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Don't you read Techdirt? Mike says we now live in a world where digital content is an "infinite good" with "zero marginal cost", and therefore, nobody should expect to pay anything.

So how does anybody make a living? Mike has an answer for that, too: with physical services like Uber, AirBnB, and Lyft! You can make tons of money doing that. Remember to thank Mike Masnick for your wonderful new career!

Remember this story from shortly after 9/11?

It was a book rather than a newspaper, and only he was prevented from boarding rather than the whole flight being cancelled, but on a stupidity scale, pretty much the same level as your hypothetical.

And college basketball teams are discriminatory. If you are less than 4 feet tall, it does not matter that you are a pretty good player for your size, you cannot get on a team.

Actually, you may be onto something here. Back before the NBA and the (somewhat racist) idea that the "native" abilities of African-Americans allow them to jump higher and perform better, the mythology from the 1920s through the 1940s or so was that to be a great basketball player, you had to be short and Jewish (and likely from Philly).

It was claimed that these Jewish players succeeded because they were short. In fact, many players were rather successful -- because they were closer to the ground, they had better balance, could maneuver faster, were great at stealing, fast low passing, etc.

Obviously a lot of the press played off of Jewish stereotypes at the time, just as they play off of African-American stereotypes now.

But I actually would think it might make for an interesting game to put more of those short, quick players mixed in with all the 7-foot players today. They probably wouldn't win, but it might change the game and force the taller players to develop completely different skills and styles of play to do well consistently.

It is a human factor that is heightened by the effect of stress on the human brain.

Why is the taser on the same side as the gun?

It usually isn't. Though when the brain says "weapon" it may choose the one that is most practiced with. This may cause muscle memory to choose the wrong weapon.

This is a failure of his training then. So how has the training program for his agency, and all the rest that use Tasers, been changed to reduce the likelihood of a repeat of this shooting?

Why is the grip not textured in a way unlike the sidearm?

It is and it is of a different size. The issue is that under stress the brain is busy dealing with more important matters than the feel of a weapon; threat, movement, sounds, etc. It is not a choice but a physiological response.

Most of the cops I see around here wear their pistols on their right hip and their Tasers on their belly, angled for right-hand access. The handles are different, but similar enough that the proper techniques for aiming and operating them are the same.

Why is a single police officer even carrying both?

If a pair of officers, one with a tazer and one with a gun, get into a situation where guns are required then the officer with the tazer is useless as backup. The same goes for a tazer situation. All officers need to have the flexibility to choose the best tool for the situation.

Or, as the old saying goes, never bring a taser to a gunfight. There are still a lot of cops on the street without Tasers, leaving them with only clubs, knives and pepper spray as their less-lethal options. But they don't shoot any more people than cops with Tasers do, they just don't tase as many. Citation: http://www.citypaper.net/news/2012-01-12-taser-use-gun-use-philadelphia-police.html. (My original source is behind the paywall at chron.com. The numbers in Houston are slightly larger but the trends are the same.)

Why do we link to some dude's blog rather than to the actual story, which consequently is better in every way.

I've seen this a LOT lately. Perhaps it is profitable to do so? And perhaps, perhaps such profits occur within a city that has laws about such?

American society has been whipped into a paranoid, trigger happy frenzy by 24 hour propaganda on film and tv.

No. This is an ugly stereotype. We don't really live like GTA 4. Ironically, it seems that the propaganda is working the other way around.

Throw unlimited availability of firearms in the mix

There are limits. Lots of them..

and you have the most dangerous society in the developed world

I would disagree.

most major American cities have a highe homicide rate than São Paulo, Brazil

First, you cherry-picked that number. The remainder of Brazil is still dangerous as hell, with homicide rates 5 to 10 times the rate in Sao Paolo (Maceio ranks at the top with a stunning 104 .01), with an overall murder rate of 25.2 for the last year available (2007), which is roughly 5 times the number for the US in the same period. Sao Paolo seem to be benefiting from increased enforcement, but at the expense of the right of individuals to defend themselves, which is inexcusable. Enforcement of reasonable existing laws is the best way to deal with violence.

Homicide (for the US, includes non-negligent homicide) rates per 100,000:

• Sao Paolo, Brazil: 10.44 (recent)
• Chicago, Illinois: 18.0 (2008)
• Austin, TX: 3.1 (2008)

Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, yet its homicide rate exceeds that of Sao Paolo, so I don't think that restrictive laws alone are the answer. Texas, on the other hand, has less restrictive gun laws, and many places there despite their alleged "cowboy" mentality have very low homicide rates. More restrictive laws don't help. Better enforcement of reasonable existing laws does.

