How badly would the drivers have had to been beaten for it to be more proportional?
I thought the US was supposed to be a christian country and slashdot was supposed to be am mostly american site (I say mostly because I am actually british)?
Didn't Jesus say:
'You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.'
So in other words even though there are shitty people in the world then anyone who considers themselves a christian should strive to not seek revenge against such people by killing them or wishing them to be killed. Instead they should forgive and leave any judgment for the lord. Wishing an agonising death upon them would then surely never be proportional, no matter how harshly they beat their victims.
But of course nobody in the US seems to actually give a shit about this part of Jesus' teachings or else you would not have the death penalty.
In the UK, and probably across the EU, it is not illegal, but there are laws that make it practically impossible.
I always like the quote from Mario Balotelli (an italian professional footballer earning millions) who was stopped by the police in the UK who asked him why he had £5,000 on him in cash. He answered: "Because I am rich!".
That is Italy-specific, within the legal framework of the ( much-needed ) fight against the mafia and camorra.
This is the problem with most suggestions that come from RMS. He espouses unrestricted freedom for all, but unfortunately when it comes to things involving financial transactions there are highly organised criminals who will exploit this freedom to make the job of law or tax enforcement almost impossible.
If someone does end up creating a truly anonymous form of currency or payment then you can be damn sure the main people who will benefit are those who want to pay no taxes or those who want to sell services and products that are illegal.
esla: Battery pack... positioned under the passengers, between them and the road... catches fire, which so far has been directed away from the cabin, but smoke entering the cabin would kill anyone who stayed in it anyway. End result: Car totaled after fire. No reported injuries (other than fanboy pride)
In this assessment you should really include that you need to pierce the battery pack via collision if you want anyone to take you seriously. Instead you make it sound like the battery just breaks all by itself which seems pretty far from the truth.
If you made an argument that the tesla should be more resilient to shit flying up off the road or low speed collisions without the battery being compromised you would have a point, but by not mentioning the very important detail of there having to be a collision of some kind (even if only with debris from the road) in your summing up of the situation you come across as just as bad as the parent.
Which is great, but not putting your fuel tank under your ass would be a good step towards minimisation of consequences like, say, fires, don't you think?
Of course this is the problem. Tesla have to worry about fitting in a battery which weight compared to the fabric of the car a lot and takes up space so it needs to be distributed around evenly. It does catch fire when the contents are exposed air though.
With good old fashioned petrol (gas for you americans) you just have this incredibly explosive stuff that you can cram into a small corner of the car and puts lots of protection around. Of course you have to protect it better because the stuff does not catch fire, it explodes but only if exposed to a source of ignition unlike a battery.
The real problem though is that the raw material needed top make exploding liquid fuel is running out, it simply will not last for ever. This can be mitigated though by moving to diesel engines which can be run off a wider variety of fuels, some of which come from other stuff instead of oil but that comes at a loss of performance.
So in comes Tesla, he realises that while there may be a way of running crap like family saloons on recycled chip fat the sports car of the future will need to work differently when petrol runs out. His early products might not be as good as some of the traditional cars that have been evolving for 100 years, but who cares because petrol based cars simply have no long term future.
It might take 20 years to run out of oil that can be refined into petrol, it might take 50. Hell, one more decent war in the middle east the price of oil might go so damn skywards that nobody can afford any within 5 years as we use the rest of the planets up double quick. The point though is that even if it takes as long as 50 years the price of gas at the pump is just going to go up and up.
Once you look at it this way you realise that even if Tesla make a loss for the next 10 years, they will amass enough patents that they will ultimately be laughing all the way to the bank.
Plus, there's still the fundamental fact that allowing people to be detained without probable cause at all evokes images of NAZI Germany or Stalinist Russia.
You are clearly a moron if you cannot see the difference between being asked to spend 10 seconds giving a breath sample without even getting out of your car and being 'detained' by the SS or secret police. That is like saying that a ticket inspector on a train is detaining you while you produce a ticket. Just in case you are that stupid I will point out a few of the differences:
- The Nazi SS only detained you if you had information they wanted to torture out of you, in other cases they just shot you if you pissed them off since they could. - Stalin detained people in these places called gulags where they often never returned from alive, even if they did come back it was after several years, not 10 seconds. - Both the nazis and stasi did not usually get involved enforcing minor traffic laws, they usually stuck to people trying to over through the state.
And this is exactly where it fails. Police officers are trained to observe as much as possible, ask tricky prying questions, and intimidate the detainee into consenting to otherwise-illegal searches. That absolutely will not change except to get even worse if your idea were to be implemented.
