However, some other groups in my organization like alternatives like PVCS. Now I have little against PVCS (price tag being one thing, and some crappy network functionality that likely has been resolved by now).
PVCS does, however, lack a lot of CVS functionality, much less SVN functionality. I'm rather pleased to see another good reason to get rid of PVCS coming up.
This is the first stable release of one of the most influential open source tools. It marks the beginning of the global transition from CVS to SVN. Aside from CVS, I think that only gcc (good, free compiler available for many platforms) and perhaps a few parts of the GNU toolchain could be considered as influential. I would say that this is of exceptional importance to anyone using or working with open source or developing software.
I cannot agree that US government data mining is necessarily ineffective.
US gov TLAs with access to certain types of data alone have phenomenally clean and good data to use for data mining. For starters:
* Phone calls. Forget *contents* of phone calls -- a cop doesn't even need a warrant to get a list of phone calls. Plug all phone calls into a nice big database, and you have an excellent association network -- I can build up a list of all the people you know.
Now, suppose I want to detect flow of causuality. I look for some degree of correlation between a phone call from entity A to entity B and entity B to entity C. If a phone call of the second type follows a phone call of the first type within a day or two more than, say, 25% of the time, there's an interesting link to explore. Maybe entity B is passing on instructions to entity C. I'm not sure what the status of past location data is -- whether a warrant is required for telcos to turn over the data they've logged on your movements. Given a couple of years of accurate movement data, it's probably really interesting when a phone call from entity A to entity B is frequently followed by a physical visit from entity B to entity C.
* Purchasing-related data. Movements can be tracked via ATM withdrawals, credit-card use, phone card use, store purchasing card use. You ever let a friend use your store grocery card? That's a great source of determining who knows who -- a store card associated with two credit cards.
When you get a driver's license, most states fingerprint you (or at least thumbprint). I didn't even know that I *could* opt out of the thumbprint until afterwards.
I agree that mining is probably less useful to find terrorists (frankly, unless a terrorist is just incredibly stupid, he's going to avoid the above), but it *is* useful to track all kinds of other people.
Any person with a cell phone should have no expectation of privacy. They're carrying around a portable tracking device with a microphone that can be turned on remotely. End of story.
I think that what Yahoo did wrong (boy, I'll bet there are tons of analysts starting sentences the same way) was to try to make a mega-page, to rely on some data that was human-indexed rather than entirely machine-produced, and to fall behind technologically.
Google doesn't do this.
* Google is very spartan. I'm glad to see that all the web designers that thought that fancy web pages are what people want have been shown to be wrong. Excuses like "oh, this is for a 'distinctive feel'" or "we won't look up-to-date without Flash", etc, just don't measure up. Google works well on all browsers, has pages that download quickly, and renders very rapidly. The only large image used is the ever-changing "Google" logo, which gives folks a fair amount of enjoyment (well, *I* get more of a kick out of it than any other single image of that size each day). Their ads are text-based, and there are few links on each page. Their page works well in any browser, including lynx. Spartan is in -- web development has matured, and garish pages with faux metal bits and hard-to-find imagemap-based links are out. Functionality matters.
* All the data that Google presents is produced by a computer, not an array of humans (except for the Directory, which is from dmoz.org, not Google-paid people. They can scale up as far as they want by just increasing their processor power. All their people just figure out how to get the computer to do the right thing. Sure, in the short term that can be a bit less efficient, but it's a big win in the long term.
* Google doesn't fall behind when it comes to technology. Google is rabid about recruiting PhDs working with automated data mining. They are constantly adding neat little features to find, interesting new experimental searches (Google Sets is my favorite), and do an impressive job for a group of people that have hordes of people trying to beat the engine constantly and are avoiding using any human-based indexing.
I guess most people realize this guy knows little about computers, and nothing about law, so his main claim to fame is...that he is a journalism major writing for Ziff-Davis? That means his rant is just a nicely worded Slashdot troll.
