If you're invoking christianity, though, to "justify" your hatred of gays; you ARE, in fact, threatening immediate harm yourself. Immediately after calling gays abominations, the bible calls for them to be put to death ("their blood be upon them").
That escalates the matter from some vague metaphysical claim about what may or may not happen after death to an immediate temporal threat of physical harm from the faithful.
The command to take it into your own hands is explicit in your "faith"; and by invoking it you are making that threat yourself. And you deserve to be dealt with accordingly.
But that "smug SF hybrid driver" bit that they did, and that people routinely cite, really drives me up the wall. It's odd too, because the the South Park guys are usually so spot on when figuring out why people need to be mocked.
I commute M-F on MUNI and only drive on the weekends for shopping and such. And I've actually gotten blocked the critical mass-holes twice in one day before... once when I was blocked on my way from work to my bus stop; and then again while on the bus when they looped around later and blocked it's route.
How South Park decided that San Francisco should be mocked for it's "smug"ness because of the number of hybrids hybrids, while totally missing the bicyclists, I have no idea. But it really gets under my skin, and IMO speaks to a certain cluelessness about what it's like here.
It's not pie-in-the-sky. Many cities around the world have implemented, or are implementing, such systems already. Tokyo, Singapore, Montreal, and even Dallas, all have extensive networks of underground tunnels linking transit stations, office buildings, and retail shops. Well... the first three include transit stations. Dallas just links shops, parks, and offices... public transit in general, and rail (high-speed or otherwise) especially, being pinko godless communist plots to sap us of out precious bodily fluids, and all that.
> Remember it doesn't matter why you hit a > pedestrian, you in the car is the one that will be > fucked financial, and legally.
That depends on the state. In some states... mostly here on the wast coast... yeah, the vehicle is always considered at fault. In others, especially back east, the pedestrian has a legal responsibility to take due care, respect the right-of-way, and cross at the intersection and with the signal.
Personally, I think the latter makes more sense. Even at the speed limit and with the fastest reflexes, a car has a significant stopping distance. A pedestrian can stop on a dime by not taking the next step. So it makes more sense that both cars AND pedestrians should have to behave in a predictable fashion.
Congratulations. You watched that South Park episode that mentioned hybrids and San Francisco.
Now, if you actually *LIVED* here, you'd know that it's not the hybrid drivers who are smug at all. They're downright humble and very conscientious; especially in comparison to the bicyclers, who treat the traffic laws and crosswalks, which they are supposed to respect as much as any vehicle, as some kind of silly little suggestion to which they're entirely immune. They bill not only blow through crosswalks and make illegal turns, blundering into pedestrians who have the right of way. It's a game amongst them to gather in numbers and deliberately block intersections, including crosswalks, for sometimes up to twenty minutes at a time! And when playing their little game, the bicyclists make no more exception for those of us on public transit than those of us walking.
If you doubt a word I've written, just google for "critical mass". I'd love to double, or even triple, the number of your "smug hybrid drivers" on the road, if it meant I never got stuck behind another chain of mass-holes.
Jobs was not taking all the credit for Ive's work. If you'd actually watch Jobs' keynotes, or even look at Apple's various design-related press materials, you'd see the prodigious amount of praise and credit that Apple in general, and Jobs in particular, regularly would heap upon Ive.
Of course that would require you to set aside the "Apple is evil and Steve Jobs is satan" mantra and sully your eyes and ears by actually going over to apple.com and watching some of the videos there. So I guess we'll just have to say that Ives, the completely unsung and unrecognized by anyone hero, was placated by the huge salary and stock grants that go along with his position.
Yeah... but do you see the incessant whining... like is all over slashdot, ars, and the like, right now over Jobs vs. Ritchie... about the fact that everybody knows who Frank Lloyd Wright is, but no one can remember who invented glass, concrete, or steel?
And you think Apple is the only one who does that? You're a fool if you do. But I expect that you know that they're not alone in that behavior and you're holding Apple to a different standard... bashing them for their perceived wrongs while ignoring the exact same behavior from.. say... Google.
