"Taser" is not a common English word as defined in the dictionary, or at least no more so than, say "Xerox", "Kleenex", or "iPod". In Merriam-Webster Online, it reads:
taser
One entry found.
Main Entry:
Taser Listen to the pronunciation of Taser
Pronunciation:
\t-zr\
Function:
trademark
--used for a gun that fires electrified darts to stun and immobilize a person
Note that "function: trademark"
In fact, I don't think Taser even makes the common stun-gun, the little thing with electrodes. I believe their claim to fame is the dart-firing aspect, such that the target (victim, perp, whatever) can be dropped from a short distance, without having to wait until they're on top of you.
I knew there was a mildly funny story about the name, and I just found it. TASER is an acronym, and it's condensed from "Tom Swift's Electric Rifle." "Tasing," therefore, is a back-creation (although, in fairness, so is "lasing"--although people have lazed on couches for centuries, nobody got anything to lase until the invention of the laser, which was a quick way to refer to "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation," which was in turn cribbed from the earlier "maser.")
Now "stun-gun"--that's probably a common English phrase, albeit of recent creation, just like "copy machine," "snot rag," and "mp3 player."
Actually he apparently has been an insurance salesman, not exactly a field full of shiny distractions. The job as a CO, it turns out, is while he waits for the lawsuit to unwind (which was three years at the time of the report--and apparently his attention hasn't wandered.)
What I find almost as disturbing is that it sounds like the upper limit comes from the testing company's recommendations, rather than the P.D.'s experience. What if the people at Wonderlic simply assume that nobody with brains would want to be a cop?
Their range of intelligence for cops is about the same they suggest for telephone operators, but below their suggestion for "administrators." You tell me--desk jobs require flexible, creative thinking ("Why, I could use the canary copy for this!",) whereas street cops just follow rigid, scripted procedures, unchanging from day to day, like telephone operators? Does that really strike you as reasonable? Do you want your neighborhood cop to be as inflexible as AOL support, with a simple menu of options that's supposed to cover every situation?
Of course, the administrators who buy the Wonderlic tests and follow their guidelines--they need to be smart.
You're concerned that EPIC might be a fly-by-night? Our UID's are in the same order of magnitude--how could you be so unfamiliar with an organization that has, by and large, been quite popular with the Slashdot crowd for at least a decade? (Can I search back before 1999?)
What, you've never anthropomorphized your palm, maybe as Jemma Jameson?
More seriously, though, I like my Z22 precisely because it's a simple PDA. I have a phone, I have a camera, I have a music player, and for that matter I have a knife and a fork, and I have no desire to have all those things combined into one monster device (a FrankenBerry?)
A lot of people gave up their seats and moved to the back of the bus because sure, they weren't looking for trouble. Rosa Parks accepted trouble as the price of change.
Her demand was irrational and unreasonable, and she needed to be defied from the get-go. Class notes are the student's interpretations of the material presented during the class, and no more belong to the teacher, whatever her reasons, then the student's memories.
Hey, I am one of those "mysterious devices of 1959," and I'll have you know that I'm not lost in the mists of time--I just can't remember where I parked the car. I'll be fine.
This was an economics class. Do you figure that the instructor was presenting entirely new material, or was she, in fact, distributing the distillation of her own classes and reading?
I'm just an ignorant yutz, but I have taken a couple of college classes, and an NDA was never part of it.
I'll give you dialing, although my phone has voice-command dialing and I'll bet yours does too, and the police use multiple channels. Still, I don't initiate calls when I'm driving (mostly I ride mass transit anyway.)
I just suspect what I call "the pit-bull effect." Golden retrievers who bite children rarely make the paper, but pit-bulls do. If we see an idiot sail across three lanes of highway singing to the radio, he's an idiot, but if he's on the phone, it's the phone. I'm guessing that idiots are idiots.
I'd be interested to see figures on the number of accidents that have occurred while police and cabbies are using the radio (as near as I can tell that's the standard--if the driver was talking on the phone at the time of the crash, then it's "cell-phone related", even if he was hit by a meteor.) Maybe those figures are a standard part of every cell-phone analysis, but I've never seen them in press coverage of cell-phone bans and such.
