Compared to this ROT13 thing, "OMG! Ponies!" was pretty damn funny. Doing all stories in ROT13 is just annoying as hell and makes it harder to read the summaries.
the duplicitous device is capable of using readily available materials to create copies of itself – albeit at a slightly smaller scale.
I propose we give these printed "offspring" citizenship. Frankly a 3-D printer has to be more intelligent than anyone on Jersey Shore. And if these progeny can also 3D print, they are contributing more to society than anyone I've seen in reality shows.
If a robot could be designed that could distinguish weed from crop, it would eliminate the need for most herbicides and herbicide resistant GMO seeds
If a robot could be designed that could distinguish weed from crop, it would eliminate the need for most herbicides and herbicide resistant GMO seeds--*as long as the robots were not significantly more expensive than the herbicides*. That's the tricky part.
Or cause more pollution issues, or some other unforeseen consequence. A bad firmware update that kills 80% of a nations crops would be devastating.
Is that even a real name? I swear news stories sound faker and faker every day. So what right will they want to take away in the US because someone "tried to cut an Internet cable"?
You will no longer be able to have flippers in your carry-on luggage. The TSA will require cavity searches of anyone going to tropical locations that may attract scuba divers. Regulators and frog masks will be banned from carry-on and checked luggage. Anyone purchasing or filling any kind of tank (including, but not limited to oxygen, water, CO2, propane, argon, nitrogen, etc.) will need to be registered, fingerprinted, and relinquish their constitutional rights and future social security payments. Additionally anyone who uses more than 100 gallons of water per month must turn over their first born daughter to spin straw into gold to help finance the new agency offshoot of the TSA to "protect" us all from this new vile form of terrorism.
Fiber has a kevlar sheating which should worth something.
Why? It's not like you can use it for anything. Kevlar needs to be purpose made for specific uses. You can't melt it down and reuse it like metal. You can buy sheets of Kevlar fabric for very little. It's mostly the labor and skill that it takes to make stuff that adds the value. Not the material itself.
5. The Police have NO RIGHT to search you or your property for evidence without a specified WARRANT. PERIOD.
You seem to be misinformed. They can search your vehicle during a traffic stop if they have probable cause. This can also be grounds for forcibly entering you home if they have cause to believe you are holding someone hostage, etc. Unfortunately probable cause can be very easy to abuse.
Yes, but with ubiquitous 3d printers, there will be more for sale.
I'm not taking a stance, just saying, easy, non-traceable production will make them much more available. If I had to guess, it'll be a bigger problem in countries other than the US, since guns are already fairly easy to come by.
I don't see how. I remember when I was younger there was a local bar that you could pick up a loaded stolen gun for $20. I think you could pay a little more for one with the serial numbers already filed off too. I'm sure places like that are still around, but the prices may have gone up since then. Still, how much does a 3D printer cost? It's going to be a long time before it's cheaper to print a gun than to steal or buy a stolen one.
I would also guess that printing guns is going to leave a trail on the hard drive of a computer. It'd probably be a lot more risky to get caught with a log of all of the guns you sold than to get caught with a couple of stolen ones. Criminals may not be academically smart , but I can assure you they know how to skirt the law better than most upstanding citizens would ever guess.
The blocks were unique as were the cranks (if memory servers) but things like heads, pistons, rods, etc where often reused from other engines.
I doubt it. Diesel and gas engines have pretty radically different compression ratios. Typically a gasoline engine is in the 8-10:1 compression range. Granted there are others outside of this range, but most cars become pretty un-streetable above 11:1. Additionally it gets harder to find gasoline that has a high enough octane rating to be in cars that are at 12:1. Obviously cars with turbos and various types of blowers will use lower compression pistons as the forced air increases the pressure. Once the fuel is compressed it is ignited by the spark plug.
