Of course they aren't a government entity, but the OP was comparing their behavior to a government, albeit in an incorrect way. I provided a better comparison.
It's not a threat if the stated action is legal, as presumably it would be if the officer fired to protect public safety (i.e. because you didn't drop the weapon and instead pointed it at a person).
That's no different than "threatening" to sue someone if they don't comply with your demands. It's never unlawful to file a lawsuit (until a judge decides the suit was unlawful and acts to disbar the lawyer), so you can "threaten" that all you want.
Far more generally, people fear sudden or unusual events far more than they fear regular smaller events, even if those regular smaller events add up to far more damage over time. The panic over such low levels of Fukushima radiation compared to Denver radiation may be an example of this. Another example is the panic in Dallas over the West Nile virus. The virus has killed 13-15 or so people this year, mostly the old and infirm. Guess what also kills the old in infirm? The regular flu. How many have been killed in Texas this year? No one knows, because the government doesn't bother to collect that information. The most recent information indicates some dozen children died of the flu in the 2010-2011 flu season in Texas. Numbers of adults and seniors aren't tracked and aren't available, but the CDC estimates somewhere between like 4000 and 30000 flu deaths a year, depending on the severity of that year's outbreak.
So, a dozen+ people die from something slightly unusual. Odds are pretty good that they all would have died from the flu in a few months anyway. But now the citizens and the government all in a panic to "do something" so they start aerial spraying of pesticides. How do you opt out of aerial spraying of pesticides where you live?
Car crashes, the flu, heart disease, cancer from Denver's background radiation - no one really cares. But risk or kill a small fraction of that number of people - but do it all at once and in some novel way - and people will react with exponentially higher fervor.
I think I saw someone on Slashdot once explain this as human instinct. Things that are unusual are more likely to get cave-man-proto-humans killed, so humans developed or evolved enhanced reactions to them. All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.
This is the opposite of trickle down economics. Trickle down says that you should give money to rich people first, so that eventually it finds its way to poorer people.
Tesla's model is to take money from rich people first, to fund research that eventually helps poorer people too. That sounds a lot more like a progressive stance when put that way, right?
One such company is Socialware, for example. I think for a lot of these settings Facebook has exposed assets and you can directly manipulate things in a "whack-a-mole" fashion, but hiring a company like Socialware gives you all of that managed for you in a proxy. Obviously this is out of reach of one guy running an elementary school, though.
What position do you hold your head relative to your body? Do you slouch way back on chairs then hold your head forward to keep it upright? Do you sit forward with your elbows on your knees then have to look up all the time? Neither of those are particularly good on your neck. I keep my neck straight relative to my body by sitting upright. I use good chairs to maintain curvature of my spine. And I keep my neck well positioned when lying down. And I haven't had to miss work due to a debilitating headache in years. (Though, I did have a smaller headache through much of the night last night, which is partially back now and keeping me from getting to sleep. But I can work through the muscles in one side of my neck seizing and causing pain through that half of my head; it's when both sides seize simultaneously that I couldn't see and couldn't drive and couldn't work.)
If we understood the nervous system better, I think we could find the cause of fibromyalgia. And I agree with you that we would likely find multiple, completely unrelated root causes.
I don't propose a small list of rights. I propose a small list of limitations, I.e. the opposite. Those limitations need to include some things not limited now, though, like better protections for the common air, water, and soil.
Celebrities are defined as public figures. I think the concept of public figures exists to separate those "more memorable" people from the private citizenry. Even then, though, as with your private investigator and police/mafia suggestions, creation and cataloging of those memories are time-consuming and thus expensive, and they are rarely retroactive.
Most of our laws are written around the fact that we are humans. For example, there are pretty severe laws about pouring certain chemicals into the ground, but very different laws about pouring clean water into the ground, because as humans certain chemicals could greatly poison the ground and groundwater, while pouring water into the ground is only unlawful when it's a waste of clean water in a drought. If human physiology were different, these laws would be different.
The laws and customs related to public privacy are all based around the concept that humans have poor memories, which are often forgotten in moments, and are most certainly forgotten in days, months, and years, and are absolutely forgotten upon in about a century. Moreover, any "memories" which are more durable require extensive human time and effort to produce and catalog - something which is very expensive and thus limited.
Our laws and customs were designed taking this into account. Now, after however many centuries of development of our laws and customs, in the last five years we have means to augment fundamental human nature. Those that only understand the letter of the laws and customs written long ago see this as changing nothing, for they view the letters in a vacuum and ignore human nature. Those that understand the spirit of the laws and customs understand that they were established for a given time and place, and if the circumstances change the laws and customs should as well.
