No. It's not a nightmare, it's a boon. The average customer will buy windows a second time on failed validation. It's more money in their pocket as long as the false positive rating is small enough to be blamed on "pirates"
Gentoo compiles are not a fair comparison. That's a niche platform. A fairer comparison is apt-get and the like, which in my experience is a much faster and easier software acquisition process than the MS "find the software lying around somewhere, either at some store or a website... do some heterogeneous install process and hope the website you got it off of is legit since this stuff is rarely signed... wait forever for the "updating registry..." part because heterogeneous installs have to account for all permutations of possibilities as well as include all dependencies for install since they can't be sure you don't already have them." process. In my experience, the gentoo model is about the same speed as installing MS software (except for OpenOffice which takes about 3 lifetimes), but has less hassle for the user. Hopefully MS alleviates some of this with Windows Marketplace.
If we got the government out of marriage, what would the mainstream parties have to fight about at the expense of the gays?!? Common sense only leads to having to focus on real problems, and no one wants that!
Yes, but any language that does not suffer from the halting problem is by definition, not Turing complete. This makes such language's usefulness as a general computing language suspect, since introducing a construct as fundamental as recursion makes the language's halting unprovable.
Exactly. Those things that have little or no economic cost, however, are highly unlikely to reverse any major climate trend. That doesn't mean they aren't good things to do, of course.
What is the reuptake rate of CO2 for the planet in proportion to the increased production? How does this rate change in proportion to the % CO2 in the atmosphere? What is the contributing factor of H2O in the atmosphere? How about less abundant pollutants, what do they contribute? Of the ones that contribute, what are the sources? How about the balance of other major gasses (O2 and N2), how do their relative proportions affect the reuptake of the primary contributors? What portion of the trend can be attributed to other factors, such as solar cycles? Can you account for all sources of CO2, and give an accurate rate of production for them, including the natural sources? What are all the consequences of the trend, accurately and in detail? What are the costs of those consequences? What are the proposed actions to shift the climate trends? What are the costs associated with those proposals? What are the concequences, climatologically of those proposals, and the accurate prediction of the new trend, along with the costs associated with the outcome? Which of those proposals' costs, combined with the affected trend's costs exceed the cost of the trend if left to it's own devices? Finally, of the remaining proposals, if any, which is most cost effective, in dollars, lives and quality of life?
We have difinitive answers to few, if any of these questions. Until we do, screaming that we should *DO DOMETHING* no matter how stupid, costly, hazardous, ineffectual, and potentially damaging that something may be, is just political posturing, same as denial of facts is.
The action to take is not well understood. Pollution reduction is a good thing, but it carries an economic cost. Pollution can never be eliminated, and the costs associated with reducing it suffer from diminishing returns. So, while a recommendation to buy smaller cars couldn't hurt, an overly costly reduction in CO2 emissions would have a negative economic impact yet without knowing precisely what the solution is, may fail to have any impact whatsoever on the trend.
So, IMO, first, BREATH. It's not a doomsday scenario. We are going to live through this even given the worst case. In most predictions we will likely get through it almost unscathed, the scope of the problem only adding noise to the statistics of tragedies we cope with continuously in the forms of earthquakes, meteors, plagues, etc... Secondly, continue to study this issue... we should learn all we can about the causes of the trends, means to potentially change the trend, the precise effects of the trend, and the precise effects of manually changing the trend, along with the costs associated with those efforts. Only when those things are well understood should we start looking at widespread costly options. Thirdly, STOP POLITICISING THIS ISSUE! This goes for both sides of the issue. You don't understand it, I don't understand it, and I know this because the frigging climatologists don't understand it! Running around screaming how the sky is falling so that your politicians can get more votes through panic than the other guys politicians can through fearmongering isn't helping anyone. Sure, if a comet were going to crash into the planet in 3 years, we might be best off screaming our heads off to *DO SOMETHING!!!*. But a giant comet this ain't. It might damage some property values, cause some poor people to relocate, and ruin some damn fine wine, but in the big scheme of things, it's just not that big of a deal. We're going to survive, so, with that in mind, instead of doing just something, let's figure out how to do something smart. When that *smart* option is revealed, it won't be a mainstream political issue because every other option will look stupid.
No need to imagine... we have New Orleans as an example;)
1) It was catastrophic. Most cities are not 50 feet below sea level, so they could not possible flood on such a short time scale, so this is a worst case scenario.
