX\My Documents folder from the local hard disk to OneDrive without my knowledge or permission. (Technically illegal under Australian legislation)
My answer was to partition the hard disk and create a separate drive for files. It may be a slight pain always having to select F: drive to get at them, but it's less hassle in the long run.
Keep in mind that Australian Law differs from US law. Judges in one country are NOT bound by decisions made in the other country, although they may be guided in their own decision making by decisions in other countries. Australian law is not enforceable in the US and vice-versa.
Thus a decision made in Australia that conflicts with US law or legal precedent is not necessarily wrong, or "stupid". US law cannot be used to override such a decision.
I'm amused at the thought of jailing such people. Have the authorities really considered the consequences. It would only take one infected person in a prison and the virus would go through the prison population like a dose of laxatives, How do you enforce social distancing in a prison?
You're probably thinking of "The Throwback", also by Tom Sharpe. A character in that found himself rolling on a condom that had been greased on the inside with caustic oven cleaner. The police found him using a cheese grater in an attempt to get the swelling to go down.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
