I am only now running into games that don't perform acceptably on a first generation 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo with a Radeon 4890.
Now that's not to say I don't enjoy the option, and that's not to say I'm normally this far behind the curve (gaming has not been a priority the past couple years).
But the idea that a bleeding edge machine will suddenly *need* to be upgraded to play next years game is absurd. The worst that happens is you have to turn down a setting to get a better frame rate, or perhaps a new DirectX effect is unavailable.
This isn't the way I would go, but I can see how a gaming laptop would appeal to some. Particularly those who are uninclined to ever open their case to begin with.
Why? Because this couldn't have happened to NASA? The Air Force? The Navy? Space-X? The ESA?
Who of that group has a lossless record? None of them. This *is* rocket science!
Maybe the Russians really screwed up here. Maybe there's a reason not to trust them. But at this point? We don't know anything, except that the Russians failed to do one of the most complicated things that human beings do. That's hardly a terrible indictment.
Without any data to show that the Russians did anything worng, I'm not sure why you say that.
NASA, the Air Force, the ESA... everyone that's launched any number of rockets into orbit has lost some. Even if you don't make stupid mistakes, you can never be sure you've anticipated everything.
This *is* rocket science.
We don't know what happened. But to say that the Russians are somehow incompetent is laughable at this point.
It's not even just that. It's that it's not removable and it's crap nobody wants.
Safari isn't removable on iPhone. IE isn't removable on Windows Mobile. But nobody complains about those because they are intrinsically useful, and even if you don't like them, it's just because you prefer an alternative to the default.
You are right, JWST is not Hubble. But there seems to be no reason at all to replace Hubble with an identical instrument. In that regard, as a spaceborne science telescope that can help capture the public's imagination of sights across the universe, the JWST *is* the Hubble successor, and it's useful to keep calling that.
Hubble's mission became largely irrelevant half way through it's lifetime. The purpose was to achieve detail which was impossible for ground based instruments that were trapped below miles of distorting atmosphere.
After Hubble was launched, researchers perfected techniques to work around atmospheric distortions. They fire a laser up and observe how the atmosphere distorts the beam. Using this data, a computer reverses the distortion of the atmosphere that the telescope is observing. Clever and effective. There are now dozens of earth based stations that are better instruments than Hubble.
So JWST is designed to do what ground based stations can never do: observe parts of the spectrum that never reach the ground. No amount of computer trickery or laser distortion detection will make infrared light reach the surface. The atmosphere blocks most of it. So in that respect: A space based telescope designed to do what ground based stations CAN'T, it *is* a successor.
This also ignores the fact that Hubble is enormously popular. There is power in this. Why would NASA not leverage that popularity and say "Remember that great program we started in the early 90s with the space telescope? Congress wants to axe funding for the next one that will be EVEN BETTER!"
Either I just noticed recently, or Office 2010 finally addressed it.
Click Paste dropdown > Set Default Paste This brings up a menu where you can set more sensible defaults. 99% of the time I want just the value, but you can independently set default pastes for:
Pasting within the same document
Pasting between documents
Pasting between documents when style definitions conflict
Pasting from other programs
Changing the last one to "Keep text only" has made Word much more usable for me.
The same or similar options are available in Excel, and of course when you *want* to keep formatting, the options are still there under "Paste Special".
I agree with you. Calling it "evil" is stupid. Linus is an insufferable prick. Yada yada.
That said, the poster has every right to tell you whatever he or she wants. They're not stopping forcing you to do anything, just getting on a soapbox and spouting off about nonsense.
Keep things in perspective. Linus and those that agree with him are spouting off an opinion, they're not a thugs coming into your home/business to prevent you from using your hardware in an unapproved way.
This is/. I'm sure that there are far more people who are impressed with the fact that Apollo astronauts (including Apollo 11) rode in this car, than the fact that a religious leader did.
Why on earth did the pope angle get first billing here?
I picked up an HTC Tilt 2 (AT&T branded Touch Pro 2) at the end of 2009.
At the time, the G-1 had been out for a year, but it was STILL either the only Android phone on the market, or nearly so. Android was not the sure thing it is today. It took a frustratingly long time to get additional handsets on the market.
I chose the phone I did because it had great hardware. But beyond that, it was a process of elimination.
iOS was out of the question because it's a walled garden. I can't side-load apps, Apple controls everything, to say nothing of the fact that I like having a keyboard.
