I went to law school in NY state and was pleased when they abruptly changed the rules. The old list of exclusions was outrageous, everything from all lawyers (gee I wonder who wrote that one in?) to undertakers to nurses.
You are right that automatic disqualifications vary from place to place.
I read some hilarious cases where jurors went out and did their own research, not just looking stuff up but visiting accident sites, taking pictures, developing novel theories of the case, and returning to court with handouts for the other jurors.
As you might imagine, this can sometimes cause problems. But yeah, as a lawyer it would be very hard to restrain myself, but I would avoid it. If I stumbled across anything significant, or knew something indepedently, however, I would report it to the judge -- if they want to toss me, they can and still get a verdict, provided I don't contaminate the others. Some places also have liberal policies allowing jurors to send out questions.
But engineers and lawyers alike do sometimes serve -- it's not bulletproof.
One of the things you are expected to do is seek legal counsel in the appropriate circumstances, like securities and tax law. So you may indeed have to spend some money to do it right, just like you might hire other consultants.
Occasionally ignorance of the law is a defense -- the DMCA oddly enough.
But yes, I agree with you, the rule that everyone is expected to know every law however complex is sometimes asinine. It is largely a rule of practicality, without which people might deliberately avoid learning about the law or lie about what they knew. The number of truly complex laws are few, and the details of the jury instructions may go more to splitting fine hairs and covering the bases to avoid appeal.
One element tempering justice is the prosecutorial discretion not to bring charges, or to plead it out. The prosecutor has a lot of power in our system by controlling what does or does not see a courtroom. For civil cases, you have to take responsibility for injuries you inflict -- good precautions and good insurance are good ideas.
Remember that trials are adversarial -- dumb juries cut against both sides, yielding random verdicts. Of course, foolish lawyers may still want dumb jurors. But also, remember that half teh litigants lose, and the loser is going to tend to badmouth the decisionmaker.
Jury philosophy varies, and sure a lot of it is art, but I know of three very bright federal judges I worked with who served on juries (two of whom are *very* intellectual, and emotionally barren), plus plenty of clear-thinking college graduates. Especially if the subject matter is complex, you may want logical jurors. For a slip&fall, maybe the more emotional ones will help the plaintiff -- but what will the defense do in response?
State practice varies a lot; New York for one until recently had broad exclusions for everything from lawyers to undertakers (IIRC these were repealed). Thus the jury pool may be trimmed down in advance.
Under the federal system, the only one I know in detail, the parties have a limited number of peremptory challenges; all other challenges must be for-cause. The peremptories (3?) can be for any reason short of race or sex discrimination, etc.
I don't know. I wasn't thinking about calculations so much as human nature preferring round numbers. If 10 were 12 then a decade would be longer -- kind of like a quart and a liter are treated the same, though one is larger. And socially -- if we had a different number of digits our obscene gestures would all be different.
Ten fingers is hardly the only solution on our planet, others have been "tried" and perhaps will be tried. Hemingway's 6-toed cats are a famous example that breed true, and humans occasionally are born with an extra digit or two. Some mammals like horses fuse five fingers into one, or another number. Our ancestors may have had more. Try this PBS article on evolution of digits.
We have 10 fingers and base-10 math. Fingers are also called digits Hmm. What significance would a different base have had on us?
I fall into the "why do we have..." trap myself. There are no whys exactly, just some way that something is well adapted and selected-for or not; and even that is a gross oversimplification.
By the way, here we have 5 bases (only 4 used at a time), not the 20 (?) amino acids used in protein biosynthesis.
Laptop stolen via eBay -- nope, did buy this one there, though.
Stupid cop -- no, I wouldn't call the cop stupid even if he or she did blow it -- they're a victim of murder.
Yeah, I agree re gangs. I got tired of white middle-class types attributing all of the world's ills to gangs and, ahem, thought maybe you were one of those. Amusing is the number of these people who drive downtown to score their coke there. Also, for many of these critics a gang is three black kids standing together on the sidewalk; "gang" is both a probleam and a proxy for racism. So sorry if I reacted too strong.
