This is terrible advice for the UK and will get charged with failure to produce a breathalyser specimen which I believe is a year ban anyway!
Same here in the states, but an administrative license suspension for a period of time is a lot easier to deal with than an actual DUI/DWI conviction -- that loses your license, plus costs you thousands of dollars, plus gets you a criminal record, plus makes you ineligible for some careers, plus...
HGN is a very good indicator of alcohol intoxication. Good luck convincing a jury that a specialist is trying to end his career with perjured testimony about your eye test.
Yeah, it's a test that accurate 60%-75% of the time, when performed under ideal conditions by a professional, impartial tester.
A cop on the side of a rainy road at 2 am with uneven ground, random noses, sudden gusts of wind, a nervous subject, and all sorts of professional performance requirements (has he pulled over enough cars this shift? does he have a court day upcoming with enough overtime to pay for his boat?) is hardly a paragon of objectivity. Cops don't have to deliberately lie to legitimately interpret everything they see through their own assumptions and preconceptions. If you think the guy is drunk, then when he looks away nervously, he's "unable to focus", when he looks right at you he's "displaying a fixed gaze".
A test that basically depends on the cop waving a pen in front of your face and deciding whether or not it means anything is useless.
It is perfectly reasonable to put, say, a non-optimal but fully functional sorting routine in, and then come back and replace it with something better later
Considering this is shipping code in a device that doesn't exactly do automatic updates over a wireless network, I'm not sure when, exactly, you're anticipating that this testing" code will be replaced with the "real thing". You'll forgive me for thinking you're taking a fairly blase attitude towards the obviously complete lack of coding standards, formal oversight, or rigorous vetting in code that can quite literally destroy someone's entire life based on the output.
Playing around with temporary hacks is fun for a shareware app, not an officially-sanctioned law enforcement device that decides whether you were the victim of an accident or the perpetrator of a felony.
I doubt that the store manager could have done anything. Once a cop is on the scene his first, and only, action is to âoetake controlâ of the situation.
Well, yeah. of course once the cop got there everything is going further downhill. But the store manager certainly was in a position at any time in the preceding 15-30 minutes to defuse the situation several ways. He certainly didn't have to help it escalate (and no doubt his own training told him specifically NOT to do the shit he did that caused it to escalate).
How the heck would you know which color words in a language were "first"? Given that languages more or less "evolve" how could you ever define the "first" of any type of word in "a language".
This is something anthropologists, linguists, and etymologists study because it tells a lot about a society's development. Much like the old canard about eskimos having a hundred words for snow, there is a clear procession as a language evolves that it adds more colors to the vocabulary. Most societies start out with either a word for red or a word for blue, then add the other. Then they start adding tertiary colors like greens and oranges. They add new colors in a pretty specific order as the society develops (It's been over ten years since i studied psychology of color so I'm sure some of the colors I mentioned were in the wrong oder).
First of all I don't deal with generalities "bad" and "good" are relative to me and to most (I assume) of the people
That's fine, I only objected to your original statement (many messages ago) that communism as a mere theory was inherently evil. That it simply could not, under any theoretical circumstances, be anything BUT evil.
Plenty of people in the graphics industry complain about Adobe. While they have been a remarkably benevolent dictator, they have certainly used their power to reduce competition. They've bought out or destroyed almost every major competitor to their products for almost two decades now.
So there is no reason not to sell OSX as a product. Does Apple have no interest in really taking on Microsoft?
The reason is that they don't view OS X as a product. It is a feature of the product they sell, which is the Mac hardware (or more esoterically, the "Mac experience").
And no, they have no interest in taking on Microsoft. Microsoft is the Wal*Mart of computing as far as Apple is concerned. Apple doesn't want customers who are looking to buy software by the pound. (this is Apple's corporate attitude, not mine, I'm just articulating it since so many don't seem to understand)
It makes no practical difference that MS was found to have violated antitrust laws in a civil suit rather than a criminal suit. Either way, they are not legally "the same as any other company", once they've been found to be a monopoly by the courts.
Apart for 2b and 8 ( which are debatable at best), the rest seem to be normal business activites which any other for-profit organisation would undertake.
Convicted monopolists are not "any other for-profit organisation".
You haven't shown that communism is BAD, you've shown that communism is not a system you want to live under. And that's fine. But don't confuse your personal preferences or your interpretations for what communists actually believe would be an ideal system.