So I'm still wondering: cops drive around talking on the radio, usually with a handset, and yet they don't seem to be driving blindly into phone poles and whatnot. Is there a magical exception to the "driving while distracted" rule that applies only to cops and cabbies? (And please don't tell me that cabbies are specially trained to deal with the radio. Maybe in London they are, but here in the U.S. rudimentary English is barely a requirement.)
FWIW, when I was banging a register, I cared. I looked at the signature, and if it didn't match, I asked for ID, and if that didn't match I tore up the transaction. "My mom told me to get school supplies," didn't work on me, and a signed letter of authority got bumped up to a grown-up.
Of course I was pissing into the wind, but at least I can say that most cashiers don't care.
Ah, the shortsightedness of youth. Sit down at grandpa's knee and let me tell you of my youth, when airplanes were hijacked to Cuba by almost everybody, and Japanese people shot up airports, and German and Italian terrorists were almost as feared as the Irish, never mind crew-cut Americans driving rented trucks.
Sure, you can grab all the Muslims, and that might bag you two-thirds of the world's fanatics, but that last third will still kill you dead.
Have advertisers markedly decreased their buying of TV commercial time? No, because you don't have to pay attention for it to work.
Well, that and because advertising is what they know how to do. When all you have is a hammer, etc...
I'm not sure that anybody has ever demonstrated that ads work, exactly, but it seems pretty obvious that keeping quiet won't work, so companies do what seems like it makes sense.
And of course, with every indication that we're flipping past or otherwise ignoring ads, it's equally common sense that advertisers will announce that such actions don't matter, that some sort of subliminal effect is at work here, so that buying all that airtime still makes sense. Since nobody's really sure that their ads have ever worked, this new theory is hard to disprove.
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It's not precisely unprecedented. Toulouse-Lautrec's posters outgrew eBay some time ago.
Note that "function: trademark"
In fact, I don't think Taser even makes the common stun-gun, the little thing with electrodes. I believe their claim to fame is the dart-firing aspect, such that the target (victim, perp, whatever) can be dropped from a short distance, without having to wait until they're on top of you.
I knew there was a mildly funny story about the name, and I just found it. TASER is an acronym, and it's condensed from "Tom Swift's Electric Rifle." "Tasing," therefore, is a back-creation (although, in fairness, so is "lasing"--although people have lazed on couches for centuries, nobody got anything to lase until the invention of the laser, which was a quick way to refer to "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation," which was in turn cribbed from the earlier "maser.")
Now "stun-gun"--that's probably a common English phrase, albeit of recent creation, just like "copy machine," "snot rag," and "mp3 player."
What I find almost as disturbing is that it sounds like the upper limit comes from the testing company's recommendations, rather than the P.D.'s experience. What if the people at Wonderlic simply assume that nobody with brains would want to be a cop?
Their range of intelligence for cops is about the same they suggest for telephone operators, but below their suggestion for "administrators." You tell me--desk jobs require flexible, creative thinking ("Why, I could use the canary copy for this!",) whereas street cops just follow rigid, scripted procedures, unchanging from day to day, like telephone operators? Does that really strike you as reasonable? Do you want your neighborhood cop to be as inflexible as AOL support, with a simple menu of options that's supposed to cover every situation?
Of course, the administrators who buy the Wonderlic tests and follow their guidelines--they need to be smart.
I don't want to make too much from your choice of phrasing, but, "won't even have a chance to gun people down"!?
May I suggest, "won't ever have reason to gun people down," or "won't ever be caught in a firefight"?
But the guy was already a corrections officer!/I> Apparently he managed the boredom of sitting around a jail all day.
Welcome to the United States Senate!
You're concerned that EPIC might be a fly-by-night? Our UID's are in the same order of magnitude--how could you be so unfamiliar with an organization that has, by and large, been quite popular with the Slashdot crowd for at least a decade? (Can I search back before 1999?)
Although I am inclinated toward your position, agreement-wise, I think we should conversate about this before decisionating the matter.
