If a group of Neo-Nazis was going to burn a bunch of copies of the Talmud in Skokie, would anyone really care if a bunch of local Jewish teens came out and beat the living shit out of them? I don't really think so. Not trying to Godwin the thread, just saying -- what asshole is going to defend the "rights" of the Nazis to do that? And who's going to care when they get what's coming to them?
I would. The Neo-Nazis are within their rights to burn the Talmud. And the Jewish teens are wrong to react violently to them. Maybe I'm alone, but the right of free speech trumps the right to not be offended.
(That said, the Neo-Nazis are a bunch of nuts, and I'd probably be in a counter-protest telling them that they are morons, and their actions are stupid. But they still have the right).
And book burning is fairly well associated with the NSDAP... and 1950s America, with their Elvis hate.
The Mohamed cartoons in Denmark were artistic expression and satire intended to highlight a division in theology between those who understand why Muslims aren't supposed to depict Mohamed and those who think no one should ever, as well as bring attention to the fact that in classical Islamic culture, they often times did it anyway. There was something socially redeeming in the act.
This, on the other hand, is just stirring up the hornets nest to provoke a reaction to "prove" a point on the anniversary of the 911 terrorist attacks for political purposes.
The point needs to be proved (over and over). Really, the church is a bunch of assholes, but being an asshole is a protected condition. Burning Korans should be a common activity, along with burning bibles, the origin of species, and lots of other things. Nothing points out what a bunch of asshats a group is than letting them burn a book, and the rest of society telling them that they are idiots.
So what? Do we just keep burning more of their stuff and they more of ours until there is nothing left?
No, we burn Korans over and over again (purchasing them, of course, would not want to destroy somebody else's property) until they are used to it. We have gotten used to them burning our flag (and bibles, and lots of other stuff). The point is that the principle of free speech trumps their religion. And we do it over and over again, and keep telling them that they will have to deal with it, and eventually they will. And then we publish cartoons of Mohammad, over and over again, until they are used to it. That's the way to fight the extremists who say 'You cannot do this' (for some value of 'this'). You do it over and over again. If you don't do it when they tell you that you cannot, then you have let their beliefs trump yours. Then they get to determine what you can say and do.
Take the high ground and just let everyone else believe what they want to believe and respect them for it. If someone else is too immature to do that then that is their problem.
What they believe is that you are not allowed to say certain things, that you are not allowed to make certain images, that women have to wear certain clothes and not be educated, and a lot of other things, and they are determined to impose their beliefs on others. I cannot respect them for that. It is wrong and must be prevented. A way to prevent it is to exercise our rights over and over again, in their face, until they are habituated to it.
(2) There's a legal and moral distinction between being insulting or derogatory speech (Westergaard, Onion) and inciting violence (Dove).
They are not really inciting violence. They are doing something (IMO well within free speech rights) that other people will likely respond violently to, but it's not the fault of the person speaking, it's the fault of the person doing the violence.
If I do something (for example, say that Obama is a socialist or that Bush II was the worst president ever) that someone else takes offense to and responds violently, that's not my fault. Burning a book, ANY book, is not an incitement.
If you want to get technical, you could argue that burning the Koran constitutes 'fighting words'. Is that what you meant?
Especially when a contract that has been through the legal process of enforcement, suits, and all sorts of review shows that it is valid. The problem with writing a contract from scratch is that it is likely full of holes, poorly worded (and likely exploitable) phrases, and possible contradictions. If a contract has been through the wringer a couple of times in a court of law, then that's the one you want to use.
I think the first step would be to define the Gods and describe their features. And then the second step is you can test those for features in double-blind tests. Somehow they cant' seem to get past step 1.
Why does the all-mighty get to be an uncaused cause, but not the universe? If I say, universe == uncaused cause then there is no cause for the universe, by definition.
Without some other basis for the statement, there is no reason to think that X gets to be uncaused but Y does not.
And of course 'ten deadly sins' is not a common way to refer to them, and even the wikipedia page that you reference does not refer to them that way (even in passing). And the list that you give is not universally acknowledged as the Ten. So, you fail at being a pedant.
Um....where? If you mean the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" bill, it is available here. If you mean the amendment "Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010", the text is available at THOMAS, from the Library of Congress. Where does it say that?
I'm not saying that I know that they do or do not include a provision for 17 year olds to issue IRS forms, but that doesn't sound right. And a quick search for the value $600 doesn't come up with anything like the above.