It is perfectly possible to train the police how to do random breath tests without turning into a dictatorship, try and look up how they do it in Australia on you tube. A negative sample is taken without you even getting out of the driving seat in many cases and they never ask you any questions other then 'please count to 10 with your mouth pointing at this device'. If this returns a positive (for instance because you have been drinking but are under the legal limit) then you have to get out of your car and they may ask you some other questions to pass the time but there is still nothing to stop you refusing to answer them and asking them to get on with the more accurate test as quick as possible, many people do exactly that.
driving is a privilege that requires a licence, not a right
It's not that simple. Yes, driving is inherently dangerous to the public and therefore it's legitimate to require a license. However, freedom of movement is a right, and to the extent that driving is the only practical form of travel, there's a limit to how many restrictions can be imposed before there is a civil rights violation anyway.
Asking someone to do a basic breath test can take as little 10 seconds, providing the police are not allowed to ask your details or anything else unless you fail it I see no real civil liberty issue with testing for alcohol without any suspicion of guilt. There must be a way of the law allowing this without setting any other precedents that allowed the cops to bust your front door in and then justify it based on whatever they found. The two scenarios are so far apart that if the one cannot be made legal without the other in a framework of laws then clearly the framework itself is flawed.
That's an incredibly dangerous attitude because it completely destroys the 4th Amendment. The consequence of your view is that the police could go on any arbitrary fishing expedition, performing any search they want whatsoever. If they find something, it was magically justified. If they don't find anything, the person being searched has no standing to complain. Either way, there is no consequence for the police for performing unreasonable searches, and therefore the entire requirement of "reasonable suspicion" is utterly destroyed.
If you just hadn't thought your position through, I hope you are now enlightened. If you still think your idea is a good one, please move to some totalitarian country that suits your ideology instead of corrupting the US and ruining it for the rest of us.
I was not thinking in general terms, I was thinking this is acceptable when it comes to drink driving because driving is a privilege that requires a licence, not a right. I was not think that you should extend the idea of if they find something then the search was reasonable to searching peoples homes or even vehicles. I think it is reasonable to be able to randomly test people driving to see if they are drunk though.
(BTW, though I would never want to live in the US as I think the US attitude to firearms (any old moron can have one) is retarded.
I actually think this is an interesting question. Overhere in the UK the cops need some sort of reasonable suspicion to perform a breath test but if you fail there is zero chance of you getting off the crime by saying they did not have that reasonable suspicion. This effectively means that they can stop anyone they like for a breath test since there is very little comeback.
The way you tell if the suspicion was "reasonable" is to explain it to a judge and/or jury and see if they agree.
I would take the view that if someone has subsequently tested positive then the suspicion must have been reasonable. The idea that someone could get a positive test annulled in some way just because the officer could not convince a jury they had reasonable suspicion would strike me as being abhorrent.
My guess would be that the device simply consumed more power than it could draw from USB.
I doubt that was the case as it happened with more than one device and they charged fine from other PC's. Since this was a specific issue to that PC I always assumed the manufacturer skimped on the PSU somehow or it was caused be the USB modem that was permanently plugged in to the other USB port.
If authorities systematically searched everyone's homes without cause and installed cameras and microphones in every room I'm sure it would also bear fruit.
Having somewhere to live is a right. Driving on the public highway is a privilege you need a licence for. That is a BIG difference.
If you have not been drinking at all then providing a negative sample on Oz only involves counting to ten while the officer holds device a few inches away from your mouth. The entire stop only takes less than a minute and unless he detects something you do not need to provide any details or answer any questions.
I've driven in the US and the standard of driving is absolutely shocking.
As some who loves watching the sort of documentary where the cameras follow police I have noticed something. I have watched loads of these filmed in the UK, the US, New Zealand and Oz..
Interesting the it is the US ones where people tend to be most likely to crash into the back of the police care while he is writing a ticket out to someone else, by a huge margin. It seems that incidences of this on the US shows on the interstate are tenapenny, compared to the other countries shows set on similar roads.
I am curious, how do you think the police should be able to look for people drink driving?
Should they need to see you do something legal but seriously stupid like weaving between the lanes of the highway like a jackass before they can breathalyse you? Or should you actually need to break the law by running a red light? Or should they only be able to breath test people who crash? Or should they be able to breath test anyone who drives? Or should they only be able to breath test anyone driving if they have a history of being drink in charge?
I actually think this is an interesting question. Overhere in the UK the cops need some sort of reasonable suspicion to perform a breath test but if you fail there is zero chance of you getting off the crime by saying they did not have that reasonable suspicion. This effectively means that they can stop anyone they like for a breath test since there is very little comeback. Obviously, anyone who actually crashes gets a mandatory breath test.
We also ban people from driving for 1 year at their first drink driving offence, longer for repeated offenders. Also, failing to provide a breath sample when lawfully asked is an offence that carries the exact same sentence.
Some countries (Australia for one, I believe) just take the line that if you drive on a public road it is your duty to prove to the police that you are sober and they can randomly stop anyone the like.
I personally think that the UK approach is ok, but would not really object to the australian approach since I can understand that it makes keeping drink drivers (who are a menace anyway) off the streets. What is the law in the US though? Can you legally be breath tested without having committed a crime first? If it is more like our approach then can you get away with drink driving if you can prove that that cops did not have reasonable suspicion before pulling you over?
