Regardless, these people receive the protection of a corporate-sounding mission statement, along the lines of "to protect and serve" - even those who read it as "to bully and assault."
I'm more interested in how various strategies used by scientists when making the "latest wild claim" (tm) affects their level of success within the game of scientist-gene evolution.
Sophisticated, maybe not but given options and executing a plan then switching if that plan fails? Well, that is the essence of evolution.
Uhh, no. The essence of evolution is that your particular combination of genes make you more or less:
* adapted to your environment,
* capable of surviving to rear young.. leading to more (variations of) those genes in the gene-pool as a whole (every organisms genes).
And if the suspect will not comply with the law without a beating, what then? The police have a choice -- they can enforce the law using physical coercion (colloquially, "beating") or they can let the law go unenforced.
I've recently seen video of cops beating completely passive, peaceful protesters who are completely within their rights to assemble (Seattle WTO Conference 1999). There the cops were using violence to enforce their will, which went against the law - removing the legitimate right to protest, not to mention applying physical harm.
There's video of a cop in the UK at the G20, hitting a completely-random-guy-on-the-street with his nightstick in such a manner that he died shortly afterwards. No laws were being broken by the random guy, it was simply deadly assault. What happened to the cop? even though it was filmed from several different angles - nothing that I'm aware of.
Watch the video - one of the loitering police officers sneaks up behind [Ian Tomlinson] to hit him - he falls heavily to the ground as he had no warning - then they stand around watching (later lying that they were trying to help him but were prevented from doing so by protesters).
This is the police officer of today - a sneaky, violent liar who abuses the system to engage in a kind of sport with the general public as captive game - all the benefit of the doubt goes to the police - all the cameras, weapons, manpower is on the side of the police.
Three more ignorant assholes abusing the authority with which they've been entrusted - later to lie and file false charges against their victim.
I'm sure many of us have seen either video or witnessed this kind of thing first-hand. Certainly I have, which is what spurred my initial comment:
In my experience, "assaulting an officer" means "being assaulted by an officer".
I've heard countless stories from solicitors, clerks to the court etc etc etc about police officers lying and abusing their power.
I was recently involved in an appeal after a similar thing happened to me - the very officer who assaulted me was in charge of investigating himself to determine if he'd been guilty of misconduct! Yes, literally investigating himself:D - doh.
The reality that many of the police on the ground are not sufficiently well-developed, mentally, to be able to handle the grave responsibility which they have been given.
-- Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.
The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you're tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can't get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.
The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.
With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.
Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).
Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff.
Anyway, I fully expect that most of you, reading this, will write to say, "what the heck are you doing reading Upside anyway? You get what you deserve". How true. Serves me right. --
They admit they knew they didn't have the rights, and that they made $50 million off selling things they were fully aware they had zero rights to.
I'm not sure this law thing operates like politics. In politics you can 'hold your hands up' and say 'my bad, I made a mistake - I accept full responsibility' and that's the end of it - you walk away scott free - i.e. the name of the game is getting people (well, politicians:) to tell the truth (a lofty goal) - not to punish them for their crimes.
I'm pretty sure in law, there's some element of punishment involved. Clearly IANAL.
Oh please, don't put Israel into the position of blame
Nice rhetorical device.
Israel's actions put it into the position of blame. Decades of illegal occupation, for a start; using American attack helicopters on civilian apartment complexes, etc...
i however would like to know how that is equivalent to the brutal tactics china and iran use to control information in their countries, which is what the grandfather poster asserted
At no point did I *assert* that the US uses brutal tactics (on its own people) to control information. What I said was (and you could, in theory scroll back and read this for yourself - something you failed to do twice before posting demands for an explanation of how your straw man makes sense.)
What I said was:
If the regime controls the media well enough, any problems or threats can be described as...
Most don't seem to comprehend that this is exactly what happens in the US.
i.e. with enough of a stranglehold on information (*) any event can be spun any way that is convenient. If you never see newspaper articles about US and Israeli terrorist attacks, when the retaliatory action appears, you are wondering why - conveniently your media has a nice, neat explanation - whatever will rally public support for whatever action they have on the cards next.
