You'd be surprised. In the last few years it has become more and more common for street officers to carry concealed.380s. Firearms are no longer limited to the "firearm units" in major cities.
If police were getting paid a lot more, then there is justification to judge them more harshly, but as it is it's just a regular blue collar profession.
How much more do you want to pay them? LAPD pays the following - other cities are comparable.
"The starting base salary for high school graduates is $56,522. If you have at least 60 college units, with an overall GPA of 2.0 or better, you will start at $58,798. If you have a BA or BS (four year) degree you will start at $61,095."
http://www.joinlapd.com/salary.html At 40 hours a week, 61k works out to be about $30/hour. Overtime is usually paid out at 1.5x (~$45/hour) or 2x ($60/hour).
Not included in base pay/overtime is holiday pay and night shift differential (which tends to get dumped on new police officers). Also, uniform allowance is about a thousand a year.
New York police officers go from 35k base (40k estimated w/ overtime, etc) to 65k in 5.5 years.
In comparison - the 2006 median annual household (NOT INDIVIDUAL) income was $48,201.00.
You might not be aware that certain parts of the USA are quite corrupt - and my post was really written for an American audience.
New Rome is a great recent example, but it is also an exception because the village was dissolved. Normally abuses go on for years. If you want a link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio - or just google it for some of the perhaps less reputable websites.
I don't want to paint a picture of the USA as being run by corrupt thugs - but the tv shows and movies with corrupt yokels in small towns are based on reality. Also... while the feds have cracked down - keep in mind that even though New Rome was dissolved, nobody was prosecuted and nobody really suffered any consequences - $120,000 of "public" money went missing and they had a handful of suspects. There are still some places where you'd be wise to shut your mouth and let the nice policeman (with his hand on his gun) guide you to the local ATM to withdraw cash for your "fine". And in a place where the mayor is related to the police chief and the judge, you're not going to get any satisfaction.
There are other features that I don't see how they're getting, such as the zones where photos were shot from. That takes an awful lot of extrapolation.
I suspect it isn't as complex as you think - exif tags usually include focus distance and focal length. Also included with that is sensor size or camera model, which will tell you effective focal length. When you combine that info with the apparent size of the object in the photo (i.e. statue of liberty is x percentage of the frame high), you should be able to get a reasonable estimation on where the picture was shot from.
For relatively isolated objects (like the statue of liberty), I'd assume you'd need a single shot w/ a known location to act as an anchor (it's possible with cameras that support gps) - but I wouldn't be surprised if a mathematician could get around that. Perhaps angle of the sun at time / date (exif again), but I'd assume that would take significant processing and have all sorts of things that would screw it up.
I know DXO can analyze a jpeg or raw to get the model of a lens - presume it's stored in exif somewhere - and lens distortion can be corrected w/ a x% pincushion adjustment to the photo based on known values - DXO has a fairly huge database and I wouldn't be surprised if they were using some of their tech. Either that or the guys here fudged it by only using pictures from a specific make / model of camera.
I suspect that they would use the distance estimation in exif to eliminate the statues, etc - although I'm guessing a fair number of statues would be eliminated because they aren't scaled properly. Autofocus distance estimations can be off, but not usually hundreds of meters off.
As for cross photo whitebalance / color gimpiness across the frame, that can be relatively easily corrected - autostich (free) and autopano pro (the "pro version" of autostitch) does it and they've licensed their stuff to a bunch of other companies.
Also... keep in mind they really aren't displaying high res imagery - so they can estimate / tweak a bit. I don't know if that will scale, or if it does, what the processing requirements will be, but it's probably not a huge concern.
It's clearly not as simple as they try to make it (they really only used a small amount of image sets), but I don't think it's a photoshop job. The question is whether it will scale.
If the cops want to, they will arrest you at work for "obstruction of justice". If the public arrest doesn't get you fired, the few days you'll spend in jail waiting for bail / a trial will probably do the trick. Meanwhile, who paid your mortgage?
That completely ignores the possibility of extrajudicial beatings and other scummy stuff cops sometimes do.
Being "in the right" won't protect you from the police.
However, the faster you drive, the more likely you are to be seriously injured or killed "if" you have an accident. Not only that, making the speeds less variable reduces the number and length of traffic jams.