Oh, and just in case anyone is curious, I do think people who drive while they are too drunk to control a car should forfeit their driving privileges for at least a year so please don't come back and argue that drink driving is perfectly fine anyone should be able to drive back from the pub after anything other than a beer or so. I also do think though that the limit should be more variable depending on how long you have held a licence.
One example: my Nexus 7 draws so much power, even when sleeping, that it is possible to connect it to a weakly charging USB port, come back a few hours later, and it has a lower charge level. I'm sure the same is true for other tablets, and possibly even some phones.
I used to have the same problem with an old PC too. If I plugged most devices into my main computer they charged just fine, I had a really shit old small form factor packard bell thing I used to leave always switched on as a router though and if I plugged anything into that to charge via USB it ended up actually drawing power out of the device instead. This was not due to the device though, anything I plugged in to charge did the same thing.
Weirdly though I could plug anything that needed power to run like a usb stick, or usb modem and it worked fine without any issues.
Close on left Minimize and Maximize on right. As God and IBM intended.
It's the first thing I change in KDE and every other environment if I can (if the devs don't remove the friggin' option).
You'll never fat-finger the Close button again.
-- BMO
Personally I have never done that anyway, or at least not that I can recall. I guess I am actually able to use a mouse with a greater degree of precision. Yes, I said mouse. If I want a touch OS I will find one and install it, I do not need my desktop OS to slowly morph into one thereby wasting tons of screen real estate as all the buttons become huge.
Just follow the currently commonly accepted desktop metaphor by default and give us options to change things away from it if we want to. Since it is fairly obvious that most of us do not want to this will work fine. Alternatively make assumptions about which defaults to choose based on whether a touchscreen device is present. If we ever add a touchscreen device in future then you can detect it then and ask us if we want to apply a bunch of fat finger mitigations then if we say yes.
Just changing it without asking us then forcing us to google for the solution to put it back is just annoying. Since I have to use both windows and linux it makes sense to me for them to behave in a similar manner so I can switch between them easily.
Exactly. In all other aspects I think Linux Mint is great but their retarded attitude in not allowing this or making it easy is just a pain in the arse.
I understand their perspective as I have been using Linux for decades but I do not agree with it and probably never will. Let those of us to who want to have a quick way of doing an in place upgrade of important packages do so then just resolve any shit that crops up later. Even if the system fails to boot then most of us are used to resolving those issues anyway so can probably resolve it.
This is one area where Ubuntu always worked perfectly in the years I used it so I saw no reason to change it. I only dumped Ubuntu because I vastly preferred the Mate Desktop over Unity.
Name me one other OS that actually prevents you from doing an upgrade to a recent version without doing a full reinstall?
As far as I'm aware, Europe (or, at least, the EU) has never had carrier locked phones. It's still common to buy them on contracts with a carrier, but if you cancelled the contract, you could immediately switch carrier with the device and continue using it.
Sorry to disappoint you but we generally do (or used to anyway, I haven't tried with my current phone yet). Here in the UK if you buy a pay as you go phone on the cheap from O2 you will have to take it to some dodgy shop to get it unlocked for use on Orange or Vodafone with a different sim. Luckily those dodgy shops are everywhere so it is not that hard. The carriers still used to try though last time I checked.
I'm afraid the root cause of the problems of corruption in government are *directly* related to the outsized power big government has - if government was limited, and could not tip the economic scales of the market in one direction or another to benefit their cronies, there would be no incentive for big business to take part in the election process.
Actually, the big reason that businesses engage with politicians is not to unbalance the market, it is to make sure they have a nice friendly environment to do business in. They lobby government to pay less tax, be allowed to hire and fire at will, and also get new laws onto the statute book that benefit them like the DMCA.
I know this is going to be a wasted breath, but anyone in the US vaguely interested in how governments work should actually take a look at a few political systems in modern Europe and see how they prevent thing like corruption and use government and regulation as a method of restricting the power of large corporations instead of enhancing it. That might involve looking beyond the news reported by US news networks though as they generally have a serious vested interest in government being weaker so the rich and the corporations that own them gain even more power to push the pro-capitalist propaganda that so many of them are so fond of.
First, you have entire industries dedicated to profiting off of the idea that the world is about to explode unless we start going green. Solar panel manufacturers, raw materials recyclers, electric vehicle manufacturers, and much much more. Those groups alone profit from studies predicting a bad future.
Recycling is also not exactly a sure fire route to buckets of cash. Somethings it is cost effective to recycle like aluminium and maybe steel but most stuff is cheaper to just throw in a hole in the ground. The problem is that nobody wants a landfill next to their house and so the only money is in making rubbish go away as nobody wants to deal with it. Most stuff is simply too damn hard to split out into its raw materials in order to recycle it without serious government grants.
As to electric vehicles it might be trendy but it is nowhere near as profitable as making good old fashioned gas guzzlers. The US auto industry did not need to be bailed out due to everyone buying electric cars, they needed a bailout because labour costs were too high and because more and more people were choosing to buy foreign cars. Most other countries auto industries have done ok.
