It is simply unacceptable that the anger here is at the fact that "China broke the rules!" and not at "China is ignoring human rights!"
Why are you assuming no one cares about China's abuse of human rights? This discussion is after all about a rules violation. It isn't mutually exclusive with a disdain for what China does to their athletes.
If you've watched the coverage of the gymnastics, you would notice there is no lack of discussion about how the athletes are taken from their families sometimes at three years of age. With their parents consent, no less, because the state gives the families of successful athletes nice houses (that the athletes themselves get to visit every couple of years if they're lucky).
So this rules violation isn't masking the disdain for China's actions, it is amplifying it. Ignoring it would be letting China off the hook, and a disservice to the athletes who competed within the rules.
Who's traditional wisdom? There are very few places on earth that are not loaded with microorganisms. Even fresh basalt rock on the bottom of the ocean (where "fresh" means something like 20,000 years old) is full of microorganisms. I doubt very much that oil and gas fields are sterile.
If the state truly does just dump this stuff (which it almost certainly doesn't), sick the media on them. With "Green" being the new "PC" (no pun intended), not a politician in the country would want to be seen as dumping useful equipment/toxic waste into landfills. The state will change its procedures in a big hurry.
Good point on the power bill, although it's not quite the same as bandwidth. For each KW I use, it cost the electric company some amount to produce. There isn't the same kind of direct relationship with each KB I use. It's not as simple as that, of course, but I think my point is valid.
As for the buffet analogy, the problem I have with it is this: how much exactly is $5 worth of food at a buffet? Do you figure the cost of that same food at the market, plus mark-up for labor and overhead? Or do you compare against an equivalent quality fixed-price restaurant? I understand the point you are making, and it's hard not to feel cheated to some degree if you pay for a buffet and only end up eating a light snack. On the other hand, I don't like "cafeteria-style" restaurants where you pay by the pound for your sandwich.
I guess what it comes down to is that I put a certain amount of value on having the option to eat (or transfer) as much as I want. For me, that makes the bandwidth provided by my current DSL connection well worth the cost, even though I don't use it all up.
One big issue is that the eye is not perfect optically. It cannot focus all colors at the same focal plane.
Thank you! I've never taken the time to try to understand it, but this seems to perfectly explain the effect I sometimes see with red and blue text on a dark background under low light conditions. There is a very disconcerting 3-D effect where one of the colors appears to really stand out from the screen.
Used to drive me nuts late at night when I was already getting a little bleary-eyed (hey, that's my only excuse for spending any time on web pages with brightly colored text on a black background.)
Psychologically, I hate metered rates. I can't help but think about the money ticking away. It would definitely change my internet use if I was paying by the KB. I would likely end up paying less, but I would also end up using the internet a lot less. My current DSL plan gives me a reliable, solid 6Mb/384Kb connection for $35/mo, and I'm extremely happy with it. I don't care that there are times when it's completely idle. It's fast enough when I need it and I don't have to worry about how much it's going to cost me to upgrade my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu. I know I would be paying more than that at my current usage if it went to a metered rate.
And no, I don't download movies or music or use any p2p software at all.
On the other hand, consumers should see "unlimited" as a good thing only if they expect to use more than the average person
This seems like such a greedy perspective to me. I'm willing to pay some amount to be rid of the stress of worrying about whether my wife or kids are going to use too much bandwidth. As for the buffet analogy, it really pisses me off to see people who pile up huge amounts of food on their plates because they want to "get their money's worth", only to leave half of it uneaten. If I can get a good meal for a reasonable price, I'm happy. I don't have a need to eat as much as I possibly can, just like I don't feel any compulsion to download a bunch of crap I don't need just so I use more bandwidth than the average.
I get a large portion of my news from slashdot. I find that maybe 20%, sometimes more, of the stories here are of above average interest to me. That's far better than scanning news sites, which anyway wouldn't find half the stories here. So I'm letting all of you function as my filter. Works well enough for the type of news slashdot specializes in. You know, for nerds.
I haven't experienced any of those problems with my Thinkpad running the last two or three Ubuntu releases. No X crashes either, and I use the proprietary ATI drivers with Compiz Fusion (a quite challenging a test, I think). To be perfectly fair, I had to spend a couple of hours getting things set up originally, but since then I've just done upgrades with no significant issues to think of. Each release undoes some of the custom changes I've had to make to earlier releases.
