Do you honestly think it's more difficult to compliment someone's hair than to read a circuit diagram Yes. Because I've read the sexual harassment guidelines at several workplaces and sometimes they say things about "comments about appearance." So even if I notice that a co-worker has modified her hairstyle, I can be investigated and punished if she chooses to believe my remark is inappropriate. Strangely, within my own gender an acceptable comment (to a familiar coworker) would be "Hey fucknuts! Whadja do to your hair?"
Circuit diagrams are not arbitrary and capricious and if the circuits they describe are behaving in a manner I do not understand I can take down a book, read quietly for a little while and figure it out. It will not punish me and it behaves according to physical laws. It will not throw me into Kafka's bureaucratic meatgrinder for something I said or did today that would have been perfectly fine if I said it a day earlier or later. Humans, it turns out, are arbitrary and capricious and that's why sometimes they frighten me.
But Marx is famous for two books, and in The Communist Manifesto he and Engels do advocate violent revolution. In fact is says violent revolution is the only way to achive the movement's aims.
Das Kapital is interesting, historically, but as as an economic theory it's based on realities nearly a century and a half out of date.
Interesting assertion. You don't back it up with anything though. I say you're way off, and just repeating bullshit that you've heard elsewhere. I would encourage you to read parts 2 and 3 of Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism or Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton's views on fascism map quite easily onto the evolution of a radical agenda into extreme statism. In the Russian revolution, the combination of a vulnerable aristocracy and a virulent political ideology came together in much the manner of the French Revolution, only this time the Central Committee managed to hold on to power for much, much longer.
Marx didn't condone violence...It is widely recognised that violence is justified if it leads to self-emancipation.
Please make up your mind. But as long as you're telling us what Marx said, let's cite one of his two major works, the Communist Manifesto:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
"Forcible overthrow."
In Russia, the revolutionaries said they had a better way, Communism. They overthrew the government. As it turns out, though, Communism is sufficiently unnatural way that it needs a full-blown dictatorship to maintain the illusion that it works. Rather than handing over the means of production to the workers, the Party held it on their behalf. Thought on their behalf. Planned their lives on their behalf. Only they never let go: the proletariat were never quite ready, for one reason or another, for the state to wither away.
How exactly do 12 and 16 help on 1/3 ? How many inches is a third of a foot?
This is one of the reasons circles are 360 degrees around. 360 is a very easy number to slice up. It is divisible, without a fraction, by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120 and 180. A handy feature, that.
Why does somebody always say the attorneys should be disbarred? As far as I can tell they are working strenuously and entirely within the law to represent a client who has an extremely weak case.
There's no rule, nor should there be, that attorneys should be punished for representing jerks. Chances are, SCO engaged their services without telling them everything they needed to know, things like "we don't actually own Unix." Now the lawyers are stuck riding this out, because if they walk away, or even slack off, that could get them disbarred, censured, or on the wrong end of a malpractice suit.
These big-dog lawyers are no fools. Undoubtedly they have a pretty good idea of where their case is going. But if they don't go down swinging, they'll never get another client.
Novell has been saying for some time that SCO owes them money from royalties on System V Unix. After years of stalling, SCO finally handed over documents that said the licensing money they got from Microsoft and Sun was, in fact, for System V Unix, and not for a foosball table in the break room as SCO had originally claimed. Novell says they should get dibs on the money now because (a) it's theirs, and (b) not only is SCO going bankrupt, they're probably going to go bankrupt before the trial is even over.
This is an oversimplification and misses many nuances and may in fact be glaringly inaccurate.
A friend of mine's father was an E.R. doctor who occasionally worked with the county coroner's office. More than once, he told me, he's had to deal with the remains of a six-year-old boy who evidently thought something along the line of,
Spinning is fun
The washing machine spins
I should go for a ride.
So they set the dial, climb in and close the lid. Within seconds the G-forces are so intense they can't move their arms to open the lid. Seconds later they can't breathe. Seconds after that the blood is forced out of their brain and they're unconscious. This is an incredible blessing because in less than a minute the skin on their back has ruptured and all the blood and bile and lymph is being flung out of their bodies and pumped away by the washer. The sixty pound unbalanced load is chump change compared to the hundred and sixty pounds of water a washer usually has to spin out. And those sixty pound boys, he told me, get spun down to about thirty pounds of bones and mush.