For example:
What we now know as Google Music used to be a company/service/iOS app called Simplify Media. Google bought them last year and promptly killed the service for the iPhone and pulled the app from the App Store. And now, you can upload your music library to Google, and have it streamed anywhere you like for your listening pleasure with an app that's available in the Android Marketplace (but not for/on iOS.)
But no. Apple deserves to be castigated for buying a technology, discontinuing it for other products, and rolling it into their own, but it's A-OK hunker-dorey when Google does it because they have that little slogan: "don't be evil", which obviously means that Apple, and only Apple, *IS* evil, right?
I wouldn't go so far as to call it a conspiracy, but you people have been irrationally attacking Apple, and anyone who owns, uses, or likes their products, for just about as long as I can remember.
In elementary school, before I even know what "gay" was, I was called a faggot for having an Apple ][+ at home instead of a more acceptable C64 or IBM PC. Then came the Macintosh and "Only an idiot would use a mouse and graphics instead of the keyboard.". Then the Performa line was crap and going to be the end of the company. And what about that shitty Newton ("Eat up Martha.)? Then Apple was "beleaguered" and about to be finally wiped out entirely by IBM/Microsoft/Sun/Dell/Be/etc. and anybody who still owned one was just a zealot. ("Shut the company down. Liquidate. And refund the money to the shareholders.") Then, back to homophobia, as computers in colors other than beige were obviously only for fags. And what kind of moron buys a computer without a floppy drive, anyway. OS X? No vendor will ever port their software. And only a fascist would consider a Unix-like OS that's not GPL. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.". And so on and so on and so on.
And every time an Apple story shows up here or on Ars, it's just more of the same. You people are nothing if not predictable. Now, while Apple is the most valuable company trading; stock market metrics are worthless as a real measure of a company's success. But as soon as some other company edges Apple out for the #1 spot, you'll be harping on about how so-and-so's market cap just demolished Apple's and obviously they're doomed and anyone who still owns a Mac is a zealot/moron/whatever.
Tacky to reply twice to the same comment, I know. But to use the ever-so-popular automotive analogy...
What the cellular carriers, and those in the press going along with them, are doing is advertising and selling a car to the public as having a V-8 engine. But when you actually open up the hood, all that's there is an inline-4 and a can of mixed vegetable juice.
The fact is there are only two technologies developed so far that the ITU has acknowledged as meeting the 4G requirements. Those are "LTE-Advanced" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced" (aka WiMAX Advanced); neither one of which is actually what is being deployed and marketed by at&t or verizon:
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/40.aspx
Now, I'm aware that T-Mobile shoveled a bunch of money toward the ITU to get them to issue a press release stating that they did not object to tmo's use on the term 4G in their marketing. But there's a big difference between the lies told by marketing and MBA types and the actual facts.
Granted, I don't expect the people who work for at&t and verizon to be anything other than lying sacks of crap. But shouldn't a site that bills itself as "news for nerds" strive for better?
Yes. But Shatner doesn't have the handicap of a Zombie Gene Roddenberry shuffling around doing his best to ruin Shatner's past roles. That counts for a lot when Lucas is doing think like make Han Solo into a little bitch by having Greedo shoot first, and Indiana Jones into a... well... a part of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
(Honestly... Shia Labouf? Really? That no-talent sack of crap doesn't deserve to be allowed to enter within a 100 mile radius of Harrison Ford, much less accompany him on screen. Couldn't they have just hunted down that kid who played Short Round?)
... it's only supposed to be a category 1 by the time it reaches land, and down to tropical storm strength by the time it reached New York. When I lived in Florida, we didn't even lower the awnings for a cat 1.
After this, and the hullabaloo over that 5.9 earthquake (I live in California now, and we laughed at the big deal they made out of it.), I think the east coast are being a massive bunch of drama queens.
Correction: HP *was* a very talented company. Then, along came a woman named Carly Fiorina. The talented people, who wanted to do something more with their lives than sell printer ink, have long since left the company for greener pastures.
