Why did the defense not need to explain how he was able to draw, aim, and fire his weapon while in such a position? This seems like a highly improbable situation that someone would be able to pull out a holstered weapon and get off an accurate shot while they are being beaten nearly to the point of losing consciousness.
It's not improbable.
It's pretty easy to draw from an IWB holster in the standard position while someone is sitting on you, unless the someone is so heavy that you can't life one hip an inch or so. As for accuracy, at a few inches range, accuracy is not hard. Also, I don't think Zimmerman claimed he was nearly losing consciousness, just that he felt that he was in danger of being killed. That's not improbable, either. You can realize you're in a position where you could be killed before a great deal of damage is actually done.
The most striking thing to me has always been that both actors would have been within their rights, under "Stand Your Ground," to attack the other.
You don't understand what "Stand Your Ground" means. It does not give you a right to attack. It just means that you do not have to try to run away if you are attacked. In this case it wasn't applied because it wasn't relevant; per Zimmerman's story he never had a chance to run away after he was attacked.
In a duty-to-retreat state I suppose the prosecution might have tried to claim that Zimmerman had a chance to run away and didn't , so I guess it's relevant in that the existence of the stand-your-ground law precluded the prosecution from trying that line of argument. However, trying to argue that would have required the prosecution to more or less stipulate that Martin attacked Zimmerman, so I doubt they would have tried it even in a duty-to-retreat state.
This means that if you carry a firearm, your duty to avoid conflicts only gets stronger because it can easily escalate into a homicide.
+1000
I make this point in my concealed weapon classes. Having a gun means you need to be much, much more careful because the presence of your gun raises the stakes. Most people who carry get that fact pretty much instinctively, but I still think it's important enough that I pound on it a bit in class.
Which is what witnesses testified to and is the only way that GZ could have used the weapon that he would have been lieing on if pinned.
The second half of your sentence assumes a fact that isn't true. Assuming GZ was carrying his IWB holster in the normal position (3:30 to 4 o'clock), it would only have been necessary to rotate his body to the left a bit in order to raise his right hip by an inch or so in order to be able to draw. Unless the person straddling you is very heavy, that's not hard to do. Just for fun I tested it. I put a similar gun in a similar holster and had my six-foot 190-pound son straddle me, and I was easily able to draw. In fact, the only way my son could stop me from drawing was to put his knee on my arm and pin it hard. Even then I was able to work my arm free, though it was hard when he put his full weight on it -- and that was on carpet. On grass it would have been easier.
His defense played both sides of "stand your ground". They claimed he was attacked and entitled to use it, even though he claimed he was not familiar with it (even though he took courses that covered it). They also tried to claim that it was somehow valid in a case where the person with the gun is pursuing the other person.
No, the defense never brought up stand your ground at all. Per the defense theory of the events, Zimmerman was pinned on the ground and getting his head slammed into concrete. In that situation there is no possibility of retreat, so whether or not a person has a legal duty to retreat isn't relevant. If Florida was a duty-to-retreat state rather than a stand-your-ground state, the outcome would have been the same.
Ultimately, this case was all about whether or not it was plausible that Zimmerman was pinned and getting his head pounded. If yes, then his decision to shoot was justifiable self-defense. If no, then it was an illegal homicide and the jury would have had to decide what kind based on whether or not the state was able to prove a depraved mindset beyond a reasonable doubt.
Well, there is one other way it could have gone: The prosecution could have tried to prove that Zimmerman had intentionally provoked Martin into pounding his head into the pavement, in order to obtain legal justification for shooting him. In most states you can't claim self-defense if you provoked the situation with the intent of being able to claim self-defense, but that's hardly ever used because it's really, really hard to prove.
41 megapixels? 41 megapixels of blurry, grainy crap with heavy chromatic aberration. Even most DSLR lenses don't provide the optical resolution to make a 41MP sensor valuable, not unless you step up to the top-end lenses which tend to be very large and heavy -- because barring some revolutionary new ideas in optics, that's what it takes to make a lens with that much optical resolution.
The only thing you'll get out of this 41 MP sensor that you wouldn't get out of an 8 MP, or even smaller, is bigger files.
This is why Google is working on project Loon. IMO, if it succeeds it will be the coolest and most impactful thing Google has ever done... and I include the search engine.
