Yeah, this situation really highlights an issue with the system. It is almost impossible to create a balanced system where people can easily sue the state (encouraging them to clean up their act), and yet not encourage frivolous lawsuits.
You know there are lawyers out there that would take cases like this for a cut of the winning, so what we need is for the police to wrongly arrest some people with a whole lot of time on their hands. I'd volunteer myself, but I've got this thing... in Canada... that requires quite a bit of my time at the moment...
No, I think you missed my two point. The times when a taser is wrongly used is a vast minority of the time. If it were not then police agencies would not favor them due to fear of lawsuits (a major concern). And I assert (without evidence, of course) that their use actually decreases the overall injuries that occur during police action.
Using the Kerry incident as an example, it doesn't appear that having a taser (or stun gun in this case) affected whether or not they were going to arrest him. It didn't affect them forcing him to the ground. It also didn't affect their decision to put him in handcuffs. The only time it came into play was when they could not get the handcuffs on him. At this point they have 3 basic options to get him to comply.
1. Beat him until he is to weak or gives up. 2. Break his arm. 3. Taser him until he is to weak or gives up.
The fastest of these and least harmful to the arrestee is actually using a taser. So in this case we are all glad they had one (whether or not the guy is a big wank). And because it is the fastest, it also results in the least chance of harm to the officers and the crowd (which always like to get really close) due to thrashing a flailing. So in these cases, which are the vast majority, they are a much better option.
For most officers if they unholster their gun (of taser) and don't use it, they have to fill out a bunch of paperwork explaining why. And they had better be convincing. If they actually use a weapon, then they are usually placed on automatic suspension during which they have lots of time to fill out paperwork. In the "good ole days" they could shoot or beat whoever they wanted. But now, thanks in large part to organizations like the ACLU, this just isn't the case. And due to the proliferation of video recording devices we get rid of a lot of he said/she said scenarios. In the Kerry incident, those officers are likely going to investigated for whether or not they should have been arresting the kid in the first place. The use of the taser is pretty cut and dry from the videos.
Do you really think the obscene expense of outfitting police cars with video recorders is for your protection? That $5-10,000 per car is easily made back in the single lawsuit it prevents.
As an aside, tasers and stun guns will be used instead of guns and clubs in most situations (which is an unbelievably good thing. Imagine if the twitchy cop had been pointing a gun at the diabetic...). Where they won't be used is in cases involving multiple assailants, lethal force, and distances greater than about 20 feet, which are all a vast minority of cases.
The other point was that comparing current taser use to anything in those massively oppressive regimes is just plain wrong. And trying to do it devalues my opinion of them faster than the argentine australes.
That was a horribly biased and poorly written response to the whole "tasers" thing. "not even in their darkest hour would they consider shooting a sick guy for calling an ambulance." Oh come on. I'm sure some cop woke up in the morning and thought, "hey, why don't I shoot the first person that calls for medical assistance with a taser." Or maybe there was some confusion, the dispatcher called it out wrong, or a new officer accidentally pulled the trigger while being very nervous and surprised by something. That sounds a little more likely.
The idiot at the political rally asking the questions, I certainly have my doubts that they should have tried to arrest him, but they tasered him specifically because he was twisting around and not letting them place him in handcuffs. The warned him several times before tasering him. And once he let them handcuff him, they stopped. It was pretty much by the book once they decided to put him in custody.
Sometimes they are used at the wrongly, but that is a pretty small minority. If it happened in the USSR or China, you would hear about it. Hello? Government controlled media? Some of my friends spent some time in Brasil in areas with bad crime. They saw cops catch people and just shoot them because they didn't have time to deal with that whole legal process. The were stopped once because they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were scared for their lives. Fortunately they had all their papers on them and they let them go.
Trust me, a stun gun being used occasionally at the wrong time is a lot better than the alternative (guns and clubs).
** Now, saying the use of stun guns is worse than something from Stalin's regime is just reprehensible. Stalin is directly responsible for the deaths of at least 3 million people, possibly as high as 30 million. Stalin was evil, and saying anything to detract from that is immoral.
There are some regulations that require libraries to do some monitoring and such to be available for federal grants. If you don't care about the grants, it doesn't matter. I'm guessing university libraries are funded by the university so they wouldn't be interested in federal library grants.
As an additional point tasers are not used instead of guns, rather they are used instead of physically restraining people - which leads to more casualties than there would have been otherwise.