> They have brilliant people working for the company
Correction: They *had* brilliant people working for the company. Then, along came a woman named Carly Fiorina. The brilliant people, who wanted to do something more with their lives than sell printer ink, have long since left the company for greener pastures.
At this point, I wouldn't touch *anything* put out by HP; not even at the $99 fire-sale price.
ZIP codes aren't even enough. They're set up by the post office for its own convenience in routing mail; not by any municipality with taxation authority. I once lived in a ZIP code that encompassed one town, cut a swath out of another, and included bits of unincorporated land in two counties. Any one of those entities, as well as the state, could have set their own sales taxes, at different rates, on different items. Where I live now, there is a multi-county transportation agency that is authorized to (and does) charge a sales tax to help pay for commuter rail.
You can't even use the city field in your address; because, once again, the convenience of the post office comes into play. When I lived in the ZIP code I mentioned above, I lived in an unincorporated part of one county. But my mailing address listed the town in which the post office branch which delivered to my home was located, even though my home was outside the city limits.
Basically, you need to be able to pinpoint every single address to which a shipper could possibly deliver a package; and know what tax is charged on what items on that specific address. That really would be a holy hell of a huge and complex database. And said database could not remain static. Cities and counties like to change the tax rates and declare sales tax holidays (sometimes only on specific classes of goods) based on the shifting winds of politics.
Maybe... MAYBE... Amazon could handle the task. But you could kiss all of the smaller web-retail outlets goodbye. And I have doubts that even Amazon could build and maintain such a database.
The problem is that if you don't buy the cheaper materials, the numbers in the next quarterly report won't be quite so high as they might have been, and the CEO's quarterly bonus might be a tad lower. And most C-level execs are completely incapable of looking past the next quarter and their next bonus check.
For the overall health of the company, long-term planning and purchasing does work. As the parent said, just look at Apple; and see what happens when you pay your CEO with long-term stock options instead of an exorbitant salary and short-term bonuses.
In that case, though, the cops entered Doctor Gates' home with neither his permission nor a warrant; started trying to question him without his attorney present and even though he had committed no crime; refused to properly identify themselves with badge numbers so he could file a proper complaint; then lured him out onto his porch so he would be "in public" so they could have pretense for arresting him.
Even if race played no role whatsoever... even if he was yelling loud enough to "create a disturbance" by the time they tricked him into leaving his home (Which I can believe. Doctor Gates had just gotten off a plane from China and had fallen ill during the trip. He was probable more than a bit irritable BEFORE finding uniformed intruders in his home accusing him of committing a crime by being there.)... even with the most charitable, to the police, interpretation of the facts...
The police were STILL completely out of line. "Acted stupidly" is an understatement, whether the facts about the arrest being racially motivated were known or not. They should all have drummed off the force, made to forfeit their pensions and pay damages to Doctor Gates, and banned for life from serving the public in any capacity. And that's not an attack against ALL police, like their unions and lobbying groups would have you believe; just against the ones involved in that specific incident.
> uniformed police officers standing on every station > platform. You didn't need 911, just wave your arms.
Great... lot of good that does you if you're having a MEDICAL emergency of some kind. Badge, gun, and nightstick don't do you much good then. Maybe there's help for you if you're having heart issues and said cop moonlights with the Phoenix Foundation and has a Swiss Army Knife handy with which to rewire his taser into a defibrillator. That is, of course, assuming same cop can even figure out which piece of kit hanging off his belt is the taser in the first place. The Johannes Mehserle defense, if you'll recall, was that BART cops are too stupid and incompetent to tell the difference between their taser and their handgun. And the jury believed that very assertion.
It's been years and years since I've fired a gun; not since my days as a Boy Scout, actually. But I still remember very clearly the rules the range safety guy impressed upon us. Two of these were:
"Never point your gun at something you don't intend to shoot." and "Never shoot at something you don't intend to kill."
In our case we were, of course, "killing" paper targets and clay pigeons. But there was never any talk or instruction of shooting to incapacitate or shooting to end a threat. And I doubt that range safety rules have changed much since. That sort of thing is kind of timeless.
So yeah, I'd say that in all cases, a drawn gun is intended to kill, nothing less and nothing else.
