Tasers have a place in riot control and other situations where officers inherently must use violence.
A lot of the areas where tasers have been rolled out are places where violence is high. Quiet suburbia may opt for them to avoid having guns around, but most are i dangerous neighborhoods, where officers are (comparatively) regularly discharging their weapons. In almost all cases, taser use has done two things:
1. Dramatically reduced the number of deaths and injuries amongst both officers and civilians 2. Dramatically increased the number of incidents involving use of force.
Which is a problem. Rolling out tasers makes the cops more likely to resort to using force, knowing it is non-deadly, but it also saves hundreds of lives (and money via lawsuits, etc.). It can be difficult to work past the problem, but research indicates that when properly trained, including having been tased themselves, officers are vastly more likely to use them properly.
GQ has a good writeup, but their web interface sucks so I ain't finding it.
Depends where you hit 'em. Bears tend to be large and pretty hefty. Still, I've used electric bear fences whilst backpacking to great effect. The jolt is really quite (excuse the pun) shocking, but it's something your average human can withstand for a dozen or so seconds (all the males would take turns seeing how long we could hold on for, all the females shake their heads at the stupidity). When bears go around sniffing for food, though, they follow their nose. Their wet, highly sensitive nose. You shock that thing and they'll never come back.
Moral of the story: When tasing a bear, aim for the nose.
As far as I know the share structure of Google gives enough voting rights to the founders to retain absolute control even with a minority of the shares.
Hey, no complaining. If it's good enough for Bruce Wayne and Wayne Enterprise it's good enough for Page/Brin and Google.
And that would be awesome. See the success of the Six Word Memoir - the presidential ones are great. But so what? It's humorous and amusing and translating a work doesn't diminish it in the original language. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn't make Jane Austen any less wonderful, so if there's a market for a twitter account condensing books ("Dammit where is that white whale?!") then full speed ahead!
Maybe, but I haven't heard of one. Keyboards, yes, peripherals, yes, but mouse? I think the generally held wisdom is that your would fingers get in the way.
33,000 crashes in one week from one cause is a definite event, and means someone needs to fix it. Mozilla tried to get Skype to work on it for two weeks and, when that failed, they had to do something themselves.
You can hear her on the video in TFA. She sounds a bit like Yoda crossed with disguised Leia, but you can see how momentous it is for her. Really quite moving.
On the other hand wouldn't any adverse reaction (lawsuit) on the part of NBComcast be seen as an illegal use of monopoly?
Sure. Well, either that or a perfectly legal protection of their intellectual property. I mean, theoretically it could go either way, but my money's on the guys and gals with the money, and that means NBComcast, now more than ever.
I strongly urge you and everyone here with an interest to read this paper, entitled "Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform. I've copied the abstract below but the basic gist is to utilize a system of peer review. It's far from perfect, but despite being five years old it's a fresh look at a crippled system, and would be a great starting point to get the ball rolling on the conversation needed to fix this.
Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence, Open Review and Patent Reform argues that remedying the information deficit that impedes effective patent examination is a key to improving patent quality. The article shifts the locus of patent reform to the administrative practice of examination. It addresses the problem by proposing a new model for open examination whereby self-selected, scientific experts submit prior art with commentary to the patent examiner. Open examination combines the transparency and self-selection of public participation with the structured practices of peer review. It goes beyond them, however, by eschewing the closed conception of expertise that sometimes plagues peer review and by making legal decision-making more transparent and accountable than traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking.
Metaphorically, open examination marries the practices of Wikipedia to the authority of administrative law. By redesigning the method for patent examination, this proposal points the way towards a new approach for both intellectual property and administrative law, not by altering statutory or judicial standards, but by improving agency institutional competence. The United States Patent and Trademark Office will launch the Community Patent Review pilot in 2007 to try open examination and generate concrete data to drive reform.