Umm no. Tasers are used to incapacitate someone so that they can be physically restrained. It's a heck of a lot safer for everyone involved to incapacitate someone that is resisting having handcuffs placed on them. Tasers are usually pretty effective at essentially causing a momentary paralysis. This is opposed to stun guns (which don't have the electrified projectiles of a taser) which can have a variety of effects from causing pain to essentially knocking a person out. Killing someone with one of these is more than likely due to simply the shock of it happening when a person has certain physical ailments. In that sense, stun guns are probably about as likely to cause death as this new weapon.
Back to the story on hand, this technology makes me pretty nervous. The less apparent physical damage combined with the potential ease of use makes me wary that people may be more willing to use this in situations that don't warrant it. Especially crowd control. Causing people a whole lot of pain in high stress situations can produce lasting psychological damage, which wouldn't be readily apparent to most people.
Personally, I would like to see them develop something more like a taser for crowds, where the focus is to momentarily paralyze someone by causing their muscles to contract. That should be pretty safe, except for people falling. But then you run into the no apparent physical damage combined with ease of use, making that much more likely to be used. Ah well, either way it looks like I should be wearing tinfoil to any rallies.
I see, so no matter what, in your mind, officers are okay to use whatever ridiculous form of coercion they have in their arsenal?
No, what I said was:
I certainly don't know enough about some old lady in Orem to say who was at fault. And if that's the only part of it you've seen, neither do you. Get off your high horse man and realize that quickly passing judgment on the actions of everyone around you isn't going to get you any closer to the truth. There is usually some pretty key information you're not privy to, and a lot of experience you don't have.
If you notice, essentially every person that is posting on this story and has had training in these matters says that the officers appeared to act how they were supposed to. Either A) all of the trained professionals are wrong or B) you are wrong. Guess which one I am going with.
Well stated, and very true. However, there are more blocking programs than Adblock. I'm pretty sure that it's a feature in Norton Internet Security now to block ads. Ad blocking is becoming a little more mainstream, though not necessarily something people purposely seek out. My guess is that even if such a module were implemented, if Adblock switched to just stripping the DOM or setting the visibility:none; on those elements, it wouldn't make a big enough impact financially for website operators to do anything.
And that has to do with the price of tea in China, how exactly? Are you trying to imply that because a policeman made the wrong choice in one situation that they must make the wrong choice in all decisions? Or something? Seriously, I don't know what you're getting at.
Still, watching that video doesn't tell me much about that particular case, so I don't know. An old woman was apparently arrested, had handcuffs placed on her (as is standard), "slipped, scraping her face and hands", and now has a lawyer who, noted for liking being in the spotlight, says it was wrong while holding up a pair of handcuffs from the 1800's. Is it wrong to handcuff anyone over the age of 60 or something, because that's the age when people magically stop being a threat to anyone and anything, and become all soft and cuddly?
I certainly don't know enough about some old lady in Orem to say who was at fault. And if that's the only part of it you've seen, neither do you. Get off your high horse man and realize that quickly passing judgment on the actions of everyone around you isn't going to get you any closer to the truth. There is usually some pretty key information you're not privy to, and a lot of experience you don't have.
I think the difference is that the police approach it with the maximum amount of safety. First they just tried to get him out the door. Then when he became erratic they tried to get him under control. What if he'd suddenly pulled out a knife or a gun and started shooting people? The police didn't know anything at that point other than he was an erratic man resisting them, and at that point anything can happen. I've had to compile enough police videos of officer getting suddenly knifed, shot, or just generally beaten to a pulp to see why they might want to err on the side of caution.
Did you watch the video once they had him out of the classroom? Did you watch the officer speaking to him calmly and trying to calm him down? The guy was a nut job, repeatedly yelling out that they were going to kill him and for everyone to come to the police station to ask about him so they couldn't kill him. If I saw a guy acting like he'd been, I'd have gone the other direction. Fast. A call to the cops might not be a bad idea either.
Having a badge certainly doesn't mean someone has a brain. Heck, it doesn't even necessarily mean they are noble or anything. For a lot of them they weren't qualified to do much else and it pays better. Someone that is good cop material is someone that can make quick decisions in high pressure situations. (Oddly, like air traffic controllers, people that lean towards education usually fail miserably at this.) A good police department continually sends it's officers through training to reinforce the right ideas so that in those fractions of a second to make a decision, they are more likely to make the right one. Acting like a bouncer is probably never the right decision.