To be fair, to write a really good summary of what's going on, you'd need to be skilled at law, software development, and journalism, and I'm fairly convinced that anyone that's really competent in all three areas is not going to be making a living as a journalist.
The degree of uninformed commmentary all over the place means that few people *do* have a good handle on what's going on. From what I can get from reading this guy's archive, he tends to hobnob with CEOs/upper management of tech companies, who naturally are going to happily feed him whatever line they think will best manipulate him. He isn't going to sit down and start reading through legal code.
So, is he uninformed and parrotting BS? Sure. On the other hand, are *most* people involved? Sure. The only people that I'd really claim to know what's going on are in IBM's legal team -- and those folks, beside having an obvious bias, take the approach of not saying anything that might be wrong. Lawyers are conservative about making statements. Journalists, on the other hand, need to make impressive announcements and insights on a constant basis. Does this mean that accuracy suffers? Sure. But if it didn't, they wouldn't get paid.
I agree that anyone at this point that's worried about using Linux because of SCO is pretty much either uninformed or awfully paranoid. I've keept a reasonably close eye on groklaw and other parties involved -- and I've never even coded on the sections in question or taken any civil law courses. I think that Slashdot *was* overeager to pronounce SCO full of hot air, but at this point, they really have no case against Linux users. There are so many counterarguments that could be used if even one failed that would blow away their argument that it isn't even funny.
IBM shareholders might be a bit worried about the continuation of AIX, which is more at risk than Linux, but honestly, I still wouldn't lose any sleep over it if I had a bunch of AIX deployments. Given the data that's come up from Novell and IBM, and how weak SCO's arguments have been once in the light, this case shouldn't have been a worry for at least a month or two now.
This has been discussed on Slashdot before. If you want a quick source, most boxes running Apache are running Linux, and you can take a look at netcraft to see the percentage of Apache boxes out there -- it's by far the dominant platform.
Linux and BSD are the dominant Apache platforms. I'm fairly comfortable saying that Linux is a much more common Apache deployment platform than BSD, but sure, I'll look it up. These numbers, the first I grabbed from Google, say that this is indeed true.
Aside from the fact that all the studies I've seen posted of Linux desktop usage are at best around 1%, anecodal evidence and a general feeling from reading articles and seeing sales of business software that business intranets (behind firewalls) tend to use Windows boxes on workstations, I just think that few people will argue that Linux is not a common desktop machine today. I know of only two people in person (and one is me) that definitely run Linux as their only desktop OS, and I spend an awful lot of time talking to tech folks.
Do you have any reason to say that what I was pointing out is false? I think that it's pretty much conventional wisdom. Do you need people to justify data like "Windows 98 tends to crash more than Mac OS X" at each usage?
This probably isn't an issue for the vanilla BSDs, but OS X and Windows are both much more likely than Linux to simply be a workstation rather than a server, given the fact that the overwhelming number of Linux boxes are in use as servers.
It's generally not too bad to secure a workstation against remove attacks-- you can just rip out anything listening. On a server, you *have* to be running some sort of server software, and if that has holes, you are open to attack.
No, it was before he started saying "Real big man". It's much quieter -- mumbling rather than yelling.
I'm not saying that the officers were in the right, just that the transcript was definitely made by people arguing in favor of the guy and his daughter.
I've always wondered why people like movies with famous actors at all *anyway*.
Sure, they can generally act well, but there are a lot of good actors out in the world.
And the down side of having a famous actor is significant. You are constantly having the fact that the actor is the *actor* thrown in your face. It's much harder to achieve the illusion of the actor being the character in the movie. Sure, for some movies it doesn't matter. When you go watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan movie, you aren't going to see the character -- you're going because you want to see Schwarzenegger or Chan doing more of their trademark things. You aren't going to fall into the false reality of the movie, because, well, you're watching *Jackie Chan*!
For most movies, I *much* prefer when I don't know the actor -- maybe there's a really extensive makeup job done, or the actor is much older or younger than in any other movies that I've seen him in, or I just plain haven't seen the actor before. It means that I'm watching the *character*, not the *actor*.
