johnbentley

Ah Thanks.

I should have gotten that from ...

Still not sure exactly what I will end up with in my pocket, but I do know he has ~$16k in fines, ~80k in my medical bills ...

and

he had been operating for 4 1/2 years without any sort of insurance whatsoever.

I had dug out, and that I had 150+ pictures of multiple of his employees doing the exact same thing that ranged from 6 months before my injury to almost 2 years after it.

What was his motivation in firing you for handling sealife, when others are doing it? What difference does being attacked by the sealife make in his mind?

most unbiased first hand reporting.

I'd like to expand on this to properly value what Olly has done in his FRONTLINE | The Bombing of al-Bara | PBS, 2013-04-08.

There was a great deal of very personal reflection on the situation from Olly. A very subjective reporting.

It seems that Olly has taken up the techniques of the "New Journalism" of the 60's and 70's, typified by Hunter S Thomspon and Tom Wolfe.

Traditional journalism rightly attempts to distinguish between reporting on facts in world and making all sorts of value judgements about those events. We do need to get clear on the facts (truths about events in the world) first before making value judgements about them.

However in defending the distinction between judgements about facts and value, traditional journalism attempts to limit the role of the journalist to just reporting on facts. The ambition is to limit a misrepresentation of the facts that the journalist's own value judgements might influence them toward. That is, the traditional journalist is limited to reporting on facts in order to avoid bias. The traditional journalist, so limited, is therefore best able to get at reality (so think traditional journalists). Such a journalism is the model of "objectivity".

But the result, according to the New Journalism School, is a sterile description that fails to get at reality. For reality is not only a description of facts but what it is like to experience those facts (what it is like to be subject to the risk of being bombed, be a part of the hell's angels, or "on the bus" with the merry pranksters).

What is needed, so says the New Journalism, is the first person subjective account to bring us closer to what it is really like to be in that situation.

The argument and discussion around these issues is a large one. However, I do think that there is an important role for journalists (with the right ability) to be prepared to give us a first hand account while at the same time being able to keep clear the distinction between judgements of fact and value/experience.

The best journalists, in my view, provide three things:

• A clear and delineated reporting of the facts, properly sourced (E.g. Reporting on the numbers of dead and where those numbers came from ).
• On top of that a clear and delineated reporting of what it is like to experience those facts. Not only interviewing others who are a part of the events but by becoming part of those events themselves and giving their own, first person, account (E.g. "Perhaps this was the safest place, I had absolutely no idea" Olly speaking on the impossibility of trying to reduce the risk of being bombed as the jet returns.); and
• On top of those, arguing for and defending moral and political conclusions given their knowledge of the facts and the experiences of others and themselves (E.g. "There needs to be UN backed armed intervention ..."; etc. This example is hypothetical. That is, I haven't see Olly make this claim.).

For all of these things can be done without entailing a "bias". The fear of the charge of "bias" leads timid journalists to cling to the safe harbour of the first kind of project.

Olly Lambert did remarkably well in his piece to bring us the first two projects. He did make some moral judgements in his piece, to the benefit of the piece, but the purpose of the piece was, rightly for the purposes at hand, not a project of the third sort. That is, he was not giving us a systematic political and moral conclusions about the overall situation, something that could be done in a separate report.

Anyway in this piece we have is not only brave journalism in terms of risking limb, but brave journalism in providing a first person account (the second project).

He was willing, also, to stop reporting (take the camera out of the grieving boy's face when requested).

I look forward to learning more from Olly and seeing if he has engaged, or will engage, in the third project. Given his fine work on this report he'll be a journalist I'll want to follow.

A great example of someone who has been doing all three projects for most of their lengthy journalistic career is John Pilger.

Edit: Re-did the examples.

What's a "Pin Check"? How many Pin Checks should every skydiver do, or have done to them, on every skydive?

We can think about exception handling broadly in terms of recoverable V unrecoverable exceptions. For example, if user of web app fails to login this state can be recovered by sending the user back to login, with an error message, to try again.

Of course sometimes, in apps where safety is not at stake, an exception is unrecoverable. This generally, although not always, occurs when the developer doesn't anticipate the exception. For example, the (very poor in this case) developer might have assumed the existence of a log file in order to write to it, but the user might have deleted the log file. The App might not be able to handle that state.

The general practice in these situations, for unrecoverable exceptions (which are often unanticipated exceptions), is to have a catch-all-exception-handler-of-last-resort. What that does is a matter of design. It could involve displaying a message to the user; writing the error to a log; sending the error details to the developer; then shutting down the app.

Could you speak to the catch-all-exception-handler-of-last-resort in a rocket context?