I've been wondering about how businesses use google for so much. Doesn't this give google an insider view of business happenings?
It would if Google looked. I'm sure Google's enterprise agreements state that Google will hold the customer's information confidential and will not use it except in defined ways that have to do with providing the service. Getting caught violating such agreements -- or even suspected of violating such agreements -- would be far more harmful to Google's business than any benefit that could be derived, not to mention the fact that it would violate Google's own code of conduct. Individual employees could peek and try to misuse the data, but Google is quite careful to secure the data and to audit access, and all Google employees are told in strong words at the beginning of their employment that inappropriately access customer data (even the employee's own!) is grounds for immediate termination.
Google takes security and confidentiality seriously, and has apparently done a good job of convincing its many enterprise customers that it does so.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, though the above is my own opinions and perceptions and does not represent any sort of official communication. It's just me talking.)
Too complicated for a company who's success is based on reading people's minds.
It's only complicated for the power users. For most people -- who don't type hostnames and rely on DNS automatic domain suffixing to turn them into the correct URL -- the heuristics do an excellent job of doing the right thing... and when they get it wrong the generally fail on the side of searching, which then lets the search engine pick up the slack, because people usually find that the top result is the URL they were trying to type.
It think it works really well for the common case, and reasonably well for the uncommon case.
It's woefully consistent - type a server name that is a "recognised external" URL (so something ending in.com,.co.uk,.fr, etc) and it'll go straight to the site. Type an internal server name (either a plain server name or an internal DNS name) and it will insist on searching Google, because quite obviously the user DIDN'T want localsite or site.network.internal after all.
When you type the hostname you should see a box pop down below the location bar that has two lines with what you've typed. One has a "page" icon and one has a magnifying glass. The former will try to use the text as a URL, the later will search for it using your default search engine. If you hit enter, whichever one of those lines is on top will be the action taken. Chrome tries to guess which one you most likely want using some heuristics, which in the case of abbreviated internal names general get the wrong answer, so the search line will be on top. If you hit the down arrow, though, it'll highlight the one with the page icon and hitting enter then will interpret your text as a hostname.
Another tip: If there are some hosts that you go to frequently, add them to your list of custom search engines and give them nice shortcuts. For example, I often use "teams.corp.google.com" (Google's internal white pages) to look people up. I could type "teams" and rely on default DNS suffixing to expand that out, but then I run into the exact problem you mention, requiring me to type "teams" then hit the down arrow, then return. Instead, I added it as a custom search engine with the shortcut 't'. So I just hit 't' then space then enter, and I'm there. In that case, teams actually is a search engine, so I can also type 't', then a name then enter, and it'll do a search. But I use the same thing for some internal hosts I hit frequently that aren't search engines.
I dont think that GET data embeded in the URL is encrypted
It is.
SSL/TLS creates an encrypted stream on top of the TCP stream, and the HTTP data is all transported over that. So URL, headers, body... everything is all secured.
I don't know anything about interaction with TOR. However, it's worth pointing out that if you're accessing Google via HTTPS (without TOR), your search terms are encrypted in transit.
Even in the new healthcare system proposed by the neoliberal party in the Netherlands insurance companies have to offer the same price for the basic insurance for everybody. Taxing some more than others would cause uproar.
This isn't a tax, it's an insurance premium. And why shouldn't those who make lifestyle choices which reduce their expected claims be able to get a better price? I also get a better price on my homeowner's insurance by installing handrails and smoke alarms, and by building outside of flood plains and tornado zones, and I get discounts on my auto insurance because my kids get good grades (which insurers have found is strongly correlated with safe driving among youth) and because I don't drive a sports car.
Individual choices affect the likelihood of catastrophic events, and it's perfectly reasonable to me that choices that decrease expected costs should lower premiums.
Now, whether or not smoking actually increases expected costs is a valid question. The research I've seen shows that the lifetime medical costs for smokers tends to be lower than for non-smokers, because smokers die younger and faster, and long-term care for the healthy as they slowly fade away gets really expensive. But if smoking does actually increase costs, why shouldn't smokers pay higher premiums?
Even better if you get involved earlier than the primaries... pick a party -- either party -- and go to your local caucus meetings and help influence the selection of the representatives to state caucuses who have real influence on what candidates appear on the primary ballots.