I worked in Chicago for a couple of years, where some suburban parents wouldn't let their kids go on field trips to the downtown Shedd Aquarium a few blocks from my office because they might get shot in a drive-by (true story!). For an appeals court, I reviewed drug cases ad nauseum... Vice Lords and (Black) Gangster Disciples are biggies... the crack cases the feds decided to sweep up. The drugs are just a business, the violence pretty routinely stupid. In fact half the point seemed to be drug distribution, esp. crack of course. As you would know, a lot of the violence has to do with people trying to rob or edge out each other.
One upbeat thing is that it appears easier to break up gangs than the Mafia.:)
In Boston, by contrast, the gang threat was more imagined, the affiliations are much looser. The word "gangs" totally inflames some people, though, out of proportion to what's going on. And of course god forbid we talk about what causes crime, just lock them all up. It gets depressing, the federal penalties are pretty intense and, if it hasn't changed, are 100x severe for crack v. equivalent weight of cocaine. A paperclip's weight of crack, with intent to distribute (a "dealer"), could draw 5 years.
Fortunately everyone will come out of prison good citizens. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Yes, I wasn't sure of the sloppy language and couldn't kind a great example in the amount of time I'll allow myself to chase these things around.... The press! sigh.
But the concept does exist. With Mickey, he's both art and mark. You make a big drawing of Mickey, that's copyright. You stick it on your commercial van, or the fronts of your baseball caps, that looks like trademark. That sort of thing. It would be tricky to make a Mickey movie and make it abundantly clear that Disney had nothing to do with it, and that you weren't diluting their trademark, and so on. I don't think Disney went to the mat over the Sonny Bono thing over Mickey, but for the myriad other inventions they own which do not symbolize Disney.
The one I'm wondering about -- I'm not an IP guy -- is what I cited somewhere of "patenting" a copyrighted trademark. I'm hoping that's just April Fool's"
The 55-story Chicago highrise I lived in not that long ago had cameras here and there around the building. (I knew where by peering over the guard's shoulder.) One of them showed me how he could manually pan and zoom the, and said he actually kinda liked the Friday graveyard shift because the drunks would come home and "people get real uninhibited." Hey, at least he was paying attention.
If MS had simply implemented Java right in the first place, this wouldn't even been an issue, right? I speculate the court did not trust them to do it right on their own, but of course I agree Microsoft should in principle be able to do it itself. Oops, I put principle and Microsoft in the same sentence.
Microsoft wants Java completely dead, or co-opted, right?
Eh, what do we care what foreigners think?;-) Americans don't HAVE an accident! Er, accent!
To be honest, and I'm trying here, I can't fathom how to pronounce "our" and "are" differently. I'll have to bring this one up at dinner. These things make me feel bad as I try to teach my 6 y.o. to spell and feel I must keep apologizing for our language. Verb conjugations doesn't help ("what do you mean 'teared' isn't past tense for 'tear'? well, son, y'see, English is a collection of other languages that it mutilated and mixed and misremembered about until....") Like, why do flammable and inflammable meant the same thing? (Yes, I know the answer, but I will feel silly explaining it to him.)
The tendency in American English is towards eliminating the "duplicate" word, which is fine by me if we can still speak intelligibly. "Potatoe" refers to an old joke about a certain U.S. vice president. (The sharp-tongued little boy later appeared at the Democratic Convention.)
The intermediate-experience problem is true of other fields, like flying. Experienced enough not to be scared, too inexperienced to be... experienced.
I think a lot of cops would resist smart guns partly because they don't want to think they could screw up that badly. Few are going to say, yes, please protect me from my own incompetence (though losing your gun is not necessarily incompetence -- stuff happens fast, and in close quarters). Also, the number of times they use weapons in the line of duty is pretty small, it must be hard to gain experience or self-assess. There are as many studies of cop shootings as there are shootings, who knows. When I was growing up in LA a cop who entered a dwelling shot and killed a young child with a play gun, provoking a lot of discussion. Often an officer ina pinch would fire not just once, but empty the gun completely, with a remarkably low accuracy (20%?).