I'm entirely unclear what the difference is. I want to do something and have to pay the government $ to do so. Is that a fee or a tax?
I work in Arlington County, Virginia. The tax / license amounts are here. They call it a "BUSINESS LICENSE TAX" so now I'm really confused. Fortunately, it's $0 for a business less than $10,000 / year, which makes sense to me, and gets graduated over time for more amounts.
I think that we're really close to agreeing about principles, but disagree about what to do about it.
How would you determine if there really was consciousness in there ?
You earlier said that we should look at behavior, and I think that won't work since we don't know what's going on inside. Consciousness could be 'faked'.
You couldn't hope to look inside their brains and see if there's consciousness in there, if you have no idea what to look for. And learning what to look for is basically impossible, if you can't even say whether something/somebody has consciousness or not.
This is the crux of the issue. We don't know what to look for inside the brain. I don't think that we can look at behavior either. So, we're stuck. The only viable solution is to keep working at it until we can eventually agree on what consciousness is and then test for it. I think that Edelman is making (slow) progress towards this in "A Universe of Consciousness" , where he at least puts forward a hypothesis on the neural correlates of consciousness, and tries to explain how it works (qualia, unity of experience, etc.). Eventually, someone is going to figure out how it works, and we'll have a physical theory of consciousness (implemented in a particular way). At that point, we can test people to see if they are zombies, and we can look at a system and say, "Does it do X?" and if yes, then its conscious.
Kurzweil is absolutely correct. His best argument is not the complexity of the genome, but focusing on the actual functional structures in the brain. A cortex composed of a billion repeating units is something we CAN feasibly simulate. Already, we have massive systems that run an algorithm spread across billions of separate instances. (google.com is one)
I would urge you to read the following slashdot post: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1757102&cid=33278462
The point of the post is that we are unable to model the neural activities of a worm with 302 neurons, and this after an extremely large amount of work. The cortex is not 'composed of a billion repeating units'. It is composed of 100 billion non-repeating units, with thousands of connections (each) to other non-repeating units, and each of the non-repeating units keep changing both internally and in their connection strengths, and the fluid that the units works in keeps changing and affecting huge numbers of units, and it turns out that interesting things are happening in the dendritic trees of each of the individual units. The whole question of the computational unit of the brain is back in play.
I don't think that the brain is in-theory too complex to model or understand. We know a lot, and the speed of research is great. It's just that as we make progress in understanding it we are discovering that it is more complicated than we had imagined, so the point that we think that we will really understand the brain isn't getting a lot closer. And these are just the 'known unknowns'. There are quite possibly 'unknown unknowns' that will make it even harder. That's science for you. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research.
My issue with your post is that it is flippant. You really don't know (and nobody knows, so it's not you specifically) what percent of the way to understanding the brain we are. So having phrases like 'it might take a few years' in your post makes me cringe. We'll get there, I really think we will, but we're a long way from even knowing how well we're doing.
I don't think so. Consciousness is a pain to deal with scientifically because we have a personal experience with it; we know that being conscious means that 'it feels like something' to be conscious. If something can have a 'discussion about consciousness' but doesn't have qualia or intentionality, then it's not conscious. Or, it could have consciousness, but if you asked it if it was conscious, it could say 'no'. So, we're left with philosophical zombies and all sorts of similar problems.
It simply doesn't work to look at behavior, especially if that behavior requires discussion. Does that mean someone who cannot communicate are not conscious?
Can you recommend a google search term for this sort of thing? Is there a professional organization for people who do personal histories? I'm interested in getting the personal histories of some loved ones and would like to have some confidence that the people involved are professional and good at what they do.
I have been thinking that it would be good to hire a writer / interviewer / historian to speak to my parents. They are getting pretty old now (I'm not young myself, actually), and there are lots of things that I don't know. I ask, but time with them is limited, with the grand and great-grand kids always around. There's lots of baggage and history there, much of it good but some areas that we don't talk about, in particular some of the stuff my dad did when overseas fighting. I am wondering if having a third-party, sort of a confidant for them, would be useful, and especially if they had the right personality. I'm not sure how to find someone like that though.
No, it's easier for a human to determine sentence structure when the sentences have more space between them, which does not necessarily correspond to two spaces. As pointed out above, with modern typesetting and proportional width fonts you get the 'right' amount of spacing between sentences whether the human puts in one or two spaces.