The reality is that without government funded research coming out of other countries the huge corporations and oil companies would have just out spent everyone else trying their damnedest to sweep climate change under the table.
Why does that make you want to disagree? Oh, I see. You're still clinging to some outdated notion that there's some difference between government and corporations. How quaint.
Government is the most powerful entity in our mixed society precisely because it's the "end boss" of all the large corporate entities.
I think it is the other way around. Due to the huge amount of funding needed to get elected it is those who donate the most to political campaigns who ultimately are in charge, that is the corporations. Politicians simply do what their corporate backers tell them unless they know it will cause them too many problems with their electorate to get re-elected.
So long as politicians fund science with taxpayers' money, it will be politicized.
Just because something is funded by government does not mean politicians should be able to influence it. It is perfectly possible to have government funding for universities but done in such a way that individual politicians have no influence over the research that is done.
If you remove government funding completely from research though you end up with utterly biased research towards big business. There is precious little money to be made in climate science compared to the huge amounts being made by the oil industry so without government funding of climate research nobody would do it as the oil industry or car industry would simply be able to buy universities off doing it. This would result in the only research being done being friendly to whoever made the most cash or purely a source of R&D for companies where the results were never made public (If a company does research they have not interest most of the time in the results being put in the public domain).
Most other countries in the world manage to have government funded research without if being so political. I think the real problem here is not research being funded by government it is that your political system is utterly dysfunctional and bent. The whole way your politicians in the US are bought and sold by campaign donations is a huge problem as it combines with your lack of enforceable limits on how much money can be spent on election campaigns to give the rich and corporations to much power.
This is then made even worse by the lack of any requirement to be truthful in political advertising to the american public. Most other systems have at least some element of there being rules that force you to be able justify any statements made but in the US it is perfectly legal to call you opponent out as being a child murderer without so much as a shred of proof. There is a an expression that if you throw enough shit then some of it will stick and this is certainly what seems to result in your political system.
Combine this with a lack of any requirements for news media to be in anyway balanced and you end up with a system that favours whoever can spend the most.
I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.
You know they ran him over first to make sure he could put up any resistance? And you should just shut the fuck up to be honest as you have had plenty of incidences of similar crap in the US, did anybody stop them?
In fact, if the two muslim nutjobs who atacked that soldier were in the US instead of here they would have shot a whole bunch of people instead thank to the ease with which they could have gotten firearms. Then again, in the US there might have been somebody walking down the street with a concealed carry permit who could have played rambo and started a firefight in a public place and killed a bunch more people in the crossfire.
Also, do read my other post where I actually post some figures calling you out for the absolute bullshit you posted about murder rate by country. Maybe then you will pull your head out from Wayne LaPierre's ass.
The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.
US: 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants EU Average: about 1 per 100,000 inhabitants.
(Russia is not part of the EU so the figure for Europe on the page above is not the same as the EU)
There might be plenty of countries who have a higher murder rate than the US, but most the western europe or the rest of the developed world is way below you. If you filter the list of countries linked above to only include developed countries with stable democratic governments the US is suddenly fares pretty badly. I mean sure, you do have a lower murder rate than El Salvador, but the UK, Italy, Germany, New Zealand, France, Israel, Australia, Denmark, Japan, Spain, etc are all about 5 times lower.
Seriously, have a good long look at the list of countries above you on the list above and see if you can find anywhere which had a comparable standard of living to that of the US which has the same or similar murder rate.
Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns?
Certainly not in Manchester where this occurred as any criminal worth his salt can get themselves a real gun or at least a converted started pistol, it didn't get the nickname "Gunchester" for nothing.
Do wonder why the police raided this guy in the first place. I assume they didn't just pick a house at random hoping they might find soemthing they can chage someone with.
Not quite but close. Nowadays search warrants to boot someones door in like this do not require a judge to sign them anymore so it all it takes is to convince a slightly senior officer and they can go a knocking. This guy probably did something in the past to get on their shitlist so they just turn up a raid him anytime they are doing a big operation in his area.
Often they will need to make sure they find something when they do a series of raids like this as they look stupid if they raid 5 houses and find sod all. So instead they pick the 5 houses they want to raid for serious criminals then include 5 houses of habitual drug users so they can be sure of having a few arrests by the end of the day when they talk to the press even if the serious criminal raids generated nothing. The fact that all the charges get dropped a few weeks later for insufficient evidence or because the amount of drugs found are pathetic is rarely reported in most of our shitty press so nobody notices what a joke it is.
Slashdot Mirror
How badly would the drivers have had to been beaten for it to be more proportional?
I thought the US was supposed to be a christian country and slashdot was supposed to be am mostly american site (I say mostly because I am actually british)?
Didn't Jesus say:
'You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.'