Being unrealistic does not make something inherently bad, and if you claim that communism is about taking away freedom, you're continuing to ignore what communism is supposed to be (again, talking about the economic system, not the political one). It's supposed to be a voluntary system. Whether or not YOU would personally volunteer to live in it has no bearing on whether or not it is voluntary.
I agree completely that it's a ridiculous utopian fantasy that requires people to desire certain things and think/behave certain ways, but most economic systems have the same failings to one degree or another.
I appreciate the 5th grade lesson on receipts, but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Nobody is questioning the ROLE or validity or importance of receipts in modern society. (and I would note the receipt in no way proves his money is in the register -- perhaps the cashier put the money in her pocket -- why shouldn't the customer be able to check that by inspecting the register?)
They're questioning why someone should be involuntarily FORCED to provide his belongings for a search based on no questions that could not be satisfied non-invasively. And while receipts are wonderful, what gives the store the right to demand receipts of every person leaving for every object on their person? I don't carry around the receipts for my clothes, yet I walk into stores that sell those exact clothes every day.
The guy is not going by "possession is 9/10 ownership" truism, he's going by the "it's my fucking bag and not yours" LEGAL FACT that states we have privacy in our possessions that can only be violated against our wishes by certain authorities under certain conditions. Your desire to see my receipt does not trump my right to not show you a damn thing unless I want to.
If CC wants to know whether or not he paid for his stuff, they can ask the cashier who handed him the bag, she's only 3 feet away! Certainly they saw it or they would have called the cops already. Or they can check their surveillance video. They don't NEED the receipt to be shown again at the door any more than they need a blood sample - it's security theater that serves a psychological purpose in deterring shoplifting and employee scams, and that's fine if CC wants to spend money on it, but don't try to compel customers to join in the play just for the sake of making it a more convincing act. If you're worried your employees are putting 3 CDs for the price of one into peoples bags, you don't need to harass customers to deal with that issue, you need to monitor your employees more carefully. Just because harassing customers is less expensive than improving cashier monitoring doesn't make it any more legally permissible.
You're talking about a lot of issues beyond what I was disagreeing with. You said Communism itself, the very concept and idea, was inherently BAD. Not the execution, the very concept. When of course, it isn't, as you admit, any more than the very concept or idea of libertarianism is inherently BAD. Both would work lovely in a world where everyone participated because they wanted to and if they all acted like excellent theoretical people.
(I should note that communism has nothing to do with a post-industrial world of plenty where robots stockpile all needed supplies. It has no requirements of infinite resources or infinite goods, it assumes that people will contribute all they can to the common till and then take back only what they need -- you certainly could NOT call that a capitalist heaven, since nobody would own anything or be able to restrict the use of any property, indeed the word "property" would be meaningless. In times of scarcity, you couldn't decide to allocate resources based on ability to "pay", they would be allocated based on who had contributed and then the excess provided in a wonderfully utopian fair manner, and nobody would complain about it because they were all happy communists who agreed on how the division should logically work. Silly, yes, but neither inherently evil, nor liberty-depriving, nor capitalist, nor particularly more silly than thinking a boycott can effectively remedy someone dumping toxins that will last for 10,000 years into the drinking water.)
If someone steals something, and then puts it in their bag and walks out setting off the alarms, then if the store has no right to check the bag, then how would the store check if you did steal something?
...huh?
That's not a "condition of leaving", that's holding a shoplifter until the police arrive. If you have evidence they stole something, by all means, do what you are legally allowed to do. If you saw them shoplift, or you have video of them shoplifting, or (if your state allows) the alarm goes off when they leave, by all means hold them and call the cops.
None of those things applies to the cases we're talking about, where a person hasn't stolen anything, hasn't been seen to steal anything, isn't even accused of stealing anything, and doesn't set off the alarm, yet somebody still insists they MUST be treated like a shoplifter.
Yeah, the rules have been updated at most stores to follow the person and not stop them until they've passed the checkout and are trying to leave. A combination of situations like yours, people who put things in their pocket so they don't have to carry them, and people trying to get hassled by security so that they could sue the store made retailers notice that until you've actually passed the checkout, there's no way to say for sure that you intended to steal the item.
I know I've had a few situations (since I'm a guy and don't grab a darn shopping cart) that my hands got full so I start putting stuff in my pockets rather than go all the way back to the entrance to get a cart. I'd be pretty pissed if some idiot accused me of shoplifting just because I only have two hands to hold things in.
Was the store manager asking the police to issue a trespass citation? That would be a very common response to a customer that hassled the staff.