Does anyone know how this proposal relates to Google's work on SPDY and QUIC? SPDY does multiplexing, and QUIC extends that to essentially re-implement TCP in a fashion that is optimized for web traffic.
I should go read the spec, but I'm hoping that someone who already has will post a summary.
b) because Google+ has a real name policy I don't agree with.
Google backed off on that policy, FYI. There are lots of pseudonyms on Google+.
And, no, I don't want Google to propagate my search results, browser history, and marketing crap everywhere I go.
I really like that I can do a search on my desktop, then later when I'm out, say, driving to the place I searched for, I can repeat the search on my phone with a single character, or even less, because my phone knows what I searched for on the desktop. YMMV.
And, in the end, over the last few years Google has become hostile to privacy
Do you have any examples of where Google has disclosed or otherwise behaved irresponsibly with user data? I think Google is very careful to maintain user privacy. But -- as I already said -- I'm biased. (Aside: you might point at PRISM as an example of misbehavior, assuming you think Google's statements about that are lies. I think Google is being truthful.)
and I don't necessarily trust the intentions of your glorious leader
That's certainly your prerogative. Personally, based on the exposure I've had to said intentions, I have strong confidence in Larry Page. Execution may not always match intentions, of course, and there is always the possibility that eventually other leadership will take over (though given the stock voting structure that's not going to happen until Page and Brin decide to allow it), but for the foreseeable future I don't see Google turning evil.
But, if you disagree Google enables you to opt out. In some cases that means not using Google services, of course, because that's the deal: you get those services in exchange for allowing Google to show you targeted ads, and accurate targeting requires Google to know something about you. Google wants you to make an informed decision on that deal, and wants to make its services so valuable to you -- and the risk so low, through careful stewardship of your data -- that you like the deal. But if you don't, you absolutely should opt out.
So, delete your Google+ profile, and avoid doing whatever you did to create it. Or, if you prefer, delete your Google account, or just remove it from your phone/tablet. It's your choice.
There's no moral argument you can make that places the life of an undeveloped fetus over the life and interests of its mother.
That's the mother who chose to create the fetus, or at least made decisions she knew had a significant likelihood of creating it, right? I, personally, don't have a strong stake in this argument either way, but your statement ignores some pretty strong moral arguments that are based on responsibility. Granted there are cases where the mother is not responsible (e.g. rape), and responsibility-based arguments don't hold up there. There are also arguments based on the fact that carrying the child to term and then giving it up for adoption represents a relatively mild imposition on a healthy woman, while termination is a rather more severe imposition on the fetus.
Anyway, my point is that your statement is one-sided and debatable... which is why it is so heavily debated.
Sometimes the blood that waters the tree of liberty is that of innocents. You can never have perfect safety, and even trying to get very close to it will involve massive compromises in liberty. The price of liberty may just be the occasional 9/11... accepting the tragic deaths of a thousandth of a percent of the population every few years in order to avoid stomping on the freedoms of the other 99.999%.
I view the victims of terrorist attacks against a free society as unwitting, tragic heroes for the cause of freedom. At least, as long as we allow them to be. If we, on the other hand, choose to react to their deaths by smashing freedoms in a vain attempt to prevent the unpreventable, then we convert their deaths from heroic memorials for liberty to sad signposts on the road to a police state.
AFAIK, there is no such thing as a YouTube account any more; it's been merged with the Google+ account system. I think what actually happened was one of two things: either you didn't have a Google+ account and one was created (more precisely, your Google account was "upgraded" to a Google+ account), or you did have one and just didn't realize that it was being used for YouTube.
In either case, if you don't want to have a Google+ account, you can delete it, either effectively downgrading it to just a Google account or you can delete your Google account entirely. Be aware, though, that a lot of Google's other services are tied to your Google account, so only delete it if you don't use Google's other services: don't buy apps on the Play store, don't use Calendar or Contacts, don't want Google to back up your device settings, don't want search history automatically propagated between your web browser and mobile device, etc., etc., etc. Personally, I think having the account adds a lot of value to both my mobile experience and my desktop experience, and I'm also of the strong opinion that I'd rather have a single Google account across all of Google's services (and to use it for single sign-on to many other web and mobile properties) rather than manage a bunch of separate accounts, but I'm biased. You can make your own evaluation and choose appropriately; most of Google's services and products can be used without an account, except where that really doesn't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google -- I'm pretty sure I'd feel the same even if I didn't work for Google, though. Note that I don't work on any of the aforementioned stuff, and am really just speaking as a knowledgeable user, albeit one who has a fairly high degree of trust in Google's competence and intention to behave responsibly with my data and use it to help me, because a big part of my job is securing the data to prevent leakage and internal abuse).
