Cops are trained to hit center of mass. Most handgun fights are within 10 feet and over within seconds. You don't have time to overthink "Should I wound him or kill him?"
If you tried for a wounding shot like the legs or arms, you'd likely miss. And even if you shot to wound and hit their legs, who's saying you wouldn't hit the femoral artery and have them bleed out faster than an ambulance could get there?
The rest is just tl;dr. The cops collectively are out of control with their authoritarianism, civil forfeiture and paramilitary fetishism but I feel some sympathy for most of them individually because it's an impossible job to begin with and made worse when every action is put under a PC microscope and second guessed by people who have never even done a ride along let alone done the job.
And the black community has to quit with both the victimhood and the total denial of the road warrior lifestyle in "the community". Racism can't explain bulk importing Mexicans by the millions to do jobs blacks won't do. Tell me why racists won't hire a black guy to roof houses or work in a kitchen but they will hire Mexicans who are at best marginally literate in Spanish and most likely completely illiterate in English.
Usually the computer crime you read about is little better than simple theft, this seems much smarter -- rather than steal credit cards or scam merchants for pennies, why not steal information that can be used to make a profit elsewhere in a way that would otherwise seem totally legitimate?
If you stop and think about it it seems totally obvious that this is a much smarter way to commit computer crime, but then the question is who else has been doing this? Have any of those stock market reports on the days winners and losers been the result of these kinds of inside information?
I don't think most street cops find marijuana in and of itself to be a very big threat. Many may have some cultural objection to it, but I think mostly they like it illegal because it provides great leverage for harassing people.
I wonder if the drive to find a DWI-like tool for checking for pot consumption among drivers isn't about safe driving but instead looking to regain some of the edge they had when marijuana was illegal.
I doubt we know enough about marijuana yet to develop any kind of biochemical intoxication standard (outside of physical impairment tests) like we have for alcohol due to the persistence of THC (ie, urine tests positive weeks after use). So any new system developed will probably have some kind of granularity that could flag a person who smoked pot an hour ago to 24 hours ago at best and STILL not have anything more than a crude correlation to their possible impairment.
But, public paranoia, the neo-Temperance League moralism of groups like MADD and LEO authoritarianism will combine to make such a "Potalyzer" an acceptable standard and more or less give back LEOs the ability to harass people.
Frankly, I DO wish there was both a hard-science standard of measurable THC impairment AND a magic device to do it with. It would probably help establish that actual impairment for most people is a small number of hours at all but extreme doses and eliminate the nonsense urinalysis screening and discrimination that goes with it.
I'm sure this will be disputed, but I think there's a segment of transit advocates that's almost ideologically opposed to transportation in single user vehicles, and the closer those vehicles are to private cars the more opposed they are.
Is that Windows display scaling is unsatisfactory. Either I can read the screen and the display is too small or the display is so high resolution and has enough real estate but I can't read anything.
I'm not sure the larger screen of the 3 makes this any better. Maybe a little, but from the one I've seen it seems to suffer from a similar problem.
And the worst part is that display scaling seems broken in some way that causes it to scale external displays, making a laptop/desktop two display setup obnoxious.
I think the misleading implied conclusion is that with neutral gerrymandering we will end up with a functionally different government, that somehow Republican advantaged gerrymandering is somehow solely or even predominantly responsible for all that's nasty about government.
I don't disagree with the idea that politically motivated gerrymandering has negative democratic effects, I just don't think that some neutrally ideal gerrmandering scheme would really alter the nature of government in a way that still wouldn't produce the same national security apparatus, deference to corporate and financial interests, etc.
I kind of wonder if something like this causes Apple to reconsider partnerships with vendors and play somewhat less hardball. It's obviously in Apple's best interest to have GT succeed -- the loan gets remade, they get a new gee-whiz screen material that no one else has or can even make (an established Apple strategy of cornering supplies of new technologies) and GT gets to make money, too, which can be invested in even better sapphire for the iPhone 7.
Squeeze your vendors too hard, there are fuckups and you've wasted millions of dollars and possibly put much more at risk and you don't gain the new magical feature advantage you wanted.