So in other words even though there are shitty people in the world then anyone who considers themselves a christian should strive to not seek revenge against such people by killing them or wishing them to be killed. Instead they should forgive and leave any judgment for the lord. Wishing an agonising death upon them would then surely never be proportional, no matter how harshly they beat their victims.
But of course nobody in the US seems to actually give a shit about this part of Jesus' teachings or else you would not have the death penalty.
In the UK, and probably across the EU, it is not illegal, but there are laws that make it practically impossible.
I always like the quote from Mario Balotelli (an italian professional footballer earning millions) who was stopped by the police in the UK who asked him why he had £5,000 on him in cash. He answered: "Because I am rich!".
That is Italy-specific, within the legal framework of the ( much-needed ) fight against the mafia and camorra.
This is the problem with most suggestions that come from RMS. He espouses unrestricted freedom for all, but unfortunately when it comes to things involving financial transactions there are highly organised criminals who will exploit this freedom to make the job of law or tax enforcement almost impossible.
If someone does end up creating a truly anonymous form of currency or payment then you can be damn sure the main people who will benefit are those who want to pay no taxes or those who want to sell services and products that are illegal.
esla: Battery pack ... positioned under the passengers, between them and the road ... catches fire, which so far has been directed away from the cabin, but smoke entering the cabin would kill anyone who stayed in it anyway. End result: Car totaled after fire. No reported injuries (other than fanboy pride)
In this assessment you should really include that you need to pierce the battery pack via collision if you want anyone to take you seriously. Instead you make it sound like the battery just breaks all by itself which seems pretty far from the truth.
If you made an argument that the tesla should be more resilient to shit flying up off the road or low speed collisions without the battery being compromised you would have a point, but by not mentioning the very important detail of there having to be a collision of some kind (even if only with debris from the road) in your summing up of the situation you come across as just as bad as the parent.
Which is great, but not putting your fuel tank under your ass would be a good step towards minimisation of consequences like, say, fires, don't you think?
Of course this is the problem. Tesla have to worry about fitting in a battery which weight compared to the fabric of the car a lot and takes up space so it needs to be distributed around evenly. It does catch fire when the contents are exposed air though.
With good old fashioned petrol (gas for you americans) you just have this incredibly explosive stuff that you can cram into a small corner of the car and puts lots of protection around. Of course you have to protect it better because the stuff does not catch fire, it explodes but only if exposed to a source of ignition unlike a battery.
The real problem though is that the raw material needed top make exploding liquid fuel is running out, it simply will not last for ever. This can be mitigated though by moving to diesel engines which can be run off a wider variety of fuels, some of which come from other stuff instead of oil but that comes at a loss of performance.
So in comes Tesla, he realises that while there may be a way of running crap like family saloons on recycled chip fat the sports car of the future will need to work differently when petrol runs out. His early products might not be as good as some of the traditional cars that have been evolving for 100 years, but who cares because petrol based cars simply have no long term future.
It might take 20 years to run out of oil that can be refined into petrol, it might take 50. Hell, one more decent war in the middle east the price of oil might go so damn skywards that nobody can afford any within 5 years as we use the rest of the planets up double quick. The point though is that even if it takes as long as 50 years the price of gas at the pump is just going to go up and up.
Once you look at it this way you realise that even if Tesla make a loss for the next 10 years, they will amass enough patents that they will ultimately be laughing all the way to the bank.
Plus, there's still the fundamental fact that allowing people to be detained without probable cause at all evokes images of NAZI Germany or Stalinist Russia.
You are clearly a moron if you cannot see the difference between being asked to spend 10 seconds giving a breath sample without even getting out of your car and being 'detained' by the SS or secret police. That is like saying that a ticket inspector on a train is detaining you while you produce a ticket. Just in case you are that stupid I will point out a few of the differences:
- The Nazi SS only detained you if you had information they wanted to torture out of you, in other cases they just shot you if you pissed them off since they could.
- Stalin detained people in these places called gulags where they often never returned from alive, even if they did come back it was after several years, not 10 seconds.
- Both the nazis and stasi did not usually get involved enforcing minor traffic laws, they usually stuck to people trying to over through the state.
And this is exactly where it fails. Police officers are trained to observe as much as possible, ask tricky prying questions, and intimidate the detainee into consenting to otherwise-illegal searches. That absolutely will not change except to get even worse if your idea were to be implemented.
It is perfectly possible to train the police how to do random breath tests without turning into a dictatorship, try and look up how they do it in Australia on you tube. A negative sample is taken without you even getting out of the driving seat in many cases and they never ask you any questions other then 'please count to 10 with your mouth pointing at this device'. If this returns a positive (for instance because you have been drinking but are under the legal limit) then you have to get out of your car and they may ask you some other questions to pass the time but there is still nothing to stop you refusing to answer them and asking them to get on with the more accurate test as quick as possible, many people do exactly that.
It's not that simple. Yes, driving is inherently dangerous to the public and therefore it's legitimate to require a license. However, freedom of movement is a right, and to the extent that driving is the only practical form of travel, there's a limit to how many restrictions can be imposed before there is a civil rights violation anyway.