In a diesel engine the compression ratio is in the 15 to 20:1 range. Obviously some are higher too. This is because a diesel engine ignites the fuel by compression heating rather than a spark. There is no way a gasoline block is going to hold up to this for long, if at all. Perhaps some racing connecting rods will, but the valves and valve seals in a gasoline head are not going to be up to the task of this kind of compression either. The port on the heads are going to be very different too as they require more strength for diesel compression ratios
As the block is typically what is used to define the engine (everything else can be changed)
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but most blocks are defined by the volume they displace. This is affected by the volume of the cylinders in the block itself, but it also largely dependent on the stroke of the pistons, which is determined by how far the crank lobes allow them to move from their lowest point in the cylinder to the uppermost via the connecting rods.
The blocks are actually a good block (Oldsmobile seemed to be a pretty good block manufacturer) it is just all the other crap to make the engine that sucked.
Olds made some pretty heavy duty gasoline blocks back in the day. But I really don't know about their diesel line.
It's a shame that there is so much space-age trash in the ocean. I can just imagine how each piece has destroyed some part of the reef. Although it would be interesting to see a reef that grew around a rocket. We should make an effort to remove much of that junk.
FTS "working almost 3 miles below the surface."
Not much of what wold be defined as "reef" at those depths.
Look, wrist watches were replaced by cellphones. There is no reason to introduce a watch again, unless it will replace the cellphone. Then, tell me - how the battery life problems were solved?
For a patrolman a bad day could include coming home in a bag
"Being a cop is a dangerous job" is a myth
In the US, the following professions have fatality rates that are more than ten times greater than law enforcement:
No, it depends on how you define it. If it's the total percentage of fatalities of those in the field, yes patrolman in not number one. It also depends on what list you look at. According to the Bureau of Labor, police officer 18.6 fatalities per 100K. 176 officers were kill in in the line of duty in 2011.
Fishing - 121.2 deaths per 100K However there very few fishermen in the US, so it's a total of 40 deaths.
Logging - 102.4 per 100K. Again, not very many loggers. At total of 64 loggers died in 2011.
Aircraft Operation - 57 per 100K. The vast majority died in Alaska in old equipment in hostile areas. total deaths, 72. These also include people who walk into propellers and such.
Firefighting & Rescue - Sorry, you don't get this one. It was 2.5 per 100K in 2011. While 80 died in the line of duty, 53 were from heart attacks.
Garbage &; Recycling Collection - 41.2 per 100K. Actual number 34.
Roofing - 31.8 per 100K. Actual number 56
Structural Iron &; Steel - 26 per 100K. Total number of fatalities 16
Farming/Ranching/Agriculture - 25.3 per 100K Here's one that has higher total fatalities. 260. Of course this includes horse and ATV accidents and the fact that most farmers are never "off duty". Any accident on the property in which they live would be considered a workplace accident.
Trucking & Driver/Sales - 759 total deaths. The worst of any profession. 24 per 100K
Electrical Power-line - 27 people killed.
Taxi & Chauffeur
If you ONLY consider homicides (which pale in comparison to fatal accidents),
Obviously the roads are dangerous. Truck drivers have the highest number of fatalities. In the last two years I've read in my local paper about several patrolmen dying in wrecks on the way home after a long shift. Those didn't get counted as killed in the line of duty either.
Taxi & Chauffeur are STILL 10x more likely to get killed on the job than Police.
How many other professions have to worry about being stalked when off duty? Or worry about some idiot tracking down their family? It's not a safe or easy profession to be in.
Yes its like those Mars Rovers that only lasted days instead of weeks and months and years- their primary mission wasn't even accomplished! What poor workmanship and slave labor have wrought!
Or don't even last that long. For example:
The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated in the upper atmosphere because of a miscommunication of pound-seconds instead of newton-seconds - okay, that was a ground-initiated software fault, but still.
The Beagle 2 that died for some unknown reason en-route and crashed.
I'm sure some Google time could provide a long list of failed Mars attempts...
Space travel if fucking hard to do. Even with all of the failures, NASA has done some pretty impressive things. Russia has one hell of a track record with space stations. But not so much luck with Mars. Russia/USSR has been able to land one probe on Mars and recently one on Phobos (very cool by the way). Japan and the ESA have a 100% failure rate with Mars landings. Here's a list of Mars missions.