I am interested to see what happens when good CG (starting somewhere around Gollum in LoTR) becomes more pervasive and it's not as readily apparent who is acting as what character.
After a quick skim of his website ("Enderle Group"...that's a bit pretentious for a group of one), I don't know whether I'd say he's stupid. I think he's probably about as informed as most IT journalists out there, which is not a lot.
More concerning is the fact that he may have the lowest degree of integrity I've ever seen in a professional journalist. His website pretty plainly describes how companies can buy positive endorsements from him. He's really more of an ad source than anything else. (Admittedly, this is par for the course for the business publication field, but seems kind of depressing in the technology field.)
He also seems to go in for real shock-and-alarm articles "Foo is DEAD and has STUPID MANAGEMENT". He likes to make very strong statements in his articles. Finally, while he cites a few articles that turned out to be correct, he doesn't seem to have a very good history of being correct.
Frankly, if I have to have someone like him, I'd prefer John C. Dvorak. Dvorak sometimes promotes bad ideas, and tends to go for overly-strong statements, but at least tends to be interesting, and has articles that contain less brown-nosing or FUDding than Enderle. Plus, his writing is more pleasant to read.
Online P2P pirates prolly not big movie problem
on
FBI Anti-Piracy Seal
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I think the MPAA should be looking at two other issues in addition to piracy: - why do only 40% of movies actually make money? I find it hard to believe that wholesale copyright infringement is ripping that much off the bottom line; very few people actually have the bandwidth to download movies, and not all of those have DVD burners
You ever wonder why the RIAA is so much more rabid about going after people than the MPAA? Probably because it's quite feasible to toss around MP3s, even over a modem, but movies require a fancier setup. It's unlikely that all that many movies are actually pirated by people online. When you consider that a music album doesn't cost that much less than a DVD, and that a typical MP3-ized album might be 60MB, as opposed to at *least* ten times that for a ripped movie, the MPAA/RIAA positions start to make more sense.
- why does the average file cost $89m to make and market? I can remember only about 10 years ago that $100m was considered an obscene amount to spend on making a film (refer to "Waterworld" and "Last Action Hero" as examples); now it's only slightly above average?
Inflation is some of that. Larger audiences are some of that.
Movies are a lousy business to be in. It's really, really hard to come up with a reliable model for what will do well, You can make a semi-reliable model by learning to market the bajeezus out of things and getting an N dollar return per dollar spent on marketing, but it's hard to say that director A plus cast B plus scriptwriters C for dollars D will make a good movie. It usually doesn't take all that much money to *make* a good movie (I have nice memories of Monty Python). It's just hard to do so predictably.
Yeah, but what big corporations are willing to pay off politicians to go after serial killers?
Besides, if there weren't any hardened criminals, there wouldn't be any fear, and if there wasn't any fear, how would the current administration's goals be achived?
Not unless you disagree with a law strongly, believe that you can change the law by disobeying it, and believe that a significant number of other people feel the same way.
You have to ask yourself what the cop should reasonably assume. IMHO the cop should assume that an intoxicated man may have been driving the truck. Which means asking for a license is reasonable.
Absolutely. In which case, when the man asked why his ID was being demanded, the officer should have said that it is "on suspicion of driving under the influence", and the guy would have been in the wrong. The officer repeatedly refused to tell the guy why he was being detained or why his ID was being demanded.
Note that physical location in conjunction with information about that location may be enough for probable cause. If someone says that a shadowy figure fired shots at him less than a minute ago, and then ran down a road, and cops see you jogging along said road (and nobody else in the area), then sure, you could be searched for a gun.
On the other hand, if you ask why the cops want to see your ID, they should tell you that "you're suspected of assault", not given repeated refusals to explain what they're about, as happened in the case in the story submission.
This officer was doing his job - its not "normal" for people to walk around very late at night in a residential area,
Jesus fucking *Christ*. Has our society really devolved this far?
Farenheight 451 was written after exactly an incident like this one. I thought that that was an abnormal and somewhat disturbing event. Now we consider it standard to stop and question people walking after a certain time?