Blackberry is not, nor has it ever been a serious contender for a smartphone OS ecosystem. It's more like a Playstation of a Tivo than a PC. A useful appliance hat's not seriously expandable enough to be useful.
Symbian: never came close to getting enough market share for consideration.
Windows Mobile: Tons of legacy apps, can sideload, can develop and deploy apps myself because the whole system is as open as I will ever need it to be. Perfect.
Android. Just as open as Windows Mobile (more so) but new. Not satisfied it will go anywhere.
Congrats, Microsoft. The only reason I had to NOT go Android is gone because of time. The only reason I would have stayed with Windows on my phone is gone too. You broke all compatability with all legacy apps. You removed the ability to sideload. Why would I want an iPhone without the marketshare?
My next phone will be Android. I just need to wait for my contract to be up with AT&T because they don't have any decent QWERTY android phones.
Moe info is needed. I had to do something similar when my employer got rid of a lot of old machines. they went to different places, and for each, I evaluated certain criteria.
Who will be administering these machines? This might make the decision easy for you, it might not BE your decision if there's a competent admin in the organization there who will of course have their own ideas. They may use the product keys the machines came with, they may have their own distro they want to standardize on, or they may even qualify for one of the cheap or free site licenses that Microsoft offers to NPOs.
As others have asked, what will the machines be used for? If it's 100% for the web, any OS will do, and it's a question of what will be easiest to maintain. Install the OS, lock it down good, install Firefox or Chrome in terminal mode and you're golden.
If you have any expectation that the staff or kids will want to install their own applications, you're almost certainly better off with XP - end of life or not. WINE is probably not something you want to get into with folks who don't understand computers well enough to administer them on their own.
Remember, just because it's a charity for local kids doesn't necessarily mean anything. Kids might not ever get anywhere near these machines. They could go to an admin who does the finances. One of the PCs we donated went to a charity for Cerebral Palsy where it's being used for fund raising. It's running Razor's Edge on XP.
The best thing to do is ask how they expect to use the machines. Then figure out how to set them up based on that (If they don't have their own people).
I do something similar with my personal domain. Every account I have to sign up for gets a unique email address. Doing that, I've had to blacklist maybe 40 email addresses since 1998.
Many of those are fly-by night domains that I wasn't surprised, and a few were just wild guesses (help@mydomain.com, etc.). Still, there are a few legit businesses that surprised me who either sold my email address to spammers or had their databases compromised:
1saleaday.com (not shocking)
Chima Brazilian Steakhouse (I was a little surprised to see a legit brick-and-mortar business on my spam list)
creditreport.com (not shocking)
digitalriver.com (ecommerce solutions)
Giant Microbes
Lending Tree
Renchi (not shocking, but disappointing, I liked shopping on that site)
U3 (the failed flash drive platform people)
The rest were mostly the kind of places where I'd be surprised if I *didn't* get spam.
I always thought it was hysterical that Sony pushed Memory Stick SO HARD all through the late 90s and 2000s, yet their two flagship products - The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 supported different proprietary memory card formats INSTEAD of Memory Stick.
IIRC, PS3 supports it, but by now the point is moot.
Basically the controller (which worked in very much the same way as what this guy builds) was $120 by itself, or $180 if you purchased it as a complete package with a new NES. Since a new NES was the same price in stores at the time, it essentially made the controller free if you didn't already have a system.
They used to distribute these to children's hospitals too. And I can't find a link to verify this bit, but I believe it was in cooperation with The Starlight Foundation.
Sadly, I never heard of a similar project for later Nintendo consoles. I can see why they don't still make these for the Wii. It's control scheme is a bit too oddball to translate to a controller like that. But I don't know why they couldn't offer something like this for the SNES / N64 / GameCube eras.
I agree. That is the obvious thing. Which is why it's quite disappointing that Nintendo never shows multiplayer games with more than one New Controller.
If you notice, they go out of their way to show multiplayer with one new controller and multiple Wii Remotes. But never more than one new controller.
And they've been tight lipped about the use of multiple new controllers even saying that they won't be sold separately from the console.
I'm excited for this, but I'm worried about the ability to connect multiple controllers to the thing.
What the original suspect may have done is IRRELEVANT to whether destroying the recording / assaulting the recorder is OK. That stuff is never OK.