(*) - such as that found within the US - were major events (usually perpetrated by your own government or their employees (Israel)) {are completely removed from / never enter} the historical record.
You've got the worst healthcare system of any developed nation (certainly measured by infant mortality...
Yeah, except infant mortality in other countries is measured in entirely different ways. Adjusting to use the same standards completely changes your pointless point, and you know that.
Seems kinda suspect to me to have a large chart of country vs infant mortality rate and to not normalise the figures so that like is compared with like.
It's very tempting to just call bullshit without thinking but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Please enlighten us as to what it is that I know about the different methods of measuring infant mortality rate.
When's the last time you had *any* say over anything happening within your country?
Every time we have an election, we have a say.
And yet overwelmingly, the US electorate wants socialised healthcare - yet there's zero chance of this happening because your politicians care not what the people want - their concern is in continuing the status-quo which benefits their paymasters. Doesn't sound like a great deal of control to me.
I also hear that there's limited support for the most recent (of a long line of) wars even within the propaganda-rich-complete-information-poor US - yet war is profitable today and in the future so again, the people's opinion is ignored.
I'm sure it greatly annoys you to know that, because it doesn't fit well with your fantasy. Sorry.
It's true it doesn't fit although the emotions evoked by your cynical double-speak, something at which USAnians and their apologists excel, is distaste rather than anger. No doubt those of your countrymen who don't know as you do, believe your spin? It's utterly abhorrent to many, myself included, to watch your country profit from the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of people, year after year, whilst singing your own praises all over the press as bringers of democracy. How do you people live with yourselves? What's worse is that the unknowing masses are the ones who pay with their lives when victims of your foreign policy retaliate.
The whole world has deep concerns over American lack of respect for international law and aggression
Then why doesn't "the whole world" actually step up, pay their share and risk their own share of lives when it's necessary to do so? The US pays, per capita, wildly more than any other nation on earth to do things like mitigate HIV/AIDS in Africa.
OK, back to the subject - US aggression and lack of respect for international law. In a similar vein to your response - why doesn't the US stop invading foreign countries and giving nukes to Israel?
Let's see - how about when things fell apart in Serbia, Croatia, and their neighboring little hell holes?
It's my understanding the the US sold Milosevic weapons. Is that the kind of help you mean? Facilitating genocide? Well done US - bringer of democracy.
Nope - e.g. the wealthy are untouchable (OJ Simpson, anyone?) unless specifically targeted by someone more wealthy.
...and having equal access to power.
Nope - e.g. one must profess belief in some flavour of christianity before being elected to high office and 'travel in the right circles' - cash leads to power leads to being elected. Simple pattern.
The "majority rule" is often described as a characteristic feature of democracy
Nope - e.g. the majority of US citizens want socialised healthcare but it's been blocked for years by the 'healthcare' industry lobbyists.
Presumably you're on of the ghouls profiting from invading foreign countries or maybe one of the brainwashed sheep who doesn't realise what the US is upto?
but it seems like the US is the scapegoat/boogieman of choice when...
The whole world has deep concerns over American lack of respect for international law and aggression not to mention hypocrisy.
Why not try spreading democracy to the US or the UK before taking it to the middle east?
No, you don't have a democracy before you come back whining that it is so. When's the last time you had *any* say over anything happening within your country?
justify their own regime or blame their problems on, however crazy the case may be (oh noes, we're ruled by an iron fisted dictator, our economy and human development index lag despite the fact that we're sitting on a huge pile of the most valuable substance on the planet...
You've got the worst healthcare system of any developed nation (certainly measured by infant mortality, as a minimum) for the greatest cost - one more side-effect of living in a non-democratic business-run dictatorship where business makes government policy, information is controlled - apparently without the knowledge of the people.
You act as if the US stole freedom from someone...