While you were replying to me in general agreement, note that I don't actually believe much in inalienable rights. The problem is that they are entirely impractical. You might claim that a person has the right to free speech, sure, but do they have the right to live? Probably - what's the point of speech if you're dead.
But to live, I continue, you need breathable air. So is the right to breathable air inalienable? What air is yours then, exactly? Just the air in your lungs? How useful is that since that's spent air. Do you have a right to the air you are about to breath in? What if it's above someone else's property? What if that person chooses to pump mercury vapor into this air? Do you have a right to stop him from doing that? Is that more you stopping him from exercising his rights than him stopping you from exercising yours?
The end result of this logic exercise is usually that, in order to have any inalienable rights at all, we have to have strong and strict laws protecting the commons and environment. We may even need food stamps and health care.
I'd much prefer a strict, strong list of defined limitations in our rights, that include things like protections for commons and care for the sick, and then let anything else by free by default. Then some people can argue which of those free things are more or less free than the others while the rest of us stop being bothered by them.
Yup, you have a right to move about without being constantly monitored. It only rarely comes up. A few years back a judge ordered someone to stop recording the license plates of every car that came into a polling station to vote. The same injunction is made on occasion again people trying to record the plates of every car visiting a given adult video store. Unfortunately the right isn't codified into law, but it's based on judicial precedent. Of course you don't have the right to total anonymity as the government or a private detective can choose to follow you specifically - even with a tracker on your car if they have a warrant.
I figured that the MF was moving through the debris, and/or the debris was moving because of secondary motion i.e. the planet's rotation. If the interior of the planet was suddenly gone the rotation of the outer crust could flight it off at wild speeds, especially if there's a moon such as we have to act as a gravity slingshot.
For my wife it was at first wondering why, with her lower back and legs in pain and numbness due to blown disk, her hands were also numb. After a few weeks on constant painkillers for her back, when those came down she found she was constantly fatigued, and with skin that felt like she had a 2nd degree sunburn over her whole body. And numb hands.
Are you proposing that, while her back was in excruciating pain, she chose to imagine that her hands were numb? Why would she go to the bother? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that nerve cells can misfire or nerve receptors can respond to the wrong or nonexistent signals, in the same way that brain cells can misfire in epileptic patients. They're all the same basic cells.
Having the treatment be a mood stabilizing drug makes sense as well, then in that they mess with the brain's ability to process nerve signals. While my wife was on it she would tell me that she felt "stupid" because she just couldn't think as quickly or as well as before. We got her off of that as soon as possible.
My restless legs haven't, though. Damn it's annoying as hell when I'm just trying to get to sleep and they start to ache in seconds if held still. Usually getting them really cold mitigates it enough to get to sleep, and they only bother me in the late evening.
There was a recent study that showed accupucture worked. No, not Chinese accupucture; it didn't actually matter where the needled were stuck, but there was a difference if they were stuck at all. Maybe it was a placebo effect but no matter, it had an effect.
Personally my chiropractic experience was a success in that she showed me how my posture was the source of my periodic, debilitating headaches. (Muscles seized in the back of my neck.) Drastic changes to my posture (I sit strictly upright at all times) led to drastic reductions in frequency, and I know new places I can push to force the muscles to relax if they do tense up. Of course she also mucked up my jaw in an adjustment so she wasn't perfect (or even great), but for the problem I saw her for she helped.
Sure you can. The police are public officers working a job for which they are empowered with the ability to detain and arrest. The public are exercising their rights to move freely and with relative anonymity through their own state.
These are drastically different scenarios and it's perfectly reasonable to allow constant surveillance of one (where the people have been entrusted with abusable rights) and not the other.
I played from release day until last year. My account was never hacked.
I use noscript and, when I could get one, an authenticator. I also don't use the same email address for my battle.net authentication as I did for other WoW forums, so phishing was even easier to identify.
Spirit and Opportunity were both "faster, better, cheaper" concept vehicles that did amazingly well, so your conclusion based on just one point of data would be wrong. At this point I don't think there's enough data to make any conclusions about the project's value.
I always assumed that, while the inner core and perhaps much of the surface of Alderaan was indeed vaporized into plasma or somesuch, the topmost outer crust - perhaps the highest mountains - were instead merely fractured, having been a bit too far away from the original blast but shattered by the force of the exploding plasma. That never looked like enough debris to be a whole planet to me anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they aren't a government entity, but the OP was comparing their behavior to a government, albeit in an incorrect way. I provided a better comparison.
It's not a threat if the stated action is legal, as presumably it would be if the officer fired to protect public safety (i.e. because you didn't drop the weapon and instead pointed it at a person).