On the other hand, if you live in a country where you're free to buy semi-automatic weapons perhaps it's hard to argue that driving at 100mph should be illegal...
Or the magistrate was buddy buddy with the sheriff who, in turn was the mayor's half brother. In most places with a lot of speed traps, corruption is rampant and the magistrate / judge is complicit in the fraud. Google "New Rome" or look up info on the worst speed traps in the USA.
Why is it that "tech workers" are virtually the only group singled out for getting the shaft on overtime pay. Sure, other groups have exceptions in state and federal law (truck drivers, fruit pickers, etc), but if you look across the board - virtually all states have sections just for us in the overtime part of the law and no other group gets screwed in such a wide swath of area. This even extends to Canada.
I left an employer who stiffed me on overtime pay "accidentally" and when I talk to other people in town, the general consensus is their employers "don't pay overtime... and they have lawyers on hand to ensure they don't start paying."
Problem is... shit like 11 layers of management happens
I've heard the statistic that for every 2 employees that actually worked, 3 managers oversaw them. Bell (Canada) is a great example of a company that embodies fail in basically everything that they do.
If you were sufficiently cynical, there is a good chance you'd think the Chinese did this to prevent any possibility of protest from appearing on international TV. Question is... what wasn't shown?
3) Now you have to shoot it down. You may not realize this, but a passenger jet is FREAKING HUGE. One missile isn't going to take out a jet with 2, 3, or 4 engines. You're going to have to really go to work on that bad boy... and now it's just an out of control ball of metal and fire... braaaavoooo.
Right, and it's a good thing that the engines that get hit by missiles w/ 10 kilograms of HE (sidewinder) or 23 kilos of HE (amraam) aren't anywhere near the giant fuel tanks in the wings. Explosive decompression shouldn't be a big deal - 10 PSI isn't a huge difference. And "drag" created by gunshot / explosive impacts shouldn't be a worry, as the plane is only traveling at ~900km/h.
Perhaps - perhaps not - 3 components in rocket fuel - oxidizer (perchlorate), fuel and a catalyst. All 3 have to be in close proximity and in the right state to work. "Fuel" is typically fairly benign stuff - finely ground aluminum, etc - the oxidizer is the stuff that is a bit of a pain to transport.
Even if there was a total lack of fuel (unlikely) on Mars, mining the oxidizer and lifting it into orbit would dramatically lower the amount of power required in the creation of a big rocket - Mars gravity is just over 1/3rd that of Earth's. It's not something we can use right away, but it makes setting up shop there and doing something productive a hell of a lot easier.
So, it seems to me that the important discovery is that there could be a relatively massive supply of a chemical compound which is able to produce breathable oxygen
In addition to the oxygen + rocket fuel oxidizer - all that perchlorate is in close proximity to frozen water and the gravity of Mars is 38% of Earth's. Not a bad combination if you wanted to launch some rockets elsewhere.
So as I understand it, perchlorate can be used to make rocket fuel.
Sort of - Perchlorates are oxidizers, which technically are not the "fuel" in the reaction. Oxidzers are, however, the stuff that is somewhat dangerous to handle / transport - the fuel is normally a rather ordinary substance (i.e. in black powder the fuel is charcoal, in modern rockets, powdered aluminum)
A catalyst is required, but the less you have to ship to mars, the easier it is...
Because SMS is generally free, at least in the UK and EU. It's only in the US, where they don't really understand how phones work, that they charge to both send and receive messages.
Incoming texts were free (well, included) in the USA - up to about a year and a half ago. Then, all the major players had a circle jerk where the idea was brought up and now incoming texts get charged.
Now it's happening in Canada. I'm sure when a few of the big players see how they can make a shitload of money, it'll happen there eventually.
The really big issue here is cell phone companies have extremely abusive contracts - they change something like this - but pretend that the "contract" is still valid, and will still send you bills and to collections if you don't pay.
So what to do? Sue? Good luck - the cell phone companies have "mandatory binding arbitration" clauses. The arbitration companies are, of course, completely corrupt, ruling in favor of the cell phone company in 95+% of cases. Several court cases have resulted in the clause being stricken, so now they write different contracts for different areas. If they can get away with it, they do, until someone fights a costly case in their circuit court.