According to eyewitness reports, pretty much immediately after Mehserle shot Oscar Grant, his accomplices started going through the crowd "confiscating" cameras and cell phones. There is even a video of them pounding on the door and windows of a departing BART train (they're under computer control at most points), from which someone was filing, demanding that she give up her camera. The videos that got out only did so because people filming managed to hide and lie about their cameras, or get away before the cops got to them.
Basically, the reason Oscar Grant is now anything more than just another black guy "shot while going for a gun", is because of the courage of those people with cameras and the incompetence of Mehserle's compatriots in their attempt to cover it up.
If there was an easement on the owner's property allowing a telco to run fiber under it, why wasn't it properly filed, documented, and mapped on the deed to the land?
Looks like there are TWO possible culprits here. Either the easement was properly filed and mapped on the deed and the contractors didn't bother to check the map; in which case they, or possibly the landowner, are at fault. Or the telco never had an easement on the property and had no right to have their fiber there in the first place. It's impossible to tell which is at fault without more information.
Yes. And you don't need anything so newfangled as an MBA to find the logic in that. It goes at least as far back, if not farther, as Sun Tzu: "The best defense is a good offense." has been held to be a truism for thousands of years.
Or, perhaps, Apple believes that Samsung is... you know... infringing on their patents. It's not as if Apple is the only player in the industry suing others for patent violations, after all. I seem to recall a recent settlement in which Apple will be paying large amounts of money to Nokia.
I've seen a lot of rabid and mindless hatred of Apple on Slashdot. What I've not seen is a detailed breakdown of the patents in question, and a refutation of Apple's claim that Samsung has violated them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're invoking christianity, though, to "justify" your hatred of gays; you ARE, in fact, threatening immediate harm yourself. Immediately after calling gays abominations, the bible calls for them to be put to death ("their blood be upon them").
That escalates the matter from some vague metaphysical claim about what may or may not happen after death to an immediate temporal threat of physical harm from the faithful.
The command to take it into your own hands is explicit in your "faith"; and by invoking it you are making that threat yourself. And you deserve to be dealt with accordingly.
Ok. Sorry if I jumped the gun there.
But that "smug SF hybrid driver" bit that they did, and that people routinely cite, really drives me up the wall. It's odd too, because the the South Park guys are usually so spot on when figuring out why people need to be mocked.
I commute M-F on MUNI and only drive on the weekends for shopping and such. And I've actually gotten blocked the critical mass-holes twice in one day before... once when I was blocked on my way from work to my bus stop; and then again while on the bus when they looped around later and blocked it's route.
How South Park decided that San Francisco should be mocked for it's "smug"ness because of the number of hybrids hybrids, while totally missing the bicyclists, I have no idea. But it really gets under my skin, and IMO speaks to a certain cluelessness about what it's like here.
It's not pie-in-the-sky. Many cities around the world have implemented, or are implementing, such systems already. Tokyo, Singapore, Montreal, and even Dallas, all have extensive networks of underground tunnels linking transit stations, office buildings, and retail shops. Well... the first three include transit stations. Dallas just links shops, parks, and offices... public transit in general, and rail (high-speed or otherwise) especially, being pinko godless communist plots to sap us of out precious bodily fluids, and all that.
> Remember it doesn't matter why you hit a
> pedestrian, you in the car is the one that will be
> fucked financial, and legally.
That depends on the state. In some states... mostly here on the wast coast... yeah, the vehicle is always considered at fault. In others, especially back east, the pedestrian has a legal responsibility to take due care, respect the right-of-way, and cross at the intersection and with the signal.
Personally, I think the latter makes more sense. Even at the speed limit and with the fastest reflexes, a car has a significant stopping distance. A pedestrian can stop on a dime by not taking the next step. So it makes more sense that both cars AND pedestrians should have to behave in a predictable fashion.
> smug hybrid drivers
Congratulations. You watched that South Park episode that mentioned hybrids and San Francisco.
