Not only that, but I wonder how legit the discs etc look. If they look enough like the real thing, people might just think they're getting a bargain. The means that they're getting screwed with an illegitimate item, and the creators/sellers of the original are also getting screwed (because the people in question would, at least, appear to be the type that prefers physical goods to downloads).
Slashdot uses them, which means that I can no longer post when using a text-based browser (links, etc). Yes, I realize it is outdated, but as a supposed geek site one would assume that they might have thought about the implications for those that use the "good ol ways" to get online.
In regards to tech training. Students are not active (in a tech role) at working on systems, nor would it be a good idea for them to be. Among other things, there are required admin passwords and other important things that a student should not have access to. Do you really want the temptation of a root password available to students when grades and privacy issues are involved?
Nor would it be a good idea for long-term support. Students move on (college, etc), or move away, which would mean that there would be a constant changeover between experienced and inexperience help. Assuming that there would be a constant supply of "expert" students is a far reach, and even if you get an expert there's still a curve in learning the eccentricities and fine details of a particular system.
Moving back to loss of productivity, school districts - while not needing to make a profit - still require a certain degree of productivity. Moreover, when you're riding the edge of technology and more important systems more to a tech platform, keeping stuff running becomes more important. When everything from attendance and marks to faxes and phones is done on or moving to an IT platform, you'd better believe that downtime becomes a major issue. You want experienced help in this, and some buck-saving measures ultimately end up costing money.
That's a release date. There's a lot of things that can lead up to that. So it's still possible that in some form or other, the Pirate game existed before the patent, even if it wasn't on the shelves yet.
It depends on what you want to do. If you want something portable you can charge your PDA, smaller is better. If you want to have a charger on cars, smaller is better. If you want to use part of your roof, smaller may be better.
If you're talking about massive power-plant-style solar arrays, perhaps size isn't too much of an issue, but even the more power you can generate in less space means less work and more scalability.
I've had cases where I'll be in a particular area (sometimes not in town) and decide to see a show. As I'm a hobbyist photographer, in many cases I tend to have a camera with me, which I suppose would have the capabilities of recording (crappy) video if I had a really big card in it. Now I *could* choose to leave my camera in the car and worry about having it stolen, or I could bring it with me, and leave it in the case rather than being a dork trying to make a crappy cam of a movie.
So far I've had little problems with the latter, but if the theatres start giving me grief that will change rather quickly.
Don't be encouraged by the success of the Iraqis. They are only doing as well as they are because of U.S. unwillingness to be seen using excessive force - not a likelihood in the case of internal rebellion.
Actually, I'm guessing it has a lot to with the fact that the "insurgents" are at least smart enough to avoid a scale-of-arms confrontation with the Americans, that and many of them have a die-for-the-cause attitude. Rather than running up and getting machine-gunned, they focus on planting bombs and other such methods. In addition to causing casualties or deaths, this inflicts fear and uncertainty. A soldier can face an enemy soldier, but a machine-gun does little against a hidden roadside bomb or mine. The Americans aren't going to be beat by force-of-arms, but the longer they stay the more the demoralization works again them, and thus this is the tactic that is used. Unfortunately for those in Iraq, they're in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
This is not your grandfathers war with "glorious" charges and battle at sea, land and air. It's about holding onto a hostile territory against an enemy that doesn't play by your "rules," facing the fear of being blown bits by roadside bombs or some nutcase with a detonator and tnt strapped to his back.
As the IT guy, I am constantly exposed to data that, personally, I'd rather not see.
A big one is emails. Got an administrative staff member moving to a new computer, one of the things that I have to do is move all his/her email settings to the new machine, and ensure that her mailbox (if it's POP3) and address book make it over. Even if it's something like an IMAP account, I still need to test that the username/password and settings are correct.
Generally in most cases I just catch a glimpse of the mail headers, etc, but you never know what you could have access to when copying a user's confidential files. In cases where I've had to do data recovery it gets even harder to avoid poking around, as one has to at least partially verify that files are being restored intact, etc.
The IT department has access to a lot of things, and frankly a rogue IT Dept member could very easily read/filter his boss's email, documents, and pretty much anything else. The best policy for data security is to hire people you can *trust* with your data, and to treat them well (I'm sure we've all heard heard stories of what disgruntled IT dept employees have pilled off).
The SE registry has never really sat well with me for various reasons as you have described. however, a registry that actual dealt with sex offences (and one specific for offences against minors) which were in fact rape or due to a large difference in age should exist for repeat offenders.