Mike Wall's piece brings it up. Water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen, which are the major components of rocket fuel. The idea is to mine and process it on the moon, then set up refueling stations in LEO so that you only need to carry enough fuel for part of the way. The hard part is getting off of Earth - going to the Moon, landing, taking off, and returning to Earth is much cheaper. That's why Apollo 13 could make it - big rocket going, small rocket coming back. If you eliminate the need for an über rocket at the first stage, that means smaller, lighter rockets carrying less weight, which means vastly, vastly cheaper travel costs, which makes it worth it if you can keep the good.
The CoLBeRT project is dedicated to its namesake, Stephen Colbert, who manipulates the neurocircuits of millions of Americans daily using only the light from their monitors.
Yup. Anyone who has taken a cursory glance at an astronomy or a biology or really any science book knows astrology is absurd. More than anything, I think this story is worthwhile for pointing out how big a place astrological signs and their "meaning" still have in our world. Hopefully this helps push it out.
In actuality, people have known this for millennia. The precession of Earth's axis has been known about since the Greeks, and is pretty basic astronomy. The wobble of our axis takes about 26,000 years to go around once, and since the current system has been around in some form for about 2,500 years, that means we've gone 1/10 of the way around. 12 signs, 10% off - that means most people change by one sign, and lo, so it is.
Additionally, constellations are not all the same size, so some should be much more common than others. More to the point, constellations do not form a perfectly connected circle, so many people are born technically between signs. What this means is that astrological signs are, at this point, completely dependent on a man-made calendrical system, which have changed throughout our history, sometimes radically.
BBC News, however, reports that US government officials have intervened, and Kernell has begun serving time at federal correctional institute in Ashland, Kentucky.
When most people think of an ideal criminal justice system, they think of judges and juries, not government officials. This system does not seem to be a well-oiled machine:
The BOP is not bound by judicial recommendations, one legal expert said federal sentencing was often "arbitrary". "The judge can give either incarceration or probation, but if it's incarceration the state gives power to the Bureau of Prisons to determine the nature of incarceration," said Professor Robert Weisberg, director of the criminal justice center at Stanford University in California. "There is not a general or uniform US rule," he added. "There is huge local variation."
NASA also put out a piece comparing different findings by different organizations, explaining the differences and why they aren't a big deal. The articles also states that year-to-year measures aren't particularly useful - not only are 2010 and 2005 very close, but the next six are also very similar to each other - but looking at it decade by decade (i.e. a larger sample size) gives far more meaning:
On that time scale, the three records are unequivocal: the last decade has been the warmest on record. “It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” said Hansen. "It is the underlying trend that is important."
Why exactly is this news or a surprise? Will everyone be shocked because they request credit card, banking and cell phone information too?
No, but the first few times they did request phone or credit card information it was news. There was a time when cell phones weren't a ubiquitous part of our world, so this serves as a reminder of what is becoming a larger and more involved part of our lives. If this happens in a dozen more high-profile cases, it will no longer be interesting, just like cops/jobs using Facebook is becoming a very boring story now compared to a few years ago.
Now that they are giving him money for legal defense, a good lawyer can say that it shows that they were in fact working together. IANAL btw
Not at all. Whenever the ACLU or the EFF defends someone pro bono, they are not thrown into the lawsuit with the defendant. It's certainly not criminal to donate money to defend a cause you believe in and, thanks to the SCOTUS, these donations by WikiLeaks and others are actually just an expression of free speech.
At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks...
Here are some opening lines from previous Wall Street Journal articles:
- At the end of 2010, the "global financial" traders, who tend to be morally crippled and calloused egomaniacs... - At the end of 2010, the "journalistic reporting" newspapers, whose employees tend to be hypocritical parasites and star-struck airheads... - At the end of 2010, the "United States", whose elected representatives tend to be greedy lawyers and ignorant blowhards...
