I remember that scene! But I think you missed a bit... for one, the "one bite" thing is a little exaggerated, John was eating while they were talking, and tho it was kinda quick, that's really minor.
The more interesting point was that Charlie purposely didn't make any for Sarah, and told her to make more for herself. I saw it as a demonstration of still caring for John and at the same time telling her to shove it.
Yeah, seems like people look for reasons to hate the show when it was actually a good show if you have an adult attention span and pay attention to what the characters are saying and how they're acting rather than just waiting for the next robot fight and not caring what gets said or done in the meantime.
I have a slightly different take. I thought Season 1 was pretty good and showed promise. The best episodes were on Season 2. Of course, the most god-awful episodes were on Season 2, also.
During Season 1, I remember telling a friend of mine that I like the show, but that I worried it would fall into a cliched formula: meet a new character each week who was there for only the one episode, solve that character's problem, and then forget about the whole thing. Sadly, Season 2 had a lot of this "Touched By A Terminator" nonsense.
The last half-dozen episodes, tying up the whole Riley thread and all, were very, very good. But, the show died because it deserved to. It could have been a good show. Unfortunately, it was a very uneven effort.
Seriously, what the hell do you consider a good show? What is on TV that is better than SCC? I'd really like to know what it is that people who don't like things like SCC really like. At least then I'll know what I'm looking for and I'll be better at choosing which shows I should skip since they can't possibly stay around more than a season or two.
Ok, I broke down and went hunting for links anyway.
There's this that says:
* Florida adopted a right-to-carry law in 1987. At the time the law was passed, critics predicted increases in violence. The founder of the National Organization of Women, Betty Friedan stated:
"lethal violence, even in self defense, only engenders more violence." (13)
* When the law went into effect, the Dade County Police began a program to record all arrest and non arrest incidents involving concealed carry licensees. Between September of 1987 and August of 1992, Dade County recorded 4 crimes committed by licensees with firearms. None of these crimes resulted in an injury. The record keeping program was abandoned in 1992 because there were not enough incidents to justify tracking them. (13)(15)
So, in 5 years, they had 4 incidents of crimes, none resulting in injury. This was around the time that gun violence was peaking in the U.S. too, IIRC. Not exactly the picture of a bunch of gun-crazy guys that shoot someone at the drop of a hat that you're trying to convey, is it?
More official stats from Florida here. Seems that only about 1% of CC holders commited a crime with their weapon over the last 20+ years (166 in total, out of nearly 1.5 million).
Back that up with something credible and it might be worth discussing. People with carry permits tend to be the most well-trained in the use of guns, and aren't likely to be found using them for the kinds of ridiculous reasons you state. At least we pretty much agree about the games.
I call shenanigans! You can't prove because someone has a permit they understand not to do stupid things with their guns. America's problem was already stated above. We don't know or care about responsibility, we don't want to face consequences, we don't want to raise our kids, we don't want to care about our neighbors or less fortunate individuals, in fact, we just don't give a crap about anyone that doesn't make us money or please us in some way. Guns should be banned until we as a society learn to stop being douche bags, but that will never happen! So buy up what you can, and go hunting with that assault rifle... GO MERICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, if you're trying to prove your point about people being douchebags, you're doing a good job. Just look up statistics for gun crime rates among concealed-carry permit holders versus the population in general and you'll see that it's much lower for the permit holders. I don't have links handy here at work, but a Google search or two should turn up the info.
Wow. TERRIBLE comparison. For it to be a little more accurate you'd have to get half the gun owners in the country to take out their guns and start firing them for two hours every day. You think death by firearms would raise once that started happening? Throw in a good helping of 18-25 year olds firing guns after a night of drinking and see what you get.
Wow. TERRIBLE logic there. If the primary use of guns was to be taken out and fired randomly for two hours a day, then you might have a point. Since they aren't, you don't.
Americans believe they have the right to defend themselves with firearms. But what constitutes self-defense? Who decides?
Law enforcement and a jury of our peers.
America's problem isn't just too many guns, it's the fact that people carry them around and feel that they have the right to use them.