The US has been providing attack helicopters and more to Israel so that they can kill civilians in the occupied territories for decades, continually blocking the otherwise earth-wide desire for peace in this area. Does that count?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not but visual data is data.
Regardless, these people receive the protection of a corporate-sounding mission statement, along the lines of "to protect and serve" - even those who read it as "to bully and assault."
Thanks for the heads-up :D
timecube is painful - I can't help wondering if the author suffered a head-injury prior to writing it.
Yah, who knows what societies we've missed-out on because 'way-back-when', aggression was more useful than cooperation, from a survival perspective.
Hopefully those from 10,000 years into the future won't say the same thing :(
Yay, 48-pt text - always a good indicator of article quality.
I'm more interested in how various strategies used by scientists when making the "latest wild claim" (tm) affects their level of success within the game of scientist-gene evolution.
Whenever I tried to read this, my brain throws an exception.
Uhh, no. The essence of evolution is that your particular combination of genes make you more or less:
* adapted to your environment,
* capable of surviving to rear young.. leading to more (variations of) those genes in the gene-pool as a whole (every organisms genes).
Living in a country with more nukes than any other? Did I win?
var attacker = (benefitToForeignPolicyAgenda (russianMilitary) >= benefitToForeignPolicyAgenda (boredTeenager)) ? russianMilitary : boredTeenager;
I've recently seen video of cops beating completely passive, peaceful protesters who are completely within their rights to assemble (Seattle WTO Conference 1999). There the cops were using violence to enforce their will, which went against the law - removing the legitimate right to protest, not to mention applying physical harm.
There's video of a cop in the UK at the G20, hitting a completely-random-guy-on-the-street with his nightstick in such a manner that he died shortly afterwards. No laws were being broken by the random guy, it was simply deadly assault. What happened to the cop? even though it was filmed from several different angles - nothing that I'm aware of.
Watch the video - one of the loitering police officers sneaks up behind [Ian Tomlinson] to hit him - he falls heavily to the ground as he had no warning - then they stand around watching (later lying that they were trying to help him but were prevented from doing so by protesters).
This is the police officer of today - a sneaky, violent liar who abuses the system to engage in a kind of sport with the general public as captive game - all the benefit of the doubt goes to the police - all the cameras, weapons, manpower is on the side of the police.
Here's another one:
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXFMIbkKMMc
Three more ignorant assholes abusing the authority with which they've been entrusted - later to lie and file false charges against their victim.
I'm sure many of us have seen either video or witnessed this kind of thing first-hand. Certainly I have, which is what spurred my initial comment:
I've heard countless stories from solicitors, clerks to the court etc etc etc about police officers lying and abusing their power.
I was recently involved in an appeal after a similar thing happened to me - the very officer who assaulted me was in charge of investigating himself to determine if he'd been guilty of misconduct! Yes, literally investigating himself :D - doh.
The reality that many of the police on the ground are not sufficiently well-developed, mentally, to be able to handle the grave responsibility which they have been given.
Look, dude. The cops should not be using violence unless it's being used to protect someone. That's the issue.
I've found the second half of this to be persuasive in the past:
* http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html
--
Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.
The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you're tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can't get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.
The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.
With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.
Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).
Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff.
Anyway, I fully expect that most of you, reading this, will write to say, "what the heck are you doing reading Upside anyway? You get what you deserve". How true. Serves me right.
--
Skip this, it's a goat 'singing' along to a guitar.
In my experience, "assaulting an officer" means "being assaulted by an officer".
Jeez, making that card was a complete waste of time. Can't we just blend it instead?
I'm not sure this law thing operates like politics. In politics you can 'hold your hands up' and say 'my bad, I made a mistake - I accept full responsibility' and that's the end of it - you walk away scott free - i.e. the name of the game is getting people (well, politicians :) to tell the truth (a lofty goal) - not to punish them for their crimes.
I'm pretty sure in law, there's some element of punishment involved. Clearly IANAL.
I guess they rejected the 'avoid war' option :-(
Nice rhetorical device.