Absolutely, and I think this is indicative of the sort of problem that plagues the legislative branch these days. Congress has the power to control almost everything, but that doesn't mean it should and it certainly doesn't mean the Senators and Representatives should be the ones making all of the detailed decisions. It's what delayed reversing DADT for so long - legislators thinking that, for some reason, they are more equipped to make a decision than the people currently running the military. NASA is another great example - ALL of the people qualified to make a decision on this sort of thing are at NASA and NONE are in Congress. Congress should say "We want to fund this type of goal for this amount of money, give us something that you think works." No more. Scientific progress should not be contingent on who wants to grab more laborers for his/her district. Until we vote for people aside from lawyers and professional politicians, Congress needs to listen to actual experts.
As of December 31, 2007, there were 105,229 active missing person records in NCIC. Juveniles under the age of 18 accounted for 54,648 (51.93%) of the records, and 12,362 (11.75%) were for juveniles between the ages of 18 and 20.
During 2007, 814,967 missing person records were entered into NCIC, a decrease of 2.53% from the 836,131 records entered in 2006. Missing person records cleared or canceled during the same period totaled 820,212. Reasons for these removals include: the subject was located by a law enforcement agency; the individual returned home; or the record had to be removed by the entering agency due to a determination that the record was invalid.
In 2007, there were 518 records entered as Abducted by a Stranger; 299,787 entered as Runaway; and 2,919 entered as Abducted by Non-Custodial Parent. This only accounts for 303,224 entries of the 418,967 entered, or 72.4%, which is an increase from 297,632 entries of the 836,131 entered, or 35.6%, in 2006.
You're the first person I've seen who thinks cultivating scientific understanding and curiosity among teenagers is a waste of money compared to being able to more easily color spreadsheet data. The world would be a much better place if other gigantic corporate entities did things like this more often.
Slashdot Mirror
Tasers have a place in riot control and other situations where officers inherently must use violence.
A lot of the areas where tasers have been rolled out are places where violence is high. Quiet suburbia may opt for them to avoid having guns around, but most are i dangerous neighborhoods, where officers are (comparatively) regularly discharging their weapons. In almost all cases, taser use has done two things:
1. Dramatically reduced the number of deaths and injuries amongst both officers and civilians
2. Dramatically increased the number of incidents involving use of force.
Which is a problem. Rolling out tasers makes the cops more likely to resort to using force, knowing it is non-deadly, but it also saves hundreds of lives (and money via lawsuits, etc.). It can be difficult to work past the problem, but research indicates that when properly trained, including having been tased themselves, officers are vastly more likely to use them properly.
GQ has a good writeup, but their web interface sucks so I ain't finding it.
Depends where you hit 'em. Bears tend to be large and pretty hefty. Still, I've used electric bear fences whilst backpacking to great effect. The jolt is really quite (excuse the pun) shocking, but it's something your average human can withstand for a dozen or so seconds (all the males would take turns seeing how long we could hold on for, all the females shake their heads at the stupidity). When bears go around sniffing for food, though, they follow their nose. Their wet, highly sensitive nose. You shock that thing and they'll never come back.
Moral of the story: When tasing a bear, aim for the nose.
As far as I know the share structure of Google gives enough voting rights to the founders to retain absolute control even with a minority of the shares.
Hey, no complaining. If it's good enough for Bruce Wayne and Wayne Enterprise it's good enough for Page/Brin and Google.
And that would be awesome. See the success of the Six Word Memoir - the presidential ones are great. But so what? It's humorous and amusing and translating a work doesn't diminish it in the original language. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn't make Jane Austen any less wonderful, so if there's a market for a twitter account condensing books ("Dammit where is that white whale?!") then full speed ahead!
Maybe, but I haven't heard of one. Keyboards, yes, peripherals, yes, but mouse? I think the generally held wisdom is that your would fingers get in the way.
33,000 crashes in one week from one cause is a definite event, and means someone needs to fix it. Mozilla tried to get Skype to work on it for two weeks and, when that failed, they had to do something themselves.