People can change and turn their lives around, but there should be a certain number "strikes" allowed. Then again, maybe if those who are repeat-offenders at high risk weren't let out to re-offend in the first place, there wouldn't be a need for a registry.
One of the differences up here from the American system is that if (and I hope, when) Mr Crookes loses this case, then he can look forward to paying the costs of the defendants.
Usually that acts as a strong deterrent against frivolous lawsuits. I guess it doesn't always work, but it'll be nice to see the big fat bill forthcoming.
My guess would be because, due to wage/currency/other differences between the two locations, the average cost of a CD would be lower in order for it to sell at all. This is not really all that unusual. Even as a Canadian, when I went to a "Denny's" (no Denny's jokes, please) in the US, the prices on the menu were the same. However, the difference in the dollar meant that the meal cost me 25% more.
Similarly, 1GBP= 1.98119 USD = 15.4949 HKD. If I were to go to Hong Kong and buy a CD, it might still cost me 15-20 dollars (as a guess), but those are Hong Kong dollars, and when converted to foreign currency might be respectively a lot less than the same item in another country. That would resolve to under 1 GBP, and about $2 US.
If you were to try and sell the CD for the converted value of local currency, that could be anywhere from 100-140HKD. I'm guessing that nobody would pay that for a CD in HK, so in order to make any sales at all, it resolves into the local pricing and market.
Not that I'm giving lattitude to the actions of the UK labels. How many of those same labels *produce* the stamped discs and various other merchandise in cheap Chinese factories, to their own profit? It seems fair game that somebody could sell the same CD's back and make a profit from the cheaper foreign-market value.
Yes, a million bucks isn't necessarily a lot in terms of a government expenditure, but why is that? Perhaps because so many projects are "porked" out, overpriced, and generally using incomprehensible amounts of money that a million simply doesn't seem big bucks in comparison?
There are a lot of good things that could have been done with a million bucks. More if it wasn't nibbled down in bits and bites before it got to its destination. Just because we're used to larger wasteful expenditure on the behalf of government doesn't mean that we shouldn't be pissed off when they're wasting a "measly million" on something so stupid as defending unconstitutional legislation.
We have units from Polycomm at work. You can remotely control the camera, zoom, etc. They're compatible with standardized video-conferencing software, and can dial from a list much akin to a video-phone.
They also plug directly into a TV, or video projector, and can be set to "follow" noise.
They can also be rather extensively expensive, of course, but I've seen some on eBay for not too bad a price (up to the discretion of the buyer).
Here is some stuff from their website. It doesn't seem to mention pricing though, but I do remember that it isn't cheap, especially since it is more centric to a business environment than a home one. But it's fairly easy to use... enough that non-technical exec and boss-types manage nicely.
What they usually advertise is some like an (up to) 3MB/s connection with "unlimited" transfer limits, sometimes all packaged as bandwidth.
The thing is, of course, that most advertise as "up to", and you generally don't get very close to 3MB/s for any sustained amount of time, especially if you're getting throttled for using anything that could actually hit that limit on a sustained basis.
Still, I'm in Canada, and all things considered I'm pretty happy with my ISP (Shaw). Sometimes my connection is slower than others, but I've never had it be so slow that it has affected my ability to utilize it. My roommate can be downloading craploads of movies/music/whatever, and I still have enough bandwidth for my own comfortable downloading, browsing, or such things as VOIP etc with nary a hiccup. I've had a phone-call once about excessive usage, at which point I asked him to tune it down a bit, and other than that no complaints from the ISP.
If the merchant bears all financial liability for fraudulent charges, it gives them a reason to make sure that the person buying the product/service is who they say they are.
OK, so I'm buying something online. On ebay or whatever. How do you verify my ID?
OK, so I've got a fake copy of a Visa. The fake card has whatever signature I cared to put on it. If I can make a fake CC, I can also make fake ID. How do you verify my ID?
Online, we now have "verified by Visa" etc, which is helping the situation. However, the amount of controls CC companies offer to combat theft are minimal at best, since - as mentioned - they're not liable, so there's no reason for them to offer better safety methods to merchants when it just costs them money to do so (and takes away those nice tasty fines they can lay on the merchants for processing a bad CC #)
Actually, when the issue of cops abusing power in the US came up, my suggestion was that they should have some form of continuous camera (though I had thought more of on on-belt).