The difference being, of course, that Godwin's response is well written, and highly amusing. I recommend reading it in its entirety simply to see what an amused and amusing lawyer can do.
Hah! Try this: go to Google images and type in FBI seal. Guess how many frigging seals you will get? Hundreds, and some of them are really high quality. Consider, for example, this one. What are they going to do? Going after wikipedia / commons for this is insane.
And so all you have to do is figure out what that number is. What can be done with that land? Is it lost? What is the correct number for land usage for Darlington, Calvert Cliffs, or any other nuclear (or coal, or solar, etc.) plant? I don't know, and I'm guessing that you don't either, and neither does Maury. But the fact that there is a parcel of land of X hectares, of which 600k m^2 has an actual plant on it, doesn't make the X number a good basis of comparison.
(Aside: even at the inflated value of 480 hectares, 730 w / m^2 is an order of magnitude better than the actual value for the solar sites)
> Nuclear power offers the advantage of massive energy production on a small area of land, giving it a high W/skm rate
Really? That's funny, every nuclear plant I know is enormous. Darlington is just down the road from me, I can almost see it but for the large berm around it. It's a 3.5 GWp plant situated on a plot of land 480 hectares. Do the math, and you get about 730 watts per square meter.
Solar power is 1000 watts per square meter. Best-case panels in fixed mountings will get you about 15% of that, or about 150 watts per square meter.
That's completely bogus. Take a look at Darlington in google maps at 435222N 784311W. How big is it? It's about 1200 m x 500 m, or 600,000 m^2 and produces 3.5 GWp as you said. Or, consider the Calvert Cliffs plant at 38 25 54.81 N, 76 26 32.48 W. It's about 700m x 600 x, or 420,000 m^2 and produces about 1.7 GWp. Compare that to the Nellis Solar Plant (PV) at 36 15 30 N, 115 3 10 W. It's 1100 x 500 m, 550,000 m^2, and produces 14 MW. Finally, Nevada Solar One (concentrating) at 3548.0N 11458.6W. It's about 1600 x 800 m, or 1,280,000 m^2 and produces 75 MW max.
So, I get 5833 w / m^2 for Darlington, 4000 w / m^2 for Calvert Cliffs, 25 w / m^2 for Nellis, and 58 w / m^2 for Nevada Solar One. Someone please check my numbers to verify that I didn't slip digits.
The underlying problem is that you are completely changing the values in your comparison. First, you can't just say that Darlington is on a plot of land of a particular size and use the entire area if the plant is not using the land. I can buy a 10,000 acres of land and put a small plant on it and the plant is not 'using' 10,000 acres of land. Second, the solar power available is far less than even the 15% you give; to make a valid comparison you'd have to consider the amount of power that is historically produced, which we don't have, but at least use the max amount that can be produced coming down the wire.
Yes, nuclear plants are enormous, but they produce massive amounts of energy. Solar plants are enormous too (see #'s above), but don't produce nearly as much. Frankly, the low w / m^2 for solar is not a big deal since they are stationed in the middle of the desert.
that's not clear. The question is why a person would or would not buy an electric car. I think that most people would be concentrated on the day-to-day issues rather than the long term value. so, they would care more about the fact that the distance you can travel would be less (60 miles versus 90) than the fact that it would last 8 years rather than 5. (I totally made up these numbers). The average consumer is terribly short-sighted.
The U.S. of A. is a single country, but it's a federal republic. The majority of laws are at the state level, not the federal level. The federal government tries to influence the state laws, but can't make them do much. For example, speed limits are set locally but the federal government tries to affect them by withholding federal road money if you don't do what they want. Drug laws are the same way, with the federal government trying to make places like California have certain policies. There's actually a continual battle about what things the federal govt can do versus what the states are allowed to do.
That's very much a jurisdiction-dependent issue. In California, it seems like it's commonplace and accepted. Here in Virginia it is not and will get you a ticket.
The issues here are completely independent. The motorcyclist needs to get tickets for his infractions, and I'd say that reckless endangerment is one of the likely ones, and so he'll get what he deserves.
The cop is still wrong for pulling the gun completely unnecessarily. When he steps out of the car, the first thing he should do is flash the badge and order the guy off the motorcycle. The hand motions were actually pretty close to what they should have been, but he had the wrong thing in his hand. There are rules for when and why you pull a gun, and this is absolutely not one of them.