And I said almost exactly that two posts up:
Nothing however explains the confiscation of cameras and assaulting of bystanders. There *is* no reason I can dream up that is anything other than a criminal act on the part of the police.
I think it's possible that the police were justified in using force (perhaps even deadly force) AND they took things too far / broke the law.
I mostly agree that the cops acted inappropriately (unless some extraordinary evidence surfaces). Which pains me to have to defend this part, but your remarks seems so clueless I feel compelled to.
"It turns out he's been IDed as the suspect in an armed robbery attempt from earlier in the weekend and police tried to pull him over (no idea if it's because of the robbery or another reason)"
Call me a liberal pinko leftie Communist, but let's remember that even in the US of A there's a presumption of innocence. I would have preferred a trial before the guy was found guilty.
You're right. He shouldn't be found guilty before a trial. But if he did try to run over a cop, or if they have reasonable cause to believe that he did (it's unclear if the police even knew about the robbery or not) then they do have the right to treat him as a greater threat.
If a police officer runs your license number for speeding and doing 12 over, they'll approach your car with due caution, but they'll be more or less relaxed.
If that same officer pulls someone else over, and the plate comes back as belonging to an armed robbery suspect, their reaction will be entirely different. The person still wasn't tried or convicted. But we've decided that it's pragmatic and appropriate.
The question in this case is the details. Why did they unload their clips into the car? Did he do something, or were they using unrestrained force? These are important questions.
"but rather than stop, he rammed a police cruiser and tried to run over at least one officer on foot"
And I'm kind of assuming that part of the story came from the cops after the fact. And there are those who have a serious belief - and not just criminals - that it's in your best interest to avoid dealing with police these days. There just seems to be too many cowboys who shoot or taser first and ask questions later.
If you believe that running form the police is a valid strategy in any case ever, you're either stupid, or just as much of a problem as bad cops.
I am not defending bad cops. I am not even saying that there aren't a lot of bad cops. But police serve a necessary function. And there are good cops. And I can't even imagine a scenario where it would be preferable to run from the police rather than to cooperate. What are you going to do? Run into the Atlantic and swim to international waters? Do you expect treatment would be better by running than by not under any circumstances? Do you expect you could ever get away? These are not rational arguments.
Bad cops or not, if the guy ran he was in the wrong too. Not just in the wrong, but stupid or crazy.
Yes, he was driving a weapon. But you clearly misunderstand the narrative that makes this not make sense unless he drew a weapon or made some other overt threatening action.
The video sucks though, so let me explain what I see blow by blow. I may be wrong, about some of this as it's hard to see.
The video starts, and I can't even see the car. At about 3 seconds shots ring out. The source of them is unclear, but there is on report of shots coming from anywhere other than the officers.
At about 5 seconds the car halts near the intersection on the right.
Men approach the car cautiously with guns drawn. Presumably they are the police.
The officers surround the car which is now stopped. There is no additional sign of activity. The car doesn't move any further.
Then at 1:13ish many, many shots ring out. Far more than the number of shots that rang out before. Definitely multiple officers discharging lots of rounds.
The question is why? What were they reacting to?
Reiterating what I said before: If what the suspect supposedly did is true, and the cops are telling the truth that he fled and tried to run them over and refused to stop one can make the argument that the shots at 0:03 could have been justified.
But no shots were fired again until 1:13, and then they unloaded. What changed? If he didn't draw a weapon or make an overt threat, there's no reason. He had been stopped. The shots at 0:03 either hit him, or scared him into stopping.
I have no idea what the first half of your second paragraph is talking about. Sadly, I suspect that there have been too many journalists killed in war zones recently to know which "Reuters guy" you are referring to.
That said, I suspect your analysis of why this happened may be pretty close to the mark. Something along the lines of:
Stressed cops from this big, hard to control event get confronted with a real threat: an officer is nearly run down in a motor vehicle stop. Everyone's on edge, and the suspect is trying to get away. A gunfight ensues. Everyone is keyed up. And bad calls get made.
Further evidence of this is that there was another shooting later in the same night. A female officer who claims a different suspect was trying to run her over too.
It's not an excuse, or a defense. But I think this didn't just happen. These cops were driven to an edge. They did what they thought they had to do, but then they took things too far. I suspect a lot of these things happen in similar ways.
I had trouble Googling the incident myself until I added "Raymond Herisse" (the name of the man who died) to my searches.