I understand that we're only hearing one side of the story here, but you're taking hypotheticals to a whole new level where it's impossible to even discuss anything. He was happy to volunteer the unfair citation he already received, I can only imagine he'd be thrilled to point out the irony in receiving a trespass citation when his only "crime" was trying to LEAVE and being physically prevented from doing so. You then go on to reinterpret everything that happened with the assumption that he was the subject of an investigation and most certainly someone who was trespassing and harassing employees?
Yeah, a Mac is definitely the way to go if you can. You can set up a Mac Mini to be a browsing "appliance" quite easily, and it will be secure, functionally immune to viruses, pretty much idiot-proof, yet still compatible with 99% of the web sites out there. You also have an easy and obvious upgrade path for those who display aptitude and interest in a more comprehensive computer experience.
You could certainly build a linux box that was similar (though it would lose compatibility with some sites), but if someone hasn't already designed a distro that is close to this purpose, you'll spend a lot of time and effort reinventing what you can do with about a dozen clicks after plugging a Mac Mini in.
I really hope we stop doing business with China. Our greed will be the end of us.
On the contrary, their greed will be the end of them. Coca-Cola, Levi's and Rock 'n' Roll have ended communism in more countries than any military or political action.
However, though the items may now be his property, he's still standing on their property.
Indeed it is. Nobody disputes that -- as it is their property, they have the right to tell any person they like to leave their store for any reason (subject to civil rights limitations, since they do claim to be be open to the public).
They DON'T have the right to tell people as they are already leaving, "by the way, as a condition of leaving, we demand that you do X". By the time somebody is leaving, they don't have the option of simply staying for the rest of their lives and dying of old age in Circuit City. They have to leave sooner or later, you can't require them to do things in order to be able to leave and get on with the rest of their lives.
No, but using extreme cases and fallacious logic can be indicative of a lack of intelligence.
I don't know about your part of the world, but asking to check receipts is done on a daily basis in mine. There's nothing extreme about declining to show them, and any employee who has spent more than five minutes in training knows how to handle the situation properly. It's not like he ran through the store on fire and was upset they beat the flames out -- he did something completely normal and common that every retail company in the country sees on a daily basis -- he kept walking and declined to show his receipt.
I shudder to think how your heart would cope if you were ever faced with an actual extreme situation, like somebody wearing a brightly colored shirt or jaywalking.
Hey, if you think assaulting your friends is no big deal, feel free. I know you can create an imaginary situation involving a totally insane home owner and multiple gang rapes that justifies you physically preventing someone from leaving your home when they want to. However a sane home owner acting reasonably to protect their property will not behave in the manner you described.
It's only about privacy in a euphemistic way, it's about sovereignty of ones body.
Under our current legal definitions of the word privacy, it's not a euphemism -- freedom to control one's own body is considered a right of privacy. It's not some clever word just to "get around".
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Same here in the states, but an administrative license suspension for a period of time is a lot easier to deal with than an actual DUI/DWI conviction -- that loses your license, plus costs you thousands of dollars, plus gets you a criminal record, plus makes you ineligible for some careers, plus...
Yeah, it's a test that accurate 60%-75% of the time, when performed under ideal conditions by a professional, impartial tester.
A cop on the side of a rainy road at 2 am with uneven ground, random noses, sudden gusts of wind, a nervous subject, and all sorts of professional performance requirements (has he pulled over enough cars this shift? does he have a court day upcoming with enough overtime to pay for his boat?) is hardly a paragon of objectivity. Cops don't have to deliberately lie to legitimately interpret everything they see through their own assumptions and preconceptions. If you think the guy is drunk, then when he looks away nervously, he's "unable to focus", when he looks right at you he's "displaying a fixed gaze".
A test that basically depends on the cop waving a pen in front of your face and deciding whether or not it means anything is useless.
Considering this is shipping code in a device that doesn't exactly do automatic updates over a wireless network, I'm not sure when, exactly, you're anticipating that this testing" code will be replaced with the "real thing". You'll forgive me for thinking you're taking a fairly blase attitude towards the obviously complete lack of coding standards, formal oversight, or rigorous vetting in code that can quite literally destroy someone's entire life based on the output.
Playing around with temporary hacks is fun for a shareware app, not an officially-sanctioned law enforcement device that decides whether you were the victim of an accident or the perpetrator of a felony.
Well, yeah. of course once the cop got there everything is going further downhill. But the store manager certainly was in a position at any time in the preceding 15-30 minutes to defuse the situation several ways. He certainly didn't have to help it escalate (and no doubt his own training told him specifically NOT to do the shit he did that caused it to escalate).