What kind of surprises me is that Apple doesn't have their own skunkworks R&D for coming up with new technologies like sapphire screens or other key components. They could work out what they wanted and then farm it out to someone who can mass produce it. Sort of like the Bell Labs or IBM labs.
changing the tapes becomes the whole of the backup maintenance: no one actually verifies that the backup job is running properly. I've been on calls to clients who've diligently changes their tapes nightly, but the backup software has been crashed for months..
I've seen the same thing, but I think the entire backup process is something of a kabuki dance because just seeing "Job success" is a false sense of security in and of itself.
Do you know if the media is usable to restore from? Do you know if the data backed up is capable of actually being used to restore to function whatever system was backed up?
I think most places fall down on these two items. Where I work we are told to do restores from backup media to validate usability -- but just very partial restores, a handful of random files, which really only validates simple to verify data (a common file, small executable, etc). I've seen plenty of instances where the tapes (even LTO) stumbles further into the media -- is it the drive? The specific bit of media?
But almost nobody does a real restore, where they attempt to restore an entire system from backup (which almost always means multiple servers).
I think the flashlight-as-impact-weapon was just a brief stopover on the trip away from using more traditional blunt force weapons. Take away a baton and suddenly a 6 D-cell mag light is the new baton, unfortunately with characteristics more of a lead-filled blackjack than a high-impact plastic PR-24 "tonfa".
I kind of think that the increasing tactical fetishism of police is almost kind of a symptom as much as it is a cause of police violence. To a certain extent the increasing vilification of the police and the removal of intermediate force from their toolkit has increased their siege mentality, leading to a subverted kind of frustration that plays out in them getting soldiered up.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot wrong with policing, but the wholesale denial going on in "the community" doesn't help either -- treating every police interaction as a wholesale denial of civil rights and refusing to acknowledge minority-on-minority criminality or treating it as some kind of excusable byproduct of discrimination only makes the situation worse.
As far as I know, the American police used to use a lot more blunt force -- flashlights, billy clubs, night sticks, beavertail saps, sap gloves -- to subdue people.
Over the past few decades, and especially since Rodney King's beating, blunt force seems to be off the menu. It has been somewhat replaced by the Taser, but their cost and the increasing awareness of the risk of death seems to have blunted (sorry) its use.
I wonder if the elimination of blunt force from the police toolkit has somehow led to a situation where "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" kind of a situation, where the police have come to see many situations that may have in the past been responded to with blunt force instead getting treated as a situation to shoot.
Physical confrontations without the use of an alternate weapon often boil down to wrestling matches which can quickly become a pulled gun or a struggle for an officer's gun, and many times a physical struggle is justified as a reason to shoot.
None of this to say that people weren't beaten for unjust reasons, but they also weren't killed, either.
When cops carried blunt force weapons they also knew how to use them in a way to inflict pain in a way that gained submission but also in a way that avoided major injury, since major injury didn't necessarily work in their favor. They seemed to have a spectrum of force available instead of a binary choice of shooting or not shooting.
"Local bowling alleys and morturaries mostly mum on drone strategies"
Even for someone like Amazon, how likely is it they will be delivering via drone? Even if the FAA issued a greenlight for it tomorrow, how much could they actually deliver? Battery powered drones have extremely limited payloads and ranges and the existing physical delivery networks are huge and in place and relatively cheap compared to owning and maintaining a fleet of drones.
And why would Microsoft have a drone strategy? Windows on drones? Drones to comunicate with Azure? I just don't see it.
Is it possible for the existing cell network/protocols to identify "unknown" towers -- ie, those that appear in the spectrum but aren't known to be legitimate cell towers and somehow blacklist them to limit their functionality?
Do cell towers have a way of communicating to handsets which towers should be avoided or not used?
Some of it is historical -- prior to the Ancel Keys bad science about diet, it was a commonly held understanding that cutting carbohydrate consumption contributed to weight loss. Taubes cites numerous sources, some dating back hundreds of years. IIRC, even the science was trending this way before WWII but a lot of it was German-led science which the war lost and competitiveness from American scientists chose to bury.