It seems to me like he figured he was a white rich kid and so he was entitled to do whatever it was he was trying to accomplish. When things went from "academic" to "reality" he started to get scared and was in disbelief that he would get cuffed and taken away.
An officer of the law can not come up to you at any moment that you are just standing in a public situation and tell you to "Get on the ground" without first having a warrant for your arrest or stating that you are under arrest for "probable cause of committing a crime".
I think, and don't quote me on this, that in a lot of areas it isn't legal for them to tell you that, but if they do then it is illegal for you to refuse. Essentially, you have to comply with the illegal request, and then try to take legal actions afterwards for what they did. Weird, eh?
The police officers already had him restrained and then they tasered him.
No, the police officers had him on the ground. They tasered him because he wouldn't let them put handcuffs on him. IE, they were trying to further restrain him, but he was resisting. They warned him several times that he would be tasered if he didn't let them hold his arms.
No, the taser came in because just as they were about to finish putting handcuffs on him, he started resisting again. Had he continued to be violent after getting him in handcuffs, they probably would have tried to taser him again, and then maybe carry him out by his arms and legs.
I'm going to guess that most of this people reading slashdot don't spend a lot of time at night clubs. A single bouncer could have EASILY handled this man WITHOUT injuring him, or themselves. They would have just pushed him out the door. That's all that had to be done. The police just needed to MAKE A DECISION ABOUT WHERE THEY WERE GOING and push him out that door. SIMPLE. Instead they had 6 of them there trying to push him to the ground. The door was less than 10 feet away it looks like. Yes, a door that goes out to a hallway, then a full flight of stairs, then down the next hallway to the outside. There are a few reason that I can think of why they did what they did. 1. He was resisting at the beginning, so maybe it was policy to arrest at that point. 2. As a government official, security was probably heightened and they may have had extra policies in place. 3. As trained officers, they probably had a clue how much damage one scrawny guy can cause. (I volunteered in a nursing home and dated someone that worked in another. It can take several big guys to take down a single elderly man or women.) 4. If they wanted to get him all the way out of the building, in handcuffs was probably the safest way with the stairs and hallways. (The nut refused to take an elevator, and was yelling for people to come looking for him because they were going to "kill" him.)
I don't know what they should have done, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't at all resemble what a bouncer has to do.
I watched a video of officers from our local police department being "wet" tasered as part of their training. They were shot in the back, tasered for a bit, with people on either side of them holding them so they didn't fall to fast to the ground. Some fell slowly, others dropped like rocks, and some peed their pants. I'm pretty sure they, at least, have a fair idea of what happens to people they have to taser. It's not something I'd like to be involved in, on either side of the taser.
Trying to escape from an assault does not make one a threat.
So are you saying that anyone should just be allowed to run from the police? A person running away is not a threat, so why should police be allowed to use force if a person is running away.
I think that in most areas, a person that is running away, not holding a weapon, and not showing any evidence of assaulting anyone, is not deemed a threat. Pretty much all the police can do is run after them and try to corner them. They certainly can't shoot at them. Once they are cornered, or in custody, but still resisting, then they can use force as the person has become a potential 'threat'.
Ummmm... yes it is. If the police are arresting you, you're supposed to let them. If they were in the wrong, then you try to take legal action against them (although in many situations you are just screwed). It's not a very good system, but that's the way it is. When the officers weren't able to get the man under control initially, they wrestled him to the ground. The next step is to place handcuffs on him to restrict his movements. At this point he was continuing to resist. If he continues to "resist" their efforts to place him under "restraint" (ie, handcuffs) then tasering him is the next option to quickly exhaust his body so they can move his arms into position.
In the old days the standard method would have been to beat him until he was exhausted to the point that they could force him to comply. Really, him getting tasered is not that bad in comparison.
The problem is that with him continuing to resist them, they are kind of stuck. They can't sit there all day with him on the ground until he complies. They are all exposed, and they don't know if one of his nutty friends will do something drastic. There is also the chance that he might get more violent. He has already resisted arrest and shown himself to be erratic, so they have to take him in.
The real issue is whether or not the officers should have been screwing with him in the first place. Kerry pretty much said to leave him alone. At the same time, presidential candidates are big targets, so law enforcement take their security pretty seriously. Removing him was probably a good thing. They probably could have dragged him outside and told him to get lost, but maybe they had a different policy in place. Who knows? I'm sure an overly long and tedious investigation will go over the events time and again. Maybe he will get off, maybe the officers will get off, maybe people will lose their jobs, who knows? One thing is for certain, this prick doesn't the time of day from anyone.