I used to like to tinker a lot with the systems I used, but I've slowly tired of doing that. The nice thing with my current Ubuntu systems is that I can find some really cool stuff when I'm in the mood to tinker, but I can also get my work done without tinkering at all. It's all up to me.
And to back up what someone said earlier about printers: I set up my wife's laptop to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu. She tried to hook up our HP inkjet all-in-one, and it took me 20 minutes to get all the drivers and crap downloaded. The next time she wanted to print (from OOo), she was running Ubuntu. She called me in fearing another 20 minute ordeal, but I had her plug in the printer, then bring up the print dialog again. Ubuntu had silently (and correctly) configured the printer, and OOo saw it without even having to be restarted.
This is a really good point. As an atheist, I've come to realize that the chief difference between myself and those who choose to "believe" is that I can live with the fact that I just don't know.
I don't know exactly how life was formed.
I don't know what caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.
I don't know how our current universe began, or if this is the only one.
I don't know if there was a specific instant when the universe came into existence or if there will be a time when it will end.
I don't know if there really is dark matter or dark energy.
There are lots more things that I don't know. I would really like to have answers/explanations for those things, but I'm not compelled to "believe" some made-up explanation just to (artificially) satisfy that desire. If and when there are decent scientific explanations for any of these questions, I'll be happy. In the meantime, I'm content not knowing, but it's fun to speculate on possibilities without building a religion around them and proselytizing those speculations as given truths.
By the way, I don't know if there is some form of superior, supernatural being that influenced any part of my reality, either, which I suppose argues that I'm really an agnostic. But I don't believe that there is any such being, which hopefully puts me back to being an atheist.
In other words, the real issue is that only a minority of programmers are able to take skills developed in one context and apply them in a different context.
I couldn't agree with you more. You've done a nice job of generalizing what I was trying to say. I might add that I think there is a certain percentage of those "other programmers" that can't effectively be retrained in a new context. They're the ones who likely weren't very good to begin with, though. Ugh, too much pessimism. Maybe I need to watch the ending of Life of Brian again.
I would consider you an exception rather than the rule. My experience is that "programmers" without solid computer architecture-level training have a very hard time understanding embedded/realtime systems development. There are certainly programmers out there without such training who would do well (like yourself), but then they most likely would have excelled in a computer engineering program had they chosen that path in college. I'm guessing that's a minority, though.
I once lived through a year-long delay while another group had to completely re-architect, re-design, and re-write their part of a machine we were developing. They decided that multiple inheritance, persistence, and template libraries would be fun to use, despite the fact they had very limited resources. The result was a subsystem that ran an order of magnitude slower than the minimum requirement. (And by the way, the part I worked on was also in C++ and easily met all performance requirements, so no need to blast C++. Just because a language gives you a lot of rope doesn't mean you need to hang yourself with it.)
Using the "pay what you want" model, quite possibly. I'm not what you would call a big music fan. I've collected 100 or so CDs over the years, most of which contain music recorded before CDs were invented. I suspect I would have more if I could freely sample music on my own terms. I mostly avoid music stations on the radio in favor of talk/news these days. Can't stand the shock jocks or the one in ten songs that I find listenable.
I was given a Jethro Tull CD a while back as a gift. I like Tull and have several other CDs, but I wasn't sure I liked this one. It took a couple of weeks listening to it in my car while commuting (run through maybe 10 times) before I came to really like it. A 30 second clip on Amazon isn't going to convince me, nor is a single play on the radio (if I were listening to music stations).
But if a friend said to check out the new Radiohead album (no, I haven't checked it out, but it's a good example), I could stick it on a CD and give it a few run throughs. If I like it, I would be more than willing to pay $5-10 on it, depending on how much. I would be especially likely to pay if I knew that the artist was getting a large chunk of that instead of the wretched RIAA members.
But it is a case of monopoly. MS has historically had "agreements" with all of the large-scale PC vendors. I challenge you to compete with Dell and their economies of scale, as well as their customer support (okay, don't laugh, let's call it "perceived" customer support). Without that, you're selling to more knowledgeable buyers, who, you guessed it, are the ones already putting Linux on their PCs (after paying the MS tax in many cases).
Looks at the inroads Linux has made in schools. Most of the time, the driving factor has been reducing cost, but schools are finding the increased functionality very compelling. Luckily, donated PCs are perfect for this use, so the MS tax typically doesn't come into play. If the playing field were leveled, Linux would stand a much better chance. In fact, I bet that Linux would become the dominant OS in the US if it were bundled with every PC, even if Windows was a free download. Never underestimate the laziness of US consumers.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this same mechanism in the client software for IXIA network test equipment. They have a spreadsheet-like pages, and when there is a check box in a column, you can click it, then select a range of cells in the column and it will apply the setting for the check box you just changed.