I agree with you, but the subtitles and transcript are decidedly not complete, and are decidedly not complete in favor of the man and his daughter.
At one point (after being slammed to the ground and being handcuffed), the teenage daughter says that the officers are "fuckers" or something along those lines that the transcript leaves out. I think that the man might have been muttering curses from inside the patrol car (there's something going on in the background), and that was left out. Finally, there were some places where the transcript read "garbled" -- and some of these were where the guy was being more rude to the officer (not that this has the slightest bit of bearing on the legality of the whole thing).
The guy asked why the cop was asking him for ID. The officer -- and this is the point that everyone's crabby about -- refused to tell him why. It could have been "suspicion of assault" or any number of things. The cop wouldn't tell him, so the guy started guessing ("Is it because I'm parked illegally?")
The point is that if a cop comes up, and demands ID, and refuses to give you any justification for needing that ID, he is in the wrong. Requiring officers to do this is the only way that we can allow a system of checks and balances (for example, if an officer demands ID or arrests someone for, say, suspicion possession of drugs, and the suspect can later demonstrate that the officer could not have had probable cause, then the officer is legally in the wrong. The idea is that officers need to be held to some degree of accountability, given their position of power.
Frankly, whacking or spanking your kid is falling out of favor, but it's decidedly legal and definitely practiced by many parents. If an officer wants to arrest someone for suspicion of assault or domestic abuse or something, fine. They need to tell that person why they are doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean ssl instead of ssh?
However, some other groups in my organization like alternatives like PVCS. Now I have little against PVCS (price tag being one thing, and some crappy network functionality that likely has been resolved by now).
PVCS does, however, lack a lot of CVS functionality, much less SVN functionality. I'm rather pleased to see another good reason to get rid of PVCS coming up.
This is the first stable release of one of the most influential open source tools. It marks the beginning of the global transition from CVS to SVN. Aside from CVS, I think that only gcc (good, free compiler available for many platforms) and perhaps a few parts of the GNU toolchain could be considered as influential. I would say that this is of exceptional importance to anyone using or working with open source or developing software.
You're both kind of right.
Technically, NTFS supports both soft and hard links.
From a practical I-want-to-have-software-using-it standpoint, Windows doesn't have support for either, just shortcuts.
I have to look through it, but based on the way it works, it probably has two more benefits:
* Easier to set up and maintain user accounts (CVS requires setting up shell accounts)
* More secure. One can spoof history with CVS, corrupt the thing, or whatnot.
I'd like to see Sourceforge move to SVN, and see what happens...
I cannot agree that US government data mining is necessarily ineffective.
US gov TLAs with access to certain types of data alone have phenomenally clean and good data to use for data mining. For starters:
* Phone calls. Forget *contents* of phone calls -- a cop doesn't even need a warrant to get a list of phone calls. Plug all phone calls into a nice big database, and you have an excellent association network -- I can build up a list of all the people you know.
Now, suppose I want to detect flow of causuality. I look for some degree of correlation between a phone call from entity A to entity B and entity B to entity C. If a phone call of the second type follows a phone call of the first type within a day or two more than, say, 25% of the time, there's an interesting link to explore. Maybe entity B is passing on instructions to entity C. I'm not sure what the status of past location data is -- whether a warrant is required for telcos to turn over the data they've logged on your movements. Given a couple of years of accurate movement data, it's probably really interesting when a phone call from entity A to entity B is frequently followed by a physical visit from entity B to entity C.
* Purchasing-related data. Movements can be tracked via ATM withdrawals, credit-card use, phone card use, store purchasing card use. You ever let a friend use your store grocery card? That's a great source of determining who knows who -- a store card associated with two credit cards.
When you get a driver's license, most states fingerprint you (or at least thumbprint). I didn't even know that I *could* opt out of the thumbprint until afterwards.
I agree that mining is probably less useful to find terrorists (frankly, unless a terrorist is just incredibly stupid, he's going to avoid the above), but it *is* useful to track all kinds of other people.