This is something anthropologists, linguists, and etymologists study because it tells a lot about a society's development. Much like the old canard about eskimos having a hundred words for snow, there is a clear procession as a language evolves that it adds more colors to the vocabulary. Most societies start out with either a word for red or a word for blue, then add the other. Then they start adding tertiary colors like greens and oranges. They add new colors in a pretty specific order as the society develops (It's been over ten years since i studied psychology of color so I'm sure some of the colors I mentioned were in the wrong oder).
That's fine, I only objected to your original statement (many messages ago) that communism as a mere theory was inherently evil. That it simply could not, under any theoretical circumstances, be anything BUT evil.
LOL. Yeah, I'll just tell the Department of Defense that their file formats are wrong, I'm sure they'll get right on that to make me happy.
Funny, I haven't heard anything about my bid in a long time...
Plenty of people in the graphics industry complain about Adobe. While they have been a remarkably benevolent dictator, they have certainly used their power to reduce competition. They've bought out or destroyed almost every major competitor to their products for almost two decades now.
The reason is that they don't view OS X as a product. It is a feature of the product they sell, which is the Mac hardware (or more esoterically, the "Mac experience").
And no, they have no interest in taking on Microsoft. Microsoft is the Wal*Mart of computing as far as Apple is concerned. Apple doesn't want customers who are looking to buy software by the pound. (this is Apple's corporate attitude, not mine, I'm just articulating it since so many don't seem to understand)
It makes no practical difference that MS was found to have violated antitrust laws in a civil suit rather than a criminal suit. Either way, they are not legally "the same as any other company", once they've been found to be a monopoly by the courts.
Convicted monopolists are not "any other for-profit organisation".
You haven't shown that communism is BAD, you've shown that communism is not a system you want to live under. And that's fine. But don't confuse your personal preferences or your interpretations for what communists actually believe would be an ideal system.
Being unrealistic does not make something inherently bad, and if you claim that communism is about taking away freedom, you're continuing to ignore what communism is supposed to be (again, talking about the economic system, not the political one). It's supposed to be a voluntary system. Whether or not YOU would personally volunteer to live in it has no bearing on whether or not it is voluntary.
I agree completely that it's a ridiculous utopian fantasy that requires people to desire certain things and think/behave certain ways, but most economic systems have the same failings to one degree or another.
I appreciate the 5th grade lesson on receipts, but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Nobody is questioning the ROLE or validity or importance of receipts in modern society. (and I would note the receipt in no way proves his money is in the register -- perhaps the cashier put the money in her pocket -- why shouldn't the customer be able to check that by inspecting the register?)
They're questioning why someone should be involuntarily FORCED to provide his belongings for a search based on no questions that could not be satisfied non-invasively. And while receipts are wonderful, what gives the store the right to demand receipts of every person leaving for every object on their person? I don't carry around the receipts for my clothes, yet I walk into stores that sell those exact clothes every day.
The guy is not going by "possession is 9/10 ownership" truism, he's going by the "it's my fucking bag and not yours" LEGAL FACT that states we have privacy in our possessions that can only be violated against our wishes by certain authorities under certain conditions. Your desire to see my receipt does not trump my right to not show you a damn thing unless I want to.
If CC wants to know whether or not he paid for his stuff, they can ask the cashier who handed him the bag, she's only 3 feet away! Certainly they saw it or they would have called the cops already. Or they can check their surveillance video. They don't NEED the receipt to be shown again at the door any more than they need a blood sample - it's security theater that serves a psychological purpose in deterring shoplifting and employee scams, and that's fine if CC wants to spend money on it, but don't try to compel customers to join in the play just for the sake of making it a more convincing act. If you're worried your employees are putting 3 CDs for the price of one into peoples bags, you don't need to harass customers to deal with that issue, you need to monitor your employees more carefully. Just because harassing customers is less expensive than improving cashier monitoring doesn't make it any more legally permissible.
You're talking about a lot of issues beyond what I was disagreeing with. You said Communism itself, the very concept and idea, was inherently BAD. Not the execution, the very concept. When of course, it isn't, as you admit, any more than the very concept or idea of libertarianism is inherently BAD. Both would work lovely in a world where everyone participated because they wanted to and if they all acted like excellent theoretical people.