Check with your local police force and see if they have a "citizen's police academy" that you can attend. I assure you you would come away with a whole new respect for what an officer goes through, and you wouldn't so cavalierly assume they could just grab his arms and be done with it. My wife went through such a program and it significantly changed her appreciation for their job.
I just don't think I'd really consider that to be resisting arrest
That's just ridiculous. Anything other than doing exactly as the officer asks is resisting, regardless of whether you agree with why they are there in the first place. It doesn't matter if he is trying to punch them or just refusing to be handcuffed. How can an officer possibly know how far this person is willing to go in his resistance? They have to assume the worst, for everyone's safety. What if they had backed off and the guy rushed the stage, putting Kerry at risk or maybe forcing them or Kerry's security to shoot him. What would you be saying, then?
Is "fairness" to other speakers really a justification for the application of force?
If by "force" you mean being taken by the arm to be led out of the building, then sure, it was justified.
It's pretty clear from the video that the student escalated the level of force by resisting being led out of the building.
There are two aspects to this discussion that seem to be getting blurred. There is what happened before the student pulled away from the officers and there is what happened after. Anyone who disagrees with what the officers did after are not really being objective, or they don't understand anything about proper police procedure.
The decisions by the forum organizers and/or the police leading up to that are reasonable to debate or question. What would likely have happened if they had left the guy alone? Probably he would have ranted for a while longer. Either the crowd would have reacted with annoyance, in which case he would likely have run out of steam, or perhaps the crowd would have begun to cheer him on. At the very least, that would have been the end of any civilized discussion.
As has been said more than once just in this thread, he had at least one had free and was grabbing a seat or railing. That gives him plenty of leverage to twist and maybe use his legs. What happens if he grabs one of the officers weapons (taser or gun)? The cops can't take that chance. I see the only alternative at that point to have used substantially more physical force, likely causing injury of some sort. Perhaps just whacking his hand with a baton would have been sufficient, but that would have left a potentially serious physical injury. A couple of minutes after he was zapped, the pain is only a memory. Witness his behavior in the video that shows him after being led down the stairs. He's obviously not still suffering any effects from the stun gun/taser.
This guy can have his OWN assembly where he DOES get to talk non-stop the whole time if he wants, and if someone decides to stand there trying to shout him down, then HE gets the benefit of the police working for HIM, if that becomes necessary.
Yes, but he'll have to wait until the Illinois Nazis are done with their march.
But they definitely had him in control, had him partially cuffed and were well on their way to having him completely cuffed when they Tasered him
Look again at the video. While they had him on the ground trying to cuff him, and well before he was tasered, he managed to partially twist and get an arm in front of him. In that position, he can easily grab at an officers weapon, and his legs also become dangerous. He was obviously struggling with all his might. You be the cop, what would you do?
I would suggest you attend a "citizen's police academy" in your area if there is one. Find out what it's like to be a cop and what kind of stress they have to deal with. If you really watch the video, you'll see that the cops reacted (rather appropriately, in my opinion) to escalating physical behavior by the student.
If at the point where Kerry said he would answer the question, the student had simply put his arms up in a gesture of conformance, the situation would have calmed and I suspect Kerry would have answered the question. The police weren't trying to arrest him initially, he brought that upon himself by resisting.
As for the taser, there were three or four cops nearly on top of the guy trying to control his arms. Those arms were within reach of several guns, and his behavior was combative enough that the cops can't take any chances of him grabbing one. They are trained to respond as they did and use minimal physical force to maintain their own safety. This idiot will be left with the memory of the pain from the taser, but no physical scars.
So I'll say it again, try and walk a mile in a cops shoes before condemning them for tasering this guy. You can argue that the situation was mishandled at the beginning, but you would have to concede that the student was at least as responsible for it getting out of hand.
Microsoft will decide by mid-2008 whether it can afford to forgo the $40 normally charged for Works.
Sounds like a win-win for Microsoft. They get whatever revenue they're currently getting for Works plus the ad revenue for the next year, then they'll decide whether or not to forget about the non-ad revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
It is simply unacceptable that the anger here is at the fact that "China broke the rules!" and not at "China is ignoring human rights!"
Why are you assuming no one cares about China's abuse of human rights? This discussion is after all about a rules violation. It isn't mutually exclusive with a disdain for what China does to their athletes.