Not to criticize -- adrenaline does funny things. But I'm happy to see cops wearing body armor, maybe giving them a little extra confidence, and those stupid guns colored orange. That reminds me -- in college there was a big game of "assassin" where players "hunted" each other outside of class and other safe zones using little spring dart guns. One of them was ordered to the ground at gunpoint by a screaming cop in a donut shop. (I don't remember whether he had the "gun" in his hand.) Oops. I think that was right around when blaze orange guns became the rage.:)
Meanwhile, our foreign readers are looking at this and shaking their heads in wonderment.
It's easy to get clobbered. The magnet doesn't do a thing to you, because you demetal before going near it. Also,, you use metal things, they;re just nonferrous, but to the human eye what does thst mean? The 3rd parties are the ones you have to watch, and hectic situations. There's also a neat trick that the field rises exponentially in intensity as you get closer. Someone in my lab almost lost their head to the weighted base of an IV pole that shot into the bore. It took three people to pull it off. We scanned a murderer that his escorts simply refused to remove the shackles from, but that was OK because they were anchored well.
"Look stupid" -- have you hung out with any city cops? I have, a ridealong with a Boston anti-gang unit most recently. (Interestingly one guy supported gun control, his partner didn't.) There's a major macho thing going on there, exposed to significant danger, but a sense of humor, too. Ask one of them when they'd hear the end of it if they got shot by their own gun, assuming they lived. Dead people -- and here you should have known I was being facetious -- don't worry much about how they look.
I wouldn't get too worried about the gangs going to school. Most of them are just a bunch of thugs. And the term "gang-infested cities" is political, not sociological, largely appealing to tense suburbanites. I've lived in or near five major cities and "gang-infested" just doesn't come up. "Guns" and "criminals" are the primary problems.
I hope some people remember Disney's proposed amusement park for nearby Manassas that praise the lord was shot down by people from every wing, in significant part because of the comments of Disney execs. I imagine they meant well, sort of, but the whole thing illustrates Disney's preoccupation with money over, well, everything else.
Manassas, ~50 miles west of Washington DC, was the site of two major Civil War engagements known as the Battles of Bull Run by Yankees more familiar with a nearby creek. Imagine the Animatronic possibilities (discussion from a NPS history) mindful of the real historic horror (this article doesn't even mention their proposal of a slave auction):
Disney emphasized the nation's Civil War heritage for its latest venture..... In an effort to combine education and entertainment, Disney officials hoped to include "painful, disturbing and agonizing" exhibits on slavery and re-create a piece of the underground railroad through which park visitors would escape. The goal, as Rummell later clarified, was to be "entertaining in the sense that it would leave you with something that you could mull over."....
At the initial press conference, Senior Vice President Bob Weis made the mistake of saying that, to show the Civil War "with all its racial conflict," attractions would "make you a Civil War soldier . . . [and] make you feel what it was like to be a slave." Weis meant to refer to Disney's use of the new technology of virtual reality, in which visitors could physically enter an environment and explore it. For instance, Disney had created a ride on Aladdin's carpet in which guests would literally feel as if they were flying through a room. Weis did not intend to suggest for Disney's America the sociological impacts associated with slavery, but many listeners immediately made the connection. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy did not mince words when he reminded readers that "authentic history," as Weis promised, must include such atrocities as slave whippings and rape. Unamused, Milloy urged Disney to stick with fun and keep history, especially slave history, out of the park.
Less though than I had been led to believe. I'm not a big fan of guns, but either way I want the right numbers.
That must be a cop's worst nightmare, getting shot by his or her own gun. Get dead and look stupid at the same time.:-(
I wonder how many times a year officers lose control of their guns, with or without lasting ill effects? I admired the no-gun practice of the British beat "bobbies," though I understand that's changing. Being armed or not must affect one's psychology in every encounter.
I was just saying that whatever you present, the doubter can say that you staged or altered it to get the result you want. That would include multiple exposure -- each "fake" photo would show the effet slightly greater than the exposure before. It's this kind of doubt I'd like to figure a way around.
It is such a drag to find stats, and many sites don't provide attribution for them! For all one knows, the numbers are gossip.
