Interesting Links for 23-05-2014

[andrewducker]

• Is RIPA fit for purpose?
  (tags: crime police epicfail internet )
• George R. R. Martin’s 14 Greatest LiveJournal Entries
  (tags: livejournal GeorgeRRMartin )
• This is pretty-much how I feel about Facebook right now
  (tags: Facebook )
• The BBCs HR department are clearly trying to destroy it
  (tags: bbc HumanResources fail )
• This is now officially my

Comments

[bart_calendar]

They are hiring a dude who just barely managed to make Godzilla entertaining?

[andrewducker]

They're hiring the dude that got a $100million opening weekend, and over $200million before hitting the second weekend.

I hear that they work that way :->

[bart_calendar]

He got that money for naming the film "Godzilla."

I could take two hours of video of my cat and if I named the film "Godzilla" could get that many asses in seats.

[steer]

You would surely at least have to glue dorsal plates onto your cat and have it fight something?

I'd probably watch that.

[del_c]

I was disappointed to see the wild animals using running wheels were like wild hamsters, wild gerbils, and so forth. I was hoping for a lion.

[andrewducker]

Ha! Yes, that would have been entertaining :->

[luckylove]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQIpD3AF1lA
Cats like wheels too. (I hope that's the right video. Am posting from my tablet so it might be the slug again.)
I'm unaware of anyone making a wheel big enough for a lion but as they seem to like boxes as much as their smaller relatives they'd probably like wheels too.

[fiddlingfrog]

Does this mean you have a link to a video of a slug on a running wheel? Because that would be awesome if you did.

[luckylove]

Out of the six hamsters I've had only one didn't love their wheel. The other five adored them.
Jasper's first wheel was too small so he ended up using it like this until I got him a bigger one. He still ran on the outside of the bigger one too. He would use it properly but liked to exercise sitting down.
Khan loved running in wheel that I was holding. They all loved being out of their cages but if I held a wheel Khan would run in it.
Twitch (current hamster along with Sophie) injured his leg a couple of weeks ago. He's currently in a plastic box rather than a wire cage and we took his wheel away to give his leg a chance to heal. We gave it back to him a couple of nights ago and he's much happier. He runs in it again but also uses it like this a lot.
Wheels give them an opportunity to run really fast without worrying about obstacles or predators. I think that's why they love them.

[steer]

Hah.... I actually feel some slight sympathy for the BBC HR dept there. If you're going to have a scale of 1-5 you do need to have some kind of guidelines as to what proportion of people belong in each box. Otherwise you risk one manager thinking that about one fifth of employees belong in each category and another manager thinking that only 1% of employees are extraordinary and 1% are in the very lowest. So, it completely makes sense to have some rule of thumb that you apply to work out approximately what frequency to rate people in the best and worst groups... except when you take in the human aspect and people worrying that they won't be granted the best grade because that would put them over the magic barrier.

[andrewducker]

Now you're assuming that all teams have equal percentages of people in the different boxes. The experience, from everywhere that's used a variant of stack ranking, is that it's horribly toxic

[steer]

Actually I'm assuming quite the opposite, that all teams have different percentages of people in different boxes and that managers have freedom to say that 100% of their staff are in the top 5% or bottom 5% if they believe that to be the case. I presumed that was the intent of the document (and that people discussing it later were misinterpreting

[andrewducker]

I presumed that was the intent of the document (and that people discussing it later were misinterpreting)I'm confused. On what basis did you assume that was the intent of the document? If the intent of the document was to say that all groups would have varying numbers of people in different buckets then surely it would say that, and not give numbers

Group of NJ rabbis indicted for using stun guns and beatings to force men to divorce

[cartesiandaemon]

The situation with divorce is awful. The husband traditionally has to agree to the divorce, and the wife (and future children) have a vile stigma if she can't divorce and ever wants another relationship ever again. People should really insist that a rabbinical court can set aside a marriage if necessary, or that marriages can't be sanctioned without some symmetric way of dissolving them. The authority already make this decision -- husbands in Israel are imprisoned if they refuse to agree, because it's obvious to everyone (including secular and religious authorities) that that's really abusive. But apparently people haven't managed to escape from "the husband must agree, even by coercion".

Although in this case, what the kidnapping sounded like it might be equally corrupt.

Re: Group of NJ rabbis indicted for using stun guns and beatings to force men to divorce

[andrewducker]

This is the problem with rules set down by God. They're tricky to change.

Re: Group of NJ rabbis indicted for using stun guns and beatings to force men to divorce

[cartesiandaemon]

I keep introspecting about this. This is why I don't like pretending laws come from God, because I expect it to fossilize them. But religions do reinterpret laws, some I agree with and some I don't. I'm not sure whether or not "we can't change that rule because god said it" is more entrenched than "we can't change that rule because it's in the constitution" or "we can't change that rule because it's against nature". And I'm not sure how entrenched rules *should* be: I'd like think rules could be changed easily with a good reason, but that does seem to cause it's own problems with some popular idea suddenly seizing hold.

Re: Group of NJ rabbis indicted for using stun guns and beatings to force men to divorce

[abigail_n]

No one, not even the ultra-orthodox, thinks that the rules of marriage were set down by god. In fact it's fairly easy to tell what rules were supposedly set down by god - they're the ones that are in the bible as actually having been said by god. Everything else is tradition and precedent. Judaism is a legalistic religion, and changing customs and traditions can take time because there has to be a consensus among rabbis, and there's always the problem of some groups wanting to seem holier than thou, and more strict about their interpretations of the law