That way, if somebody alleges police violence, you can show footage. If something happened, it will be there. If the cop turned off the camera, then it will become apparent pretty quickly that there was a likely ulterior motive in doing so. Part of procedure should be to flip on the cam upon exiting the police vehicle, so no turning it on after the action is over, either.
The footage wouldn't have to be used all the time, but surveillance might make people think twice about taking a swing at the cops, and likewise for cops who like to abuse power.
A few months ago, I wanted to buy lightscribe discs and they were still around $25 for a 10-pack, so about $2.50 per disc
Dual-layer discs were running about the same, sometimes more. So that would be about 4.3Gb or 8.6Gb'ish...
$1.72/GB for a lightscribe, or $3.44/GB on the dual-layer
Now compare that to single-layer HD-DVD discs with 25GB, that's about $2.50/disc again.
Not too bad, all things considered (and now the dual-layer or lightscribe stuff has gone down too).
I wonder how much a dual-layer HD-DVD or LightScribe HD-DVD disc will run? My personal hope is that the newer format discs push the price of existing DVD's (especially dual-layer or scribeable ones) down, since I'm sticking with standard DVD-players at the moment.
And if Apple can show that EVERYONE in the industry is doing exactly the same thing, with similar advertising language, then it's probably not going to go anywhere
Or it could just lead to a lot of companies getting sued over sneaky language... especially as precedents get set.
Yeah. The GATOS project would have worked with this, however it seems to be discontinued for modern kernels. Even if it weren't, the documentation seems pretty horrid, so I couldn't tell either way.
It would also lend a (possibly unfair) advantage to those who were able to support better video cards. At a farther zoom out, lots of on-screen action might be a bit laggy on some cards, resulting in a "few clicks too slow" scenario.
As long as they allowed the zoom limitations to meet up with midline machines though, it should be fine.
I'm for a reformation of the police and justice system in general. There was a time when there were beat cops, and they were well known and in many cases respected in a neighborhood. They weren't out to nail people for ticket revenue, or to police religious values, etc. Yes, abuse of power and overzealousness did exist, but due to the size of the area/city they could still be held accountable by the community at large if they weren't by the actual departments. Of course, even then there were flaws.
Nowadays, like many things, the police have a certain veil of anonymity. Faceless officers abuse their power in pursuit of faceless criminals. Sometimes they make bad calls because they don't have time to properly assess or investigate scenarios. Sometimes bad things happen because bad cops get in. A lot of times bad things happen because like most things, the justice system has become a bureaucracy ruled at times by the almighty buck. Less money means making it through other means. It means less pay, which means less applicants, which means you can't always keep certain standards. It means you can't police the police properly, and the bureaucracy and red-tape slow down that process anyways.
Should police not exist? Yes, of course they should exist.
Should steps be taken to improve the way the policing system runs? Yes
I can think of many things that need to be fixed. Firstly, the system for reviewing misconduct needs to be indefinitely separated and maintained from the normal police body.
Record-keeping needs to be greatly improved, in some cases, in regards to evidence-keeping, collection, and storage. I hear lots of cases where property that is held doesn't make it back in good condition, or sometimes at all.
And actually, I think that police surveillance should increase as attached to the officers themselves, in a bi-directional manner. Camera on the cars (already exist in most cases), or somehow attached to the police themselves. They are getting small enough to attach to people without being a large encumbrance, and if an officer suddenly decides to turn it off then it could be considered pretty fair evidence of intent to do something improper.
Yes, there are good cops. I've met some of them. Unfortunately, the joy of meeting a good cop is greatly overclouded by the feeling of personal helplessness and danger incited by meeting a bad one. There are plenty of ways to have your life ruined, or at least made very unpleasant, but the darker areas of law enforcement.
In terms of this site now... it could be good or bad. There are plenty of cases where "snitches" are just as criminal as those they are used against, and in the cases of an "axe to grind" they aren't exactly trustworthy. There are plenty of cases where cops have turned "to the dark side" when question to nail a suspect too, as described in many of the stories posted by others in this article.
Maybe one day cops will all have required undetectable cameras on themselves. Until then, we've got a case of a "watch the watchers" that can go either way
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but I wonder how legit the discs etc look. If they look enough like the real thing, people might just think they're getting a bargain. The means that they're getting screwed with an illegitimate item, and the creators/sellers of the original are also getting screwed (because the people in question would, at least, appear to be the type that prefers physical goods to downloads).