According to the FBI, 46 of 594 officers slain feloniously 1992-2001 were killed by their own weapon. Another 49 were killed by weapons other than firearms.
FBI Uniform Crime Reports -- I pulled the pdf for "# Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted" for 2001, see Table 5.
Even 46 dead officers is too many. It would be helpful to have "wounded with own gun" or "3rd party shot with officer's gun" or "gun stolen and later used in crime" statistics, plus the cost and reliability of the gun modifications, before making an assessment. Oh yes, we should ask the cops what they think!
As for cables, sounds like a cheaper way to address this. I wonder about the cons.
There are also occasional surprise disarmings and discharge. Read that one! The magnet is very powerful, but I'm a little skeptical of the "molecular structure" reasoning in the article. I used to be an MRI tech -- what a horrible safety failure. These events can end less humorously, as with a boy killed by an oxygen bottle in New York about a year ago.
IIRC a large percentage of police officers slain in the line of duty are killed by their own gun -- wrested away in an altercation. I have heard of this sort of tech especially for law enforcement. By extension, imagine the usefulness for combat troops if only the "good guys" could operate their weapons.
It comes down to a Q of the technology's reliability. Real police seldom discharge or even brandish their weapon, esp. outside the cities; and of the ones who are shot, I imagine a fair number did not have their weapon ready to fire or even see it coming.
Now, we need a really smart gun that shoots only the right people, at the right time. Yes of course running Linux.:)
A compulsory law for all gun owners is of course a different policy question from police departments selectively implementing same. The legislation will however give development of the tech an economic shot in the arm -- without a market the guns would either be prohibitively expensive or not exist.
I don't think he *did* say that. The "absolute morons" referenced "everyone appears to claim" -- a prevalent view, not necessarily the author's.
The writer's point is that computers are increasingly turnkey. That makes it less likely users will go looking for some plug-in or add-on that didn't come with the package. Frankly I think that's a blessing, I hate trying to keep up with that low-level stuff, even if I understand it -- and of course Java isn't something I worry about getting.
*
Hate to tell you, but PhD's and JD's are not insurance enough against moron-hood. Heck, even I have a JD.:) And I used to work with a PhD who always joked it stood for "piled high and deep." Unfortunately in his case it was sorta true; nor was he unique. I'm sure your parents do fine on their own merits.
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I went to law school in NY state and was pleased when they abruptly changed the rules. The old list of exclusions was outrageous, everything from all lawyers (gee I wonder who wrote that one in?) to undertakers to nurses.
You are right that automatic disqualifications vary from place to place.
I read some hilarious cases where jurors went out and did their own research, not just looking stuff up but visiting accident sites, taking pictures, developing novel theories of the case, and returning to court with handouts for the other jurors.
As you might imagine, this can sometimes cause problems. But yeah, as a lawyer it would be very hard to restrain myself, but I would avoid it. If I stumbled across anything significant, or knew something indepedently, however, I would report it to the judge -- if they want to toss me, they can and still get a verdict, provided I don't contaminate the others. Some places also have liberal policies allowing jurors to send out questions.
But engineers and lawyers alike do sometimes serve -- it's not bulletproof.
I guess the defendant's lawyer thought I would be more sympathetic to his client.
So were you?
Good points except maybe that last sentence. :)
One of the things you are expected to do is seek legal counsel in the appropriate circumstances, like securities and tax law. So you may indeed have to spend some money to do it right, just like you might hire other consultants.
Occasionally ignorance of the law is a defense -- the DMCA oddly enough.
But yes, I agree with you, the rule that everyone is expected to know every law however complex is sometimes asinine. It is largely a rule of practicality, without which people might deliberately avoid learning about the law or lie about what they knew. The number of truly complex laws are few, and the details of the jury instructions may go more to splitting fine hairs and covering the bases to avoid appeal.
One element tempering justice is the prosecutorial discretion not to bring charges, or to plead it out. The prosecutor has a lot of power in our system by controlling what does or does not see a courtroom. For civil cases, you have to take responsibility for injuries you inflict -- good precautions and good insurance are good ideas.
It is a stereotype that all jurors are sheep.