Back that up with something credible and it might be worth discussing. People with carry permits tend to be the most well-trained in the use of guns, and aren't likely to be found using them for the kinds of ridiculous reasons you state.
At least we pretty much agree about the games.
Parodies are not automatically fair use. Re-read the two live crew decision.
Getting permission to make a parody just makes you not be a douchebag.
Nothing is automatically fair use. You can still be sued and have to go to court and try to prove that what you did falls under the guidelines of the fair use provisions of the law. Then you just have to hope you don't lose the case and end up owing a stupid amount of money to someone.
Also, I don't think parodying something without permission makes you a douchebag. It would seriously suck to have to get someone's permission before we make fun of them. Not all parody is targeted at the person who created the work, but much of it is, and often for good reason.
Tom Waits has successfully sued a few times for the use of his songs and even a performer who simply sounded too much like him singing a song that wasn't his in the use of television advertisements.
Seriously? You can be sued and lose just for sounding too much like someone else? That's completely ridiculous.
What do you expect in a system designed by lawyers? The only way to redress a wrong is through lawyers, so the lawyers will always win.
And if you want to argue in court that an engineer fucked up designing your house (and that's why it fell), you'll need another engineer to argue that the design was broken. And if you want to sue a doctor for malpractice, you need some other doctor to state that the defendant was in the wrong. And (...).
You need an expert to do expert work for you. Oh noes! It's a conspiracy created to promote [expert's class]'s own interests.
When the only way a citizen can have a chance to redress a wrong is to pay through the nose for an expert to represent them, something is severely fucked up. Our legal system is so convoluted that you have to go to school for years of intensive study to have a real chance to navigate it successfully. It was made this way by lawyers, and lawyers are the ones that benefit from the situation.
If you don't like how class action lawsuits work then don't take part, pay your own lawyers (or represent yourself) in your own case against the other party - and reap all the reward yourself. Oh, and take all the risk yourself too - people seem to conveniently forget that the 'class' in a 'class action' rarely take any of the risk of the lawsuit onboard themselves, while their lawyers do.
What do you expect in a system designed by lawyers? The only way to redress a wrong is through lawyers, so the lawyers will always win.
It should be considered to be theft on a massive scale. What else would we call it when A deprives B of something that they paid for fair and square?
The problem with "buying" digital content these days is that the only way you can legally purchase it is by agreeing to 50 pages of legalese that basically strip you of any rights you could possibly have with regard to the information you're buying. Thus, you are giving them money without any assurance that you'll actually be able to make any use of what you're buying. Nice racket they've got going, huh?
Oh, give me a break. It has little to do with working better and more to do with people not having to pay for stuff and little chance of getting caught or punished. Copyright laws may be flawed, but they are not completely unjust. The people who use things without paying their fair share are the unjust ones...not rebels against an unfair law.
It has a lot to do with both working better and being free. Copyright law is horribly flawed, to the point of being nearly completely unjust. I can't say that they're better than piracy at this point. It's just different people getting fucked in each scenario, either the public or the industry, but it's the industry that has brought us to where we're at through their constant lobbying for more and more monopoly powers over copyrighted works and durations that last generations. It's disgustingly corrupt and I think that's why people don't really respect copyright anymore.
And I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
It's certainly not trust. Don't trust anything you download unless you verify that it's clean. There are some distributors that have earned a level of trust because they have consistently only distributed clean copies, but by and large you shouldn't trust anything you download. The fact that people will take the risk is simply due to the fact that the industry has ensured that they can screw us over with impunity.
I don't totally disagree with you, though. We do give the middle man too much and the artist too little. But pirating gives the artist less.
The artists have become collateral damage in a struggle between the middle men and the public. The middle men try to grab more and more power and control from the public and give the artists as little as possible. I think that they need to be killed off and copyright law reformed if artists are ever to get a fair shake and if the public is ever to start respecting copyright again.
How is this even remotely surprising? Being "mentally challenged" doesn't mean you have to look odd. We're looking at the tail end of the bell curve here, not some alien species.
I'm guessing that he meant he couldn't tell from what they said or how they acted when they got up to the point where he was interacting with them, not just by looking at them in line. Just a guess though.