IMHO, the situation needs people throwing hammers through the windows of Bell and Telus stores while yelling "unsolicited incoming text message". I think that would be far more effective than a class action.
What, exactly, will you do when they draw their weapons and tell you to hand it over?
What will you do to prevent the 6 guys jumping on you and holding you down as they do a cavity search - perfectly legal, btw. Sure, it's not supposed to be a punitive thing, but do you think the border guards care? The fact that you were "resisting" will explain any bruises or evidence of physical abuse.
What will you do as they slice open your car seats and rip apart your car "looking for drugs"? Perfectly legal, as above, and you have no recourse and won't get much, if any compensation.
Border guards have virtually unlimited authority at the border. There is also virtually no oversight and even less accountability to a civil court. Border guards aren't stupid. They know what power they have and how far they can bend the rules.
In this sense, border guards are exactly like corrupt cops. If they want something, they are going to get it.
Yes. Those rumors of people dancing in the office on announcement of the resignation are quite true.
Some of the higher end corp stuff managed to survive, but virtually everything on the home consumer side is the typical disposable shit you now come to expect from HP. The fact they are extending the warranty is surprising. HP's laptop support used to be utter shit. Not the worst in the industry, mind you, but shit is shit.
Slashdot Mirror
That lens is 16.5 kilograms, not sure exactly how much walking you'll get done.
*golf clap* Nicely done.
You'd be surprised. In the last few years it has become more and more common for street officers to carry concealed .380s.
Firearms are no longer limited to the "firearm units" in major cities.
If police were getting paid a lot more, then there is justification to judge them more harshly, but as it is it's just a regular blue collar profession.
How much more do you want to pay them?
LAPD pays the following - other cities are comparable.
"The starting base salary for high school graduates is $56,522. If you have at least 60 college units, with an overall GPA of 2.0 or better, you will start at $58,798. If you have a BA or BS (four year) degree you will start at $61,095."
http://www.joinlapd.com/salary.html
At 40 hours a week, 61k works out to be about $30/hour. Overtime is usually paid out at 1.5x (~$45/hour) or 2x ($60/hour).
Not included in base pay/overtime is holiday pay and night shift differential (which tends to get dumped on new police officers). Also, uniform allowance is about a thousand a year.
New York police officers go from 35k base (40k estimated w/ overtime, etc) to 65k in 5.5 years.
In comparison - the 2006 median annual household (NOT INDIVIDUAL) income was $48,201.00.
They get paid a LOT less than other jobs
Fail.
I notice your email address ends in .UK
You might not be aware that certain parts of the USA are quite corrupt - and my post was really written for an American audience.
New Rome is a great recent example, but it is also an exception because the village was dissolved. Normally abuses go on for years.
If you want a link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio - or just google it for some of the perhaps less reputable websites.
The Federal government really didn't have much power in certain parts of the country (this has changed dramatically in the years since WW2) and there have been several cases where corruption, racism and the culture of abuse was so entrenched that violent insurrection was required to remove local governments or bring about change.
More wiki links (I'm lazy)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorr_Rebellion
I don't want to paint a picture of the USA as being run by corrupt thugs - but the tv shows and movies with corrupt yokels in small towns are based on reality.
Also... while the feds have cracked down - keep in mind that even though New Rome was dissolved, nobody was prosecuted and nobody really suffered any consequences - $120,000 of "public" money went missing and they had a handful of suspects.
There are still some places where you'd be wise to shut your mouth and let the nice policeman (with his hand on his gun) guide you to the local ATM to withdraw cash for your "fine".
And in a place where the mayor is related to the police chief and the judge, you're not going to get any satisfaction.
There are other features that I don't see how they're getting, such as the zones where photos were shot from. That takes an awful lot of extrapolation.
I suspect it isn't as complex as you think - exif tags usually include focus distance and focal length. Also included with that is sensor size or camera model, which will tell you effective focal length.
When you combine that info with the apparent size of the object in the photo (i.e. statue of liberty is x percentage of the frame high), you should be able to get a reasonable estimation on where the picture was shot from.