Sigh... becoming a police officer is a CHOICE. Investigating murder scenes, cleaning up car crashes, and keeping angry wives and husbands from killing each other is part of the job. The people who become police officers CHOOSE to deal with these and other stressful situations, they CHOOSE to (occasionally) risk their lives.
They do. But putting up with some asshole who thinks it's funny to abuse a system that is designed to protect its citizens is not something they choose to put up with.
CHOOSING to put yourself in the line of fire is no excuse to trample on the rights of the people you're supposed to protect.
I couldn't agree more.
If they want a bigger paycheck with safer working conditions, they can find different jobs.
If they all choose to do that, then who will be left to protect Anonymous Cowards like you?
I've seen this attitude plenty of times, where people seem to want to excuse the terrible behavior and the military-style tactics of police because "the poor dears have a tough job without much pay, cut them some slack."
Not at all. What I do get tired of seeing is people like you, who somehow think every cop should be crucified for making a mistake in a dangerous situation and yet you have no idea what it's like.
Well, NO! As people to whom the rest of us have given the right to use lethal force and invade and seize private property, the police should be held to a much higher standard, and they should be trained to understand that they work for us, not the other way around.
And most do. I've had and have many friends who are in law enforcement. Do you know the reason most of them chose that profession? Because the wanted to help people. Unfortunately most get in the system and discover they can't help anyone. Once that sinks in, they do their 20, and get out.
The bad apples in the police forces may very well be in the minority, I don't know. I've known cops who are friendly and cops who are psychopaths or arrogant jerks. For example, I knew a guy who worked as a juvenile prison guard (while studying to become a full-fledged cop) and bragged about "putting the smackdown" on teenagers who ran their mouths.
Those are the type who should never make it past the psych evaluation. But when you have a shortage of candidates, you sometimes have to take what you can get.
Yet that is an exceedingly rare situation and it's not what people are referring to here. If you are SWATting someone the whole point is that the person being SWATted doesn't actually pose a threat, so something like that would never happen.
Really? You know that for a fact? Do you think the person setting this crap up knows the victims well enough to know that for a fact too? I know many people who keep guns in close proximity to their bed. If someone broke down their door, in all likelihood several police would be shot as well as the person being SWATted.
So if SWATting could reasonably be expected to involve deaths, to the extent that the SWATter should be charged with murder, something is wrong.
Anytime you are forcibly entering someones home the risk of someone being injured or killed can be very high.
Given the propensity of the American police responding to that sort of call to shoot first and possibly get round to asking questions a bit later on, SWATting somebody should be charged as attempted murder
While I understand your sentiment, I have to disagree with you. In cases like "SWATting" these officers have been called to a scene where the assumption is that there is an armed person who has already killed a loved on and is emotionally distraught. As most law enforcement officers will tell you, domestic disturbances are some of the most unpredictable calls to go to. So a call like this would be about as scary as most police will ever get.
Granted, there are some pretty bad police officers out there. But there are a lot more really good ones. It's just that nobody seems to pay attention to them, except on rare occasions. Go check to see how much they get paid. It's pretty poorly in most cases. The average patrolman's salary is just over $50K An entry level application engineer makes a little over $54K. Barring natural disasters, a bad day at work for someone in IT is to have to work late. How much fun do you think it is to investigate a murder scene? Or a fatal car crash with children involved? For a patrolman a bad day could include coming home in a bag. In most professions a mistake will cost the company money. For an officer it could be someones life, or their own.
How would you handle call like this? Would you allow yourself to get shot prior to opening fire? Have you ever been shot at? Judging a situation after the fact from your nice comfy chair is just a little bit different than being an active participant.
It's funny that we will spend money to go see a movie and cheer on the cop who shoots the bad guy. But in 99.9% of the times you see this in movies, the "good guy" would be criminally charged for acting the way they do. But when a cop shoots someone who feigns having a gun and does not respond to commands to submit we through a fit. The asshole that called this in is the one at fault here for abusing the system that is in place to protect us.