2) Even in this worst case scenario, where a major city went down completely in the blink of an eye, when looked at from a larger economic standpoint, it's hardly a blip.
Now granted, NO is no NY. But in NY, only the waterfront is likely to be affected, and gradually over the course of years, not days. We have the engineering means to compensate given that timescale... hell, we have the engineering means to build a major city 50 feet below the ocean in the first place! Even if we procrastinate and did nothing as levels began rising, when Battery Park started going under water, I guarantee you that the entire Manhattan coastline would be shorn up in a matter of a year or two. Cost is not an issue... we rebuild the entire Missisipi delta every few decades as a matter of course. A few hundred miles of concrete dikes is a drop in the bucket.
A few meters is a HUGE rise in levels that we see no indications of. That's a massive quantity of water. London, New York, Tokyo could easily compensate through a variety of means (dikes, pylons, fill-dirt, etc...) It's the average coastal homeowner that would take the brunt of the cost, but most of them have the means to absorb it, especially given the drawn out period of time it would occur over. Modern western civilization has little to fear from rising sea levels. The 3rd world is where the problems lie.
It isn't that fragile. No amount of climate change is going to erase the rotary engine, mathematics, electricity, etc.... away and leave us back in the dark ages. Well, no climate change due to global warming anyway... The people you are most worried about are the ones who still live the same way we did 1300 years ago, so civilization isn't the most solid argument against global warming.
Not to say that I wouldn't ever dump a plain blob of data into a SQL server for convienience, just saying that in pure CS terms, it's not a "correct" solution, just one in which the round peg happens to fit in the square hole nicely.
I'm not too hopefull for Reiser ATM. Politics being what they are and all, and the project always seemed to me to have bitten off more than they could chew from day one. It's a pie in the sky project that if it ever pans out will be revolutionary, but I'm not holding my breath. My money would be on WinFS in the long run, with a good clone for non-windows becoming workable [reliable even] 2-5 years after.
If I had to do a non-relational ACID, clustered data solution, I'd probably tend more towards a Turmite (gambit scheme) system with parity, or something similar built on Erlang or any other comparable message passing (or publish/subscribe as it's sometimes called) architecture. I don't believe that parity is built into either system in it's current state, and that might not be a requisite since you could probably use plain redundancy, but the scalability, robustness and flexibility is way more than I think you are likely to get out of an RDBMS, especially a non-oracle, open source one. What you sacrifice is integrity (and the miserable API;)) but if that doesn't matter to you in the first place... As a side benefit, you would get automatic local data caching, as your app would coexist with it's data, since the data store is a green-threaded process and in many usage patterns the storage site could migrate towards the use site, as well as automatically balancing the load across all cores on a machine, which is of increasing importance as the core-wars scale up, and happens automatically in a message passing architecture since all your functions become thread-services.
This is of course, just me brainstorming, so take it for what it's worth. Overall though, I'm tending toward the opinion that RDBMS's are a big square hole that we tend to shove all of our pegs into for better or worse, and that if you find you do not need a fundamental principle of the RDBMS, like foreign keys, that it's a strong indication you've got a round peg in your hand.
Yes, you can get alot done without them, but then you have to ask yourself why you are using an RDBMS in the first place. Raw storage can be accomplished much faster using other methods, so the only thing you buy yourself is the SQL API, which isn't generally the easiest to work with anyway.
The 2nd is very, very relevant in this day and age, for the purposes of conscription. The fact that there exists an armed populace in the US comes into play in every single government decision involving the use of force. The arguments against the futility of the direct use of force against the standing US military are NOT new and unique to our "day and age". They were directly addressed by Jefferson in the federalist papers which outline the debate for the 2nd amendment in the first place.
It was admitted, even prior to the drafting, that self armed civilians could never directly overthrow the US government. The people arguing that such a thing is possible are simply ignorant, willfully or not, of the reality of the outcome of such tactics. Even during the formation of the US, it was a simple reality that small arms troops, no matter how overwhelming, cannot, ever, compete with a modest force that brings sufficient artillery to the field (as Pickett's famous charge at Gettysburg so graphically demonstrated). As the civilian conscripts will never amass an artillery, or it's modern equivelent including air power, capable of competing with the federal army, it's a forgone conclusion who would win, in any post gunpowder time period.