For relatively isolated objects (like the statue of liberty), I'd assume you'd need a single shot w/ a known location to act as an anchor (it's possible with cameras that support gps) - but I wouldn't be surprised if a mathematician could get around that. Perhaps angle of the sun at time / date (exif again), but I'd assume that would take significant processing and have all sorts of things that would screw it up.
I know DXO can analyze a jpeg or raw to get the model of a lens - presume it's stored in exif somewhere - and lens distortion can be corrected w/ a x% pincushion adjustment to the photo based on known values - DXO has a fairly huge database and I wouldn't be surprised if they were using some of their tech.
Either that or the guys here fudged it by only using pictures from a specific make / model of camera.
I suspect that they would use the distance estimation in exif to eliminate the statues, etc - although I'm guessing a fair number of statues would be eliminated because they aren't scaled properly. Autofocus distance estimations can be off, but not usually hundreds of meters off.
As for cross photo whitebalance / color gimpiness across the frame, that can be relatively easily corrected - autostich (free) and autopano pro (the "pro version" of autostitch) does it and they've licensed their stuff to a bunch of other companies.
Also... keep in mind they really aren't displaying high res imagery - so they can estimate / tweak a bit. I don't know if that will scale, or if it does, what the processing requirements will be, but it's probably not a huge concern.
It's clearly not as simple as they try to make it (they really only used a small amount of image sets), but I don't think it's a photoshop job.
The question is whether it will scale.
Problem is, winning in court isn't everything.
If the cops want to, they will arrest you at work for "obstruction of justice".
If the public arrest doesn't get you fired, the few days you'll spend in jail waiting for bail / a trial will probably do the trick. Meanwhile, who paid your mortgage?
That completely ignores the possibility of extrajudicial beatings and other scummy stuff cops sometimes do.
Being "in the right" won't protect you from the police.
However, the faster you drive, the more likely you are to be seriously injured or killed "if" you have an accident. Not only that, making the speeds less variable reduces the number and length of traffic jams.
On the other hand, if you live in a country where you're free to buy semi-automatic weapons perhaps it's hard to argue that driving at 100mph should be illegal...
What about flintlocks?
I really want to know.
Or the magistrate was buddy buddy with the sheriff who, in turn was the mayor's half brother.
In most places with a lot of speed traps, corruption is rampant and the magistrate / judge is complicit in the fraud.
Google "New Rome" or look up info on the worst speed traps in the USA.
then fight any government wrongs in court.
Assuming you're not murdered while in custody.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/01/custody.death/
Why is it that "tech workers" are virtually the only group singled out for getting the shaft on overtime pay.
Sure, other groups have exceptions in state and federal law (truck drivers, fruit pickers, etc), but if you look across the board - virtually all states have sections just for us in the overtime part of the law and no other group gets screwed in such a wide swath of area.
This even extends to Canada.
I left an employer who stiffed me on overtime pay "accidentally" and when I talk to other people in town, the general consensus is their employers "don't pay overtime... and they have lawyers on hand to ensure they don't start paying."
Interesting, no?
Problem is... shit like
11 layers of management happens
I've heard the statistic that for every 2 employees that actually worked, 3 managers oversaw them.
Bell (Canada) is a great example of a company that embodies fail in basically everything that they do.
If you were sufficiently cynical, there is a good chance you'd think the Chinese did this to prevent any possibility of protest from appearing on international TV.
Question is... what wasn't shown?
Because the guy in charge of making the changes disagrees with the governor and doesn't actually want to do them.
Thus the "cobol is hard" stalling.
While there are technical issues, the real thing holding this up is politics.
3) Now you have to shoot it down. You may not realize this, but a passenger jet is FREAKING HUGE. One missile isn't going to take out a jet with 2, 3, or 4 engines. You're going to have to really go to work on that bad boy... and now it's just an out of control ball of metal and fire... braaaavoooo.
Right, and it's a good thing that the engines that get hit by missiles w/ 10 kilograms of HE (sidewinder) or 23 kilos of HE (amraam) aren't anywhere near the giant fuel tanks in the wings. Explosive decompression shouldn't be a big deal - 10 PSI isn't a huge difference.
And "drag" created by gunshot / explosive impacts shouldn't be a worry, as the plane is only traveling at ~900km/h.