Asking someone to do a basic breath test can take as little 10 seconds, providing the police are not allowed to ask your details or anything else unless you fail it I see no real civil liberty issue with testing for alcohol without any suspicion of guilt. There must be a way of the law allowing this without setting any other precedents that allowed the cops to bust your front door in and then justify it based on whatever they found. The two scenarios are so far apart that if the one cannot be made legal without the other in a framework of laws then clearly the framework itself is flawed.
That's an incredibly dangerous attitude because it completely destroys the 4th Amendment. The consequence of your view is that the police could go on any arbitrary fishing expedition, performing any search they want whatsoever. If they find something, it was magically justified. If they don't find anything, the person being searched has no standing to complain. Either way, there is no consequence for the police for performing unreasonable searches, and therefore the entire requirement of "reasonable suspicion" is utterly destroyed.
If you just hadn't thought your position through, I hope you are now enlightened. If you still think your idea is a good one, please move to some totalitarian country that suits your ideology instead of corrupting the US and ruining it for the rest of us.
I was not thinking in general terms, I was thinking this is acceptable when it comes to drink driving because driving is a privilege that requires a licence, not a right. I was not think that you should extend the idea of if they find something then the search was reasonable to searching peoples homes or even vehicles. I think it is reasonable to be able to randomly test people driving to see if they are drunk though.
(BTW, though I would never want to live in the US as I think the US attitude to firearms (any old moron can have one) is retarded.
I simply switched desktops. I now run Mate on Ubuntu 12.04.
How well does that work?
Do you still get the ease of doing dist-update under Ubuntu?
The way you tell if the suspicion was "reasonable" is to explain it to a judge and/or jury and see if they agree.
I would take the view that if someone has subsequently tested positive then the suspicion must have been reasonable. The idea that someone could get a positive test annulled in some way just because the officer could not convince a jury they had reasonable suspicion would strike me as being abhorrent.
My guess would be that the device simply consumed more power than it could draw from USB.
I doubt that was the case as it happened with more than one device and they charged fine from other PC's. Since this was a specific issue to that PC I always assumed the manufacturer skimped on the PSU somehow or it was caused be the USB modem that was permanently plugged in to the other USB port.
If authorities systematically searched everyone's homes without cause and installed cameras and microphones in every room I'm sure it would also bear fruit.
Having somewhere to live is a right. Driving on the public highway is a privilege you need a licence for. That is a BIG difference.
If you have not been drinking at all then providing a negative sample on Oz only involves counting to ten while the officer holds device a few inches away from your mouth. The entire stop only takes less than a minute and unless he detects something you do not need to provide any details or answer any questions.
I've driven in the US and the standard of driving is absolutely shocking.
As some who loves watching the sort of documentary where the cameras follow police I have noticed something. I have watched loads of these filmed in the UK, the US, New Zealand and Oz..
Interesting the it is the US ones where people tend to be most likely to crash into the back of the police care while he is writing a ticket out to someone else, by a huge margin. It seems that incidences of this on the US shows on the interstate are tenapenny, compared to the other countries shows set on similar roads.
I do not consent to living in a police state.
I do not consent to "federal contractors".
I DO NOT CONSENT
OR:
"These are not the droids you're looking for."
I am curious, how do you think the police should be able to look for people drink driving?
Should they need to see you do something legal but seriously stupid like weaving between the lanes of the highway like a jackass before they can breathalyse you? Or should you actually need to break the law by running a red light? Or should they only be able to breath test people who crash? Or should they be able to breath test anyone who drives? Or should they only be able to breath test anyone driving if they have a history of being drink in charge?
I actually think this is an interesting question. Overhere in the UK the cops need some sort of reasonable suspicion to perform a breath test but if you fail there is zero chance of you getting off the crime by saying they did not have that reasonable suspicion. This effectively means that they can stop anyone they like for a breath test since there is very little comeback. Obviously, anyone who actually crashes gets a mandatory breath test.
We also ban people from driving for 1 year at their first drink driving offence, longer for repeated offenders. Also, failing to provide a breath sample when lawfully asked is an offence that carries the exact same sentence.
Some countries (Australia for one, I believe) just take the line that if you drive on a public road it is your duty to prove to the police that you are sober and they can randomly stop anyone the like.
I personally think that the UK approach is ok, but would not really object to the australian approach since I can understand that it makes keeping drink drivers (who are a menace anyway) off the streets. What is the law in the US though? Can you legally be breath tested without having committed a crime first? If it is more like our approach then can you get away with drink driving if you can prove that that cops did not have reasonable suspicion before pulling you over?
Oh, and just in case anyone is curious, I do think people who drive while they are too drunk to control a car should forfeit their driving privileges for at least a year so please don't come back and argue that drink driving is perfectly fine anyone should be able to drive back from the pub after anything other than a beer or so. I also do think though that the limit should be more variable depending on how long you have held a licence.