That being said, it does not render an armed populace obsolete. The point of an armed populace is that it is prohibitively expensive to use non overwhelming force against the populace. In other words, a small armed police force is not going to be able to contain a population center against their will unresisted. They must bring in the big guns in order to do so, and in doing so, they are making an overt military move against their own people. Whereas a small police occupation with little or no loss of life can be swept under the rug, any large movement against a populace is going to have very dire concequences for the initiating government. Asking the military to attack, in force, their own homes is a VERY dangerous proposition and invites a coup d'etat, splintering the military into factions. Under these conditions, the armed populace can then be conscripted to protect their homes and family and will fight alongside the regular army, as well as serve as a supply source. The oppressive government, under those conditions wouldn't have a chance.
This is not to say that such a scenario is very realistic... the fact being that it would never get that far. The government, understanding the expense and futility of such a scenario, would (one would hope) never initiate such force in the first place, instead opting to get it's way through the regular channels of congress and the courts, where the people have an opportunity to reject their oppressors through open debate, impeachment and voting instead of bullets.
Giving some modern examples of armed populace deterence to illustrate that such an expense is obsolete:
The fall of the soviet union was performed by the army factioning to such an extent that reconstructing the government according to the wishes of the factions that were backed by the people was the only non suicidal option.
Although the frontal assault against Iraq was performed with little resistance, it has proven EXTREMELY expensive to continue occupation in the midst of guerrila skirmishers. Whether the occupation is good or bad is beside my point, the point I am drawing attention to is that the armed populace is proving more effective, in terms of making it expensive for the occupation, than the regular army was capable of doing, because fighting embedded populace is is extremely difficult because it precludes the use of overwhelming force, as I said above.
In Waco Texas, the Branch Dividian sect shook up the entire country. The Federal Government rolled out tanks for the first time in history against their own citizens. Had these people been unarmed, it wouldn't hardly have been a story and injustices would have likely been swept under the rug. Because they were armed, the actions of the government were scrutinized careful
are you really suggesting that it will be best for society that we all carry weapons all the time?
No, I am suggesting that it would be best for society that the criminal element is not able to assume that the non criminal element are a bunch of sheep. Whether you carry an arm or not is irrelevent. Disallowing the populace self protection is a de facto licence for criminals to act with impunity, knowing that only other criminals can be armed by definition.
Yeah, they are in control and you don't like it. But let's admit it, they want the money. If they know that they are in control, there's a much lower chance that they'll get nervous and shot at you if you make a suspicios movement.
I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Maybe it's just an American thing, but the idea of being forced by my country's laws to bend over and take it from any criminal who wants me to makes me want to throw up. I'd rather live with a higher death rate knowing that some of those deaths were of the criminal and others were on nonemasculated real men (and our countries are in the same ballpark for overall violent death rates btw).
Not to mention that the entire point of the 2nd amendment is conscription, so petty crime is a moot argument to begin with.
If you are trying to be honest with statistics, then include all violent crime deaths, not just gun deaths. A decrease in gun deaths that is more than made up for by an increase in knife and bomb deaths is not an improvement. In the end you are still dead.
Wonderful.... right... Which is why, on my recent trip to London, I was warned repeatedly about muggings.
Before applauding your wonderful reduction of gun crimes, look at your per capita violent crime stats as compared to the US, including knives, bombs, etc. I think you will find you aren't doing as well as you think you are. Last I checked, Brittain's per capita violent crime rate exceeded the US as a whole (although it was still in the good median range for western countries).
I agree, and in this particular case, the suspect was resisting until the first, or possibly second tasing. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th tasings however, the witnessing of which was beginning to form a dangerous mob around the officers, were done while the suspect was cuffed and slack, and most definately physically subdued. It is those later tasings that were obvious "punishment" by the officers (which is circumstancially demonstrated by one officer threatening to tase onlookers for asking for his badge number.)
So yes, overwhelming non lethal force to subdue a suspected criminal is most definately warranted by officers. Force used by officers after subduction, however is criminal assault.
Slashdot Mirror
From the people that brought you edlin comes Microsoft Vista(tm)
No. It's not a nightmare, it's a boon. The average customer will buy windows a second time on failed validation. It's more money in their pocket as long as the false positive rating is small enough to be blamed on "pirates"
Or not. My last call to MS ended up with them refusing to give me a code at all. They wanted my credit card or to screw off.