If you've watched the coverage of the gymnastics, you would notice there is no lack of discussion about how the athletes are taken from their families sometimes at three years of age. With their parents consent, no less, because the state gives the families of successful athletes nice houses (that the athletes themselves get to visit every couple of years if they're lucky).
So this rules violation isn't masking the disdain for China's actions, it is amplifying it. Ignoring it would be letting China off the hook, and a disservice to the athletes who competed within the rules.
Who's traditional wisdom? There are very few places on earth that are not loaded with microorganisms. Even fresh basalt rock on the bottom of the ocean (where "fresh" means something like 20,000 years old) is full of microorganisms. I doubt very much that oil and gas fields are sterile.
Try "To Serve Mankind".
If the state truly does just dump this stuff (which it almost certainly doesn't), sick the media on them. With "Green" being the new "PC" (no pun intended), not a politician in the country would want to be seen as dumping useful equipment/toxic waste into landfills. The state will change its procedures in a big hurry.
Good point on the power bill, although it's not quite the same as bandwidth. For each KW I use, it cost the electric company some amount to produce. There isn't the same kind of direct relationship with each KB I use. It's not as simple as that, of course, but I think my point is valid.
As for the buffet analogy, the problem I have with it is this: how much exactly is $5 worth of food at a buffet? Do you figure the cost of that same food at the market, plus mark-up for labor and overhead? Or do you compare against an equivalent quality fixed-price restaurant? I understand the point you are making, and it's hard not to feel cheated to some degree if you pay for a buffet and only end up eating a light snack. On the other hand, I don't like "cafeteria-style" restaurants where you pay by the pound for your sandwich.
I guess what it comes down to is that I put a certain amount of value on having the option to eat (or transfer) as much as I want. For me, that makes the bandwidth provided by my current DSL connection well worth the cost, even though I don't use it all up.
How's that for belaboring a point?
One big issue is that the eye is not perfect optically. It cannot focus all colors at the same focal plane.
Thank you! I've never taken the time to try to understand it, but this seems to perfectly explain the effect I sometimes see with red and blue text on a dark background under low light conditions. There is a very disconcerting 3-D effect where one of the colors appears to really stand out from the screen.
Used to drive me nuts late at night when I was already getting a little bleary-eyed (hey, that's my only excuse for spending any time on web pages with brightly colored text on a black background.)
Psychologically, I hate metered rates. I can't help but think about the money ticking away. It would definitely change my internet use if I was paying by the KB. I would likely end up paying less, but I would also end up using the internet a lot less. My current DSL plan gives me a reliable, solid 6Mb/384Kb connection for $35/mo, and I'm extremely happy with it. I don't care that there are times when it's completely idle. It's fast enough when I need it and I don't have to worry about how much it's going to cost me to upgrade my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu. I know I would be paying more than that at my current usage if it went to a metered rate.
And no, I don't download movies or music or use any p2p software at all.
On the other hand, consumers should see "unlimited" as a good thing only if they expect to use more than the average person
This seems like such a greedy perspective to me. I'm willing to pay some amount to be rid of the stress of worrying about whether my wife or kids are going to use too much bandwidth. As for the buffet analogy, it really pisses me off to see people who pile up huge amounts of food on their plates because they want to "get their money's worth", only to leave half of it uneaten. If I can get a good meal for a reasonable price, I'm happy. I don't have a need to eat as much as I possibly can, just like I don't feel any compulsion to download a bunch of crap I don't need just so I use more bandwidth than the average.
I get a large portion of my news from slashdot. I find that maybe 20%, sometimes more, of the stories here are of above average interest to me. That's far better than scanning news sites, which anyway wouldn't find half the stories here. So I'm letting all of you function as my filter. Works well enough for the type of news slashdot specializes in. You know, for nerds.
For everything else, there's The Daily Show.
I haven't experienced any of those problems with my Thinkpad running the last two or three Ubuntu releases. No X crashes either, and I use the proprietary ATI drivers with Compiz Fusion (a quite challenging a test, I think). To be perfectly fair, I had to spend a couple of hours getting things set up originally, but since then I've just done upgrades with no significant issues to think of. Each release undoes some of the custom changes I've had to make to earlier releases.
I used to like to tinker a lot with the systems I used, but I've slowly tired of doing that. The nice thing with my current Ubuntu systems is that I can find some really cool stuff when I'm in the mood to tinker, but I can also get my work done without tinkering at all. It's all up to me.