Actually, that's exactly what it does. I thought of Dragon Ball Z after reading that he was dead. In Dragon Ball Z you think you know that absolute power of a character as some value N, except that the character discovers a way to make their power N+1, and defeat the bad guy. Each an every episode the character discovers a way to increment their maximum power by 1, just enough to defeat the bad guy, whose power increments by 1 each episode. (I guess if the bad guys power were ever incremented by 2, the good guy would die?) Power Rangers did the exact same thing. I never really liked either of those shows.
The WoT series is just like that. For the first part of the series, in each book the main character (Rand) discovers a way to increase his power, which incidentally is just enough to defeat each new opponent. It got old, but I managed to make it all the way to the end of book 11 by listening to them while working out. Thinking about anything other than working out while working out is a good thing.
Look, I admire the plot and scope of the books. But I don't buy that it was necessary to be so ponderous and dull so often in his writing.
Tolkien's writing can have parts that are a bit ponderous to read through (I've never actually finished The Silmarillion). However I did read The Hobbit and the LOTR in fourth grade, and my brother read The Hobbit in second. I would have been nine then, and I recall liking them very much, though I wonder now how much I may have simply not caught.
To be fair though, Tolkien was introducing a heck of a lot of concepts to people, and he was a linguist. Most of the ideas that we have for elves and dwarfs were developed and popularized by his writing. Remember, before this most people probably said that elves were tiny little beings that worked in shoe shops or the north pole. If he hadn't spent so much time describing these things in detail, nobody would have had a clue what they were supposed to be. Essentially everything in it needed to be explained in some detail. Now that everyone has read those books or become familiar with the ideas, authors can simply refer to them and we understand them. Tolkien didn't have that luxury.
Also, Tolkien was fascinated with languages. For some people they add something, for most people they don't. What it boils down to is he loved thinking about and inventing languages, it was his passion, and that is reflected in his writing. Personally I think he went a little overboard, but I don't feel it puts to big of a burden on the reader.
Jordan apparently has a fascination with clothing (particularly dresses) and scenery. I would guess that at least 1/10th of most of his books are dedicated to describing in great detail what people are wearing. Yes, I understand that people like to wear clothing the color that represents the organization they are a member of. But why must you describe the particular shade, hems, and style of embroidery on each and every dress in a group of women? Why?!? Also, if you say something is a snow capped mountain, I understand what that looks like. There is no need to describe every mountain a character passes in great detail to the reader.
I'm fairly certain that a person cannot be counted as a character in one of Jordan's books without devoting at least a paragraph to their hair is combed. Seriously.
Adblock Plus has a neat feature where you can sort the number of items blocked by each filter rule. Number 7 out of hundreds is "*/ads/*", and two of the ones above it are for specific sites I go to. This tells me that any decent ad blocker is going to block "/ads/" directories. So, load an image on your page from a directory labeled "ads". Then check for clients that load some image from some other random directory and don't load the one from/ads/. Finally, just pass that client a message that you don't serve pages to people blocking ads.
And yes, I do recognize that I just used my working install of Adblock Plus to show how to block it.
These aren't print-layout formats like PDF. Content is the primary issue, "lay out" is a secondary concern.
The thing about display formats like PDF is they contain all of the image, coloring, and font information so that even if the computer it is being viewed on doesn't have that particular font or uses a different color scheme, it can still be viewed exactly as originally intended. That cool, but you expect editors like Word to do very nearly the exact same thing if you have the right fonts installed and a similar monitor. If you don't, then you get those things, and it had damn well display the content in the way intended. Content is primary to ASCII text and HTML, not Word files. If you think content is primary to layout in Word, then you're living under a rock.
You like one browser more than other because of extensions. Then you say Lynx is better than IE. Newsflash: IE has supported extensions for about 10 years now and Lynx has... how long? Zero or am I being misinformed?
Just a quick nitpick. IE completely and purposely broke their standard plugin system when they released IE6, which was almost exactly 6 years ago. All of the IE6 betas supported them, but the final version had it removed. From a plugin standpoint, IE6/7 plugins have only been supported for 6 years.