Gentoo compiles are not a fair comparison. That's a niche platform. A fairer comparison is apt-get and the like, which in my experience is a much faster and easier software acquisition process than the MS "find the software lying around somewhere, either at some store or a website... do some heterogeneous install process and hope the website you got it off of is legit since this stuff is rarely signed... wait forever for the "updating registry..." part because heterogeneous installs have to account for all permutations of possibilities as well as include all dependencies for install since they can't be sure you don't already have them." process. In my experience, the gentoo model is about the same speed as installing MS software (except for OpenOffice which takes about 3 lifetimes), but has less hassle for the user. Hopefully MS alleviates some of this with Windows Marketplace.
She understands perfectly what she's backing. She's not acting like a Republican, hell, protecting the RIAA is practically in her party's plank!
Backing the Libertarian rebuttal with as much force as your attack:
The Libertarians are against selling everyone into corporate slavery.
I'll even counter attack:
It's the Republicans and Democrats who want to sell you into corporate slavery.
Now that this debate has all the substance of a Bush/Kerry one, we can be content that we are all well informed on the issues... ooh! Shiny!
If we got the government out of marriage, what would the mainstream parties have to fight about at the expense of the gays?!? Common sense only leads to having to focus on real problems, and no one wants that!
Brilliant!
You had to give it away with Intercal though, didn't you...
Yes, but any language that does not suffer from the halting problem is by definition, not Turing complete. This makes such language's usefulness as a general computing language suspect, since introducing a construct as fundamental as recursion makes the language's halting unprovable.
Exactly. Those things that have little or no economic cost, however, are highly unlikely to reverse any major climate trend. That doesn't mean they aren't good things to do, of course.
What is the reuptake rate of CO2 for the planet in proportion to the increased production? How does this rate change in proportion to the % CO2 in the atmosphere? What is the contributing factor of H2O in the atmosphere? How about less abundant pollutants, what do they contribute? Of the ones that contribute, what are the sources? How about the balance of other major gasses (O2 and N2), how do their relative proportions affect the reuptake of the primary contributors? What portion of the trend can be attributed to other factors, such as solar cycles? Can you account for all sources of CO2, and give an accurate rate of production for them, including the natural sources? What are all the consequences of the trend, accurately and in detail? What are the costs of those consequences? What are the proposed actions to shift the climate trends? What are the costs associated with those proposals? What are the concequences, climatologically of those proposals, and the accurate prediction of the new trend, along with the costs associated with the outcome? Which of those proposals' costs, combined with the affected trend's costs exceed the cost of the trend if left to it's own devices? Finally, of the remaining proposals, if any, which is most cost effective, in dollars, lives and quality of life?
We have difinitive answers to few, if any of these questions. Until we do, screaming that we should *DO DOMETHING* no matter how stupid, costly, hazardous, ineffectual, and potentially damaging that something may be, is just political posturing, same as denial of facts is.
The action to take is not well understood. Pollution reduction is a good thing, but it carries an economic cost. Pollution can never be eliminated, and the costs associated with reducing it suffer from diminishing returns. So, while a recommendation to buy smaller cars couldn't hurt, an overly costly reduction in CO2 emissions would have a negative economic impact yet without knowing precisely what the solution is, may fail to have any impact whatsoever on the trend.
So, IMO, first, BREATH. It's not a doomsday scenario. We are going to live through this even given the worst case. In most predictions we will likely get through it almost unscathed, the scope of the problem only adding noise to the statistics of tragedies we cope with continuously in the forms of earthquakes, meteors, plagues, etc... Secondly, continue to study this issue... we should learn all we can about the causes of the trends, means to potentially change the trend, the precise effects of the trend, and the precise effects of manually changing the trend, along with the costs associated with those efforts. Only when those things are well understood should we start looking at widespread costly options. Thirdly, STOP POLITICISING THIS ISSUE! This goes for both sides of the issue. You don't understand it, I don't understand it, and I know this because the frigging climatologists don't understand it! Running around screaming how the sky is falling so that your politicians can get more votes through panic than the other guys politicians can through fearmongering isn't helping anyone. Sure, if a comet were going to crash into the planet in 3 years, we might be best off screaming our heads off to *DO SOMETHING!!!*. But a giant comet this ain't. It might damage some property values, cause some poor people to relocate, and ruin some damn fine wine, but in the big scheme of things, it's just not that big of a deal. We're going to survive, so, with that in mind, instead of doing just something, let's figure out how to do something smart. When that *smart* option is revealed, it won't be a mainstream political issue because every other option will look stupid.