The science behind insulin as the primary hormonal regulator of fat accumulation has been known since the 1960s.
Most troubling from Taubes' book is the weird politics of dietary science and how senior people who control funding for studies get wed to particular theories and hang on to them even when evidence doesn't support them, even suppressing promising science that tends to discredit these ideas.
I'm curious how more competition for entry-level or low skilled jobs helps African Americans. Their unemployment rate is nearly 14%, probably higher in lower age brackets. And given the school "achievement gaps" and lower education attainment for African Americans, these are precisely the jobs they need to work their way out of poverty.
Racism is a common argument for African American unemployment, but how does this stand up when the prime competitors for these jobs are non-white and in many cases marginal English speakers and functionally illiterate in English? Just who are these anti-African American, pro-Latino racists, anyway?
You could make the argument that African Americans don't get hired due to racist criminal justice policies which leave them with criminal records, but again I ask -- who are these people discriminating against African Americans with criminal records yet hiring illegal immigrants with false papers or whose "past" is essentially unavailable because their past is unobtainable in Mexico?
You could make an argument that African Americans don't want to or are incapable of work, but that argument is inherently racist. Their may be qualitative criticisms of entry level jobs (low pay, "jobs nobody wants") but if you buy that argument, then why do Latinos take those jobs? One variant explanation is that African Americans have some moral entitlement to better jobs (eg, due to past discrimination), but I'm not sure how that's supposed to work and the functional equivalent of this argument, affirmative action, hasn't worked and has been mostly discredited.
IIRC, the rape setup was a squeeze play perpetrated by the maid and her accomplice. DSK was a habitue of sex clubs/prostitutes, making it seem not unlikely that his aristocratic privilege and sexual appetite would have led him to be vulnerable to that situation.
On top that, the idea of replacing the dollar with another currency was hardly some new idea, it's an idea that has floated around for a long time. It doesn't seem plausible that a conspiracy against one man would be enough to suppress this idea if it was actually a viable alternative. Euro market weakness and the risks of default in some Euro countries mostly rules out the Euro, the lack of Chinese transparency and currency manipulation rules out the Renminbi. Beyond those two alternatives, there aren't any global currencies with enough depth and market adoption able to replace the dollar.
Further, if dropping the dollar was a profitable idea, why wouldn't global markets just do it? I'm sure many countries would LOVE to stick it to Uncle Sam and our banks, but it seems like they like profitability even more.
You want a peaceful civilization? Encourage lots of different people to live next to each other.
Wow, I feel misinformed despite my NY Times subscription. You mean to tell me there's a war going on in 90+% white Scandinavia and I didn't know about it? Given how oppressive their governments are known to be and the complete absence of social welfare there, such barbarism I guess should be expected.
I'm especially glad to know that multiethnic regions like Africa and the Middle East are so peaceful and nonviolent, that must have been another article I missed out on.
Can someone explain to me how a city getting whiter is necessarily worse for the city?
Is there a specific race that is missing? If you made it 30% Chinese, 30% White and 30% Indian is that good enough, or do you need some minimal proportion of every race?
And is it really "race" we need -- ie, if we bulk up on suburbanized, native-born nonwhites (like Mindy Kaling or Aziz Ansari as an example) does that really count, or is what we're looking for some kind of non-white cultural influence, so non-whites who act white don't count?
Please, someone tell me what the ideal racial combination is.
Solar only feels like half a solution without cheap, high capacity heavy-cycle batteries capable of running everything for several days with zero power input and providing boost power for when solar output lags.
I'm thinking like 120kWh for under $10k.
If there's some way to store enough potential solar energy you can generate then even something like 15w/sq ft ought to be adequate.
I am sure somewhere there is a Federal Law Enforcement agency that already has plans to buy about two dozen of these things and establish a jet pack SWAT team.
If its even halfway successful, expect every agency with a SWAT team to have one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm beginning to think that there basically is no security on the Internet. What security there is is a facade only.
Cops are trained to hit center of mass. Most handgun fights are within 10 feet and over within seconds. You don't have time to overthink "Should I wound him or kill him?"