Remember that trials are adversarial -- dumb juries cut against both sides, yielding random verdicts. Of course, foolish lawyers may still want dumb jurors. But also, remember that half teh litigants lose, and the loser is going to tend to badmouth the decisionmaker.
Jury philosophy varies, and sure a lot of it is art, but I know of three very bright federal judges I worked with who served on juries (two of whom are *very* intellectual, and emotionally barren), plus plenty of clear-thinking college graduates. Especially if the subject matter is complex, you may want logical jurors. For a slip&fall, maybe the more emotional ones will help the plaintiff -- but what will the defense do in response?
State practice varies a lot; New York for one until recently had broad exclusions for everything from lawyers to undertakers (IIRC these were repealed). Thus the jury pool may be trimmed down in advance.
Under the federal system, the only one I know in detail, the parties have a limited number of peremptory challenges; all other challenges must be for-cause. The peremptories (3?) can be for any reason short of race or sex discrimination, etc.
No, not "just as"; and for the Mac OS spy curious.
I don't know. I wasn't thinking about calculations so much as human nature preferring round numbers. If 10 were 12 then a decade would be longer -- kind of like a quart and a liter are treated the same, though one is larger. And socially -- if we had a different number of digits our obscene gestures would all be different.
Humorously, but I wonder.
You know, I am so darn tired of you Mac nuts.
;-)
Oh wait, I own three of them. I guess I am one.
Is this really how your parents are making you spend your vacation? ;-)
Curiosity: Did your parents sign off on the installation of all of the spyware? If so, why, if not, how did it arrive?
Happy Hunting -- and Holidays.
Doonesbury's always had 5. And other serious strips.
Someone has enumerated Simpsons finger jokes.
Supposedly the Simpsons God had five fingers.
Nature has a lot of adaptations but no reasons.
:)
At least if you take the secular view.
Ten fingers is hardly the only solution on our planet, others have been "tried" and perhaps will be tried. Hemingway's 6-toed cats are a famous example that breed true, and humans occasionally are born with an extra digit or two. Some mammals like horses fuse five fingers into one, or another number. Our ancestors may have had more. Try this PBS article on evolution of digits.
We have 10 fingers and base-10 math. Fingers are also called digits Hmm. What significance would a different base have had on us?
I fall into the "why do we have..." trap myself. There are no whys exactly, just some way that something is well adapted and selected-for or not; and even that is a gross oversimplification.
By the way, here we have 5 bases (only 4 used at a time), not the 20 (?) amino acids used in protein biosynthesis.
Laptop stolen via eBay -- nope, did buy this one there, though.
... Vice Lords and (Black) Gangster Disciples are biggies ... the crack cases the feds decided to sweep up. The drugs are just a business, the violence pretty routinely stupid. In fact half the point seemed to be drug distribution, esp. crack of course. As you would know, a lot of the violence has to do with people trying to rob or edge out each other.
:)
Stupid cop -- no, I wouldn't call the cop stupid even if he or she did blow it -- they're a victim of murder.
Yeah, I agree re gangs. I got tired of white middle-class types attributing all of the world's ills to gangs and, ahem, thought maybe you were one of those. Amusing is the number of these people who drive downtown to score their coke there. Also, for many of these critics a gang is three black kids standing together on the sidewalk; "gang" is both a probleam and a proxy for racism. So sorry if I reacted too strong.
I worked in Chicago for a couple of years, where some suburban parents wouldn't let their kids go on field trips to the downtown Shedd Aquarium a few blocks from my office because they might get shot in a drive-by (true story!). For an appeals court, I reviewed drug cases ad nauseum
One upbeat thing is that it appears easier to break up gangs than the Mafia.
In Boston, by contrast, the gang threat was more imagined, the affiliations are much looser. The word "gangs" totally inflames some people, though, out of proportion to what's going on. And of course god forbid we talk about what causes crime, just lock them all up. It gets depressing, the federal penalties are pretty intense and, if it hasn't changed, are 100x severe for crack v. equivalent weight of cocaine. A paperclip's weight of crack, with intent to distribute (a "dealer"), could draw 5 years.
