The problem is, it's your LOCAL reps that could be doing the most good in this situation!
The telco's screw you on your local service. It's the wires to your house, your street, your neighborhood. It's not the big ass trunk-lines that connect your city to the next city.
If everyone leans on their city council reps, or their county council reps, or their mayor, and pushes for their city/county to make cable within their county/city a public utility, the telco's will be left with nothing. Lot of communities are looking for this already, because they want a better fibre rollout than the big companies are doing.
You want to yell at someone...Yell at someone who lives in your town, and can actually do something about your local situation. This stuff should be like your water/sewer utility, locally bought, locally paid for, and locally accountable. Hold AT&T accountable? No way! They could afford to piss off whole states more less your little town. But hold a local company accountable? One that has no customers outside your county? Hell yea.
This is just common sense. If they aren't required to share wires, what happens? Well, one thing you get is the owner strangling competition. The other thing you get is every single provider stringing their own damn wires.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees telephone poles bending under the weight of heavy fibre lines. Now imagine more of them on every pole.
On the plus side, the increased bandwidth may help us out somewhat.
Southerners are weird. Lot of times you'll get hardcore racists who have really close friends of other races. They don't even see it as hypocritical, because their friend is "different" from all those other *insert racial slur here*.
I find it's different with the word "slavery" down here. People remember. It hasn't been that long, and they get pissed if you try to pretend like it didn't happen, or just avoid the whole issue.
Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.
If I'm driving down the road at 3:00am, and I see someone's garage is on fire, do I kick down the door to their house and try to get the people out, or do I just keep driving, because there is probably some crazy bastard in there with a gun under his pillow, just itching to blast 14 rounds through the wall in the direction of his front door? I could call the fire department I suppose, but why should I do that if I'm afraid to go in myself for fear of being shot?
If you don't verify your target, yes, even in your own damn house, you're criminally negligent. Maybe Texas doesn't agree, but most other states do.
That may well come up in the trial, over whether he can be charged with proxy assault (which is normally reserved for gang leaders and such) for sending police officers to kick down someone's door. The cops themselves were acting under the understanding that there were armed intruders on the property, and at least one person had already been shot.
I think under the circumstances they did a damn good job. Being confronted with a genuine armed target, they reacted correctly, neutralizing the threat with non-lethal force, and securing the situation.
There's really no possibility of completely eliminating civilian casualties in a SWAT situation...There is no such thing as a safe weapon. I don't think that means we need to eliminate SWAT, and if we could eliminate the sort of situations that call for SWAT teams, I'd assume we'd just go ahead and do that.
I'm not going to ask them to stand there and get shot because they can't be certain that they're shooting at the right guy with the gun. There is going to be a certain amount of risk, and I trust they'll be out there trying to minimize that risk, but it'll never be eliminated.
I don't know when we as a society started thinking that we ought to be sacrosanct in our persons. I don't want anything bad to happen to me or mine, but I'm not going to go gunning for the cops when one of my loved ones get caught in a crossfire between cops and criminals, or in a situation like this, where a third party put them all in harms way.
You should still be professional. I did a brief stint in retail, and managed to end up in charge by virtue of everyone over me being fired. I was on my way out, so I didn't give a damn...If some customer got rude, I threw them out of the store.
But I never swore at them. It's not professional. Ask them politely to leave. Ask them firmly to leave. Call the cops. I never had any problems, but I'm a big guy, and most people didn't try to get in my face.
It's a prank call. Cell phone, pay phone, public phone. The "traditional" fake call.
The thing that added to this one was the fact that the house actually seemed to BE the house, so the call was much more believable than if it had been coming from a random pay phone.
Contrary to what people seem to believe, it's unlikely that swat would ever shoot on sight someone who is holding no more than a knife. They have a wide array of "less-lethal" options for those sort of situations, and a guy with a knife is a minimal threat.
They're charging him with assault by proxy. If there had been a death, it could very well be murder depending on the statutes.
Manslaughter is reserved for places where you didn't intend for there to be a death, and it would be hard to argue that you weren't intending someone to die when you send a van full of armed men to their house. The kid is lucky as hell; if someone had died, they'd have charged him with the absolute maximums.
If 10 rapists in riot gear with automatic weapons are running at me yelling, "Police!" I'm fucked whether I drop the gun or not.
It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion. The cops will not even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.