What am I missing from this?
One example: my Nexus 7 draws so much power, even when sleeping, that it is possible to connect it to a weakly charging USB port, come back a few hours later, and it has a lower charge level. I'm sure the same is true for other tablets, and possibly even some phones.
I used to have the same problem with an old PC too. If I plugged most devices into my main computer they charged just fine, I had a really shit old small form factor packard bell thing I used to leave always switched on as a router though and if I plugged anything into that to charge via USB it ended up actually drawing power out of the device instead. This was not due to the device though, anything I plugged in to charge did the same thing.
Weirdly though I could plug anything that needed power to run like a usb stick, or usb modem and it worked fine without any issues.
>buttons
Close on left
Minimize and Maximize on right. As God and IBM intended.
It's the first thing I change in KDE and every other environment if I can (if the devs don't remove the friggin' option).
You'll never fat-finger the Close button again.
--
BMO
Personally I have never done that anyway, or at least not that I can recall. I guess I am actually able to use a mouse with a greater degree of precision. Yes, I said mouse. If I want a touch OS I will find one and install it, I do not need my desktop OS to slowly morph into one thereby wasting tons of screen real estate as all the buttons become huge.
Just follow the currently commonly accepted desktop metaphor by default and give us options to change things away from it if we want to. Since it is fairly obvious that most of us do not want to this will work fine. Alternatively make assumptions about which defaults to choose based on whether a touchscreen device is present. If we ever add a touchscreen device in future then you can detect it then and ask us if we want to apply a bunch of fat finger mitigations then if we say yes.
Just changing it without asking us then forcing us to google for the solution to put it back is just annoying. Since I have to use both windows and linux it makes sense to me for them to behave in a similar manner so I can switch between them easily.
Too bad i use sudo apt-get dist-upgrade!
Exactly. In all other aspects I think Linux Mint is great but their retarded attitude in not allowing this or making it easy is just a pain in the arse.
I understand their perspective as I have been using Linux for decades but I do not agree with it and probably never will. Let those of us to who want to have a quick way of doing an in place upgrade of important packages do so then just resolve any shit that crops up later. Even if the system fails to boot then most of us are used to resolving those issues anyway so can probably resolve it.
This is one area where Ubuntu always worked perfectly in the years I used it so I saw no reason to change it. I only dumped Ubuntu because I vastly preferred the Mate Desktop over Unity.
Name me one other OS that actually prevents you from doing an upgrade to a recent version without doing a full reinstall?
As far as I'm aware, Europe (or, at least, the EU) has never had carrier locked phones. It's still common to buy them on contracts with a carrier, but if you cancelled the contract, you could immediately switch carrier with the device and continue using it.
Sorry to disappoint you but we generally do (or used to anyway, I haven't tried with my current phone yet). Here in the UK if you buy a pay as you go phone on the cheap from O2 you will have to take it to some dodgy shop to get it unlocked for use on Orange or Vodafone with a different sim. Luckily those dodgy shops are everywhere so it is not that hard. The carriers still used to try though last time I checked.
I'm afraid the root cause of the problems of corruption in government are *directly* related to the outsized power big government has - if government was limited, and could not tip the economic scales of the market in one direction or another to benefit their cronies, there would be no incentive for big business to take part in the election process.
Actually, the big reason that businesses engage with politicians is not to unbalance the market, it is to make sure they have a nice friendly environment to do business in. They lobby government to pay less tax, be allowed to hire and fire at will, and also get new laws onto the statute book that benefit them like the DMCA.
I know this is going to be a wasted breath, but anyone in the US vaguely interested in how governments work should actually take a look at a few political systems in modern Europe and see how they prevent thing like corruption and use government and regulation as a method of restricting the power of large corporations instead of enhancing it. That might involve looking beyond the news reported by US news networks though as they generally have a serious vested interest in government being weaker so the rich and the corporations that own them gain even more power to push the pro-capitalist propaganda that so many of them are so fond of.
First, you have entire industries dedicated to profiting off of the idea that the world is about to explode unless we start going green. Solar panel manufacturers, raw materials recyclers, electric vehicle manufacturers, and much much more. Those groups alone profit from studies predicting a bad future.
That is utter crap. Solar panel manufacturing is not that profitable, if it was why is BP winding down its solar division:
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9025019&contentId=7046515
Recycling is also not exactly a sure fire route to buckets of cash. Somethings it is cost effective to recycle like aluminium and maybe steel but most stuff is cheaper to just throw in a hole in the ground. The problem is that nobody wants a landfill next to their house and so the only money is in making rubbish go away as nobody wants to deal with it. Most stuff is simply too damn hard to split out into its raw materials in order to recycle it without serious government grants.
As to electric vehicles it might be trendy but it is nowhere near as profitable as making good old fashioned gas guzzlers. The US auto industry did not need to be bailed out due to everyone buying electric cars, they needed a bailout because labour costs were too high and because more and more people were choosing to buy foreign cars. Most other countries auto industries have done ok.