Any person with a cell phone should have no expectation of privacy. They're carrying around a portable tracking device with a microphone that can be turned on remotely. End of story.
I think that what Yahoo did wrong (boy, I'll bet there are tons of analysts starting sentences the same way) was to try to make a mega-page, to rely on some data that was human-indexed rather than entirely machine-produced, and to fall behind technologically.
Google doesn't do this.
* Google is very spartan. I'm glad to see that all the web designers that thought that fancy web pages are what people want have been shown to be wrong. Excuses like "oh, this is for a 'distinctive feel'" or "we won't look up-to-date without Flash", etc, just don't measure up. Google works well on all browsers, has pages that download quickly, and renders very rapidly. The only large image used is the ever-changing "Google" logo, which gives folks a fair amount of enjoyment (well, *I* get more of a kick out of it than any other single image of that size each day). Their ads are text-based, and there are few links on each page. Their page works well in any browser, including lynx. Spartan is in -- web development has matured, and garish pages with faux metal bits and hard-to-find imagemap-based links are out. Functionality matters.
* All the data that Google presents is produced by a computer, not an array of humans (except for the Directory, which is from dmoz.org, not Google-paid people. They can scale up as far as they want by just increasing their processor power. All their people just figure out how to get the computer to do the right thing. Sure, in the short term that can be a bit less efficient, but it's a big win in the long term.
* Google doesn't fall behind when it comes to technology. Google is rabid about recruiting PhDs working with automated data mining. They are constantly adding neat little features to find, interesting new experimental searches (Google Sets is my favorite), and do an impressive job for a group of people that have hordes of people trying to beat the engine constantly and are avoiding using any human-based indexing.
They have a contingency plan of eliminating all customers as well, which was set in motion a long time ago.
I guess most people realize this guy knows little about computers, and nothing about law, so his main claim to fame is...that he is a journalism major writing for Ziff-Davis? That means his rant is just a nicely worded Slashdot troll.
To be fair, to write a really good summary of what's going on, you'd need to be skilled at law, software development, and journalism, and I'm fairly convinced that anyone that's really competent in all three areas is not going to be making a living as a journalist.
The degree of uninformed commmentary all over the place means that few people *do* have a good handle on what's going on. From what I can get from reading this guy's archive, he tends to hobnob with CEOs/upper management of tech companies, who naturally are going to happily feed him whatever line they think will best manipulate him. He isn't going to sit down and start reading through legal code.
So, is he uninformed and parrotting BS? Sure. On the other hand, are *most* people involved? Sure. The only people that I'd really claim to know what's going on are in IBM's legal team -- and those folks, beside having an obvious bias, take the approach of not saying anything that might be wrong. Lawyers are conservative about making statements. Journalists, on the other hand, need to make impressive announcements and insights on a constant basis. Does this mean that accuracy suffers? Sure. But if it didn't, they wouldn't get paid.
I agree that anyone at this point that's worried about using Linux because of SCO is pretty much either uninformed or awfully paranoid. I've keept a reasonably close eye on groklaw and other parties involved -- and I've never even coded on the sections in question or taken any civil law courses. I think that Slashdot *was* overeager to pronounce SCO full of hot air, but at this point, they really have no case against Linux users. There are so many counterarguments that could be used if even one failed that would blow away their argument that it isn't even funny.
IBM shareholders might be a bit worried about the continuation of AIX, which is more at risk than Linux, but honestly, I still wouldn't lose any sleep over it if I had a bunch of AIX deployments. Given the data that's come up from Novell and IBM, and how weak SCO's arguments have been once in the light, this case shouldn't have been a worry for at least a month or two now.
This has been discussed on Slashdot before. If you want a quick source, most boxes running Apache are running Linux, and you can take a look at netcraft to see the percentage of Apache boxes out there -- it's by far the dominant platform.
Linux and BSD are the dominant Apache platforms. I'm fairly comfortable saying that Linux is a much more common Apache deployment platform than BSD, but sure, I'll look it up. These numbers, the first I grabbed from Google, say that this is indeed true.