18 G's is fatal. Washers subject their load to several minutes G's forces comparable to driving into a concrete wall at 100MPH. So yeah, a little label reminding the grownups that a washing machine will kill the shit out of anything or anybody put in it is a bad idea.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Well, edlin isn't Unix, right? It's DOS.
And I did learn it, for three reasons. First, in the DOS world there was no such thing as a.BAT file much longer than 20 lines, so I really could keep the whole thing in my head, including what text was on what line. Its print command listed 24 lines at a time instead of the entire damned file (because DOS was first run on 80x25 monitors where Unix was written for teletypes) Second, edlin.com was a really small file so I could wedge it onto a rescue disk along with some useful third-party tools and a couple of evil little weapons like debug.
Most importantly, it really annoyed my coworkers that I knew edlin.
Oh, and if edlin were a car it would be an Isetta 300.
My family has a cabin where overnight temps from late November to early March are routinely in the 20s, but very rarely below 10, and never below freezing more than 36 hours. But since the place is pretty old, with crusty old plumbing to match, we try to take precautions.
Before the first freeze of the year we drain the pipes, then put anti-freeze in the toilet and toilet tank, down the bathtub drain and down the drains for the kitchen and bathroom sinks. We do it this way because that's how our grandfather always did it.
We don't drain the water heater, figuring the insulation and volume of water will protect it from anything short of a week in the single digits, which won't happen.
You get a lid that efficiently prevents water evaporation. ...except that it's only on one side of the U-bend. Evaporation will continue on the outflow side, although that side is generally a high-humidity environment.
And once somebody uses the sink/tub/toilet, you'll need to oil its trap again.
As an alternative, perhaps anti-freeze?. You often have to do this as part of winterization anyway. As an aside, can someone from the Frozen North tell me how you winterize the sink traps where it's damn cold?
From the article, about 18000 votes were accepted that didn't actually vote for anything What the article actually said was:
18,000 Sarasota County electronic ballots did not register a vote in the race (emphasis added) It further says this means about fifteen percent of the ballots cast did not have a selection in this race.
The loser says this happened because the software went all wonky. The winner says it probably happened because of poor layout -- voters didn't even find the race, or they found and misunderstood the race, or they fat-fingered the ballot.
The loser, of course, can't challenge on the misunderstood-ballot theory, because it implies that her support base is statistically more likely do do something stupid than her opponent's.
That said, I find this ruling intolerable. When the government is formed by the counting of ballots, the method of the counting must be open and available. I think it was Boss Tweed who said it best: "As long as I get to count the votes, what are you going to do about it?"
Accuracy and watchability are almost mutually exclusive, believe me. I have doctor friends who watch House, M.D. and Grey's Anatomy, knowing full well House would have lost his medical license about five minutes into every episode, and that Grey's Anatomy has no medical credibility at all. Why do they watch these shows? For the drama. For the characters. Sure, they end up yelling at the television every time someone says "Order up a CPR scan and check his glycemic index" or something, to their eyes, equally ludicrous.
Ask a lawyer what they think of Boston Legal or some time. They don't watch it to improve their courtroom skills.
And any computer geek will tell you that the most exciting thing you can see when you've taken over a computer is not ten seconds of swirling colors with "Access Granted" throbbing in the middle while 80s synth-pop plays in the background. No, it's a single hash mark, like this:
# _ Where's the drama in that? You and I know, but we have special expertise, and that puts us the minority.
Medicine is most two minutes of questions, two minutes of poking, a minute to write the prescription, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Police work is mostly pulling over bad drivers, arresting the drunk ones, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Lawyering is a lifetime of paperwork.
Flying, even military flying, is mostly just sitting there, staring at the horizon, then checking the instruments occasionally.
Computering is mostly sitting there, staring and the screen, then typing occasionally.
None of this is worth watching. The real world is mundane. It takes a long time to happen. The most drama any of use are likely to see in IT is hoping and praying that the backup tapes are up to okay.