Fortunately everyone will come out of prison good citizens. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Yes, I wasn't sure of the sloppy language and couldn't kind a great example in the amount of time I'll allow myself to chase these things around.... The press! sigh.
But the concept does exist. With Mickey, he's both art and mark. You make a big drawing of Mickey, that's copyright. You stick it on your commercial van, or the fronts of your baseball caps, that looks like trademark. That sort of thing. It would be tricky to make a Mickey movie and make it abundantly clear that Disney had nothing to do with it, and that you weren't diluting their trademark, and so on. I don't think Disney went to the mat over the Sonny Bono thing over Mickey, but for the myriad other inventions they own which do not symbolize Disney.
The one I'm wondering about -- I'm not an IP guy -- is what I cited somewhere of "patenting" a copyrighted trademark. I'm hoping that's just April Fool's"
The 55-story Chicago highrise I lived in not that long ago had cameras here and there around the building. (I knew where by peering over the guard's shoulder.) One of them showed me how he could manually pan and zoom the, and said he actually kinda liked the Friday graveyard shift because the drunks would come home and "people get real uninhibited." Hey, at least he was paying attention.
If MS had simply implemented Java right in the first place, this wouldn't even been an issue, right? I speculate the court did not trust them to do it right on their own, but of course I agree Microsoft should in principle be able to do it itself. Oops, I put principle and Microsoft in the same sentence.
Microsoft wants Java completely dead, or co-opted, right?
Eh, what do we care what foreigners think? ;-) Americans don't HAVE an accident! Er, accent!
To be honest, and I'm trying here, I can't fathom how to pronounce "our" and "are" differently. I'll have to bring this one up at dinner. These things make me feel bad as I try to teach my 6 y.o. to spell and feel I must keep apologizing for our language. Verb conjugations doesn't help ("what do you mean 'teared' isn't past tense for 'tear'? well, son, y'see, English is a collection of other languages that it mutilated and mixed and misremembered about until....") Like, why do flammable and inflammable meant the same thing? (Yes, I know the answer, but I will feel silly explaining it to him.)
The tendency in American English is towards eliminating the "duplicate" word, which is fine by me if we can still speak intelligibly. "Potatoe" refers to an old joke about a certain U.S. vice president. (The sharp-tongued little boy later appeared at the Democratic Convention.)
Happy holidays!
The intermediate-experience problem is true of other fields, like flying. Experienced enough not to be scared, too inexperienced to be ... experienced.
:)
I think a lot of cops would resist smart guns partly because they don't want to think they could screw up that badly. Few are going to say, yes, please protect me from my own incompetence (though losing your gun is not necessarily incompetence -- stuff happens fast, and in close quarters). Also, the number of times they use weapons in the line of duty is pretty small, it must be hard to gain experience or self-assess. There are as many studies of cop shootings as there are shootings, who knows. When I was growing up in LA a cop who entered a dwelling shot and killed a young child with a play gun, provoking a lot of discussion. Often an officer ina pinch would fire not just once, but empty the gun completely, with a remarkably low accuracy (20%?).
Not to criticize -- adrenaline does funny things. But I'm happy to see cops wearing body armor, maybe giving them a little extra confidence, and those stupid guns colored orange. That reminds me -- in college there was a big game of "assassin" where players "hunted" each other outside of class and other safe zones using little spring dart guns. One of them was ordered to the ground at gunpoint by a screaming cop in a donut shop. (I don't remember whether he had the "gun" in his hand.) Oops. I think that was right around when blaze orange guns became the rage.
Meanwhile, our foreign readers are looking at this and shaking their heads in wonderment.
It's easy to get clobbered. The magnet doesn't do a thing to you, because you demetal before going near it. Also,, you use metal things, they;re just nonferrous, but to the human eye what does thst mean? The 3rd parties are the ones you have to watch, and hectic situations. There's also a neat trick that the field rises exponentially in intensity as you get closer. Someone in my lab almost lost their head to the weighted base of an IV pole that shot into the bore. It took three people to pull it off. We scanned a murderer that his escorts simply refused to remove the shackles from, but that was OK because they were anchored well.