What he hacked up was their caller id system, so it looked like the call was coming from the house in question. He stated in the call that he'd overdosed on cocaine, was shot, and that someone was going to kill his sister. Sounds like they sent 20 guys, which would seem to be a rational response given drugs + guns + unknown number of assailants.
They handcuffed the homeowner because he went out in his skivvies with a kitchen knife because he thought he heard people on the lawn. I guess he saved his door getting kicked in, but I'm not sure he sees it as a good thing.
I can't believe that they'd send out a swat team based purely on computer entered info. Does no one have to authorize that use of force? Seems like it would be as vulnerable to a typo as to malicious alteration.
I'd think that sort of thing would work with a pizza delivery system. I wouldn't think it would work for a van fully of heavily armed cops.
I always found it to be worse in the Northeast, because it is forever driven home that you are different different different, and you have to watch everything you say because everything that acknowledges that you are white and they are black is RACIST. You have to sit and pretend like there is no possible issue, and you worry about everything you say.
As opposed to the South. Now, don't get me wrong, there is a lot of racism in the South, but the thing is, the fact that we know it's there makes it possible to actually acknowledge it instead of just sitting around pretending there is no problem. There are things you can actually talk about without worrying that people are immediately going to be offended.
Just my opinion, but I've lived a decade in New York/New Jersey, and a decade in South Carolina/Georgia so I have a pretty deep perspective.
My only problem with working with females is in this particular context; if I say something off the cuff, in frustration, they'll view it as more significant than a guy would.
This is because they are, in many ways, better at communication than a guy would be, and more sensitive to nuance.
So you've got to watch what you say, because they pay attention, and they'll think about it more. A guy just hears, "wawawawa" noises contexted with a tone of voice. A female will hear what you actually say, and then think about it, then try to reconcile it with your subsequent and prior actions.
This is just a generalization. Lots of guys behave in what I'm representing as the "female" mode, and there are a lot of women who pay as little or less attention to what you're saying as a guy would.
It's about the office environment. If everyone is happy, and the bosses aren't sadists, then you don't get as much swearing. I swear when I get angry or frustrated, not when I'm hopping around, having a good day, feeling good about myself, etc.
Profanity doesn't make for a bad environment; bad environments make for profanity. And a bad environment that stifles profanity is a terrible environment.
There is a difference between using profanity at your customers, be they students or whatever, and using profanity among your co-workers.
Throwing down on your customers is never good. That's your job so when you start doing profanity, you're screwing up your job performance, and you deserve to be fired...unless you're in a job where the customers expect profanity (comedian, whore, phone support).
Being able to walk into the kitchen, or the breakroom, or whatever, and say, "Goddamn motherfucking asspirates should choke on a cock and die die die!" and not be fired, is therapeutic.
It's not about the profanity, it's about the freedom to express your opinion without a ton of self-censoring. If you're working in a situation where you're going to get fired for swearing in a meeting, regardless of how frustrated you are, that's going to affect your performance and it's going to add a lot of stress, because you're going to be forever worrying about what you say to whom.
I used to have a mostly-female chain of command, and it was more difficult. Had a boss who decided I was a morale problem because I was willing to say what the whole department was thinking. Got called into the HR director's office once because I snapped at a co-worker in her earshot; no profanity mind you, just frustration. Not to say that there's anything wrong with women, but you can't cut loose on a female in a corporate environment without repercussions.
In contrast I absolutely lost my shit in front of my current boss (who is a corporate VP) over a complete snafu that I'd seen coming, and warned all the responsible people about and planned against, and goddamn it if they didn't do the ONE THING, THE ONE GODDAMN THING I TOLD THEM TO NEVER DO, and he let me run down, slapped me on the back, and said, "Done is done, let's get it fixed" and we went on from there.
Just nice to be in a situation where you can express your feelings, and sometimes there is a lot of profanity-inducing anger there, and not have to worry about your job. I'm pretty low key; I can keep it bottled up if I have to, but it makes for a less pleasant environment.
The thing that bothers me about it is, for business use, it's not at all uncommon to have twice that many files lying around on your systems. My desktops routinely have a lot more than that, and running into a situation where I can't copy files at all without having to break them down into little groups, is just unacceptable from a business standpoint.
