IMO, if students don't show up for roll call too often, you talk to them. Then you talk to their parents.
The problem there, though? The kids have learned not to care, and the parents actually get offended when the school dares to question why Billy didn't show up for class (no doubt with some excuse including at least three words from the list "peanut", "gifted", "gluten", "red dye", and "thimerosal")
My parents getting that same call would have meant I'd wish I died from a peanut allergy instead.
More to the point, though: "We're very confident we can still maintain a safe and secure school because of the 200 cameras that are installed" pretty much says it all. Fire that useless sack of buzzwords immediately, because he clearly doesn't belong anywhere near teenagers doing their damnedest to test the limits of their captors.
Free hint: My highschool had exactly zero cameras, and worked perfectly smoothly thanks to a very simple concept - At any given time (other than the five minutes between classes), you belong in one place, and you don't belong anywhere else. If you don't go to class, the teacher notices. If you go somewhere else - Any faculty in that location notice. If you go behind the gym to smoke - The vice principal will catch you. No cameras or RFID tags required.
I use a gas or electric stove on a nightly basis! Some nights I even *sobs* barbecue!
Wow. So these things make slightly less nanoscale dust than most 2D printers (which, inkjet or laser, make dusting your bookshelf look practically good for you). Call me when the liberal media stops trying to spread FUD about "gun printers".
I've heard that as well, but can't seem to get around that it would be unlikely that all the glass would be installed with the thicker part towards the bottom.
Want to know how I know you know jack shit about explosives?
The same way I know you know jack shit about the real world, Mr. Military Demolitions Expert?
They used vans and SUVs because of the shit crudeness of their fertilizer+diesel bombs.
They used shitty crude fertilizer+diesel bombs because the average Joe can get fertilizer and diesel (and even then, if you don't run a local farm, good luck getting more than a few pounds of ammonium nitrate).
I could take a Smart car packed with C-4 just inside of the frame/body and do way more damage.
No doubt you could! And how, do you suppose, you would obtain that much C4 without raising every red flag in the intelligence community?
Hey, if the TSA had exactly that information and searched the car based on reasonable suspicion, consider me on their side in this one. But we all know that didn't happen, they just found yet another way to abuse the interface between government and business to give a great big
"fuck you" to our 4th amendment rights.
If you have never heard of car bombs, you should start watching international news.
You can't hide a car bomb big enough to cause serious damage to anything outside the car. Successful attacks against structures have, without exception, used unmarked vans and dark-tinted SUVs for a reason.
A valet, entirely without conducting a formal search, can instantly tell whether or not a car poses an explosive threat to the airport. The act of helping the passenger get their bags from the trunk and then driving the car to the long-term lot automatically rules out any plausible hiding spots for enough explosives to make it into a WMD or national security issue.
Not to say, of course, that you couldn't fit enough somewhere in the body of the car to seriously damage the car itself, any occupants, and perhaps break a few windows of nearby cars - The Boston Marathon bombing proved roughly what you can do with a small well-placed bomb; but "Lot Z3" doesn't exactly equal the finish line of a marathon in terms of the number of squishy pink sacks of meat available for embedding shrapnel in.
Every single non-technical person in the company, who have no clue whatsoever about the implications of this, don't care about all your "paranoid theories", and "just want the damned thing to work!"
The same people who give their email address to every popup ad that asks for it and then bitch to IT about all the spam they get. And then bitch about all the still-spam-but-of-interest-to-them they stop getting when you turn up the filters on their account. And then bitch about having to remember yet another password when you give them access to manage their own spam filter settings and can't you just be a dear and go in every morning and manually delete the spam they don't want but let the spam they do want through?
They hated it because it laid the blame squarely where it belonged, at the foot of a very difficult problem to resolve, unless you made automatic local replicas of LDAP subtrees.
A shortsighted and arbitrary kernel limitation does not really count as the fault of the downstream devs who get to suffer for it. As you point out, your "solution" actively encouraged your devs to make a completely wasteful userspace cache of something the kernel should just provide transparently; since you already know this solution, and apparently had access to the kernel code - Why didn''t you either fix the limitation, or if not possible, just build the damned cache yourself and serve high-latency requests from it, rather than getting into a blame-game with people who (reasonably) just expect LDAP to work as advertised?
Yeah, this spackles over a herd of issues that should actually be resolved
No one except the network admin gives the least damn about "why" it happens. They want email (or more accurately, they want MSN and Fox Sports) back up, and they want it back up NOW. Telling the CIO that you knew about an instant likely "fix" but chose to leave the company crippled for half an hour will generally get you escorted to your car.