Here's the 2001 decision, which was unanimous. The key part is where Kennedy writes "one who seeks to establish trade dress protection must carry the heavy burden of showing that the feature is not functional, for instance by showing that it is merely an ornamental, incidental, or arbitrary aspect of the device."
they're suing under trademark law. They're trying to say that since their file format contains a trademark (the string "AUTODESK"), the format is protected by trademark laws. SCOTUS visited this issue a year or two ago and knocked it right in the dirt: You know those construction roadsigns that have a pair of springs in the base so the wind won't knock them over? Well, they were invented and patented by a company some time ago, and when their patent expired they looked for a new way to supress competition. Well, their logo, which is trademarked, is a sign with a pair of springs under it. Under the theory that making a sign that resembles our logo is trademark infringement, they sued competitors. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which sided with the defendants and wrote very clearly that trademarks cannot be applied to functionality. If ODA's lawyer can remind the judge of this precedent, this case will be over very quickly, because all AutoDesk is doing is gratuitously building a trademark into a functional mechanism.
Of course constraints aren't there for speed. They're there for data integrity. However, handling integrity checks within the database will be significantly faster (and more reliable) than handling them through an application interfacing to the database.
can say this because databases are written in C and optimized and debugged for years. While the database does the check more quickly than an attached application, it's not for the reason you cite. The DB can do it faster because it can do the checking internally. Not only does it not have to transfer a single row to the application, typically it won't even access the referenced table: it will simply do a hit/miss test on the appropriate index.
If the application has a network between it and the database, which it often will, network lag by itself produced horrible inefficiencies in data validation, and clever client-side caching will inevitably break referential integrity.
grep -h In practical life I only ever use grep against (a) one file, (b) all of them, or (c) a stream. The [ivlnc] switches are all I can ever remember from day to day. Brainspace I could use for the rest is already occupied by things like my wife's birthday.
The best reason to pipe to grep is to keep filenames out of the output. grep foo ?.txt will produce
a.txt: foo
b.txt: foo
c.txt: foo
whereas cat ?.txt|grep foo produces
foo
foo
foo
I've also seen Unixes where their shells are linked against spectacularly broken libc's. Under Tru64's Bourne and Korn shells, for example, a multithreaded program foo fork bombs when run as foo < z.txt, but works fine as cat z.txt|foo (foo < z.txt under Bash works, though, because Bash is linked against the GNU libc).
They'll make a mint. Seriously. Everybody will -- except the French consumers this lawsuit is "protecting."
HP can issue a big press release that they're being all vive la France! about it and caving to the pressure by selling all PCs in France without an OS. Of course, since they have to use a custom manufacture process for that country, the PCs will cost more to manufacture, so naturally they'll have to charge extra. And French consumers will pay the extra with pride, because it's a French edition of the computer.
In the meanwhile, here at the store there's a copy of XP for EU130, right next to the PC, and you have to buy it, right? But since you're buying it with a PC, we'll only charge you EU100. MS gets EU70 of that, instead of the EU30 they'd get if it was preloaded.
Don't feel like installing Windows yourself? Le Best Buy will be delighted to install it for you for EU50, custom configured for your specific PC model, right over there at the service department. Yes, the service department with the long line. About an hour, why do you ask? Just enjoy the store, maybe check out the digital cameras. Note that installing the OS is just a matter of plugging a cable into a USB jack and ignoring it for fifteen minutes while a stripped-down Linux dd's the PC's HDD to where it would have been in the first place.
And that's all there is to it. The PC costs an extra EU30; the OS costs EU100; and OS installation costs EU50. EU180 per PC, EU100 of which leaves the country, and after HP "caves", you'll notice all other PC manufacturers doing exactly the same, because, hey, it's the law, right?
Okay, maybe Ubuntu will pick up a few customers, but I'm predicting less than one in five purchases will take that route. That's still an average of EU144/PC extra profit for all parties involved. Excluding VAT, of course -- I expect the French government skims another EU28 or so, on average. See? Everybody wins.
There are many, many things wrong with Jumpin' Jack Flash and I only watched it because I thought that if Whoopi Goldberg's HBO special was funny, her movies would be funny. The wrongest computer-specific thing is the graphics on the login prompt. After you type "B-FLAT" (a password that has no username associated with it and that is echoed as it's typed), it goes through a full minute of swirling 1986 graphics that say things like "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "B-FLAT" and "Access Granted" and eighth-notes all over the place. Did I mention these 16-color swirling things are happening on a monochrome monitor?