If you tried for a wounding shot like the legs or arms, you'd likely miss. And even if you shot to wound and hit their legs, who's saying you wouldn't hit the femoral artery and have them bleed out faster than an ambulance could get there?
The rest is just tl;dr. The cops collectively are out of control with their authoritarianism, civil forfeiture and paramilitary fetishism but I feel some sympathy for most of them individually because it's an impossible job to begin with and made worse when every action is put under a PC microscope and second guessed by people who have never even done a ride along let alone done the job.
And the black community has to quit with both the victimhood and the total denial of the road warrior lifestyle in "the community". Racism can't explain bulk importing Mexicans by the millions to do jobs blacks won't do. Tell me why racists won't hire a black guy to roof houses or work in a kitchen but they will hire Mexicans who are at best marginally literate in Spanish and most likely completely illiterate in English.
Usually the computer crime you read about is little better than simple theft, this seems much smarter -- rather than steal credit cards or scam merchants for pennies, why not steal information that can be used to make a profit elsewhere in a way that would otherwise seem totally legitimate?
If you stop and think about it it seems totally obvious that this is a much smarter way to commit computer crime, but then the question is who else has been doing this? Have any of those stock market reports on the days winners and losers been the result of these kinds of inside information?
More towers with low-rent microwave backhaul to other towers with grossly oversubscribed fiber.
Start collecting tin cans and string now.
I don't think most street cops find marijuana in and of itself to be a very big threat. Many may have some cultural objection to it, but I think mostly they like it illegal because it provides great leverage for harassing people.
I wonder if the drive to find a DWI-like tool for checking for pot consumption among drivers isn't about safe driving but instead looking to regain some of the edge they had when marijuana was illegal.
I doubt we know enough about marijuana yet to develop any kind of biochemical intoxication standard (outside of physical impairment tests) like we have for alcohol due to the persistence of THC (ie, urine tests positive weeks after use). So any new system developed will probably have some kind of granularity that could flag a person who smoked pot an hour ago to 24 hours ago at best and STILL not have anything more than a crude correlation to their possible impairment.
But, public paranoia, the neo-Temperance League moralism of groups like MADD and LEO authoritarianism will combine to make such a "Potalyzer" an acceptable standard and more or less give back LEOs the ability to harass people.
Frankly, I DO wish there was both a hard-science standard of measurable THC impairment AND a magic device to do it with. It would probably help establish that actual impairment for most people is a small number of hours at all but extreme doses and eliminate the nonsense urinalysis screening and discrimination that goes with it.
I'm sure this will be disputed, but I think there's a segment of transit advocates that's almost ideologically opposed to transportation in single user vehicles, and the closer those vehicles are to private cars the more opposed they are.
Is that Windows display scaling is unsatisfactory. Either I can read the screen and the display is too small or the display is so high resolution and has enough real estate but I can't read anything.
I'm not sure the larger screen of the 3 makes this any better. Maybe a little, but from the one I've seen it seems to suffer from a similar problem.
And the worst part is that display scaling seems broken in some way that causes it to scale external displays, making a laptop/desktop two display setup obnoxious.
I think the misleading implied conclusion is that with neutral gerrymandering we will end up with a functionally different government, that somehow Republican advantaged gerrymandering is somehow solely or even predominantly responsible for all that's nasty about government.
I don't disagree with the idea that politically motivated gerrymandering has negative democratic effects, I just don't think that some neutrally ideal gerrmandering scheme would really alter the nature of government in a way that still wouldn't produce the same national security apparatus, deference to corporate and financial interests, etc.
I kind of wonder if something like this causes Apple to reconsider partnerships with vendors and play somewhat less hardball. It's obviously in Apple's best interest to have GT succeed -- the loan gets remade, they get a new gee-whiz screen material that no one else has or can even make (an established Apple strategy of cornering supplies of new technologies) and GT gets to make money, too, which can be invested in even better sapphire for the iPhone 7.
Squeeze your vendors too hard, there are fuckups and you've wasted millions of dollars and possibly put much more at risk and you don't gain the new magical feature advantage you wanted.