Overall, I agree, TFA reads like "we rock because..." self-congratulatory masturbation. But some of your responses (except the last one, interestingly) make it sound like you work for a company with a near-infinite IT budget and a sane CIO. Those count as an extreme rarity in the real world, never forget that.
These sound like valid concerns, If it's not in writing, it's not going to happen - any city that's worked with a developer knows that the developer will promise the world "Oh yes, we'll build a park on every street corner and a paved jogging/biking trail around the perimeter of the development, trust us", but when funds run short, the development ends up with a patch of dirt called a "park", and fifty feet of paved trail that goes nowhere.
While true, take a look at the rest of Florida - You want suburban sprawl? They wrote the friggin' book on it. Mile after mile of endless (and currently massively underpopulated) yuppy/retiree housing developments stretching from one coast to the other.
Whether or not Destiny fell short of its goal, I don't see how it could have done any worse than the default situation there. And given the stated intent of that community, even if the developers "glossed over" a few points, their target audience might have enough motivation to fill in some of those gaps.
Of course, that all assumes the whole project doesn't include the standard "the HOA considers solar panels ugly, and demands you water your exactly-2in-grass even in a drought" clause in every deed. It amazes me people still fall for those things. Funny, really, how many people who want to control what their neighbors do, don't realize that it works both ways.
Seriously though, I think, with the exception of the "Alex P. Keatons" among us, virtually all programmers would rather work doing some sort of pure research for the betterment of humanity, than helping some sycophantic management team please the board/stockholders for yet another quarter.
Reality of the situation, though, you (and I, and all of us) have chosen the very same thing you claim has disillusioned you. You have chosen to want a paycheck. Make no mistake, for every one software engineering job position you see posted, you can find a hundred good causes that need volunteer coders. Except, good luck getting a steady paycheck if you go that route - Short of actually becoming a professor, you very much need to treat it as an act of charity.
Which leaves you to ask yourself: Can you really afford to live without a paycheck? If you can't answer "yes" without hesitation, hey, they don't call it "work" because we go there to have eight hours of fun every day.
As a compromise solution many of us have taken, do your good deeds on the side. Get that paycheck, and put 10-20 hours a week into a FOSS project, or helping the local foodbank set up a useable LAN from their pile of 15 year old mostly-DOA donated junk, or if you still have a few "in"s at your university, ask a few of your favorite non-CS professors if they have any projects that could use your skills (almost all of them do). But make a living first and foremost.
Because most people can't remember a long string of numbers but they can easily remember three english words.
If you can remember just eight digits - Two groups of four, less than a complete long distance telephone number - That will put you within half a mile of your target location. Add two more digits (the length of an LD phone number including the "1"), and it puts you to less than a football field away.
Then again, we have DNS in the first place because non-geeks couldn't manage four groups of three, so, I don't seriously expect them to do much better with lat&long.
the lock on that 92FS could be quickly and easily removed without much effort. That could be picked easily or removed with bolt cutters.
So our intent has shifted from "keep your 4YO from accidentally shooting himself" to "made of unobtanium".
Show me anything portable that a cutting torch won't turn into swiss cheese, if we want to invoke large tools as a means of bypassing them. But I haven't met many toddlers who've studied the MIT Guide to Lockpicking.
That "Anti-Gun Propaganda" was being spewed by a gun owner and a CWL holder.
Fair enough. I gave it about five seconds, noticed the total length, scrolled through the video looking for "here's where he defeats a trigger lock" in another five, and closed the window. Kinda my point, even if I mistook the overall focus of the video.
Instead of a nice 15 second clip of someone defeating a trigger lock (you could have found hundreds of them - Hell, your link had three linked from it), you posted 40 minutes of anti-gun FUD propagandist bullshit? Classy.
And as for locks - some trigger locks count as a joke. That amounts to a straw-man, however; some balcony rails count as a joke, but we don't scream bloody murder that we need to ban balconies - We buy functional rather than purely decorative rails instead.
You want an effective cheap gun lock? If you can Fire this with the lock in place, I'll buy you a beer (or a wine spritzer with some foofoo garnish, if you prefer). Five seconds on and off, and you can't even seat the magazine, much less rack it.
They cost more, and have lower reliability. Why would they sell well?