Does it really matter at that point who is the beneficiary of information? They told him to identify himself. Period.
Hell yes it matters. Why should Loomis get his ID? Unless he's at least being charged with a crime, then the police shouldn't be allowed to give them his ID either. Loomis had no right to it.
Also, you aren't required to present an ID, just to give your name and address to the police if they request it. You're not required to give it to anyone else, even if they do have nifty uniforms and guns.
casing a bank. It's suspicious behavior. You can say "what's the harm", but they see it as you coming back later and using the information to crack open the ATM. If you aren't big on hot lights and cavity searches I wouldn't run towards the President waving your arms and yelling either. There's an element of common sense here.
Common sense would be to know that people are naturally curious about things that they don't often get to see, and cover the damn ATM if they don't want anyone looking at it. Whether it's him with a camera or someone else with a photographic memory, it doesn't really matter. They are in a public place and should take precautions if they don't want anyone scoping out their machine. Compounding that with assault and harassment was just beyond stupid.
I know that retail stores often have contracts with towing agencies that give the latter pretty broad control. It's possible that they might also have similar contracts with ATM companies.
Heck, I'd consider it likely that towing agencies and ATM companies both have provisions in their contracts saying that they can require the retail store to ban someone if they bother the contractors' employees.
Yeah, and they could ask him to leave, and even to never come back. But they can't harass him, threaten him, or confiscate his property. So they were in the wrong if things happened anything like what he says.
circumstances which reasonably indicate that the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime
I don't see how taking a picture would reasonably indicate any of those things. The phrase "about to" would seem to indicate that the act is imminent, whereas taking a picture, even if it was to be used to plan a crime, certainly wouldn't make the crime imminent. Detaining a person for this is just ridiculous.
In a way, that's sad to know.
Do any European countries still have gonads?
Not sure that the US is any better really. Look at all the ridiculous laws that get passed because people are so scared of their own shadows that they'll let the politicians get away with anything as long as they say it's to keep the terrorists away. So far they're allowed to arrest pretty much anyone indefinitely, listen in on everyone's phone calls, and can confiscate damn near anything indefinitely. It's really gotten WAY out of hand, primarily due to the fact that people are to scared to oppose this stuff.
Accuracy AND a high firing rate, on the other hand, will allow you to utterly destroy and dominate any team that isn't similarly equipped.
This is what I've generally encountered. People toting $400 markers and a backpack full of paint, who play regularly. Unless you've got that kind of firepower on your team too, you will get pinned down and run over.
The funny thing about playing with military guys that are new to the game is that they tend to just hit the dirt and start crawling around:) Sounds good in a real firefight, but doesn't help much in paintball.
Of all the people I know that play (or used to play) paintball, not one of them even owned guns.
In my experience that's because most people who own and shoot real guns find that shooting a paintball gun just doesn't compare. Recoil therapy - it's a great stress reliever.
Paintball, at least in most of the places I've played, has devolved into an arms race to see who can spray the most paint. I used to play indoor games with pump-action markers, which was fun and had a much more tactical nature than the current types of games that most places run where it's basically a speedball field or just an open area with various types of cover and each team just blazes away at the other. Unless you have a team that trains together regularly, you pretty much don't stand a chance. Pick-up games are pointless.
Speaking as a non-American, I'm interested in just when you guys are going to utilise the second amendment you're so fond of for that purpose. My personal bet is this side of never....
If we're lucky we'll never have to. It's not like we've stocked up and are just itching to overthrow the government. It's meant to be a last resort, not an alternative to elections or a way of expressing our dissatisfaction with an election outcome. There's no telling what the aftermath would be like either. It's pretty scary to think about, but it's also scary to think about not even having that option. Things have gotten fairly bad, but I don't think anyone can seriously say that we've exhausted our options at this point. For a non-American, you certainly seem eager for people to pull the trigger.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember that scene! But I think you missed a bit... for one, the "one bite" thing is a little exaggerated, John was eating while they were talking, and tho it was kinda quick, that's really minor. The more interesting point was that Charlie purposely didn't make any for Sarah, and told her to make more for herself. I saw it as a demonstration of still caring for John and at the same time telling her to shove it.