It turns out he's been IDed as the suspect in an armed robbery attempt from earlier in the weekend and police tried to pull him over (no idea if it's because of the robbery or another reason), but rather than stop, he rammed a police cruiser and tried to run over at least one officer on foot.
So considering him a threat? Sure. I buy that. If what they say is true he demonstrated that he was a threat.
But from the video I saw, it seems that they shot at him on a crowded street. The car stops, and cops approach it. Then a few seconds later the 6 or so officers I could see all appear to not just fire, but unload their guns into the car.
Did the suspect draw a weapon? That would explain that kind of action, but the video I saw doesn't show that.
I can imagine a scenario where the cops do everything right and bystanders get hit when shots are fired. I can perhaps even forgive them for unloading their weapons. Adrenalin, and all that. I've never been there. Still, all the stars have to be aligned perfectly for me to believe that 4 bystanders got hit and it happened with the cops doing everything right.
Nothing however explains the confiscation of cameras and assaulting of bystanders. There *is* no reason I can dream up that is anything other than a criminal act on the part of the police.
The ACLU is investigating apparently, and rightly they should.
Even more troubling, is I can find no evidence that any officers have even been suspended. Though apparently there were officers from multiple departments involved.
I don't agree that Apple is on the way to locking down the Mac like iOS.
But your assertion that it's impossible somehow is just silly. How are apps developed for iOS? Special developer licenses. If Apple wanted to do it, they could. The only thing keeping them from doing it is momentum of public will. Users would revolt if they changed the system now. There was no entrenched freedom when Apple entered the mobile world. Well, except for users of mobile platforms that predate iOS like Windows Mobile, but they represent a VERY small number of people...
If I am reading what you said correctly you believe that Microsoft insists all computers sold with a Windows pre-install also come with a MacAfee pre-install?
If I parsed that correctly, you're mistaken. Microsoft insists no such thing. Where did you get that idea? Or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to say?
I came back to amend my prior post, and I see you beat me to it.
Yes, you're correct. The same report I cited does indeed also include the data about "most important" factors. When phrased that way, "religious or moral" reasons are 36 percent. Still staggeringly high.
The Department of Education's statistics disagree:
From 2003 to 2007, the percentage of students whose parents reported homeschooling to provide religious or moral instruction increased from 72 percent to 83 percent.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking the same thing. And then when I clicked this article, I noticed the slashdot ad was for "Super Mario Bros", but clearly not from Nintendo. Ad leads to: http://www.flashgamespy.com/gog/Mario-Games.html/_FGS?ce_cid=000hLZ0000001nOb8G8xBRqz3l000000
Classy, slashdot, classy.
I am only now running into games that don't perform acceptably on a first generation 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo with a Radeon 4890.
Now that's not to say I don't enjoy the option, and that's not to say I'm normally this far behind the curve (gaming has not been a priority the past couple years).
But the idea that a bleeding edge machine will suddenly *need* to be upgraded to play next years game is absurd. The worst that happens is you have to turn down a setting to get a better frame rate, or perhaps a new DirectX effect is unavailable.
This isn't the way I would go, but I can see how a gaming laptop would appeal to some. Particularly those who are uninclined to ever open their case to begin with.
Why? Because this couldn't have happened to NASA? The Air Force? The Navy? Space-X? The ESA?
Who of that group has a lossless record? None of them. This *is* rocket science!
Maybe the Russians really screwed up here. Maybe there's a reason not to trust them. But at this point? We don't know anything, except that the Russians failed to do one of the most complicated things that human beings do. That's hardly a terrible indictment.
Without any data to show that the Russians did anything worng, I'm not sure why you say that.
NASA, the Air Force, the ESA... everyone that's launched any number of rockets into orbit has lost some. Even if you don't make stupid mistakes, you can never be sure you've anticipated everything.
This *is* rocket science.
We don't know what happened. But to say that the Russians are somehow incompetent is laughable at this point.
It's not even just that. It's that it's not removable and it's crap nobody wants.
Safari isn't removable on iPhone. IE isn't removable on Windows Mobile. But nobody complains about those because they are intrinsically useful, and even if you don't like them, it's just because you prefer an alternative to the default.
Can you point me at the browser you wrote? And the SMS client? I hope you wrote a good GPS navigation application.