As a user, if I had to put up with that every time I logged in I'd be screaming Get to the fucking prompt! every morning from 9:05 to 9:06, and by the sixth or seventh day I'd be storming the IT department with a cricket bat so I could re-educate some Bastard Systems Programmer on the finer points of having one's brains splattered across a distant wall.
Now that I'm older and wiser the entire movie makes me feel that way. Bad movie. If the old self-loathing is acting up I'd encourage you to watch Burglar right after. No computer problems in it, really, it just sucks quite a bit.
A trivial "case has been opened since last shutdown" trip switch could determine whether a full boot is needed. Fails for hardware plugged into USB and firewire ports.
As a nonsequitur it belongs near the top of the list of Creepy Things to Say. The fact that it's an armed person in a snappy uniform does not improve matters.
Other eligible items:
Did you know blood bounces when it lands on ice?
I'd sell my soul to direct a commercial.
Pat Buchanan's got the neatest eyes.
If you sleep with your clone is it incest or masturbation?
So I wrapped the next one in duct tape and tried again.
I also know how to kill innocent people. I know how to start fires, make poison and explosives, fire a gun, drown a baby, kick a dog, and fly an airplane into a building. I know how to punch, kick, slap, stab, strangle, gouge. I can subvert computers. I have access to the personal information of others.
Take a pragmatic look at your skills and abilities, what you're capable of doing, without taking the dodge of "I'm not capable of that because I would never do that." You don't get to, see, unless you let your hypothetical cop do the same.
On the other hand, if there's something you can do but don't do because it would be wrong to do, well, that's morals. If you can have them, so can I. So can the cop. It's morally wrong to kill innocent people. It's morally wrong to manipulate the concept of innocence until a person you want to kill appears killable. It's morally wrong to drown babies, kick dogs, and fly airplanes into buildings.
Morals and ethics do indeed have tricky areas. There are valid reasons to kick a dog, for example. Hell, if it's your plane and your unoccupied building, have at it. But no, the cop's statement, all by itself, doesn't bother me very much.
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Circuit diagrams are not arbitrary and capricious and if the circuits they describe are behaving in a manner I do not understand I can take down a book, read quietly for a little while and figure it out. It will not punish me and it behaves according to physical laws. It will not throw me into Kafka's bureaucratic meatgrinder for something I said or did today that would have been perfectly fine if I said it a day earlier or later. Humans, it turns out, are arbitrary and capricious and that's why sometimes they frighten me.
Das Kapital is interesting, historically, but as as an economic theory it's based on realities nearly a century and a half out of date.
Interesting assertion. You don't back it up with anything though. I say you're way off, and just repeating bullshit that you've heard elsewhere. I would encourage you to read parts 2 and 3 of Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism or Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton's views on fascism map quite easily onto the evolution of a radical agenda into extreme statism. In the Russian revolution, the combination of a vulnerable aristocracy and a virulent political ideology came together in much the manner of the French Revolution, only this time the Central Committee managed to hold on to power for much, much longer. Marx didn't condone violence...It is widely recognised that violence is justified if it leads to self-emancipation.
Please make up your mind. But as long as you're telling us what Marx said, let's cite one of his two major works, the Communist Manifesto:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions."Forcible overthrow."
In Russia, the revolutionaries said they had a better way, Communism. They overthrew the government. As it turns out, though, Communism is sufficiently unnatural way that it needs a full-blown dictatorship to maintain the illusion that it works. Rather than handing over the means of production to the workers, the Party held it on their behalf. Thought on their behalf. Planned their lives on their behalf. Only they never let go: the proletariat were never quite ready, for one reason or another, for the state to wither away.
This is one of the reasons circles are 360 degrees around. 360 is a very easy number to slice up. It is divisible, without a fraction, by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120 and 180. A handy feature, that.
There's no rule, nor should there be, that attorneys should be punished for representing jerks. Chances are, SCO engaged their services without telling them everything they needed to know, things like "we don't actually own Unix." Now the lawyers are stuck riding this out, because if they walk away, or even slack off, that could get them disbarred, censured, or on the wrong end of a malpractice suit.
These big-dog lawyers are no fools. Undoubtedly they have a pretty good idea of where their case is going. But if they don't go down swinging, they'll never get another client.