The Judiciaries job is not to *trust* the military to do the right thing, its to *check* they are doing the right thing
The justice system is supposed to be blind and not "trust" anyone. I don't think the FISA court was set up to deal with the Constitutionality of the law itself, but to grant or deny warrants.
The fundamental basis for the FISA court's decisionmaking on the warrants is constitutionality, plus, of course, USC 50 and the established precedents. The problem isn't that that the FISA court (FISC) can't evaluate the constitutionality of the law, it can, but that FISA hearings are ex parte, so there's no one to argue the view that the law is unconstitutional.
Another serious, though subtle, problem with the FISC structure is that there is effectively no appellate review... the court has no oversight. There is an appellate court over FISC, but there is no one to force it to be used. If the government gets the answer they want from the court, fine, they go ahead. If they don't, it's purely at the government's discretion whether they want to appeal, and risk having a precedent set that goes against them if the higher court upholds the original ruling or whether they'd rather just tweak their request a bit and try again.
This creates a situation where the government can push the boundaries of what FISC will allow with no concern that they might get slapped down in any definitive way. As it turns out, based on the numbers published, the court doesn't say "no" very often anyway, and of course there is no appeals process for approved warrants.
The bottom line is that our courts are adversarial for a reason, and since the FISA procedures omit that very important element they're strongly biased in favor of whatever view the government chooses to argue -- because that's the only view that is argued.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did the defense not need to explain how he was able to draw, aim, and fire his weapon while in such a position? This seems like a highly improbable situation that someone would be able to pull out a holstered weapon and get off an accurate shot while they are being beaten nearly to the point of losing consciousness.
It's not improbable.
It's pretty easy to draw from an IWB holster in the standard position while someone is sitting on you, unless the someone is so heavy that you can't life one hip an inch or so. As for accuracy, at a few inches range, accuracy is not hard. Also, I don't think Zimmerman claimed he was nearly losing consciousness, just that he felt that he was in danger of being killed. That's not improbable, either. You can realize you're in a position where you could be killed before a great deal of damage is actually done.
On the question of drawing I posted a more complete answer here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3971423&cid=44274023
The most striking thing to me has always been that both actors would have been within their rights, under "Stand Your Ground," to attack the other.
You don't understand what "Stand Your Ground" means. It does not give you a right to attack. It just means that you do not have to try to run away if you are attacked. In this case it wasn't applied because it wasn't relevant; per Zimmerman's story he never had a chance to run away after he was attacked.
In a duty-to-retreat state I suppose the prosecution might have tried to claim that Zimmerman had a chance to run away and didn't , so I guess it's relevant in that the existence of the stand-your-ground law precluded the prosecution from trying that line of argument. However, trying to argue that would have required the prosecution to more or less stipulate that Martin attacked Zimmerman, so I doubt they would have tried it even in a duty-to-retreat state.
This means that if you carry a firearm, your duty to avoid conflicts only gets stronger because it can easily escalate into a homicide.
+1000
I make this point in my concealed weapon classes. Having a gun means you need to be much, much more careful because the presence of your gun raises the stakes. Most people who carry get that fact pretty much instinctively, but I still think it's important enough that I pound on it a bit in class.
Which is what witnesses testified to and is the only way that GZ could have used the weapon that he would have been lieing on if pinned.
The second half of your sentence assumes a fact that isn't true. Assuming GZ was carrying his IWB holster in the normal position (3:30 to 4 o'clock), it would only have been necessary to rotate his body to the left a bit in order to raise his right hip by an inch or so in order to be able to draw. Unless the person straddling you is very heavy, that's not hard to do. Just for fun I tested it. I put a similar gun in a similar holster and had my six-foot 190-pound son straddle me, and I was easily able to draw. In fact, the only way my son could stop me from drawing was to put his knee on my arm and pin it hard. Even then I was able to work my arm free, though it was hard when he put his full weight on it -- and that was on carpet. On grass it would have been easier.