[...Continued due to some kind of limitation in/.]
I really don't see how it's so hard to find a way to reconcile ones religious beliefs with their scientific ones.
As I said above, those things are completely orthogonal.
So you know that for a fact? Please show me the mathematical model which proves it. Remember, I'm not asking you to believe what I believe, so don't turn the onus around on me. I'm simply asking you to be tolerant of my beliefs, the same as I am of yours. I find the Big Bang theory to be perfectly acceptable currently, the same as you do. I simply feel that there may have been some kind of divine influence at some point, or points during, or possibly only after this event.
You have beliefs, we have models; you have dogma, we have evidence-based refinement.
See the difference?
As I stated several times already, I'm not looking to convert you, or even make you believe something. I'm simply saying that I respect that you believe as you wish without me being insulting toward you. Is it so hard for you to do the same?
Nope. We have lots of evidence that the universe behaves as if 13+ billion years ago everything sprang forth from a singularity of infinite density.We cannot claim with certainty that this is exactly what happened but, as long as the theory fits our observations and makes accurate predictions, it really does not matter. It is a useful model, not an absolute truth.
Like I said elsewhere, it's a workable theory for now. But I personally feel it's still incomplete and somewhat naive, but we don't have anything better. The universe is expanding, but that doesn't mean it would contract all the way back to a singularity if we could see it in reverse. I'm not accusing you of this, but many just accept this without question, that it all sprang from a singularity. Even if you don't like it, that is closer to faith than science. I do believe in god, but I still question by beliefs, the same as I question everything. Frankly I feel this to be a good thing. Many atheists so blindly want to deny the existence of a god, that I personally find them to be more closed minded than me. I don't make fun of them by telling them they are going to burn in hell or what ever. But I automatically get accused of believing the earth is 6K year old and want to kill people for some "sky god" or some other BS.
Where did it come from? What caused it to explode?
That is beyond the scope of the model. It is about math, not metaphysics.
Fine. then the existence of god is beyond the scope of my religious model.
You said it yourself: "we really don't have a better explanation, and it seems to be a workable theory to for now". As long as the math works out, belief has nothing to do with it.
And you said yourself, as long as I claim it to be beyond the scope of the model I choose, I no longer have to worry about it.
I know, that's a sure way to get modded as a troll.
Stating your beliefs? Not so much. Conflating a belief in the supernatural with an acceptance of a validity of a scientific theory (a "model", if you will)? There's no "clueless" mod AFAIK.
most religions tend to worship a god that tells us to be good to each other
Do you really need a god to tell you that? Can't you arrive to that conclusion on your own?
In an ideal world, no. You felt the need to call me clueless just one sentence prior. Did I call you a godless heathen destined to become Satan's bitch? No. That would be rude and counter productive. And, yes my last statement was meant as nothing more than a joke.
SWATting is the practice of spoofing a call to emergency responders (911 in the U.S.) to induce an overwhelming and potentially devastating response from law enforcement and/or other first responders to the home or residence of the victim.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people? I'm not sure what is worse; that someone came up with doing this, the fact that this happens enough that there's a term for it, or the caviler way the summary reports it. "I guess this time he poked the wrong bear."
Iris scanners have lower false positive rejection rates and are more accurate than Retina scanners, which do exist. Retinas can become damaged and change with time, unlike the human iris which does not under normal circumstances change during lifetimes.
Isn't one of the possible side effects of Latisse and LiLash changes in iris color? Some glaucoma meds can do this too. Do iris scanners look at color and pattern? Or just the patterns?
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that this story is a joke, right?
Yes, of course. My post was intended as a joke, even though it is sadly true.
OMG! Ponies!
Compared to this ROT13 thing, "OMG! Ponies!" was pretty damn funny. Doing all stories in ROT13 is just annoying as hell and makes it harder to read the summaries.
I'm here for the ponies!