That's no different than "threatening" to sue someone if they don't comply with your demands. It's never unlawful to file a lawsuit (until a judge decides the suit was unlawful and acts to disbar the lawyer), so you can "threaten" that all you want.
...and of course, there's a reason that doors on all commercial establishments open outward. That reason has three words: Chicago Theater Fire.
It's gruesome just to think about it.
Far more generally, people fear sudden or unusual events far more than they fear regular smaller events, even if those regular smaller events add up to far more damage over time. The panic over such low levels of Fukushima radiation compared to Denver radiation may be an example of this. Another example is the panic in Dallas over the West Nile virus. The virus has killed 13-15 or so people this year, mostly the old and infirm. Guess what also kills the old in infirm? The regular flu. How many have been killed in Texas this year? No one knows, because the government doesn't bother to collect that information. The most recent information indicates some dozen children died of the flu in the 2010-2011 flu season in Texas. Numbers of adults and seniors aren't tracked and aren't available, but the CDC estimates somewhere between like 4000 and 30000 flu deaths a year, depending on the severity of that year's outbreak.
So, a dozen+ people die from something slightly unusual. Odds are pretty good that they all would have died from the flu in a few months anyway. But now the citizens and the government all in a panic to "do something" so they start aerial spraying of pesticides. How do you opt out of aerial spraying of pesticides where you live?
Car crashes, the flu, heart disease, cancer from Denver's background radiation - no one really cares. But risk or kill a small fraction of that number of people - but do it all at once and in some novel way - and people will react with exponentially higher fervor.
I think I saw someone on Slashdot once explain this as human instinct. Things that are unusual are more likely to get cave-man-proto-humans killed, so humans developed or evolved enhanced reactions to them. All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.
This is the opposite of trickle down economics. Trickle down says that you should give money to rich people first, so that eventually it finds its way to poorer people.
Tesla's model is to take money from rich people first, to fund research that eventually helps poorer people too. That sounds a lot more like a progressive stance when put that way, right?
One such company is Socialware, for example. I think for a lot of these settings Facebook has exposed assets and you can directly manipulate things in a "whack-a-mole" fashion, but hiring a company like Socialware gives you all of that managed for you in a proxy. Obviously this is out of reach of one guy running an elementary school, though.
Don't you hate when you a word out of a sentence.
The sixteenth amendment makes the government's business.
What position do you hold your head relative to your body? Do you slouch way back on chairs then hold your head forward to keep it upright? Do you sit forward with your elbows on your knees then have to look up all the time? Neither of those are particularly good on your neck. I keep my neck straight relative to my body by sitting upright. I use good chairs to maintain curvature of my spine. And I keep my neck well positioned when lying down. And I haven't had to miss work due to a debilitating headache in years. (Though, I did have a smaller headache through much of the night last night, which is partially back now and keeping me from getting to sleep. But I can work through the muscles in one side of my neck seizing and causing pain through that half of my head; it's when both sides seize simultaneously that I couldn't see and couldn't drive and couldn't work.)
If we understood the nervous system better, I think we could find the cause of fibromyalgia. And I agree with you that we would likely find multiple, completely unrelated root causes.
Not six months later. And the original symptoms started before she got the really good drugs.
I don't propose a small list of rights. I propose a small list of limitations, I.e. the opposite. Those limitations need to include some things not limited now, though, like better protections for the common air, water, and soil.
Celebrities are defined as public figures. I think the concept of public figures exists to separate those "more memorable" people from the private citizenry. Even then, though, as with your private investigator and police/mafia suggestions, creation and cataloging of those memories are time-consuming and thus expensive, and they are rarely retroactive.
Most of our laws are written around the fact that we are humans. For example, there are pretty severe laws about pouring certain chemicals into the ground, but very different laws about pouring clean water into the ground, because as humans certain chemicals could greatly poison the ground and groundwater, while pouring water into the ground is only unlawful when it's a waste of clean water in a drought. If human physiology were different, these laws would be different.
The laws and customs related to public privacy are all based around the concept that humans have poor memories, which are often forgotten in moments, and are most certainly forgotten in days, months, and years, and are absolutely forgotten upon in about a century. Moreover, any "memories" which are more durable require extensive human time and effort to produce and catalog - something which is very expensive and thus limited.
Our laws and customs were designed taking this into account. Now, after however many centuries of development of our laws and customs, in the last five years we have means to augment fundamental human nature. Those that only understand the letter of the laws and customs written long ago see this as changing nothing, for they view the letters in a vacuum and ignore human nature. Those that understand the spirit of the laws and customs understand that they were established for a given time and place, and if the circumstances change the laws and customs should as well.