His defense played both sides of "stand your ground". They claimed he was attacked and entitled to use it, even though he claimed he was not familiar with it (even though he took courses that covered it). They also tried to claim that it was somehow valid in a case where the person with the gun is pursuing the other person.
No, the defense never brought up stand your ground at all. Per the defense theory of the events, Zimmerman was pinned on the ground and getting his head slammed into concrete. In that situation there is no possibility of retreat, so whether or not a person has a legal duty to retreat isn't relevant. If Florida was a duty-to-retreat state rather than a stand-your-ground state, the outcome would have been the same.
Ultimately, this case was all about whether or not it was plausible that Zimmerman was pinned and getting his head pounded. If yes, then his decision to shoot was justifiable self-defense. If no, then it was an illegal homicide and the jury would have had to decide what kind based on whether or not the state was able to prove a depraved mindset beyond a reasonable doubt.
Well, there is one other way it could have gone: The prosecution could have tried to prove that Zimmerman had intentionally provoked Martin into pounding his head into the pavement, in order to obtain legal justification for shooting him. In most states you can't claim self-defense if you provoked the situation with the intent of being able to claim self-defense, but that's hardly ever used because it's really, really hard to prove.
41 megapixels? 41 megapixels of blurry, grainy crap with heavy chromatic aberration. Even most DSLR lenses don't provide the optical resolution to make a 41MP sensor valuable, not unless you step up to the top-end lenses which tend to be very large and heavy -- because barring some revolutionary new ideas in optics, that's what it takes to make a lens with that much optical resolution.
The only thing you'll get out of this 41 MP sensor that you wouldn't get out of an 8 MP, or even smaller, is bigger files.
This is why Google is working on project Loon. IMO, if it succeeds it will be the coolest and most impactful thing Google has ever done... and I include the search engine.
I've been wondering about how businesses use google for so much. Doesn't this give google an insider view of business happenings?
It would if Google looked. I'm sure Google's enterprise agreements state that Google will hold the customer's information confidential and will not use it except in defined ways that have to do with providing the service. Getting caught violating such agreements -- or even suspected of violating such agreements -- would be far more harmful to Google's business than any benefit that could be derived, not to mention the fact that it would violate Google's own code of conduct. Individual employees could peek and try to misuse the data, but Google is quite careful to secure the data and to audit access, and all Google employees are told in strong words at the beginning of their employment that inappropriately access customer data (even the employee's own!) is grounds for immediate termination.
Google takes security and confidentiality seriously, and has apparently done a good job of convincing its many enterprise customers that it does so.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, though the above is my own opinions and perceptions and does not represent any sort of official communication. It's just me talking.)
It's only complicated for the power users.
So in other words it punishes people for being competent.
That's one way to view it. Another is that choices have to be made, and Google chooses to optimize for the many rather than the few.
Too complicated for a company who's success is based on reading people's minds.
It's only complicated for the power users. For most people -- who don't type hostnames and rely on DNS automatic domain suffixing to turn them into the correct URL -- the heuristics do an excellent job of doing the right thing... and when they get it wrong the generally fail on the side of searching, which then lets the search engine pick up the slack, because people usually find that the top result is the URL they were trying to type.
It think it works really well for the common case, and reasonably well for the uncommon case.
It's woefully consistent - type a server name that is a "recognised external" URL (so something ending in .com, .co.uk, .fr, etc) and it'll go straight to the site. Type an internal server name (either a plain server name or an internal DNS name) and it will insist on searching Google, because quite obviously the user DIDN'T want localsite or site.network.internal after all.
When you type the hostname you should see a box pop down below the location bar that has two lines with what you've typed. One has a "page" icon and one has a magnifying glass. The former will try to use the text as a URL, the later will search for it using your default search engine. If you hit enter, whichever one of those lines is on top will be the action taken. Chrome tries to guess which one you most likely want using some heuristics, which in the case of abbreviated internal names general get the wrong answer, so the search line will be on top. If you hit the down arrow, though, it'll highlight the one with the page icon and hitting enter then will interpret your text as a hostname.