You're a few years too late.
the duplicitous device is capable of using readily available materials to create copies of itself – albeit at a slightly smaller scale.
I propose we give these printed "offspring" citizenship. Frankly a 3-D printer has to be more intelligent than anyone on Jersey Shore. And if these progeny can also 3D print, they are contributing more to society than anyone I've seen in reality shows.
If a robot could be designed that could distinguish weed from crop, it would eliminate the need for most herbicides and herbicide resistant GMO seeds--*as long as the robots were not significantly more expensive than the herbicides*. That's the tricky part.
Or cause more pollution issues, or some other unforeseen consequence. A bad firmware update that kills 80% of a nations crops would be devastating.
What do you think happens to the pressure in the cargo hold of an aircraft?
The exact same thing that happens in the main cabin. They carry animals in the cargo hold all the time.
Is that even a real name? I swear news stories sound faker and faker every day. So what right will they want to take away in the US because someone "tried to cut an Internet cable"?
You will no longer be able to have flippers in your carry-on luggage. The TSA will require cavity searches of anyone going to tropical locations that may attract scuba divers. Regulators and frog masks will be banned from carry-on and checked luggage. Anyone purchasing or filling any kind of tank (including, but not limited to oxygen, water, CO2, propane, argon, nitrogen, etc.) will need to be registered, fingerprinted, and relinquish their constitutional rights and future social security payments. Additionally anyone who uses more than 100 gallons of water per month must turn over their first born daughter to spin straw into gold to help finance the new agency offshoot of the TSA to "protect" us all from this new vile form of terrorism.
they were Egyptian simply by the way they looked?
I've hear of DUI, DWI and DWB (Driving While Black). But this is the first case of DWE (Diving While Egyptian) that I'm aware of.
Fiber has a kevlar sheating which should worth something.
Why? It's not like you can use it for anything. Kevlar needs to be purpose made for specific uses. You can't melt it down and reuse it like metal. You can buy sheets of Kevlar fabric for very little. It's mostly the labor and skill that it takes to make stuff that adds the value. Not the material itself.
5. The Police have NO RIGHT to search you or your property for evidence without a specified WARRANT. PERIOD.
You seem to be misinformed. They can search your vehicle during a traffic stop if they have probable cause. This can also be grounds for forcibly entering you home if they have cause to believe you are holding someone hostage, etc. Unfortunately probable cause can be very easy to abuse.
The you have even worse abuses such as the NYC stop and frisk law
Yes, but with ubiquitous 3d printers, there will be more for sale.
I'm not taking a stance, just saying, easy, non-traceable production will make them much more available. If I had to guess, it'll be a bigger problem in countries other than the US, since guns are already fairly easy to come by.
I don't see how. I remember when I was younger there was a local bar that you could pick up a loaded stolen gun for $20. I think you could pay a little more for one with the serial numbers already filed off too. I'm sure places like that are still around, but the prices may have gone up since then. Still, how much does a 3D printer cost? It's going to be a long time before it's cheaper to print a gun than to steal or buy a stolen one.
I would also guess that printing guns is going to leave a trail on the hard drive of a computer. It'd probably be a lot more risky to get caught with a log of all of the guns you sold than to get caught with a couple of stolen ones. Criminals may not be academically smart , but I can assure you they know how to skirt the law better than most upstanding citizens would ever guess.
The blocks were unique as were the cranks (if memory servers) but things like heads, pistons, rods, etc where often reused from other engines.
I doubt it. Diesel and gas engines have pretty radically different compression ratios. Typically a gasoline engine is in the 8-10:1 compression range. Granted there are others outside of this range, but most cars become pretty un-streetable above 11:1. Additionally it gets harder to find gasoline that has a high enough octane rating to be in cars that are at 12:1. Obviously cars with turbos and various types of blowers will use lower compression pistons as the forced air increases the pressure. Once the fuel is compressed it is ignited by the spark plug.