New Orleans was a problem of poor maintainence, not incapable technology.
No need to imagine... we have New Orleans as an example ;)
1) It was catastrophic. Most cities are not 50 feet below sea level, so they could not possible flood on such a short time scale, so this is a worst case scenario.
2) Even in this worst case scenario, where a major city went down completely in the blink of an eye, when looked at from a larger economic standpoint, it's hardly a blip.
Now granted, NO is no NY. But in NY, only the waterfront is likely to be affected, and gradually over the course of years, not days. We have the engineering means to compensate given that timescale... hell, we have the engineering means to build a major city 50 feet below the ocean in the first place! Even if we procrastinate and did nothing as levels began rising, when Battery Park started going under water, I guarantee you that the entire Manhattan coastline would be shorn up in a matter of a year or two. Cost is not an issue... we rebuild the entire Missisipi delta every few decades as a matter of course. A few hundred miles of concrete dikes is a drop in the bucket.
A few meters is a HUGE rise in levels that we see no indications of. That's a massive quantity of water. London, New York, Tokyo could easily compensate through a variety of means (dikes, pylons, fill-dirt, etc...) It's the average coastal homeowner that would take the brunt of the cost, but most of them have the means to absorb it, especially given the drawn out period of time it would occur over. Modern western civilization has little to fear from rising sea levels. The 3rd world is where the problems lie.
It isn't that fragile. No amount of climate change is going to erase the rotary engine, mathematics, electricity, etc.... away and leave us back in the dark ages. Well, no climate change due to global warming anyway... The people you are most worried about are the ones who still live the same way we did 1300 years ago, so civilization isn't the most solid argument against global warming.
Not to say that I wouldn't ever dump a plain blob of data into a SQL server for convienience, just saying that in pure CS terms, it's not a "correct" solution, just one in which the round peg happens to fit in the square hole nicely.
I'm not too hopefull for Reiser ATM. Politics being what they are and all, and the project always seemed to me to have bitten off more than they could chew from day one. It's a pie in the sky project that if it ever pans out will be revolutionary, but I'm not holding my breath. My money would be on WinFS in the long run, with a good clone for non-windows becoming workable [reliable even] 2-5 years after.
;)) but if that doesn't matter to you in the first place... As a side benefit, you would get automatic local data caching, as your app would coexist with it's data, since the data store is a green-threaded process and in many usage patterns the storage site could migrate towards the use site, as well as automatically balancing the load across all cores on a machine, which is of increasing importance as the core-wars scale up, and happens automatically in a message passing architecture since all your functions become thread-services.
If I had to do a non-relational ACID, clustered data solution, I'd probably tend more towards a Turmite (gambit scheme) system with parity, or something similar built on Erlang or any other comparable message passing (or publish/subscribe as it's sometimes called) architecture. I don't believe that parity is built into either system in it's current state, and that might not be a requisite since you could probably use plain redundancy, but the scalability, robustness and flexibility is way more than I think you are likely to get out of an RDBMS, especially a non-oracle, open source one. What you sacrifice is integrity (and the miserable API
This is of course, just me brainstorming, so take it for what it's worth. Overall though, I'm tending toward the opinion that RDBMS's are a big square hole that we tend to shove all of our pegs into for better or worse, and that if you find you do not need a fundamental principle of the RDBMS, like foreign keys, that it's a strong indication you've got a round peg in your hand.
Yes, you can get alot done without them, but then you have to ask yourself why you are using an RDBMS in the first place. Raw storage can be accomplished much faster using other methods, so the only thing you buy yourself is the SQL API, which isn't generally the easiest to work with anyway.
The 2nd is very, very relevant in this day and age, for the purposes of conscription. The fact that there exists an armed populace in the US comes into play in every single government decision involving the use of force. The arguments against the futility of the direct use of force against the standing US military are NOT new and unique to our "day and age". They were directly addressed by Jefferson in the federalist papers which outline the debate for the 2nd amendment in the first place.