This is an oversimplification and misses many nuances and may in fact be glaringly inaccurate.
- Spinning is fun
- The washing machine spins
- I should go for a ride.
So they set the dial, climb in and close the lid. Within seconds the G-forces are so intense they can't move their arms to open the lid. Seconds later they can't breathe. Seconds after that the blood is forced out of their brain and they're unconscious. This is an incredible blessing because in less than a minute the skin on their back has ruptured and all the blood and bile and lymph is being flung out of their bodies and pumped away by the washer. The sixty pound unbalanced load is chump change compared to the hundred and sixty pounds of water a washer usually has to spin out. And those sixty pound boys, he told me, get spun down to about thirty pounds of bones and mush.18 G's is fatal. Washers subject their load to several minutes G's forces comparable to driving into a concrete wall at 100MPH. So yeah, a little label reminding the grownups that a washing machine will kill the shit out of anything or anybody put in it is a bad idea.
And I did learn it, for three reasons. First, in the DOS world there was no such thing as a .BAT file much longer than 20 lines, so I really could keep the whole thing in my head, including what text was on what line. Its print command listed 24 lines at a time instead of the entire damned file (because DOS was first run on 80x25 monitors where Unix was written for teletypes) Second, edlin.com was a really small file so I could wedge it onto a rescue disk along with some useful third-party tools and a couple of evil little weapons like debug.
Most importantly, it really annoyed my coworkers that I knew edlin.
Oh, and if edlin were a car it would be an Isetta 300.
My family has a cabin where overnight temps from late November to early March are routinely in the 20s, but very rarely below 10, and never below freezing more than 36 hours. But since the place is pretty old, with crusty old plumbing to match, we try to take precautions.
Before the first freeze of the year we drain the pipes, then put anti-freeze in the toilet and toilet tank, down the bathtub drain and down the drains for the kitchen and bathroom sinks. We do it this way because that's how our grandfather always did it.
We don't drain the water heater, figuring the insulation and volume of water will protect it from anything short of a week in the single digits, which won't happen.
...except that it's only on one side of the U-bend. Evaporation will continue on the outflow side, although that side is generally a high-humidity environment.
And once somebody uses the sink/tub/toilet, you'll need to oil its trap again.
As an alternative, perhaps anti-freeze?. You often have to do this as part of winterization anyway. As an aside, can someone from the Frozen North tell me how you winterize the sink traps where it's damn cold?
The loser says this happened because the software went all wonky. The winner says it probably happened because of poor layout -- voters didn't even find the race, or they found and misunderstood the race, or they fat-fingered the ballot.
The loser, of course, can't challenge on the misunderstood-ballot theory, because it implies that her support base is statistically more likely do do something stupid than her opponent's.
That said, I find this ruling intolerable. When the government is formed by the counting of ballots, the method of the counting must be open and available. I think it was Boss Tweed who said it best: "As long as I get to count the votes, what are you going to do about it?"
I'd never thought of that, the sidekick as an expository device. It certainly explains why Batman ever let Robin tag along. Well spotted.
Ask a lawyer what they think of Boston Legal or some time. They don't watch it to improve their courtroom skills.
And any computer geek will tell you that the most exciting thing you can see when you've taken over a computer is not ten seconds of swirling colors with "Access Granted" throbbing in the middle while 80s synth-pop plays in the background. No, it's a single hash mark, like this:
# _ Where's the drama in that? You and I know, but we have special expertise, and that puts us the minority.Medicine is most two minutes of questions, two minutes of poking, a minute to write the prescription, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Police work is mostly pulling over bad drivers, arresting the drunk ones, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Lawyering is a lifetime of paperwork.
Flying, even military flying, is mostly just sitting there, staring at the horizon, then checking the instruments occasionally.
Computering is mostly sitting there, staring and the screen, then typing occasionally.
None of this is worth watching. The real world is mundane. It takes a long time to happen. The most drama any of use are likely to see in IT is hoping and praying that the backup tapes are up to okay.
Here's the 2001 decision, which was unanimous. The key part is where Kennedy writes "one who seeks to establish trade dress protection must carry the heavy burden of showing that the feature is not functional, for instance by showing that it is merely an ornamental, incidental, or arbitrary aspect of the device."