You can hear her on the video in TFA. She sounds a bit like Yoda crossed with disguised Leia, but you can see how momentous it is for her. Really quite moving.
On the other hand wouldn't any adverse reaction (lawsuit) on the part of NBComcast be seen as an illegal use of monopoly?
Sure. Well, either that or a perfectly legal protection of their intellectual property. I mean, theoretically it could go either way, but my money's on the guys and gals with the money, and that means NBComcast, now more than ever.
I strongly urge you and everyone here with an interest to read this paper, entitled "Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform. I've copied the abstract below but the basic gist is to utilize a system of peer review. It's far from perfect, but despite being five years old it's a fresh look at a crippled system, and would be a great starting point to get the ball rolling on the conversation needed to fix this.
Peer to Patent: Collective Intelligence, Open Review and Patent Reform argues that remedying the information deficit that impedes effective patent examination is a key to improving patent quality. The article shifts the locus of patent reform to the administrative practice of examination. It addresses the problem by proposing a new model for open examination whereby self-selected, scientific experts submit prior art with commentary to the patent examiner. Open examination combines the transparency and self-selection of public participation with the structured practices of peer review. It goes beyond them, however, by eschewing the closed conception of expertise that sometimes plagues peer review and by making legal decision-making more transparent and accountable than traditional notice-and-comment rulemaking.
Metaphorically, open examination marries the practices of Wikipedia to the authority of administrative law. By redesigning the method for patent examination, this proposal points the way towards a new approach for both intellectual property and administrative law, not by altering statutory or judicial standards, but by improving agency institutional competence. The United States Patent and Trademark Office will launch the Community Patent Review pilot in 2007 to try open examination and generate concrete data to drive reform.
Yes. Well, mostly.
Mike Wall's piece brings it up. Water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen, which are the major components of rocket fuel. The idea is to mine and process it on the moon, then set up refueling stations in LEO so that you only need to carry enough fuel for part of the way. The hard part is getting off of Earth - going to the Moon, landing, taking off, and returning to Earth is much cheaper. That's why Apollo 13 could make it - big rocket going, small rocket coming back. If you eliminate the need for an über rocket at the first stage, that means smaller, lighter rockets carrying less weight, which means vastly, vastly cheaper travel costs, which makes it worth it if you can keep the good.
The CoLBeRT project is dedicated to its namesake, Stephen Colbert, who manipulates the neurocircuits of millions of Americans daily using only the light from their monitors.
I believe you mean "risky" not "dangerous." The most dangerous item I own is probably a knife.
Yup. Anyone who has taken a cursory glance at an astronomy or a biology or really any science book knows astrology is absurd. More than anything, I think this story is worthwhile for pointing out how big a place astrological signs and their "meaning" still have in our world. Hopefully this helps push it out.
In actuality, people have known this for millennia. The precession of Earth's axis has been known about since the Greeks, and is pretty basic astronomy. The wobble of our axis takes about 26,000 years to go around once, and since the current system has been around in some form for about 2,500 years, that means we've gone 1/10 of the way around. 12 signs, 10% off - that means most people change by one sign, and lo, so it is.
Additionally, constellations are not all the same size, so some should be much more common than others. More to the point, constellations do not form a perfectly connected circle, so many people are born technically between signs. What this means is that astrological signs are, at this point, completely dependent on a man-made calendrical system, which have changed throughout our history, sometimes radically.
It's probably because of this:
BBC News, however, reports that US government officials have intervened, and Kernell has begun serving time at federal correctional institute in Ashland, Kentucky.
When most people think of an ideal criminal justice system, they think of judges and juries, not government officials. This system does not seem to be a well-oiled machine:
The BOP is not bound by judicial recommendations, one legal expert said federal sentencing was often "arbitrary". "The judge can give either incarceration or probation, but if it's incarceration the state gives power to the Bureau of Prisons to determine the nature of incarceration," said Professor Robert Weisberg, director of the criminal justice center at Stanford University in California. "There is not a general or uniform US rule," he added. "There is huge local variation."