Jolly Ranchers may be relatively harmless in and of themselves, but it is well known that they are a gateway to the "harder" stuff (not literally, nothing's actually harder than a Jolly Rancher.) Sure, today little Chastity Amber is sucking innocently on a Jolly Rancher (and if that sentence doesn't bother you, it should), but tomorrow she's chowing down some Now&Laters. And that shit be quantum. Is she eating it now? Is she eating it later? Until you actually open her mouth and look inside, she's doing both.

Or even worse, Mike-N-Ike's... and we all know how that turned out...

So here's some more additional info. The family which sued failed to pay a $55 insurance policy on the laptop. Now, I'm not saying that the surveillance was justified only that the missed payments may have triggered suspicions whether the laptop had been stolen. Of course, once the school determined that the laptop wasn't stolen, all surveillance should have stopped.

Carol Cafiero, who had previously sought to quash a subpoena ordering her to testify, refused to answer questions pertaining to the district's controversial practice of remotely activating webcams on Apple MacBooks issued to high-school students.

It was like a window into "a little LMSD soap opera," a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program. "I know, I love it," she is quoted as having replied.

It usually first appears in a warm, moist section of the body, like an armpit or the crotch. Initially, it is a small, red bump, similar to a spider bite. Within days, it develops into a boil the size of a grapefruit with the potential to spread fatal poisons into the bloodstream. In other strains, it gradually eats away at a victim's flesh. Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a highly contagious skin infection that is resistant to the most commonly used antibiotics.

Why the urgency ? In practice if you can call 911 that doesn't mean it will always save your life, as this link shows.

I wonder..why the urgency and the short term (by industrial standards) to some phone companies, but I guess much less urgency to fix the emergency services that should _come_ after calling ?

Could it be that if you have some lobbist among the lawmakers they'll become more sensible ? Could it be that some phone companies are highly annoyed by VOIP ?.....guess one needs a lobbist for ambulances, but who's going to lobby for every Joe and Jane out there ?

It's an irony there's much attention on the 911 phone number but little attention to what 911 is all about..all of that after 9/11. But hey, missile defense and all that yadda yadda yadda.

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/050996/article01 6.shtml

now with clickedyclick userfriendliness ->

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/022102/sl.howcol .shtml

I don't know if Segway's lobbyist makes comments about the Segway not being intended as a device for the disabled in order to facilitate his task of getting governments to approve it's use on sidewalks. This is apparently a very controversial issue in many cities. To read about the sidewalk and pedestrian issues as well as Segway attempting to put down pedestrians fears that the sidewalks will be take over by Segway-riding disabled people, read more here:Segway or the Highway.

Those who are dangerous to the highway system lose their ability to drive on the highway system.

This is not the same thing at all. An equivalent senario would be people being banned from travelling in (not just driving) any vehicle on a highway if they were caught drunk driving. Banning someone from being a passenger on any aircraft is equivalent to banning someone from ever stepping into a car, bus or truck.

Of course as you note it is also different in that a court is involved at some point (i.e. there is some sort of due process) in driving bans but there are other differences as well. The people they are intending to ban from flying haven't done anything. It isn't like they have a previous conviction for hijacking an airliner so they are not allowed to fly on one again. It is that the government does like them in some way, because they are suspected of being a "terrorist", or for some other reason. Not only does stopping people from flying based purely on suspicion very bad, but it puts a huge amount of extra power into the hands of the government to persecute whatever people they don't like, as you note.

I have no problem with those who intentionally cause a security scare being barred from ever flying again, but they should at least have been convicted of an air-security related crime first.

This is a red herring though. Sure they might use this system to pick on such people but its main purpose will be to select people fitting a certain "high risk" profile. Who would "intentionally cause a security scare" anyway? Sure a terrorist group might phone in a fake bomb threat to cause disruption (its cheaper than a real bomb) but then you are not going to catch them are you. If this is going to be used to ban people from flying who are carry the wrong book or aren't grovellingly deferential enough to the security screeners then that is another big problem.

If it uses a 32kHz crystal (like mentioned in the patents), then these circumvention devices wouldn't be allowed under the DMCA:

38.4 kHz crystal (17% faster)
40 kHz crystal (22% faster)

What copyright you ask? The microcode, of course. That line of thinking is working so far for lexmark. But, we don't really need the DMCA to make crystals illegal. You can also get 34 (+3.7%), 36 (+10%), and 38 (+16%), and 44.1kHz (+35%) crystals easily...

A much better solution for intel would be to have a ring oscillator on the chip and compare the input frequency to that... but that would defeat the whole purpose -- you'd be limited to the actual rating of the chip (because faster chips would have faster ring oscillators), not the rating intel sells the chip at.