Yeah, seems like people look for reasons to hate the show when it was actually a good show if you have an adult attention span and pay attention to what the characters are saying and how they're acting rather than just waiting for the next robot fight and not caring what gets said or done in the meantime.
I have a slightly different take. I thought Season 1 was pretty good and showed promise. The best episodes were on Season 2. Of course, the most god-awful episodes were on Season 2, also.
During Season 1, I remember telling a friend of mine that I like the show, but that I worried it would fall into a cliched formula: meet a new character each week who was there for only the one episode, solve that character's problem, and then forget about the whole thing. Sadly, Season 2 had a lot of this "Touched By A Terminator" nonsense.
The last half-dozen episodes, tying up the whole Riley thread and all, were very, very good. But, the show died because it deserved to. It could have been a good show. Unfortunately, it was a very uneven effort.
Seriously, what the hell do you consider a good show? What is on TV that is better than SCC? I'd really like to know what it is that people who don't like things like SCC really like. At least then I'll know what I'm looking for and I'll be better at choosing which shows I should skip since they can't possibly stay around more than a season or two.
* Florida adopted a right-to-carry law in 1987. At the time the law was passed, critics predicted increases in violence. The founder of the National Organization of Women, Betty Friedan stated:
"lethal violence, even in self defense, only engenders more violence." (13)
* When the law went into effect, the Dade County Police began a program to record all arrest and non arrest incidents involving concealed carry licensees. Between September of 1987 and August of 1992, Dade County recorded 4 crimes committed by licensees with firearms. None of these crimes resulted in an injury. The record keeping program was abandoned in 1992 because there were not enough incidents to justify tracking them. (13)(15)
So, in 5 years, they had 4 incidents of crimes, none resulting in injury. This was around the time that gun violence was peaking in the U.S. too, IIRC. Not exactly the picture of a bunch of gun-crazy guys that shoot someone at the drop of a hat that you're trying to convey, is it?
More official stats from Florida here. Seems that only about 1% of CC holders commited a crime with their weapon over the last 20+ years (166 in total, out of nearly 1.5 million).
Back that up with something credible and it might be worth discussing. People with carry permits tend to be the most well-trained in the use of guns, and aren't likely to be found using them for the kinds of ridiculous reasons you state. At least we pretty much agree about the games.
I call shenanigans! You can't prove because someone has a permit they understand not to do stupid things with their guns. America's problem was already stated above. We don't know or care about responsibility, we don't want to face consequences, we don't want to raise our kids, we don't want to care about our neighbors or less fortunate individuals, in fact, we just don't give a crap about anyone that doesn't make us money or please us in some way. Guns should be banned until we as a society learn to stop being douche bags, but that will never happen! So buy up what you can, and go hunting with that assault rifle... GO MERICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, if you're trying to prove your point about people being douchebags, you're doing a good job. Just look up statistics for gun crime rates among concealed-carry permit holders versus the population in general and you'll see that it's much lower for the permit holders. I don't have links handy here at work, but a Google search or two should turn up the info.
Wow. TERRIBLE comparison. For it to be a little more accurate you'd have to get half the gun owners in the country to take out their guns and start firing them for two hours every day. You think death by firearms would raise once that started happening? Throw in a good helping of 18-25 year olds firing guns after a night of drinking and see what you get.
Wow. TERRIBLE logic there. If the primary use of guns was to be taken out and fired randomly for two hours a day, then you might have a point. Since they aren't, you don't.
Americans believe they have the right to defend themselves with firearms. But what constitutes self-defense? Who decides?
Law enforcement and a jury of our peers.
America's problem isn't just too many guns, it's the fact that people carry them around and feel that they have the right to use them.
Back that up with something credible and it might be worth discussing. People with carry permits tend to be the most well-trained in the use of guns, and aren't likely to be found using them for the kinds of ridiculous reasons you state. At least we pretty much agree about the games.
Parodies are not automatically fair use. Re-read the two live crew decision.
Getting permission to make a parody just makes you not be a douchebag.
Nothing is automatically fair use. You can still be sued and have to go to court and try to prove that what you did falls under the guidelines of the fair use provisions of the law. Then you just have to hope you don't lose the case and end up owing a stupid amount of money to someone.
