Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Can I file a complaint against McDonald for using incomprehensible syntax on a publicly broadcast website?
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Canterbury University in England
AFAIK, there isn't one.
There's a University of Kent, which used to be called the University of Kent at Canterbury.
There's a former FE college called Canterbury Christ Church University.
And there's a degree mill in the Seychelles.
Incidentally, has the use of the abbreviation MIT by a South Auckland tech ever been called into question?
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Lilith __,
It's been there since the late 90's.
Also, I think many people overseas regard NZ as being a fictional place, let alone the University of Canterbury.
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If media outlets aren’t going to take care over the small shit, why should anyone expect them to be any less careless about the biggies?
I don't. I learnt many years ago that when you see something in the media that you have personal knowledge of, it's most likely wrong or distorted in some respect. People should know this, and validate information against their own knowledge and experience.
TVNZ should have a corrections and clarifications page on their website, like the Guardian.
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My first, intemperate comment on another blog was that fining people for pedantry is a bloody good idea.
A more reasoned argument on that subject would be that the article in question covered the discovery of a new supernova and gave its distance incorrectly, by a vast factor. I'd suggest that those watching the piece might have their interest piqued, and could go to Wikipedia, a library book, or a course in astronomy and learn the correct information. They might learn along they way a more useful lesson, which is not to believe everything you hear on the news.
If broadcasters are required to fact check hard science pieces to a forensic level of accuracy, will they do so? Or just avoid those subjects, and concentrate on Sunny Bill Williams, or penguins washed up on the beach? If they do the latter, they won't be subject to any form of complaint, but people will be less informed.
Also, I read a lot of history. You get egregious errors in academic history books. I've got a volume on nuclear weapons development where the author conspicuously failed to understand the basic technological challenges. What does one do about that?
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to Russell Brown,
Library? Archives New Zealand?
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to andin,
Are you just after improvements to audio quality? Get a professional sound card?
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licensed premises are not supposed to serve alcohol to intoxicated persons
Define "intoxicated"?
- over the youth limit for driving?
- over the adult limit for driving?
- obviously affected by alcohol?
- sufficiently annoying to other bar patrons as to drive a number of paying customers away that isn't offset by the inebriates own consumption?
- vomiting?
- unconscious?I suspect that most bar owners draw the line at point 4.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to BenWilson,
No, but I did build a pirate ship
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to BenWilson,
The ring-bound tech manual which you could buy for the C64 was brilliant. It contained the information that most of the other manufacturers required you to discover for yourself, by disassembly and tracing circuits.