I have a litany of other apps that I use day to day, but I'll start with the basics where I assume your use overlaps mine.
You are right, JWST is not Hubble. But there seems to be no reason at all to replace Hubble with an identical instrument. In that regard, as a spaceborne science telescope that can help capture the public's imagination of sights across the universe, the JWST *is* the Hubble successor, and it's useful to keep calling that.
Hubble's mission became largely irrelevant half way through it's lifetime. The purpose was to achieve detail which was impossible for ground based instruments that were trapped below miles of distorting atmosphere.
After Hubble was launched, researchers perfected techniques to work around atmospheric distortions. They fire a laser up and observe how the atmosphere distorts the beam. Using this data, a computer reverses the distortion of the atmosphere that the telescope is observing. Clever and effective. There are now dozens of earth based stations that are better instruments than Hubble.
So JWST is designed to do what ground based stations can never do: observe parts of the spectrum that never reach the ground. No amount of computer trickery or laser distortion detection will make infrared light reach the surface. The atmosphere blocks most of it. So in that respect: A space based telescope designed to do what ground based stations CAN'T, it *is* a successor.
This also ignores the fact that Hubble is enormously popular. There is power in this. Why would NASA not leverage that popularity and say "Remember that great program we started in the early 90s with the space telescope? Congress wants to axe funding for the next one that will be EVEN BETTER!"
I was annoyed by this too for years.
Either I just noticed recently, or Office 2010 finally addressed it.
Click Paste dropdown > Set Default Paste
This brings up a menu where you can set more sensible defaults. 99% of the time I want just the value, but you can independently set default pastes for:
Changing the last one to "Keep text only" has made Word much more usable for me.
The same or similar options are available in Excel, and of course when you *want* to keep formatting, the options are still there under "Paste Special".
I agree with you. Calling it "evil" is stupid. Linus is an insufferable prick. Yada yada.
That said, the poster has every right to tell you whatever he or she wants. They're not stopping forcing you to do anything, just getting on a soapbox and spouting off about nonsense.
Keep things in perspective. Linus and those that agree with him are spouting off an opinion, they're not a thugs coming into your home/business to prevent you from using your hardware in an unapproved way.
This is /. I'm sure that there are far more people who are impressed with the fact that Apollo astronauts (including Apollo 11) rode in this car, than the fact that a religious leader did.
Why on earth did the pope angle get first billing here?
Count me among them. I'm still running WM6.5
I picked up an HTC Tilt 2 (AT&T branded Touch Pro 2) at the end of 2009.
At the time, the G-1 had been out for a year, but it was STILL either the only Android phone on the market, or nearly so. Android was not the sure thing it is today. It took a frustratingly long time to get additional handsets on the market.
I chose the phone I did because it had great hardware. But beyond that, it was a process of elimination.
iOS was out of the question because it's a walled garden. I can't side-load apps, Apple controls everything, to say nothing of the fact that I like having a keyboard.
Blackberry is not, nor has it ever been a serious contender for a smartphone OS ecosystem. It's more like a Playstation of a Tivo than a PC. A useful appliance hat's not seriously expandable enough to be useful.
Symbian: never came close to getting enough market share for consideration.
Windows Mobile: Tons of legacy apps, can sideload, can develop and deploy apps myself because the whole system is as open as I will ever need it to be. Perfect.
Android. Just as open as Windows Mobile (more so) but new. Not satisfied it will go anywhere.
Congrats, Microsoft. The only reason I had to NOT go Android is gone because of time. The only reason I would have stayed with Windows on my phone is gone too. You broke all compatability with all legacy apps. You removed the ability to sideload. Why would I want an iPhone without the marketshare?
My next phone will be Android. I just need to wait for my contract to be up with AT&T because they don't have any decent QWERTY android phones.
Moe info is needed. I had to do something similar when my employer got rid of a lot of old machines. they went to different places, and for each, I evaluated certain criteria.
Who will be administering these machines? This might make the decision easy for you, it might not BE your decision if there's a competent admin in the organization there who will of course have their own ideas. They may use the product keys the machines came with, they may have their own distro they want to standardize on, or they may even qualify for one of the cheap or free site licenses that Microsoft offers to NPOs.
As others have asked, what will the machines be used for? If it's 100% for the web, any OS will do, and it's a question of what will be easiest to maintain. Install the OS, lock it down good, install Firefox or Chrome in terminal mode and you're golden.