Slashdot uses them, which means that I can no longer post when using a text-based browser (links, etc). Yes, I realize it is outdated, but as a supposed geek site one would assume that they might have thought about the implications for those that use the "good ol ways" to get online.
In regards to tech training. Students are not active (in a tech role) at working on systems, nor would it be a good idea for them to be. Among other things, there are required admin passwords and other important things that a student should not have access to. Do you really want the temptation of a root password available to students when grades and privacy issues are involved? Nor would it be a good idea for long-term support. Students move on (college, etc), or move away, which would mean that there would be a constant changeover between experienced and inexperience help. Assuming that there would be a constant supply of "expert" students is a far reach, and even if you get an expert there's still a curve in learning the eccentricities and fine details of a particular system.
Moving back to loss of productivity, school districts - while not needing to make a profit - still require a certain degree of productivity. Moreover, when you're riding the edge of technology and more important systems more to a tech platform, keeping stuff running becomes more important. When everything from attendance and marks to faxes and phones is done on or moving to an IT platform, you'd better believe that downtime becomes a major issue. You want experienced help in this, and some buck-saving measures ultimately end up costing money.
RedHat (which we are moving away from), and Debian
That's a release date. There's a lot of things that can lead up to that. So it's still possible that in some form or other, the Pirate game existed before the patent, even if it wasn't on the shelves yet.
Interesting. I wonder if the law would preclude minors from working in game stores (although I suppose they can work in places that sell cigarettes).
What happens if the kid buys an M game from the store. He is both the buyer and the seller... so probably liable?
It depends on what you want to do. If you want something portable you can charge your PDA, smaller is better. If you want to have a charger on cars, smaller is better. If you want to use part of your roof, smaller may be better.
If you're talking about massive power-plant-style solar arrays, perhaps size isn't too much of an issue, but even the more power you can generate in less space means less work and more scalability.
I've had cases where I'll be in a particular area (sometimes not in town) and decide to see a show. As I'm a hobbyist photographer, in many cases I tend to have a camera with me, which I suppose would have the capabilities of recording (crappy) video if I had a really big card in it. Now I *could* choose to leave my camera in the car and worry about having it stolen, or I could bring it with me, and leave it in the case rather than being a dork trying to make a crappy cam of a movie.
So far I've had little problems with the latter, but if the theatres start giving me grief that will change rather quickly.
The store owner, the store, or the minimum-wage employee who sells an M game to a kid who is 17 years 11 months old, and looks like he's 21.
Yeah... that's what I thought.
Don't be encouraged by the success of the Iraqis. They are only doing as well as they are because of U.S. unwillingness to be seen using excessive force - not a likelihood in the case of internal rebellion.
Actually, I'm guessing it has a lot to with the fact that the "insurgents" are at least smart enough to avoid a scale-of-arms confrontation with the Americans, that and many of them have a die-for-the-cause attitude. Rather than running up and getting machine-gunned, they focus on planting bombs and other such methods. In addition to causing casualties or deaths, this inflicts fear and uncertainty. A soldier can face an enemy soldier, but a machine-gun does little against a hidden roadside bomb or mine. The Americans aren't going to be beat by force-of-arms, but the longer they stay the more the demoralization works again them, and thus this is the tactic that is used. Unfortunately for those in Iraq, they're in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
This is not your grandfathers war with "glorious" charges and battle at sea, land and air. It's about holding onto a hostile territory against an enemy that doesn't play by your "rules," facing the fear of being blown bits by roadside bombs or some nutcase with a detonator and tnt strapped to his back.
As the IT guy, I am constantly exposed to data that, personally, I'd rather not see.
A big one is emails. Got an administrative staff member moving to a new computer, one of the things that I have to do is move all his/her email settings to the new machine, and ensure that her mailbox (if it's POP3) and address book make it over. Even if it's something like an IMAP account, I still need to test that the username/password and settings are correct.
Generally in most cases I just catch a glimpse of the mail headers, etc, but you never know what you could have access to when copying a user's confidential files. In cases where I've had to do data recovery it gets even harder to avoid poking around, as one has to at least partially verify that files are being restored intact, etc.
The IT department has access to a lot of things, and frankly a rogue IT Dept member could very easily read/filter his boss's email, documents, and pretty much anything else. The best policy for data security is to hire people you can *trust* with your data, and to treat them well (I'm sure we've all heard heard stories of what disgruntled IT dept employees have pilled off).