The only people buying "smart" guns fall into the "I fear/hate guns and want them banned and only own that one to show all my friends as a proof of concept". Anyone actually interested in owning a firearm for self defense, or hell, even just for hunting, will stick to something that doesn't beep in error and ask you to re-authenticate right when you have that deer - or soon-to-be rapist - in your sights.
$3.8M per year for ten years. Get out, retire young. I would take that deal in a frickin' heartbeat.
Hmm...
Hey, Uncle Sam, I hear you need some replacement bomb detectors. Have you taken a look at my brand of detectors that work by the difficult-to-disprove tachyon flux method? Sure, they cost 50% more, but I guarantee at least one of us won't regret your buying them as I sip mohitos on my private beach a decade from now...
It's interesting how many terrorists are trained as engineers.
I would call that more of a sampling bias.
You basically have one core prerequisite for driving someone to acts of terrorism - Extreme belief in a position that most others don't hold, about which you feel the "wrong" opinion will cause massive damage on a large, even global, scale.
You can then divide that into two groups - The wrong and the right. The former, for some reason, almost always seem to act based on belief in imaginary creatures - Tree spirits, Allah, Gaia, Jesus, unicorns, what-have-you. The latter tend to see things in an unusually unfiltered way, and realize that we as a species amount to little more than a harmful bacterial colony run amuk in the petri dish we call "Earth"
So, you have your prerequisites there. Now for the sample bias: Relidiots focus their intellectual efforts primarily in memorizing indoctrinating material and suppressing their logical abilities to allow them to survive the cognitive dissonance of uttering seven mutually inconsistent ideas before breakfast every morning. Engineers focus their intellectual efforts on understanding the basic principles by which our universe actually works, with a particularly perverse twist toward favoring the practical over the theoretical.
Which one can cause more destruction? Science works better than praying for a plague of locusts. Simple as that.
Because he has a grasp of the English language that extends beyond calling every gun an "assault rifle", every worthless punk a "terrorist", every deadbeat a "victim of poor credit", and everyone who disagrees with him "faaaaaags"?
Going after 14YOs would make someone an ephebophile, not a pedo.
As long as we as a society accept that people have the right to pick whatever fucked up religious beliefs they want, then we as a society have to deal with the consequences of real live modern humans expressing all the petty tribal prejudices of the past few thousand years, simple as that. Racism, misogyny, suicide bombers, birth control as a goddamned (no pun intended) presidential-race-changing issue... The crazy comes as a package deal, you don't get to pick and chose from God's Law (and spare me the "why don't you obey all of Leviticus" rhetoric, we already agree completely on that).
So yes, those calling Card out as a hypocrite on this do indeed express intolerance. He sincerely believes that his personal storm-god objects to homosexuality. You (and I) happen to believe that consenting adults should have the right to do whatever the hell they want with each other. Both of those express nothing but an opinion, with the one no more valid than the other. We would argue that we have the "right" to choose. He would argue that yes, we do, but one of those ways gives you a complimentary handbasket for your trip downstairs.
See the movie or don't, but we'd all do better to leave the politics out of whether or not we enjoy the movie.
Bad drug policy certainly takes its share of blame for our exploding prison population thanks to massive incarceration of nonviolent "criminals", for destroying lives and families rather than promoting treatment, for costing billions at the same time it made virtually all local PDs dependent on the sweet, sweet teat of civil asset forfeiture. But actual violence? That has a much simpler explanation, known since Roman times.
"In Soviet Russia" jokes aside, I hate to tell you this, but the KGB would have given Vlad Kryuchkov's left nut to have anywhere near the "Total Information Awareness" at the NSA's disposal today.
The US intelligence agencies have a better reputation than their Soviet or Nazi Germany era counterparts for one and one reason only - They prefer to go high-tech rather than break kneecaps. And make no mistake, while I drastically prefer keeping my kneecaps intact, their goals count as no more or less noble than the legendary atrocities of their predecessors.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, if students don't show up for roll call too often, you talk to them. Then you talk to their parents.
The problem there, though? The kids have learned not to care, and the parents actually get offended when the school dares to question why Billy didn't show up for class (no doubt with some excuse including at least three words from the list "peanut", "gifted", "gluten", "red dye", and "thimerosal")
My parents getting that same call would have meant I'd wish I died from a peanut allergy instead.
More to the point, though: "We're very confident we can still maintain a safe and secure school because of the 200 cameras that are installed" pretty much says it all. Fire that useless sack of buzzwords immediately, because he clearly doesn't belong anywhere near teenagers doing their damnedest to test the limits of their captors.