Another tip: If there are some hosts that you go to frequently, add them to your list of custom search engines and give them nice shortcuts. For example, I often use "teams.corp.google.com" (Google's internal white pages) to look people up. I could type "teams" and rely on default DNS suffixing to expand that out, but then I run into the exact problem you mention, requiring me to type "teams" then hit the down arrow, then return. Instead, I added it as a custom search engine with the shortcut 't'. So I just hit 't' then space then enter, and I'm there. In that case, teams actually is a search engine, so I can also type 't', then a name then enter, and it'll do a search. But I use the same thing for some internal hosts I hit frequently that aren't search engines.
A fetus isn't a child. End of discussion.
Ah, well, I'll call a press conference so you can explain that to everyone. I'm sure they'll all be enlightened, and no one will disagree.
I dont think that GET data embeded in the URL is encrypted
It is.
SSL/TLS creates an encrypted stream on top of the TCP stream, and the HTTP data is all transported over that. So URL, headers, body... everything is all secured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security
I don't know anything about interaction with TOR. However, it's worth pointing out that if you're accessing Google via HTTPS (without TOR), your search terms are encrypted in transit.
Even in the new healthcare system proposed by the neoliberal party in the Netherlands insurance companies have to offer the same price for the basic insurance for everybody. Taxing some more than others would cause uproar.
This isn't a tax, it's an insurance premium. And why shouldn't those who make lifestyle choices which reduce their expected claims be able to get a better price? I also get a better price on my homeowner's insurance by installing handrails and smoke alarms, and by building outside of flood plains and tornado zones, and I get discounts on my auto insurance because my kids get good grades (which insurers have found is strongly correlated with safe driving among youth) and because I don't drive a sports car.
Individual choices affect the likelihood of catastrophic events, and it's perfectly reasonable to me that choices that decrease expected costs should lower premiums.
Now, whether or not smoking actually increases expected costs is a valid question. The research I've seen shows that the lifetime medical costs for smokers tends to be lower than for non-smokers, because smokers die younger and faster, and long-term care for the healthy as they slowly fade away gets really expensive. But if smoking does actually increase costs, why shouldn't smokers pay higher premiums?
Even better if you get involved earlier than the primaries... pick a party -- either party -- and go to your local caucus meetings and help influence the selection of the representatives to state caucuses who have real influence on what candidates appear on the primary ballots.
Does anyone know how this proposal relates to Google's work on SPDY and QUIC? SPDY does multiplexing, and QUIC extends that to essentially re-implement TCP in a fashion that is optimized for web traffic.
I should go read the spec, but I'm hoping that someone who already has will post a summary.
b) because Google+ has a real name policy I don't agree with.
Google backed off on that policy, FYI. There are lots of pseudonyms on Google+.
And, no, I don't want Google to propagate my search results, browser history, and marketing crap everywhere I go.
I really like that I can do a search on my desktop, then later when I'm out, say, driving to the place I searched for, I can repeat the search on my phone with a single character, or even less, because my phone knows what I searched for on the desktop. YMMV.
And, in the end, over the last few years Google has become hostile to privacy
Do you have any examples of where Google has disclosed or otherwise behaved irresponsibly with user data? I think Google is very careful to maintain user privacy. But -- as I already said -- I'm biased. (Aside: you might point at PRISM as an example of misbehavior, assuming you think Google's statements about that are lies. I think Google is being truthful.)
and I don't necessarily trust the intentions of your glorious leader
That's certainly your prerogative. Personally, based on the exposure I've had to said intentions, I have strong confidence in Larry Page. Execution may not always match intentions, of course, and there is always the possibility that eventually other leadership will take over (though given the stock voting structure that's not going to happen until Page and Brin decide to allow it), but for the foreseeable future I don't see Google turning evil.
But, if you disagree Google enables you to opt out. In some cases that means not using Google services, of course, because that's the deal: you get those services in exchange for allowing Google to show you targeted ads, and accurate targeting requires Google to know something about you. Google wants you to make an informed decision on that deal, and wants to make its services so valuable to you -- and the risk so low, through careful stewardship of your data -- that you like the deal. But if you don't, you absolutely should opt out.
So, delete your Google+ profile, and avoid doing whatever you did to create it. Or, if you prefer, delete your Google account, or just remove it from your phone/tablet. It's your choice.
There's no moral argument you can make that places the life of an undeveloped fetus over the life and interests of its mother.