It was admitted, even prior to the drafting, that self armed civilians could never directly overthrow the US government. The people arguing that such a thing is possible are simply ignorant, willfully or not, of the reality of the outcome of such tactics. Even during the formation of the US, it was a simple reality that small arms troops, no matter how overwhelming, cannot, ever, compete with a modest force that brings sufficient artillery to the field (as Pickett's famous charge at Gettysburg so graphically demonstrated). As the civilian conscripts will never amass an artillery, or it's modern equivelent including air power, capable of competing with the federal army, it's a forgone conclusion who would win, in any post gunpowder time period.
That being said, it does not render an armed populace obsolete. The point of an armed populace is that it is prohibitively expensive to use non overwhelming force against the populace. In other words, a small armed police force is not going to be able to contain a population center against their will unresisted. They must bring in the big guns in order to do so, and in doing so, they are making an overt military move against their own people. Whereas a small police occupation with little or no loss of life can be swept under the rug, any large movement against a populace is going to have very dire concequences for the initiating government. Asking the military to attack, in force, their own homes is a VERY dangerous proposition and invites a coup d'etat, splintering the military into factions. Under these conditions, the armed populace can then be conscripted to protect their homes and family and will fight alongside the regular army, as well as serve as a supply source. The oppressive government, under those conditions wouldn't have a chance.
This is not to say that such a scenario is very realistic... the fact being that it would never get that far. The government, understanding the expense and futility of such a scenario, would (one would hope) never initiate such force in the first place, instead opting to get it's way through the regular channels of congress and the courts, where the people have an opportunity to reject their oppressors through open debate, impeachment and voting instead of bullets.
Giving some modern examples of armed populace deterence to illustrate that such an expense is obsolete:
The fall of the soviet union was performed by the army factioning to such an extent that reconstructing the government according to the wishes of the factions that were backed by the people was the only non suicidal option.
Although the frontal assault against Iraq was performed with little resistance, it has proven EXTREMELY expensive to continue occupation in the midst of guerrila skirmishers. Whether the occupation is good or bad is beside my point, the point I am drawing attention to is that the armed populace is proving more effective, in terms of making it expensive for the occupation, than the regular army was capable of doing, because fighting embedded populace is is extremely difficult because it precludes the use of overwhelming force, as I said above.
In Waco Texas, the Branch Dividian sect shook up the entire country. The Federal Government rolled out tanks for the first time in history against their own citizens. Had these people been unarmed, it wouldn't hardly have been a story and injustices would have likely been swept under the rug. Because they were armed, the actions of the government were scrutinized careful
No, I am suggesting that it would be best for society that the criminal element is not able to assume that the non criminal element are a bunch of sheep. Whether you carry an arm or not is irrelevent. Disallowing the populace self protection is a de facto licence for criminals to act with impunity, knowing that only other criminals can be armed by definition.
I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Maybe it's just an American thing, but the idea of being forced by my country's laws to bend over and take it from any criminal who wants me to makes me want to throw up. I'd rather live with a higher death rate knowing that some of those deaths were of the criminal and others were on nonemasculated real men (and our countries are in the same ballpark for overall violent death rates btw).
Not to mention that the entire point of the 2nd amendment is conscription, so petty crime is a moot argument to begin with.
If you are trying to be honest with statistics, then include all violent crime deaths, not just gun deaths. A decrease in gun deaths that is more than made up for by an increase in knife and bomb deaths is not an improvement. In the end you are still dead.
Wonderful.... right... Which is why, on my recent trip to London, I was warned repeatedly about muggings.
Before applauding your wonderful reduction of gun crimes, look at your per capita violent crime stats as compared to the US, including knives, bombs, etc. I think you will find you aren't doing as well as you think you are. Last I checked, Brittain's per capita violent crime rate exceeded the US as a whole (although it was still in the good median range for western countries).
I agree, and in this particular case, the suspect was resisting until the first, or possibly second tasing. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th tasings however, the witnessing of which was beginning to form a dangerous mob around the officers, were done while the suspect was cuffed and slack, and most definately physically subdued. It is those later tasings that were obvious "punishment" by the officers (which is circumstancially demonstrated by one officer threatening to tase onlookers for asking for his badge number.)
So yes, overwhelming non lethal force to subdue a suspected criminal is most definately warranted by officers. Force used by officers after subduction, however is criminal assault.