And for prying it apart, get yourself a putty knife or similar (I used a spark plug gapping tool), because it ain't got no screws. I ended up putting down my keyboard for a day or so and tearing 20 of 'em apart to pull the 512, and add 2 1gb sticks because my boss thought it would be "cheaper" than getting it installed through CDW and the bench techs were intimidated by the idea of going after a computer with sharp metal tools.
Both of you are making essentially the same point: The damn ratings systems are screwed six ways to Sunday, and need to be updated in order to give an accurate idea of the content.
"R" is just as meaningless as "M" because the whole goal of studios is to make an AO/NC-17 film and bring it back, just enough, to get an M/R rating. That's just crap. We need the real deal; a rating system that will tell you, right up front, what's in it, how bad it is, and what the context is.
At the heart of it, GTA and Halo 3 are about the same thing: Killin stuff. That's why they got the same rating. But there is a world of difference conveyed in the nuances, and the two are as wildly different as it is possible to be.
TFA claims it's probably either rheumatoid arthritis, menopause, hypothyroidism, acromegaly, end-stage renal disease, pregnancy, or obesity.
However, since I don't have any of those things, that begs the question, from whence commeth my fricking carpal? I have some ulnar issues which probably stem from shoulder tension, but for the actual carpal, I get it when I have an unusually high typing month, and it goes away when I take it easy for a few weeks. Worst I ever got it, I was in college, weighing 165, living in student digs with a really crappy desk. I've got more medical problems now, I weigh more, why less carpal? Not like I type less.
To say that it's completely unrelated is disingenous...There is obviously a strong correlation, and while that does not prove a causal relation, it's certainly noteworthy.
I actually am a programmer, and a writer, and I don't much care for LaTex. Moreover, I work in a printing industry, and no one here knows what the hell it is, because they all either use Quark or some sexy proprietary layout/cms app like DTI.
If the "look" of your document is more important than the content of your document, then, by all means, use LaTex. If you'd rather be able to just put the words down on the page and let someone else format them for printing later, then there are about a zillion word processors out there that will do it fine.
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Clarification: "Cable" in this context is "Fibre, pipe, bandwidth, information infrastructure" not "Cable TV"
The problem is, it's your LOCAL reps that could be doing the most good in this situation!
The telco's screw you on your local service. It's the wires to your house, your street, your neighborhood. It's not the big ass trunk-lines that connect your city to the next city.
If everyone leans on their city council reps, or their county council reps, or their mayor, and pushes for their city/county to make cable within their county/city a public utility, the telco's will be left with nothing. Lot of communities are looking for this already, because they want a better fibre rollout than the big companies are doing.
You want to yell at someone...Yell at someone who lives in your town, and can actually do something about your local situation. This stuff should be like your water/sewer utility, locally bought, locally paid for, and locally accountable. Hold AT&T accountable? No way! They could afford to piss off whole states more less your little town. But hold a local company accountable? One that has no customers outside your county? Hell yea.
This is just common sense. If they aren't required to share wires, what happens? Well, one thing you get is the owner strangling competition. The other thing you get is every single provider stringing their own damn wires.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees telephone poles bending under the weight of heavy fibre lines. Now imagine more of them on every pole.
On the plus side, the increased bandwidth may help us out somewhat.
Southerners are weird. Lot of times you'll get hardcore racists who have really close friends of other races. They don't even see it as hypocritical, because their friend is "different" from all those other *insert racial slur here*.
I find it's different with the word "slavery" down here. People remember. It hasn't been that long, and they get pissed if you try to pretend like it didn't happen, or just avoid the whole issue.
Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.
If I'm driving down the road at 3:00am, and I see someone's garage is on fire, do I kick down the door to their house and try to get the people out, or do I just keep driving, because there is probably some crazy bastard in there with a gun under his pillow, just itching to blast 14 rounds through the wall in the direction of his front door? I could call the fire department I suppose, but why should I do that if I'm afraid to go in myself for fear of being shot?
If you don't verify your target, yes, even in your own damn house, you're criminally negligent. Maybe Texas doesn't agree, but most other states do.
That may well come up in the trial, over whether he can be charged with proxy assault (which is normally reserved for gang leaders and such) for sending police officers to kick down someone's door. The cops themselves were acting under the understanding that there were armed intruders on the property, and at least one person had already been shot.
I think under the circumstances they did a damn good job. Being confronted with a genuine armed target, they reacted correctly, neutralizing the threat with non-lethal force, and securing the situation.