Now, if you actually *LIVED* here, you'd know that it's not the hybrid drivers who are smug at all. They're downright humble and very conscientious; especially in comparison to the bicyclers, who treat the traffic laws and crosswalks, which they are supposed to respect as much as any vehicle, as some kind of silly little suggestion to which they're entirely immune. They bill not only blow through crosswalks and make illegal turns, blundering into pedestrians who have the right of way. It's a game amongst them to gather in numbers and deliberately block intersections, including crosswalks, for sometimes up to twenty minutes at a time! And when playing their little game, the bicyclists make no more exception for those of us on public transit than those of us walking.
If you doubt a word I've written, just google for "critical mass". I'd love to double, or even triple, the number of your "smug hybrid drivers" on the road, if it meant I never got stuck behind another chain of mass-holes.
Jobs was not taking all the credit for Ive's work. If you'd actually watch Jobs' keynotes, or even look at Apple's various design-related press materials, you'd see the prodigious amount of praise and credit that Apple in general, and Jobs in particular, regularly would heap upon Ive.
Of course that would require you to set aside the "Apple is evil and Steve Jobs is satan" mantra and sully your eyes and ears by actually going over to apple.com and watching some of the videos there. So I guess we'll just have to say that Ives, the completely unsung and unrecognized by anyone hero, was placated by the huge salary and stock grants that go along with his position.
Yeah... but do you see the incessant whining... like is all over slashdot, ars, and the like, right now over Jobs vs. Ritchie... about the fact that everybody knows who Frank Lloyd Wright is, but no one can remember who invented glass, concrete, or steel?
And you think Apple is the only one who does that? You're a fool if you do. But I expect that you know that they're not alone in that behavior and you're holding Apple to a different standard... bashing them for their perceived wrongs while ignoring the exact same behavior from.. say... Google.
For example:
What we now know as Google Music used to be a company/service/iOS app called Simplify Media. Google bought them last year and promptly killed the service for the iPhone and pulled the app from the App Store. And now, you can upload your music library to Google, and have it streamed anywhere you like for your listening pleasure with an app that's available in the Android Marketplace (but not for/on iOS.)
But no. Apple deserves to be castigated for buying a technology, discontinuing it for other products, and rolling it into their own, but it's A-OK hunker-dorey when Google does it because they have that little slogan: "don't be evil", which obviously means that Apple, and only Apple, *IS* evil, right?
I wouldn't go so far as to call it a conspiracy, but you people have been irrationally attacking Apple, and anyone who owns, uses, or likes their products, for just about as long as I can remember.
In elementary school, before I even know what "gay" was, I was called a faggot for having an Apple ][+ at home instead of a more acceptable C64 or IBM PC. Then came the Macintosh and "Only an idiot would use a mouse and graphics instead of the keyboard.". Then the Performa line was crap and going to be the end of the company. And what about that shitty Newton ("Eat up Martha.)? Then Apple was "beleaguered" and about to be finally wiped out entirely by IBM/Microsoft/Sun/Dell/Be/etc. and anybody who still owned one was just a zealot. ("Shut the company down. Liquidate. And refund the money to the shareholders.") Then, back to homophobia, as computers in colors other than beige were obviously only for fags. And what kind of moron buys a computer without a floppy drive, anyway. OS X? No vendor will ever port their software. And only a fascist would consider a Unix-like OS that's not GPL. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.". And so on and so on and so on.
And every time an Apple story shows up here or on Ars, it's just more of the same. You people are nothing if not predictable. Now, while Apple is the most valuable company trading; stock market metrics are worthless as a real measure of a company's success. But as soon as some other company edges Apple out for the #1 spot, you'll be harping on about how so-and-so's market cap just demolished Apple's and obviously they're doomed and anyone who still owns a Mac is a zealot/moron/whatever.
Tacky to reply twice to the same comment, I know. But to use the ever-so-popular automotive analogy...