I'm intrigued that the gun discharged.
"Look stupid" -- have you hung out with any city cops? I have, a ridealong with a Boston anti-gang unit most recently. (Interestingly one guy supported gun control, his partner didn't.) There's a major macho thing going on there, exposed to significant danger, but a sense of humor, too. Ask one of them when they'd hear the end of it if they got shot by their own gun, assuming they lived. Dead people -- and here you should have known I was being facetious -- don't worry much about how they look.
I wouldn't get too worried about the gangs going to school. Most of them are just a bunch of thugs. And the term "gang-infested cities" is political, not sociological, largely appealing to tense suburbanites. I've lived in or near five major cities and "gang-infested" just doesn't come up. "Guns" and "criminals" are the primary problems.
Manassas, ~50 miles west of Washington DC, was the site of two major Civil War engagements known as the Battles of Bull Run by Yankees more familiar with a nearby creek. Imagine the Animatronic possibilities (discussion from a NPS history) mindful of the real historic horror (this article doesn't even mention their proposal of a slave auction):
Less though than I had been led to believe. I'm not a big fan of guns, but either way I want the right numbers.
:-(
That must be a cop's worst nightmare, getting shot by his or her own gun. Get dead and look stupid at the same time.
I wonder how many times a year officers lose control of their guns, with or without lasting ill effects? I admired the no-gun practice of the British beat "bobbies," though I understand that's changing. Being armed or not must affect one's psychology in every encounter.
I was just saying that whatever you present, the doubter can say that you staged or altered it to get the result you want. That would include multiple exposure -- each "fake" photo would show the effet slightly greater than the exposure before. It's this kind of doubt I'd like to figure a way around.
It is such a drag to find stats, and many sites don't provide attribution for them! For all one knows, the numbers are gossip.
According to the FBI, 46 of 594 officers slain feloniously 1992-2001 were killed by their own weapon. Another 49 were killed by weapons other than firearms.
FBI Uniform Crime Reports -- I pulled the pdf for "# Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted" for 2001, see Table 5.
Even 46 dead officers is too many. It would be helpful to have "wounded with own gun" or "3rd party shot with officer's gun" or "gun stolen and later used in crime" statistics, plus the cost and reliability of the gun modifications, before making an assessment. Oh yes, we should ask the cops what they think!
As for cables, sounds like a cheaper way to address this. I wonder about the cons.
There are also occasional surprise disarmings and discharge. Read that one! The magnet is very powerful, but I'm a little skeptical of the "molecular structure" reasoning in the article. I used to be an MRI tech -- what a horrible safety failure. These events can end less humorously, as with a boy killed by an oxygen bottle in New York about a year ago.
IIRC a large percentage of police officers slain in the line of duty are killed by their own gun -- wrested away in an altercation. I have heard of this sort of tech especially for law enforcement. By extension, imagine the usefulness for combat troops if only the "good guys" could operate their weapons.
:)
It comes down to a Q of the technology's reliability. Real police seldom discharge or even brandish their weapon, esp. outside the cities; and of the ones who are shot, I imagine a fair number did not have their weapon ready to fire or even see it coming.
Now, we need a really smart gun that shoots only the right people, at the right time. Yes of course running Linux.
A compulsory law for all gun owners is of course a different policy question from police departments selectively implementing same. The legislation will however give development of the tech an economic shot in the arm -- without a market the guns would either be prohibitively expensive or not exist.
I don't think he *did* say that. The "absolute morons" referenced "everyone appears to claim" -- a prevalent view, not necessarily the author's.
:) And I used to work with a PhD who always joked it stood for "piled high and deep." Unfortunately in his case it was sorta true; nor was he unique. I'm sure your parents do fine on their own merits.
The writer's point is that computers are increasingly turnkey. That makes it less likely users will go looking for some plug-in or add-on that didn't come with the package. Frankly I think that's a blessing, I hate trying to keep up with that low-level stuff, even if I understand it -- and of course Java isn't something I worry about getting.
*
Hate to tell you, but PhD's and JD's are not insurance enough against moron-hood. Heck, even I have a JD.