I'm not sure, but the DS9 reference is kind of disturbing.
What, you've never anthropomorphized your palm, maybe as Jemma Jameson?
More seriously, though, I like my Z22 precisely because it's a simple PDA. I have a phone, I have a camera, I have a music player, and for that matter I have a knife and a fork, and I have no desire to have all those things combined into one monster device (a FrankenBerry?)
So is this a reward for efficiency or simply a penalty for anonymity?
A lot of people gave up their seats and moved to the back of the bus because sure, they weren't looking for trouble. Rosa Parks accepted trouble as the price of change.
They still soldier on: http://www.breadbox.com/
Her demand was irrational and unreasonable, and she needed to be defied from the get-go. Class notes are the student's interpretations of the material presented during the class, and no more belong to the teacher, whatever her reasons, then the student's memories.
Hey, I am one of those "mysterious devices of 1959," and I'll have you know that I'm not lost in the mists of time--I just can't remember where I parked the car. I'll be fine.
The distribution!?
This was an economics class. Do you figure that the instructor was presenting entirely new material, or was she, in fact, distributing the distillation of her own classes and reading?
I'm just an ignorant yutz, but I have taken a couple of college classes, and an NDA was never part of it.
I'll give you dialing, although my phone has voice-command dialing and I'll bet yours does too, and the police use multiple channels. Still, I don't initiate calls when I'm driving (mostly I ride mass transit anyway.)
I just suspect what I call "the pit-bull effect." Golden retrievers who bite children rarely make the paper, but pit-bulls do. If we see an idiot sail across three lanes of highway singing to the radio, he's an idiot, but if he's on the phone, it's the phone. I'm guessing that idiots are idiots.
I'd be interested to see figures on the number of accidents that have occurred while police and cabbies are using the radio (as near as I can tell that's the standard--if the driver was talking on the phone at the time of the crash, then it's "cell-phone related", even if he was hit by a meteor.) Maybe those figures are a standard part of every cell-phone analysis, but I've never seen them in press coverage of cell-phone bans and such.
So I'm still wondering: cops drive around talking on the radio, usually with a handset, and yet they don't seem to be driving blindly into phone poles and whatnot. Is there a magical exception to the "driving while distracted" rule that applies only to cops and cabbies? (And please don't tell me that cabbies are specially trained to deal with the radio. Maybe in London they are, but here in the U.S. rudimentary English is barely a requirement.)
FWIW, when I was banging a register, I cared. I looked at the signature, and if it didn't match, I asked for ID, and if that didn't match I tore up the transaction. "My mom told me to get school supplies," didn't work on me, and a signed letter of authority got bumped up to a grown-up.
Of course I was pissing into the wind, but at least I can say that most cashiers don't care.
Ah, the shortsightedness of youth. Sit down at grandpa's knee and let me tell you of my youth, when airplanes were hijacked to Cuba by almost everybody, and Japanese people shot up airports, and German and Italian terrorists were almost as feared as the Irish, never mind crew-cut Americans driving rented trucks.
Sure, you can grab all the Muslims, and that might bag you two-thirds of the world's fanatics, but that last third will still kill you dead.
Well, that, and Bender would have told them to "bite his shiny metal ass" and they wouldn't have learned much of anything.
And how is Professor Knuth these days?
You haven't seen how the US handles casualties of war, have you?
Eye patches and canes, maybe a dog for officers. You can't make an omelet without breaking legs.
As for civilians, well. . .
Yeah, probably even like mildly-retarded guys from the South, who go off to Viet Nam and then meet LBJ and stuff...
Well, that and because advertising is what they know how to do. When all you have is a hammer, etc...
I'm not sure that anybody has ever demonstrated that ads work, exactly, but it seems pretty obvious that keeping quiet won't work, so companies do what seems like it makes sense.
And of course, with every indication that we're flipping past or otherwise ignoring ads, it's equally common sense that advertisers will announce that such actions don't matter, that some sort of subliminal effect is at work here, so that buying all that airtime still makes sense. Since nobody's really sure that their ads have ever worked, this new theory is hard to disprove.