Now, it's worth noting that just because cp.tar likes Firefox more than IE or Opera because of it's extensions does not mean that he can't like Lynx more than IE for other reasons.
It's worth noting a thought I had about Fry's. I *think* that they little marker mark on the receipt after verifying your bag's contents "validates" your receipt for returns. I suspect that without that mark they wouldn't let you use your receipt for a return (or any other sort of exchange).
Also, the verifier is a step in the loss prevention. These people get a bonus anytime they discover an inconsistency between the receipt and the cart, and it comes strait out of the cashier's department funds. This helps keep pressure on the cashiers to make sure they properly check people out. And between the person that directs you to a cashier, the cashier, and the verifier, it would be difficult for anyone to collude between employees and customer to steal merchandise.
Honestly, I can understand why stores do it. Well, I can't understand why Circuit City does it as I can't understand why anyone would actually shop there. I don't know that it does much, but I can see why they try.
I assume that once a unique RFID is stuck to every piece of merchandise in a store, checking to see if items passing through the door match up with recent purchases will be simple and negate all of this nonsense.
Thanks for posting this. I was waiting for someone to post on the common law, and it appears that very few Slashdotters are even vaguely aware of it and it's implications here. Rather unfortunate as I believe it would have spurned some intelligent discussion rather than the chaotic fish flopping that is present now.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this situation really highlights an issue with the system. It is almost impossible to create a balanced system where people can easily sue the state (encouraging them to clean up their act), and yet not encourage frivolous lawsuits.
You know there are lawyers out there that would take cases like this for a cut of the winning, so what we need is for the police to wrongly arrest some people with a whole lot of time on their hands. I'd volunteer myself, but I've got this thing... in Canada... that requires quite a bit of my time at the moment...
No, I think you missed my two point. The times when a taser is wrongly used is a vast minority of the time. If it were not then police agencies would not favor them due to fear of lawsuits (a major concern). And I assert (without evidence, of course) that their use actually decreases the overall injuries that occur during police action.
Using the Kerry incident as an example, it doesn't appear that having a taser (or stun gun in this case) affected whether or not they were going to arrest him. It didn't affect them forcing him to the ground. It also didn't affect their decision to put him in handcuffs. The only time it came into play was when they could not get the handcuffs on him. At this point they have 3 basic options to get him to comply.
1. Beat him until he is to weak or gives up.
2. Break his arm.
3. Taser him until he is to weak or gives up.
The fastest of these and least harmful to the arrestee is actually using a taser. So in this case we are all glad they had one (whether or not the guy is a big wank). And because it is the fastest, it also results in the least chance of harm to the officers and the crowd (which always like to get really close) due to thrashing a flailing. So in these cases, which are the vast majority, they are a much better option.
For most officers if they unholster their gun (of taser) and don't use it, they have to fill out a bunch of paperwork explaining why. And they had better be convincing. If they actually use a weapon, then they are usually placed on automatic suspension during which they have lots of time to fill out paperwork. In the "good ole days" they could shoot or beat whoever they wanted. But now, thanks in large part to organizations like the ACLU, this just isn't the case. And due to the proliferation of video recording devices we get rid of a lot of he said/she said scenarios. In the Kerry incident, those officers are likely going to investigated for whether or not they should have been arresting the kid in the first place. The use of the taser is pretty cut and dry from the videos.
Do you really think the obscene expense of outfitting police cars with video recorders is for your protection? That $5-10,000 per car is easily made back in the single lawsuit it prevents.
As an aside, tasers and stun guns will be used instead of guns and clubs in most situations (which is an unbelievably good thing. Imagine if the twitchy cop had been pointing a gun at the diabetic...). Where they won't be used is in cases involving multiple assailants, lethal force, and distances greater than about 20 feet, which are all a vast minority of cases.
The other point was that comparing current taser use to anything in those massively oppressive regimes is just plain wrong. And trying to do it devalues my opinion of them faster than the argentine australes.
That was a horribly biased and poorly written response to the whole "tasers" thing. "not even in their darkest hour would they consider shooting a sick guy for calling an ambulance." Oh come on. I'm sure some cop woke up in the morning and thought, "hey, why don't I shoot the first person that calls for medical assistance with a taser." Or maybe there was some confusion, the dispatcher called it out wrong, or a new officer accidentally pulled the trigger while being very nervous and surprised by something. That sounds a little more likely.