Free hint: My highschool had exactly zero cameras, and worked perfectly smoothly thanks to a very simple concept - At any given time (other than the five minutes between classes), you belong in one place, and you don't belong anywhere else. If you don't go to class, the teacher notices. If you go somewhere else - Any faculty in that location notice. If you go behind the gym to smoke - The vice principal will catch you. No cameras or RFID tags required.
Oh... My... Gawd!
I use a gas or electric stove on a nightly basis! Some nights I even *sobs* barbecue!
Wow. So these things make slightly less nanoscale dust than most 2D printers (which, inkjet or laser, make dusting your bookshelf look practically good for you). Call me when the liberal media stops trying to spread FUD about "gun printers".
well their study has the PLA result to be 3x than what the baseline is, about. the abs result seems a bit funky
Well, y'know, I do keep myself in shape, but I wouldn't really call my abs anything to write home about...
Honestly, the entire concept of being Pardoned in this case would be yet another insult.
Agreed. In this situation, Turing doesn't need the pardon, the UK Government needs it for their crimes against humanity.
What would be the appropriate punishment?
You have to squeeze the drop back into the funnel so it can start over.
I've heard that as well, but can't seem to get around that it would be unlikely that all the glass would be installed with the thicker part towards the bottom.
Do you store your beer cap-up or cap-down?
Want to know how I know you know jack shit about explosives?
The same way I know you know jack shit about the real world, Mr. Military Demolitions Expert?
They used vans and SUVs because of the shit crudeness of their fertilizer+diesel bombs.
They used shitty crude fertilizer+diesel bombs because the average Joe can get fertilizer and diesel (and even then, if you don't run a local farm, good luck getting more than a few pounds of ammonium nitrate).
I could take a Smart car packed with C-4 just inside of the frame/body and do way more damage.
No doubt you could! And how, do you suppose, you would obtain that much C4 without raising every red flag in the intelligence community?
Hey, if the TSA had exactly that information and searched the car based on reasonable suspicion, consider me on their side in this one. But we all know that didn't happen, they just found yet another way to abuse the interface between government and business to give a great big "fuck you" to our 4th amendment rights.
If you have never heard of car bombs, you should start watching international news.
You can't hide a car bomb big enough to cause serious damage to anything outside the car. Successful attacks against structures have, without exception, used unmarked vans and dark-tinted SUVs for a reason.
A valet, entirely without conducting a formal search, can instantly tell whether or not a car poses an explosive threat to the airport. The act of helping the passenger get their bags from the trunk and then driving the car to the long-term lot automatically rules out any plausible hiding spots for enough explosives to make it into a WMD or national security issue.
Not to say, of course, that you couldn't fit enough somewhere in the body of the car to seriously damage the car itself, any occupants, and perhaps break a few windows of nearby cars - The Boston Marathon bombing proved roughly what you can do with a small well-placed bomb; but "Lot Z3" doesn't exactly equal the finish line of a marathon in terms of the number of squishy pink sacks of meat available for embedding shrapnel in.
What person thinks this is OK?
Every single non-technical person in the company, who have no clue whatsoever about the implications of this, don't care about all your "paranoid theories", and "just want the damned thing to work!"
The same people who give their email address to every popup ad that asks for it and then bitch to IT about all the spam they get. And then bitch about all the still-spam-but-of-interest-to-them they stop getting when you turn up the filters on their account. And then bitch about having to remember yet another password when you give them access to manage their own spam filter settings and can't you just be a dear and go in every morning and manually delete the spam they don't want but let the spam they do want through?
They hated it because it laid the blame squarely where it belonged, at the foot of a very difficult problem to resolve, unless you made automatic local replicas of LDAP subtrees.
A shortsighted and arbitrary kernel limitation does not really count as the fault of the downstream devs who get to suffer for it. As you point out, your "solution" actively encouraged your devs to make a completely wasteful userspace cache of something the kernel should just provide transparently; since you already know this solution, and apparently had access to the kernel code - Why didn''t you either fix the limitation, or if not possible, just build the damned cache yourself and serve high-latency requests from it, rather than getting into a blame-game with people who (reasonably) just expect LDAP to work as advertised?
Yeah, this spackles over a herd of issues that should actually be resolved
No one except the network admin gives the least damn about "why" it happens. They want email (or more accurately, they want MSN and Fox Sports) back up, and they want it back up NOW. Telling the CIO that you knew about an instant likely "fix" but chose to leave the company crippled for half an hour will generally get you escorted to your car.