In a diesel engine the compression ratio is in the 15 to 20:1 range. Obviously some are higher too. This is because a diesel engine ignites the fuel by compression heating rather than a spark. There is no way a gasoline block is going to hold up to this for long, if at all. Perhaps some racing connecting rods will, but the valves and valve seals in a gasoline head are not going to be up to the task of this kind of compression either. The port on the heads are going to be very different too as they require more strength for diesel compression ratios
As the block is typically what is used to define the engine (everything else can be changed)
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but most blocks are defined by the volume they displace. This is affected by the volume of the cylinders in the block itself, but it also largely dependent on the stroke of the pistons, which is determined by how far the crank lobes allow them to move from their lowest point in the cylinder to the uppermost via the connecting rods.
The blocks are actually a good block (Oldsmobile seemed to be a pretty good block manufacturer) it is just all the other crap to make the engine that sucked.
Olds made some pretty heavy duty gasoline blocks back in the day. But I really don't know about their diesel line.
Reef aquariums take an ungodly amount of light to get things to grow right.
Which in many cases is less than a tenth of the light of a natural tropical reef at noon.
Look at the photos. Do you see reefs? No? Do you know why?
Lack of sunlight.Or more to the point, PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation)
It's a shame that there is so much space-age trash in the ocean. I can just imagine how each piece has destroyed some part of the reef. Although it would be interesting to see a reef that grew around a rocket. We should make an effort to remove much of that junk.
FTS "working almost 3 miles below the surface." Not much of what wold be defined as "reef" at those depths.
Look, wrist watches were replaced by cellphones. There is no reason to introduce a watch again, unless it will replace the cellphone. Then, tell me - how the battery life problems were solved?
Why use a battery? When you can have a human fuel cell?
For a patrolman a bad day could include coming home in a bag
"Being a cop is a dangerous job" is a myth
In the US, the following professions have fatality rates that are more than ten times greater than law enforcement:
No, it depends on how you define it. If it's the total percentage of fatalities of those in the field, yes patrolman in not number one. It also depends on what list you look at. According to the Bureau of Labor, police officer 18.6 fatalities per 100K. 176 officers were kill in in the line of duty in 2011.
Fishing - 121.2 deaths per 100K However there very few fishermen in the US, so it's a total of 40 deaths.
Logging - 102.4 per 100K. Again, not very many loggers. At total of 64 loggers died in 2011.
Aircraft Operation - 57 per 100K. The vast majority died in Alaska in old equipment in hostile areas. total deaths, 72. These also include people who walk into propellers and such.
Firefighting & Rescue - Sorry, you don't get this one. It was 2.5 per 100K in 2011. While 80 died in the line of duty, 53 were from heart attacks.
Garbage &; Recycling Collection - 41.2 per 100K. Actual number 34.
Roofing - 31.8 per 100K. Actual number 56
Structural Iron &; Steel - 26 per 100K. Total number of fatalities 16
Farming/Ranching/Agriculture - 25.3 per 100K Here's one that has higher total fatalities. 260. Of course this includes horse and ATV accidents and the fact that most farmers are never "off duty". Any accident on the property in which they live would be considered a workplace accident.
Trucking & Driver/Sales - 759 total deaths. The worst of any profession. 24 per 100K
Electrical Power-line - 27 people killed.
Taxi & Chauffeur
If you ONLY consider homicides (which pale in comparison to fatal accidents),
Obviously the roads are dangerous. Truck drivers have the highest number of fatalities. In the last two years I've read in my local paper about several patrolmen dying in wrecks on the way home after a long shift. Those didn't get counted as killed in the line of duty either.
Taxi & Chauffeur are STILL 10x more likely to get killed on the job than Police.
Average cab driver homicides per year from 1980 to 2009 is 38.
How many other professions have to worry about being stalked when off duty? Or worry about some idiot tracking down their family? It's not a safe or easy profession to be in.
Yes its like those Mars Rovers that only lasted days instead of weeks and months and years- their primary mission wasn't even accomplished! What poor workmanship and slave labor have wrought!
Or don't even last that long. For example:
I'm sure some Google time could provide a long list of failed Mars attempts...