Perhaps - perhaps not - 3 components in rocket fuel - oxidizer (perchlorate), fuel and a catalyst. All 3 have to be in close proximity and in the right state to work.
"Fuel" is typically fairly benign stuff - finely ground aluminum, etc - the oxidizer is the stuff that is a bit of a pain to transport.
Even if there was a total lack of fuel (unlikely) on Mars, mining the oxidizer and lifting it into orbit would dramatically lower the amount of power required in the creation of a big rocket - Mars gravity is just over 1/3rd that of Earth's.
It's not something we can use right away, but it makes setting up shop there and doing something productive a hell of a lot easier.
So, it seems to me that the important discovery is that there could be a relatively massive supply of a chemical compound which is able to produce breathable oxygen
In addition to the oxygen + rocket fuel oxidizer - all that perchlorate is in close proximity to frozen water and the gravity of Mars is 38% of Earth's. Not a bad combination if you wanted to launch some rockets elsewhere.
So as I understand it, perchlorate can be used to make rocket fuel.
Sort of -
Perchlorates are oxidizers, which technically are not the "fuel" in the reaction. Oxidzers are, however, the stuff that is somewhat dangerous to handle / transport - the fuel is normally a rather ordinary substance (i.e. in black powder the fuel is charcoal, in modern rockets, powdered aluminum)
A catalyst is required, but the less you have to ship to mars, the easier it is...
Because it sure sounds like "whole heck 'o alot of rocket fuel just lying on top of frozen water on a planet with 38% of the gravity of Earth"
Sounds like it would make space travel / trips to / from Mars dramatically easier.
Because SMS is generally free, at least in the UK and EU. It's only in the US, where they don't really understand how phones work, that they charge to both send and receive messages.
Incoming texts were free (well, included) in the USA - up to about a year and a half ago. Then, all the major players had a circle jerk where the idea was brought up and now incoming texts get charged.
Now it's happening in Canada. I'm sure when a few of the big players see how they can make a shitload of money, it'll happen there eventually.
The really big issue here is cell phone companies have extremely abusive contracts - they change something like this - but pretend that the "contract" is still valid, and will still send you bills and to collections if you don't pay.
So what to do? Sue? Good luck - the cell phone companies have "mandatory binding arbitration" clauses. The arbitration companies are, of course, completely corrupt, ruling in favor of the cell phone company in 95+% of cases. Several court cases have resulted in the clause being stricken, so now they write different contracts for different areas. If they can get away with it, they do, until someone fights a costly case in their circuit court.
IMHO, the situation needs people throwing hammers through the windows of Bell and Telus stores while yelling "unsolicited incoming text message". I think that would be far more effective than a class action.
If you have blind spots in a modern car, your mirrors are not positioned properly
Or you're driving a claustrophobic, poorly designed, small windowed piece of shit like a Dodge Caliber.
You're right. I especially notice this when I turn on my cell phone jammer. Then, about 20 seconds later, the problem takes care of itself.
Great ideas! Brilliant moderation.
What, exactly, will you do when they draw their weapons and tell you to hand it over?
What will you do to prevent the 6 guys jumping on you and holding you down as they do a cavity search - perfectly legal, btw.
Sure, it's not supposed to be a punitive thing, but do you think the border guards care?
The fact that you were "resisting" will explain any bruises or evidence of physical abuse.
What will you do as they slice open your car seats and rip apart your car "looking for drugs"? Perfectly legal, as above, and you have no recourse and won't get much, if any compensation.
Border guards have virtually unlimited authority at the border. There is also virtually no oversight and even less accountability to a civil court. Border guards aren't stupid. They know what power they have and how far they can bend the rules.
In this sense, border guards are exactly like corrupt cops. If they want something, they are going to get it.
Wow, did Carly destroy HP or what?
Yes. Those rumors of people dancing in the office on announcement of the resignation are quite true.
Some of the higher end corp stuff managed to survive, but virtually everything on the home consumer side is the typical disposable shit you now come to expect from HP.
The fact they are extending the warranty is surprising. HP's laptop support used to be utter shit. Not the worst in the industry, mind you, but shit is shit.
Women named . . . Hillary should be raped.
I think "Not even with a stolen dick" would be the consensus of quite a few Americans.