The state is completely wrong for charging him with a wiretap law. There is no way that a public street has any expectation of privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
If a group of Neo-Nazis was going to burn a bunch of copies of the Talmud in Skokie, would anyone really care if a bunch of local Jewish teens came out and beat the living shit out of them? I don't really think so. Not trying to Godwin the thread, just saying -- what asshole is going to defend the "rights" of the Nazis to do that? And who's going to care when they get what's coming to them?
I would. The Neo-Nazis are within their rights to burn the Talmud. And the Jewish teens are wrong to react violently to them. Maybe I'm alone, but the right of free speech trumps the right to not be offended.
(That said, the Neo-Nazis are a bunch of nuts, and I'd probably be in a counter-protest telling them that they are morons, and their actions are stupid. But they still have the right).
And book burning is fairly well associated with the NSDAP... and 1950s America, with their Elvis hate.
The Mohamed cartoons in Denmark were artistic expression and satire intended to highlight a division in theology between those who understand why Muslims aren't supposed to depict Mohamed and those who think no one should ever, as well as bring attention to the fact that in classical Islamic culture, they often times did it anyway. There was something socially redeeming in the act.
This, on the other hand, is just stirring up the hornets nest to provoke a reaction to "prove" a point on the anniversary of the 911 terrorist attacks for political purposes.
The point needs to be proved (over and over). Really, the church is a bunch of assholes, but being an asshole is a protected condition. Burning Korans should be a common activity, along with burning bibles, the origin of species, and lots of other things. Nothing points out what a bunch of asshats a group is than letting them burn a book, and the rest of society telling them that they are idiots.
So what? Do we just keep burning more of their stuff and they more of ours until there is nothing left?
No, we burn Korans over and over again (purchasing them, of course, would not want to destroy somebody else's property) until they are used to it. We have gotten used to them burning our flag (and bibles, and lots of other stuff). The point is that the principle of free speech trumps their religion. And we do it over and over again, and keep telling them that they will have to deal with it, and eventually they will. And then we publish cartoons of Mohammad, over and over again, until they are used to it. That's the way to fight the extremists who say 'You cannot do this' (for some value of 'this'). You do it over and over again. If you don't do it when they tell you that you cannot, then you have let their beliefs trump yours. Then they get to determine what you can say and do.
Take the high ground and just let everyone else believe what they want to believe and respect them for it. If someone else is too immature to do that then that is their problem.
What they believe is that you are not allowed to say certain things, that you are not allowed to make certain images, that women have to wear certain clothes and not be educated, and a lot of other things, and they are determined to impose their beliefs on others. I cannot respect them for that. It is wrong and must be prevented. A way to prevent it is to exercise our rights over and over again, in their face, until they are habituated to it.
(2) There's a legal and moral distinction between being insulting or derogatory speech (Westergaard, Onion) and inciting violence (Dove).
They are not really inciting violence. They are doing something (IMO well within free speech rights) that other people will likely respond violently to, but it's not the fault of the person speaking, it's the fault of the person doing the violence.
If I do something (for example, say that Obama is a socialist or that Bush II was the worst president ever) that someone else takes offense to and responds violently, that's not my fault. Burning a book, ANY book, is not an incitement.
If you want to get technical, you could argue that burning the Koran constitutes 'fighting words'. Is that what you meant?
Especially when a contract that has been through the legal process of enforcement, suits, and all sorts of review shows that it is valid. The problem with writing a contract from scratch is that it is likely full of holes, poorly worded (and likely exploitable) phrases, and possible contradictions. If a contract has been through the wringer a couple of times in a court of law, then that's the one you want to use.
I think the first step would be to define the Gods and describe their features. And then the second step is you can test those for features in double-blind tests. Somehow they cant' seem to get past step 1.
Why does the all-mighty get to be an uncaused cause, but not the universe? If I say, universe == uncaused cause then there is no cause for the universe, by definition.
Without some other basis for the statement, there is no reason to think that X gets to be uncaused but Y does not.
Looks good to me. I did have a snicker at her title: "Forskningsassistent". Heh heh.
Ten deadly sins:
And of course 'ten deadly sins' is not a common way to refer to them, and even the wikipedia page that you reference does not refer to them that way (even in passing). And the list that you give is not universally acknowledged as the Ten. So, you fail at being a pedant.
Um....where? If you mean the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" bill, it is available here. If you mean the amendment "Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010", the text is available at THOMAS, from the Library of Congress. Where does it say that?