Space travel if fucking hard to do. Even with all of the failures, NASA has done some pretty impressive things. Russia has one hell of a track record with space stations. But not so much luck with Mars. Russia/USSR has been able to land one probe on Mars and recently one on Phobos (very cool by the way). Japan and the ESA have a 100% failure rate with Mars landings. Here's a list of Mars missions.
Sigh... becoming a police officer is a CHOICE. Investigating murder scenes, cleaning up car crashes, and keeping angry wives and husbands from killing each other is part of the job. The people who become police officers CHOOSE to deal with these and other stressful situations, they CHOOSE to (occasionally) risk their lives.
They do. But putting up with some asshole who thinks it's funny to abuse a system that is designed to protect its citizens is not something they choose to put up with.
CHOOSING to put yourself in the line of fire is no excuse to trample on the rights of the people you're supposed to protect.
I couldn't agree more.
If they want a bigger paycheck with safer working conditions, they can find different jobs.
If they all choose to do that, then who will be left to protect Anonymous Cowards like you?
I've seen this attitude plenty of times, where people seem to want to excuse the terrible behavior and the military-style tactics of police because "the poor dears have a tough job without much pay, cut them some slack."
Not at all. What I do get tired of seeing is people like you, who somehow think every cop should be crucified for making a mistake in a dangerous situation and yet you have no idea what it's like.
Well, NO! As people to whom the rest of us have given the right to use lethal force and invade and seize private property, the police should be held to a much higher standard, and they should be trained to understand that they work for us, not the other way around.
And most do. I've had and have many friends who are in law enforcement. Do you know the reason most of them chose that profession? Because the wanted to help people. Unfortunately most get in the system and discover they can't help anyone. Once that sinks in, they do their 20, and get out.
The bad apples in the police forces may very well be in the minority, I don't know. I've known cops who are friendly and cops who are psychopaths or arrogant jerks. For example, I knew a guy who worked as a juvenile prison guard (while studying to become a full-fledged cop) and bragged about "putting the smackdown" on teenagers who ran their mouths.
Those are the type who should never make it past the psych evaluation. But when you have a shortage of candidates, you sometimes have to take what you can get.
Taxi driver is a more dangerous occupation than policeman,
No, it's not
Yet that is an exceedingly rare situation and it's not what people are referring to here. If you are SWATting someone the whole point is that the person being SWATted doesn't actually pose a threat, so something like that would never happen.
Really? You know that for a fact? Do you think the person setting this crap up knows the victims well enough to know that for a fact too? I know many people who keep guns in close proximity to their bed. If someone broke down their door, in all likelihood several police would be shot as well as the person being SWATted.
So if SWATting could reasonably be expected to involve deaths, to the extent that the SWATter should be charged with murder, something is wrong.
Anytime you are forcibly entering someones home the risk of someone being injured or killed can be very high.
Given the propensity of the American police responding to that sort of call to shoot first and possibly get round to asking questions a bit later on, SWATting somebody should be charged as attempted murder
While I understand your sentiment, I have to disagree with you. In cases like "SWATting" these officers have been called to a scene where the assumption is that there is an armed person who has already killed a loved on and is emotionally distraught. As most law enforcement officers will tell you, domestic disturbances are some of the most unpredictable calls to go to. So a call like this would be about as scary as most police will ever get.
Granted, there are some pretty bad police officers out there. But there are a lot more really good ones. It's just that nobody seems to pay attention to them, except on rare occasions. Go check to see how much they get paid. It's pretty poorly in most cases. The average patrolman's salary is just over $50K An entry level application engineer makes a little over $54K. Barring natural disasters, a bad day at work for someone in IT is to have to work late. How much fun do you think it is to investigate a murder scene? Or a fatal car crash with children involved? For a patrolman a bad day could include coming home in a bag. In most professions a mistake will cost the company money. For an officer it could be someones life, or their own.