Overall, I agree, TFA reads like "we rock because..." self-congratulatory masturbation. But some of your responses (except the last one, interestingly) make it sound like you work for a company with a near-infinite IT budget and a sane CIO. Those count as an extreme rarity in the real world, never forget that.
Woosh! (or you meant to respond to the GP).
So a child's life is less important to you then a few minutes of missing sleep?
"Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child becomes missing or is abducted".
Let me know when sleep becomes more important to you than every single one of those childrens' lives, so I can laugh heartily at you.
These sound like valid concerns, If it's not in writing, it's not going to happen - any city that's worked with a developer knows that the developer will promise the world "Oh yes, we'll build a park on every street corner and a paved jogging/biking trail around the perimeter of the development, trust us", but when funds run short, the development ends up with a patch of dirt called a "park", and fifty feet of paved trail that goes nowhere.
While true, take a look at the rest of Florida - You want suburban sprawl? They wrote the friggin' book on it. Mile after mile of endless (and currently massively underpopulated) yuppy/retiree housing developments stretching from one coast to the other.
Whether or not Destiny fell short of its goal, I don't see how it could have done any worse than the default situation there. And given the stated intent of that community, even if the developers "glossed over" a few points, their target audience might have enough motivation to fill in some of those gaps.
Of course, that all assumes the whole project doesn't include the standard "the HOA considers solar panels ugly, and demands you water your exactly-2in-grass even in a drought" clause in every deed. It amazes me people still fall for those things. Funny, really, how many people who want to control what their neighbors do, don't realize that it works both ways.
Welcome to the club. Now get back in line. :p
Seriously though, I think, with the exception of the "Alex P. Keatons" among us, virtually all programmers would rather work doing some sort of pure research for the betterment of humanity, than helping some sycophantic management team please the board/stockholders for yet another quarter.
Reality of the situation, though, you (and I, and all of us) have chosen the very same thing you claim has disillusioned you. You have chosen to want a paycheck. Make no mistake, for every one software engineering job position you see posted, you can find a hundred good causes that need volunteer coders. Except, good luck getting a steady paycheck if you go that route - Short of actually becoming a professor, you very much need to treat it as an act of charity.
Which leaves you to ask yourself: Can you really afford to live without a paycheck? If you can't answer "yes" without hesitation, hey, they don't call it "work" because we go there to have eight hours of fun every day.
As a compromise solution many of us have taken, do your good deeds on the side. Get that paycheck, and put 10-20 hours a week into a FOSS project, or helping the local foodbank set up a useable LAN from their pile of 15 year old mostly-DOA donated junk, or if you still have a few "in"s at your university, ask a few of your favorite non-CS professors if they have any projects that could use your skills (almost all of them do). But make a living first and foremost.
Because most people can't remember a long string of numbers but they can easily remember three english words.
/ob "Correct Horse Battery Staple"
If you can remember just eight digits - Two groups of four, less than a complete long distance telephone number - That will put you within half a mile of your target location. Add two more digits (the length of an LD phone number including the "1"), and it puts you to less than a football field away.
Then again, we have DNS in the first place because non-geeks couldn't manage four groups of three, so, I don't seriously expect them to do much better with lat&long.
the lock on that 92FS could be quickly and easily removed without much effort. That could be picked easily or removed with bolt cutters.
So our intent has shifted from "keep your 4YO from accidentally shooting himself" to "made of unobtanium".
Show me anything portable that a cutting torch won't turn into swiss cheese, if we want to invoke large tools as a means of bypassing them. But I haven't met many toddlers who've studied the MIT Guide to Lockpicking.
That "Anti-Gun Propaganda" was being spewed by a gun owner and a CWL holder.
Fair enough. I gave it about five seconds, noticed the total length, scrolled through the video looking for "here's where he defeats a trigger lock" in another five, and closed the window. Kinda my point, even if I mistook the overall focus of the video.
Trigger locks are a joke by the way...
Instead of a nice 15 second clip of someone defeating a trigger lock (you could have found hundreds of them - Hell, your link had three linked from it), you posted 40 minutes of anti-gun FUD propagandist bullshit? Classy.
And as for locks - some trigger locks count as a joke. That amounts to a straw-man, however; some balcony rails count as a joke, but we don't scream bloody murder that we need to ban balconies - We buy functional rather than purely decorative rails instead.
You want an effective cheap gun lock? If you can Fire this with the lock in place, I'll buy you a beer (or a wine spritzer with some foofoo garnish, if you prefer). Five seconds on and off, and you can't even seat the magazine, much less rack it.