I'm not saying that I know that they do or do not include a provision for 17 year olds to issue IRS forms, but that doesn't sound right. And a quick search for the value $600 doesn't come up with anything like the above.
I'm entirely unclear what the difference is. I want to do something and have to pay the government $ to do so. Is that a fee or a tax?
I work in Arlington County, Virginia. The tax / license amounts are here. They call it a "BUSINESS LICENSE TAX" so now I'm really confused. Fortunately, it's $0 for a business less than $10,000 / year, which makes sense to me, and gets graduated over time for more amounts.
How would you determine if there really was consciousness in there ?
You earlier said that we should look at behavior, and I think that won't work since we don't know what's going on inside. Consciousness could be 'faked'.
You couldn't hope to look inside their brains and see if there's consciousness in there, if you have no idea what to look for. And learning what to look for is basically impossible, if you can't even say whether something/somebody has consciousness or not.
This is the crux of the issue. We don't know what to look for inside the brain. I don't think that we can look at behavior either. So, we're stuck. The only viable solution is to keep working at it until we can eventually agree on what consciousness is and then test for it. I think that Edelman is making (slow) progress towards this in "A Universe of Consciousness" , where he at least puts forward a hypothesis on the neural correlates of consciousness, and tries to explain how it works (qualia, unity of experience, etc.). Eventually, someone is going to figure out how it works, and we'll have a physical theory of consciousness (implemented in a particular way). At that point, we can test people to see if they are zombies, and we can look at a system and say, "Does it do X?" and if yes, then its conscious.
Kurzweil is absolutely correct. His best argument is not the complexity of the genome, but focusing on the actual functional structures in the brain. A cortex composed of a billion repeating units is something we CAN feasibly simulate. Already, we have massive systems that run an algorithm spread across billions of separate instances. (google.com is one)
I would urge you to read the following slashdot post: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1757102&cid=33278462 The point of the post is that we are unable to model the neural activities of a worm with 302 neurons, and this after an extremely large amount of work. The cortex is not 'composed of a billion repeating units'. It is composed of 100 billion non-repeating units, with thousands of connections (each) to other non-repeating units, and each of the non-repeating units keep changing both internally and in their connection strengths, and the fluid that the units works in keeps changing and affecting huge numbers of units, and it turns out that interesting things are happening in the dendritic trees of each of the individual units. The whole question of the computational unit of the brain is back in play.
I don't think that the brain is in-theory too complex to model or understand. We know a lot, and the speed of research is great. It's just that as we make progress in understanding it we are discovering that it is more complicated than we had imagined, so the point that we think that we will really understand the brain isn't getting a lot closer. And these are just the 'known unknowns'. There are quite possibly 'unknown unknowns' that will make it even harder. That's science for you. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research.
My issue with your post is that it is flippant. You really don't know (and nobody knows, so it's not you specifically) what percent of the way to understanding the brain we are. So having phrases like 'it might take a few years' in your post makes me cringe. We'll get there, I really think we will, but we're a long way from even knowing how well we're doing.
I don't think so. Consciousness is a pain to deal with scientifically because we have a personal experience with it; we know that being conscious means that 'it feels like something' to be conscious. If something can have a 'discussion about consciousness' but doesn't have qualia or intentionality, then it's not conscious. Or, it could have consciousness, but if you asked it if it was conscious, it could say 'no'. So, we're left with philosophical zombies and all sorts of similar problems.
It simply doesn't work to look at behavior, especially if that behavior requires discussion. Does that mean someone who cannot communicate are not conscious?
Can you recommend a google search term for this sort of thing? Is there a professional organization for people who do personal histories? I'm interested in getting the personal histories of some loved ones and would like to have some confidence that the people involved are professional and good at what they do.
I have been thinking that it would be good to hire a writer / interviewer / historian to speak to my parents. They are getting pretty old now (I'm not young myself, actually), and there are lots of things that I don't know. I ask, but time with them is limited, with the grand and great-grand kids always around. There's lots of baggage and history there, much of it good but some areas that we don't talk about, in particular some of the stuff my dad did when overseas fighting. I am wondering if having a third-party, sort of a confidant for them, would be useful, and especially if they had the right personality. I'm not sure how to find someone like that though.
No, it's easier for a human to determine sentence structure when the sentences have more space between them, which does not necessarily correspond to two spaces. As pointed out above, with modern typesetting and proportional width fonts you get the 'right' amount of spacing between sentences whether the human puts in one or two spaces.