The idiot at the political rally asking the questions, I certainly have my doubts that they should have tried to arrest him, but they tasered him specifically because he was twisting around and not letting them place him in handcuffs. The warned him several times before tasering him. And once he let them handcuff him, they stopped. It was pretty much by the book once they decided to put him in custody.
Sometimes they are used at the wrongly, but that is a pretty small minority. If it happened in the USSR or China, you would hear about it. Hello? Government controlled media? Some of my friends spent some time in Brasil in areas with bad crime. They saw cops catch people and just shoot them because they didn't have time to deal with that whole legal process. The were stopped once because they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were scared for their lives. Fortunately they had all their papers on them and they let them go.
Trust me, a stun gun being used occasionally at the wrong time is a lot better than the alternative (guns and clubs).
** Now, saying the use of stun guns is worse than something from Stalin's regime is just reprehensible. Stalin is directly responsible for the deaths of at least 3 million people, possibly as high as 30 million. Stalin was evil, and saying anything to detract from that is immoral.
There are some regulations that require libraries to do some monitoring and such to be available for federal grants. If you don't care about the grants, it doesn't matter. I'm guessing university libraries are funded by the university so they wouldn't be interested in federal library grants.
Umm no. Tasers are used to incapacitate someone so that they can be physically restrained. It's a heck of a lot safer for everyone involved to incapacitate someone that is resisting having handcuffs placed on them. Tasers are usually pretty effective at essentially causing a momentary paralysis. This is opposed to stun guns (which don't have the electrified projectiles of a taser) which can have a variety of effects from causing pain to essentially knocking a person out. Killing someone with one of these is more than likely due to simply the shock of it happening when a person has certain physical ailments. In that sense, stun guns are probably about as likely to cause death as this new weapon.
Back to the story on hand, this technology makes me pretty nervous. The less apparent physical damage combined with the potential ease of use makes me wary that people may be more willing to use this in situations that don't warrant it. Especially crowd control. Causing people a whole lot of pain in high stress situations can produce lasting psychological damage, which wouldn't be readily apparent to most people.
Personally, I would like to see them develop something more like a taser for crowds, where the focus is to momentarily paralyze someone by causing their muscles to contract. That should be pretty safe, except for people falling. But then you run into the no apparent physical damage combined with ease of use, making that much more likely to be used. Ah well, either way it looks like I should be wearing tinfoil to any rallies.
No, what I said was:
If you notice, essentially every person that is posting on this story and has had training in these matters says that the officers appeared to act how they were supposed to. Either A) all of the trained professionals are wrong or B) you are wrong. Guess which one I am going with.
Well stated, and very true. However, there are more blocking programs than Adblock. I'm pretty sure that it's a feature in Norton Internet Security now to block ads. Ad blocking is becoming a little more mainstream, though not necessarily something people purposely seek out. My guess is that even if such a module were implemented, if Adblock switched to just stripping the DOM or setting the visibility:none; on those elements, it wouldn't make a big enough impact financially for website operators to do anything.
And that has to do with the price of tea in China, how exactly? Are you trying to imply that because a policeman made the wrong choice in one situation that they must make the wrong choice in all decisions? Or something? Seriously, I don't know what you're getting at.
Still, watching that video doesn't tell me much about that particular case, so I don't know. An old woman was apparently arrested, had handcuffs placed on her (as is standard), "slipped, scraping her face and hands", and now has a lawyer who, noted for liking being in the spotlight, says it was wrong while holding up a pair of handcuffs from the 1800's. Is it wrong to handcuff anyone over the age of 60 or something, because that's the age when people magically stop being a threat to anyone and anything, and become all soft and cuddly?
I certainly don't know enough about some old lady in Orem to say who was at fault. And if that's the only part of it you've seen, neither do you. Get off your high horse man and realize that quickly passing judgment on the actions of everyone around you isn't going to get you any closer to the truth. There is usually some pretty key information you're not privy to, and a lot of experience you don't have.
I think the difference is that the police approach it with the maximum amount of safety. First they just tried to get him out the door. Then when he became erratic they tried to get him under control. What if he'd suddenly pulled out a knife or a gun and started shooting people? The police didn't know anything at that point other than he was an erratic man resisting them, and at that point anything can happen. I've had to compile enough police videos of officer getting suddenly knifed, shot, or just generally beaten to a pulp to see why they might want to err on the side of caution.