If you have any expectation that the staff or kids will want to install their own applications, you're almost certainly better off with XP - end of life or not. WINE is probably not something you want to get into with folks who don't understand computers well enough to administer them on their own.
Remember, just because it's a charity for local kids doesn't necessarily mean anything. Kids might not ever get anywhere near these machines. They could go to an admin who does the finances. One of the PCs we donated went to a charity for Cerebral Palsy where it's being used for fund raising. It's running Razor's Edge on XP.
The best thing to do is ask how they expect to use the machines. Then figure out how to set them up based on that (If they don't have their own people).
I do something similar with my personal domain. Every account I have to sign up for gets a unique email address. Doing that, I've had to blacklist maybe 40 email addresses since 1998.
Many of those are fly-by night domains that I wasn't surprised, and a few were just wild guesses (help@mydomain.com, etc.). Still, there are a few legit businesses that surprised me who either sold my email address to spammers or had their databases compromised:
The rest were mostly the kind of places where I'd be surprised if I *didn't* get spam.
I always thought it was hysterical that Sony pushed Memory Stick SO HARD all through the late 90s and 2000s, yet their two flagship products - The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 supported different proprietary memory card formats INSTEAD of Memory Stick.
IIRC, PS3 supports it, but by now the point is moot.
That's EXACTLY what Nintendo used to do. At least during the NES era.
I wrote about this once before on Slashdot.
Basically the controller (which worked in very much the same way as what this guy builds) was $120 by itself, or $180 if you purchased it as a complete package with a new NES. Since a new NES was the same price in stores at the time, it essentially made the controller free if you didn't already have a system.
They used to distribute these to children's hospitals too. And I can't find a link to verify this bit, but I believe it was in cooperation with The Starlight Foundation.
Sadly, I never heard of a similar project for later Nintendo consoles. I can see why they don't still make these for the Wii. It's control scheme is a bit too oddball to translate to a controller like that. But I don't know why they couldn't offer something like this for the SNES / N64 / GameCube eras.
I agree. That is the obvious thing. Which is why it's quite disappointing that Nintendo never shows multiplayer games with more than one New Controller.
If you notice, they go out of their way to show multiplayer with one new controller and multiple Wii Remotes. But never more than one new controller.
And they've been tight lipped about the use of multiple new controllers even saying that they won't be sold separately from the console.
I'm excited for this, but I'm worried about the ability to connect multiple controllers to the thing.
And I said almost exactly that two posts up:
I think it's possible that the police were justified in using force (perhaps even deadly force) AND they took things too far / broke the law.
There are certainly a lot of questions to answer.
On the one hand, the freedom of speech lover in me thinks that this goes to far, as I do with many things the French do...
On the other hand, I imagine what CNN would be like if they had to report or analyze a story instead of asking what Twitter thinks of a story...
I mostly agree that the cops acted inappropriately (unless some extraordinary evidence surfaces). Which pains me to have to defend this part, but your remarks seems so clueless I feel compelled to.
You're right. He shouldn't be found guilty before a trial. But if he did try to run over a cop, or if they have reasonable cause to believe that he did (it's unclear if the police even knew about the robbery or not) then they do have the right to treat him as a greater threat.
If a police officer runs your license number for speeding and doing 12 over, they'll approach your car with due caution, but they'll be more or less relaxed.
If that same officer pulls someone else over, and the plate comes back as belonging to an armed robbery suspect, their reaction will be entirely different. The person still wasn't tried or convicted. But we've decided that it's pragmatic and appropriate.
The question in this case is the details. Why did they unload their clips into the car? Did he do something, or were they using unrestrained force? These are important questions.
If you believe that running form the police is a valid strategy in any case ever, you're either stupid, or just as much of a problem as bad cops.
I am not defending bad cops. I am not even saying that there aren't a lot of bad cops. But police serve a necessary function. And there are good cops. And I can't even imagine a scenario where it would be preferable to run from the police rather than to cooperate. What are you going to do? Run into the Atlantic and swim to international waters? Do you expect treatment would be better by running than by not under any circumstances? Do you expect you could ever get away? These are not rational arguments.
Bad cops or not, if the guy ran he was in the wrong too. Not just in the wrong, but stupid or crazy.
No, you misunderstand.