Take a look at how much the average American consumes (in terms of food, natural resources, etc) and pollutes. Can you imagine if every citizen of India and China did the same?

Yes, freedom of speech is a weighty issue, but why should it be in danger when everyone can put up a website about anything (be it penis enlargement, low mortgages, teen sluts or perhaps even a more sensible subject) at no cost (if they put up with ads) and anyone who is interested in that can find it with a search engine?
There seems to be some cultural gap between Europe and the United State in that matter, I think in Europe very few people would degrade the principle of freedom of speech to such a formal notion about the media with which one should be able to spread unwanted data, but I suppose there are enough Americans, too, who think that freedom of speech is about the right of people to make their opinions public and the right of people who are interested to access this material.
I find it odd that while there is such insisting on issues about how one should be able to transmit information, restrictions on content seem to be accepted more easily. Laws against obscenity in the United States are much stricter than in many other countries and repression for political views unfortunately isn't over after the McCarthy era, now there are again reports about people being questioned because of "un-american material": The New McCarthyism, Novel Security Measures...

Certainly, the United States isn't the only country with such problems, but I find it strange that, while there are such real issues, again and again Americans think it could be a big problem for the freedom of speech when sellers had to wait for interested people coming to their website rather than waste the time of millions of people who aren't interested (well, maybe even a DOS attack should be protected by the First Amendment because even if there are so many of these data packets, they're all free speech that has to be protected as long as they aren't un-American). I haven't ever heard someone outside the United States seriously seeing the regulation of damaging advertising methods like spamming as a matter of free speech - it's a matter of business regulation, and there are much more important things for people concerned about free speech to worry about.

"There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that. - It never is" - White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer

The RIAA's approach to Gnutella thus far has been actively discovering copyright offenders and sending DMCA complaints to their ISP

I was a bit worried about this so I did some research. The only case of someone actually losing access was covered in an article on Salon. News.com reported about pressure on ISPs, but mentioned only one subscriber being cut off.

I checked the dslreports message boards expecting to find howls of protests by those cut off from their monopoly broadband providers. Silence....

I think the RIAA and MPAA are doing a great job at scaring people away from file sharing without actually paying many bounty hunters because the idea of a secret copyright police force is so juicy.

Similarly, there seems to be hysteria about people being denied boarding on aircraft for being dissidents. The Bangor, Maine Green Party member turns out to have been pretty uncooperative. Yes, the guard was an overbearing oaf, but she admits to provoking him in an interview . The Green's press release doesn't mention any of this.

The guy detained in Germany for having "unconventional" views and the guy denied flying for having a copy of Hayduke Lives look like the result of hysterical untrained guards, not a plot to deny everyone's civil rights. More hysteria won't help.

The guy who was harassed for taking pictures of National Guardsmen at a security checkpoint probably should have asked first (it's supposedly not illegal, but photography at customs is so he should have thought a bit), but he was another victim of a freakazoid with a chip on his shoulder.

I don't think we should have to turn into loyal plastic robots, but I'm not going to wear my Circumvention Device t-shirt through airport security. No need to get the wheels of teeny minds spinning.

There's certainly an epidemic of ineptitude (that's not new since Sept. 11), but I don't believe there's an epidemic of harrassment. Likewise of ISPs and their customers.

Its lucky that nothing like that would ever happen in the land of the free.

ps. I hate responding to so called trolls, but this one has been modded up twice

Yeah there's going to be a lot of shit going on. Here's another bizarre story: Novel Security Measures. In my mind I imagine a group of ten terrorists sneaking by with sacks of plastic explosives, while "Security" goes through this guy's Harry Potter book.

I also see the subtext here: Do you look different? Act different? If so, you're going to be suspect. And I don't mean, do you look Middle Eastern, I mean, do you have black hair? Listen to weird music? Read books with pictures of dynamite on them?

You thought Zero-Tolerance bullshit and picking on geeks and gamers was bad.. that's nothing!

But of course, you don't have the God-given right to fly in an airplane, go to work, walk on the street, or leave your house at all, right?

-Fantastic Lad

Nor do we execute you for voicing your opinion against the government. Such is the beauty of freedom.

US residents that don't work in law enforcement are now 2nd class citizens. Whether FBI, IRS, local police, or other, the 'commoners' are prohibited from criticizing you, identifying you to the public, or recording your actions in the same public areas that you record theirs.

If you think that's bad, consider the camera on top of Independence Hall, the building where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

(Previously submitted and rejected, BTW)

Arbitron has already tested their Personal People Meter in Philly. It included a motion detector to make sure you are wearing it and relied on signals embedded in the radio/tv broadcasts to determine what you were 'watching'. Sounds like Neilson's got similar technology in a watch.