The reality is that without government funded research coming out of other countries the huge corporations and oil companies would have just out spent everyone else trying their damnedest to sweep climate change under the table.
Why does that make you want to disagree? Oh, I see. You're still clinging to some outdated notion that there's some difference between government and corporations. How quaint.
Government is the most powerful entity in our mixed society precisely because it's the "end boss" of all the large corporate entities.
I think it is the other way around. Due to the huge amount of funding needed to get elected it is those who donate the most to political campaigns who ultimately are in charge, that is the corporations. Politicians simply do what their corporate backers tell them unless they know it will cause them too many problems with their electorate to get re-elected.
So long as politicians fund science with taxpayers' money, it will be politicized.
Just because something is funded by government does not mean politicians should be able to influence it. It is perfectly possible to have government funding for universities but done in such a way that individual politicians have no influence over the research that is done.
If you remove government funding completely from research though you end up with utterly biased research towards big business. There is precious little money to be made in climate science compared to the huge amounts being made by the oil industry so without government funding of climate research nobody would do it as the oil industry or car industry would simply be able to buy universities off doing it. This would result in the only research being done being friendly to whoever made the most cash or purely a source of R&D for companies where the results were never made public (If a company does research they have not interest most of the time in the results being put in the public domain).
Most other countries in the world manage to have government funded research without if being so political. I think the real problem here is not research being funded by government it is that your political system is utterly dysfunctional and bent. The whole way your politicians in the US are bought and sold by campaign donations is a huge problem as it combines with your lack of enforceable limits on how much money can be spent on election campaigns to give the rich and corporations to much power.
This is then made even worse by the lack of any requirement to be truthful in political advertising to the american public. Most other systems have at least some element of there being rules that force you to be able justify any statements made but in the US it is perfectly legal to call you opponent out as being a child murderer without so much as a shred of proof. There is a an expression that if you throw enough shit then some of it will stick and this is certainly what seems to result in your political system.
Combine this with a lack of any requirements for news media to be in anyway balanced and you end up with a system that favours whoever can spend the most.
I mean just recently, you had a trained military person beheaded in broad daylight by a couple guys with knives. AND nobody stopped them. Nobody could. In America, you would have had someone (or a few someones) kick the shit out of the guys before they could finish cutting the soldiers head off.
You know they ran him over first to make sure he could put up any resistance? And you should just shut the fuck up to be honest as you have had plenty of incidences of similar crap in the US, did anybody stop them?
In fact, if the two muslim nutjobs who atacked that soldier were in the US instead of here they would have shot a whole bunch of people instead thank to the ease with which they could have gotten firearms. Then again, in the US there might have been somebody walking down the street with a concealed carry permit who could have played rambo and started a firefight in a public place and killed a bunch more people in the crossfire.
Also, do read my other post where I actually post some figures calling you out for the absolute bullshit you posted about murder rate by country. Maybe then you will pull your head out from Wayne LaPierre's ass.
The same is true for murder rates. In fact, if you exclude the cities in the US with the strictest gun control laws (DC, Chicago etc) which also happen to have the highest murder rates by guns, the murder rates in the US is actually LESS than most other countries.
Unfortunately that is not actually true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country
US: 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants
EU Average: about 1 per 100,000 inhabitants.
(Russia is not part of the EU so the figure for Europe on the page above is not the same as the EU)
There might be plenty of countries who have a higher murder rate than the US, but most the western europe or the rest of the developed world is way below you. If you filter the list of countries linked above to only include developed countries with stable democratic governments the US is suddenly fares pretty badly. I mean sure, you do have a lower murder rate than El Salvador, but the UK, Italy, Germany, New Zealand, France, Israel, Australia, Denmark, Japan, Spain, etc are all about 5 times lower.
Seriously, have a good long look at the list of countries above you on the list above and see if you can find anywhere which had a comparable standard of living to that of the US which has the same or similar murder rate.
Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns?
Certainly not in Manchester where this occurred as any criminal worth his salt can get themselves a real gun or at least a converted started pistol, it didn't get the nickname "Gunchester" for nothing.
Do wonder why the police raided this guy in the first place. I assume they didn't just pick a house at random hoping they might find soemthing they can chage someone with.
Not quite but close. Nowadays search warrants to boot someones door in like this do not require a judge to sign them anymore so it all it takes is to convince a slightly senior officer and they can go a knocking. This guy probably did something in the past to get on their shitlist so they just turn up a raid him anytime they are doing a big operation in his area.
Often they will need to make sure they find something when they do a series of raids like this as they look stupid if they raid 5 houses and find sod all. So instead they pick the 5 houses they want to raid for serious criminals then include 5 houses of habitual drug users so they can be sure of having a few arrests by the end of the day when they talk to the press even if the serious criminal raids generated nothing. The fact that all the charges get dropped a few weeks later for insufficient evidence or because the amount of drugs found are pathetic is rarely reported in most of our shitty press so nobody notices what a joke it is.