They cost more, and have lower reliability. Why would they sell well?
The only people buying "smart" guns fall into the "I fear/hate guns and want them banned and only own that one to show all my friends as a proof of concept". Anyone actually interested in owning a firearm for self defense, or hell, even just for hunting, will stick to something that doesn't beep in error and ask you to re-authenticate right when you have that deer - or soon-to-be rapist - in your sights.
$3.8M per year for ten years. Get out, retire young. I would take that deal in a frickin' heartbeat.
Hmm...
Hey, Uncle Sam, I hear you need some replacement bomb detectors. Have you taken a look at my brand of detectors that work by the difficult-to-disprove tachyon flux method? Sure, they cost 50% more, but I guarantee at least one of us won't regret your buying them as I sip mohitos on my private beach a decade from now...
It's interesting how many terrorists are trained as engineers.
I would call that more of a sampling bias.
You basically have one core prerequisite for driving someone to acts of terrorism - Extreme belief in a position that most others don't hold, about which you feel the "wrong" opinion will cause massive damage on a large, even global, scale.
You can then divide that into two groups - The wrong and the right. The former, for some reason, almost always seem to act based on belief in imaginary creatures - Tree spirits, Allah, Gaia, Jesus, unicorns, what-have-you. The latter tend to see things in an unusually unfiltered way, and realize that we as a species amount to little more than a harmful bacterial colony run amuk in the petri dish we call "Earth"
So, you have your prerequisites there. Now for the sample bias: Relidiots focus their intellectual efforts primarily in memorizing indoctrinating material and suppressing their logical abilities to allow them to survive the cognitive dissonance of uttering seven mutually inconsistent ideas before breakfast every morning. Engineers focus their intellectual efforts on understanding the basic principles by which our universe actually works, with a particularly perverse twist toward favoring the practical over the theoretical.
Which one can cause more destruction? Science works better than praying for a plague of locusts. Simple as that.
And you know this how...?
Because he has a grasp of the English language that extends beyond calling every gun an "assault rifle", every worthless punk a "terrorist", every deadbeat a "victim of poor credit", and everyone who disagrees with him "faaaaaags"?
Going after 14YOs would make someone an ephebophile, not a pedo.
/ Read a book!
So freedom of expression implies that I have to pay for others to express themselves? No thanks, that's not how it works.
Pay for it? No.
Actively ignore it (as opposed to having some mythical "right" not to hear the likes of Fred Phelps spewing his crazy)? Yes.
As long as we as a society accept that people have the right to pick whatever fucked up religious beliefs they want, then we as a society have to deal with the consequences of real live modern humans expressing all the petty tribal prejudices of the past few thousand years, simple as that. Racism, misogyny, suicide bombers, birth control as a goddamned (no pun intended) presidential-race-changing issue... The crazy comes as a package deal, you don't get to pick and chose from God's Law (and spare me the "why don't you obey all of Leviticus" rhetoric, we already agree completely on that).
So yes, those calling Card out as a hypocrite on this do indeed express intolerance. He sincerely believes that his personal storm-god objects to homosexuality. You (and I) happen to believe that consenting adults should have the right to do whatever the hell they want with each other. Both of those express nothing but an opinion, with the one no more valid than the other. We would argue that we have the "right" to choose. He would argue that yes, we do, but one of those ways gives you a complimentary handbasket for your trip downstairs.
See the movie or don't, but we'd all do better to leave the politics out of whether or not we enjoy the movie.
The major source of violent crime for the past couple of generations has been bad drug policy.
Actually, try tetraethyl lead.
Bad drug policy certainly takes its share of blame for our exploding prison population thanks to massive incarceration of nonviolent "criminals", for destroying lives and families rather than promoting treatment, for costing billions at the same time it made virtually all local PDs dependent on the sweet, sweet teat of civil asset forfeiture. But actual violence? That has a much simpler explanation, known since Roman times.
Purges are an excellent idea, comrade.
"In Soviet Russia" jokes aside, I hate to tell you this, but the KGB would have given Vlad Kryuchkov's left nut to have anywhere near the "Total Information Awareness" at the NSA's disposal today.
The US intelligence agencies have a better reputation than their Soviet or Nazi Germany era counterparts for one and one reason only - They prefer to go high-tech rather than break kneecaps. And make no mistake, while I drastically prefer keeping my kneecaps intact, their goals count as no more or less noble than the legendary atrocities of their predecessors.