Also, I don't think parodying something without permission makes you a douchebag. It would seriously suck to have to get someone's permission before we make fun of them. Not all parody is targeted at the person who created the work, but much of it is, and often for good reason.
Tom Waits has successfully sued a few times for the use of his songs and even a performer who simply sounded too much like him singing a song that wasn't his in the use of television advertisements.
Seriously? You can be sued and lose just for sounding too much like someone else? That's completely ridiculous.
What do you expect in a system designed by lawyers? The only way to redress a wrong is through lawyers, so the lawyers will always win.
And if you want to argue in court that an engineer fucked up designing your house (and that's why it fell), you'll need another engineer to argue that the design was broken. And if you want to sue a doctor for malpractice, you need some other doctor to state that the defendant was in the wrong. And (...).
You need an expert to do expert work for you. Oh noes! It's a conspiracy created to promote [expert's class]'s own interests.
When the only way a citizen can have a chance to redress a wrong is to pay through the nose for an expert to represent them, something is severely fucked up. Our legal system is so convoluted that you have to go to school for years of intensive study to have a real chance to navigate it successfully. It was made this way by lawyers, and lawyers are the ones that benefit from the situation.
If you don't like how class action lawsuits work then don't take part, pay your own lawyers (or represent yourself) in your own case against the other party - and reap all the reward yourself. Oh, and take all the risk yourself too - people seem to conveniently forget that the 'class' in a 'class action' rarely take any of the risk of the lawsuit onboard themselves, while their lawyers do.
What do you expect in a system designed by lawyers? The only way to redress a wrong is through lawyers, so the lawyers will always win.
It should be considered to be theft on a massive scale. What else would we call it when A deprives B of something that they paid for fair and square?
The problem with "buying" digital content these days is that the only way you can legally purchase it is by agreeing to 50 pages of legalese that basically strip you of any rights you could possibly have with regard to the information you're buying. Thus, you are giving them money without any assurance that you'll actually be able to make any use of what you're buying. Nice racket they've got going, huh?
Oh, give me a break. It has little to do with working better and more to do with people not having to pay for stuff and little chance of getting caught or punished. Copyright laws may be flawed, but they are not completely unjust. The people who use things without paying their fair share are the unjust ones...not rebels against an unfair law.
It has a lot to do with both working better and being free. Copyright law is horribly flawed, to the point of being nearly completely unjust. I can't say that they're better than piracy at this point. It's just different people getting fucked in each scenario, either the public or the industry, but it's the industry that has brought us to where we're at through their constant lobbying for more and more monopoly powers over copyrighted works and durations that last generations. It's disgustingly corrupt and I think that's why people don't really respect copyright anymore.
And I find it a bit ironic you trust pirates of all people to deliver you a product free of root kits and trojans.
It's certainly not trust. Don't trust anything you download unless you verify that it's clean. There are some distributors that have earned a level of trust because they have consistently only distributed clean copies, but by and large you shouldn't trust anything you download. The fact that people will take the risk is simply due to the fact that the industry has ensured that they can screw us over with impunity.
I don't totally disagree with you, though. We do give the middle man too much and the artist too little. But pirating gives the artist less.
The artists have become collateral damage in a struggle between the middle men and the public. The middle men try to grab more and more power and control from the public and give the artists as little as possible. I think that they need to be killed off and copyright law reformed if artists are ever to get a fair shake and if the public is ever to start respecting copyright again.
How is this even remotely surprising? Being "mentally challenged" doesn't mean you have to look odd. We're looking at the tail end of the bell curve here, not some alien species.
I'm guessing that he meant he couldn't tell from what they said or how they acted when they got up to the point where he was interacting with them, not just by looking at them in line. Just a guess though.
It seems that he could have saved himself a lot of grief by just going home and looking up pictures of the insides of ATMs on the internet.
As his own article shows, it's not like they're hard to find. But hey, fight the power and all that.
It's good to draw attention to abuse of power, lest those in power get too comfortable abusing it.
Does it really matter at that point who is the beneficiary of information? They told him to identify himself. Period.