(I should note that communism has nothing to do with a post-industrial world of plenty where robots stockpile all needed supplies. It has no requirements of infinite resources or infinite goods, it assumes that people will contribute all they can to the common till and then take back only what they need -- you certainly could NOT call that a capitalist heaven, since nobody would own anything or be able to restrict the use of any property, indeed the word "property" would be meaningless. In times of scarcity, you couldn't decide to allocate resources based on ability to "pay", they would be allocated based on who had contributed and then the excess provided in a wonderfully utopian fair manner, and nobody would complain about it because they were all happy communists who agreed on how the division should logically work. Silly, yes, but neither inherently evil, nor liberty-depriving, nor capitalist, nor particularly more silly than thinking a boycott can effectively remedy someone dumping toxins that will last for 10,000 years into the drinking water.)
That's not a "condition of leaving", that's holding a shoplifter until the police arrive. If you have evidence they stole something, by all means, do what you are legally allowed to do. If you saw them shoplift, or you have video of them shoplifting, or (if your state allows) the alarm goes off when they leave, by all means hold them and call the cops.
None of those things applies to the cases we're talking about, where a person hasn't stolen anything, hasn't been seen to steal anything, isn't even accused of stealing anything, and doesn't set off the alarm, yet somebody still insists they MUST be treated like a shoplifter.
Yeah, the rules have been updated at most stores to follow the person and not stop them until they've passed the checkout and are trying to leave. A combination of situations like yours, people who put things in their pocket so they don't have to carry them, and people trying to get hassled by security so that they could sue the store made retailers notice that until you've actually passed the checkout, there's no way to say for sure that you intended to steal the item.
I know I've had a few situations (since I'm a guy and don't grab a darn shopping cart) that my hands got full so I start putting stuff in my pockets rather than go all the way back to the entrance to get a cart. I'd be pretty pissed if some idiot accused me of shoplifting just because I only have two hands to hold things in.
I understand that we're only hearing one side of the story here, but you're taking hypotheticals to a whole new level where it's impossible to even discuss anything. He was happy to volunteer the unfair citation he already received, I can only imagine he'd be thrilled to point out the irony in receiving a trespass citation when his only "crime" was trying to LEAVE and being physically prevented from doing so. You then go on to reinterpret everything that happened with the assumption that he was the subject of an investigation and most certainly someone who was trespassing and harassing employees?
Yeah, a Mac is definitely the way to go if you can. You can set up a Mac Mini to be a browsing "appliance" quite easily, and it will be secure, functionally immune to viruses, pretty much idiot-proof, yet still compatible with 99% of the web sites out there. You also have an easy and obvious upgrade path for those who display aptitude and interest in a more comprehensive computer experience.
You could certainly build a linux box that was similar (though it would lose compatibility with some sites), but if someone hasn't already designed a distro that is close to this purpose, you'll spend a lot of time and effort reinventing what you can do with about a dozen clicks after plugging a Mac Mini in.
On the contrary, their greed will be the end of them. Coca-Cola, Levi's and Rock 'n' Roll have ended communism in more countries than any military or political action.
Indeed it is. Nobody disputes that -- as it is their property, they have the right to tell any person they like to leave their store for any reason (subject to civil rights limitations, since they do claim to be be open to the public).
They DON'T have the right to tell people as they are already leaving, "by the way, as a condition of leaving, we demand that you do X". By the time somebody is leaving, they don't have the option of simply staying for the rest of their lives and dying of old age in Circuit City. They have to leave sooner or later, you can't require them to do things in order to be able to leave and get on with the rest of their lives.
I don't know about your part of the world, but asking to check receipts is done on a daily basis in mine. There's nothing extreme about declining to show them, and any employee who has spent more than five minutes in training knows how to handle the situation properly. It's not like he ran through the store on fire and was upset they beat the flames out -- he did something completely normal and common that every retail company in the country sees on a daily basis -- he kept walking and declined to show his receipt.
I shudder to think how your heart would cope if you were ever faced with an actual extreme situation, like somebody wearing a brightly colored shirt or jaywalking.
Hey, if you think assaulting your friends is no big deal, feel free. I know you can create an imaginary situation involving a totally insane home owner and multiple gang rapes that justifies you physically preventing someone from leaving your home when they want to. However a sane home owner acting reasonably to protect their property will not behave in the manner you described.
Under our current legal definitions of the word privacy, it's not a euphemism -- freedom to control one's own body is considered a right of privacy. It's not some clever word just to "get around".
Yes, because doing what anyone ever tells you to do is a sign of intelligence.