What kind of surprises me is that Apple doesn't have their own skunkworks R&D for coming up with new technologies like sapphire screens or other key components. They could work out what they wanted and then farm it out to someone who can mass produce it. Sort of like the Bell Labs or IBM labs.
changing the tapes becomes the whole of the backup maintenance: no one actually verifies that the backup job is running properly. I've been on calls to clients who've diligently changes their tapes nightly, but the backup software has been crashed for months..
I've seen the same thing, but I think the entire backup process is something of a kabuki dance because just seeing "Job success" is a false sense of security in and of itself.
Do you know if the media is usable to restore from? Do you know if the data backed up is capable of actually being used to restore to function whatever system was backed up?
I think most places fall down on these two items. Where I work we are told to do restores from backup media to validate usability -- but just very partial restores, a handful of random files, which really only validates simple to verify data (a common file, small executable, etc). I've seen plenty of instances where the tapes (even LTO) stumbles further into the media -- is it the drive? The specific bit of media?
But almost nobody does a real restore, where they attempt to restore an entire system from backup (which almost always means multiple servers).
I think the flashlight-as-impact-weapon was just a brief stopover on the trip away from using more traditional blunt force weapons. Take away a baton and suddenly a 6 D-cell mag light is the new baton, unfortunately with characteristics more of a lead-filled blackjack than a high-impact plastic PR-24 "tonfa".
I kind of think that the increasing tactical fetishism of police is almost kind of a symptom as much as it is a cause of police violence. To a certain extent the increasing vilification of the police and the removal of intermediate force from their toolkit has increased their siege mentality, leading to a subverted kind of frustration that plays out in them getting soldiered up.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot wrong with policing, but the wholesale denial going on in "the community" doesn't help either -- treating every police interaction as a wholesale denial of civil rights and refusing to acknowledge minority-on-minority criminality or treating it as some kind of excusable byproduct of discrimination only makes the situation worse.
As far as I know, the American police used to use a lot more blunt force -- flashlights, billy clubs, night sticks, beavertail saps, sap gloves -- to subdue people.
Over the past few decades, and especially since Rodney King's beating, blunt force seems to be off the menu. It has been somewhat replaced by the Taser, but their cost and the increasing awareness of the risk of death seems to have blunted (sorry) its use.
I wonder if the elimination of blunt force from the police toolkit has somehow led to a situation where "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" kind of a situation, where the police have come to see many situations that may have in the past been responded to with blunt force instead getting treated as a situation to shoot.
Physical confrontations without the use of an alternate weapon often boil down to wrestling matches which can quickly become a pulled gun or a struggle for an officer's gun, and many times a physical struggle is justified as a reason to shoot.
None of this to say that people weren't beaten for unjust reasons, but they also weren't killed, either.
When cops carried blunt force weapons they also knew how to use them in a way to inflict pain in a way that gained submission but also in a way that avoided major injury, since major injury didn't necessarily work in their favor. They seemed to have a spectrum of force available instead of a binary choice of shooting or not shooting.
The story almost reads like an Onion headline:
"Local bowling alleys and morturaries mostly mum on drone strategies"
Even for someone like Amazon, how likely is it they will be delivering via drone? Even if the FAA issued a greenlight for it tomorrow, how much could they actually deliver? Battery powered drones have extremely limited payloads and ranges and the existing physical delivery networks are huge and in place and relatively cheap compared to owning and maintaining a fleet of drones.
And why would Microsoft have a drone strategy? Windows on drones? Drones to comunicate with Azure? I just don't see it.
That beacon is a warning.
Is it possible for the existing cell network/protocols to identify "unknown" towers -- ie, those that appear in the spectrum but aren't known to be legitimate cell towers and somehow blacklist them to limit their functionality?
Do cell towers have a way of communicating to handsets which towers should be avoided or not used?
...in "Good Calories, Bad Calories".
Some of it is historical -- prior to the Ancel Keys bad science about diet, it was a commonly held understanding that cutting carbohydrate consumption contributed to weight loss. Taubes cites numerous sources, some dating back hundreds of years. IIRC, even the science was trending this way before WWII but a lot of it was German-led science which the war lost and competitiveness from American scientists chose to bury.