The SE registry has never really sat well with me for various reasons as you have described. however, a registry that actual dealt with sex offences (and one specific for offences against minors) which were in fact rape or due to a large difference in age should exist for repeat offenders.
People can change and turn their lives around, but there should be a certain number "strikes" allowed. Then again, maybe if those who are repeat-offenders at high risk weren't let out to re-offend in the first place, there wouldn't be a need for a registry.
One of the differences up here from the American system is that if (and I hope, when) Mr Crookes loses this case, then he can look forward to paying the costs of the defendants.
Usually that acts as a strong deterrent against frivolous lawsuits. I guess it doesn't always work, but it'll be nice to see the big fat bill forthcoming.
My guess would be because, due to wage/currency/other differences between the two locations, the average cost of a CD would be lower in order for it to sell at all. This is not really all that unusual. Even as a Canadian, when I went to a "Denny's" (no Denny's jokes, please) in the US, the prices on the menu were the same. However, the difference in the dollar meant that the meal cost me 25% more.
Similarly, 1GBP= 1.98119 USD = 15.4949 HKD. If I were to go to Hong Kong and buy a CD, it might still cost me 15-20 dollars (as a guess), but those are Hong Kong dollars, and when converted to foreign currency might be respectively a lot less than the same item in another country. That would resolve to under 1 GBP, and about $2 US.
If you were to try and sell the CD for the converted value of local currency, that could be anywhere from 100-140HKD. I'm guessing that nobody would pay that for a CD in HK, so in order to make any sales at all, it resolves into the local pricing and market.
Not that I'm giving lattitude to the actions of the UK labels. How many of those same labels *produce* the stamped discs and various other merchandise in cheap Chinese factories, to their own profit? It seems fair game that somebody could sell the same CD's back and make a profit from the cheaper foreign-market value.
Yes, a million bucks isn't necessarily a lot in terms of a government expenditure, but why is that? Perhaps because so many projects are "porked" out, overpriced, and generally using incomprehensible amounts of money that a million simply doesn't seem big bucks in comparison?
There are a lot of good things that could have been done with a million bucks. More if it wasn't nibbled down in bits and bites before it got to its destination. Just because we're used to larger wasteful expenditure on the behalf of government doesn't mean that we shouldn't be pissed off when they're wasting a "measly million" on something so stupid as defending unconstitutional legislation.
We have units from Polycomm at work. You can remotely control the camera, zoom, etc. They're compatible with standardized video-conferencing software, and can dial from a list much akin to a video-phone.
They also plug directly into a TV, or video projector, and can be set to "follow" noise.
They can also be rather extensively expensive, of course, but I've seen some on eBay for not too bad a price (up to the discretion of the buyer).
Here is some stuff from their website. It doesn't seem to mention pricing though, but I do remember that it isn't cheap, especially since it is more centric to a business environment than a home one. But it's fairly easy to use... enough that non-technical exec and boss-types manage nicely.
What they usually advertise is some like an (up to) 3MB/s connection with "unlimited" transfer limits, sometimes all packaged as bandwidth.
The thing is, of course, that most advertise as "up to", and you generally don't get very close to 3MB/s for any sustained amount of time, especially if you're getting throttled for using anything that could actually hit that limit on a sustained basis.
Still, I'm in Canada, and all things considered I'm pretty happy with my ISP (Shaw). Sometimes my connection is slower than others, but I've never had it be so slow that it has affected my ability to utilize it. My roommate can be downloading craploads of movies/music/whatever, and I still have enough bandwidth for my own comfortable downloading, browsing, or such things as VOIP etc with nary a hiccup. I've had a phone-call once about excessive usage, at which point I asked him to tune it down a bit, and other than that no complaints from the ISP.
If the merchant bears all financial liability for fraudulent charges, it gives them a reason to make sure that the person buying the product/service is who they say they are.
OK, so I'm buying something online. On ebay or whatever. How do you verify my ID?
OK, so I've got a fake copy of a Visa. The fake card has whatever signature I cared to put on it. If I can make a fake CC, I can also make fake ID. How do you verify my ID?
Online, we now have "verified by Visa" etc, which is helping the situation. However, the amount of controls CC companies offer to combat theft are minimal at best, since - as mentioned - they're not liable, so there's no reason for them to offer better safety methods to merchants when it just costs them money to do so (and takes away those nice tasty fines they can lay on the merchants for processing a bad CC #)
Actually, when the issue of cops abusing power in the US came up, my suggestion was that they should have some form of continuous camera (though I had thought more of on on-belt).