Israel's actions put it into the position of blame. Decades of illegal occupation, for a start; using American attack helicopters on civilian apartment complexes, etc...
OK, I've just received a huge email with moderation results for this discussion:
flamebait: 6
overrated: 1
funny: 1
insightful: 11
offtopic: 3
informative: 2
interesting: 1
troll: 2
At no point did I *assert* that the US uses brutal tactics (on its own people) to control information. What I said was (and you could, in theory scroll back and read this for yourself - something you failed to do twice before posting demands for an explanation of how your straw man makes sense.)
What I said was:
i.e. with enough of a stranglehold on information (*) any event can be spun any way that is convenient. If you never see newspaper articles about US and Israeli terrorist attacks, when the retaliatory action appears, you are wondering why - conveniently your media has a nice, neat explanation - whatever will rally public support for whatever action they have on the cards next.
(*) - such as that found within the US - were major events (usually perpetrated by your own government or their employees (Israel)) {are completely removed from / never enter} the historical record.
Yay \o/
-1, "even though everything you say is true Ima mod you troll". My favourite.
Seems kinda suspect to me to have a large chart of country vs infant mortality rate and to not normalise the figures so that like is compared with like.
It's very tempting to just call bullshit without thinking but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Please enlighten us as to what it is that I know about the different methods of measuring infant mortality rate.
And yet overwelmingly, the US electorate wants socialised healthcare - yet there's zero chance of this happening because your politicians care not what the people want - their concern is in continuing the status-quo which benefits their paymasters. Doesn't sound like a great deal of control to me.
I also hear that there's limited support for the most recent (of a long line of) wars even within the propaganda-rich-complete-information-poor US - yet war is profitable today and in the future so again, the people's opinion is ignored.
It's true it doesn't fit although the emotions evoked by your cynical double-speak, something at which USAnians and their apologists excel, is distaste rather than anger. No doubt those of your countrymen who don't know as you do, believe your spin? It's utterly abhorrent to many, myself included, to watch your country profit from the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of people, year after year, whilst singing your own praises all over the press as bringers of democracy. How do you people live with yourselves? What's worse is that the unknowing masses are the ones who pay with their lives when victims of your foreign policy retaliate.
OK, back to the subject - US aggression and lack of respect for international law. In a similar vein to your response - why doesn't the US stop invading foreign countries and giving nukes to Israel?
It's my understanding the the US sold Milosevic weapons. Is that the kind of help you mean? Facilitating genocide? Well done US - bringer of democracy.
Sure... right after it stops being a valid comparison.
Your implication that the USA and UK are democracies is offensive. That you likely believe it, adds insult to injury.
Let's quickly take a few snippets from wikipedia's definition of democracy
Nope - e.g. the wealthy are untouchable (OJ Simpson, anyone?) unless specifically targeted by someone more wealthy.
Nope - e.g. one must profess belief in some flavour of christianity before being elected to high office and 'travel in the right circles' - cash leads to power leads to being elected. Simple pattern.
Nope - e.g. the majority of US citizens want socialised healthcare but it's been blocked for years by the 'healthcare' industry lobbyists.
Presumably you're on of the ghouls profiting from invading foreign countries or maybe one of the brainwashed sheep who doesn't realise what the US is upto?
I don't know which is more offensive - that they can't come up with a new approach or that people keep falling for it.
The whole world has deep concerns over American lack of respect for international law and aggression not to mention hypocrisy.
Why not try spreading democracy to the US or the UK before taking it to the middle east?
No, you don't have a democracy before you come back whining that it is so. When's the last time you had *any* say over anything happening within your country?
You've got the worst healthcare system of any developed nation (certainly measured by infant mortality, as a minimum) for the greatest cost - one more side-effect of living in a non-democratic business-run dictatorship where business makes government policy, information is controlled - apparently without the knowledge of the people.
The US has been providing attack helicopters and more to Israel so that they can kill civilians in the occupied territories for decades, continually blocking the otherwise earth-wide desire for peace in this area. Does that count?