And to back up what someone said earlier about printers: I set up my wife's laptop to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu. She tried to hook up our HP inkjet all-in-one, and it took me 20 minutes to get all the drivers and crap downloaded. The next time she wanted to print (from OOo), she was running Ubuntu. She called me in fearing another 20 minute ordeal, but I had her plug in the printer, then bring up the print dialog again. Ubuntu had silently (and correctly) configured the printer, and OOo saw it without even having to be restarted.
This is a really good point. As an atheist, I've come to realize that the chief difference between myself and those who choose to "believe" is that I can live with the fact that I just don't know.
I don't know exactly how life was formed.
I don't know what caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.
I don't know how our current universe began, or if this is the only one.
I don't know if there was a specific instant when the universe came into existence or if there will be a time when it will end.
I don't know if there really is dark matter or dark energy.
There are lots more things that I don't know. I would really like to have answers/explanations for those things, but I'm not compelled to "believe" some made-up explanation just to (artificially) satisfy that desire. If and when there are decent scientific explanations for any of these questions, I'll be happy. In the meantime, I'm content not knowing, but it's fun to speculate on possibilities without building a religion around them and proselytizing those speculations as given truths.
By the way, I don't know if there is some form of superior, supernatural being that influenced any part of my reality, either, which I suppose argues that I'm really an agnostic. But I don't believe that there is any such being, which hopefully puts me back to being an atheist.
In other words, the real issue is that only a minority of programmers are able to take skills developed in one context and apply them in a different context.
I couldn't agree with you more. You've done a nice job of generalizing what I was trying to say. I might add that I think there is a certain percentage of those "other programmers" that can't effectively be retrained in a new context. They're the ones who likely weren't very good to begin with, though. Ugh, too much pessimism. Maybe I need to watch the ending of Life of Brian again.
I would consider you an exception rather than the rule. My experience is that "programmers" without solid computer architecture-level training have a very hard time understanding embedded/realtime systems development. There are certainly programmers out there without such training who would do well (like yourself), but then they most likely would have excelled in a computer engineering program had they chosen that path in college. I'm guessing that's a minority, though.
I once lived through a year-long delay while another group had to completely re-architect, re-design, and re-write their part of a machine we were developing. They decided that multiple inheritance, persistence, and template libraries would be fun to use, despite the fact they had very limited resources. The result was a subsystem that ran an order of magnitude slower than the minimum requirement. (And by the way, the part I worked on was also in C++ and easily met all performance requirements, so no need to blast C++. Just because a language gives you a lot of rope doesn't mean you need to hang yourself with it.)
Using the "pay what you want" model, quite possibly. I'm not what you would call a big music fan. I've collected 100 or so CDs over the years, most of which contain music recorded before CDs were invented. I suspect I would have more if I could freely sample music on my own terms. I mostly avoid music stations on the radio in favor of talk/news these days. Can't stand the shock jocks or the one in ten songs that I find listenable.
I was given a Jethro Tull CD a while back as a gift. I like Tull and have several other CDs, but I wasn't sure I liked this one. It took a couple of weeks listening to it in my car while commuting (run through maybe 10 times) before I came to really like it. A 30 second clip on Amazon isn't going to convince me, nor is a single play on the radio (if I were listening to music stations).
But if a friend said to check out the new Radiohead album (no, I haven't checked it out, but it's a good example), I could stick it on a CD and give it a few run throughs. If I like it, I would be more than willing to pay $5-10 on it, depending on how much. I would be especially likely to pay if I knew that the artist was getting a large chunk of that instead of the wretched RIAA members.
But it is a case of monopoly. MS has historically had "agreements" with all of the large-scale PC vendors. I challenge you to compete with Dell and their economies of scale, as well as their customer support (okay, don't laugh, let's call it "perceived" customer support). Without that, you're selling to more knowledgeable buyers, who, you guessed it, are the ones already putting Linux on their PCs (after paying the MS tax in many cases).
Looks at the inroads Linux has made in schools. Most of the time, the driving factor has been reducing cost, but schools are finding the increased functionality very compelling. Luckily, donated PCs are perfect for this use, so the MS tax typically doesn't come into play. If the playing field were leveled, Linux would stand a much better chance. In fact, I bet that Linux would become the dominant OS in the US if it were bundled with every PC, even if Windows was a free download. Never underestimate the laziness of US consumers.