Of course constraints aren't there for speed. They're there for data integrity. However, handling integrity checks within the database will be significantly faster (and more reliable) than handling them through an application interfacing to the database.
If the application has a network between it and the database, which it often will, network lag by itself produced horrible inefficiencies in data validation, and clever client-side caching will inevitably break referential integrity.
a.txt: foo
b.txt: foo
c.txt: foo
whereas cat ?.txt|grep foo produces
foo
foo
foo
I've also seen Unixes where their shells are linked against spectacularly broken libc's. Under Tru64's Bourne and Korn shells, for example, a multithreaded program foo fork bombs when run as foo < z.txt, but works fine as cat z.txt|foo (foo < z.txt under Bash works, though, because Bash is linked against the GNU libc).
HP can issue a big press release that they're being all vive la France! about it and caving to the pressure by selling all PCs in France without an OS. Of course, since they have to use a custom manufacture process for that country, the PCs will cost more to manufacture, so naturally they'll have to charge extra. And French consumers will pay the extra with pride, because it's a French edition of the computer.
In the meanwhile, here at the store there's a copy of XP for EU130, right next to the PC, and you have to buy it, right? But since you're buying it with a PC, we'll only charge you EU100. MS gets EU70 of that, instead of the EU30 they'd get if it was preloaded.
Don't feel like installing Windows yourself? Le Best Buy will be delighted to install it for you for EU50, custom configured for your specific PC model, right over there at the service department. Yes, the service department with the long line. About an hour, why do you ask? Just enjoy the store, maybe check out the digital cameras. Note that installing the OS is just a matter of plugging a cable into a USB jack and ignoring it for fifteen minutes while a stripped-down Linux dd's the PC's HDD to where it would have been in the first place.
And that's all there is to it. The PC costs an extra EU30; the OS costs EU100; and OS installation costs EU50. EU180 per PC, EU100 of which leaves the country, and after HP "caves", you'll notice all other PC manufacturers doing exactly the same, because, hey, it's the law, right?
Okay, maybe Ubuntu will pick up a few customers, but I'm predicting less than one in five purchases will take that route. That's still an average of EU144/PC extra profit for all parties involved. Excluding VAT, of course -- I expect the French government skims another EU28 or so, on average. See? Everybody wins.
Except, of course, the consumer.
As a user, if I had to put up with that every time I logged in I'd be screaming Get to the fucking prompt! every morning from 9:05 to 9:06, and by the sixth or seventh day I'd be storming the IT department with a cricket bat so I could re-educate some Bastard Systems Programmer on the finer points of having one's brains splattered across a distant wall.
Now that I'm older and wiser the entire movie makes me feel that way. Bad movie. If the old self-loathing is acting up I'd encourage you to watch Burglar right after. No computer problems in it, really, it just sucks quite a bit.
Other eligible items:
- Did you know blood bounces when it lands on ice?
- I'd sell my soul to direct a commercial.
- Pat Buchanan's got the neatest eyes.
- If you sleep with your clone is it incest or masturbation?
- So I wrapped the next one in duct tape and tried again.
- Badger, badger, badger, badger...
- I keep having these dreams about you.
- Did you ever wonder what it tastes like?
Ah, hell, you get the idea.I also know how to kill innocent people. I know how to start fires, make poison and explosives, fire a gun, drown a baby, kick a dog, and fly an airplane into a building. I know how to punch, kick, slap, stab, strangle, gouge. I can subvert computers. I have access to the personal information of others.
Take a pragmatic look at your skills and abilities, what you're capable of doing, without taking the dodge of "I'm not capable of that because I would never do that." You don't get to, see, unless you let your hypothetical cop do the same.
On the other hand, if there's something you can do but don't do because it would be wrong to do, well, that's morals. If you can have them, so can I. So can the cop. It's morally wrong to kill innocent people. It's morally wrong to manipulate the concept of innocence until a person you want to kill appears killable. It's morally wrong to drown babies, kick dogs, and fly airplanes into buildings.
Morals and ethics do indeed have tricky areas. There are valid reasons to kick a dog, for example. Hell, if it's your plane and your unoccupied building, have at it. But no, the cop's statement, all by itself, doesn't bother me very much.