That way, if somebody alleges police violence, you can show footage. If something happened, it will be there. If the cop turned off the camera, then it will become apparent pretty quickly that there was a likely ulterior motive in doing so. Part of procedure should be to flip on the cam upon exiting the police vehicle, so no turning it on after the action is over, either.
The footage wouldn't have to be used all the time, but surveillance might make people think twice about taking a swing at the cops, and likewise for cops who like to abuse power.
Because I don't have an injket that can actually print on discs, but my last DVD-burner happened to come with lightscribe functionality?
A few months ago, I wanted to buy lightscribe discs and they were still around $25 for a 10-pack, so about $2.50 per disc
Dual-layer discs were running about the same, sometimes more. So that would be about 4.3Gb or 8.6Gb'ish...
$1.72/GB for a lightscribe, or $3.44/GB on the dual-layer
Now compare that to single-layer HD-DVD discs with 25GB, that's about $2.50/disc again.
Not too bad, all things considered (and now the dual-layer or lightscribe stuff has gone down too).
I wonder how much a dual-layer HD-DVD or LightScribe HD-DVD disc will run? My personal hope is that the newer format discs push the price of existing DVD's (especially dual-layer or scribeable ones) down, since I'm sticking with standard DVD-players at the moment.
And if Apple can show that EVERYONE in the industry is doing exactly the same thing, with similar advertising language, then it's probably not going to go anywhere
Or it could just lead to a lot of companies getting sued over sneaky language... especially as precedents get set.
Yeah. The GATOS project would have worked with this, however it seems to be discontinued for modern kernels. Even if it weren't, the documentation seems pretty horrid, so I couldn't tell either way.
It would also lend a (possibly unfair) advantage to those who were able to support better video cards. At a farther zoom out, lots of on-screen action might be a bit laggy on some cards, resulting in a "few clicks too slow" scenario.
As long as they allowed the zoom limitations to meet up with midline machines though, it should be fine.
I'm for a reformation of the police and justice system in general. There was a time when there were beat cops, and they were well known and in many cases respected in a neighborhood. They weren't out to nail people for ticket revenue, or to police religious values, etc. Yes, abuse of power and overzealousness did exist, but due to the size of the area/city they could still be held accountable by the community at large if they weren't by the actual departments. Of course, even then there were flaws.
Nowadays, like many things, the police have a certain veil of anonymity. Faceless officers abuse their power in pursuit of faceless criminals. Sometimes they make bad calls because they don't have time to properly assess or investigate scenarios. Sometimes bad things happen because bad cops get in. A lot of times bad things happen because like most things, the justice system has become a bureaucracy ruled at times by the almighty buck. Less money means making it through other means. It means less pay, which means less applicants, which means you can't always keep certain standards. It means you can't police the police properly, and the bureaucracy and red-tape slow down that process anyways.
Should police not exist? Yes, of course they should exist.
Should steps be taken to improve the way the policing system runs? Yes
I can think of many things that need to be fixed. Firstly, the system for reviewing misconduct needs to be indefinitely separated and maintained from the normal police body.
Record-keeping needs to be greatly improved, in some cases, in regards to evidence-keeping, collection, and storage. I hear lots of cases where property that is held doesn't make it back in good condition, or sometimes at all.
And actually, I think that police surveillance should increase as attached to the officers themselves, in a bi-directional manner. Camera on the cars (already exist in most cases), or somehow attached to the police themselves. They are getting small enough to attach to people without being a large encumbrance, and if an officer suddenly decides to turn it off then it could be considered pretty fair evidence of intent to do something improper.
Yes, there are good cops. I've met some of them. Unfortunately, the joy of meeting a good cop is greatly overclouded by the feeling of personal helplessness and danger incited by meeting a bad one. There are plenty of ways to have your life ruined, or at least made very unpleasant, but the darker areas of law enforcement.
In terms of this site now... it could be good or bad. There are plenty of cases where "snitches" are just as criminal as those they are used against, and in the cases of an "axe to grind" they aren't exactly trustworthy. There are plenty of cases where cops have turned "to the dark side" when question to nail a suspect too, as described in many of the stories posted by others in this article.
Maybe one day cops will all have required undetectable cameras on themselves. Until then, we've got a case of a "watch the watchers" that can go either way