There's really no possibility of completely eliminating civilian casualties in a SWAT situation...There is no such thing as a safe weapon. I don't think that means we need to eliminate SWAT, and if we could eliminate the sort of situations that call for SWAT teams, I'd assume we'd just go ahead and do that.
I'm not going to ask them to stand there and get shot because they can't be certain that they're shooting at the right guy with the gun. There is going to be a certain amount of risk, and I trust they'll be out there trying to minimize that risk, but it'll never be eliminated.
I don't know when we as a society started thinking that we ought to be sacrosanct in our persons. I don't want anything bad to happen to me or mine, but I'm not going to go gunning for the cops when one of my loved ones get caught in a crossfire between cops and criminals, or in a situation like this, where a third party put them all in harms way.
You should still be professional. I did a brief stint in retail, and managed to end up in charge by virtue of everyone over me being fired. I was on my way out, so I didn't give a damn...If some customer got rude, I threw them out of the store.
But I never swore at them. It's not professional. Ask them politely to leave. Ask them firmly to leave. Call the cops. I never had any problems, but I'm a big guy, and most people didn't try to get in my face.
It's a prank call. Cell phone, pay phone, public phone. The "traditional" fake call.
The thing that added to this one was the fact that the house actually seemed to BE the house, so the call was much more believable than if it had been coming from a random pay phone.
Contrary to what people seem to believe, it's unlikely that swat would ever shoot on sight someone who is holding no more than a knife. They have a wide array of "less-lethal" options for those sort of situations, and a guy with a knife is a minimal threat.
They're charging him with assault by proxy. If there had been a death, it could very well be murder depending on the statutes.
Manslaughter is reserved for places where you didn't intend for there to be a death, and it would be hard to argue that you weren't intending someone to die when you send a van full of armed men to their house. The kid is lucky as hell; if someone had died, they'd have charged him with the absolute maximums.
I didn't say "the" I said "their" as in "the system that they use to identify callers" not "the system commonly known as 'Caller Id'"
If 10 rapists in riot gear with automatic weapons are running at me yelling, "Police!" I'm fucked whether I drop the gun or not.
It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference between a police raid and a home invasion. The cops will not even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.
What he hacked up was their caller id system, so it looked like the call was coming from the house in question. He stated in the call that he'd overdosed on cocaine, was shot, and that someone was going to kill his sister. Sounds like they sent 20 guys, which would seem to be a rational response given drugs + guns + unknown number of assailants.
They handcuffed the homeowner because he went out in his skivvies with a kitchen knife because he thought he heard people on the lawn. I guess he saved his door getting kicked in, but I'm not sure he sees it as a good thing.
I can't believe that they'd send out a swat team based purely on computer entered info. Does no one have to authorize that use of force? Seems like it would be as vulnerable to a typo as to malicious alteration.
I'd think that sort of thing would work with a pizza delivery system. I wouldn't think it would work for a van fully of heavily armed cops.
I always found it to be worse in the Northeast, because it is forever driven home that you are different different different, and you have to watch everything you say because everything that acknowledges that you are white and they are black is RACIST. You have to sit and pretend like there is no possible issue, and you worry about everything you say.
As opposed to the South. Now, don't get me wrong, there is a lot of racism in the South, but the thing is, the fact that we know it's there makes it possible to actually acknowledge it instead of just sitting around pretending there is no problem. There are things you can actually talk about without worrying that people are immediately going to be offended.
Just my opinion, but I've lived a decade in New York/New Jersey, and a decade in South Carolina/Georgia so I have a pretty deep perspective.
I'm sorry you got that from my comment.
My only problem with working with females is in this particular context; if I say something off the cuff, in frustration, they'll view it as more significant than a guy would.
This is because they are, in many ways, better at communication than a guy would be, and more sensitive to nuance.
So you've got to watch what you say, because they pay attention, and they'll think about it more. A guy just hears, "wawawawa" noises contexted with a tone of voice. A female will hear what you actually say, and then think about it, then try to reconcile it with your subsequent and prior actions.
This is just a generalization. Lots of guys behave in what I'm representing as the "female" mode, and there are a lot of women who pay as little or less attention to what you're saying as a guy would.
It's about the office environment. If everyone is happy, and the bosses aren't sadists, then you don't get as much swearing. I swear when I get angry or frustrated, not when I'm hopping around, having a good day, feeling good about myself, etc.