Did you watch the video once they had him out of the classroom? Did you watch the officer speaking to him calmly and trying to calm him down? The guy was a nut job, repeatedly yelling out that they were going to kill him and for everyone to come to the police station to ask about him so they couldn't kill him. If I saw a guy acting like he'd been, I'd have gone the other direction. Fast. A call to the cops might not be a bad idea either.
Having a badge certainly doesn't mean someone has a brain. Heck, it doesn't even necessarily mean they are noble or anything. For a lot of them they weren't qualified to do much else and it pays better. Someone that is good cop material is someone that can make quick decisions in high pressure situations. (Oddly, like air traffic controllers, people that lean towards education usually fail miserably at this.) A good police department continually sends it's officers through training to reinforce the right ideas so that in those fractions of a second to make a decision, they are more likely to make the right one. Acting like a bouncer is probably never the right decision.
That was honestly the first thing that came to my mind.
When I saw the video, I was immediately reminded of that scene from the Holy Grail with Dennis.
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!Simple attention getting, nothing more.
I think, and don't quote me on this, that in a lot of areas it isn't legal for them to tell you that, but if they do then it is illegal for you to refuse. Essentially, you have to comply with the illegal request, and then try to take legal actions afterwards for what they did. Weird, eh?
No, the police officers had him on the ground. They tasered him because he wouldn't let them put handcuffs on him. IE, they were trying to further restrain him, but he was resisting. They warned him several times that he would be tasered if he didn't let them hold his arms.
No, the taser came in because just as they were about to finish putting handcuffs on him, he started resisting again. Had he continued to be violent after getting him in handcuffs, they probably would have tried to taser him again, and then maybe carry him out by his arms and legs.
I don't know what they should have done, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't at all resemble what a bouncer has to do.
I watched a video of officers from our local police department being "wet" tasered as part of their training. They were shot in the back, tasered for a bit, with people on either side of them holding them so they didn't fall to fast to the ground. Some fell slowly, others dropped like rocks, and some peed their pants. I'm pretty sure they, at least, have a fair idea of what happens to people they have to taser. It's not something I'd like to be involved in, on either side of the taser.
I think that in most areas, a person that is running away, not holding a weapon, and not showing any evidence of assaulting anyone, is not deemed a threat. Pretty much all the police can do is run after them and try to corner them. They certainly can't shoot at them. Once they are cornered, or in custody, but still resisting, then they can use force as the person has become a potential 'threat'.
Ummmm... yes it is. If the police are arresting you, you're supposed to let them. If they were in the wrong, then you try to take legal action against them (although in many situations you are just screwed). It's not a very good system, but that's the way it is. When the officers weren't able to get the man under control initially, they wrestled him to the ground. The next step is to place handcuffs on him to restrict his movements. At this point he was continuing to resist. If he continues to "resist" their efforts to place him under "restraint" (ie, handcuffs) then tasering him is the next option to quickly exhaust his body so they can move his arms into position.
In the old days the standard method would have been to beat him until he was exhausted to the point that they could force him to comply. Really, him getting tasered is not that bad in comparison.
The problem is that with him continuing to resist them, they are kind of stuck. They can't sit there all day with him on the ground until he complies. They are all exposed, and they don't know if one of his nutty friends will do something drastic. There is also the chance that he might get more violent. He has already resisted arrest and shown himself to be erratic, so they have to take him in.
The real issue is whether or not the officers should have been screwing with him in the first place. Kerry pretty much said to leave him alone. At the same time, presidential candidates are big targets, so law enforcement take their security pretty seriously. Removing him was probably a good thing. They probably could have dragged him outside and told him to get lost, but maybe they had a different policy in place. Who knows? I'm sure an overly long and tedious investigation will go over the events time and again. Maybe he will get off, maybe the officers will get off, maybe people will lose their jobs, who knows? One thing is for certain, this prick doesn't the time of day from anyone.
Actually, that's exactly what it does. I thought of Dragon Ball Z after reading that he was dead. In Dragon Ball Z you think you know that absolute power of a character as some value N, except that the character discovers a way to make their power N+1, and defeat the bad guy. Each an every episode the character discovers a way to increment their maximum power by 1, just enough to defeat the bad guy, whose power increments by 1 each episode. (I guess if the bad guys power were ever incremented by 2, the good guy would die?) Power Rangers did the exact same thing. I never really liked either of those shows.