Aside from the fact that all the studies I've seen posted of Linux desktop usage are at best around 1%, anecodal evidence and a general feeling from reading articles and seeing sales of business software that business intranets (behind firewalls) tend to use Windows boxes on workstations, I just think that few people will argue that Linux is not a common desktop machine today. I know of only two people in person (and one is me) that definitely run Linux as their only desktop OS, and I spend an awful lot of time talking to tech folks.
Do you have any reason to say that what I was pointing out is false? I think that it's pretty much conventional wisdom. Do you need people to justify data like "Windows 98 tends to crash more than Mac OS X" at each usage?
This probably isn't an issue for the vanilla BSDs, but OS X and Windows are both much more likely than Linux to simply be a workstation rather than a server, given the fact that the overwhelming number of Linux boxes are in use as servers.
It's generally not too bad to secure a workstation against remove attacks-- you can just rip out anything listening. On a server, you *have* to be running some sort of server software, and if that has holes, you are open to attack.
No, it was before he started saying "Real big man". It's much quieter -- mumbling rather than yelling.
I'm not saying that the officers were in the right, just that the transcript was definitely made by people arguing in favor of the guy and his daughter.
I've always wondered why people like movies with famous actors at all *anyway*.
Sure, they can generally act well, but there are a lot of good actors out in the world.
And the down side of having a famous actor is significant. You are constantly having the fact that the actor is the *actor* thrown in your face. It's much harder to achieve the illusion of the actor being the character in the movie. Sure, for some movies it doesn't matter. When you go watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan movie, you aren't going to see the character -- you're going because you want to see Schwarzenegger or Chan doing more of their trademark things. You aren't going to fall into the false reality of the movie, because, well, you're watching *Jackie Chan*!
For most movies, I *much* prefer when I don't know the actor -- maybe there's a really extensive makeup job done, or the actor is much older or younger than in any other movies that I've seen him in, or I just plain haven't seen the actor before. It means that I'm watching the *character*, not the *actor*.
I am interested to see what happens when good CG (starting somewhere around Gollum in LoTR) becomes more pervasive and it's not as readily apparent who is acting as what character.
After a quick skim of his website ("Enderle Group"...that's a bit pretentious for a group of one), I don't know whether I'd say he's stupid. I think he's probably about as informed as most IT journalists out there, which is not a lot.
More concerning is the fact that he may have the lowest degree of integrity I've ever seen in a professional journalist. His website pretty plainly describes how companies can buy positive endorsements from him. He's really more of an ad source than anything else. (Admittedly, this is par for the course for the business publication field, but seems kind of depressing in the technology field.)
He also seems to go in for real shock-and-alarm articles "Foo is DEAD and has STUPID MANAGEMENT". He likes to make very strong statements in his articles. Finally, while he cites a few articles that turned out to be correct, he doesn't seem to have a very good history of being correct.
Frankly, if I have to have someone like him, I'd prefer John C. Dvorak. Dvorak sometimes promotes bad ideas, and tends to go for overly-strong statements, but at least tends to be interesting, and has articles that contain less brown-nosing or FUDding than Enderle. Plus, his writing is more pleasant to read.
I think the MPAA should be looking at two other issues in addition to piracy:
- why do only 40% of movies actually make money? I find it hard to believe that wholesale copyright infringement is ripping that much off the bottom line; very few people actually have the bandwidth to download movies, and not all of those have DVD burners
You ever wonder why the RIAA is so much more rabid about going after people than the MPAA? Probably because it's quite feasible to toss around MP3s, even over a modem, but movies require a fancier setup. It's unlikely that all that many movies are actually pirated by people online. When you consider that a music album doesn't cost that much less than a DVD, and that a typical MP3-ized album might be 60MB, as opposed to at *least* ten times that for a ripped movie, the MPAA/RIAA positions start to make more sense.
- why does the average file cost $89m to make and market? I can remember only about 10 years ago that $100m was considered an obscene amount to spend on making a film (refer to "Waterworld" and "Last Action Hero" as examples); now it's only slightly above average?