Hell yes it matters. Why should Loomis get his ID? Unless he's at least being charged with a crime, then the police shouldn't be allowed to give them his ID either. Loomis had no right to it. Also, you aren't required to present an ID, just to give your name and address to the police if they request it. You're not required to give it to anyone else, even if they do have nifty uniforms and guns.
casing a bank. It's suspicious behavior. You can say "what's the harm", but they see it as you coming back later and using the information to crack open the ATM. If you aren't big on hot lights and cavity searches I wouldn't run towards the President waving your arms and yelling either. There's an element of common sense here.
Common sense would be to know that people are naturally curious about things that they don't often get to see, and cover the damn ATM if they don't want anyone looking at it. Whether it's him with a camera or someone else with a photographic memory, it doesn't really matter. They are in a public place and should take precautions if they don't want anyone scoping out their machine. Compounding that with assault and harassment was just beyond stupid.
I know that retail stores often have contracts with towing agencies that give the latter pretty broad control. It's possible that they might also have similar contracts with ATM companies. Heck, I'd consider it likely that towing agencies and ATM companies both have provisions in their contracts saying that they can require the retail store to ban someone if they bother the contractors' employees.
Yeah, and they could ask him to leave, and even to never come back. But they can't harass him, threaten him, or confiscate his property. So they were in the wrong if things happened anything like what he says.
He has an iphone and calls himself a "rail/rubyist" cause RoR isn't gay enough. He might have been looking to get manhandled.
And any of that excuses them in detaining him when he broke no law, how exactly?
circumstances which reasonably indicate that the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime
I don't see how taking a picture would reasonably indicate any of those things. The phrase "about to" would seem to indicate that the act is imminent, whereas taking a picture, even if it was to be used to plan a crime, certainly wouldn't make the crime imminent. Detaining a person for this is just ridiculous.
In a way, that's sad to know. Do any European countries still have gonads?
Not sure that the US is any better really. Look at all the ridiculous laws that get passed because people are so scared of their own shadows that they'll let the politicians get away with anything as long as they say it's to keep the terrorists away. So far they're allowed to arrest pretty much anyone indefinitely, listen in on everyone's phone calls, and can confiscate damn near anything indefinitely. It's really gotten WAY out of hand, primarily due to the fact that people are to scared to oppose this stuff.
Accuracy AND a high firing rate, on the other hand, will allow you to utterly destroy and dominate any team that isn't similarly equipped.
This is what I've generally encountered. People toting $400 markers and a backpack full of paint, who play regularly. Unless you've got that kind of firepower on your team too, you will get pinned down and run over.
:) Sounds good in a real firefight, but doesn't help much in paintball.
The funny thing about playing with military guys that are new to the game is that they tend to just hit the dirt and start crawling around
Germany turning into France? Never thought I'd see the day.
Germany has been worse than France on this kind of thing for a long time.
Good post.
But, seriously, you 'need' to 'stop' putting 'single quotes' around every other 'word'.
Amen to that.
Of all the people I know that play (or used to play) paintball, not one of them even owned guns.
In my experience that's because most people who own and shoot real guns find that shooting a paintball gun just doesn't compare. Recoil therapy - it's a great stress reliever.
Paintball, at least in most of the places I've played, has devolved into an arms race to see who can spray the most paint. I used to play indoor games with pump-action markers, which was fun and had a much more tactical nature than the current types of games that most places run where it's basically a speedball field or just an open area with various types of cover and each team just blazes away at the other. Unless you have a team that trains together regularly, you pretty much don't stand a chance. Pick-up games are pointless.
Speaking as a non-American, I'm interested in just when you guys are going to utilise the second amendment you're so fond of for that purpose. My personal bet is this side of never....
If we're lucky we'll never have to. It's not like we've stocked up and are just itching to overthrow the government. It's meant to be a last resort, not an alternative to elections or a way of expressing our dissatisfaction with an election outcome. There's no telling what the aftermath would be like either. It's pretty scary to think about, but it's also scary to think about not even having that option. Things have gotten fairly bad, but I don't think anyone can seriously say that we've exhausted our options at this point. For a non-American, you certainly seem eager for people to pull the trigger.