There are no short, witty words that end in kp, so we don't.
NASA also put out a piece comparing different findings by different organizations, explaining the differences and why they aren't a big deal. The articles also states that year-to-year measures aren't particularly useful - not only are 2010 and 2005 very close, but the next six are also very similar to each other - but looking at it decade by decade (i.e. a larger sample size) gives far more meaning:
On that time scale, the three records are unequivocal: the last decade has been the warmest on record. “It’s not particularly important whether 2010, 2005, or 1998 was the hottest year on record,” said Hansen. "It is the underlying trend that is important."
Why exactly is this news or a surprise? Will everyone be shocked because they request credit card, banking and cell phone information too?
No, but the first few times they did request phone or credit card information it was news. There was a time when cell phones weren't a ubiquitous part of our world, so this serves as a reminder of what is becoming a larger and more involved part of our lives. If this happens in a dozen more high-profile cases, it will no longer be interesting, just like cops/jobs using Facebook is becoming a very boring story now compared to a few years ago.
Now that they are giving him money for legal defense, a good lawyer can say that it shows that they were in fact working together. IANAL btw
Not at all. Whenever the ACLU or the EFF defends someone pro bono, they are not thrown into the lawsuit with the defendant. It's certainly not criminal to donate money to defend a cause you believe in and, thanks to the SCOTUS, these donations by WikiLeaks and others are actually just an expression of free speech.
At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks...
Here are some opening lines from previous Wall Street Journal articles:
- At the end of 2010, the "global financial" traders, who tend to be morally crippled and calloused egomaniacs...
- At the end of 2010, the "journalistic reporting" newspapers, whose employees tend to be hypocritical parasites and star-struck airheads...
- At the end of 2010, the "United States", whose elected representatives tend to be greedy lawyers and ignorant blowhards...
How fun!
No.
Absolutely, and I think this is indicative of the sort of problem that plagues the legislative branch these days. Congress has the power to control almost everything, but that doesn't mean it should and it certainly doesn't mean the Senators and Representatives should be the ones making all of the detailed decisions. It's what delayed reversing DADT for so long - legislators thinking that, for some reason, they are more equipped to make a decision than the people currently running the military. NASA is another great example - ALL of the people qualified to make a decision on this sort of thing are at NASA and NONE are in Congress. Congress should say "We want to fund this type of goal for this amount of money, give us something that you think works." No more. Scientific progress should not be contingent on who wants to grab more laborers for his/her district. Until we vote for people aside from lawyers and professional politicians, Congress needs to listen to actual experts.
Some interesting stats from the FBI:
As of December 31, 2007, there were 105,229 active missing person records in NCIC. Juveniles under the age of 18 accounted for 54,648 (51.93%) of the records, and 12,362 (11.75%) were for juveniles between the ages of 18 and 20.
During 2007, 814,967 missing person records were entered into NCIC, a decrease of 2.53% from the 836,131 records entered in 2006. Missing person records cleared or canceled during the same period totaled 820,212. Reasons for these removals include: the subject was located by a law enforcement agency; the individual returned home; or the record had to be removed by the entering agency due to a determination that the record was invalid.
In 2007, there were 518 records entered as Abducted by a Stranger; 299,787 entered as Runaway; and 2,919 entered as Abducted by Non-Custodial Parent. This only accounts for 303,224 entries of the 418,967 entered, or 72.4%, which is an increase from 297,632 entries of the 836,131 entered, or 35.6%, in 2006.
You're the first person I've seen who thinks cultivating scientific understanding and curiosity among teenagers is a waste of money compared to being able to more easily color spreadsheet data. The world would be a much better place if other gigantic corporate entities did things like this more often.
are they going to have to use their personal cell phone? Are you going to cover those minutes?
He doesn't need to - it's a tax write off.