Yes, he was driving a weapon. But you clearly misunderstand the narrative that makes this not make sense unless he drew a weapon or made some other overt threatening action.
Here is the video:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ef7_1306812064
The video sucks though, so let me explain what I see blow by blow. I may be wrong, about some of this as it's hard to see.
The video starts, and I can't even see the car.
At about 3 seconds shots ring out. The source of them is unclear, but there is on report of shots coming from anywhere other than the officers.
At about 5 seconds the car halts near the intersection on the right.
Men approach the car cautiously with guns drawn. Presumably they are the police.
The officers surround the car which is now stopped. There is no additional sign of activity. The car doesn't move any further.
Then at 1:13ish many, many shots ring out. Far more than the number of shots that rang out before. Definitely multiple officers discharging lots of rounds.
The question is why? What were they reacting to?
Reiterating what I said before: If what the suspect supposedly did is true, and the cops are telling the truth that he fled and tried to run them over and refused to stop one can make the argument that the shots at 0:03 could have been justified.
But no shots were fired again until 1:13, and then they unloaded. What changed? If he didn't draw a weapon or make an overt threat, there's no reason. He had been stopped. The shots at 0:03 either hit him, or scared him into stopping.
I have no idea what the first half of your second paragraph is talking about. Sadly, I suspect that there have been too many journalists killed in war zones recently to know which "Reuters guy" you are referring to.
That said, I suspect your analysis of why this happened may be pretty close to the mark. Something along the lines of:
Stressed cops from this big, hard to control event get confronted with a real threat: an officer is nearly run down in a motor vehicle stop. Everyone's on edge, and the suspect is trying to get away. A gunfight ensues. Everyone is keyed up. And bad calls get made.
Further evidence of this is that there was another shooting later in the same night. A female officer who claims a different suspect was trying to run her over too.
It's not an excuse, or a defense. But I think this didn't just happen. These cops were driven to an edge. They did what they thought they had to do, but then they took things too far. I suspect a lot of these things happen in similar ways.
I had trouble Googling the incident myself until I added "Raymond Herisse" (the name of the man who died) to my searches.
It turns out he's been IDed as the suspect in an armed robbery attempt from earlier in the weekend and police tried to pull him over (no idea if it's because of the robbery or another reason), but rather than stop, he rammed a police cruiser and tried to run over at least one officer on foot.
So considering him a threat? Sure. I buy that. If what they say is true he demonstrated that he was a threat.
But from the video I saw, it seems that they shot at him on a crowded street. The car stops, and cops approach it. Then a few seconds later the 6 or so officers I could see all appear to not just fire, but unload their guns into the car.
Did the suspect draw a weapon? That would explain that kind of action, but the video I saw doesn't show that.
I can imagine a scenario where the cops do everything right and bystanders get hit when shots are fired. I can perhaps even forgive them for unloading their weapons. Adrenalin, and all that. I've never been there. Still, all the stars have to be aligned perfectly for me to believe that 4 bystanders got hit and it happened with the cops doing everything right.
Nothing however explains the confiscation of cameras and assaulting of bystanders. There *is* no reason I can dream up that is anything other than a criminal act on the part of the police.
The ACLU is investigating apparently, and rightly they should.
Even more troubling, is I can find no evidence that any officers have even been suspended. Though apparently there were officers from multiple departments involved.
I don't agree that Apple is on the way to locking down the Mac like iOS.
But your assertion that it's impossible somehow is just silly. How are apps developed for iOS? Special developer licenses. If Apple wanted to do it, they could. The only thing keeping them from doing it is momentum of public will. Users would revolt if they changed the system now. There was no entrenched freedom when Apple entered the mobile world. Well, except for users of mobile platforms that predate iOS like Windows Mobile, but they represent a VERY small number of people...
If I am reading what you said correctly you believe that Microsoft insists all computers sold with a Windows pre-install also come with a MacAfee pre-install?
If I parsed that correctly, you're mistaken. Microsoft insists no such thing. Where did you get that idea? Or am I misunderstanding what you're trying to say?
I came back to amend my prior post, and I see you beat me to it.
Yes, you're correct. The same report I cited does indeed also include the data about "most important" factors. When phrased that way, "religious or moral" reasons are 36 percent. Still staggeringly high.
The Department of Education's statistics disagree:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf
Which is strange because they cite the exact same phrasing "religious or moral instruction".
In either case, the number is significant.