That's the mother who chose to create the fetus, or at least made decisions she knew had a significant likelihood of creating it, right? I, personally, don't have a strong stake in this argument either way, but your statement ignores some pretty strong moral arguments that are based on responsibility. Granted there are cases where the mother is not responsible (e.g. rape), and responsibility-based arguments don't hold up there. There are also arguments based on the fact that carrying the child to term and then giving it up for adoption represents a relatively mild imposition on a healthy woman, while termination is a rather more severe imposition on the fetus.
Anyway, my point is that your statement is one-sided and debatable... which is why it is so heavily debated.
Sometimes the blood that waters the tree of liberty is that of innocents. You can never have perfect safety, and even trying to get very close to it will involve massive compromises in liberty. The price of liberty may just be the occasional 9/11... accepting the tragic deaths of a thousandth of a percent of the population every few years in order to avoid stomping on the freedoms of the other 99.999%.
I view the victims of terrorist attacks against a free society as unwitting, tragic heroes for the cause of freedom. At least, as long as we allow them to be. If we, on the other hand, choose to react to their deaths by smashing freedoms in a vain attempt to prevent the unpreventable, then we convert their deaths from heroic memorials for liberty to sad signposts on the road to a police state.
AFAIK, there is no such thing as a YouTube account any more; it's been merged with the Google+ account system. I think what actually happened was one of two things: either you didn't have a Google+ account and one was created (more precisely, your Google account was "upgraded" to a Google+ account), or you did have one and just didn't realize that it was being used for YouTube.
In either case, if you don't want to have a Google+ account, you can delete it, either effectively downgrading it to just a Google account or you can delete your Google account entirely. Be aware, though, that a lot of Google's other services are tied to your Google account, so only delete it if you don't use Google's other services: don't buy apps on the Play store, don't use Calendar or Contacts, don't want Google to back up your device settings, don't want search history automatically propagated between your web browser and mobile device, etc., etc., etc. Personally, I think having the account adds a lot of value to both my mobile experience and my desktop experience, and I'm also of the strong opinion that I'd rather have a single Google account across all of Google's services (and to use it for single sign-on to many other web and mobile properties) rather than manage a bunch of separate accounts, but I'm biased. You can make your own evaluation and choose appropriately; most of Google's services and products can be used without an account, except where that really doesn't make sense.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google -- I'm pretty sure I'd feel the same even if I didn't work for Google, though. Note that I don't work on any of the aforementioned stuff, and am really just speaking as a knowledgeable user, albeit one who has a fairly high degree of trust in Google's competence and intention to behave responsibly with my data and use it to help me, because a big part of my job is securing the data to prevent leakage and internal abuse).
American pilots had the same problem from the 40 to the 80's or so as the airlines were highering mostly exmilitary
Sir, I applaud your refusal to be dictated to by the supposed authorities who specify what they call "proper" spelling. Sadly, I lack your backbone.
The Judiciaries job is not to *trust* the military to do the right thing, its to *check* they are doing the right thing
The justice system is supposed to be blind and not "trust" anyone. I don't think the FISA court was set up to deal with the Constitutionality of the law itself, but to grant or deny warrants.
The fundamental basis for the FISA court's decisionmaking on the warrants is constitutionality, plus, of course, USC 50 and the established precedents. The problem isn't that that the FISA court (FISC) can't evaluate the constitutionality of the law, it can, but that FISA hearings are ex parte, so there's no one to argue the view that the law is unconstitutional.
Another serious, though subtle, problem with the FISC structure is that there is effectively no appellate review... the court has no oversight. There is an appellate court over FISC, but there is no one to force it to be used. If the government gets the answer they want from the court, fine, they go ahead. If they don't, it's purely at the government's discretion whether they want to appeal, and risk having a precedent set that goes against them if the higher court upholds the original ruling or whether they'd rather just tweak their request a bit and try again.
This creates a situation where the government can push the boundaries of what FISC will allow with no concern that they might get slapped down in any definitive way. As it turns out, based on the numbers published, the court doesn't say "no" very often anyway, and of course there is no appeals process for approved warrants.
The bottom line is that our courts are adversarial for a reason, and since the FISA procedures omit that very important element they're strongly biased in favor of whatever view the government chooses to argue -- because that's the only view that is argued.
Possibly, but that certainly wouldn't be related to what you searched for.
Did you have a legal duty to be truthful, as in you could be prosecuted for lying to the public? Officers of publicly-traded companies do.