Inflation is some of that. Larger audiences are some of that.
Movies are a lousy business to be in. It's really, really hard to come up with a reliable model for what will do well, You can make a semi-reliable model by learning to market the bajeezus out of things and getting an N dollar return per dollar spent on marketing, but it's hard to say that director A plus cast B plus scriptwriters C for dollars D will make a good movie. It usually doesn't take all that much money to *make* a good movie (I have nice memories of Monty Python). It's just hard to do so predictably.
Yeah, but what big corporations are willing to pay off politicians to go after serial killers?
Besides, if there weren't any hardened criminals, there wouldn't be any fear, and if there wasn't any fear, how would the current administration's goals be achived?
Not unless you disagree with a law strongly, believe that you can change the law by disobeying it, and believe that a significant number of other people feel the same way.
The problem with this wonderful idea is that there's no certain way for you (the questioned person" to know whether there's probable cause.
And you *definitely* can't make that judgement if the cop refuses to tell you *why* you're being detained and your ID requested.
You have to ask yourself what the cop should reasonably assume. IMHO the cop should assume that an intoxicated man may have been driving the truck. Which means asking for a license is reasonable.
Absolutely. In which case, when the man asked why his ID was being demanded, the officer should have said that it is "on suspicion of driving under the influence", and the guy would have been in the wrong. The officer repeatedly refused to tell the guy why he was being detained or why his ID was being demanded.
Note that physical location in conjunction with information about that location may be enough for probable cause. If someone says that a shadowy figure fired shots at him less than a minute ago, and then ran down a road, and cops see you jogging along said road (and nobody else in the area), then sure, you could be searched for a gun.
On the other hand, if you ask why the cops want to see your ID, they should tell you that "you're suspected of assault", not given repeated refusals to explain what they're about, as happened in the case in the story submission.
I told him, and he said he'd wait for me to finish jogging and if he didn't see me come in the house in 20 minutes he'd go looking for me.
So he's bullshitting to try and scare you into giving your real address in case you handed him a fake one. Cops aren't required to tell the truth.
I don't look like a criminal.
So, what exactly does a criminal look like? The mid-eighties DARE drug dealer? Long fingernails, greasy, stringy hair, trenchcoat, sickly skin?
This officer was doing his job - its not "normal" for people to walk around very late at night in a residential area,
Jesus fucking *Christ*. Has our society really devolved this far?
Farenheight 451 was written after exactly an incident like this one. I thought that that was an abnormal and somewhat disturbing event. Now we consider it standard to stop and question people walking after a certain time?
Christ.
I agree with you, but the subtitles and transcript are decidedly not complete, and are decidedly not complete in favor of the man and his daughter.
At one point (after being slammed to the ground and being handcuffed), the teenage daughter says that the officers are "fuckers" or something along those lines that the transcript leaves out. I think that the man might have been muttering curses from inside the patrol car (there's something going on in the background), and that was left out. Finally, there were some places where the transcript read "garbled" -- and some of these were where the guy was being more rude to the officer (not that this has the slightest bit of bearing on the legality of the whole thing).
The guy asked why the cop was asking him for ID. The officer -- and this is the point that everyone's crabby about -- refused to tell him why. It could have been "suspicion of assault" or any number of things. The cop wouldn't tell him, so the guy started guessing ("Is it because I'm parked illegally?")
The point is that if a cop comes up, and demands ID, and refuses to give you any justification for needing that ID, he is in the wrong. Requiring officers to do this is the only way that we can allow a system of checks and balances (for example, if an officer demands ID or arrests someone for, say, suspicion possession of drugs, and the suspect can later demonstrate that the officer could not have had probable cause, then the officer is legally in the wrong. The idea is that officers need to be held to some degree of accountability, given their position of power.
Frankly, whacking or spanking your kid is falling out of favor, but it's decidedly legal and definitely practiced by many parents. If an officer wants to arrest someone for suspicion of assault or domestic abuse or something, fine. They need to tell that person why they are doing so.