Sadly, this is what first came to mind:
http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb57525/southpark/images/d/dd/CartmanGetsanAnalProbe21.gif
I'm sorry this is so off topic; the word distracted me so.
While you were replying to me in general agreement, note that I don't actually believe much in inalienable rights. The problem is that they are entirely impractical. You might claim that a person has the right to free speech, sure, but do they have the right to live? Probably - what's the point of speech if you're dead.
But to live, I continue, you need breathable air. So is the right to breathable air inalienable? What air is yours then, exactly? Just the air in your lungs? How useful is that since that's spent air. Do you have a right to the air you are about to breath in? What if it's above someone else's property? What if that person chooses to pump mercury vapor into this air? Do you have a right to stop him from doing that? Is that more you stopping him from exercising his rights than him stopping you from exercising yours?
The end result of this logic exercise is usually that, in order to have any inalienable rights at all, we have to have strong and strict laws protecting the commons and environment. We may even need food stamps and health care.
I'd much prefer a strict, strong list of defined limitations in our rights, that include things like protections for commons and care for the sick, and then let anything else by free by default. Then some people can argue which of those free things are more or less free than the others while the rest of us stop being bothered by them.
Yup, you have a right to move about without being constantly monitored. It only rarely comes up. A few years back a judge ordered someone to stop recording the license plates of every car that came into a polling station to vote. The same injunction is made on occasion again people trying to record the plates of every car visiting a given adult video store. Unfortunately the right isn't codified into law, but it's based on judicial precedent. Of course you don't have the right to total anonymity as the government or a private detective can choose to follow you specifically - even with a tracker on your car if they have a warrant.
I figured that the MF was moving through the debris, and/or the debris was moving because of secondary motion i.e. the planet's rotation. If the interior of the planet was suddenly gone the rotation of the outer crust could flight it off at wild speeds, especially if there's a moon such as we have to act as a gravity slingshot.
For my wife it was at first wondering why, with her lower back and legs in pain and numbness due to blown disk, her hands were also numb. After a few weeks on constant painkillers for her back, when those came down she found she was constantly fatigued, and with skin that felt like she had a 2nd degree sunburn over her whole body. And numb hands.
Are you proposing that, while her back was in excruciating pain, she chose to imagine that her hands were numb? Why would she go to the bother? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that nerve cells can misfire or nerve receptors can respond to the wrong or nonexistent signals, in the same way that brain cells can misfire in epileptic patients. They're all the same basic cells.
Having the treatment be a mood stabilizing drug makes sense as well, then in that they mess with the brain's ability to process nerve signals. While my wife was on it she would tell me that she felt "stupid" because she just couldn't think as quickly or as well as before. We got her off of that as soon as possible.
My restless legs haven't, though. Damn it's annoying as hell when I'm just trying to get to sleep and they start to ache in seconds if held still. Usually getting them really cold mitigates it enough to get to sleep, and they only bother me in the late evening.
There was a recent study that showed accupucture worked. No, not Chinese accupucture; it didn't actually matter where the needled were stuck, but there was a difference if they were stuck at all. Maybe it was a placebo effect but no matter, it had an effect.
Personally my chiropractic experience was a success in that she showed me how my posture was the source of my periodic, debilitating headaches. (Muscles seized in the back of my neck.) Drastic changes to my posture (I sit strictly upright at all times) led to drastic reductions in frequency, and I know new places I can push to force the muscles to relax if they do tense up. Of course she also mucked up my jaw in an adjustment so she wasn't perfect (or even great), but for the problem I saw her for she helped.
Sure you can. The police are public officers working a job for which they are empowered with the ability to detain and arrest. The public are exercising their rights to move freely and with relative anonymity through their own state.
These are drastically different scenarios and it's perfectly reasonable to allow constant surveillance of one (where the people have been entrusted with abusable rights) and not the other.
I played from release day until last year. My account was never hacked.
I use noscript and, when I could get one, an authenticator. I also don't use the same email address for my battle.net authentication as I did for other WoW forums, so phishing was even easier to identify.
Spirit and Opportunity were both "faster, better, cheaper" concept vehicles that did amazingly well, so your conclusion based on just one point of data would be wrong. At this point I don't think there's enough data to make any conclusions about the project's value.
I always assumed that, while the inner core and perhaps much of the surface of Alderaan was indeed vaporized into plasma or somesuch, the topmost outer crust - perhaps the highest mountains - were instead merely fractured, having been a bit too far away from the original blast but shattered by the force of the exploding plasma. That never looked like enough debris to be a whole planet to me anyway.