How would you handle call like this? Would you allow yourself to get shot prior to opening fire? Have you ever been shot at? Judging a situation after the fact from your nice comfy chair is just a little bit different than being an active participant.
It's funny that we will spend money to go see a movie and cheer on the cop who shoots the bad guy. But in 99.9% of the times you see this in movies, the "good guy" would be criminally charged for acting the way they do. But when a cop shoots someone who feigns having a gun and does not respond to commands to submit we through a fit. The asshole that called this in is the one at fault here for abusing the system that is in place to protect us.
I really don't see how it's so hard to find a way to reconcile ones religious beliefs with their scientific ones.
As I said above, those things are completely orthogonal.
So you know that for a fact? Please show me the mathematical model which proves it. Remember, I'm not asking you to believe what I believe, so don't turn the onus around on me. I'm simply asking you to be tolerant of my beliefs, the same as I am of yours. I find the Big Bang theory to be perfectly acceptable currently, the same as you do. I simply feel that there may have been some kind of divine influence at some point, or points during, or possibly only after this event.
You have beliefs, we have models; you have dogma, we have evidence-based refinement. See the difference?
As I stated several times already, I'm not looking to convert you, or even make you believe something. I'm simply saying that I respect that you believe as you wish without me being insulting toward you. Is it so hard for you to do the same?
But believing in the Big Bang is logical?
Nope. We have lots of evidence that the universe behaves as if 13+ billion years ago everything sprang forth from a singularity of infinite density.We cannot claim with certainty that this is exactly what happened but, as long as the theory fits our observations and makes accurate predictions, it really does not matter. It is a useful model, not an absolute truth.
Like I said elsewhere, it's a workable theory for now. But I personally feel it's still incomplete and somewhat naive, but we don't have anything better. The universe is expanding, but that doesn't mean it would contract all the way back to a singularity if we could see it in reverse. I'm not accusing you of this, but many just accept this without question, that it all sprang from a singularity. Even if you don't like it, that is closer to faith than science. I do believe in god, but I still question by beliefs, the same as I question everything. Frankly I feel this to be a good thing. Many atheists so blindly want to deny the existence of a god, that I personally find them to be more closed minded than me. I don't make fun of them by telling them they are going to burn in hell or what ever. But I automatically get accused of believing the earth is 6K year old and want to kill people for some "sky god" or some other BS.
Where did it come from? What caused it to explode?
That is beyond the scope of the model. It is about math, not metaphysics.
Fine. then the existence of god is beyond the scope of my religious model.
You said it yourself: "we really don't have a better explanation, and it seems to be a workable theory to for now". As long as the math works out, belief has nothing to do with it.
And you said yourself, as long as I claim it to be beyond the scope of the model I choose, I no longer have to worry about it.
I know, that's a sure way to get modded as a troll.
Stating your beliefs? Not so much. Conflating a belief in the supernatural with an acceptance of a validity of a scientific theory (a "model", if you will)? There's no "clueless" mod AFAIK.
most religions tend to worship a god that tells us to be good to each other
Do you really need a god to tell you that? Can't you arrive to that conclusion on your own?
In an ideal world, no. You felt the need to call me clueless just one sentence prior. Did I call you a godless heathen destined to become Satan's bitch? No. That would be rude and counter productive. And, yes my last statement was meant as nothing more than a joke.
[Continued in next post...]
SWATting is the practice of spoofing a call to emergency responders (911 in the U.S.) to induce an overwhelming and potentially devastating response from law enforcement and/or other first responders to the home or residence of the victim.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people? I'm not sure what is worse; that someone came up with doing this, the fact that this happens enough that there's a term for it, or the caviler way the summary reports it. "I guess this time he poked the wrong bear."
Iris scanners have lower false positive rejection rates and are more accurate than Retina scanners, which do exist. Retinas can become damaged and change with time, unlike the human iris which does not under normal circumstances change during lifetimes.
Isn't one of the possible side effects of Latisse and LiLash changes in iris color? Some glaucoma meds can do this too. Do iris scanners look at color and pattern? Or just the patterns?