What the cellular carriers, and those in the press going along with them, are doing is advertising and selling a car to the public as having a V-8 engine. But when you actually open up the hood, all that's there is an inline-4 and a can of mixed vegetable juice.
http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/opb/rep/R-REP-M.2134-2008-PDF-E.pdf
The fact is there are only two technologies developed so far that the ITU has acknowledged as meeting the 4G requirements. Those are "LTE-Advanced" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced" (aka WiMAX Advanced); neither one of which is actually what is being deployed and marketed by at&t or verizon:
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/40.aspx
Note that "LTE" is not the same thing as "LTE-Advanced". A key point where "LTE" falls flat on it's face (As does HSPA+ and the Clearwire WiMAX network offered by Sprint.) is the bandwidth requirement:
"enhanced peak data rates to support advanced services and applications (100 Mbit/s for high and 1 Gbit/s for low mobility"
Now, I'm aware that T-Mobile shoveled a bunch of money toward the ITU to get them to issue a press release stating that they did not object to tmo's use on the term 4G in their marketing. But there's a big difference between the lies told by marketing and MBA types and the actual facts.
> averaged about 24Mbps and peaked at 42.85Mbps
So can we please STOP calling it 4G?
Granted, I don't expect the people who work for at&t and verizon to be anything other than lying sacks of crap. But shouldn't a site that bills itself as "news for nerds" strive for better?
Yes. But Shatner doesn't have the handicap of a Zombie Gene Roddenberry shuffling around doing his best to ruin Shatner's past roles. That counts for a lot when Lucas is doing think like make Han Solo into a little bitch by having Greedo shoot first, and Indiana Jones into a... well... a part of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
(Honestly... Shia Labouf? Really? That no-talent sack of crap doesn't deserve to be allowed to enter within a 100 mile radius of Harrison Ford, much less accompany him on screen. Couldn't they have just hunted down that kid who played Short Round?)
... it's only supposed to be a category 1 by the time it reaches land, and down to tropical storm strength by the time it reached New York. When I lived in Florida, we didn't even lower the awnings for a cat 1.
After this, and the hullabaloo over that 5.9 earthquake (I live in California now, and we laughed at the big deal they made out of it.), I think the east coast are being a massive bunch of drama queens.
> HP is a very talented company
Correction: HP *was* a very talented company. Then, along came a woman named Carly Fiorina. The talented people, who wanted to do something more with their lives than sell printer ink, have long since left the company for greener pastures.
> They have brilliant people working for the company
Correction: They *had* brilliant people working for the company. Then, along came a woman named Carly Fiorina. The brilliant people, who wanted to do something more with their lives than sell printer ink, have long since left the company for greener pastures.
At this point, I wouldn't touch *anything* put out by HP; not even at the $99 fire-sale price.
ZIP codes aren't even enough. They're set up by the post office for its own convenience in routing mail; not by any municipality with taxation authority. I once lived in a ZIP code that encompassed one town, cut a swath out of another, and included bits of unincorporated land in two counties. Any one of those entities, as well as the state, could have set their own sales taxes, at different rates, on different items. Where I live now, there is a multi-county transportation agency that is authorized to (and does) charge a sales tax to help pay for commuter rail.
You can't even use the city field in your address; because, once again, the convenience of the post office comes into play. When I lived in the ZIP code I mentioned above, I lived in an unincorporated part of one county. But my mailing address listed the town in which the post office branch which delivered to my home was located, even though my home was outside the city limits.
Basically, you need to be able to pinpoint every single address to which a shipper could possibly deliver a package; and know what tax is charged on what items on that specific address. That really would be a holy hell of a huge and complex database. And said database could not remain static. Cities and counties like to change the tax rates and declare sales tax holidays (sometimes only on specific classes of goods) based on the shifting winds of politics.
Maybe... MAYBE... Amazon could handle the task. But you could kiss all of the smaller web-retail outlets goodbye. And I have doubts that even Amazon could build and maintain such a database.
Correction:
The problem is that if you don't buy the cheaper materials, the numbers in the next quarterly report won't be quite so high as they might have been, and the CEO's quarterly bonus might be a tad lower. And most C-level execs are completely incapable of looking past the next quarter and their next bonus check.
For the overall health of the company, long-term planning and purchasing does work. As the parent said, just look at Apple; and see what happens when you pay your CEO with long-term stock options instead of an exorbitant salary and short-term bonuses.