Oooh, don't forget that fancy new 3D UI, I'm sure Vista is way better than Linux there:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ
I'm pretty sure I've seen this same mechanism in the client software for IXIA network test equipment. They have a spreadsheet-like pages, and when there is a check box in a column, you can click it, then select a range of cells in the column and it will apply the setting for the check box you just changed.
Check with your local police force and see if they have a "citizen's police academy" that you can attend. I assure you you would come away with a whole new respect for what an officer goes through, and you wouldn't so cavalierly assume they could just grab his arms and be done with it. My wife went through such a program and it significantly changed her appreciation for their job.
I just don't think I'd really consider that to be resisting arrest
That's just ridiculous. Anything other than doing exactly as the officer asks is resisting, regardless of whether you agree with why they are there in the first place. It doesn't matter if he is trying to punch them or just refusing to be handcuffed. How can an officer possibly know how far this person is willing to go in his resistance? They have to assume the worst, for everyone's safety. What if they had backed off and the guy rushed the stage, putting Kerry at risk or maybe forcing them or Kerry's security to shoot him. What would you be saying, then?
Is "fairness" to other speakers really a justification for the application of force?
If by "force" you mean being taken by the arm to be led out of the building, then sure, it was justified.
It's pretty clear from the video that the student escalated the level of force by resisting being led out of the building.
There are two aspects to this discussion that seem to be getting blurred. There is what happened before the student pulled away from the officers and there is what happened after. Anyone who disagrees with what the officers did after are not really being objective, or they don't understand anything about proper police procedure.
The decisions by the forum organizers and/or the police leading up to that are reasonable to debate or question. What would likely have happened if they had left the guy alone? Probably he would have ranted for a while longer. Either the crowd would have reacted with annoyance, in which case he would likely have run out of steam, or perhaps the crowd would have begun to cheer him on. At the very least, that would have been the end of any civilized discussion.
As has been said more than once just in this thread, he had at least one had free and was grabbing a seat or railing. That gives him plenty of leverage to twist and maybe use his legs. What happens if he grabs one of the officers weapons (taser or gun)? The cops can't take that chance. I see the only alternative at that point to have used substantially more physical force, likely causing injury of some sort. Perhaps just whacking his hand with a baton would have been sufficient, but that would have left a potentially serious physical injury. A couple of minutes after he was zapped, the pain is only a memory. Witness his behavior in the video that shows him after being led down the stairs. He's obviously not still suffering any effects from the stun gun/taser.
This guy can have his OWN assembly where he DOES get to talk non-stop the whole time if he wants, and if someone decides to stand there trying to shout him down, then HE gets the benefit of the police working for HIM, if that becomes necessary.
Yes, but he'll have to wait until the Illinois Nazis are done with their march.
But they definitely had him in control, had him partially cuffed and were well on their way to having him completely cuffed when they Tasered him
Look again at the video. While they had him on the ground trying to cuff him, and well before he was tasered, he managed to partially twist and get an arm in front of him. In that position, he can easily grab at an officers weapon, and his legs also become dangerous. He was obviously struggling with all his might. You be the cop, what would you do?
I would suggest you attend a "citizen's police academy" in your area if there is one. Find out what it's like to be a cop and what kind of stress they have to deal with. If you really watch the video, you'll see that the cops reacted (rather appropriately, in my opinion) to escalating physical behavior by the student.
If at the point where Kerry said he would answer the question, the student had simply put his arms up in a gesture of conformance, the situation would have calmed and I suspect Kerry would have answered the question. The police weren't trying to arrest him initially, he brought that upon himself by resisting.
As for the taser, there were three or four cops nearly on top of the guy trying to control his arms. Those arms were within reach of several guns, and his behavior was combative enough that the cops can't take any chances of him grabbing one. They are trained to respond as they did and use minimal physical force to maintain their own safety. This idiot will be left with the memory of the pain from the taser, but no physical scars.
So I'll say it again, try and walk a mile in a cops shoes before condemning them for tasering this guy. You can argue that the situation was mishandled at the beginning, but you would have to concede that the student was at least as responsible for it getting out of hand.
Try reading TFA next time, bozo!
Microsoft will decide by mid-2008 whether it can afford to forgo the $40 normally charged for Works.
Sounds like a win-win for Microsoft. They get whatever revenue they're currently getting for Works plus the ad revenue for the next year, then they'll decide whether or not to forget about the non-ad revenue.
...the 6502 which was a reversed engineer Motorola 68000.
Uh, no. The 6502 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6502 is completely different that the 68000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68000, and was not a reverse engineered anything.