The difference being, of course, that Godwin's response is well written, and highly amusing. I recommend reading it in its entirety simply to see what an amused and amusing lawyer can do.
Hah! Try this: go to Google images and type in FBI seal. Guess how many frigging seals you will get? Hundreds, and some of them are really high quality. Consider, for example, this one. What are they going to do? Going after wikipedia / commons for this is insane.
No, that does not work. java -X does not tell you if -XX:MaxPermSize is there or not.
And so all you have to do is figure out what that number is. What can be done with that land? Is it lost? What is the correct number for land usage for Darlington, Calvert Cliffs, or any other nuclear (or coal, or solar, etc.) plant? I don't know, and I'm guessing that you don't either, and neither does Maury. But the fact that there is a parcel of land of X hectares, of which 600k m^2 has an actual plant on it, doesn't make the X number a good basis of comparison.
(Aside: even at the inflated value of 480 hectares, 730 w / m^2 is an order of magnitude better than the actual value for the solar sites)
> Nuclear power offers the advantage of massive energy production on a small area of land, giving it a high W/skm rate
Really? That's funny, every nuclear plant I know is enormous. Darlington is just down the road from me, I can almost see it but for the large berm around it. It's a 3.5 GWp plant situated on a plot of land 480 hectares. Do the math, and you get about 730 watts per square meter.
Solar power is 1000 watts per square meter. Best-case panels in fixed mountings will get you about 15% of that, or about 150 watts per square meter.
That's completely bogus. Take a look at Darlington in google maps at 435222N 784311W. How big is it? It's about 1200 m x 500 m, or 600,000 m^2 and produces 3.5 GWp as you said. Or, consider the Calvert Cliffs plant at 38 25 54.81 N, 76 26 32.48 W. It's about 700m x 600 x, or 420,000 m^2 and produces about 1.7 GWp. Compare that to the Nellis Solar Plant (PV) at 36 15 30 N, 115 3 10 W. It's 1100 x 500 m, 550,000 m^2, and produces 14 MW. Finally, Nevada Solar One (concentrating) at 3548.0N 11458.6W. It's about 1600 x 800 m, or 1,280,000 m^2 and produces 75 MW max.
So, I get 5833 w / m^2 for Darlington, 4000 w / m^2 for Calvert Cliffs, 25 w / m^2 for Nellis, and 58 w / m^2 for Nevada Solar One. Someone please check my numbers to verify that I didn't slip digits.
The underlying problem is that you are completely changing the values in your comparison. First, you can't just say that Darlington is on a plot of land of a particular size and use the entire area if the plant is not using the land. I can buy a 10,000 acres of land and put a small plant on it and the plant is not 'using' 10,000 acres of land. Second, the solar power available is far less than even the 15% you give; to make a valid comparison you'd have to consider the amount of power that is historically produced, which we don't have, but at least use the max amount that can be produced coming down the wire.
Yes, nuclear plants are enormous, but they produce massive amounts of energy. Solar plants are enormous too (see #'s above), but don't produce nearly as much. Frankly, the low w / m^2 for solar is not a big deal since they are stationed in the middle of the desert.
that's not clear. The question is why a person would or would not buy an electric car. I think that most people would be concentrated on the day-to-day issues rather than the long term value. so, they would care more about the fact that the distance you can travel would be less (60 miles versus 90) than the fact that it would last 8 years rather than 5. (I totally made up these numbers). The average consumer is terribly short-sighted.
The U.S. of A. is a single country, but it's a federal republic. The majority of laws are at the state level, not the federal level. The federal government tries to influence the state laws, but can't make them do much. For example, speed limits are set locally but the federal government tries to affect them by withholding federal road money if you don't do what they want. Drug laws are the same way, with the federal government trying to make places like California have certain policies. There's actually a continual battle about what things the federal govt can do versus what the states are allowed to do.
That's very much a jurisdiction-dependent issue. In California, it seems like it's commonplace and accepted. Here in Virginia it is not and will get you a ticket.
The cop is still wrong for pulling the gun completely unnecessarily. When he steps out of the car, the first thing he should do is flash the badge and order the guy off the motorcycle. The hand motions were actually pretty close to what they should have been, but he had the wrong thing in his hand. There are rules for when and why you pull a gun, and this is absolutely not one of them.
The state is completely wrong for charging him with a wiretap law. There is no way that a public street has any expectation of privacy.