In that case, though, the cops entered Doctor Gates' home with neither his permission nor a warrant; started trying to question him without his attorney present and even though he had committed no crime; refused to properly identify themselves with badge numbers so he could file a proper complaint; then lured him out onto his porch so he would be "in public" so they could have pretense for arresting him.
Even if race played no role whatsoever... even if he was yelling loud enough to "create a disturbance" by the time they tricked him into leaving his home (Which I can believe. Doctor Gates had just gotten off a plane from China and had fallen ill during the trip. He was probable more than a bit irritable BEFORE finding uniformed intruders in his home accusing him of committing a crime by being there.)... even with the most charitable, to the police, interpretation of the facts...
The police were STILL completely out of line. "Acted stupidly" is an understatement, whether the facts about the arrest being racially motivated were known or not. They should all have drummed off the force, made to forfeit their pensions and pay damages to Doctor Gates, and banned for life from serving the public in any capacity. And that's not an attack against ALL police, like their unions and lobbying groups would have you believe; just against the ones involved in that specific incident.
> uniformed police officers standing on every station
> platform. You didn't need 911, just wave your arms.
Great... lot of good that does you if you're having a MEDICAL emergency of some kind. Badge, gun, and nightstick don't do you much good then. Maybe there's help for you if you're having heart issues and said cop moonlights with the Phoenix Foundation and has a Swiss Army Knife handy with which to rewire his taser into a defibrillator. That is, of course, assuming same cop can even figure out which piece of kit hanging off his belt is the taser in the first place. The Johannes Mehserle defense, if you'll recall, was that BART cops are too stupid and incompetent to tell the difference between their taser and their handgun. And the jury believed that very assertion.
> You shoot to end the threat.
It's been years and years since I've fired a gun; not since my days as a Boy Scout, actually. But I still remember very clearly the rules the range safety guy impressed upon us. Two of these were:
"Never point your gun at something you don't intend to shoot." and "Never shoot at something you don't intend to kill."
In our case we were, of course, "killing" paper targets and clay pigeons. But there was never any talk or instruction of shooting to incapacitate or shooting to end a threat. And I doubt that range safety rules have changed much since. That sort of thing is kind of timeless.
So yeah, I'd say that in all cases, a drawn gun is intended to kill, nothing less and nothing else.
According to eyewitness reports, pretty much immediately after Mehserle shot Oscar Grant, his accomplices started going through the crowd "confiscating" cameras and cell phones. There is even a video of them pounding on the door and windows of a departing BART train (they're under computer control at most points), from which someone was filing, demanding that she give up her camera. The videos that got out only did so because people filming managed to hide and lie about their cameras, or get away before the cops got to them.
Basically, the reason Oscar Grant is now anything more than just another black guy "shot while going for a gun", is because of the courage of those people with cameras and the incompetence of Mehserle's compatriots in their attempt to cover it up.
If there was an easement on the owner's property allowing a telco to run fiber under it, why wasn't it properly filed, documented, and mapped on the deed to the land?
Looks like there are TWO possible culprits here. Either the easement was properly filed and mapped on the deed and the contractors didn't bother to check the map; in which case they, or possibly the landowner, are at fault. Or the telco never had an easement on the property and had no right to have their fiber there in the first place. It's impossible to tell which is at fault without more information.
Yes. And you don't need anything so newfangled as an MBA to find the logic in that. It goes at least as far back, if not farther, as Sun Tzu: "The best defense is a good offense." has been held to be a truism for thousands of years.
> Apple seems to want to have a government-
> enforced monopoly in its product areas.
Eh... that's the whole point of a patent in the first place.
Or, perhaps, Apple believes that Samsung is... you know... infringing on their patents. It's not as if Apple is the only player in the industry suing others for patent violations, after all. I seem to recall a recent settlement in which Apple will be paying large amounts of money to Nokia.
I've seen a lot of rabid and mindless hatred of Apple on Slashdot. What I've not seen is a detailed breakdown of the patents in question, and a refutation of Apple's claim that Samsung has violated them.