Profanity doesn't make for a bad environment; bad environments make for profanity. And a bad environment that stifles profanity is a terrible environment.
There is a difference between using profanity at your customers, be they students or whatever, and using profanity among your co-workers.
Throwing down on your customers is never good. That's your job so when you start doing profanity, you're screwing up your job performance, and you deserve to be fired...unless you're in a job where the customers expect profanity (comedian, whore, phone support).
Being able to walk into the kitchen, or the breakroom, or whatever, and say, "Goddamn motherfucking asspirates should choke on a cock and die die die!" and not be fired, is therapeutic.
It's not about the profanity, it's about the freedom to express your opinion without a ton of self-censoring. If you're working in a situation where you're going to get fired for swearing in a meeting, regardless of how frustrated you are, that's going to affect your performance and it's going to add a lot of stress, because you're going to be forever worrying about what you say to whom.
I used to have a mostly-female chain of command, and it was more difficult. Had a boss who decided I was a morale problem because I was willing to say what the whole department was thinking. Got called into the HR director's office once because I snapped at a co-worker in her earshot; no profanity mind you, just frustration. Not to say that there's anything wrong with women, but you can't cut loose on a female in a corporate environment without repercussions.
In contrast I absolutely lost my shit in front of my current boss (who is a corporate VP) over a complete snafu that I'd seen coming, and warned all the responsible people about and planned against, and goddamn it if they didn't do the ONE THING, THE ONE GODDAMN THING I TOLD THEM TO NEVER DO, and he let me run down, slapped me on the back, and said, "Done is done, let's get it fixed" and we went on from there.
Just nice to be in a situation where you can express your feelings, and sometimes there is a lot of profanity-inducing anger there, and not have to worry about your job. I'm pretty low key; I can keep it bottled up if I have to, but it makes for a less pleasant environment.
The thing that bothers me about it is, for business use, it's not at all uncommon to have twice that many files lying around on your systems. My desktops routinely have a lot more than that, and running into a situation where I can't copy files at all without having to break them down into little groups, is just unacceptable from a business standpoint.
And for prying it apart, get yourself a putty knife or similar (I used a spark plug gapping tool), because it ain't got no screws. I ended up putting down my keyboard for a day or so and tearing 20 of 'em apart to pull the 512, and add 2 1gb sticks because my boss thought it would be "cheaper" than getting it installed through CDW and the bench techs were intimidated by the idea of going after a computer with sharp metal tools.
**They do run nice with 2gb of ram.
Both of you are making essentially the same point: The damn ratings systems are screwed six ways to Sunday, and need to be updated in order to give an accurate idea of the content.
"R" is just as meaningless as "M" because the whole goal of studios is to make an AO/NC-17 film and bring it back, just enough, to get an M/R rating. That's just crap. We need the real deal; a rating system that will tell you, right up front, what's in it, how bad it is, and what the context is.
At the heart of it, GTA and Halo 3 are about the same thing: Killin stuff. That's why they got the same rating. But there is a world of difference conveyed in the nuances, and the two are as wildly different as it is possible to be.
TFA claims it's probably either rheumatoid arthritis, menopause, hypothyroidism, acromegaly, end-stage renal disease, pregnancy, or obesity.
However, since I don't have any of those things, that begs the question, from whence commeth my fricking carpal? I have some ulnar issues which probably stem from shoulder tension, but for the actual carpal, I get it when I have an unusually high typing month, and it goes away when I take it easy for a few weeks. Worst I ever got it, I was in college, weighing 165, living in student digs with a really crappy desk. I've got more medical problems now, I weigh more, why less carpal? Not like I type less.
To say that it's completely unrelated is disingenous...There is obviously a strong correlation, and while that does not prove a causal relation, it's certainly noteworthy.
I actually am a programmer, and a writer, and I don't much care for LaTex. Moreover, I work in a printing industry, and no one here knows what the hell it is, because they all either use Quark or some sexy proprietary layout/cms app like DTI.
If the "look" of your document is more important than the content of your document, then, by all means, use LaTex. If you'd rather be able to just put the words down on the page and let someone else format them for printing later, then there are about a zillion word processors out there that will do it fine.
How would OpenOffice's theoretical astroturfers be paid?
They get secret access to the version of OOo that doesn't suck.