The science behind insulin as the primary hormonal regulator of fat accumulation has been known since the 1960s.
Most troubling from Taubes' book is the weird politics of dietary science and how senior people who control funding for studies get wed to particular theories and hang on to them even when evidence doesn't support them, even suppressing promising science that tends to discredit these ideas.
Is this project real, or just a sly attempt by Google to corner the market for helium?
I'm curious how more competition for entry-level or low skilled jobs helps African Americans. Their unemployment rate is nearly 14%, probably higher in lower age brackets. And given the school "achievement gaps" and lower education attainment for African Americans, these are precisely the jobs they need to work their way out of poverty.
Racism is a common argument for African American unemployment, but how does this stand up when the prime competitors for these jobs are non-white and in many cases marginal English speakers and functionally illiterate in English? Just who are these anti-African American, pro-Latino racists, anyway?
You could make the argument that African Americans don't get hired due to racist criminal justice policies which leave them with criminal records, but again I ask -- who are these people discriminating against African Americans with criminal records yet hiring illegal immigrants with false papers or whose "past" is essentially unavailable because their past is unobtainable in Mexico?
You could make an argument that African Americans don't want to or are incapable of work, but that argument is inherently racist. Their may be qualitative criticisms of entry level jobs (low pay, "jobs nobody wants") but if you buy that argument, then why do Latinos take those jobs? One variant explanation is that African Americans have some moral entitlement to better jobs (eg, due to past discrimination), but I'm not sure how that's supposed to work and the functional equivalent of this argument, affirmative action, hasn't worked and has been mostly discredited.
IIRC, the rape setup was a squeeze play perpetrated by the maid and her accomplice. DSK was a habitue of sex clubs/prostitutes, making it seem not unlikely that his aristocratic privilege and sexual appetite would have led him to be vulnerable to that situation.
On top that, the idea of replacing the dollar with another currency was hardly some new idea, it's an idea that has floated around for a long time. It doesn't seem plausible that a conspiracy against one man would be enough to suppress this idea if it was actually a viable alternative. Euro market weakness and the risks of default in some Euro countries mostly rules out the Euro, the lack of Chinese transparency and currency manipulation rules out the Renminbi. Beyond those two alternatives, there aren't any global currencies with enough depth and market adoption able to replace the dollar.
Further, if dropping the dollar was a profitable idea, why wouldn't global markets just do it? I'm sure many countries would LOVE to stick it to Uncle Sam and our banks, but it seems like they like profitability even more.
This one trick with rare earths will save you money (but don't tell the Chinese!)
The way he described it, basically never. They play a key role in so many things that you basically kiss metals and oxides goodbye without them.
You want a peaceful civilization? Encourage lots of different people to live next to each other.
Wow, I feel misinformed despite my NY Times subscription. You mean to tell me there's a war going on in 90+% white Scandinavia and I didn't know about it? Given how oppressive their governments are known to be and the complete absence of social welfare there, such barbarism I guess should be expected.
I'm especially glad to know that multiethnic regions like Africa and the Middle East are so peaceful and nonviolent, that must have been another article I missed out on.
Can someone explain to me how a city getting whiter is necessarily worse for the city?
Is there a specific race that is missing? If you made it 30% Chinese, 30% White and 30% Indian is that good enough, or do you need some minimal proportion of every race?
And is it really "race" we need -- ie, if we bulk up on suburbanized, native-born nonwhites (like Mindy Kaling or Aziz Ansari as an example) does that really count, or is what we're looking for some kind of non-white cultural influence, so non-whites who act white don't count?
Please, someone tell me what the ideal racial combination is.
Solar only feels like half a solution without cheap, high capacity heavy-cycle batteries capable of running everything for several days with zero power input and providing boost power for when solar output lags.
I'm thinking like 120kWh for under $10k.
If there's some way to store enough potential solar energy you can generate then even something like 15w/sq ft ought to be adequate.
I am sure somewhere there is a Federal Law Enforcement agency that already has plans to buy about two dozen of these things and establish a jet pack SWAT team.
If its even halfway successful, expect every agency with a SWAT team to have one.