The WoT series is just like that. For the first part of the series, in each book the main character (Rand) discovers a way to increase his power, which incidentally is just enough to defeat each new opponent. It got old, but I managed to make it all the way to the end of book 11 by listening to them while working out. Thinking about anything other than working out while working out is a good thing.
Tolkien's writing can have parts that are a bit ponderous to read through (I've never actually finished The Silmarillion). However I did read The Hobbit and the LOTR in fourth grade, and my brother read The Hobbit in second. I would have been nine then, and I recall liking them very much, though I wonder now how much I may have simply not caught.
To be fair though, Tolkien was introducing a heck of a lot of concepts to people, and he was a linguist. Most of the ideas that we have for elves and dwarfs were developed and popularized by his writing. Remember, before this most people probably said that elves were tiny little beings that worked in shoe shops or the north pole. If he hadn't spent so much time describing these things in detail, nobody would have had a clue what they were supposed to be. Essentially everything in it needed to be explained in some detail. Now that everyone has read those books or become familiar with the ideas, authors can simply refer to them and we understand them. Tolkien didn't have that luxury.
Also, Tolkien was fascinated with languages. For some people they add something, for most people they don't. What it boils down to is he loved thinking about and inventing languages, it was his passion, and that is reflected in his writing. Personally I think he went a little overboard, but I don't feel it puts to big of a burden on the reader.
Jordan apparently has a fascination with clothing (particularly dresses) and scenery. I would guess that at least 1/10th of most of his books are dedicated to describing in great detail what people are wearing. Yes, I understand that people like to wear clothing the color that represents the organization they are a member of. But why must you describe the particular shade, hems, and style of embroidery on each and every dress in a group of women? Why?!? Also, if you say something is a snow capped mountain, I understand what that looks like. There is no need to describe every mountain a character passes in great detail to the reader.
I'm fairly certain that a person cannot be counted as a character in one of Jordan's books without devoting at least a paragraph to their hair is combed. Seriously.
Adblock Plus has a neat feature where you can sort the number of items blocked by each filter rule. Number 7 out of hundreds is "*/ads/*", and two of the ones above it are for specific sites I go to. This tells me that any decent ad blocker is going to block "/ads/" directories. So, load an image on your page from a directory labeled "ads". Then check for clients that load some image from some other random directory and don't load the one from /ads/. Finally, just pass that client a message that you don't serve pages to people blocking ads.
And yes, I do recognize that I just used my working install of Adblock Plus to show how to block it.
The thing about display formats like PDF is they contain all of the image, coloring, and font information so that even if the computer it is being viewed on doesn't have that particular font or uses a different color scheme, it can still be viewed exactly as originally intended. That cool, but you expect editors like Word to do very nearly the exact same thing if you have the right fonts installed and a similar monitor. If you don't, then you get those things, and it had damn well display the content in the way intended. Content is primary to ASCII text and HTML, not Word files. If you think content is primary to layout in Word, then you're living under a rock.
Just a quick nitpick. IE completely and purposely broke their standard plugin system when they released IE6, which was almost exactly 6 years ago. All of the IE6 betas supported them, but the final version had it removed. From a plugin standpoint, IE6/7 plugins have only been supported for 6 years.
Now, it's worth noting that just because cp.tar likes Firefox more than IE or Opera because of it's extensions does not mean that he can't like Lynx more than IE for other reasons.
It's worth noting a thought I had about Fry's. I *think* that they little marker mark on the receipt after verifying your bag's contents "validates" your receipt for returns. I suspect that without that mark they wouldn't let you use your receipt for a return (or any other sort of exchange).
Also, the verifier is a step in the loss prevention. These people get a bonus anytime they discover an inconsistency between the receipt and the cart, and it comes strait out of the cashier's department funds. This helps keep pressure on the cashiers to make sure they properly check people out. And between the person that directs you to a cashier, the cashier, and the verifier, it would be difficult for anyone to collude between employees and customer to steal merchandise.
Honestly, I can understand why stores do it. Well, I can't understand why Circuit City does it as I can't understand why anyone would actually shop there. I don't know that it does much, but I can see why they try.
I assume that once a unique RFID is stuck to every piece of merchandise in a store, checking to see if items passing through the door match up with recent purchases will be simple and negate all of this nonsense.
Thanks for posting this. I was waiting for someone to post on the common law, and it appears that very few Slashdotters are even vaguely aware of it and it's implications here. Rather unfortunate as I believe it would have spurned some intelligent discussion rather than the chaotic fish flopping that is present now.